After the Jbed’s Esmertec solution for JavaME on Android, a new solution have just arrived by Carlos Bazzarella from Poliplus software, called : ME4Android. The solution aims to help developers port their JavaME applications into Android automatically without any single code change, only by making a small modification in the build scripts. The demo Flyer application already available shows the capabilities of ME4Android to run midlets that use the low level user interface API.

Sample Flyer application running on Android

We asked Carlos on full JavaME support for Android and he told us in email “right now ME4Android does not support a complete JavaME stack but in the long run it will, specially when the source code becomes available.”

The good news is that ME4Android will be open sourced with Android, Carlos confirmed to OHM “Since Android will eventually be fully open sourced, I intend to do the same with ME4Android. Actually as soon as Google releases all of their source code, I’ll do the same.”

When asked about Esmertec solution, he told us “I am familiar with Esmertec Jbed and given the fact that it will bean optional commercial component on the free Android platform, you can guarantee that it will not be used much and will never have 100% deployment on Android. ME4Android as a free alternative with complete source code available has absolutely no barriers for adoption and provides the best bridge for JavaME developers to take to Android.”

ME4Android could be the solution for JavaME developers looking for a quick way to get their application running on Android at low cost. Actually they can continue to develop on their own platforms, then just wait for full JavaME support using ME4Android from Poliplus or Jbed from Esmertec. Handset Manufacturers will have to decide on this.

Popularity: 19%

While it’s not possible to run Android on current iPhone, anyone can create amazing skins for the emulator. AndDev.org have created an amazing iPhone skin for Android emulator in two flavors : landscape and portrait. To use it, unzip the downloaded package then rename it to iphone_HVGA-L and iphone_HVGA-P, instead of using the default names. Copy to android_sdk/tools/lib/images/skins/ and you are ready. To run the emulator with the new skin see our previous tips. Then enjoy !

Popularity: 21%

After two weeks of launching the Android SDK, some small applications started to surface from simple calculator, MMORPG game, Twitter and GTalk client, password manager … This is defintely not the full list, since many developers are keeping their project secret for the Challenge, but it’s already a good start. Below some of the applications released :

Android Password Safe: A password manager for Android

Steven Osborn have written a basic password manager for the Android platform. It uses a 128Bit AES to encrypt passwords and sensitive data and requires the user to enter a password to decrypt/access their password safe. Current features include 28 Bit AES Encryption, Password protection, All data is entrypted including notes, website link, description, and finally click through website link, will take you from your entry to the website. Planned features include : Fetching/Caching of favicons and Customizable encryption. Maybe 256bit AES, DES, etc.

Android Calculator

The first Android calculator is also simple and basic written by Bill Meltsner. Features include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and modulo division!, Supports decimals, Displays errors in shiny red text, Indents answers to differentiate them from equations, Restricts cursor movement to the current equation, Only accepts certain keys as input, Gets almost the entire screen dedicated to it, Has all its features end in exclamation points!.

Features not supported include order of operations, but instead parses equations from left-to-right regardless of operator, Treats numbers with a trailing decimal point as malformed instead of disregarding the decimal point, Error detection needs much improvement, Requires keyboard usage; no shiny buttons to press, there are other small bugs which going to be fixed in future releases.

Download Android Calculator.

Twitter Client for Android

Davanum is very active these days on Android application development, he created the first twitter client for Android showing how to make XML over HTTP calls. The application allow simply to send tweets and view your friend’s tweets.

What’s next

At this time it’s interesting to see many developers experimenting development for the Android platform. The Google approach of making application development for Android easier, with java only supported, seems to be very successful until now, the support is great and the community is very active. So we’ll see certainly more amazing experiments in the future, especially that current developments are made by single developers.

