Posted: 22 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

It's scary to join an open source project

Think of the last time you walked up to a complete stranger, stuck out your hand and said, "Hi, my name is …" Depending on how often you do that, it was probably a scary moment. Before you walked up to the person, you had to steel your nerves, decide what you were going to say, and then approach them.

Joining an open source software project is a bit like that. You have to send a mail to a huge list of random people. Or file a bugzilla bug that goes to a ton of random people.

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Snake charmers unite at PyCon 2012

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 03:00 AM PDT

This month Santa Clara, CA, hosted the largest snake charmer gathering in history—but not the mass of individuals holding flutes, wearing turbans, and playing seductively at wicker baskets you might be imagining. Rather, this crowd was more likely to be found staring at laptops than a venomous snake at the other end of a pungi. This was PyCon, a conference dedicated to charmers of the python programming language.

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Updated SDK Tools and ADT revision 17

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 02:06 PM PDT

Today we are releasing an update to the SDK Tools and the Eclipse plugin. Revision 17 brings a lot of new features and bug fixes in various areas such as Lint, the build system as well as the emulator.

Lint is a static checker which analyzes Android projects for a variety of issues around correctness, security, performance, usability and accessibility, checking your XML resources, bitmaps, ProGuard configuration files, source files and even compiled bytecode. It can be run from within Eclipse or from the command line.
New for r17:

Added check for Android API calls that require a version of Android higher than the minimum supported version. You can use the new @TargetApi annotation to specify local overrides for conditionally loaded code. For more information, read here.
Added over 40 new Lint rules for a total of over 80, including checks for performance, XML layouts, manifest and file handling. For a full list read here.
Added ability to suppress Lint warnings in Java code with the new @SuppressLint annotation, and in XML files with the new tools: namespace prefix and ignore attribute. For more information, read here.
Improved HTML and XML reporting and Eclipse integration. For more information, read here.

We've also made improvements to the build systems for Eclipse and Ant:

Added strict dependency support for 3rd party Jar files. You can read more information here.
Added support for custom views with custom attributes in libraries. Layouts using custom attributes must use the namespace URI http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto instead of the URI that includes the app package name. This URI is replaced with the app specific one at build time.
Added a feature that allows you to run some code only in debug mode. Builds now generate a class called BuildConfig containing a DEBUG constant that is automatically set according to your build type. You can check the (BuildConfig.DEBUG) constant in your code to run debug-only functions such as outputting debug logs.

The emulator is seeing some big improvements as well:

Thanks to contributions to AOSP from Intel, the emulator now supports running x86 system images in virtualization mode on Windows and Mac OS X. This allows the emulator running at near native speed. The drivers are available through the SDK Manager. Read more here.
After adding webcam support and sensor emulation, we are adding experimental support for Multi-Touch input through a tethered Android device. (Read more here)

Finally, we are also releasing an updated Support Library with the following improvements:

ShareCompat provides easy helper classes for both sending and receiving content for social sharing apps.
NavUtils and TaskStackBuilder provide cross-version support for implementing the Android Design guidelines for navigating within your app including the action bar's "Up" button.
NotificationCompat.Builder provides a compatibility implementation of Android 3.0's Notification.Builder helper class for creating standardized system notifications.
A new Library Project adds support for GridLayout back to API level 7 and higher.

You can get more information about these changes in the SDK Tools Release Notes and ADT Release Notes.