Eric Cloninger

Some guy continuously making messes and cleaning them up again

NOTE: This blog post was originally hosted on the Motorola Developers (MOTODEV). site. That site is no longer online. I’ve made every attempt to preserve the original content with only formatting changes to fit this site.

Hello Everyone!

A new version of MOTODEV Studio for Android was released on 28 January

  1. This new release provides support for the Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) SDK and the Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) Preview SDK. MOTODEV Studio 2.1 ships with ADT plugins version 9, which have been renumbered by Google since the last major release.

A description of the release with a list of new features is available on the MOTODEV discussion boards . If you are planning to develop apps for the Honeycomb Preview SDK, please spend a few moments reading the known issues in the release notes . The installers are available at the MOTODEV Studio downloads page and you can update an existing version of MOTODEV Studio using the “Check for Updates” from the Help menu.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio for Android.

Eric Cloninger

Product Line Manager

>>>> Content of Discussion Board Post <<<<

Hello everyone!

I hope you’re excited as we are about Wednesday’s announcement of the Honeycomb Preview SDK. This means you can now start preparing your apps to run on the next generation of Android mobile devices, including the Motorola XOOM™.

MOTODEV Studio is ready for you to download as well. We’ve been preparing this release for several months to work with the Gingerbread SDK and we were ready for the Honeycomb preview as well. The Honeycomb preview works with MOTODEV Studio with some limitations, which are outlined in the “known issues” section of the release notes. Keep in mind that if you are working on projects that will be shipping in the Android Market immediately, you should continue to work with the Gingerbread SDK.

Now, on to some of the cool new features of MOTODEV Studio 2.1. (A full list is available in the release notes)

  • Improvements to the Localization Files Editor to provide support for array items. You can now edit cells in this editor “live” and there are new menu bar items for adding and deleting items from the editor.
  • The Device Management View supports multiple selection so you can operate on more than one device at a time. This means you can start or stop multiple emulators and even deploy the same app to multiple handsets at the same time.
  • We’ve improved the way the Code Snippets window displays and provided the ability to disable the popup preview.
  • Support for obfuscating your application code. Google announced several months ago that the SDK had the ability to obfuscate code with ProGuard. MOTODEV Studio now has some nice features that add project support for this tool as well.
  • Improvements to the Database Management View that allow you to completely disable updates from devices. You can also delete tables directly from the editor by right-clicking.
  • There is a new “Run As” option that installs the app on the target device, but does nothing after that. This is useful for developers of preference panels and home screen widgets.
  • There is a question at startup about erasing passwords from previous installations. This is a fix for a bug that was brought to our attention on the MOTODEV Discussion Boards. If you want to set your own password for the key storage, you will want to allow this to happen.

MOTODEV App Validator

With the release of MOTODEV Studio 2.0 in October 2010, we added a new feature called the MOTODEV App Validator. This feature performs a number of static checks on your applications to help ensure that they are the absolute best quality that they can be.

With MOTODEV Studio 2.1, we’ve updated the App Validator to test new conditions, including some that may surprise you. To access this feature, right click your project in the Package Manage and choose “Validate Android Application”. Or, you can validate existing Android applications (.apk files) by choosing “App Validator” from the MOTODEV Menu.

The new features of the App Validator are…

  • The missingDrawables checker tests for drawables for the xhdpi configuration used in the Motorola XOOM.
  • The ability to test against device specifications. This helps ensure that your application will work correctly on new Motorola devices, such as the CHARM™, CITRUS™, and ATRIX™.
  • Test your app against conditions that could prevent it from appearing in the Android Market for certain classes of devices, such as those with small screens (e.g. Motorola CHARM).
  • Output results in .CSV format for input into a spreadsheet.

We’re making a lot of exciting new changes to MOTODEV Studio and the App Validator in the coming months, so stay tuned to the MOTODEV Studio blog for news.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio.

Eric

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