h/t - Jeff Adams
TechCrunch - Google I/O just kicked off at Moscone West in San Francisco, and it wasn’t long at all before Google’s Hugo Barra pulled the curtains back on the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
The update was originally thought to be a major one (rumors at the time referred to it as Android 5.0), and it seems like a quite a treat for Android users despite the minor version bump. So what has Google brought to the table this time around? Let’s find out together — I’ll be updating as new information and features are revealed.
- First up on the list of additions to Jelly Bean is Project Butter, meant to make the Jelly Bean experience (naturally) “buttery smooth.” The Android team did so by bumping up Jelly Bean’s framerate to 60 FPS, and implemented vsync and triple buffering to tighten up the experience. Developers also have access to a new tool called systrace in the Jelly Bean SDK that displays what the rendering engine is up to.
- Text input has also been improved, especially with regard to voice typing – users no longer need to have a solid network connection to make the feature work, as the speech interpretor lives directly on the device. Only U.S. English will be supported for now. Arabic and Hebrew support has been improved as well, and they’re looking to add 18 new input languages.
