If you are behind a proxy and looking to connect the emulator to Internet, Luisa Magarian have posted the way to set proxy for the emulator. It uses the command line and the adb utility. First change directory to the emulator tools folder, you will find also the adb utility there. Run the emulator, then from command line :

1. ./adb shell sqlite3 /data/data/com.google.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db “\”INSERT INTO system VALUES(99,’http_proxy’,’ [host_or_IP]:[port]’);\”"
2. Change [host_or_ip] and [port] to your correct proxy values
3. Try to connect from Android and it should be working fine.

Luisa posted also the way to access some Android’s system setting using SQLite, this will help to get more information on how Android work, for example to retrieve all settings :

1. ./adb shell sqlite3 /data/data/com.google.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db “\”SELECT * FROM system\”"
2. This will return :
   1|music_volume|3
   2|voice_volume|3
   3|ringer_volume|3

Popularity: 72%

I’ll say also what a week ! This Monday we got the first look into Android SDK, developers started playing with the SDK, coding the first Android applications, and certainly reporting bugs and features. It’s the first week, and Android developers blog have just announced the first SDK update version M3-RC22a including fixes for high priority issues. There is also an update for the Eclipse plugin (ADT) to version 0.3.1, so be sure to check the latest update from your eclipse environment.

The Android team was very helpful over the discussions groups and answered a lot of technical questions around the platform, when answers are required. David posted some good reading over the official blog that you might check, but here I’ll post some blogs on Android and OHA launched this week, where you can find more news on the platform :

1. Android Portal
2. Hello Android
3. OHAdev.com

Got a blog or a website on Android ? Add it in comments.

Popularity: 17%

Since monday we started discovering what’s on Android, the system, the applications, the architecture … etc. It was important to know what’s already on Android to develop better applications for the system. In short, Android is running on a linux kernel and using Dalvik as Java Virtual Machine. Android features include :

Application Framework

The application Framework enable Android application to reuse and replace existent components. The Framework include Activity Manager, Window manager, Content providers, View system, notification manager, package manager, telephony manager, resource manager, location manager and XMPP service.

Android Libraries

Android system is based on set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. Core libraries include :

• System C library- a BSD-derived implementation of the standard C system library (libc), tuned for embedded Linux-based devices
• Media Libraries- based on PacketVideo’s OpenCORE; the libraries support playback and recording of many popular audio and video formats, as well as static image files, including MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, and PNG
• Surface Manager- manages access to the display subsystem and seamlessly composites 2D and 3D graphic layers from multiple applications
• LibWebCore- a modern web browser engine which powers both the Android browser and an embeddable web view
• SGL- the underlying 2D graphics engine
• 3D libraries- an implementation based on OpenGL ES 1.0 APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer
• FreeType- bitmap and vector font rendering
• SQLite- a powerful and lightweight relational database engine available to all applications

Dalvik Virtual Machine

Dalvik is the Java Virtual Machine that power Android systems, optimized for mobile phones, owned by google, and best of all going to be open sourced ! Dalvik executes files in the .dex format optimized for minimal footprint. The system itself is optimized to run multiple Dalvik VMs efficiently.

Android applications

The current SDK released came with a set of applications including Home, browser (based on webkit), contacts manager, Phone application, Maps, XMPP client, and according to documentation there will be also sms application, calendar and many others. I bet there will be other basic applications by Google such notes application, some games … etc, but the big job is left here for developers who will participate in the challenge.

Development tools

Android SDK, released this monday is defintely the best development environnement for Android applications. A plugin for eclipse is available to help coding, debugging, memory and performance profiling, in addition to the device emulator to see your application running live in Android before to see it on real handsets.

Some others Android’s Technical features

• Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification
• Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
• GSM Telephony
• Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi
• Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer

Be sure to check Android documentation to learn more about this new technology.

Popularity: 34%

I just finished downloading and installing everything necessary to get Android working and started experimenting the new platform, sample applications, which I find amazing. As you can see below it’s the hello world application running on Android platform :

I just didn’t like the emulator so much, but I guess there will be more amazing devices in the future. So as development platform it’s very fine, I just have to be more familiar with the navigation pad.

So back to Android platform, the home screen show the browser in the middle screen, which based on Webkit, then three major applications included with the system Contacts manager, Recent calls and Maps in addition to sample demos. Below the full list as shown in Android. I still don’t know much on installing applications, and how to make more personalisations, but with such great documentation I guess this would be for the next days.

There is a special page on Youtube showing Android talks, and I stopped at the first video where Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz showing some of the main features. Steve showed something that I didn’t know how to try on the emulator, which is the text notifications. It’s a small chat application where you can receive notifications from your friends. I noticed xmpp settings in the system so I guess it is for gmail chat, or other jabber servers.

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll make certainly more experiments in the next days to get to know Android better.

Popularity: 13%