UnAngelo blog

Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a new version of the Android platform that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. It introduces a new “holographic” UI theme and an interaction model that builds on the things people love about Android — multitasking, notifications, widgets, and others — and adds many new features as well.

Besides the user-facing features it offers, Android 3.0 is also specifically designed to give developers the tools and capabilities they need to create great applications for tablets and similar devices, together with the flexibility to adapt existing apps to the new UI while maintaining compatibility with earlier platform versions and other form-factors.

Today, we are releasing a preview of the Android 3.0 SDK, with non-final APIs and system image, to allow developers to start testing their existing applications on the tablet form-factor and begin getting familiar with the new UI patterns, APIs, and capabilties that will be available in Android 3.0.

Here are some of the highlights:

UI framework for creating great apps for larger screen devices: Developers can use a new UI components, new themes, richer widgets and notifications, drag and drop, and other new features to create rich and engaging apps for users on larger screen devices.

High-performance 2D and 3D graphics: A new property-based animation framework lets developers add great visual effects to their apps. A built-in GL renderer lets developers request hardware-acceleration of common 2D rendering operations in their apps, across the entire app or only in specific activities or views. For adding rich 3D scenes, developers take advantage of a new 3D graphics engine called Renderscript.

Support for multicore processor architectures: Android 3.0 is optimized to run on either single- or dual-core processors, so that applications run with the best possible performance.

Rich multimedia: New multimedia features such as HTTP Live streaming support, a pluggable DRM framework, and easy media file transfer through MTP/PTP, give developers new ways to bring rich content to users.

New types of connectivity: New APIs for Bluetooth A2DP and HSP let applications offer audio streaming and headset control. Support for Bluetooth insecure socket connection lets applications connect to simple devices that may not have a user interface.

Enhancements for enterprise: New administrative policies, such as for encrypted storage and password expiration, help enterprise administrators manage devices more effectively.

For an complete overview of the new user and developer features, see the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights.

Additionally, we are releasing updates to our SDK Tools (r9), NDK (r5b), and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (9.0.0). Key features include:

• UI Builder improvements in the ADT Plugin:
  • Improved drag-and-drop in the editor, with better support for included layouts.
  • In-editor preview of objects animated with the new animation framework.
  • Visualization of UI based on any version of the platform. independent of project target. Improved rendering, with better support for custom views.

To find out how to get started developing or testing applications using the Android 3.0 Preview SDK, see the Preview SDK Introduction. Details about the changes in the latest versions of the tools are available on the SDK Tools, the ADT Plugin, and NDK pages on the site.

Note that applications developed with the Android 3.0 Platform Preview cannot be published on Android Market. We’ll be releasing a final SDK in the weeks ahead that you can use to build and publish applications for Android 3.0.

As great as the cheap and modular furniture from IKEA is, it’s a bit lacking in personality. Mykea offers custom skins that personalize your bland IKEA furniture to spice up your office and living space. More »

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…la kiero
…no la kiero
…la kiero
…no la kiero
…la kiero
…no la kiero
…la kiero
…no la kiero

Hledáme zkušeného Flash programátora zapáleného pro hry. Kontaktujte nás na contact(zavinutec)amanita-design.net

We are looking for an experienced freelance Flash programmer with passion for games. We need to meet in Prague regularly and we can’t guarantee full time job. You can contact us  at contact(at)amanita-design.net

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…I got access!

You can build many different types of apps with App Inventor. Often people begin
by building games like MoleMash or games that let you draw
funny pictures on your friend’s faces. You can even make use of the phone’s
sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that
inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your
classmates study for a test. With Android’s text-to-speech capabilities, you can
even have the phone ask the questions aloud.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. This is because instead
of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to
specify the app’s behavior.

The App Inventor team has created blocks for just about everything you can do
with an Android phone, as well as blocks for doing “programming-like” stuff–
blocks to store information, blocks for repeating actions, and blocks to perform
actions under certain conditions. There are even blocks to talk to services like
Twitter.

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ideas para regalos para estas navidades:

This incredible iPhone 4 was yesterday unveiled as the world’s most expensive mobile – worth a jaw-dropping £5 MILLION.

The handset is wrapped in more than 500 individual flawless cut diamonds totalling 100 carats.

It features two interchangeable diamonds which fit over the ‘home’ button – a single cut 7.4 carat pink diamond and a rare 8 carat single cut flawless diamond which are together worth more than £4 million.

Bling: The new iPhone’s handset is wrapped in more than 500 individual flawless cut diamonds totalling 100 carats and features two interchangeable diamonds worth more than £4 million

The back of the phone is plated in rose gold and the Apple logo glitters with 53 diamonds.

