Android™ Tablet Application Development For Dummies®

Exploring Android Software Tools

Various Android tools are at your disposal while writing Android applications. In the following sections, I outline some of the most popular tools that you will use in your day-to-day Android development process.

Exploit the Internet

Thanks to the Internet capabilities of Android devices, real-time information is easy to obtain. As a user, you can use the Internet to see what time the next movie starts or when the next commuter train arrives. As a developer, you can use the Internet in your apps to access real-time, up-to-date data such as weather, news, and sports scores. You can also use the web to store some of your application's assets, which is what Pandora and YouTube do.

Don't stop there. Why not offload some of your application's intense processes to a web server when appropriate? This can save a lot of processing time in some cases and also helps keep your Android app streamlined. This arrangement — client–server computing — is a well-established software architecture in which the client makes a request to a server that is ready and willing to do something. The built-in Maps app is an example of a client accessing map and GPS data from a web server.

Build in audio and video support

The Android OS makes including audio and video in your apps a breeze. Many standard audio and video formats are supported, and including multimedia content ...