Google has kicked-off its Google I/O keynote address by announcing Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

The design process leading up to Jelly Bean has focused on making the platform “simple, beautiful, and really smart”.

That means things like its Project Butter, a system-wide overhaul to improve the smoothness of display out and be more responsive to your touch inputs, a revamped search experience with some very Siri-like voice control, and smarter control over widget resizing and home screen customization.

Project Butter uses stricter locking to vsync signals to reduce jerky animations, employs triple buffering to make sure there’s always content to be displayed on-screen when the GPU is ready for it, and attempts to anticipate where your finger will be at the next vsync to make touch input feel more accurate.

International users will appreciate the extended language support in Jelly Bean. From Arabic to Hebrew, Japanese to Persian, there are new characters, bi-directional text support, and custom keyboard maps.

Notifications get a major revamp, adding in photos, multiple notification sizes, and actions to allow you to interact with apps straight from the notification display.

Those widgets we mentioned will now automatically shrink-down when moved to a home screen where there’s just not enough space, or automatically slide app icons out of the way when just a little reorganization is needed to make them fit.

Developing…

Source: Google