Popularity: 20%

With the launch of Android mobile platform, Google announced that developers can use Java as programming language to create applications for the platform and using Dalvik as the Java virtual machine. The choice of Java was itself a limitation for many developers, especially low level progammers used to deal directly with different mobile hardware issues…

It’s true that, for example, Symbian support programming in C++, but here is the full and real situation. There is a lot of application developed for Symbian, but you have to always compile your application for the different platforms separately. Applications for Symbian 3rd edition don’t run on 2nd, or 1st edition devices. Sometimes applications for S60 3rd edition are compatible with N73, but not with N80, while it should be the same operating system and there is no reason for an application to be hardware dependant.

Now back to Android, the fact is only Java language is supported doesn’t mean that you cannot develop applications in other languages. This have been proved by many developers, hackers and experts in application development for mobile. The guys at Elements Interactive B.V., the company behind Edgelib library, succeeded to run native C++ applications on the Android platform, even that at this time there is still many issues on display and sound … etc. This include the S-Tris2 game and a 3D animation demo of Edgelib.

Wouter ten Brink, Elements Interactive CTO, told us by email “As our company focuses on native (C++) development only, we will keep looking for solutions to bring native applications to Android.”. He added “Personally, I believe Google will eventually offer a way to run native code, but we’ll have to see what will happen on this area the coming months.”

Performance Vs Portability

It’s clear that Google, by making Dalvik the Java Virtual Machine for Android, is looking for maximum portability against performance. The MSM chipsets, currently supported by Android, include a Java hardware acceleration, which is supposed to provide high performance for Java applications running on Android Handsets. But it’s not everything.

The Google answer on running C/C++ applications on Android from the FAQs is : “No. Android applications are written using the Java programming language”. Very simple answer, but the problem here is for developers and companies having ready to use code and applications for other mobile platform and looking to get their code ported to Android at low cost.

Java-Not-In-Time and JIT

The performance issue in reality isn’t due to Java itself, but to the virtual machine running Java code on mobile devices. You can run Java very fastly on PCs today with JIT VMs, thing not available for mobile devices, which make Java applications and games very slow on mobile. So what about Dalvik ? Dan Morrill posted on the Android developers group that “a just-in-time compiler is definitely on the Dalvik roadmap”.

This should answer the performance question about Java, Android and Dalvik, even that we don’t know much at this time on the Dalvik VM.

Conclusion

Finally the choice of Java on Android is to make mobile application developement faster and easier for developers, and to make Android platform more stable. Probably many don’t agree on coding in Java for Android and looking for native support. This could solve some problems for native developers, but will open the door for a huge new problems and incompatibilities. If Google decided to make Android the best open mobile platform, it’s also their choice to keep this platform safe for a better future.

Popularity: 44%

Ascender, leading provider of advanced font products for mobile handsets and member of the OHA, announced the “Droid Fonts”, a set of seven typefaces specially designed for the Android for optimal quality and comfort on mobile handsets. The Droid fonts family have been optimized for a better rendering in application menus, web browsers and for other screen text.

“Ascender is proud to be providing the font solution to the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance. We believe that handset manufacturers, wireless carriers and application developers will be very happy with the fonts provided and we look forward to addressing the future font needs across the platform,” said Ira Mirochnick, President of Ascender Corporation. “We are also very excited that the platform supports our Ascender Compact Asian Font solution (ACAF) which will make it easy for manufacturers to implement additional high quality Asian fonts in a small footprint.”

According to the press release, the Droid family of fonts consists of Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif. Each contains extensive character set coverage including Western Europe, Eastern/Central Europe, Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish support. The Droid Sans regular font also includes support for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean support for the GB2312, Big 5, JIS 0208 and KSC 5601 character sets respectively.

It’s interesting to get Asian fonts supported for Android especially Japanese, Chinese and Korean, this also reflect the Google strategy to target the largest population. But what I notice here is that Android is missing middle eastern fonts such Arabic and Hebrew, in addition to other Asian fonts. So you will be missing these for current release, but we will probably see them supported in future releases according to Ascender.

Popularity: 22%