Mathias Lin | 林马

I've been using the Nexus One skin provided by Tim Hoeck for Android development. Thanks for the work.
http://timhoeck.com/2010/01/16/nexus-one-emulator-skin/

Today though I came across a very sharp PSD file (at http://psdlist.com/gadget/179/google-nexus-one-psd-templates-and-png-files.html) that's even clearer and sharper than the images in the current skin set. Therefore I replaced the skin and the buttons.

Here's an updated version of the Nexus One skin. You can download it from the link below.
Thanks to Tim Hoeck for the initial effort to provide the Nexus One skin.

Just stumbled over Droid Draw, a user interface (UI) designer/editor for programming the Android Cell Phone Platform. You can either download the small application to your desktop or run it in the browser as an applet.

http://www.droiddraw.org/

Here's a good tutorial to it:
http://mobiforge.com/designing/story/understanding-user-interface-android-part-1-layouts

I'm mainly working on Windows for software development, Linux only on server sides, and was looking for a quick way to be able to build the Android Kernel on my primary machine, which only runs Windows. Building the Android kernel requires Linux or Mac. So as a quick solution I installed the VMWare Player running Ubuntu 9 on it.

Here are some hints how to get everything running quickly this way:

Install VMWare Player (download from http://www.vmware.com/products/player/)

In order not to running through the entire Ubuntu setup, I downloaded a current Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop image from http://chrysaor.info/?page=ubuntu

Since the hard disk is a little small for building Android (should have at least 10 GB of free space), I download another 50G disk and mount it to the system
Very useful instruction and quick way to add another HD I found here:
http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/howto/vmware-scsi-disk-add.html

Once the Ubuntu system is up and running with the newly mounted HD, proceed with the steps as documented at http://source.android.com/download
After having installed the necessary environment (git, repo, and all dependencies), the main steps to build the Android system and kernel are then:

• repo sync
• make
• make sdk

One important note regarding building the Kernel.
For some reason the project list on http://source.android.com/projects is not up to date, the Kernel project is not part of the core anymore but now a separate project. So building the Android system and building the underlying Linux kernel are actually two separate things. That's why we execute the 'make sdk' after the 'make' in order to get the kernel-qemu file as well.

see http://groups.google.com/group/android-platform/browse_thread/thread/5d7f720f11b1f177

I dowloaded the android source code few weeks back through the following link, and I have been working on code for few days now. But I recently checked out source code yesterday on a separate machine and found out that after doing a 'repo sync' there is no kernel folder in the source code.

This is intentional. Having the kernel source in the android manifest caused large downloads that few people needed, was not scalable, and caused some confusion.

The result of the make process are then four files, which you can then use with the emulator:

• kernel-qemu
• ramdisk.img
• system.img
• userdata.img

For Android GUI prototyping there are two helpful resources out there, one is a Visio stencil created by ArtfulBits (runs with Visio 2003+):
http://www.artfulbits.com/Android/Stencil.aspx

See some samples of (original / stencil):

Another helpful resource is a Photoshop file with vectorized GUI elements to be reused:
http://www.matcheck.cz/androidguipsd/