I’m just starting my first Android app, which allows users to draw to the screen. So accomplish this, I’m not using a normal xml layout file which is then “rehydrated”, but instead I’ve just created a class which inherits from View which deals with drawing the user input to the screen. I fired up a new project in IntelliJ IDEA and created my view and the classes which would run the app based on the html5 canvas/javascript prototype I’d put together a little while earlier. Everything worked well except the application only filled about a quarter of the screen when run on my Xoom tablet, despite me not actually having specified any screen sizes or limitations.

The solution, after some googling, was fairly simple- in the manifest you need to specify the minSdkVersion to be at least 4, as prior to this, varying screen sizes was not supported. I added the following to the bottom of my manifest file;

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion=”4″ />