Revision 17 of the Android SDK is this year's first Software Development Kit release. The SDK is used to develop mobile apps for Google's phone and tablet operating system. Thanks to Intel's assistance, the SDK's emulator now supports x86 system images (Android Virtual Devices) in virtualisation mode under Windows and Mac OS X. This works with both Intel's and AMD's virtualisation technology, though the latter only runs with Linux.

The graphics acceleration feature is marked as experimental and can only be used under Android 4.0.3. Other new features include more than 40 new Lint rules, nearly doubling the number of error messages that can be generated by the static code analysis tool. It is also possible to suppress warnings using the Java annotation @SuppressLint and to deactivate messages in XML code. The developers have also improved the HTML and XML reports, integration of Lint into the Eclipse development environment, and the build system.

(fab)