British designer Stuart Hughes, 38, of Liverpool, was commissioned to make two of the bespoke handset by a mega-rich Australian businessman.

He said: ‘It was a fantastic challenge and I am really pleased with the end result – the phones look superb.

‘Phones are so popular at the moment and this is the ultimate design for one. It was a very exciting project.

‘The diamonds are rare and difficult to source, stones like that usually have a very long history.

‘It is amazing that someone is prepared to spend £5 million on a phone, I doubt it will get used because it is worth so much money.

'It would be a disaster if it was ever lost.' 

The phones come with their own protection box – made from a single 7kg block of Granite in imperial pink with the inned lined with Nubuck top grain leather.

Father-of-two Stuart gold-plated his first mobile phone, a Nokia 8800, in 2003 and has since been making elaborate bespoke designs for customers in London, Marbella and Monaco.

His cheaper iPhone models – which retail between £1,800 and £22,000 – have been snapped up by showbiz royalty including Stefano Gabbana, of Dolce and Gabbana.

Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld is also a regular customer of Stuart’s work.

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Me encantaron!

Personal art project by visual artist, graphic designer and illustrator Yanko Tsvetkov

If it seems to you like every day Google releases a new product or feature, well, it seems like that to us too. The central place we tell you about most of these is through the official Google Blog Network, where you’ll find more than 100 blogs covering all kinds of products, policy issues, technical projects and much more.

But if you want to keep up just with what’s new (or even just what Google does besides search), you’ll want to know about Google New. A few of us had a 20 percent project idea: create a single destination called Google New where people could find the latest product and feature launches from Google. It’s designed to pull in just those posts from various blogs. We hope it helps you find something useful you’ve never tried before.

Posted by Ji Lee, Google Creative Lab

Since our previous post, we’ve made good progress on 2D graphics performance: 2D canvas acceleration is now available in trunk and the canary build by using the –enable-accelerated-2d-canvas command-line switch (coming to the developer channel shortly). We’ve also been hard at work improving our 3D graphics stack. Today, we’re excited to release a set of WebGL demos to help highlight what you can do with the API.

Chromium’s 2D canvas acceleration uses the same GPU process infrastructure as the compositor, which is designed to maintain the same stability and security Chromium has always had. In addition, this system picks the best graphics API to use on each OS that Chromium supports: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS and Linux. We haven’t finished implementing accelerated 2D canvas support – there’s no Mac support and some functions are not accelerated yet – but Chromium already achieves some impressive gains on the recent IE9 Platform Preview Test Drive 2D canvas demos:

These early numbers show up to 60x speed improvement over the current version of Google Chrome. With Google Chrome’s fast release cycles, we expect to be able to get these enhancements to users quickly and add new performance improvements over time.

We’re excited to give developers fast 2D graphics, but we think truly hardware accelerating graphics on the web means giving developers access to a programmable 3D graphics pipeline with WebGL. Even with accelerated 2D canvas and SVG, it’s still not possible to achieve many graphics effects with these APIs. (To read more about the progression from dynamic 2D to CSS Transforms and WebGL, check out our recent blog post). With WebGL and 3D CSS, developers can create modern games, impressive photo galleries, 3D data visualizations, virtual environments, and whatever else they can dream up.

To give you a taste for what WebGL can do, we’ve worked with a number of talented artists and developers to create the first round of a series of demos, ranging from a realistic aquarium to a 3D wall of photos. We hope these demos help demonstrate even more immersive experiences made possible with these APIs. So check out our demo gallery with an up-to-date canary build or Chromium build and have some fun with using your GPU in the browser! For a quick peek at some of these demos, you can watch our playlist of preview videos:

Posted by James Robinson, Software Engineer and Gregg Tavares, Software Engineer

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…no me lo puedo de creer!
intersante no? Cuantas versiones saldrán de esto?

The M-Dress is an elegant silk jersey dress that is also a functional soft electronics mobile phone. The M-Dress accepts a standard SIM card and allows the wearer to receive and make calls without carrying a cellular phone in their pocket or purse. Simplicity is elegance.

The M-Dress (Mobile Phone Dress) was designed after our research showed that very often phone calls are missed because mobile phones are quite awkward to carry, especially for women, that have garments with small or no pockets.To allow women to stay connected while remaining stylish, CuteCircuit designed the M- Dress. A mobile phone in its own right but built out of soft circuitry.

The wearer inserts their usual SIM card in the small slot underneath the label and the dress is ready to be used, having the same phone number as your usual phone. When the dress rings, the simple gesture of bringing your hand to the ear will allow the sensor to open the call and when done talking the gesture of releasing the hand downwards will close the call.

CuteCircuit introduced special gesture recognition software to allow the M-Dress to work in an easy and intuitive way.