ANDROID LAUNCHES LOLLIPOP
This release is packed with new features for users and thousands of new APIs for developers. It extends Android even further, from phones, tablets, and wearables, to TVs and cars.
Android 5.0 brings Material design to Android and gives you an expanded UI toolkit for integrating the new design patterns easily in your apps.
New 3D views let you set a z-level to raise elements off of the view hierarchy and cast real time shadows, even as they move.
Built-in activity transitions take the user seamlessly from one state to another with beautiful, animated motion. The material theme adds transitions for your activities, including the ability to use shared visual elements across activities
Ripple animations are available for buttons, checkboxes, and other touch controls in your app.
You can also define vector drawables in XML and animate them in a variety of ways. Vector drawables scale without losing definition, so they are perfect for single-color in-app icons.
A new system-managed processing thread called Render Thread keeps animations smooth even when there are delays in the main UI thread.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVED:
Android now runs exclusively on the new ART runtime, built from the ground up to support a mix of ahead-of-time (AOT), just-in-time (JIT), and interpreted code. It’s supported on ARM, x86, and MIPS architectures and is fully 64-bit compatible.
ART improves app performance and responsiveness. Efficient garbage collection reduces the number and duration of pauses for GC events, which fit comfortably within the v-sync window so your app doesn’t skip frames. ART also dynamically moves memory to optimize performance for foreground uses.
Android 5.0 introduces platform support for 64-bit architectures—used by the Nexus 9's NVIDIA Tegra K1. Optimizations provide larger address space and improved performance for certain compute workloads. Apps written in the Java language run as 64-bit apps automatically—no modifications are needed. If your app uses native code, we’ve extended the NDK to support new ABIs for ARM v8, and x86-64, and MIPS-64.
Continuing the focus on smoother performance, Android 5.0 offers improved A/V sync. The audio and graphics pipelines have been instrumented for more accurate timestamps, enabling video apps and games to display smooth synchronized content.
NOTIFICATIONS PANEL:
Varying notification details may appear on the lock screen if desired by the user. Users may elect to allow none, some, or all notification content to be shown on a secure lock screen.
Key notification alerts such as incoming calls appear in a heads-up notification—a small floating window that allows the user to respond or dismiss without leaving the current app.
You can now add new meta data to notifications to collect associated contacts (for ranking), category, and priority.
A new media notification template provides consistent media controls for notifications with up to 6 action buttons, including custom controls such as "thumbs up"—no more need for Remote Views!.
Android 5.0 introduces a redesigned Overview space (formerly called Recents) that’s more versatile and useful for multitasking.New APIs allow you to show separate activities in your app as individual documents alongside other recent screens.
You can take advantage of concurrent documents to provide users instant access to more of your content or services. For example, you might use concurrent documents to represent files in a productivity app, player matches in a game, or chats in a messaging app.
Android 5.0 adds new APIs that allow apps to perform concurrent operations with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), allowing both scanning (central mode) and advertising (peripheral mode).
New multi-networking features allow apps to query available networks for available features such as whether they are Wi-Fi, cellular, metered, or provide certain network features. Then the app can request a connection and respond to connectivity loss or other network changes.
NFC APIs now allow apps to register an NFC application ID (AID) dynamically. They can also set the preferred card emulation service per active service and create an NDEF record containing UTF-8 text data.
HIGH END GRAPHICS:
Android 5.0 also introduces the Android Extension Pack (AEP), a set of OpenGL ES extensions that give you access to features like tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, ASTC texture compression, per-sample interpolation and shading, and other advanced rendering capabilities. With AEP you can deliver high-performance graphics across a range of GPUs.
Android 5.0 introduces all new camera APIs that let you capture raw formats such as YUV and Bayer RAW, and control parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity, and frame duration on a per-frame basis. The new fully-synchronized camera pipeline allows you to capture uncompressed full-resolution YUV images at 30 FPS on supported devices.
Along with images, you can also capture metadata like noise models and optical information from the camera.
Apps sending video streams over the network can now take advantage of H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) for optimized encoding and decoding of video data.
Android 5.0 adds support for multimedia tunneling to provide the best experience for ultra-high definition (4K) content and the ability to play compressed audio and video data together.
NEW SENSORS ADDED:
In Android 5.0, a new tilt detector sensor helps improve activity recognition on supported devices, and a heart rate sensor reports the heart rate of the person touching the device.
New interaction composite sensors are now available to detect special interactions such as a wake up gesture, a pick up gesture, and a glance gesture.
At Last android 5.0 gets rid of chrome and introduces chromium as its latest browser.
In my Ubuntu post I have explained importance and usage of chromium. Please see it to know more.
The initial release for Android 5.0 includes a version of Chromium for
Chromium M37 also includes native support for all of the Web Components specifications: Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, HTML Imports, and Templates. This means you can use Polymer and its material design elements in a Web View without needing polyfills.
Although WebView has been based on Chromium since Android 4.4, the Chromium layer is now updatable from Google Play.
As new versions of Chromium become available, users can update from Google Play to ensure they get the latest enhancements and bug fixes for WebView, providing the latest web APIs and bug fixes for apps using WebView on Android 5.0 and higher.
