Working with Intents

        An Intent object encapsulates a task request used by the Android operating system.When the startActivity( ) method is called with the Intent parameter, the Android system matches the Intent action with the appropriate activity on the Android system. That activity is then launched.

The Android system handles all intent resolution. An intent can be very specific, including a request for a specific activity to be launched, or something vague, requseting that any activity matching certain criteria be launced. For the finer details on intent resolution, see the Android documentation.

Passing information with Intents

Intents can be used to pass data between activities. You can use an intent in this way by including additional data, called extras, within the intent.
To package extra pieces of data along with an intent, you use the putExtra( ) method with the appropriate type of object you want to include. The Android Programming convention for intent extra is to name each one with the package prefix.
for example, com.gaurang.androidcoders.NameOfExtra.

Using Intents to Launch Other Application

Initially, an application may only be launching activity classes defined within its own package. However, with the appropriate permissions, applications may also launch external activity classes in other applications.
There are well-defined intent actions for many common user tasks
for example, you can create intent actions to initiate applications such as the following :

• Launching the built-in web browser and supplying a URL address.
• Launching the web browser and supplying a search string.
• Launching the built-in Dialer application and supplying a phone number.
• Launching the built-in  Maps application and supplying a location.
• Launching Google Sreet view and supplying a location.
• Launching the built-in camera application in still or video mode.
• Launching a ringtone picker.
• Recording sound.

Applications may also create their own intent types and allows other applications to call them, which makes it possible to develop tightly integrated application suites.

Application Activity Cycle

All The Instance in your Application is an Activity . For instance, when your activity starts for the first time, it comes to the foreground of the system and receives user focus. During this process, the Android system calls a series of lifecycle methods on the activity in which you set up the user interface and other components. If the user performs an action that starts another activity or switches to another app, the system calls another set of lifecycle methods on your activity as it moves into the background.Within the lifecycle callback methods, you can declare how your activity behaves when the user leaves and re-enters the activity. 
for example, you are playing a game & you got a new mail , you pause & minimize the game see the the mail & resume the game Back from the same point where you stop.

• onCreate( )

                   This is called when your Activity is created.

• onStart( )

                   This is called to Start your Activity.

• onResume( )

                   This is called to resume the last saved instance state .onPause( ) method is required for calling 

          this method. 

• onPause( )

                   This is called to pause the current instance & save the instance for restoring the state on calling 

         onResume( ) method.

Google TV Running On Android OS..

Hello geeks...
Started with Android Application Development For Mobile & tablets.....
Here`s a New Opportunity for YOU .... " Google Tv "  Running on Android
Start Making Your Apps optimized for Google Tv .

Do You Know What is Google TV ?

Google TV is a Smart TV platform from Google co-developed by Intel, Sony and Logitech. Google TV integrates Google's Android operating system and Google Chrome browser to create an interactive television overlay on top of existing Internet television and WebTV sites to add a 10-foot user interface. Google TV initially launched October 6, 2010, with official devices from Sony and Logitech.

Google TV's first generation devices were created and commercialized by Sony and Logitech. The first generation of devices were based on x86 architecture processor by Intel. For the second generation of devices new partners have joined, including LG, Samsung and Vizio, some of which include 3D capabilities. The second generation of Google TV devices are based on ARM architecture processors.

There are Two Ways of Having Google TV..

1. Buddy Box

A small box sits between your existing cable (or satellite) receiver and the TV, bringing the goodness of Google TV to your TV set. You can also use the remote to control your cable box, TV, and stereo. If you’re still not impressed, then try controlling it with your phone.

2. Integrated TV

The web and app goodness of Google TV is built right into your TV set, so you just need to plug in your existing cable (or satellite) receiver as usual. Did we mention that you can use the remote (or your phone!) to control your cable box, TV, and stereo.

The features Of Google TV varies with different Models & Companies...

The Major Partners of Google TV are Sony, LG &Vizio.....

Google TV is able To Access & download Apps From the Google Play Store

Some Of The Apps Optimized For Google TV

Publishing Apps On Play Store

Hello Friends !
Once You Are Ready Building Your App You can Publish it On the google play store.

Overview

Google Play gives you an easy way to distribute your applications to Android users. Key features of Google Play include:

• Open: Google Play is open to any developer.
• Simplicity: Join Google Play in 3 easy steps: Register, upload, and publish.
• Community: Android users can rate and comment on applications.
• Choice: Choose between distributing free and paid applications.
• Manage: Your application portfolio: view downloads, ratings, and comments.

You can set up to start publishing on Google Play in only a few minutes. Here's how you do it:

• Register for a Google Play publisher account
• If you will sell apps, set up a Google Checkout Merchant Account
• Explore the Google Play Android Developer Console and learn about the tools for publishing

Register for a publisher account

The first step is to visit the Google Play Android Developer Console and register for a publisher account.

