The tools in the /tools directory of the SDK deserve a mention:
- our designer was particularly impressed with
draw9patch which helped design stretchable buttons. He gave me assets from there, and I changed from a background colour to a 9-patch drawable and now we have a custom button, rounded corners, etc stretched to fit the text.
ddms, which is also integrated into the Eclipse plugin. It's immensely powerful, but I use it to take screenshots.adb - interact with your device or emulator from the command line. I use this to follow the logs from my device in a terminal window on my desktop, though I have found it useful for installing and uninstalling apps which are misbehaving.sqlite3 - great for interacting with an installed database, and trying out queries.apkbuilder, zipalign, aapt - great for running headless buildsmonkey for fuzz-testing your app.
I would also single out the three Designing for Performance, Responsiveness and Seamlessness, but I'd also like to add a fourth Coding for (Battery) Life.
Although the Javadoc can be a little sparse at times, it helps no end to have the source right there for you to look at.
It is also very useful to have plenty of sample apps written by Googlers to build, examine and then see how they did it.
