The news surrounding Android 4.4 KitKat, the Nexus 5 and all the apps that will be updating soon will be pretty steady for the next few hours and days. We are all keeping our eyes peeled for things like the SDK, Source Code, Updated Apps, Updated Devices and factory recovery images. As it were, the Android 4.4 KitKat SDK has been released for all those amazingly talented developers who are eager to get to work on bringing their current apps and future apps up to speed.
Personally, I am pretty darn excited that Google put so much work into making the latest version of Android more memory efficient and capable of running on those lower end 512MB devices. That should resurrect a number of older devices that couldn’t quite cut it on Jelly Bean.
Here’s a quick look at some of the new features for developers:
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New ways to create beautiful apps — A new full-screen immersive mode lets your app or game use every pixel on the screen to showcase content and capture touch events. A new transitions framework makes it easier to animate the states in your UI. Web content can take advantage of a completely new implementation of WebView built onChromium.
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More useful than ever — A printing framework lets you add the convenience of printing to your apps. A storage access framework makes it easier for users find documents, photos, and other data across their local and cloud-based storage services. You can integrate your app or storage service with the framework to give users instant access to their data.
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Low-power sensors — New hardware-integrated sensors let you add great new features to your apps without draining the battery. Included are a step detector and step counter that let you efficiently track of the number of walking steps, even when the screen is off.
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New media capabilities — A new screen recorder lets you capture high-quality video of your app directly from your Android device. It’s a great new way to create walkthroughs, tutorials, marketing videos, and more. Apps can useadaptive playback to offer a significantly better streaming video experience.
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RenderScript in the NDK — A new C++ API in the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) lets you use RenderScript from your native code, with access to script intrinsics, custom kernels, and more.
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Improved accessibility support — New system-wide captioning settings let your apps present closed captions in the style that’s preferred by the user.
Not to shabby Google. None of this will probably mean a heck of a lot to the average users, but all you crafty devs out there are in for some fun tonight. Now, trick or treating or playing about?
Source: Android Developers Blog
Via AndroidPolice