App inventor will not only make Application development for Android easier, but it will even change the way people use their mobile phones. We have previously mentioned that Google Android is targeting developers, and today we are discovering that it’s trying to make application development easier even for non-programmers.

No other mobile platform will be able to compete with Google on this side. The only negative point for Android remain the differences/incompatibilities between versions, especially that we started already talking about Android 3 – Gingerbread.

From App inventor website :

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

An online development environment will definitely make a revolution for the Android platform, even if you will say that applications will be limited in features compared to advanced programming capabilities.

With App Inventor you can create location-aware applications, for example to help you remember where you parked your car, an app that shows the location of your friends or colleagues at a concert or conference, or your own custom tour app of your school, workplace, or a museum. Or simply apps that use the phone features of an Android phone such texting, camera, sensors, … etc. But if you are more familiar with webservices you will be able even to interact with your favorite websites such Amazon and Twitter… etc.

App Inventor  gallery already include apps such :

DROIDMuni : displays schedules for the San Francisco transit system. After the user selects from one of the transits lines and choosing a direction and particular stop, the application will display the lines next arrival times. Once the user has retrieved the desired arrival times, they are able to set up to four favorites which are saved and stored based on their unique e-mail address. Using the DroidMuni remind feature, the user can set a reminder to be notified when a bus is a specified number of minutes away.

ParkIt : allows users to locate their car on their Android phone. After clicking the “Park It” button, the app stores the users car’s location until the “Find It” Button is clicked. The “Find It” button displays the user’s current location, and the user’s car’s location using latitude and longitude. When the user clicks “Show On Map”, GoogleMaps is activated, and the route to the car is displayed.

Drum Kit : allows the user to hit seven different parts of a full, labeled drum kit and hear each drum’s respective sound. This app allows the user not only to learn more about the drums (i.e. the names and sounds of the drums), but also to have fun and create their own beat.

Super Hero Game : a fantastic Quiz game that tests the users true Super Hero Knowledge. Each screen shows a different character from a superhero world and asks a question pertaining to that picture. The user types in the answer and clicks submit. The program responds with a RIGHT or WRONG and the user is prompted to go on to the next question. The question will change as well as the picture. If the user wants to quit at any time they can GIVE UP and the program closes.

Where’s Speedo : allows a user and a users friends or family find each other. The app detects the user’s location and sends it to the users friends or family using the app. The app allows the user to view the location of another user on a map. It also allows the user to set how often the app sends his/her location.

I think we should expect more amazing apps from this magical inventor ! Behind the app inventor a research work conducted in MIT including the Open Blocks Java library used by the blocks editor, Open Blocks visual programming which is closely related to the Scratch programming language, and Kawa Language Framework and Kawa’s dialect of the Scheme programming language used to translates the visual blocks language for implementation on Android.

App inventor is still invitation only, and you can complete this form to get an invitation when available.

“Our customers around the world have been asking for a Rush Hour app, the i-phone version was introduced in November 2009, and now the Android application joins the Rush Hour family” says Bill Ritchie, ThinkFun co-founder and CEO.

Rush Hour is the smartest and most challenging logic puzzle on the Android platform and is packed with exclusive features, such as:

All New Challenges — The free application has 35 original challenges and the $1.99 full version has 2500 Challenges — With each version, the challenges range from beginner to expert that will entertain novice players and test advance players with super-hard expert levels.

Perfect Score — Rush Hour for Android tracks the number of moves players make to get out of the traffic jams and compares them to the shortest, most efficient path possible. Even exceptional gamers who manage to solve all of the puzzles can’t claim mastery of Rush Hour until they have tallied the perfect score on each challenge.

Solve Button — No matter where they are in their challenge, the solve button will show players how to solve it, and then put them back where they left off so players can learn and complete the challenge themselves.

“There are plenty of unauthorized Rush Hour knock-offs out there,” says Liz Deakin, Director, Marketing and Sales at ThinkFun “we are the original, the best, and the owner of the Rush Hour brand, the Rush Hour content, and the Rush Hour magic”.  You can find the Rush Hour/Android app for free in the Andoid Market on your handset – categories:  Games – Brain & Puzzle.

