your unofficial guide to the google android
Apps
The Best Android Apps for Your Car
Sep 3rd
Having an Android along for your daily commute or occasional car trips can make the ride a lot easier, safer, and simply more fun. Here are our favorite Android apps to have on hand when it’s time to hit the road.,
More at Life Hacker
http://lifehacker.com/5626711/the-best-android-apps-for-your-car
Unit Converter Lite v. 1.0
Sep 3rd
Wopnersoft’s Unit Converter v. 1.0
Unit Converter is a simple and user-friendly unit conversion application for the Android OS.
Features:
- Many common units of measure, including Area, Distance, Volume, etc.
- The ability to save commonly used conversions to favorites list.
- Settings to customize the look and feel of the application.
- Intuitive menu options to easily swap to/from unit and copy result to the clipboard.
- Quick list view to see all converted values on a single screen.
- Apps2SD for Froyo (Android 2.2).
Unit Converter Lite v. 1.0
Sep 3rd
Wopnersoft’s Unit Converter v. 1.0
Unit Converter is a simple and user-friendly unit conversion application for the Android OS.
Features:
- Many common units of measure, including Area, Distance, Volume, etc.
- The ability to save commonly used conversions to favorites list.
- Settings to customize the look and feel of the application.
- Intuitive menu options to easily swap to/from unit and copy result to the clipboard.
- Quick list view to see all converted values on a single screen.
- Apps2SD for Froyo (Android 2.2).
Android App Developers Endure Lower Sales in Search of Growth
Sep 2nd
Pinger Inc., a developer of mobile applications, can get twice as much in sales from programs for Apple devices than for phones powered by Android software. That’s not stopping it from creating its first Android app.
“Even if the revenue generation might be less, we think it’s still going to be significant,” said Joe Sipher, chief product and marketing officer at San Jose, California-based Pinger, which makes text-messaging and other programs. “Our users are saying, ‘Gosh, I switched to an Android phone, can you put your Textfree app on Android?’”
Pinger and other programmers don’t want to miss out on the $40 billion that Booz & Co. estimates will come from sales of apps by 2014, much of it from Google Inc.’s Android platform. Android unseated Research In Motion Ltd.’s software as the top mobile operating system in the U.S. last quarter. That’s making developers more willing to put up with its drawbacks, including higher app-creation costs and an online marketplace some users consider harder to navigate than Apple’s App Store.
PopCap Games Inc., maker of the “Bejeweled” and “Plants vs. Zombies” games, doesn’t yet have any titles in the Android Market. By mid-2011, the Seattle-based company expects to release games simultaneously for iPhone and Android handsets.
‘High Hopes’
“Even though we are not making any money on Android right now, we have pretty high hopes for it,” said Andrew Stein, PopCap’s director of mobile business development. “There’s really no reason why users shouldn’t consume and buy content to the same extent on an Android phone as they are on an iPhone.”
Android phones like Motorola Inc.’s Droid X and HTC Corp.’s Droid Incredible are gaining devotees. Stein said he expects revenue generated from Android games to approach that of its iPhone versions by the end of 2011.
A wide variety of apps — as well as the availability of the most popular ones for games, location, texting and content — is critical to luring phone buyers. Apple has more than 250,000 apps available, compared with about 70,000 for Android.
Like Apple, Google takes a 30 percent cut of revenue from apps sold in its marketplace.
“We want to reduce friction and remove the barriers that make it difficult for developers to make great apps available to users — across as many devices, geographies and carriers as possible,” said Randall Sarafa, a Google spokesman.
Google rose $10.32, or 2.3 percent, to $460.34 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock has lost 26 percent this year.
Android Remedies
Google may be taking steps to remedy some of the issues that make Android app creation less lucrative to developers.
Apple iTunes users can do one-click shopping because iTunes saves their information. While Android buyers can do the same if they sign up for Google Checkout, that service doesn’t have as many users. Android Market also lacks features for in-app purchases, which some developers of Apple apps use to sell new game levels or virtual products, said Tim Chang, a venture capitalist at Norwest Venture Partners, whose investments includes iPhone-game maker Ngmoco.
