I'm looking to create AVDs to test my apps on, and i'm trying to figure out the correct settings for a square screen such as the new Motorola Flip Out. I don't see a wikipedia article for it, or many specs...
On a related note, what about tablets? Actually.. Why aren't there a set of AVD instances with params from popular devices.. or at least a site that lists them for each of the 60+ devices.
Thanks in advance :)
The Motorola Flipout has a 320x240 screen.
For the specs of many other phones there are quite a few sites where you could find all the details. For example phonearena.com is one of them.
At the risk of getting another dubious badge for resurrecting old threads, I'll give the semi-official Motorola response... :)
Nearly every Motorola handset is accompanied by an SDK addon that includes a system image and a skin. In a few cases, the addon contains only the skin. Just download the archive and make sure the top-level directory of the archive is in into /addons. After that, you should be able to create new AVDs based on the addon. I find that it's a lot easier to use the GUI AVD Manager than a command line, but both are usable.
Download the addons at http://developer.motorola.com/docstools/tools/
Good luck.
Related
I know this question has been asked multiple times on this and other sites but I still have no luck with dealing with this. So before I uninstall everything I want to see if there are anymore opinions.
Like the others I am trying to create (this computers) first AVD but have been presented with a greyed out 'OK' button. I have installed all of the latest packages, including the latest ARM package. I have restarted the software and computer to no avail. I have used AVD before but this is the first time it haden't worked for me.
Helpful opinions will be welcomed.
You must have everything selected, that includes at least 5 things:
a AVD name, a device, a Target API Level, a CPU, a Skin, the memory is mostly automatically filled and the SD Card is optional, so it looks like this:
I don't have a tablet but I wanted to take screenshots from the emulator for display in Google Play. I did that using Eclipse (using the method given in the top answer here How to take emulator screenshots using Eclipse?) but the screenshots are not good quality: the image is broken (some areas are kind of shifted) in at least one spot each time I take a screenshot.
Is there any better way to do it?
According to this answer that is an emulator issue. To solve this, you need to enable the 'use host GPU' setting when creating an emulator, according to another answer.
I would use the DDMS shipped with ADT (also listed as Debug monitor) and choose the device and app, then click that camera icon. It creates very good looking screenshots.
I also got some rendering errors with the emulator... It's best with actual devices. You can also try if other images/emulators perform better.
Developed a application of size 40MB. I need to test it for all screen support but the android emulator really a bad choice(I feel... ). It gives Insufficient memory error almost every time). How developer test their application?
One more Question
I have designed app for four different layout(normal,small,large and xlarge). Will every device(In future) satisfy these layout params?
And i faced a real problem that i tested my app in Sony xperia minpro(Small screen 240*320 2.4inch) and in Samsung galaxy 5(smallscreen 240*320, 2.8inch) but the layout is overlapping in samsung device. This can be a serious problem , actually we cant check our app in every device.. that is impossible too.
TIA
40MB is way too big for an Android application. Many users will have problems installing the app on their devices. You should consider moving some resources out of the application and downloading them either on demand or on first app run.
The list of layout types (normal, small, large, xlarge) is definitely not final, for there quite possibly will be even larger screens (xxlarge) or tiny ones (xsmall?).
Developed a application of size 40MB. I need to test it for all screen
support but the android emulator really a bad choice(I feel... ). It
gives Insufficient memory error almost every time). How developer test
their application?
You can configure the emulator with any amount of memory you wish, including an emulated SD card so memory shouldn't be a problem. However, 40MB is quite big so you may be hitting the package size limit.
One more Question I have designed app for four different
layout(normal,small,large and xlarge). Will every device(In future)
satisfy these layout params?
You're asking us to predict the future - there's no way we can know what Google are planning if they haven't already announced it though I would suggest that there will never be a commitment to keep screen sizes or resolutions static - technology constantly evolves and specs that are OK for today, will not be OK for tomorrow.
I have seen dictionaries weighing in at 40Mb, best practise is to download the database as a separate file. Some graphically intensive games approach that size. If you want to emulate many Android devices make sure your PC is up to snuff and you have the latest SDK.
How developer test their application?
You do not have so many choices: you have to use as many (and different) physical devices as you can, from different vendors and technical specifications (screen, etc), to try to detect as many specific bugs as possible.
This is difficult, as you are often limiten to a few physical devices.
To give you examples, I recently struggled with the Camera, for a bug happening with Motorola Defy only. I am currently struggling with the Camera, but only for Samsung Galaxy this time.
When you find a specific bug, try to fix it "the general way": instead of detecting the vendor/version of the device to write specific code for it, try to enhance your code in a way it will work for all tested phones. So far, I never had to write anything specific to a given device. The bugs I encountered were always tied to a permissivities or particular cases that could be handled by making the common code more complete or resiliant. Let's say by "making as less assumptions as possible" knowing that we tend to make assumptions without meaning it.
On top of testing on as many physical devices as possible, create emulators. You can parameter them to have different screen layouts, different embedded hardware, memory, etc. And on top of the default emulator that comes with the Android distribution, you also have emulators provided by the devices vendors and that reproduce the specificity of these devices. For example, Samsung released a Galaxy Tab emulator. Sony Ericsson released a EDK Cellphone emulator. You can get them thru the regular android distribution update workflow.
Will every device(In future) satisfy these layout params (normal,small,large and xlarge)?
Yes, as Android distributions are backward compatible. Any of these layout will still be supported in the future, but may become 'deprecated' (so not recommended, but still working), and new layout types will certainly be created.
I recently bought a Motorola XOOM tablet to develop Android apps on. I'm running into major problems with finding resources to learn from. I know Java. The Android Dev Guide sample codes are almost all dependent on a keyboard or won't run on my XOOM. Are there any suggested places to start learning Android development, other than the Android Dev guide?
You will be creating a new avd config to specify the tablet screen size, memory constraints, SDcard size, etc. I believe that most of that can be achieved by just creating a new avd and changing the parameters in avd manager. Although You may also have to create a tablet skin to go with the AVd you created.
Please visit these links.... They breif you right from setting up the vitrual device configuration in eclipse to development of applications for tablets.
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/android/android-sdk_tablet_virtual-device-configuration/
[2x Links deleted due to spam, 1x Link repeated]
I hope these links will help you in creating an android app for your beautifull tablet.
To start learning android,First preference goes to Android dev guide and you can also follow some tutorials ,blogs and e-books.But Dev guide provides the complete android stack.
Also check out MOTODEV. The resources are quite good especially with XOOM development.
Check out O'Reilly eBooks on eCarrel (eReader for developers app).
The app will run on your XOOM just great.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ambrosoft.searchlib
I also use the XOOM for development and I love it
Answers above are great, here is an addition:
http://p-xr.com
I need to make a screencast of an app to present to a client, but need it to look better than the ugly red phone or the various other incarnations of the emulator. Is there a way to swap out that image?
Also would be great to get rid of the keyboard that displays next to it and make the window borders go way (since I have to capture it full screen on a mac, unfortunately, I can't crop it tight).
When you create an AVD, you can specify a different skin to use. Besides the ones available by default, there are also a bunch on the web for various devices. You can search for "[phone name] emulator skin" to find a variety, but here are a couple of examples:
Nexus One
Nexus S
The Motorola MOTODEV site (http://developer.motorola.com/docstools/tools/) has addons for nearly every one of our released phones. Registration is required. Most of the addons are full system images, which should work or you could extract out the skin for your own uses. There is a "skin only" addon for the upcoming XOOM tablet that uses Gingerbread for the runtime.
Good luck