Android developers can now download the third release of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) from the Android developer site.
It
can be used to target devices running Android 1.5 and higher. In
addition to a few bug fixes and improvements, this release includes toolchain improvement, OpenGL ES 2.0 suppport and a new name "r3."
The
toolchain binaries have been refreshed for this release with GCC 4.4.0,
which should generate slightly more compact and efficient machine code
than the previous one (4.2.1).
Applications
targeting Android 2.0 (API level 5) or higher can now directly access
OpenGL ES 2.0 features. This brings the ability to control graphics
rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs, using the GLSL
shading language.
This
NDK release is just called "r3", for "Revision 3", to indicate that it
is not limited to a specific Android platform/API level. Some
developers thought that the previous release's name (1.6_r1) was
confusing and indicated that it could only be used to target Android
1.6, which was not true.