My emulator looks different than in the examples!

December 8th, 2009 7 Comments

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

Emulators for versions 1.5 and 1.6

Posted in SDK level 2.0, emulator, n00b frustrations | Tags: , ,
« Missing dependencies for the Eclipse ADT plugin
Creating your own emulator skins »
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7 Responses to “My emulator looks different than in the examples!”

  1. Bruce says:
    May 20, 2010 at 11:12 pm

    Take a look on http://www.android.encke.net/. Cheers

  2. Michelle says:
    April 19, 2010 at 8:12 pm

    Take a look on http://www.android.encke.net/. Cheers

  3. Amy says:
    April 18, 2010 at 10:14 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…

  4. luke says:
    December 12, 2009 at 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…

  5. Tim H says:
    December 12, 2009 at 7:27 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/

  6. GrigaApps says:
    December 12, 2009 at 3:37 am

    Take a look on http://www.android.encke.net/. Cheers

  7. Teh Tech Blogz0r by Luke Meyer says:
    December 9, 2009 at 10:28 pm

    [...] 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 [...]

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