{"id":791,"date":"2011-10-18T21:52:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-19T04:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/?p=791"},"modified":"2011-10-18T21:52:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T04:52:00","slug":"a-closer-look-at-android-4-0-ice-cream-sandwich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/a-closer-look-at-android-4-0-ice-cream-sandwich\/","title":{"rendered":"A closer look at Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpsso-pinterest-pin-it-image\" style=\"display:none !important;\">\n<\/div><!-- .wpsso-pinterest-pin-it-image -->\n\n<p>Google has (finally) released its Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) software development kit (SDK). So let\u2019s take a closer look.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h4>Ice Cream Sandwich for Users<\/h4>\n<p>The new features for users in Ice Cream Sandwich are detailed on the Android Developers website. To summarize, those are as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Evolved UI<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>New typeface<\/strong> optimized for high-resolution screens<\/li>\n<li><strong>System Bar Refinements<\/strong> contains virtual buttons for better user experience<\/li>\n<li><strong>Action Bar<\/strong> like features<\/li>\n<li><strong>Resizable widgets<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Improved voice input engine<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Better control over network data<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>People app<\/strong> offers richer profile information, including a large profile picture, phone numbers, addresses and accounts, status updates, events, and a new button for connecting on integrated social networks.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Improved Calendar, Camera, Email and Browser apps<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Android Beam<\/strong> for sharing across two NFC-enabled devices<\/li>\n<li><strong>Face Unlock<\/strong> is a new screen-lock option that lets users unlock their devices with their faces<\/li>\n<li><strong>Wi-Fi Direct<\/strong> lets users connect directly to nearby peer devices over Wi-Fi<\/li>\n<li><strong>Connecting to Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) devices<\/strong> so users can connect to wireless medical devices and sensors in hospitals, fitness centers, homes, and elsewhere.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Ice Cream Sandwich for Developers<\/h4>\n<p>Developers need to be aware of the following features:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Unified UI framework<\/strong> for phones, tablets, and more. All the UI elements from Honeycomb, like the action bar and fragments<\/li>\n<li><strong>New social API<strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>new APIs for Contacts, Calendar, and Visual Voicemail<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>audio remote control API<\/strong> so any music or media app can register to receive media button events from the remote control and then manage play state<\/li>\n<li><strong>spell-checker API<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Android Beam<\/strong> so you can Share just about everything over NFC by tapping two phones together (like the bump app)<\/li>\n<li><strong>ShareActionProvider widget<\/strong> lets developers quickly embed standard share functionality and UI in the Action Bar of their applications<\/li>\n<li><strong>Low-level streaming multimedia<\/strong> (sounds a bit like DRM)<\/li>\n<li><strong>New camera capabilities<\/strong> like continuous focus and image zoom. There&#8217;s also face detection.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Wi-Fi Direct<\/strong> for ad-hoc networking<\/li>\n<li><strong>Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP)<strong> For connecting to medical or fitness devices like the MotoActive.<\/strong><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>GridLayout<\/strong> improves the performance of Android applications by supporting flatter view hierarchies that are faster to layout and render<\/li>\n<li><strong>Hardware-accelerated 2D drawing<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>About a million other things<\/strong> &#8211; Stylus support, a new framework for text-to-speech engines, data usage, a VPN API, and policy management for the camera.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Source<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/developer.android.com\/sdk\/android-4.0-highlights.html\" target=\"_blank\">developer.android.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google has (finally) released its Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) software development kit (SDK). So let\u2019s take a closer look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[154,49,72],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}