Google Announces Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and Releases SDK

Google I/O has begun, and several major announcements have been made including the release of Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), Google Nexus 7 tablet featuring an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and running Android 4.1, and the Google Nexus Q media player based on TI OMAP4460 processing and running Android 4.0 ICS. I’ll write about all those announcements today in three different posts. Let’s start with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The new version of Google’s mobile operating system includes a smoother and more responsive UI, a home screen that automatically adapts to fit your content, a better predictive keyboard, more interactive notifications, improved Android Beam (NFC) sharing, improved voice dictation (now works offline) and more. Here’s a summary of the key technical changes to Android 4.1: Faster, smoother and more responsive Vsync timing will be used for all drawing and animations to ensure a constant framerate (~62.5 fps). Triple buffering is used […]

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon SDK 1.0 for Android

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon SDK for Android at the Uplinq 2012 developers conference, and a preview release of the SDK is now available on Qualcomm’s developer site. The full SDK will be available to device manufacturers and developers in the coming months. The Snapdragon SDK for Android enables developers to features of Snapdragon processors via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) not otherwise available in the stock Android SDK including: Snapdragon Audio SDK (new) Snapdragon Camera SDK (new) Snapdragon Sensors SDK (new) Adreno GPU sample code for OpenGL ES FastCV SDK – Mobile-optimized Computer Vision  (CV) library Supposedly, there is also IZat Location SDK, but it did not show up in the list when I tried it. At first, the SDK will only support devices build around Snapdragon S4 8960 processor, but the company expects to support future Snapdragon processors over time. The Snapdragon SDK for Android allows developers to take […]

Collabora and Fluendo Release GStreamer SDK 2012.5 Amazon

Last week, Collabora and Fluendo jointly announced the release of an open source software development kit (SDK ) for GStreamer multimedia framework. The SDK aims at easing the integration of Gstreamer  into projects and provides a pre-built version of the framework which is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. GStreamer is used in many Linux applications such as media players (Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok),  video editors (PitiVi), and media centers such as XBMC among other applications. It’s also often the framework used to play videos on ARM platforms with implementations for OMAP 4/5 and devices compliant with the OpenMAX standard. Gstreamer website has also been updated and provides links to download GStreamer SDK and documentation on the home page. The new documentation looks pretty good with fives main sections: Instructions for installing the SDK on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora), Windows or Mac OS. 11 basic and 2 advanced tutorials. […]

Android NDK Revision 8 Adds MIPS Architecture Support

Google has just released Android Native Development Kit Revision 8, the Android SDK that allows developers to reuse C/C++ code. This version adds support for MIPS architecture and fixes a few bugs. Here’s the changelog of the new features and most important bug fixes: Added support for the MIPS ABI, which allows you to generate machine code that runs on compatible MIPS-based Android devices. Major features for MIPS include MIPS-specific toolchains, system headers, libraries and debugging support. For more details regarding MIPS support, see docs/CPU-MIPS.htmlin the NDK package. Fixed a typo in GAbi++ implementation. Fixed an issue in which make-standalone-toolchain.sh fails to copy libsupc++.*. You can download Android NDK version 8 to develop native apps for MIPS or take advantage of the new bug fixes. Previously, MIPS provided the Android NDK on their own website, but this version might be phased out, as MIPS support is now part of  the […]

Tizen 1.0 SDK and Source Code Release

The Tizen Technical Steering Group has announced, today, the release of Tizen 1.0 “Larkspur”. Tizen 1.0 release provides several new SDK features and improvements including: Simulator: A new browser-based tool that supports the Tizen APIs and allows you to run and debug your web applications, and simulate running applications with various device profiles. IDE: Enhancements include more flexibility around templates and debugging tools. Emulator: Significantly improved emulator performance through Intel’s Hardware Acceleration Manager for Windows and OpenGL acceleration for Linux. Updates to the platform source code include: Web: Support for additional features of W3C/HTML5 specification Location: Support for POI (Point of Interest) and route search Connectivity: Wi-Fi Direct key features added You can see the full list of changes by reading the release notes for the SDK and the source code. Tizen has also added a bug tracker and a wiki for the community and a few back-end changes have been […]

Texas Instruments Releases Android 4.0.3 DevKit for Beagleboard-XM and Beaglebone

After collaborating with arowboat, android-porting and Linaro communities, Texas Instruments has released Android 4.0.3 development kits for Sitara microprocessors which support Beagleboard-XM (Sitara DM3730) and Beaglebone (Sitara AM335x) low cost development boards, as well as other Sitara-based evaluation modules and development boards. Android 4.0.3 Devkit for Beaglebone If you have a Beaglebone (and an LCD or DVI-D cape), you can use TI Android ICS 4.0.3 DevKit v3.0.1, a release providing an Android ICS 4.0.3 distribution for TI’s Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex A8 Processors. This DevKit provides Android sources with pre-integrated SGX (3D graphics accelerator) drivers, TI hardware abstraction for Audio, WLAN & Bluetooth for TI WL1271 chipset, USB mass storage, etc, as well as development and debugging tools such as a toolchain, TI CCSv5, ADT plugins and more, which are provided to build custom Android solutions for the embedded market more easily. The pre-built images includes Android default apps, multimedia […]

Qt 5 for Raspberry Pi (QtonPi) 0.1 Release

Nokia Qt Labs has announced the very first release of Qt5 for Raspberry: QtonPi 0.1. QtonPi 0.1 includes a pre-alpha release of Qt 5, but Qt 5 alpha will be part of the next release. So bear in mind that it’s likely to be buggy and some features are missing. This release is includes: Base Layer Fedora RPM Packages plus some additional Raspberry Pi specific packages Linaro GCC 4.5.4 toolchain QtonPi image creator and sysroot tools Middleware Documentation on how to get toolchain + sysroot + Qt Creator working to Develop Apps Qt 5 running on full-screen EGFS mode The release can be downloaded via: BitTorrent – qtonpi-0.01.tar.bz2.torrent HTTP Download – qtonpi-0.01.tar.bz2 Alternatively if you are already running the Debian 6 image in the emulator or Raspberry Pi board, you can install the latest snapshot (e.g. nightly build) by adding deb http://archive.qmh-project.org/rpi/debian/ unstable main to /etc/apt/sources.list and run the following […]

Nokia Qt Labs Releases Qt 5.0 Alpha

Nokia Qt Labs announced the alpha release of Qt 5 C++ application development framework, which focuses on the delivery of Qt Essential modules for Qt 5. This new version of Qt goal is to bring the focus to a model, although native Qt using C++ would still be used to implement modular backend functionality for Qt Quick. The developers explains that this module is working nicely on Qt for embedded system where UIs are full screen, but more work is needed on the desktop, and it will only be fully implemented in Qt 5.1 or 5.2. Qt developers make 4 big architectural changes to Qt internal architecture: Base all Qt ports on Qt Platform Abstraction layer (QPA) to make it easier to port Qt to other windowing systems and devices. Re-architect Qt graphics stack using a a Scenegraph on top of OpenGL to increase performance versus Qt 4, using Qt […]

Memfault IoT and embedded debugging platform