The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development Version 6.6 Released

Subscribers now have access to the latest release of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, known as Version 6.6, in all formats. Just log into your Warescription page and download away, or set up an account and subscribe!

This update includes:

• A new chapter on Android’s convoluted tasks system. This chapter includes a review of what tasks are, what the standard behavior that users see without any changes on our part, and what some common modifications are to task behavior. It also covers persistent tasks and documents-as-tasks, introduced in Android 5.0.

• A new chapter on the App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), for getting your Android app running on Chrome OS, as was profiled earlier in this blog

• An updated chapter on UI Automator, covering the new UI Automator 2.0 and its Gradle/Android Studio integration

• A new chapter on Android Studio dialogs, focusing on the Project Structure dialog and the Translations Editor.

• A new section in the chapter on the Play Services SDK’s fused location provider, covering SettingsApi (to prompt users to enable locations) and requestLocationUpdates() (for periodically getting location fixes)

• Minor changes for Android 5.1

• A somewhat revamped chapter on ContactsContract, as the previous edition of this chapter was really old

The next update is planned for the first half of June. In other words, the next update is planned for sometime after the Google I|O conference, in case Google makes some Earth-shattering (or at least book-shattering or author-shattering) announcements.