Re: Sergey Brin descends from Mount Sinai with Android API

[Muthu Ramadoss]

> Sergey Brin descends from Mount Sinai with Android API
> The Ten Commandments or a waste of time?
>
> By Ted Dziuba
>
>
>
> Fail and You If there's one thing that's never affected by economic
> downturn, it's the mobile handset market. This phenomenon is most
> evident at the underground parties and dive bars in San Francisco, where
> it is a well known yet unspoken tradition that in any given group of
> hipsters, the one with the cheapest phone must always buy the first
> pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
>
> We're in the middle of a recession. And Google Android is about to enter
> a market that's quickly being dominated by a company whose expertise is
> making cool shit that you think you need. But I'm still absolutely
> certain I didn't just waste the last six days of my life learning
> Google's API and writing an Android application.
>
>
> You Have An API, Now What?
> Google released version 1.0 of the Android SDK late last month, and
> nobody really cared. Someone has to give this thing a little love,
> though. It's an open API, free documentation, and Google won't hold an
> iron grip on the application market's balls like Apple does. The main
> draw, though, is that Google is trying to smooth over a lot of the
> friction for a developer who wants to get started.
>
>
> One of the many reasons that programmers love to make APIs is that they
> get to write code that doesn't actually do anything useful and still
> feel like they've handed the commandments down to Moses. That is to say,
> it's easier to draw shit on a white board than it is to write a program
> that people actually want to use.
>
> With the Android phone, you get all sorts of neat doodads: a GPS locater
> service, an accelerometer, WiFi, 3D graphics, and a system for playing
> audio and video. Pretty cool, but what do you do with all that? Sergey
> Brin wrote a game changing, disruptive application that detects how long
> the phone stays in the air when you throw it. Fascinating.
>
> Identifying the target market for my application as hipsters who live in
> San Francisco, I came up with an idea. People in San Francisco have a
> problem: When they venture outside the city - to Napa for a wine
> tasting, for example, or to Lake Tahoe for snowboarding - they run a
> pretty good probability of entering a town where there is a Republican
> majority. Now, running into someone with an opposing world view is
> either a blessing or a curse for a San Franciscan, depending on who you
> ask, but in either case, it would be great if something could notify you
> when you step into red territory.
>
> Google's phone will have a GPS, and California provides statistics on
> voter registration, so this is a match made in Mountain View.
>
>
> Ten Points For Gryffindor
> All Android development is in Java, and Google has fortunately provided
> an Eclipse plugin for their SDK. The integration is very clean, save for
> some standard issue bullshit you'll need to go through to get JUnit to
> work with your Android project. If you're going to attempt an Android
> application without Eclipse, enjoy your bookkeeping: There's manifest
> files that need to be written, Python scripts that need to be run to
> generate some boilerplate code, bytecode that needs to be reinterpreted,
> and a bunch of other shit that you just don't want to deal with.
>
> Google also provides an emulator for the device. As emulators do, this
> one runs balls slow, taking more than two minutes to start up on my
> 1.5GHz Athlon. Thankfully, you can keep the emulator running and load
> new code into it.
>
> The API itself is decent. I only played a couple of rounds of how do I
> find the objects I need to instantiate this fucking thing, clicking
> around the Javadocs. I used the geocoder interface along with the
> location API to figure out what town the phone is in, then cross
> referenced that with my voter registration data to figure out the
> probability that any given person you see on the street was a
> Republican.
>
> Developing the GUI in Android will bring back some horrific memories of
> Swing programming at first. You can make the whole UI programmatically
> if you're into that sort of thing, but Android encourages you to use XML
> to design the interface. It makes for cleaner code and is easier for
> someone who has had their soul gradually worn down to a nub by web
> programming for the past several years.
>
>
> Morph The Screen Into Something Cool
> What I had originally set out to do was write an application that runs
> in the background and constantly monitors your GPS coordinates, reacting
> when it needs to. Using Google's examples, I wrote a program that can
> poll the GPS and check your location every time it's run, but the
> run-in-the-background thing eluded me. I know that it can be done, I
> just didn't really feel like taking the time to learn Android's whole
> programming model. Why? Because I'm a hobbyist with a short attention
> span.
>
> Google's hoping to attract a lot of developers by having an open
> platform, but I don't think they realize that a lot of developers have
> better shit to do than tinker around with a cell phone, especially if
> the tutorial is as much fun as a tax return. Developers are users, too.
> We need a good interface.
>
> The first part of the tutorial is a Hello, World. Once I get beyond
> that, I want to do something neat. The second part of the tutorial is a
> notepad application. Notepad? It's a cell phone with all sorts of
> gizmos. Show me how to make it beep and shit. The documentation's goal
> is to remind me why I'm spending my free time squirreled away in the
> computer room and not sitting on the couch drinking a beer.
>
> In any event, Google's if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach is
> probably no match for a slowing economy. The phone will be priced at
> $179, but Google and T-Mobile will likely be able to flood the market
> and start eating Apple's lunch if they accept collateralized debt
> objects in lieu of cash. ®
>
>
> Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/06/dziuba_android/
>
--
Thanks.

Muthu Ramadoss
http://mobeegal.in - mobile search. redefined. (+91 9840348914)