Tuning Android Applications Version 0.2 Available

Tuning Android Applications Version 0.2 is now available for subscribers.

This update adds ~36 pages on bandwidth consumption, including a short example of how to use TrafficStats. This coverage is a bit weak — I want to incorporate some examples of budget-based bandwidth shaping in a later update. And if somebody out there has had success in using Wireshark for traffic analysis of Android devices on WiFi, drop me a line, as I’d like to pick your brain.

This update also adds a few clarifications to the CPU coverage from the previous version, with more updates in this area to come.

The next update — Version 0.3 — will have partial coverage of memory and battery consumption. In particular, the “Focus On” chapters for memory (HPROF files and MAT) and battery (the Qualcomm MDP devices and Trepn) should be completed. This is targeted for release before droidcon UK in early October, if for no other reason than I have a presentation on Traceview and MAT at that event… :-)

At that point, this title will go into update hibernation until early 2012, as I return my attention to The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development and The Busy Coder’s Guide to Advanced Android Development, adding in coverage of Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) when it is released, putting in more Honeycomb coverage (loaders and property animations), and so on. Those will be some fairly massive updates, particularly for how ICS takes the Honeycomb-style UI and crams it into a phone form factor. Hence, I am expecting a couple of revisions to those titles during the balance of 2011, which, along with a “skunkworks” project you’ll hear about eventually, will consume most of my available time.

If you have questions regarding the use of the sample code, please post a question on StackOverflow tagged with commonsware and android. Be sure to indicate what book example you are having issues with, and be sure to include source code and stack traces if you are encountering crashes.