Android Developer Challenge 2 Details Appearing

Google has announced some early details for the next Android Developer Challenge. Submissions will begin in August across ten categories. In this challenge, there will be two rounds. It's the first round that's new and exciting for developers and users:

Users get to download, rank, and rate specific, but random, applications submitted to the challenge by, what else, but an Android application! This round will result in 200 finalists: twenty in each of the ten categories. The second round will be rated with Google-selected judges, as before, but their ratings will only count for 55% of the total score, with the other 45% coming from the community ratings. Three winners from each category will be chosen to win $100k, $50k, and $25k US dollar prizes. From all of the entries, overall winners (best of all entries, regardless of category) will be awarded an additional $150k, $50k, and $25k.

Finally, Google has provided a little teaser to encourage developers to go to their events:

attendees of selected developer events will be provided with devices intended for use in developing submissions for ADC 2

The categories for this challenge include the following:

• Education/Reference
• Games: Casual/Puzzle
• Games: Arcade/Action
• Social Networking
• Lifestyle
• Productivity/Tools
• Media
• Entertainment
• Travel
• Misc

Terms and conditions for the challenge are forthcoming. It's still unclear who is eligible, what applications will be eligible, and so on. Find out more as details become available from the Google Android Developer Challenge site.

Android Development Tip: Managing AVDs with the Eclipse Android Development Tools Plug-In

I've updated my Eclipse development environment a number of times in the past few weeks, what with the Android 1.5 preview, then the release version. I checked for updates this week and noticed yet another version of the ADT Eclipse plugin was available. One interesting new feature added in the latest version is an Android Virtual Device (AVD) manager, accessible from within Eclipse.

All emulator instances using the Android 1.5 SDK require an AVD configuration. Sure, you can use the android command line interface to create and manage AVDs, but if you just want to create a simple AVD quickly, you can now use the little wizard provided with the ADT plugin. The AVD manager button is added to your Eclipse toolbar. It looks like a little black cell phone.

Simply click it and the AVD manager will launch, listing all AVDs on your system. You can Add and Delete AVDs, as well as Refresh the AVD listing.


When creating a new AVD, you can set the following information:

• The AVD friendly name
• The Target Android system
• The Skin
• Whether or not to create an SD Card Image
• 
  You cannot create custom hardware profiles. That, you still need to use the android command line tool for.