Here's what you have to do during registration:

1. When your registration is verified, you’ll be notified at the email address you specified during registration.Visit the Google Play Android Developer Console at https://play.google.com/apps/publish/ .
2. Enter basic information about your developer identity — developer name, email address, and so on. You can modify this information later.
3. Read and accept the Developer Distribution Agreement that applies to your country or region. Note that apps and store listings that you publish on Google Play must comply with the Developer Program Policies and US export law,
4. Pay a $25 USD registration fee using Google Checkout. If you don't have a Google Checkout account, you can quickly set one up during the process.

When your registration is verified, you’ll be notified at the email address you specified during registration.

( NOTE: 

• You need a Google account to register. You can create one during the process.
• If you are an organization, consider registering a new Google account rather than using a personal account.
• Review the developer countries and merchant countries where you can distribute and sell apps.)

For Selling Paid Apps you Need to follow this step Also

Set up a Google Checkout Merchant account

If you want to sell products on Google Play — priced apps, in-app products, or subscriptions — you will also need to set up a Google Checkout Merchant Account. You can do that at any time, but make sure to first review the list of merchant countries.

To set up a Merchant account from the Developer Console:

1. Sign in to your Google Play Android Developer Console at https://play.google.com/apps/publish/
2. Click on the "Edit profile" link.
3. Select "Setup a Merchant Account at Google Checkout".

This will take you to the Google Checkout site to sign up as a Merchant; you'll need to have information about your business handy to complete this step.

The Developer Console

Once you've registered and received verification by email, you can sign in to your Google Play Android Developer Console, which will be the home for your app publishing operations and tools on Google Play. This sections below introduce a few of the key areas you'll find in the Developer Console.

Your Developer Profile

Developer profile: Specifies your developer identity and contact information, stores your developer key, and more.

Your developer profile identifies you to Google Play and to your customers. During registration you can provide information for your profile, but you can go back at any time to edit the information and change your settings.

Your developer profile contains:

• Your developer name — the name you want to show users on your product details page and elsewhere on Google Play.
• Your developer contact information — how Google can contact you if needed (this information isn't exposed to users.
• Merchant information, in-app billing information.
• Your developer public key for licensing and In-app Billing.

Multiple user accounts

If you are working with a team, you can set up multiple user accounts to access different parts of your Developer Console. The first account registered is the account owner, with full access to all parts of the Console. The owner can add user accounts and manage what parts of the Console they have access to. For example, an owner can grant users access to publishing and app configuration, but not access to financial reports.

Linking your Merchant Account

If you want to sell apps or in-app products, you can link your Google Checkout Merchant account to your developer profile. Google Play uses the linked Checkout account for financial and tax identification and monthly payouts of sales.

Your product and listing details

The Developer Console lets you set up a colorful storefront page for your app called the product details page. Your product details page is the home for your app in Google Play — it's the page users see on their mobile phones or on the web when they want to learn about your app and download it.

You can upload custom brand assets, screen shots, and videos to highlight what's great about your app, and you can provide a localized description, add notes about the latest version, and more. You can update your store listing at any time, even if you don’t have a new version of your application.

Uploading and publishing

From the Developer Console you can quickly upload a release-ready APK and publish it when you're ready. The app is a draft until you publish it, at which time Google Play makes your product details page and app available to users. You can unpublish the app at any time.

Distribution Controls

In the Developer Console you can manage what countries and territories the app is distributed to and, for some countries, you can choose what carriers you want to target.

You can also see the list of devices that your app is currently available to, based on any distribution rules declared in its manifest file.

Selling and pricing your Products

The Developer Console gives you tools to set prices for your apps and in-app products. Your app can either be free to download or priced (charged before download).

• In addition, you can sell in-app products and subscriptions in your app, whether it is free or priced. You can set prices separately for priced apps, in-app products, and subscriptions.If you publish your app as free, it must remain free. Free apps can be downloaded by any users in Google Play.
• If you publish it as priced, you can change it to free, Priced apps can be purchased and downloaded only by users who have registered a forms of payment in Google Play.

If you are selling a priced app or in-app products or subscriptions, the Developer Console lets you set prices in a large number of different currencies. When users around the world visit your product details page, they see the price of your app in their own currency. For most countries, the price you set is the final price charged to users, inclusive of taxes.

To help you manage your prices, the Developer Console provides an autofill capability that uses recent exchange rates to populate the prices in all supported currencies. You can change prices for apps and in-app products at any time, just by saving changes in the Develoer Console.

App statistics

The Developer Console gives you detailed statistics on the install performance of your app.

You can view installations of your app measured by unique users, as well as by unique devices. For user installations, you can view active installs, total installs, and daily installs and uninstalls. For devices, you can see active installs as well as daily installs, uninstalls, and upgrades.

