Droid-Blog

Three days ago, madvertise, one of my favourite ad networks, updated its Android SDK in a major update to 2.0. So what changed and what’s new? Here is an overview over the major changes.

First of all, get the new SDK here.

How to make it work again: Renamed classes

When updating the new SDK, there are some minor changes a developer has to consider.

In order to make the naming of the SDK for iOS and Android equal, the names of the classes have been changed. Every class that started with ‘Mad‘ before now starts with ‘Madvertise’. So the MadViewCallbackListener is now called MadvertiseViewCallbackListener and the MadView is now called MadvertiseView. Accordingly, the method to set the MadvertiseViewCallbackListener is now called setMadvertiseViewCallbackListener(), not setMadViewCallbackListener().

The MadvertiseViewCallbackListener now has two more callback methods:

public void onError(Exception exception)

which will be called when an exception in the SDK occurs and

public void onIllegalHttpStatusCode(int statusCode, String message)

which will be called when the madvertise-Server returns something different than a HTTP status code 200. The code you will probably see the most is a 204, which means that the device requesting an ad is not yet known to the madvertise-Server.

Also, the banner-type ‘iab’ has been renamed to ‘medium_rectangle’. However, at the moment ‘iab’ still works.
When you included all these changes, everything should work fine again.

New functionality

The update of the SDK adressed some bugs many of you experienced. Here is an excerpt:

• Requests are now interrupted when a MadvertiseView is destroyed.
• No reloading of ads when a phone is turned, keyboard is being opened, and so on, anymore.
• Banners are scaled correctly now.
• Before, when the request interval was set to <60, it was adjusted to 30 automatically.
• The width of a MadvertiseView was sometimes not calculated correctly

There are also some improvements where you have to do nothing to activate them:

• Animated banners: Ads provided as animated GIFs are now played when the device is capable of doing so.
• Banners are shown automatically now, so you don’t need a MadvertiseViewCallbackListener to make your ads visible anymore.
• Ads now don’t acquire space in the layout before they are shown.
• Multiple ads: You can now display more than one ad on a screen, for example one fixed on top and one in a list. However, the total number of ads on a screen should not exceed four.

And there are some new features you should think of when integrating the new SDK:

• New banner formats – you can now display the following banner types:
  • mma (320×53)
  • medium_rectangle (320×200)
  • leaderboard (728×90)
  • fullcreen (768×768)
  • portrait (766×66)
  • landscape (1024×66)
• Multiple banner formats – you can now request multiple banner formats in your XML-declaration of a MadvertiseView like this:

           <de.madvertise.android.sdk.MadvertiseView
             android:id="@+id/madad"
             android:layout_width="match_parent"
             android:layout_height="wrap_content"
             mad:isTestMode="false"
             mad:backgroundColor2="#000000"
             mad:textColor="#FFFFFF"
             mad:bannerType="mma,portrait,landscape,leaderboard"
             mad:deliverOnlyText="false"
             />

The list is sorted by priority. So in the above example, when there is no mma-banner available, a portrait-banner will be shown, when there is no portrait-banner, a landscape-banner will be shown, and so on.

• Animations: Ads can now be animated when they are received. To add an animation, add <attr name="animation" format="string" /> to your attrs.xml file. Now you can set animations in your XML-layout using mad:animation. You can choose between fade (default), left_to_right and top_down.
• New request parameters: You can set the gender and age of your users by calling MadvertiseView.setGender() or MadvertiseView.setAge(). As these methods are static, it is recommended to call them before your layout is inflated.

 Conclusion

The new madvertise SDK comes with some nice new features and bug fixes. The new formats are suitable for tablets and phones with large screens like the Galaxy Nexus. I’m curious whether the animation banners and animation of new banners will lead to more clicks.

Please feel free to leave your thoughts and questions on the new update in the comments below.