Android Designers LLC.
  • How to Post Screen Shots to the Market
    With your phone connected to your computer, and your application running, run ddms.bat; this is found in your android sdk directory under the tools directory. When ddms runs, you will see your phone ID and that it is "online". Click on it to select your phone. From the Device menu, select Screen Capture. You will see your screen captured. Click the save button to make a png file. At this point, the png file can be loaded into the market for your application, however, it is currently sized at 480w x 854h. The market supports this size and 320w x 480h. Resize you png down to 320w x 480h and post that to the market. When your customers view screen shots in the market, the smaller size shows your whole screen without any clipping. Using the larger size ends up clipping your screen!
  • How to Create an APK for the Market
    coming soon
  • How to Layout Buttons using Gravity
    coming soon
  • How to Handle Portrait vs. Landscape Layouts
    Many applications can take advantage of displaying their contents differently when the phone is turned from a portrait layout to a landscape layout. If you application does not adjust when someone rotates their phone, it can appear to be an incomplete or poorly designed product. In order to build and test your application for both modes, design and layout for both aspects.

    In your application directory structure, you will have res directory for your application resources. Under this directory, with be a layout directory. This is where you define your screen layouts, for example main.xml for your main screen, or help.xml for your help screen. To support horizontal or landscape mode, create a new directory under the res directory and name it layout-land. Now create your layout in this directory so that they layout nicely in landscape mode. For our example, we will have a main.xml in the layout directory and a main.xml in the layout-land directory. When you application is run, the system will automatically read and display the proper main.xml depending on the orientation of the phone. As the phone is rotated, the proper main.xml is loaded. Since you have built two main.xml files, you can design, test, and see each layout in your Eclipse editor before you deploy onto your phone.