Illustrations of emulator usage in books and on the web have emulator skins that look like devices, but if your SDK is at all recent, the emulator doesn’t look like that – the screen is bare. This is a seemingly insignificant thing, but strangely no one seems to talk about it. I didn’t find any documentation explaining this – I had to ask like a n00b on the IRC channel. Well, to save you the embarrassment – it’s pretty simple. For the API 1.5 and before, the emulator looks like a device. For 1.6 and after, it doesn’t. If you really want your emulator to look like that, you need to use an emulator targeted at 1.5 or before – as far as I can tell, there’s no setting you can use to configure 1.6 or 2.0 to show the device skin from 1.5.
Emulators for versions 1.5 and 1.6
[...] I did get a new Android article up. This inspired Daeron to fiddle with skins and he figured out how to create new skins so we can [...]
Pingback by Teh Tech Blogz0r by Luke Meyer — December 9, 2009 @ 10:28 pm
Take a look on http://www.android.encke.net/. Cheers
Comment by GrigaApps — December 12, 2009 @ 3:37 am
But the emulator also supports skinning, so you can grab a number of different skins that are available. I’m pretty much hooked on Jeff Sharkey’s G1 skin:
http://www.android.encke.net/
http://jsharkey.org/blog/2008/10/10/leveraging-the-android-emulator/
Comment by Tim H — December 12, 2009 @ 7:27 am
Thanks guys, I swear I looked all over the SDK docs for info on this – didn’t hit the right Google queries for online answers, I guess. Still no explanation why the change between 1.5 and 1.6 but at least we have the ability to edit skins. That’s a cool G1 skin; I want to see if I can merge the two into a single skin that flips between landscape and portrait…
Comment by luke — December 12, 2009 @ 8:53 pm
Thanks guys, I swear I looked all over the SDK docs for info on this – didn’t hit the right Google queries for online answers, I guess. Still no explanation why the change between 1.5 and 1.6 but at least we have the ability to edit skins. That’s a cool G1 skin; I want to see if I can merge the two into a single skin that flips between landscape and portrait…
Comment by Amy — April 18, 2010 @ 10:14 pm
Take a look on http://www.android.encke.net/. Cheers
Comment by Michelle — April 19, 2010 @ 8:12 pm
Take a look on http://www.android.encke.net/. Cheers
Comment by Bruce — May 20, 2010 @ 11:12 pm