OpenIntents

OpenIntents defines and implements open interfaces for improved interoperability of Android applications. Another interesting Android project which aims to make your mobile experience unique on Android handsets. The project is very open; anyone can participate into OpenIntents with code or ideas. Many interesting experiments and applications are already available with OpenIntents; most notable the Sensor Similator, and the central shopping list.

Tipper

Tipper is the second cool utility from iambic, a handy “split tip” calculator for dining out. It saves time and effort by calculating the total and displaying the actual tip amount.

SeaThreePO Android Translator

Even if it’s a quick Synday project as David announced on his blog, SeaThreePO is a pretty useful Android translator. SeaThreePO is based on dims’ code and using simply Android XMPP and Google translation bots.

Read also :

• Interview with Adriano Chiaretta from iambic
• Android SDK Security Release m5-rc15
• McObject Sharpens its Edge in Database Indexes With New KD-Tree
• ARM To Showcase Android Internet Devices at Mobile World Congress 2008

Android Location

Android Location is a social mapping application for Android, a revolutionary service that will change the way people use mobile phones to keep in touch with their friends. Android Location aims to facilitates real-world interaction between friends and puts an end to frustrating missed connections. There are already 9 developers member of the project, but notice that the application is beeing developed under J2ME to assure compatibility with other mobile platforms. Features include :

• Know where you are without having a GPS
• Connect with friends and get alerted where they are nearby
• Explore places and events recommended by friends
• Recommend new places
• Search for stuff to buy in nearby stores

Metosphere

Metosphere is a mapping application where users can explore virtual objects around physical location like messages, emergency alerts, news, events, reviews, games. The goal is to follow the Firefox/Eclipse model and provide the ability to create extensions and add-ons like a Geocaching Assistant, Location Messaging Client, Proximity-based RSS Reader, Flash Mob Communicator, Community/Campus Emergency Alert Notifier, or even a Meatspace MUD game. More objects are going to be supported in the future.

GoogHelper

GoogHelper is a snappy utility that helps you quickly launch various Internet searches using mobile friendly sites such as Google, Yahoo!Finance, Amazon, Wikipedia and many more. The application is provided by iambic, and according to a blog post there will be more applications for android coming in the next month. The company already provide a very large set of mobile applications for Palm, Smartphone, Symbian, PocketPC, Blackberry and more.

Netscramble

Netscramble is a port of the KDE game “knetwalk”. The player is given a network diagram with the parts of the network randomly rotated; he/she must rotate them to connect all the terminals to the server. You have to be an android to solve it!. Pretty fun game that you can enjoy from your keyboard or touchscreen.

Read also :

• Interview with Adriano Chiaretta from iambic
• Weekly Android Applications 12/2/2008

Paparazzi Game for Google Android

“Paparazzi” was designed to use the built-in phone camera in the first person real-life multiplayer game. This is a prototype of location based MMORPG which will combine all new Android features like gps/compass/camera. Just imagine that you will be able to see virtual objects via phone camera. An innovative virtual reality game for the Android developer contest. Paparazzi preview version is available for download.

AndroidSAP Connects Android to a SAP Backend

Ignacio Hernandez have created an interesting example application to connect Android to SAP NetWeaver. An intersting project to bring Android to enterprise ERP/CRM world. Code is free so you can use it in your own application. More information and download available from Ignacio blog.

GridGrain, Open Source Grid Computing for Android

Featured last Tuesday on BusinessWeek, GridGrain is an open source Grid Computing solution for Java available for Android platform. GridGrain is not an application but a technology that could be used to create innovative applications with shared computing between different Android devices. But the question is, can we really turn Android devices into supercomputers ? Sounds like science fiction.

Molib, Velib on Android

Velib is a new public bicycle rental program launched in Paris on July 15, 2007. The program include 750 hire points, and 10,000 bicycles. Similar programs are available in others cities such Brussels, Copenhagen, Munich … etc. Velib is very useful and with Molib it become much more better, especially if you don’t know the city. The idea is to avoid congestions and use a velib instead of your car or metro. Molib will be simply your guide in Paris to find Velib stations nearby in real time, and show your locations in the city.

