Android’s much ballyhooed 1.5 release (aka Cupcake) seems to be imminent. Last week, Google released a preview version of the SDK, and I’ve dug through it a bit and kicked the tires. In honor of the impending 1.5 release, here are 15 neat features I really dig.
Five New User Features that Kick Ass
Here are some features Android end-users will really like, although they shouldn’t matter much to developers.
- A2DP – AKA Bluetooth stereo, so you can listen to music and take phone calls without cords. No screenshots to demo, and can’t test it in the emulator, but it’s on the feature list. This is even more crucial for the G1 than for the iPhone, since it doesn’t have a built-in standard headphone jack.
- Soft Keyboard - Terrible for typing real emails, but sometimes you don’t want to slide open the keyboard just to mash out a quick one-handed SMS.
- Music Player Widget – Along with A2DP, easy access to the music player makes Android phones a more viable replacement for an MP3 player.
- Smart Folders – Starred Contacts Folders, for example, which may finally make a competent “speed dial” replacement. The folder’s contacts update dynamically when you change your contacts list, unlike the current release, where you’d have to go add or remove the contact in the folder separately.
- Camcorder – with YouTube uploading. Can’t run this in the emulator, but the application is there and it’s on the feature list.
Five New Developer Features that Kick Ass
These features will make programmers happy. The impact from these will probably take a few days/weeks after release to matter to end users while developers scramble to write code once the final release of the SDK comes out.
- SDK Targeting – A major developer concern is compatibility, especially as new handset manufacturers add their own proprietary software and as some may lock the core OS at a different release than others. You can make one app for SDK 1.1 base devices, and a different one for SDK 1.5 devices that include the Google APIs, for example, and if the user’s software doesn’t match up they can’t run and crash your app.
- AppWidget Framework – Not just for the Home Screen; there might be some nifty uses for in-app embedding of one app inside another that I can’t even fully comprehend yet (maybe a third-party drum sequencer AppWidget inside RockOut, for example).
- JetPlayer – some digging through headers seems to indicate this is Sonivox JET, which looks like a MIDI engine. It also promises to ease development of rhythm games. Not a lot of details on this yet, but expect to see a glut of drum sequencers, pianos, Tap Tap Revolution ripoffs, and MIDI editors popping up on the Market once the documentation is fleshed out a bit.
- SoundPool fixes – my initial testing shows that they’ve fixed some of the bugs with the low-latency SoundPool audio APIs. In API 1.1, calling the stop() method for an audio stream instantly crashed your app. This led to delays in audio as multiple streams had to be muted and allowed to die, and wasted developer time writing code to do audio stream bookkeeping. Now, it just works! Expect better sound from games and more features from apps like RockOut as a result.
- XML File Wizard - I’m generally a TextMate / Vim kind of guy, but there’s a lot of hard-to-remember options to deal with when creating views for an Android app, and fine-grained targeting will get really scary when more hardware comes out with a wide variety of capabilities. A relatively simple way to say “use this template when they’re on a portrait touchscreen device and this one on a landscape device with a trackball” is going to be really helpful, and it should eliminate some programmer confusion.
Five Nice Touches
Details matter. These don’t necessarily make for bragging rights but they all improve the user experience in some way.
- Carbon-Fiber Applications List – Like a racing bike’s frame, this obviously makes it go faster. But in all seriousness, the semi-transparent apps list in 1.0/1.1 were hard to read at times, and this helps.
- Animated Transitions - Subtle, and most importantly, fast (a fraction of a second) so it adds to the experience rather than just slowing me down.
- Better Bookmarks/Most Visited/History View – History view used to be buried as a menu option. This makes it much easier to manage my favorites without having to dig through menus.
- SquirrelFish – WebKit’s new Javscript engine should make things faster. A lot faster, for Javascript-heavy Web apps. It’s not a visible change, but it’s significant. By most measures, at least on desktops, it’s up to 4x faster than the old WebKit engine. It’s not as fast as V8, the engine Google uses in Chrome, but it should be a nice little bump in responsiveness for Web applications and Android apps with embedded WebViews, like the Gmail app.
- Pictures in Starred Contacts view – Rather than a generic star icon. Looks nice, and it’s helpful for me to find who I’m looking for within a list of favorites since there’s no particular order to them.
Did I miss your favorite new feature? Weigh in with a comment below the entry.
(The title of this post is a nod to our delicious neighbors and Comic Sans MS abusers, Kickass Cupcakes).