I extended my android application with a preferences screen now, which is quite easy to do.

• A tutorial for creating a Preferences Activity got me started – unfortunaltely the xml preferences definition it uses is incorrect. The tags are names of Classes which have to be capitalized.
• The open the preferences activity I added a Option Menu.
• I wanted to add some kind of progress indicator. I ended up using the ProgressDialog and the AsyncTask to run the downloading and xml parsing in the background. To fix issues with device rotation I might have a look at the BetterAsyncTask in the Droid-FU library later.
• I also ran into DateFormat and Date issues with the UTC formated Date in the XML file. I Thought about using  joda-time at least twice but then stuck to the JDK implementation for smaller app size. The fact that android brings it’s own class named DateFormat which just provides a localized JDK-DateFormat object doesn’t help either.