Read also :

• Android SDK Security Release m5-rc15
• McObject Sharpens its Edge in Database Indexes With New KD-Tree
• Interview with Adriano Chiaretta from iambic
• Weekly Android Applications 12/2/2008

Android RPN Calculator

Android RPN Calculator is an experimental application which aims to implement an RPN-based calculator. Read the definition of RPN before using the calculator if you don’t it, otherwise you might find it very confusing to use. Currently many buttons still not implemented but many already working. So you can get the apk and give it a try.

Website : http://code.google.com/p/android-rpn-calculator/

Android Crossword game

Arensus Crossword Player is the name of a new fun game which let you solve crosswords on Android. You can download crosswords from the internet using simply Android browser, then you use Crossword Player for the game itself. There are options to reveal a letter, word, or the entire crossword, and player can save Scale factor, Top/left position of view, Played time, Current crossword field, Current direction, All letters for each field, All checked status of each field, and All revealed status of each field. Arensus Crossword Player is one of the applications that are participating in the Android Challenge.

Website : http://oxonom.com/node/10

KudoStar, social rating system

KudoStar is a mobile social rating system that connects your contacts and favorite locations. People and places accumulate positive and negative Kudostars (KudoScore), with relevant sound, images, and video while keeping the user interface intuitive and simple to use. KudoStar then uses this information and ties it in with not only other Android phones but also your social networking sites. KudoStar will also utilize Facebook’s F8 and Google’s opensocial platforms to virally spread the collected data to a multitude of users. Tying Google Maps, and v:social’s media platforms KudoStar will allow a vast array of viewing options for the data that is collected.

Website : http://www.kudostar.com/

Android VNC

The aim of this project is to make testing of Android platform more easy on real handsets with full screen VNC client running. The current test framework is ideally suited for Windows Mobile based handsets running .NET VNC Viewer. So if you see somewhere a windows mobile phone using Android, you are probably seeing the VNC client running in fullscreen !

Website : http://code.google.com/p/android-vnc/

Android City Audioguides

City Audioguides is aiming to use android framework positioning and other technologies to improve your travelling experiences delivering audio content relative to your current physical location. Bringing museum-like audioguides to a larger scope. The application is built on top of the android-rss project and licenced under GNU General Public License v2.

Website : http://sourceforge.net/projects/pounamu/

Read also :

• This week’s Android applications
• First Android Applications : Games, Messaging, Security and Utilities
• Android SDK Security Release m5-rc15
• McObject Sharpens its Edge in Database Indexes With New KD-Tree

McObject is offering the Android-ready Perst, as well as TestIndex, a demo application showing Perst and Android’s bundled SQLite database performing the same tasks side by side. Both are available as free downloads, with complete source code, from http://www.mcobject.com/android.

With Perst, users of Android-based phones will benefit from responsive, richly-featured embedded software made possible by a database system that delivers high performance and a small footprint, and by the efficiency that results from true Java developer-oriented features.

Perst stores data directly in Java objects. This eliminates the need for data-packing or unpacking code to map between the application’s data model and the database’s data model, as is required by relational and object-relational databases. The Perst API is flexible, easy-to-use and very fast compared to alternative commercial Java OODBMSs.

Perst is a very compact embedded database, with a core consisting of only five thousand lines of code. This small footprint imposes little demand on system resources. Moreover, Perst does not require administration. Perst supports transactions with the ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated and Durable) properties, and expands developers’ coding efficiency by making Java objects as easy to use as possible.

For example, for access to objects, Perst implements specialized collection classes optimized for different data layouts and access patterns, including:

• Classic B-Tree implementation;
• R-tree indexes for spatially-oriented applications such as GIS and navigation;
• Main-memory database containers, based on T-Tree indexes, optimized for real-time memory-only access;
• Patricia Trie index, which speeds searches in networking and telephony applications;
• TimeSeries class to efficiently deal with small fixed-size objects;
• Specialized versions of collections for thick indices (indices with many duplicates), and bit indices (keys with a restricted number of possible values).

In addition to its core functionality, Perst provides optional features such as garbage collection, detection of hanging references, automatic schema evolution, XML import/export utilities, master-slave replication support (with the option to run read-only queries on slave nodes), an SQL subset to filter elements of any collection, and integration with the AspectJ and JAssist AOP tools.

To read McObject’s complete announcement of Perst and TestIndex for Android, see http://www.mcobject.com/pressroom.php?step=3&article=91.

