Last week I was asked to present a quick informal piece about developing for Android to the Interactive Team of Global in London. Rather than a “Hello World” example it was to be a background to the platform, the languages you can use, and a bit about the applications we’ve released. I presented on Friday along with colleagues who spoke of iPhone and Symbian.
It went okay (it’s not like much can really go wrong is it), but I certainly have a hell of a lot of room for improvement. It was my first semi-proper presentation, and I can see myself enjoying presenting in future, but right now I get unaccountably nervous. I hope I get lots of opportunities to give informal presentations like this in the future, because that is what it’ll take to get better and begin to enjoy them.
Yet another post revolving around the world of Android. This time though I’m actually writing this post on my Nexus, and using a new type of keyboard which rather than tapping, you swipe across. Having just tried to write the word swipe I see how they are seemingly being quite cheeky in that they’d much rather you write swype, the name of the application.
So rather than picking out each character, you simply swipe your finger roughly across each of the letters you require. I say roughly as it is impressively clever at working out which word you were aiming for. Initially sceptical, in just writing this post I can already feel myself speeding up to the extent that I’m thinking I shall have to try this for an extended period of time, and see if I can get used to it.
If you have an Android phone you can sign up to join the beta here. However… it appears that right now the beta its closed due to “overwhelming demand”. It’s had a bit of press recently.
Alternatively, they’ve made some kind of arrangement with T-Mobile and HTC to have Swype pre-bundled on the MyTouch 3G, so you can find it on there (if you’re the kind of person who chooses their phone based on the keyboard).
BSkyB released a Sky News application for Android yesterday. It’s free, and boasts of its quick access to video content.
On the face of it, it’s quite an ugly application. They’ve said to hell with the Android default theme, and gone with something which shares aspects of their website design. The result is not pretty, and doesn’t provide an enjoyable user experience.
Citizen Journalism
One interesting feature in the application is an option called “Report” which sits at equal prominence to news and video. This is for citizen journalism. On selecting this, you are presented with fields to enter your name, phone number, location (not automatically detected unfortunately), comments, and even a photo, to send in to Sky News. I’m glad to see something of this nature so prominent. It’s not citizen journalism as I’d like it, because the information is not sent to and held in an openly accessible place, like it is when Twitter is involved for instance, but it certainly makes the submission of news, by citizens on the go, a breeze.
It does have decent access to video content, and it’s nice to see they’ve released the app for free, even though that does seem perhaps slightly at odds to what we’ve been hearing from the Murdoch camp in regards to free news recently.
Personally, despite missing out on the video content, I’d still rather use the BBC news website and the news & weather app that comes with the Nexus. That’s of course until the BBC’s Android app is released, which will surely be great.
Whenever I want to quickly show off the capabilities of my Android phone to someone, I whip out Sky Map. It’s visually impressive, and one can see easily that it has a practical application in the world.
I don’t know if it counts as true augmented reality, as it doesn’t use the camera. I think it probably does because it is still merging the real-life environment with computer generated imagery (correct me if I’m wrong). With that in mind… it’s clearly the best example of augmented reality implemented in a phone that I’ve come across so far. It puts many of the available sensors (AGPS, Compass, Accelerometer) to great use.
I’ve included a link to Layar, another great example of AR, which allows the community to create their own maps.
I think I know where I want to go one day. MWC. I haven’t really followed the event in the past, so I don’t know if it’s usually this exciting. It could just be due to huge change and innovation in the mobile industry right now, but it certainly is a busy, interesting world out there in mobile land at the moment.
Not only have new phones been announced, but a plethora of new mobile operating systems and application platforms. I can’t wait to see how they turn out, and wish the best to each of them. The busier this pond, the better it will be for the consumer.
Windows Phone 7 Series
Windows have finally got their act together in the mobile arena, and are going to try and do something innovative. Their Windows Mobile operating system did well for me for the last few years, but really in hindsight was a pretty tired old thing. It was designed for early PDAs, and hasn’t to any real degree been updated since then. Windows Mobile 6 was a refreshing upgrade from 5, but for me that was mostly thanks to innovation on HTC’s part, and their Sense user interface. There was 6.5, but it’s not like that really made a dent.
WP7S (shortened to an acronym which is just as much of a mouthful) has been totally redesigned to look and feel nothing like it’s predecessor (though still based on Windows CE). Like the Zune HD, it has been designed to be finger friendly, nice visually, and fun to interact with.
Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo
Among the announcements of new OSs, came a surprise merger. I’ve liked what I’ve seen of Nokia’s Maemo flagship, the N900, and am hoping it does okay. It’s now out in shops and appears to be getting a reasonable advertisment backing in shop windows. Although not perfect, it’s an interesting platform, and certainly has a lot going for it. From what I’ve seen it seems very powerful, and as it’s based on Debian it’s quick to port to so there are lots of apps out there already available for it. There are also a number of development language options.
