Ice cream sandwich is Googles most ambitious version of Android to date and the reviews have been positive. Get an in-depth ride through Ice cream sandwich, what it has to offer and what the future holds of Android's next version Jellybean. We will cover topics such as dealing with multiple screen sizes, Async Tasks, the new powerful animation framework and lastly we will look into what we can expect from Jellybean, Android 5.0.

1. GOOGLE’S
OBSESSION WITH
SWEET TREATS
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

2. ICECREAM
SANDWICH
AND OTHER
DELICIOUS THINGS
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
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3. WHO AM I?
• Software Developer working with Android
since the beta days
• Previously a Flex/Flash and ColdFusion developer.
• Co-Author Flex 3 in Action
• Currently apart from Android, heavily involved in
the Node.js and CoffeeScript community.
• Entrepreneur, Author, Teacher & Developer
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

4. ABOUT THIS TALK
What’s cool in 3.0/4.0
• Design Guidelines
• Animation Framework
• ActionBar Framework
• Fragments
• New Views
• Dialog Fragments
The Future of Android Development
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

5. DESIGN GUIDELINES
Previous versions of Android looked like crap. There I said it.
• ICS looks beautiful.
• ICS focuses on simplicity
• Bye bye menu button
• Bye bye hardware keys
ICS is designed for multiple screens.
Flat look. Easy to scale.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

6. ACTIONBAR
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
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7. ➸ SWIPING (VIEW PAGER)
➸
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
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8. HOLO THEME
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
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9. ANIMATION FRAMEWORK
• Previous versions of Android did not do animations well
• I hated the anim.xml files for simple animations
• With Honeycomb, Android introduced .animate()
on all views.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

10. DEMO
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
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11. OBJECTANIMATOR, VALUEANIMATOR
• .animate() is powerful, but ObjectAnimator and
ValueAnimator are even more powerful.
• ObjectAnimator allows you to animate any property
of an object
objectAnimatorNext = ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(this, “translationX”, 100f);
objectAnimatorNext.setInterpolator(new DecelerateInterpolator());
objectAnimatorNext.start();
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

12. QUICK WALKTHROUGH
PARALLAX
Parallax is cool, everyone wants to do it
and wants to know how.
Lets walk through how to do a simple parallax
effect using ObjectAnimator
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

13. SUMMARY HOW IT WORKS
• Foreground has to be faster.
• ObjectAnimator animates it forward and backwards
• Check if Animation already running to prevent it going nuts
• To make it usable in the real world you will need to fix the
edges of the imageview so that it doesn’t overflow.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

14. VALUEANIMATOR
• Not all views have all the properties ready to be animated
using .animate()
• ValueAnimator will handle the rest for you.
• Animates the values from x to y.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

15. DEMO
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

16. VALUEANIMATOR
That’s cool but how do I animate it?
• So we ran it. But.. It didn’t do anything. It knows nothing of
the progressbar.
• Enter onAnimateUpdateListener
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

17. DEMO
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

18. ACTIONBAR
• Bigger screens, thumb easier to click on top.
• Android introduced ActionBar in Honeycomb,
but ICS makes it much more cooler.
• ActionBar can support multiple screen resolution
with ease.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

19. HOW TO USE ACTIONBAR
• ActionBar a = getActionBar()
• Actionbar uses the menuInflator and the
onCreateOptionsMenu
• Why? To support backwards compatibility.
Do I like it? No.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

20. IFROOM | WITHTEXT
• One thing I like very much is the IfRoom|WithText
parameters.
• If the screen is small, they will just appear in the
overflow icon for GalaxyNexus+ or in the menu on
phones with hardware keys.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

21. DEMO
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

22. FRAGMENTS
• Android is fragmented, so they introduced Fragments. Heh heh.
• Support large and small screen layouts.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

23. ON A SINGLE SCREEN
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
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24. ON A TABLET
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
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25. GRIDLAYOUT AND SPACE
• ICS introduces two new Views.
• GridLayout and Space
• Gridlayout lets you get an amazing layout structure while
space, well spaces out your layout
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

26. GRIDLAYOUT
• Previous, we used LinearLayout, FrameLayout and
a combination of other Layouts to get a pretty cool
UI done.
• With GridLayout, we can achieve the same without
multiple views
• Less views = faster load times.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

27. DEMO
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

28. DIALOG FRAGMENT
• Recently introduced
• DialogFragment gets rid of the ugly onCreateDialog(int)
No more case switching for no reason.
• Scales perfectly on all phone sizes
• Easy to use. You can pass listeners objects to the dialog
for notification results!
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

29. DEMO
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

30. FUTURE OF ANDROID
Im not a Google employee so I have no idea. But I can make
some educated guesses.
PROS CONS
• Better API support for Cloud. • More and More phones. Android is
• Siri altnerative with an open API growing at a crazy rate. Which means
• More Focus on Gaming. Android more trouble for developers to port on
Game Center? OpenFient Acquisition? different phones.
• More options for TV development, • Which means Bad android reviews and
Google Glasses Integration. discouragement to develop further.
• iPhone starts to look very promising in
this scenario.
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com

31. THANK YOU
ANY QUERIES?
Faisal Abid @faisalabid
www.faisalabid.com