Google is in talks with EBay Inc.’s PayPal to add its payment service, three people familiar with the matter said last month. That may ease the process for buyers. Google may also offer tools that let developers sell subscriptions and virtual goods from within apps, Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in June.
For now, producing programs for Android isn’t as lucrative. Loopt Inc., the maker of an app for locating your friends on a map, and Zecter Inc., which offers the ZumoDrive file storage service, said they derive less in sales from Android apps than iPhone versions. Neither of the Mountain View, California-based companies would specify the difference.
Paid Versus Free
“There’s no question Android has a lot more phones out than six months ago, but that’s very different from saying Android is a more appealing platform for developers,” said Sam Altman, chief executive officer at Loopt.
ZumoDrive makes money by getting people to download the free program and then upgrade to a paid version. Thirty percent more iPhone customers do that, said CEO David Zhao.
Besides attracting fewer paid app downloads, fewer people click on ads in Android programs, according to data from Smaato Inc., a Redwood City, California-based mobile-ad firm. In July, the iPhone had a “click-through” rate of 140 in the U.S., compared with 103 for Android, Smaato said, citing data that measures which operating system had users that clicked on advertisements more often.
Plus, the market share Gartner Inc. measures for Android — 34 percent in the U.S. last quarter — doesn’t mean there are that many customers for apps, said Pinger’s Sipher. Some Android phones don’t have the ability to access Google’s app store and the proliferation of different models means some programs won’t work on some phones.
Product Variables
App creators have to contend with various versions of Android and differences in screen resolution and keyboard. That makes it more expensive to test programs and can force developers to design for the lowest common denominator, said Bill Predmore, president of POP, which builds mobile applications and ads for clients including Google, Microsoft Corp. and Target Corp.
Still, the accelerating rate of Android phone sales is luring some developers that keep long-term prospects in mind. While Zumobi, which makes MSNBC’s mobile app, gets less than 3 percent of its traffic from Android, the developer is investing almost as much in Android apps as it does for the iPhone, said co-founder John SanGiovanni. Zumobi’s free, ad-funded programs get about the same revenue, and in some cases, even a bit more, from Android, he said.
‘Senseless’
Google, itself, could help narrow the revenue gap for developers, according to Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts Inc. who now runs mobile-gaming company Digital Chocolate. He calls Google’s policy of letting consumers use paid apps for as long as 24 hours and return them for a full refund “senseless and lazy.”
“As a game platform right now, Android strikes out,” Hawkins said. “As long as they keep selling devices, Android could be a good game business by 2012, but it would blossom now if Google would get out of their own way.”
Tutorial: Android (CRUD+Sync+Push) App integration with Hibernate
Sep 2nd
The main goal of this tutorial is to understand the inner workings of architecting an Android CRUD (Create,Read, Update, Delete) App. This App operates in offline mode with synchronization and real time push updates from the Cloud. Hibernate serves as the ORM layer in the Cloud for storing the originating data in a relational database system.
The focus is more on learning how to architect efficient Enterprise Mobile Apps, and not on creating a badass app for the App store 
That is not to say, the concepts don’t apply to badass apps. Just the usecases are kept simple for better exploration of ideas.
The tutorial will try to address the following:
Android Drive
Sep 2nd
I like when people do not get – is the market willing to turn.
Last week, Google released a geek Gizmo interface makes it possible for average people to create Android applications a simple user interface-term brain. was the reaction of the technical community involved in hysterical laughter, ridicule the instrument and the alleged restriction on trade rules. Evenly, giggling noting that, while Apple's App Store, download the software loaded polished professionalGoogle has been encouraging point-and-meow. They used the Nexus news beat Google with a laptop that had a life before mobile carriers just started selling its own Android phones.
The technical community is not replaced, which means that the market is shifting in the process.