About Rush Hour

The story of Rush Hour began almost 15 years ago, when famed Japanese inventor Nob Yoshigahara traveled to America looking for a game company that shared his vision of excellence and his passion for puzzling. Bill Ritchie and ThinkFun co-founder Andrea Barthello knew right away they had found something special in Yoshigahara and his puzzles. The inventor changed ThinkFun forever, and remained a close friend of the company until his death in 2004. The original Rush Hour board game continues to be a world-wide best seller, winning numerous gaming awards including the Best 25 Toys in 25 Years Award by Parent’s Choice Magazine.

About ThinkFun Inc.

ThinkFun Inc., located in Alexandria, VA, is a leading designer, developer and manufacturer of innovative, educational games and services. ThinkFun understands the essential link between “Think” and “Fun” and is committed to developing products that ignite the mind, motivate learning and encourage fun play for all ages whether in school or at home. All of ThinkFun’s products organically teach problem solving and critical thinking skills…preparing today’s kids to be tomorrow’s adults.

Follow ThinkFun: Web: www.ThinkFun.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ThinkFun
Facebook: www.facebook.com (ThinkFun Fan)
YouTube: www.youtube.com/ThinkFunInc

That day is today, and Google have just announced officially the availability of their Nexus One phone the new “Superphone” where “Web meets phone”. That’s already two slogans to market the new nexus one, it’s a Superphone, forget about smartphones. It’s also a new Web experience for mobile users and people who still new to Android.

The hardware is pretty attracting : Thinner and lighter than iPhone, automated brightness adjustment , amazing sensors, noise canceling headphones, 5 megapixel camera with flash and autofocus, … and get ready to see all of these features running under Google Android 2.1 !

There are some downs for Nexus One since Android still missing some features mainly the multi-touch support, the Nexus One screen is amazing but seems to be very gourmand in energy so stay near charger or avoid using full-brightness screen all the time.

Google Nexus One is already available at http://www.google.com/phone/

The unlocked edition is available at $529 in US, UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. T-mobile provides also an unlocked edition of Nexus One at $179 with a $80 monthly plan including  500 minutes/unlimited SMS/unlimited data. You can still get the T-mobile version without any plan by paying an additional $379 !This is the Google phone number One, and there will be certainly more Android phones coming in 2010.

The mobile market war is not only about Android and iPhone, many other mobile giants are already in the market including Nokia with their Symbian OS, MSFT with Windows CE, Palm with their amazing WebOS… We don’t forget also that Google have just acquired Admob, the largest mobile advertising network, for $750 million.

If 2009 was the year of Android, what do you think about 2010 ?!

Sophie Navro, Marketing Manager at Wave commented “As businesses grow and as time becomes more of a privilege than a right, we wanted to devise an option for every user to have what they need at the touch of a button” “We were determined to cater for every need, whether you are an MD of a company or a girl about town, MyLink offers something for everyone”.

MyLink is the first comprehensive solution to synchronize your Google Android phone with your Lotus or Outlook email and has released four new products. MyLink Access, MyLink Essential, MyLink Advanced and MyLink Enterprise are available to purchase online from 1st December 2009. Each type is adapted to suit the needs of every kind of user, ranging from business to social. MyLink Access is free and prices range to a maximum of £4.99 per licence for consumers and available on application for any business.

About Wave

Wave is a Lotus, Microsoft and Google Android technologies specialist in moving from one mail system to another. As a migration specialist, Wave proudly provides high quality, cost effective products and solutions to large outsourcers, customers and small businesses around the world. Wave has offices in the UK, France, USA, Tunisia, Dubai and opening soon in Hong Kong.

Visit the website, http://www.waveglobal.net to find out more or contact Wave at: contact@waveglobal.net

The application provides everything you need to search and buy products from Amazon on the go. Amazon App for Android™ came with a new experimental feature to remember your searches of barcodes or products photo.

Many other apps on Android market already provides such search features, but Amazon provides in addition to the new Amazon Remembers capabilities support for 1-click purchase, Amazon Prime, Tracking packages or modifying orders, getting the Gold Box deal of the day, and access to your wish lists.

After Sign-in Amazon app, you can see recommendation on your home page – the same way as seen on Amazon home page. From menu options you can access Home page, Search, your shopping cart, Amazon Remembers list, and Your account.

