Even last week was a little slow and holidays already here, here is again another selection of Android applications. The most original project this week is probably Hecl, which is a scripting language written in Java. Hecl could do for Android, what Python did for Symbians. But until we reach that level, there is a lot of missing things in Android platform itself.

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.

Popularity: 19%

After the second Android SDK update, here is another collection of Android applications. Some of the missing features in Android are really limiting developers from being more creative. For example, until today there is no API for Bluetooth, Camera, and GPS. The reason why many developers have to deal with the existent part of Android only until all features will be available.

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.

Popularity: 21%

Some of the very cool tools that popped out from Android developers, a Java applet called DroidDraw, which aims to provide a complete GUI creation tool for developers. OHM had an interview with Brendan Burns, who is behind the DroidDraw and Android-GL projects.

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.

Popularity: 58%

db4objects, provider of object oriented database for the .NET and Java, have just announced officially the availability of their solution db4o for the Android platform. Db4o is a distributed company with engineers from all over the world, but really hats off for their amazing work to make their entire solution ready for Android in record time. So for now, Android developers have full object oriented solution ready to use.

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.

Popularity: 31%

Almost one month since first Android launch and the list of application is already getting bigger. This week there is another set of great and useful application, from geo localisation, text games, and mobile remote server control.

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.

Popularity: 27%