If the official documentation about Android layouts isn’t so clear for you, then you should check the following article about all layouts in Android:
http://mobiforge.com/designing/story/understanding-user-interface-android-part-1-layouts
Note in most cases a RelativeLayout is the best solution for placing elements. (especially at list cells)
Displaying images in a ListView from online sources are not always trivial. To have seamless scrolling and good UI experience, you need to have a separate thread, which downloads and adds images to the ListView. A really intresting article about this, can be found here: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/07/multithreading-for-performance.html
If you ever wondered, how you can swipe between views like in many iphone application, or simply on the home screen, then check out this post with a solution derived from the open sourced Android home screen:
http://www.codeshogun.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-to-implement-swipe-action-in-android/
Note You can find the best solution in the comments, I attached it as java file to this post.
WorkspaceView.java zipped
Note 2 ViewFlipper and ViewAnimator is quite buggy on Android 1.5 & 1.6, and even slow on newer versions.
Here are some useful tricks about Android layouts:
Here is a solution to faster your listviews:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/02/android-layout-tricks-1.html
Another useful solution to reuse layouts and make code more consistent and easy to maintain:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/02/android-layout-tricks-2-reusing-layouts.html
http://android.amberfog.com/?p=9
Using ViewStub to quickly insert a new view:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/03/android-layout-tricks-3-optimize-with.html
Eclipse ADT plugin is not compatible with Eclipse Helios (3.6) as stated on download site. They promise, that this bug will be fixed in the near future, however in the meanwhile you should get Eclipse Galileo (3.5) to use the plugin seamlessly.
Issue fixed, check plugin site!.
Sometimes Eclipse IDE gets really slow, which can be really annoying (especially when changing tabs, it takes a while to switch to the other one). Here is a quick solution, which makes it much more better: http://www.codeweblog.com/eclipse-adt-mac-version-tab-to-switch-slow-solution/.
If you find the official Facebook API a bit complicated, the you should give a try to FBRocket.
It is easy to update your twitter status from your android app:
http://www.androidpeople.com/android-post-status-to-twitter-using-jtwitter-example/
However these instructions are a bit outdated, because twitter has newer authentication based on OAuth. Check the JTwitter site for details: JTwitter
Very intresting feature of Nokia Symbian 3rd and 5th devices, read more here.