LOLLIPOP REVIEW:
This release is packed with new features for users and thousands of new APIs for developers. It extends Android even further, from phones, tablets, and wearables, to TVs and cars.
MATERIAL DESIGN:
Android 5.0 brings Material design to Android and gives you an expanded UI toolkit for integrating the new design patterns easily in your apps.
New 3D views let you set a z-level to raise elements off of the view hierarchy and cast real time shadows, even as they move.
Built-in activity transitions take the user seamlessly from one state to another with beautiful, animated motion. The material theme adds transitions for your activities, including the ability to use shared visual elements across activities
Ripple animations are available for buttons, checkboxes, and other touch controls in your app.
You can also define vector drawables in XML and animate them in a variety of ways. Vector drawables scale without losing definition, so they are perfect for single-color in-app icons.
A new system-managed processing thread called Render Thread keeps animations smooth even when there are delays in the main UI thread.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVED:
Android now runs exclusively on the new ART runtime, built from the ground up to support a mix of ahead-of-time (AOT), just-in-time (JIT), and interpreted code. It’s supported on ARM, x86, and MIPS architectures and is fully 64-bit compatible.
ART improves app performance and responsiveness. Efficient garbage collection reduces the number and duration of pauses for GC events, which fit comfortably within the v-sync window so your app doesn’t skip frames. ART also dynamically moves memory to optimize performance for foreground uses.
Android 5.0 introduces platform support for 64-bit architectures—used by the Nexus 9's NVIDIA Tegra K1. Optimizations provide larger address space and improved performance for certain compute workloads. Apps written in the Java language run as 64-bit apps automatically—no modifications are needed. If your app uses native code, we’ve extended the NDK to support new ABIs for ARM v8, and x86-64, and MIPS-64.
Continuing the focus on smoother performance, Android 5.0 offers improved A/V sync. The audio and graphics pipelines have been instrumented for more accurate timestamps, enabling video apps and games to display smooth synchronized content.
NOTIFICATIONS PANEL:
Varying notification details may appear on the lock screen if desired by the user. Users may elect to allow none, some, or all notification content to be shown on a secure lock screen.
Key notification alerts such as incoming calls appear in a heads-up notification—a small floating window that allows the user to respond or dismiss without leaving the current app.
You can now add new meta data to notifications to collect associated contacts (for ranking), category, and priority.
A new media notification template provides consistent media controls for notifications with up to 6 action buttons, including custom controls such as "thumbs up"—no more need for Remote Views!.
APPS MADE OFFICE CENTRIC:
Android 5.0 introduces a redesigned Overview space (formerly called Recents) that’s more versatile and useful for multitasking.New APIs allow you to show separate activities in your app as individual documents alongside other recent screens.
You can take advantage of concurrent documents to provide users instant access to more of your content or services. For example, you might use concurrent documents to represent files in a productivity app, player matches in a game, or chats in a messaging app.
CONNECTING THE NEW WAY:
Android 5.0 adds new APIs that allow apps to perform concurrent operations with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), allowing both scanning (central mode) and advertising (peripheral mode).
New multi-networking features allow apps to query available networks for available features such as whether they are Wi-Fi, cellular, metered, or provide certain network features. Then the app can request a connection and respond to connectivity loss or other network changes.
NFC APIs now allow apps to register an NFC application ID (AID) dynamically. They can also set the preferred card emulation service per active service and create an NDEF record containing UTF-8 text data.
HIGH END GRAPHICS:
Android 5.0 also introduces the Android Extension Pack (AEP), a set of OpenGL ES extensions that give you access to features like tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, ASTC texture compression, per-sample interpolation and shading, and other advanced rendering capabilities. With AEP you can deliver high-performance graphics across a range of GPUs.
VIDEO & CAMERA IMPROVED:
Android 5.0 introduces all new camera APIs that let you capture raw formats such as YUV and Bayer RAW, and control parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity, and frame duration on a per-frame basis. The new fully-synchronized camera pipeline allows you to capture uncompressed full-resolution YUV images at 30 FPS on supported devices.
Along with images, you can also capture metadata like noise models and optical information from the camera.
Apps sending video streams over the network can now take advantage of H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) for optimized encoding and decoding of video data.
Android 5.0 adds support for multimedia tunneling to provide the best experience for ultra-high definition (4K) content and the ability to play compressed audio and video data together.
In Android 5.0, a new tilt detector sensor helps improve activity recognition on supported devices, and a heart rate sensor reports the heart rate of the person touching the device.
New interaction composite sensors are now available to detect special interactions such as a wake up gesture, a pick up gesture, and a glance gesture.
CHROMIUM LAUNCHED:
In my Ubuntu post I have explained importance and usage of chromium. Please see it to know more.
The initial release for Android 5.0 includes a version of Chromium for
Chromium M37 also includes native support for all of the Web Components specifications: Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, HTML Imports, and Templates. This means you can use Polymer and its material design elements in a Web View without needing polyfills.
Although WebView has been based on Chromium since Android 4.4, the Chromium layer is now updatable from Google Play.
As new versions of Chromium become available, users can update from Google Play to ensure they get the latest enhancements and bug fixes for WebView, providing the latest web APIs and bug fixes for apps using WebView on Android 5.0 and higher.
LOLLIPOP REVIEW:
