The holidays and the downtime allowed me the opportunity to work on some side projects. In this case, I wanted to update the user interface of some Android mobile applications I had published a year ago. With the advent of the Android 4.x series of releases, one of the major user interface recommendations is the implementation of the ActionBar. Rewriting the user interface allowed me to use a number of tools that I read about or had recommended to me by coworkers. Two tools that I wanted to point out that I found particularly useful include:
AndroidKickstartR allows a developer to specify various project features such as Android Annotations, ActionBarSherlock, Spring Rest for Android and Maven, generating a Android App project shell within 5 minutes.
Android Action Bar Style Generator creates Action Bar artifacts using the standard Android Action Bar that come with the Android SDK or the near-Android standard ActionBarSherlock.
Besides coworkers, I have found the following Android site: Android UI Patterns hosted by Juhani Lehtimaki an excellent source of Android tool recommendations.
