Google develops Photostream: Android Flickr App

In an effort to spur a little more development on their new Andorid OS, Google has just released a Flickr app which gives uses a new way to interact with their images stored on Flickr. It is a bit surprising to see Google offer an app for Flickr especially since it is a service offered by their competitor Yahoo and also because just this week Google relaunched their Picasa 3 program and web albums. I’d imagine a Picasa album is in the works, but since Flickr is used by Yahoo’s millions of users every day and has a few billion images to sort through, it makes more senser to capitalize on on Flickr’s huge user base. Flickr has been known for having an incredible API and developers have been taking advantage of it for all it’s worth. Hopfully this will spark some interest in web developers and show them how friendly and easy to use the Android OS can be.

Some of the Android features shown off with the app include:

 

 

 

Activity aliases

Adding custom shortcuts to Home

Adding a new wallpaper chooser to the system

Custom layouts

Custom XML attributes

Use of themes

Use of styles

Use of text colors

Use of

Use of bitmap and layer drawables from XML

Use of HttpClient

Proper interaction between background threads and the UI thread

Efficient display rotation (using the new onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() API)

Animations and layout animations

Cropping an image

Image manipulation

 

You can check out some additional iamges from Photostream after the jump.