The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development Version 4.5 Released

Happy New Year!

Subscribers now have access to the latest release of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, known as Version 4.5, in all formats. Just log into your Warescription page and download away, or set up an account and subscribe!

This release:

• Adds ~50 pages of coverage of the new “Maps V2” mapping option for Android, with material roughly matching the coverage of the original “Maps V1”

• Adds a standalone tutorial for creating an app that uses SQLCipher for Android, based on a workshop delivered at AnDevCon IV in December

• Adds material to the app widgets chapter on resizeable app widgets and lockscreen app widgets

• Adds material to the device admin chapter on controlling lockscreen behavior, including a sample app that allows you to disable the lockscreen support for app widgets and the camera

• Adds coverage of ShareActionProvider

• Removes the chapter on the WIMM One, as WIMM Labs is no more

• Fixes lots of errata and adds other minor improvements

There are other changemarks that you will see in this edition, related to other sorts of changes:

• Fixed most, if not all, of the broken curly quotes, as the publishing process’ “smart quotes” turned out to be not quite as smart as anticipated, so many paragraphs where the quotes changed will have changemarks for that reason

• All samples using ActionBarSherlock were updated to have android:targetSdkVersion of 14 or higher, to eliminate duplicate overflow menu affordances on some devices, so a few manifest code listings will have changemarks for that reason

In terms of the book formats, the EPUB, MOBI/Kindle, and APK files have larger images. The APK file also supports a long-tap on an image, which will then open up in a separate activity that supports zoom and pan operations, for you to be able to examine the image more closely. These changes did increase the file sizes by a fair bit, though.

Version 4.6 is planned for mid-February.