Nexus One and the Android App similar Inventor served, namely seeding the market. Android was a relatively new entrant in the mobile operating system market and go against AppleMicrosoft, RIMM, Symbian and other established players. The adoption of Android is a threat to all – mobile phone manufacturers, software developers, operators and consumers. To reduce the risk and the acceptance test required Google to a phone in the hands of the people get. So he moved to build HTC Android One, and that HTC was (this essay to take this opportunity for their development and production possibilities). This ensures that developers earlyAdopters, carriers, analysts, journalists and even competitors see what could be done in the Android market and, in turn, created pleasure and in FUD.
Google Android uses Nexus to move past a market barrier.
remaining most important advantage of Apple's market is the App Store (face it, Android, Symbian ^ 3, WebOS, and perhaps even Windows Mobile-what-are-called-by-7 this week similar/identical/good- enough capacity to operational level). Apple AppWealth is a market barrier. To overcome past requires people to believe that Android East is a good environment for creating applications (and how well things Durn sell Android Apps is a redundant phrase Asia). Android App Inventor is a simple tool for creating applications, and the Nexus One of the application development tools – is to reduce the risk of discovery and as a side effect, perhaps because users the next great idea for an incentivemobile application.
Misreading the intention of an event is indicative of a shift in the market, because this cycle that inert missiles wrong rhetorical thought. If conventional view prevail, able to think unconventional. Google recognizes the obstacle app market while a number of technology experts and industry do not. “The goal is to empower people to become creators, not just the consumer, in this mobile world,” was expressed as the Android App Inventor Project. “IInventor thinks Google App tool that allows anyone to Android application program could deep, “says one wag.
Unconventional thinking is the same that drove the social networks. The people are the unruly crowd, which together ideas less than all professional developers, and raised several orders of magnitude, then sleep multiplied by the number of trainees, with politicians (the last item, an incredible amount). Each of these users can never be perfectan app, but they can invent more applications that Steve Jobs has invented her wet dreams digital. Android App unleashed imagination.
The best parallel I can recall was Borland. In the early days of MS-DOS, a compiler 1980 will cost a few thousand dollars. Borland Turbo Pascal put it on the market for $ 49 and write every two-bit hack applications began. Borland and shareware market places, not Microsoft, MS-DOS made successfully. Rough hack were created by enthusiasts and kidnappedconverted into mainstream applications. Android App Inventor follows the same path, taking a step further programming power in the hands of every man, woman, child and dog, well-functioning (though still members of Congress have not yet advanced enough).
Android App Inventor is a game changer. Experts do not understand the game.
Tags : Android Apps
Your first Eclipse RAP application
Sep 1st
3.1. Create Project
Create a new plugin project “sawan.modi.rap.first” via File -> New -> Project -> Plug-in Development -> Plug-in Project. Perform the following selection.
Select the “RAP Hello World” template and press “Finish”.
Select your “MANIFEST.MF”, right click on it, select Run-as-> Rap Application.
This should start your first RAP application.
Congratulations! You have your first Eclipse RAP application running.
Eclipse RAP requires an entrypoint similar to “org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications” for Eclipse RCP applications. The entrypoint for Eclipse RAP is defined via “org.eclipse.rap.ui.workbench.entrypoint”.
View your Entrypoint via the entension “org.eclipse.rap.ui.workbench.entrypoint” in the file “MANIFEST.MF” . Please note that the parameter “default” is used in your runtime configuration of RAP.
.
Create now a view. Select therefore in MANIFEST.MF the tab extension and add the extension point “org.eclipse.ui.views”. Add then add the view with the id “sawan.modi.rap.first.View”. The procedure is the same as for Eclipse RCP application which is described in Eclipse RCP Application.
Create the following view class.
package sawan.modi.rap.first;
import org.eclipse.swt.SWT;import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite;import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Label;import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Text;import org.eclipse.ui.part.ViewPart;
public class View extends ViewPart {
public static final String ID = "sawan.modi.rap.first.View";
@Override public void createPartControl(Composite parent) { Label label = new Label(parent, SWT.NONE); label.setText("This is my label"); Text text = new Text(parent, SWT.NONE); text.setText("Input"); }
@Override public void setFocus() {
}
}
Add the view to the perspective by changing Perspective.java to the following.
package sawan.modi.rap.first;
import org.eclipse.ui.IPageLayout;import org.eclipse.ui.IPerspectiveFactory;
/*** Configures the perspective layout. This class is contributed* through the plugin.xml.*/public class Perspective implements IPerspectiveFactory {
public void createInitialLayout(IPageLayout layout) { String editorArea = layout.getEditorArea(); layout.setEditorAreaVisible(false);
layout.addStandaloneView(View.ID, false, IPageLayout.LEFT, 0.25f, editorArea);
}}
Run your application and see your new view in actions.
