Updates on Updates

Now that Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) has shipped, some people will be wondering when I will be updating my books to reflect ICS, the new r14 edition of the development tools, etc.

The answer is: November. Hopefully. For some books. Waffle, waffle, waffle.

Part of my difficulty is that I have no idea when the Galaxy Nexus will actually ship. The best I’ve heard is “November”, which is a relatively large target. My guess is that they will try to release it in the US before November 24, but that’s a guess, and I’ve been wrong before. I will not ship a book update based solely on emulator behavior, as down that road lies madness (and mad readers). And, my travel schedule complicates matters a bit. Notably, I have a metric buttload of presentations at AnDevCon 2011 II, and while I am in Burlingame, I am not out buying a phone.

If I were a betting man, I would bet that I won’t be able to buy a Galaxy Nexus until November 19th or later, either because it doesn’t ship until then, or I can’t get a chance to buy one until then.

Here’s what I can tell you:

• I should ship a small update to Tuning Android Applications before AnDevCon 2011 II, as it is mostly complete and I need that material for a pair of presentations.

• The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development will be updated before The Busy Coder’s Guide to Advanced Android Development. Depending on the availability of the Galaxy Nexus, they may ship almost simultaneously, or there may be a couple of weeks in between. If my guess of the Galaxy Nexus being available by November 24 is accurate, then these book updates should ship by the end of November.

• Android Programming Tutorials will get a light update before year’s end, to ensure everything works on ICS and the new build tools, plus update the Eclipse-specific instructions for the various changes those new tools have introduced. This book is slated for another complete overhaul in early 2012, to get fragments and the action bar covered early and used throughout most of the book, as opposed to showing up ~20 tutorials in.

Also, for those of you who have been using any of my CWAC components, they are probably in a state of disarray if you have updated to the latest tools release. Pretty much every author of an Android library project will have to update their projects. This is part of my workload scheduled for tomorrow, so stay tuned to the components’ Git repositories for new commits and tags.