Installation of Honeycomb

As an initial step , update your sdk with Android3.0. You can follow steps mentioned on this official documentation page. In ADT AVD Manager you should be able to Android 3.0 API entry.

As a next step you will be required to chose whether to optimize or to upgrade your existing Android application.

If you have an existing app for an earlier versions of Android , then you can optimize it for a tablet – style experience on Android3.0 , by considering the following steps:

1) First add in your Android manifest file.

By targeting the Android3.0 patform , the system will automatically apply Holographic theme to each activity , provided you dont have your custom theme applied , otherwise it will overrride the inherited holographic theme.

Or you can achieve device specific theme by adding a declaration in res/values-l1 folder -

Other custom themes can be declared under res/values/styles.xml

Now your application will automatically switch to the holo theme if running on HONEYCOMB or later.

2.Continue to build your application against the minimum version specified by android:minSdkversion.

3. Provide alternative resources for xlarge screens – Every application should provide alternative resources to support specific device configurations. For example , you can create a new layout for xtra large screen by specifying xlarge qualifier

you can place the layout under res/layout-xlarge

we can also specify landscape resources with land qualifier

like res/layout-xlarge-land

The resource directory structure of an application supporting different screen sizes and densities can be as follows -

res/layout/my_layout.xml // layout for normal screen size
res/layout-small/my_layout.xml // layout for small screen size
res/layout-large/my_layout.xml // layout for large screen size
res/layout-large-land/my_layout.xml // layout for large screen size in landscape mode
res/layout-xlarge/my_layout.xml // layout for extra large screen size
res/drawable-lhdpi/my_icon.png // image for low density
res/drawable-mdpi/dpi/my_icon.png // image for medium density
res/drawable-hdpi/my_icon.png // image for high density

res/drawable-nodpi/composite.xml // density independent resource

Now you can test your application by building in Android3.0. and publish it to Android Market

If you want to Develop a New App for tablets and similar devices then

First thing to do is to add minSdkversion to 11 and set the support for other screens as false.
External services such as Android market may use the information provided in manifest file to filter application from devices that do not have an extra large screen.

your manifest file must have these declared –

Now you can just use the new APIs introduced in Android3.0 to build your Application .

Hope this was useful. Do share your feedback by downloading our Honeycomb ready CollegeFinder app. It’s still little rough but we are working on it.

We are very excited to announce the release Android version of CodeMunch application.

CodeMunch Android application manages all employee follow-ups in one place. You can add a follow-up for your employee. This saves a lot of time by keeping track of all the follow-ups for your employees in one place negating the need to remember them.

To get started you need to install CodeMunch application from the Android market place. Alternatively, you can use QR code to scan and install.

Once installed, launch it and start adding contacts. After adding contacts you can create follow-ups for the respective employees. This is a faster and easier way of adding follow-ups.

For the geeks – this was our first ‘official’ Android project and we had lot of fun developing it. Main APIs we used include Contact API for fetching the contacts, SQLLite to store data. App supports Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and the latest Android 2.0.1.

Here are some screen shots -

Please share your feedback and suggestions on CodeMunch feature discussion forum
Complete overview on CodeMunch website