Android Draw 9-patch seems broken too

As far as I can tell, the current release of the Android SDK (R08) ships without the Swing Desktop jar, and this causes draw9patch to fail.

~$ draw9patch &
[2] 52452
~$ Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
       org/jdesktop/swingworker/SwingWorker
 at com.android.draw9patch.Application$1.run(Application.java:48)
 at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
 at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:461)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:269)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:190)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:184)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:176)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:110)

[2]+  Done                    draw9patch

The 'fix' is rather simple: just download the JAR for Swing Desktop from here, and drop the swinglabs-0.8.0.jar file into the [sdk-install-dir]/tools/lib folder.

The Swing Desktop project can be found here.

Update -- Richard just left a comment here and pointed me to his site (Android 9 Patch) who's got plenty of 9-patch icons that really look awesome, and I thought I'd share the goodness (especially, given he's so kind as to share them at no charge). 

Go check out Patch 15, it's pretty impressive!

Carrier BIlling comes to Android!

Some of you folks may have recently noticed a little remark at the bottom of an email from the Android Market folks:

Finally, we wanted to bring to your attention that Android Market now offers a new form of payment for users on the AT&T network -- Direct Carrier Billing. This payment option lets Android users on the AT&T network purchase applications more easily.

This is an awesome achievement on the part of the Google folks, which integrates payments made by users into their phone bills, if they are AT&T customers: in turn, this enables us (the developers) to receive our payments via fewer user clicks and in a more streamlined way, so as to smooth the path for the user to purchase our Apps.

And all that, at virtually no additional complexity for us, which is, I'd say, pretty awesome!

I would expect more integrations and more awesomeness in the next few months: stay tuned!

Latest update for Android SDK breaks for Ubuntu Karmic

If you have recently updated your Android SDK to R08 (Gingerbread, 2.3) on Linux and are using Ubuntu Karmic, chances are that you will not be able to run the emulator: It will simply die with the following error:


$ ./emulator
./emulator: /lib32/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.11' not found (required by ./emulator)


This is caused by an incompatibility with Karmic's installed GLIBC - the new SDK/Emulator works just fine on Lucid.


The Android team is working on a fix - in the meantime, a workaround is to download the _r07 of the tools from here, and replace emulator in the tools/ folder under the android_sdk installation folder.


A bit hacky, but works.