Hi, I'm Rich Hyndman.
The L Developer Preview is well underway.
And I'm here in the first of this series
of Dev Bytes with a super quick rundown of the top features.
The most important thing for developers
is that there are system images available for the Nexus
5 and Nexus 7.
So now you can test your apps and provide feedback to us
in the bug tracker and Google+ community.
Head here, and set your project to API level L to get started.
And one thing you're sure to notice
is the new Material design language.
Material provides updates to the visual
of the interaction and the motion design guidelines.
It replaces Holo, and introduces a new theme.material along
with APIs for activity transitions, shadows, reveals,
and more.
Notifications have received an update
and now appear on the lock screen
letting you surface content, updates, and actions
to users at a glance.
There's three visibility levels that
lets you manage the information shown on secure lock screens.
We have VISIBILITY_PUBLIC where the entire notification
is shown, VISIBILITY_PRIVATE where it's just the application
name and, "Unlock your device to see this notification,"
and VISIBILITY_SECRET that doesn't show on the lock screen
at all.
If you choose Private you can additionally
specify a separate, custom, redacted notification
which would show on secure lock screens instead.
Lock screens in the L Developer Preview
no longer show controls if you're a remote control client.
So instead you should provide media playback control
through a notification.
Also if you don't want the notification
to be sent to the user's Android Wear device
you can use new Notification Compat method setLocalOnly.
There is a non-Compat version of the method
as well in Notifications, but it applies
to API level 20 and above.
Whilst mentioning API level 20, this
introduces Android 4.4 W. It's 4.4
with the wearable extensions.
The L Developer Preview doesn't have its own API level,
and apps built against it cannot be uploaded to Play.
We'll be incrementing the API level
later on in the year for the L release.
So if you check your SDK Manager you'll
see those two new SDK versions available,
4.4 W and the L Developer Preview.
If you're building production apps, build them against 4.4 W.
WebView has been updated to Chrome M36, which
included support for Web Audio, Undulating Monkeys, and Web
RTC, making it our most advanced WebView yet.
And another big behind the scenes update is the runtime.
The Art runtime replaces Dalvik in L.
So please make sure you've tested your apps soon.
Along with ahead-of-time compilation,
improved garbage collection, and improved debugging support,
also comes 64-bit support.
The majority of titles in the Play Store are 64-bit ready,
and benefit with Art as they're running purely Dex Bytecode.
Art's not only beneficial for the memory footprint,
but also for battery life, which brings us onto Project Volta.
As J focused on [? junk?] removal,
and K made Android more svelte, there's a big effort in L aimed
towards improving power tracking and doing something about power
use.
So there's new tools and APIs you
can use to help save your user's battery.
For example, APIs so that you can specify that a task should
be done if the phone is charging whilst
on an unmetered network like Wi-Fi,
and you want to guarantee that it would start within an hour.
This is all done through the Job Scheduler APIs.
There are also a couple of new UI widgets in the support
library.
We have RecyclerView, an advanced version of ListView
allowing you to display and animate
rich, dynamic collections, and CardView
that lets you display important information inside a card which
uses the new elevation API in L.
Next we have the new camera API, Camera2.
It provides access to full resolution frames at full frame
rate with per frame control of capture settings
and calibration metadata.
Staying with multimedia, we've open
sourced the new video player called ExoPlayer.
Built on top of Android's low level media APIs,
it includes support for DASH and smooth streaming adaptive
playback, providing a new, flexible way
to enable video in your applications.
Continuing in the same vein we have audio updates as well.
With low latency audio, multichannel high dynamic
range floating point mixing, and USB audio support.
We've updated to Connectivity with dynamic network selection
with seamless handoff, and Bluetooth LE
gets an update including peripheral mode.
And then we have, in order of size, Android Wear, Android TV,
and Android Auto.
Don't forget to also look out for all the I/O
material on these topics.
You can dive into Wear and TV right now
as there are emulators available for both.
Phew.
That is one hell of a preview.
We'll be going into more details on the topics
in this video over the next couple of months.
So stay tuned and happy coding.