We've made fun of the iPad's 2x mode before, which is the way most apps appeared on Apple's tablet before iPad-optimized apps appeared. Now, despite the fact that many Android apps scale just fine on Honeycomb, Google is going to adopt a similar mode in Android.
Here's how Google described the change, but in reality, it's pretty much the same as how 2x mode works on the iPad:
Beginning with the upcoming release, any app that does not target Android 3.0 (set either android:minSdkVersion or android:targetSdkVersion to “11” or higher) or does not explicitly set android:xlargeScreens="true" in the element will include a button in the system bar that, when touched, allows users to select between two viewing modes on large-screen devices.
“Stretch to fill screen” is normal layout resizing (using your app’s alternative resources for size and density) and “Zoom to fill screen” is the new screen compatibility mode.
When the user enables this new screen compatibility mode, the system no longer resizes your layout to fit the screen. Instead, it runs your app in an emulated normal/mdpi screen (approximately 320dp x 480dp) and scales that up to fill the screen---imagine viewing your app at the size of a phone screen then zooming in about 200%. The effect is that everything is bigger, but also more pixelated, because the system does not resize your layout or use your alternative resources for the current device (the system uses all resources for a normal/mdpi device).
As we noted earlier, most Android apps scale just fine on Honeycomb tablets. However, there are some that show up in tiny, smartphone-sized windows on screens. The new change will appear in the "next release" of Honeycomb, which is probably going to be 3.2.
However, there are far more that simply don't work on Honeycomb. While the majority (Samsung says 60,000) of apps are working well on Honeycomb, if Google really wants to fix the lack of tablet apps, it needs to figure out how to better "emulate" earlier Android releases so that some apps that currently crash work on Honeycomb.
That, it would seem to us, would be at least as important as this new zoom feature.
Google has unbundled another part of Android from the OS itself, and has put a new version of YouTube, 2.1, into the Android Market. The company earlier said it was going to continue to do this, so that important but not central portions of platform functionality no longer need be tied to Android OS releases.
In this case, the bad news is that the new version of YouTube requires Froyo (Android 2.2) on your device. The good news lies in the changes. In addition to saying that the YouTube app was rebuilt from the ground up to mirror the desktop experience, Google also said thew new version is their "fastest, most intuitive YouTube mobile app to date." In addition:
In-page playback: you can read the video description, browse related, rate or flag videos without having to interrupt video playback.
Posting comments: you can post a comment while the video is playing, just like on the desktop website.
Subscription updates: we've made it easier to access new videos from your subscriptions. If you are signed into your account, you will see all your subscription updates right on the home screen of the app.
New full-screen UI: To enter full-screen mode simply rotate the phone. The new player controls make it easier to seek within the video, and you can pause or resume the playback by just tapping on the screen.
Google took feedback on the earlier version of the unbundled YouTube from a few of weeks back, and included some of those suggestions in version 2.1. In addition to being in the Android Market, as 2.3 rolls out (it will be on the upcoming Nexus S, for once), that platform version also has YouTube 2.1 pre-installed.
You've seen, we're sure, a list of suggested queries change as you begin entering in your search text at Google's site. In this test that Google has been running, more than that, the actual search results themselves are being incrementally changed as the query is entered.
A new way to search, but one that's probably very bandwidth and CPU intensive, is being tested as we speak, and it's reportedly called "Google streaming search." Watch the video below, produced by Rob Ousbey, who noticed the functionality in his browser.
By the way, if you watch the video in full screen mode, and look closely to the edit box where the query is being entered, on the RHS you can see a link that says "turn off streaming."
As we know Google is often running search experiments, so an experiment in and of itself isn't something new. However, an interesting thought comes to mind: how the heck do ads work when you have something like this?
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