HTC to include “Live Experience Tour” in 11 cities for HTC One marketing campaign

HTC has already been pretty clear that they’re going to put their best marketing foot forward with the HTC One to help boost sales. We’ve seen some commercials for the One, but now we’re hearing that HTC’s marketing campaign will include “Live Experience Tours” in several cities in the US. These stops will include pop up shops to demonstrate the key features of the HTC One, like BlinkFeed, Zoe, and BoomSound. HTC wants to show you that the One is “everything your phone isn’t.” Very
arrogantconfident marketing slogan.

In addition to the showrooms for the One, BoomSound lounges will begin popping up in locations

Now is the time to switch to the new Google Play Developer Console

The new Google Play Developer Console is out of preview and is the default experience. In addition to offering all of the functionality of the old version, the new version features a streamlined publishing flow, store listings in more languages with language-specific graphics, and new user ratings statistics, so you’ll have better tools for delivering great Android apps that delight users. If you haven't already made the switch, now is the time, as we'll be retiring the former version on April 15 to focus our efforts on this new experience.



The new Developer Console brings you new functionality built on top of a quick-to-navigate user experience. You can add language-specific graphics to your store listing to help your users around the world understand what your app is about. New graphs let you track your ratings over time with breakdowns by device, country, app version, and more. The statistics page now shows you when you released each version of your app, so you see how each new version changes your installations and ratings, and you can view crashes specific to an application version. These new features are only the beginning of what’s to come for developers on

Getting Your App Ready for Jelly Bean and Nexus 7

We are pleased to announce that the full SDK for Android 4.1 is now available to developers and can be downloaded through your SDK Manager. You can now develop and publish applications against API level 16 using new Jelly Bean APIs. We are also releasing SDK Tools revision 20.0.1 and NDK revision 8b containing bug fixes only.

For many people, their first taste of Jelly Bean will be on the beautiful Nexus 7. While most applications will run just fine on Nexus 7, who wants their app to be just fine? Here are some tips for optimizing your application to make the most of this device.

Screen

Giving Nexus 7 its name, is the glorious 7” screen. As developers we see this as around 600 * 960 density independent pixels and a density of tvdpi. As

New Seller Countries in Google Play

Over the past year we’ve been working to expand the list of countries and currencies from which Android developers can sell their products. Starting today, developers in Czech Republic, Israel, Poland, and Mexico can sell priced applications and in-app products on Google Play, using their local bank accounts for payments. Welcome developers!

Android Developers on Google+

[This post is by Reto Meier, Android Developer Relations Tech Lead. — Tim Bray]

I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved with Android since the 0.9 preview SDK was releaed to developers back in 2007. A lot has changed since then, but one thing that hasn’t is the rapid pace at which new tools, resources, and information have become available for us Android developers. Just look at the last few months.

In December Android Training launched, with its first set of classes designed to demonstrate the best practices behind building great Android Apps.

Watch out for XmlPullParser.nextText()

Watch out for XmlPullParser.nextText():
[This post is by Jesse Wilson from the Dalvik team. —Tim Bray]
Using XmlPullParser is an efficient and maintainable way to parse XML on Android. Historically Android has had two implementations of this interface:

• KXmlParser, via XmlPullParserFactory.newPullParser().
• ExpatPullParser, via Xml.newPullParser().

The implementation from Xml.newPullParser() had a bug where calls to nextText() didn’t always advance to the END_TAG as the documentation promised it would. As a consequence, some apps may be working around the bug with extra calls to next() or nextTag():

A Closer Look at 10 Billion Downloads

A Closer Look at 10 Billion Downloads:
On Tuesday, we announced that Android Market passed 10 Billion app downloads. We wanted to look a little deeper at that huge number. First question: which app was lucky number 10 billion? Photobucket Mobile. They’ll be getting a great prize package, including tickets to next year’s Google I/O developer conference.
Remember we still have 8 days left to celebrate 10 billion downloads with 10-cent apps on Android

New Layout Widgets: Space and GridLayout

[This post is by Philip Milne, who is part of the Android framework team. — Tim Bray]
Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) sports two new widgets that have been designed to support the richer user interfaces made possible by larger displays: Space and GridLayout.
The most commonly used class for layout in Android is LinearLayout, which allows its children to be aligned in the usual ways: along either the horizontal or vertical axes. It’s often possible to take a complicated layout and break it down into a set of nested linear layouts and, provided this nesting doesn’t get too deep, this is still a good choice for many simple layouts.
A number of posts and articles (e.g. Android Layout Tricks #1, Flattening The Stack) have highlighted drawbacks of nested layouts; which fall into three basic categories:

• Inability to control alignment along both axes simultaneously
• Performance problems in hierarchies that are too deep
• Unsuitability for design tools that support free-form editing

A simple example of the first problem is the following form:

As the font and the text of the “Email address” label change, we want the label to remain aligned with the

Updated NDK for Android 4.0

Updated NDK for Android 4.0:
Today we are releasing an updated version of the Android NDK, now in revision 7. The updated NDK lets developers who are using native code get started with the new native APIs available in Android 4.0.
Android NDK r7 includes a number of build system improvements and bug fixes, but most importantly it gives you access to two new sets of APIs:

Low-level streaming multimedia: A new