Once you are done with publishing your App... Publish your App For more popularity of your App

Promote Your Apps

After you publish your app, you can bring Android users to your app's product details page by providing links in your social network posts, ad campaigns, app reviews and articles, your web site, and more.

You can use the resources in this section to create deep links for your online placements. Google Play badges are an especially great way let Android users know that your app is available and link them directly to your download page. With the badge generator, they're also easy to make.

Hope you all got how to publish your Apps on Play Store...

Google Play & Visibility of your Apps in Play Store

Google Play is the premier store for distributing Android apps. It’s preinstalled on more than 400 million devices worldwide, a number growing by more than a million every day. Android users have downloaded more than 25 billion apps from Google Play, growing at a rate of more than 1.5 billion per month.

When you publish on Google Play, you put your apps in front of Android's huge base of active customers, in more than 130 countries and territories across the world.

Google Play is also a top destination for visitors from the the web. Anyone with a browser can explore everything that Google Play has to offer from its web site. Android users can even buy and install the apps they want and Google Play pushes them automatically to their devices over the air.

The accessiblility and convenience of the Google Play web site give you new ways to drive traffic to your products from online ads, web search, cross-linking, and more.

Growth in app consumption: Users download more than 1.5 billion apps from Google Play each month.

User ratings and reviews

When you develop a great app, Android users show their appreciation through ratings and reviews. They rate your app (out of 5 stars) after downloading it and can post a short description of their experience. When other users are considering your app, they look at the ratings and reviews as key benchmarks of the app’s quality.

Your app’s rating is one of the most important factors influencing its ranking in the various lists and search results in Google Play. It's also one of the key signals that the editorial staff looks for, when curating apps and games for promotion in the store.

Category browsing

When you publish an app in Google Play, you pick the category in which you want users to find your app. More than 30 categories are available. Inside each category, apps are ranked based on a combination of ratings, reviews, downloads, country, and other factors. Many popular categories also start with a collection of featured apps selected by the Google Play editorial staff.

                     
Featuring in categories: Most app and game categories include a featured list curated by the editorial team.

Search

Search on Google Play lets users pinpoint an app or game quickly. Search uses powerful heuristics to suggest terms as the user types, and it offers direct links to apps as suggestions. In results, users find the most relevant, most popular apps at the top.

Featured, Staff Picks, Collections, and Badges

 

The Google Play editorial team is dedicated to bringing the best apps to the attention of users and setting the tone for app quality throughout the store. It constantly reviews apps from across Google Play to find not only the best-known apps and games, but also the “diamonds in the rough” that they want more people to see.

When the team finds great apps and games, it uses theFeatured, Staff Picks, and other collections to promote them to users.

You can't nominate your app for featuring, but the team is always on the lookout for great apps through a number of signals and indicators. If you build an app that users love and that looks great on Android devices, the editorial team will notice.

Featured and Staff Picks

Each week the the Google Play editorial staff selects a new set of apps to promote in its popular Featured and Staff Picks collections.

The Featured collections highlight the latest and greatest app and game titles available for Android. Category featuring highlights the best and most popular apps in the top categories. Staff Picks collects all recently featured apps and games on Google Play. To better reach tablet users, there’s a special Staff Picks collection that highlights the best apps for Android tablets.

 EDITORS' CHOICE

Editors’ Choice is a curated collection of apps that highlights some of the very best apps available on Android. These apps are chosen for high quality and great UI, long-term popularity, and innovative use of Android features.

Apps chosen for Editors’ Choice also receive a badge that is displayed wherever the app name is seen in Google Play.

 TOP DEVELOPER

Top Developer is a badge recognizing established, respected developers for their commitment to launching high-quality and innovative apps on Android. The Google Play editorial staff selects developers awards a Top Developer badge from time to time, based on the cumulative work of the developer.

The Top Developer badge appears next to the developer name wherever it is displayed in Google Play. For a developer, the badge means long-term recognition of all of your apps. For users, the badge signifies an additional level of trust and confidence in your products.

Rich, colorful product pages

In Google Play, your app’s storefront is its product details page — a rich and colorful page that lets you promote your app, highlight its ratings and reviews, and show what your app can do.

Your product details page is the one page where your users come to find out everything about your app. When they see your app listed in search results, top charts, category listings, and collections, one tap takes them directly to your product details page.

You can manage your product details page through the Google Play Android Develeper Console, from any web browser. Just sign in, upload or update your brand assets, and enter your product details in the languages of your markets.

When you publish, Google Play adds your app’s ratings, reviews, links to your other products, and more, and makes sure your product details page looks great on phones, tablets, or in a web browser.

You can link web users directly to your product details page from outside Google Play, such as from your web site, an ad campaign, reviews, social media posts, and more. See Linking to Your Products to find out how.

