Google has made a new version of the Android SDK available to developers. It offers new tools and a brand new user interface. Here are the details.

Eric Ogren, Contributor

February 14, 2008

1 Min Read

Google has made a new version of the Android SDK available to developers. It offers new tools and a brand new user interface. Here are the details.Google has been listening. It's taken a lot of user feedback into consideration and re-vamped the Android SDK as a result.

According to the Android Developer Blog, here are the changes:

* New user interface -- As mentioned when we introduced the m3 version of the Android SDK, we're continuing to refine the UI that's available for Android. m5-rc14 replaces the previous placeholder with a new UI, but as before, work on it is still in progress.

* Layout animations -- Developers can now create layout animations for their applications using the capabilities introduced in the android.view.animation package. Check out the LayoutAnimation*.java files in the APIDemos sample code for examples of how this works.

* Geo-coding -- android.location.Geocoder enables developers to forward and reverse geo-code (i.e., translate an address into a coordinate and vice versa), and also search for businesses.

* New media codecs -- The MediaPlayer class has added support for the OGG Vorbis, MIDI, XMF, iMelody, RTTL/RTX, and OTA audio file formats.

* Updated Eclipse plug-in -- A new version of ADT is available and provides improvements to the Android developer experience. In particular, check out the new Android Manifest editor.

Google obviously has made an effort to make the SDK better to use as well as include new features to entice developers. It is available immediately.

This build is called m5-rc14.

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