But it looks like sort of good bye to Maemo. It’s merging with an open-source project from Intel known as Moblin, and becoming MeeGo. I’d not previously heard of Moblin, a netbook OS, but based on what I’ve seen of it so far, it looks like quite a nifty little OS. Forgetting the merger with Maemo for a moment, I’d like to download Moblin and have a play.
With a partner like Intel, and an OS which on the face of it should be able to handle the mobile and netbook markets (and tablet if that’s a market yet), I’m hoping for good things here.
WAC
Yes, WAC. Wholesale Applications Community. A combination of many mobile networks, and some manufacturers like Sony & Samsung in there too. The “Sh*t we don’t have an app store” group. Fair play to them, they need an app store. What’s interesting here is they’re aiming to create a cross-OS application platform, and using Adobe AIR!
The first OS to support the WAC’s platform will be Android. This could be nice. If they get the API right, so we can make the same calls regardless of the device or OS, then this could prove very popular with developers. And of course popular with consumers, which will be able to re-download the apps which they paid for even after having gone out and upgraded to a new phone with a different OS.
What could be the result though, is a platform which feels like a restrictive middle-man. If that’s the case and it doesn’t bother you, it’d probably be sensible to make a (hugely more pervasive) web-app.
Google are touring the world giving out free Nexus One phones. I was lucky enough to be given one at the Android Developer Labs event in London.
Is this proof that Nexus just isn’t selling as well as they hoped? Or was handing out free Ones always the plan? (I could technically use a capital there). The Nexus, like Google claim about many of their products, is supposed to be a demonstration of what can be done, rather than necessarily being a money maker. Certainly an aim of the Nexus is to promote Android as a platform. With that, handing out free ones at Android events is certainly going to create buzz and excitement around the platform. (That’s buzz without a capital).
Hero
I bought an HTC Hero shortly before confirmation that the Nexus would be available. The Hero is a very good phone. It lacks Android 2.x Eclair w00t (disappointingly coming with Cupcake), but really it is a very well built phone, and the Cupcake OS is not much lacking to its younger baked sibling.
Decisions
Lumbered with the Hero, I was very tempted to buy the Nexus, but having one delivered to the office for development, a quick play led me to think it just wasn’t worth it over the Hero. Very good, but not £500 better.
Well a couple of weeks later the decision was made for me, and the very kind people at Google gave me a Nexus. I’m very grateful to them, and have since fallen in love with the phone.
Result
Google do a lot of things well, and a few things badly. I mean, Google Accounts are in my mind a fiasco of fiercely tangled interconnected tubes that are not unlike some kind of impossible maze. But they do a lot of things well, and are increasingly integrating themselves with our lives in any way they can. Sure, aiming to provide a service we desire, but surely with motives of profit above all else.
It’s the fact they’re one enormous company that is sucking data from our very movements, which makes me feel slightly uncomfortable about it all. For now, I just hope their motto holds true.
Anyway, they gave me a phone, and a very good one at that, so they’re awesome.
I decided it’d be nice to change things a bit. It’s not that I fell out of love with the old site, but that I wanted this site to be more informal, in the style of notes and observations, rather than full articles. I’ll still write articles, but when I do I’ll give them the time they require. So here I can write shortish notes, and can do so without needing to devote loads of time to each post.
Design
This time I decided to go heavily for simplicity, and with the intention of building up from there. If anything, I hope this will be a learning opportunity, to see how I can implement more functionality and provide more rich an experience, whilst maintaining this original simplicity.
I’ve built the site around the Atom XML language. I felt that if the user will likely be consuming this content from an RSS reader of some kind, I should organise the content around this standard language, the obvious choices being Atom or RSS. I plumped for Atom, and extended it with GeoRSS to include location data in the form of a longitude and a latitude. I love meta-data, and like the idea of including it wherever possible. Meta-data simply improves data beyond measure, making it far more interesting, allowing the consumer to learn a great deal more than they can see from the surface. With that in mind, I know location data isn’t the most fascinating piece of information to have about a post, but I think it does enrich the experience, and I believe you should include possibly useful meta-data wherever you can.
For now this site is simply grabbing the contents of the Atom XML document, and presenting it in the form of this page. This can’t remain as the XML will grow and grow, but it’ll stick for now. I need to decide if I want to database drive this, or stick to static files. I’ll make the Atom feed available once I’ve decided how I’m going to do this.
Also of note, I’ve built this front-end in HTML5. I love experimenting with new things, and although this may lead to a poorer service for some (such as those using older browsers), it’s worth it for the chance to explore new methods of presenting information.
With this new format I hope I’ll be able to add to this site more often now, and I hope to bring back interestingness in the form of flickr, twitter and last.fm integration soon. Also, maybe a little about me.