Building Hello World Android App

Hope U all Understood My Last post about installing Android Development Environment.....
Now i will Show you How To build a Simple Hello World App in Eclipse....... :)
Let's get started... 

• Create a new Android project (File > New > Android Application)

• Set your project properties
• Project Name: Hello World
• Application Name: Hello World
• Package Name: com.Gaurang.test
• Min Required SDK : Android 2.3 or any as you want
• Target SDK: Select Android 4.2 or any you want
• Press " Next ".

• Select your App logo & press Next

• Then Select Blank Activity & press Next. 

• Give Activity Name & press Finish.

• your Project is created, now start Developing.
• First open The activity_main.xml file.
• Drag & Drop The TextView  & Button from sidebar to the graphical xml view.

• I Renamed the Button name to "Click Here". 
• Now open the MainActivity.java file from the side navigation panel as shown in fig below.

• Now copy the code given Below.

• Save all files.
• now run the App in the AVD  By clicking on the Run button on the menu bar of Eclipse as shown below.

• your App Is ready to run Now , Emulater  will open & your App gets Started.

• Now On clicking The Button It will Display a message for short priod of time.

Congratulaions Your First App Is Ready....

Stay Tuned For More Help....

Happy Coding :)

Setting up Android development Environment

There are many ways to develop for Android and because of all the options it is sometimes a little daunting getting your environment setup. I found myself bouncing from web page to web page, not really sure if I had the right tools and if they were setup correctly. I wanted to document the process that worked for me. Here is the Method I used.

System Requirements

• Windows XP (32-bit), Vista (32- or 64-bit), or Windows 7 (32- or 64-bit)
• Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later (x86 only)
• Linux (tested on Ubuntu Linux, Lucid Lynx)
  • GNU C Library (glibc) 2.7 or later is required.
  • On Ubuntu Linux, version 8.04 or later is required.
  • 64-bit distributions must be capable of running 32-bit applications.

Tools Required

• Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (v3.5 Galileo recomended but You can use any other)
• Java Platform (JDK 6  or higher)
• Android SDK Tools

Step 1:  Install Java Platform (JDK 6 or higher)

•  Download the installation file from Sun from here http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp 

• Now run the JDK installation. I did not change any of the default installation options. When complete continue to step 2.

Step 2. Install Eclipse IDE

• I choose to use the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (v3.5 Galileo). You can download  it here 

                Download "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (92 MB)" from here         http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

• This is a zip file and does not require installation. Just copy the eclipse folder into your programs directory.

Step 3: Download the Android SDK Tools 

• Download the install package  from here http://developer.android.com/sdk/index

• This does not require installation. Just unzip and copy the files. You can install the package anywhere but remember where you put as you will need to reference it in Eclipse. I happen to install it inside my eclipse folder.

Step 4:  Configure Android SDK

• Launch "SDK-manager.exe" located in the Android SDK install folder"

• Choose The platforms u want to install.

• When done go to Tools in Menubar.

• Now we are going to create a virtual device (AVD).

• Select "New"

•  Create the new Android Virtual Device
• Name: Android4.2 (Any Name u Want) 
• Target: Android 4.2 API Level 17 (Or which ever API you installed)
• SD card Size:  200 MiB to 32000MiB 
• Leave the rest at the default settings

• Press "Create AVD". Be patient it may take a few minutes to create your new AVD.
• Close the SDK setup. 

Step 5:  Configure Eclipse

• Launch Eclipse for the first time. You will be asked where you want to your workspace folder to be located. 
• I used the default location. 
• Check "Use this as the default and do not ask again" so you don't have to answer this question every time. 
• Press "OK".

• Select "Help > Install New Software..."

•  Press "Add".

• Fill out the Add Site information
• Name: Android
• Location: https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/
• Press "OK"

        NOTE : If you get an error don't use SSL. change location from "https://dl- ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/" to "http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/"

•  After a connection is made and available tools are retrieved expand "Developer Tools" and select "Android DDMS" and "Android Development Tools"
• Press "Next"

• Press "Next" again.
• Check "I accept the terms of the license agreements"
• You may receive a Security Warning about unsigned content. Press "OK"
• Done. Now you should restart Eclipse.

• After rebooting we need to tell Eclipse where we copied the "Android SDK" in step 3.
• Select "Windows > Preferences"

• Select "Android" from the left pane. After you select "Android" you will receive an error. That is because it is not setup yet. We are setting it up now.
• For the SDK Location, browse to where you installed the SDK.

•  Press Ok.

• A dialog box will appear. If you want to send usage data to Google leave it checked, other uncheck it and press "Continue". This dialog box can sometimes get trapped beneath your window. Minimize Eclipse if you don't see it.

                                                   You are now ready to build your first application.