ZEDRAY

This event turned out to be a lot of fun, despite a registration glitch that sent me a “this event if full, try again next year” email.  A big thanks to Silvia for encouraging me to follow up on that email and get myself re-registered (you’re a star) and to someone at Google call Liz for forwarding all the final event details.

What made the event was the free food, friendly presenters and the chance to make some quality Android contacts.  Highlights being Mike “I’m-not-an-American-I’m-Canadian-with-a-British-passport” Jennings’s Android keynote/device demo/Q&A, meeting some up and coming Android consultants from novoda.com and a rather solid discussion on application traceability with alsutton.com.

A note also goes to Reto Meier who is writing (or frantically updating for 0.9) his book titled: “Professional Android Applications”.  By the sounds of things, the book will definitely be worth a read and made for a good excuse for the speaker to pick on the author while fielding some of the more technical questions.

Unfortunately I only got to *watch* the lightning talks, and not demo Snowball as I had already upgraded my laptop to Android SDK 0.9 and hadn’t had time to bring all my code up to spec.  This was a problem shared by many (to varying degrees), and is a reminder to inventors to always carry around their elevator pitch/product demo on PowerPoint.

According to an unnamed Google employee, constant SDK updating is just one of many Android problems that will be “solved by the launch”.

After several months of black out, it’s suddenly new Android SDK day!
This is important as it gives us ‘fan boys’ a chance to take a look at how the new mobile phone operating system from Google is progressing.

Download here:
http://code.google.com/android/

Existing developers should follow the upgrade guide:
http://code.google.com/android/intro/upgrading.html

A few observations:

• Updated user interface/home screen (looks pretty as ever), messaging and picture applications now present. Hopefully this will mean less peering into grainy YouTube videos to see the user interface in action.
• App store still missing (see comment about grainy YouTube videos).
• Applications must be cryptographically signed, so as to identify the developer. This is a new and important feature, but lacks any mention of how this fits into the Android ecosystem. Historically the Java ME implementation of application signing was appallingly bad, so I will be keeping a close eye on how this develops.
• Bluetooth support is conspicuous by its absence. Bluetooth is hard to get right (just look at all those buggy phones over the years), so this was somewhat expected. We are told to wait until version 1.0 for this feature, but I could imagine this sort of thing holding up the whole show.
• Network access now requires explicit permission at install time. Perhaps all those developers with unlimited 3G data plans forgot about the little guys.
• GTalk is now officially *gone* from this release (citing security reasons), which will kill a lot of developers who were taking this shortcut to peer-to-peer.
• There are unspecified changes to the installer, so I will have to do some experimentation with the “adb” to see how flexible this will be.
• They have *fixed* the long startup times bug. Although I didn’t seem much difference with startup time, this always seems to happen when I am giving a presentation (see Murphy’s law).

I will follow up with more detail once I start developing.

Snowball:
I promised myself that I wouldn’t touch Snowball until Google released an improved emulator. Now here it is, I will have to schedule some development time after my vacation next week.

For this SDK release, my Snowball “to do” list looks like this:

• Implement the Wi-Fi Channel, so handsets can share content with Wi-Fi base stations and other users in a peer-to-peer fashion.
• Create a Snowball development kit, including the “Snowball Engine” client application and example code so other developers can try it out.
• Bluetooth support will have to wait for 1.0.

Based on Google group discussions here and here, it seems that Mobeegal and Commandro (both ADC winners) were considering these issues when developing their applications.

“Basically, you’re right, those problems exist and, for example, Commandro has some tricks inside it in order to correctly respond to missing signals, as well as it can be run as a background service (without UI at all) with minimal and rare GPS interaction in order to
keep saving battery.” - Alex Pisarev

Again this turns into a critique of the challenge, i.e. entries that implement intelligent workarounds are totally transparent to the judges.

Summary of points:

• Yes GPS technology will get better, but don’t expect a dramatic performance improvement within the next 3 years.
• Some of the winners used a background service (and other unspecified tricks) to achieve better performance, lower battery consumption and an overall better user experience.
• Intelligent LBS support needs to be baked into the platform, i.e. you shouldn’t have 5 background applications on your phone all attempting to do the same thing. Snowball is my attempt to make this work. I can’t wait to get my hands on real hardware to show what it can do.

My logs show that an American switched on my Snowball client for about two minutes late on Sunday night (West coast time). It seems like someone at Google is burning the midnight oil, trying to get all the submissions ready for the Judges in time.
Good luck to them.

Its official, I will now be presenting at the JAX08 Conference with a presentation entitled:

Where am I? Location Based Services
Location Based Services stellen einen der großen Benefits mobiler Devices dar, der weit über die Bestimmung der eigenen Position hinausgeht. Im Java-ME-Umfeld werden derartige Services u.a. mittels Location API (JSR 179) realisierbar. Die Session zeigt die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen Java-ME-basierter Location Based Services und führt sowohl in die theoretischen Grundlagen als auch in die praktische Verwendung der Location API ein. Darüber hinaus wird anhand einer auf der Androids-Plattform basierenden Beispielanwendung eine Alternative zum klassischen LBS-Ansatz aufgezeigt. (click)

I will be co-presenting with my CEO - Lars Roewekamp of OpenKnowledge GMBH.

A very exciting time to be in mobile development and location based services in general.
I will also slip in something on Snowball and demo a few Android proofs of concept applications.

A new year and a good opportunity to look at all the mobile related stuff in my portfolio since:

2004

• EdiMap (MSc Edinburgh University)
  Tourist map of Edinburgh, with downloadable POI.
• NotPacMan (Self training)
  The familiar PacMan game.

2006 (Starting at OpenKnowledge)

• 
  Barometer, Horoskop and Lovecheck (AirMotion)
  Fun and games, and a lot of device testing.
• MiniMove (BMW via BBDO)
  Rotate the BMW mini on your mobile.

2007

• 
  MobileAct (Sony Ericsson via AirMotion)
  Weekly magazine content to go with the Channel 4 series.
• 
  MiniMove China (BMW via BBDO China)
  Rotate the BMW mini on your mobile in Chinese.
• 
  
  Mitch&Co Blackbox (Tchibo via MINICK)
  Explore the latest Mitch&Co fashon range on either male of female models.
• NowHere (Burda Wireless)
  Photograph where you are and upload as a NowHere POI.

2008…

• Ads by a [big mobile network operator]*
  Important stuff
• Google Android
  Self training on the new mobile OS from Google
• Snowball - The Mobile Location Based Search API
  My world beating business idea.

* To comply with my company’s code of conduct for blogs, I have removed all references to customers and projects currently in progress.