Read also :

• McObject Sharpens its Edge in Database Indexes With New KD-Tree
• ODMG3 now hosted by ODBMS.ORG
• db4objects Announces db4o Database for Android
• Android SDK Security Release m5-rc15

CallFreq, Dialer that knows better

Sadko Mobile is one of the companies created after Android launch to create applications both for mobile devices and for desktops and servers interacting with such devices. Their first application CallFreq is small but useful. It allows using filters to list the contacts that you have most frequently dialed, instead of listing all your contacts. It’s a kind of Journal, but I find it very well shown especially with your contact’s pictures and filter to display by hour, day, week, or month. CallFreq is already available for download, but not sources available.

Connect4 game for Android

AndroidCan just opened its doors on December 13rd and promised to provide more games and fun for Android. Their first game is the classical Connect4 with four level of difficulty is already available for download. Sources not available also.

Hecl, Mobile Scripting language on Android

The Hecl Programming Language is a high-level, open source scripting language implemented in Java. David N. Welton, creator of Hecl, have just announced that an alpha version of Hecl is already available for Android and could be downloaded from Hecl website. Hecl will participate in the Google Android Challenge, so if you are interested you can start by joining their mainling list.

Read also :

• Running C++ Native Applications on Android, The Final Point
• What’s on Android
• Android SDK Security Release m5-rc15
• McObject Sharpens its Edge in Database Indexes With New KD-Tree

Dodge Ball for Android

Ryo Ichinose have written Dodge Ball for Android, a fun game where you have to move a spaceship and avoiding falling balls from the sky. Code source and video demo are available.

CameraSource, Live Camera Previews in Android

While there is no camera emulation currently available for Android, here is the first unofficial solution provided by Tom Gibara to work with local and remote camera sources. The code is public domain and consists of four classes CameraSource, GenuineCamera, RemoteCamera and WebcamBroadcaster. This is more experiment than real application but CameraSource is very useful to get camera emulation working on Android platform.

Android Feed Reader

To follow Android news and your favorite blogs, here is the second RSS/Atom feed reader for the Android platform. Currently the project came with the very basic features of an RSS reader, and a basic UI … There is a lot of To-dos, but it’s already a good start. AFR uses the ROME + JDOM libraries for parsing feeds, and the java.beans module from Apache Harmony, which is required by ROME.

Read also :

• Weekly Android Applications 21/01/2008
• Tips: How to install apk files on Android Emulator
• Android Developer Challenge Open

OHM : Can we know a little about yourself ?

Brendan : I’m a professor of computer science at Union College in Schenectady, NY. I just graduated a year and a half ago from the University of Massachusetts with a PhD in Robotics. Before grad. school, I worked in the software industry for a couple of years; mostly web-apps. I’ve done a bunch of different development over the years.

OHM : So you have a PhD in robotics, and you are interested into mobile development also ?

Brendan : I like to code. My term ended in the middle of November, and I wanted a project to keep me busy.

I had just taught graphics as my fall course and so I thought I’d play around and port some of the code from the class over to Android. Since I’d never done OpenGL on an embedded device, then I was thinking about building an app for the Challenge and I realized it was really annoying to build a GUI in XML. So I wrote the GUI builder.

OHM : Are you entering the challenge alone or in a team ?

Brendan : I’m not sure, probably by myself. I’m not 100% committed to entering. I have to come up with a really good idea, and so far my ideas are only ok.

OHM : So what about Android-GL, are you planning to build something with it ?

Brendan : I was thinking about it, but the renderer still has some bugs in it. While I was working on that I found a reported and number of them and I’ve seen reports from other people as well.

Also, I’m not 100% convinced that 3D plus mobile is the best solution, since most devices still don’t have accelerated graphics

OHM : how did you find coding on Android platform ?

Brendan : Its pretty easy I think. Its very similar to J2SE, more similar than J2ME which I did a little coding for.

There are some major differences between the OpenGL ES API and the regular OpenGL API - no glBegin(…)/glVertex(…)/glEnd() - that took some getting used to, but that’s the direction that the regular OpenGL API is headed also as far as I’ve heard. I think OpenGL 3.0 does away with that style of 3D coding. So it wasn’t a bad thing to learn more about.

OHM : so Java before Android was not much different than after Android ?