Eclipse RAP supports most of the API JFace and Eclipse RCP support. If you want to learn how you can extend your Eclipse RAP application you can review Eclipse RCP App.
Of course Eclipse RAP does only support a subset of these API (but this is increasing every release) so the best way of exploring it is to build your application and see which API are available.
Flash on Android. The End?
Sep 1st
This morning I woke up to a popup screen on my Motorola Droid. It was a system update that would (finally?) allow me to install the Flash plugin on my device. At long last I was going to be able to test out this “full web experience on mobile”.
I’ll start out with my conclusions: Flash is most likely dead. The “full web experience on mobile” marketing scheme is a total bungle, one from which Flash will have a nearly impossible task of recovering from.
Here’s a conversation that probably took place at some point:
Marketing Guy: “Can we get Flash applications to run on portable devices”
Tech Guy: “Of course, a computer is a computer. Code is code. It can be done”
MG: “So we could advertise the full web experience on mobile right?”
TG: “Well, I wouldn’t go that far, the technical specifications of mobile dev…”
MG: “You’re saying we can’t get Flash applications to run on portable devices?”
TG: “We can, technically, but current Flash applications are not optimized to run on low-end equip…”
MG: “FULL WEB EXPERIENCE! We’ll definitely kill Apple with that. Forever. We rule. Marketing FTW!”
TG: “But…”
MG: “No time for arguments, get coding, I take care of the press releases!”
So they’ve spend the last year overselling Flash. And now the smokes and mirrors are gone, and the end result pretty much sucks. People were expecting the full web experience on their mobile (wonder who put THAT in their heads) and they’re experiencing what they would if they pulled out a 7 year old computer out of the closet, installed Vista on it and started browsing.
The backlash is violent, and based on what people have been sold, justified. But is Flash truly over?
First of all, I think it’s fair to separate Flash development into 2 categories: website design/navigation and visually heavier web applications (such as games and movies).
As a website design and navigation tool, Flash is dead. Finished. Over. Its hardware requirements are too steep and the added value vs. HTML5 is becoming non-existent. You used to need Flash for things as simple as decent rollovers and any form of movement. Not anymore. Is it worth it for a website to maintain both an HTML5 version for mobile and a Flash version for laptops and desktops? I don’t think so.
And since HTML5 now embeds videos, that too is over for the little plugin that could. Sorry Adobe, time to move on.
Here is, I think, the last thing that could both save Flash and also tremendously help Android as a platform: Flash games.
Flash is a unique and incredibly well-crafted integrated development environment. One that has been in heavy use for the past decade. You have legions of Flash developers out there ready to make new or port old Flash games. There are thousands of Flash games spread throughout the Internet at the moment. Many of these games exceed in quality the current Android offerings. Offer Android Application as a target platform for Flash. Of course developers will have to optimize their code, test their games against the actual hardware it will run on. (Meaning Flash applications would suddenly run well on mobile devices). You could then boost the catalog of good Android games. As a developer, the cost-benefits of porting existing code and assets on the platform with just a few adjustments would suddenly make more sense.
Android wins by getting more content, and Flash wins for staying a pertinent development environment (for a few more years). For Flash, that’s kind of a last hope. For Android, although the platform did lose face and credibility for not really being able to offer that “full web experience” it promised, its current adoption rate makes this issue a non-threat.
Android Device Chatter with the Google Mother Ship
Sep 1st
In this post I present some insight into push-based services offered by Google on the Android platform. I have conducted some preliminary experiments at the network/transport layer level and the summary of findings is described.
Message Push
Android client devices come with a “message