This week marks an important milestone in Telerik’s mobile story - it is the official release of our native mobile suites - UI for Android and UI for iOS.

What’s included in UI for Android?

This is the official release of UI for Android. All controls that are included are official and ready for production. The release contains an advanced Charting framework, a Calendar, an AppFeedback control and a demo application that is full of examples.

Before exploring the features of each control, let’s see what else you get with UI for Android.

Support

The important aspect of UI for Android, as well as any other Telerik product, is that you get help directly from the developers who build the tools.

If you decide to evaluate UI for Android, you’ll get a 30-day period of dedicated support with 72-hours response time, access to all Telerik Community Forums and the UI for Android feedback portal where you can monitor the status of the issue you submit as well as vote for new functionality.

If you decide to purchase UI for Android, your support plan will include 1 year of dedicated support with 24-hours response time, access to all Telerik Community Forums and the UI for Android feedback portal where you can monitor the status of the issue you submit as well as vote for new functionality.

Documentation

UI for Android offers a comprehensive documentation that would get you started in no time.

Weekly Updates

We strive to push product updates every week that would be available through your Telerik account.

How much does UI for Android cost?

We've just launched UI for Android at a limited time introductory price of $199. Buying the product gives you access to source code, one year of product updates, plus dedicated support with a 24-hour response time.

Now that you have an overview of what’s included with UI for Telerik, let’s explore each control and its features.

First on the list is the new Telerik Calendar for Android - a polished control featuring:

Calendar Views - week, month and year.

Support for displaying events and appointments that are color-coded and very easy to create.

Single, Multiple and Range Date Selection

A mechanism for setting Special and Disabled Dates. It also supports customizing each cell depending on the date it represents. This can be used to make the weekends red or to add a birthday cake on the date of your birthday.

Support for different cultures. Telerik Calendar can either inherit the default device culture or use a custom one provided by the developer.

You can tell us what you think about the Calendar on the forums or our feedback portal.

The second addition to the suite is Telerik AppFeedback for Android. AppFeedback enables two-way communication between the application developer and the user. The component shortens the gap between the developer and the user by providing an intuitive way to send and receive feedback. AppFeedback is a native Android control that allows end users to provide feedback by making a snapshot that is sent to a remote secure location and is available for review by the developer immediately. The control easily integrates with AppFeedback projects that are an integral part of the Telerik Platform.

You can post your feedback on the AppFeedback’s forums as well as on our feedback portal.

Telerik Chart for Android was introduced with the first beta of UI for Android. Since then we’ve been working hard to incorporate all the feedback our customers sent us. Our Charting library improved significantly over the past few months in terms of features and performance and I’m confident that it would be of great help to anyone building data visualization applications.

Here are some of the highlights:

Performance improvements and UI virtualization

Backed by its advanced UI virtualization mechanism Telerik Chart (re)draws only the area that is currently visible. Using UI virtualization decreases the memory footprint of your app, makes interaction smooth and enables scenarios that require displaying live streaming data.

New and improved interaction behaviors

Telerik Chart for Android provides support for a Tooltip behavior which can be used to visualize information about a specific data point. The developer has full control over the visual representation of the tooltip as well as what information the tooltip will display.

Along with the Tooltip RadChart provides a Trackball behavior. This behavior displays a vertical line across the plot area as well as little visual indicators wherever the trackball line crosses a data point.

One of the areas in which we made significant improvements was the Pan & Zoom behavior. We quickly recognized that if you want to enable your application users to zoom in and explore dense areas you’d need a highly performant Pan & Zoom mechanism that can provide smooth experience out of the box.

Financial Series and Financial Indicators

With this release we introduce support for stock series – both Ohlc (Open-High-Low-Close) and Candlestick. This would enable you to visualize series that operate with special data points which hold information about each the following parameters: open, high, low, close.

For more advanced financial scenarios, you can display financial indicators on top of the financial series. Telerik Chart supports a wide range of indicators - Moving Average, Bands, Momentum and Volatility. Selection

With support for DataPoint and Series selection you can select either part of the series or the whole series. Tell us what you think of the Chart on its forums and submit your feature requests on the feedback portal. Telerik Examples Application With this release we’re introducing Telerik Examples - an Android app that will be showcasing the usage of UI for Android in various scenarios. Some of the scenarios currently included are: Using Calendar to represent different time periods in a Weekly, Monthly or Yearly fashion.

Using Calendar to select a range of dates.

Visualizing data using Telerik Chart’s various series: Line, Area, Bar, Pie.

Visualizing financial data using Telerik Chart’s support for Financial Series and Indicators.

Explore the details in a data set by using Telerik Chart’s support for pinch-to-zoom and pan gestures.

Data annotations in Telerik Chart.

Providing feedback using Telerik’s AppFeedback component. AppFeedback enables two-way communication between the application developer and the user.

Telerik Examples is available for download from Google Play. The source code of the app is available on GitHub.

Why choose UI for Android? Telerik is still new to the Android community but this does not change the fact that over the years we became experts in making developers more productive by providing the best tools on the market. With our constantly expanding portfolio we learned how to reuse our knowledge across technologies in the most efficient way. On a quick side note, we announced UI for Windows Phone in March, 2011. One year later, UI for Windows 8 became the first commercial library on the market. In 3 years UI for Windows Phone and UI for Windows 8 years made their way into many high-profile Windows Store apps. If you’re interested, here’s a showcase gallery with some of the apps people are building with UI for Windows Phone. Finding the right tools when creating an Android app can be a hustle. With Telerik UI for Android you will get a product that is optimized for mobile development, updated on a weekly basis, and supported by the same developers that make it. What’s next for UI for Android?

Our number one goal is to make you successful. We want to make sure our products are solving real problems so we will be glad to hear more about the apps your building. Feel free to leave a comment on our forums, submit a feature request throughthe feedback portal or just say hi here on the blogs, google+ or twitter.