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Embedded systems, an emerging area of computer technology, combine multiple technologies, such as computers, semiconductors, microelectronics, and the Internet, and as a result, are finding ever-increasing application in our modern world. With the rapid development of computer and communications technologies and the growing use of the Internet, embedded systems have brought immediate success and widespread application in the post-PC era, especially as the core components of the Internet of Things. They penetrate into every corner of modern life from the mundane, such as an automated home thermostat, to industrial production, such as in robotic automation in manufacturing. Embedded systems can be found in military and national defense, healthcare, science, education, and commercial services, and from mobile phones, MP3 players, and PDAs to cars, planes, and missiles.

Application developers on general-purpose computers can often ignore the hardware and focus completely on their software because the two entities have become quite independent. However, developers cannot ignore embedded system hardware. Due to the embedded system’s specialized features, constrained resources, and integration of hardware and software, you need to understand the working principles and mechanisms of the hardware and hardware layers in order to design efficient applications for the embedded environment.

This chapter introduces Android† application development on Intel hardware platforms. Developing Android system applications requires some special development, debugging, and performance analysis tools, and the development environment and object formats are different from those of general-purpose desktop computers. Before developing Android applications, we need to learn about the development process of Android system applications.

So far, you have completed installing the development environment for an emulator target machine. But if your target machine is a real device (for example, a mobile phone or a tablet with the Intel Inside logo), you need to install and configure the development environment for it. This chapter discusses how to build an application development with a real Android device, including how to install drivers and connect the device to your development host machine. Later, you see how to create an application and test it on both an emulator and a real device.

At the heart of all compute devices is the operating system, or OS. Development and execution of application software are based on the OS and the software platform as a whole. In this chapter, you learn about the Android OS—the recommended software platform for Intel Atom-based machines—to build your competence for subsequent development of embedded applications.

Due to the characteristics of any embedded systems, such as resource constraints, tailoring and customization are important features for an embedded OS, and Android is no exception. This chapter provides a general discussion of customization in an embedded OS and then explains the customization of Android, specifically.

Since its emergence in the 1980s, the concept of the (GUI) has become an indispensable part of (HCI). As embedded systems have evolved, they have gradually adopted this concept as well. The Android embedded OS running on the Intel Atom hardware platform is at the forefront of this movement.

This chapter describes the state transitions of activities and discusses the Context class, intent, and the relationship between applications and activities.

In the previous chapter, you learned about Android interface design by creating a simple application called GuiExam. The chapter also covered the state transition of activities, the Context class, and an introduction to intents and the relationship between applications and activities. You learned how to use a layout as an interface, and how button, event, and inner event listeners work. In this chapter, you learn how to create an application with multiple activities; examples introduce the explicit and implicit trigger mechanisms of activities. You see an example of an application with parameters triggered by an activity in a different application, which will help you understand the exchange mechanism for the activity’s parameters.

So far, three chapters have been devoted to Android interface design. The application interface discussed so far is similar to a dialog interface. The drawback is that it is difficult to obtain accurate touchscreen input information, so it is hard to display accurate images based on the input interface. This chapter introduces the view-based interaction style interface. In this mode, you can enter information with accurate touchscreen input and display detailed images, which happen to be requirements for lots of game applications.