Google Android - The Android Log
Thanksgiving Interview - Android maker talks mashups and mobiles
November 22nd, 2007 by Head RobotAndy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google, talked to CNET News.com about Android:
Q: What does Android look like?
A: Google has stepped up on behalf of the alliance to do various components of the support from a developer community perspective. We have a user interface team continuing development on the UI, and there will actually be a replacement UI.
We’ve been building it as a mobile mashup platform. That is a new concept for [mobile] phones. So the developer can now stand on the system platform and take advantage of other developers’ work for the first time. So, that just creates more flexibility for the developers, less work, faster turnaround, rapid prototyping, and all that stuff, and we’re really, really excited about that concept.
Q: Is there a prototype dubbed Dream? Who has it, and when are we going to see it?
A: I actually don’t know where that name come from. That’s been an internal code-name that’s been kicked around here, but it changes quite constantly.
We have manufacturing partners in the alliance, and they’re building products, and Google has been given some of those devices. As part of the SDK, there’s a complete hardware emulator that runs on the PC. It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. It’s literally a hardware emulator of various devices — you know, different screen formats: horizontal, landscape, or portrait and, with the Qwerty keyboard and without a Qwerty keyboard; with touch, without touch.
Read the rest of the article, Android maker talks mashups and mobiles - ZDNet UK
Technorati Tags: Android, Thanksgiving, Danger, Andy Rubin, Mobile
Android Developers Blog - Example Application, A stitch in Time
November 22nd, 2007 by Head RobotPosted by Dick Wall, Google Developer Programs, on the Android Developers Blog
Background: While developing my first useful (though small) application for Android, which was a port of an existing utility I use when podcasting, I needed a way of updating a clock displayed on the UI at regular intervals, but in a lightweight and CPU efficient way.
Problem: In the original application I used java.util.Timer to update the clock, but that class is not such a good choice on Android. Using a Timer introduces a new thread into the application for a relatively minor reason. Thinking in terms of mobile applications often means re-considering choices that you might make differently for a desktop application with relatively richer resources at its disposal. We would like to find a more efficient way of updating that clock.
The Application: The rest of the story of porting the application will be detailed in future blog entries, but if you are interested in the application in question and the construction of it, you can read about it in a not-so-recent Developer.com article about using Matisse (a GUI builder for Swing). The original application is a Java Swing and SE application. It is like a stopwatch with a lap timer that we use when recording podcasts; when you start the recording, you start the stopwatch. Then for every mistake that someone makes, you hit the flub button. At the end you can save out the bookmarked mistakes which can be loaded into the wonderful Audacity audio editor as a labels track. You can then see where all of the mistakes are in the recording and edit them out.
Learn how the application was built and grab the source code at, Android Developers Blog: A Stitch in Time
Technorati Tags: Android, Application, Google, SDK, example, source-code