Preface

Among all the things that mobile phones are and have become, one definite trend is the increase in the media production and consumption capabilities they offer. This trend began with the advent of the camera phone in the late 1990s, and over the last few years has dramatically taken off with the surging popularity of smart phones. In terms of media capabilities, today’s mobile handsets are simultaneously cameras, photo albums, camcorders, movie players, music players, dictation machines, and potentially much more.

In particular, Android has rich capabilities available within the SDK that this book seeks to illuminate with discussion and examples so that you can get a jump-start on developing the next generation media applications. It walks you through examples that not only show how to display and play media but also allow you to take advantage of the camera, microphone, and video capture capabilities. It is organized more or less into four sections: The first four chapters deal with imaging; the second four handle audio; and the final four are about video and harnessing web services for finding and sharing media.

The examples presented within get a bit more challenging as the book progresses, as the amount of work that needs to be done to develop applications that harness the capabilities increases. Regardless, with some familiarity with Android application development you, the reader should be able to jump to any section and utilize the discussion and example code to create an application that utilizes the capabilities presented.

The examples are generally in the form of a full class that extends an Activity targeted to run with the SDK version 4 (Android 1.6) or later. The examples also include the contents of an XML layout file and in many cases the contents of the AndroidManifest.xml file. It is assumed that you will be using Eclipse (Galileo or later) with the ADT plugin (0.9.9 or later) and using the Android SDK (r7 or later). Since much of the book is geared toward audio and video, I advise that you run the examples on a handset (running Android 1.6 or later) rather than on the emulator, because in many cases the examples do not function on the emulator.

I am excited to see what the future of media applications on mobile devices is. It is my hope that through this book I can help you to create and define that future. I look forward to seeing your Android media applications in action.

With all that out of the way, let's get started!