Android Fully Loaded

318 Pages·2012·7.59 MB·English

by  Rob Huddleston

Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Android® Fully Loaded, Second Edition
Published by:
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Copyright © 2012 by Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN: 978-1-118-17302-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Acknowledgments
Thank you to Stephanie McComb, Acquisitions Editor at Wiley, for entrusting
yet another edition of this book to me. This marks the fourth project we have
worked on together, and I look forward to many more to come.
Thank you also to my fantastic agent Margot Hutchison for handling all of the
business details so that I don’t have to.
Thank you to Chris Pichereau, David Sechrist, Debbie Abshier, and all of the
others at Abshier House for their hard work shepherding this project along,
keeping me on track, and making sure my English makes sense.
Thank you to Phil Nickinson, who once again agreed to be my tech editor. Phil is
the editor of AndroidCentral.com, one of the foremost experts on all things
Android, and a great cousin. Neither this or the prior version would have been
possible without him.
Finally, thank you to Kelley, Jessica, and Xander. I love you all.
Credits
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Stephanie McComb
Editorial Director
Robyn B. Siesky
Vice President & Executive Group Publisher Richard Swadley Vice
President & Executive Publisher Barry Pruett
Business Manager
Amy Knies
Marketing Manager
Sandy Smith
Production Editor, Copy Editing, Layout, Design, Proofreading, and
Indexing Abshier House
Technical Editor
Phil Nickinson
Cover Image
Michael E. Trent
About the Author
Rob Huddleston is an Adjunct Professor at the Art Institute of California,
Sacramento in the Web Design and Interactive Media department, where he
teaches programming and design, focusing heavily on mobile development. He
has been creating web pages and applications since 1994, and worked for many
years as a corporate trainer, where he taught web and graphic design to
thousands of students from all walks of life.
Rob is the author of XML: Your visual blueprint™ for building expert websites
using XML, CSS, XHTML; HTML, XHTML; and CSS: Your visual blueprint™
for designing effective websites; Master VISUALLY: Dreamweaver CS4 and
Flash Professional CS4; ActionScript 3: Your visual blueprint™ for creating
interactive projects in Flash CS4 Professional; the Adobe Flash Catalyst Bible;
Teach Yourself VISUALLY Web Design, and the first edition of this book.
When he is not writing or teaching, Rob hangs out with his wife and two
children, runs the Sacramento Adobe Users Group, sees a ridiculous number of
movies, and obsesses about Firefly and Serenity.
You can contact Rob via his website at http://www.robhuddleston.com or follow
him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/robhuddles.

Introduction
Consider this, four short years ago, very few people had ever heard the term
“smartphone.” While the term is in fact quite a bit older — according to
Wikipedia, it was first applied to the Ericsson GS88 in 1997 — it was not until
Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone in 2007 that the term entered common
usage. The smartphone almost perfectly fits the definition of a disruptive
technology; that is, one of those technologies that comes along every so often
that radically changes our world. One simple example: Smartphones have
created a massive shift in how we interact online. Today, most people visiting the
top sites on the web still use desktop and laptop computers, but that trend is
quickly changing. In fact, estimates are that by 2015, smartphones will surpass
traditional computers to become the primary means by which we get online.
The smartphone market itself is changing so fast it is hard to keep up. At times it
seems like new devices are released almost every day. Desktop PC users are
used to hearing about new versions of Windows or the Macintosh operating
system every three or four years, while their devices seem to get new versions at
a breakneck speed.
Apple led the next revolution in mobile devices in 2010 with the announcement
of the iPad. Just as smartphones existed before the iPhone, tablets existed before
the iPad, but it was the device that brought the idea of tablets into the
mainstream.
On both the phone and the tablet market, Google’s Android was the latecomer.
The first Android phone was released in September 2008, almost 20 months
after the iPhone was unveiled. The iPad preceded commercially viable Android
tablets by more than six months.
Despite that, Android market share has exploded. A 2011 report by research firm
Nielsen showed that Android was the number one mobile operating system, with
40 percent of smartphone users on the platform, compared to 28 percent on
Apple’s iOS. The report did not look at tablets, but while most anaylists agree
that the iPad still dominates the market, it is a dominance unlikely to persist.
These new mobile technologies have also opened up a new world for developers,
providing an exciting and rapidly expanding market for applications built for
mobile devices, which in turn provides you, the end user, a seemingly limitless
supply of apps that will increase your productivity by enabling you to check e-
mail, read and edit documents, view presentations, and much more — all on
your device. At least as many apps exist to decrease your productivity as well:
No shortage of games exist to allow you to kill time and drain your battery while
having fun.
I assume you are buying this book because you recently bought an Android-
based, whether it be a smartphone or a tablet. You hold in your hand a miniature
computer; a computer so far advanced from those that took us to the moon that it
is almost unfair to label both with that same term, computer. In some ways,
carrying a device with that kind of speed and capabilities can be a bit daunting.
Hopefully, reading through this book will help strip away some of that mystery,
will help you better understand your new device, and will enable you to truly
leverage all that it can do.
Most of all, please enjoy your new device.