Working New Android 5 Lollipop Features into Your Apps

Url: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/01/01/new-android-5-lollipop-features.aspx

Who doesn't love some sugar? Android 5, code-named "Lollipop," is Google's latest release of the Android OS for phones, tablets and wearable devices. There are a large number of new features, some you should be aware as you develop apps going forward:

• Material Design and UI controls and capabilities. Material Design is a bold, colorful, and responsive UI design for consistent and intuitive experiences across all devices. This includes responsive, natural motion, realistic lighting, shadows, and visual elements that make it easier for users to navigate on their device, and new colors, typography, animations, and edge-to-edge imagery assistance to focus user attention.
• Notifications. The new Notifications provide ways to control when and how users receive messages. Users are able to view and respond to messages directly from the lock screen as well as hide sensitive content for these notifications.
• New runtime and performance improvements. ART is the new Android runtime (replacing Dalvik). Let's be honest -- who hasn't had problems with a poorly performing app in Dalvik on some device? I know that my Nexus 7 2013 seems to have problems. Over time, I find that apps run slower and slower until a reboot resolves that problem. ART improves application performance and responsiveness.
• 64 bits. Apple released 64-bit support in iOS in the fall of 2013. The competitive marketplace requires that Android does likewise. With Android 5.0, Google supports the current 32-bit ARM architecture, as well as 64-bit chips from ARM, x86 and MIPS.
• Accessibility. I have a large number of users at one of my clients that have accessibility issues. Given the vision problems that they have, I personally feel that it's important to make their interaction with my applications work as well as possible. Previously, Android hasn't done a good job in this area. With Lollipop, Android has improved accessibility.

These are some of the high-level improvements in Android 5, but there are many more. Clearly, one article cannot do justice to an update of this magnitude.

This column will focus on one of the new controls in Android 5. Let's get started!