Brendan : Yeah, I think so, because I’m not in the mobile industry, and I don’t have a strong sense for the use of Java in that market. So I don’t really know if Android will mark a major shift toward Java or not.

One thing that is interesting about Android is that after two quick SDK releases, its slowed down !

You can tell that there are internal releases being developed, because the release stamp on the bottom of the docs pages keeps changing (Today its: Build m3-rc31 - 04 Dec 2007 17:47). So I’m curious about Google’s SDK release plans/schedule.

OHM : Which feature are you waiting for in the next release ?

Brendan : I’m waiting for Bluetooth support to be activated, So I can drive my Lego NXT Robot from Android !

Thanks Brendan for your time.

Read also :

• Android SDK Security Release m5-rc15
• McObject Sharpens its Edge in Database Indexes With New KD-Tree
• Interview with Adriano Chiaretta from iambic
• Weekly Android Applications 12/2/2008

Java programmers are delighted with Android’s full object oriented platform they are frustrated by its bundling with a relational database, requiring cumbersome plumbing between objects and tables. db4o fills the gap by providing a fast and secure, native Java object database that makes storing objects and sharing of data between applications simple and easy.

It’s true that Android came with “Content providers” but as Carl Rosenberger, db4object’s Chief Software Architect, said in a blog post “this is not Java, it’s not object-oriented, it’s not even SQL.” Which is the missing element in Android platform : The object database solution.

This Tuesday we had the chance to talk to Nik Wekwerth, the VP of Marketing db4objects, and he told us about db4o solution for Android and how it could help developers to make fully advanced object oriented applications. “It’s all about simplicity” he told us, “In Java you prefer always to stay in Object Oriented. Object is more flexible than SQL, it doesn’t lock your memory”.

There are currently two applications ported to db4o, the Password Manager application and MapMe. It shows the capabilities of db4o and the simplicity of using objects to store and retrieve data. There is no real benchmark at this time Nik told us, but it’s clear from these two samples that using db4o is much easier and very simple to maintain.

Where can you use db4o ? “If you look at our customers, database usage is very large from planes, high speed trains, photocopiers, research …” Added Nik. DB4o proved its performance in many critical usage and their world class leaders customers like BMW, Boeing, Bosch, IBM, Intel, Ricoh, and Seagate, are certainly enough for Android developers to make sure that they have in hands a high level database solution.

Developers can write software applications that enable the backup of user data to a back-end server or their home PC. A consumer use case could be to start a game on the phone, freeze it, and continue playing at home in the evening. Business use cases include field force automation, data acquisition such as with RFID, and complex navigation systems that use locally cached geodata.

Db4o is open source under GPL, you can get started by downloading db4o for Android and start porting your current relational application, or start your new project in a fully object oriented environnement.

Read also :

• ODMG3 now hosted by ODBMS.ORG
• McObject Sharpens its Edge in Database Indexes With New KD-Tree
• McObject, Object-Oriented Embedded Database for Android
• Tips: Howto Connect Android Emulator behind proxy

LocateMe, Geo Localisation for Android

Locateme is a se of experimens by Davanum, who is also behind the twitter and gmail client, to create a geo location application using CellID/LAC combinations and the latest Google Maps location feature.

zaTelnet, Telnet client for Android

zaTelnet, provider of mobile toolset for remote server control for mobile, already released its telnet client for Android platform. The current client emulates terminal VT100 and offers extended opportunities for interface customization, such as full screen mode, different display sizes, 240×240, 240×480, 480×480 and 480×640 screen resolutions, portrait and landscape orientation modes, screen with adjustable size and different font sizes.

Twisty, z-machine interpreter for Android

For text adventure games fans, they can have fun on Android with Twisty, the first z-machine interpreter for Android platform. The application allows to play Infocom classics as well as hundreds of newer text adventures written in the last ten years or so. The package comes bundled with a few built-in games, but also allows you to load games from your sdcard.

There are more amazing solutions and technologies coming to Android platform in the next days to make application development easier and faster. Some of them already exists such the IntelliJ IDEA plugin, or the android-positron. There are also very important database solutions that we’ll see with more details in future posts.

Read also :

• Weekly Android Applications 21/01/2008
• Android SDK Security Release m5-rc15
• McObject Sharpens its Edge in Database Indexes With New KD-Tree
• Interview with Adriano Chiaretta from iambic