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For those who don’t know, Mike & I make a popular widget app for Android called HD Widgets. We’ve spent a lot of time resolving for Android UI fragmentation and have been mostly successful. Recently we made the jump to the latest Android sdk (15). We did this to take advantage of the new features …

Google recently introduced the Android Design site for 4.0 / ICS offering tips and resources for making apps that look and feel like native Google apps. One big benefit is that you can download design resources including stencils, vector art, and icons to make it faster and easier to create stuff. The “All Icons” pack …

While I was working on my first Android app, I found 9-patch (aka 9.png) to be confusing and poorly documented. After a little while, I finally picked up on how it works and decided to throw together something to help others figure it out. Basically, 9-patch uses png transparency to do an advanced form of …

I’m writing this for my non-Twitter friends. For those who use it, Twitter is totally obvious, but some people still don’t do it. I use Twitter, not Facebook or LinkedIn. Facebook is friends, family, and game spam. LinkedIn is mid-level recruiters and too generalized. Twitter is precise – the 140-character limit provides wonderful brevity. Not …

I wanted to build a music player for Android, but before I could start I realized that I had no idea where the music files were stored on the device, let alone how to actually grab them. So I took a step back and made something simpler: an Android documents browser. It works as you’d …