Published by Head Robot on 29th November 2007
Mike Butcher wrote at TechCrunc.com.
Dave Burke, an engineering manager within Google’s mobile team, stood up today at the Future of Mobile conference in London to talk about Android and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), the new open mobile platform initiative from Google. This is the the first conference presentation in Europe on the subject since Google’s announcement on November 5th, and was live blogged by TechCrunch UK.
But if you were expecting much new information on all this you would probably have been disappointed. Burke introduce the OHA, outlined how it has 30+ industry leaders on board and how there is no gPhone, just a phone built by partners using the Android platform - this we already know. There was a run-down of what the platform will be capable of and a reminder that the SDK is a only a few days old and that we will probably not see handsets until the second half of next year when the full open source platform will be released.
He also did a fairly impressive demonstration of coding an application (in this case a mobile browser) inside 8mins (or 7mins 58 seconds to be exact - he timed it on stage).
Read the rest of, Google Pitches Android to European Developers.
Technorati Tags: Google, Android, Europe, SDK, Developers
Published by Head Robot on 23rd November 2007
Posted Thursday by Phil Manchester
Like it or not, Google has achieved something that none of the established knitting circles has managed so far; it has created a single target platform for developers to aim for. One early view of how you can build Android applications [link] illustrates this.
But a unified standard does not necessarily play well with the established mobile Linux players. The LiPS Forum [link] , for example, says it “regards OHA as complementary” and acknowledges [link] that Android and the OHA have confirmed the popularity of Linux in mobile and embedded applications. LiPS also says that Android shares in its mission “to reduce fragmentation among Linux-based mobile platforms” - only with a different approach. While LiPS aims to unify the development of mobile Linux through open standards, it sees the Android and OHA team as working to the same end with shared code.
Continue reading the article, Inside Google Android Paranoia
Technorati Tags: Mobile, Handset, Android, SDK, Palm, Windows, Java
Published by Head Robot on 22nd November 2007
Posted 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