It seems that session in Amazon Android app is handled in the same way as in Amazon website because after sign-in, I checked my account and it requested password for a second time. You will notice also that navigation interface is not much different from Amazon iPhone app.

Below some Screenshots

Milford, CT, April 1, 2009 – DataViz®, Inc., a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner and leading provider of Microsoft Office compatibility solutions is now shipping Documents To Go® Standard Edition version 1.0 for Android™. The highly anticipated office suite leverages DataViz’s experience developing mobile solutions and brings a feature rich, enterprise-grade productivity tool to devices based on the Android platform.

View, Edit & Create
For nearly a decade Documents To Go has been providing mobile professionals with the ability to view, edit and create native Microsoft Word and Excel® files instantly on their mobile device. Files can be transferred via Bluetooth, USB, memory cards as well as e-mail attachments which means that unlike online or “cloud based” solutions, they are always available for “anytime, anywhere” access. In addition, users can edit their Office documents with confidence thanks to DataViz’s acclaimed InTact Technology™ which ensures that all original file formatting is retained once a file has been edited on their Android handset and forwarded on.

Send & Receive Attachments
With Gmail and other mobile e-mail solutions being at the heart of Android-based devices, having full access to attachments is more important than ever. Now customers can download, view, edit and send Word & Excel files when on the go. In addition, a free beta version of DataViz’s award-winning RoadSync application is also now available in Android Market. RoadSync uses the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync® protocol to provide secure, wireless and direct push synchronization with Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 and the beta supports push e-mail, attachments and contacts.

“By utilizing the development tools provided by Google and Open Handset Alliance, we were able to bring our solutions to Android Market much faster than we anticipated,” said Ilya Eliashevsky, Product Manager, DataViz, Inc. “Whether you are a corporate customer or a student, you can instantly extend the capability of your Android-powered handset to get more done with Documents To Go and RoadSync.”

Feature Rich
Although new to the Android platform, Documents To Go supports many advanced viewing and editing features. These include but are not limited to touch, keypad and scroll ball navigation, multiple zoom levels, bold, italics, underline, bulleted and numbered lists, embedded pictures, bookmarks, comments, track-changes, word count, password-protected files, spreadsheet functions, sort, freeze pains, insert and delete rows and columns, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, save and save as.

Supports Office 97-2008
Documents To Go is the first mobile Office suite for Android that supports editing of native Microsoft Word and Excel files as well as the only solution to support all of the latest Microsoft Office file formats including 97, 2000, X, XP, 2003 and 2007 for Windows as well as 98, 2001, 2004, 2008 for Macintosh.

Pricing & Availability
Documents To Go is now available exclusively through Android Market for a limited-time introductory price of $19.99 (regularly $29.99.) The RoadSync beta is free through May 31, 2009 and also immediately available though Android Market. Supported devices include the T-mobile G1, HTC Dream, Vodafone HTC Magic and other devices running Android OS. For more information: http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/android/index.html

About DataViz
Founded in 1984, DataViz is an industry leader in developing and marketing Office compatibility and productivity solutions across a variety of platforms including Android™, BlackBerry, Java®, Linux, Palm OS®, Symbian OS™, Windows Mobile®, Windows® and Macintosh®. DataViz partners include Microsoft®, Motorola®, Palm®, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson® and other industry leaders. For more information: www.dataviz.com

At that time also there was no Android based handset, only the emulator was available; but there was the iPhone, and Admob launched last year a very big initiative to reach and engage users on iPhone. Admob offered $1Million to iPhone developers to promote their iPhone apps and web-apps. Today after that G1 device was available, it was time to launch mobile advertising on the Android platform and that’s the announcement you will read below. Until Google consider eating its dogfood, other mobile advertising startups will find the time to take a good part from the advertising market share.

Currently some advertisers – not announced below – are already using Admob to deliver their ads and promote their Android applications in the Admob network. We saw link that open directly in the search result of the Adroid market, with the name of the application as search keyword.

Update 1/28/2009 : An Admob SDK demo is available in the Android Market showing Ads placement in the Lunar Lander sample application.

Below the press release :

AdMob Launches Ad Unit for Android Applications

Innovative Ad Network Delivers Monetization Solution for Android Developers

SAN MATEO, Calif. AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, today announced that it has launched its first advertising unit for Android applications, enabling developers to monetize their applications on this new device platform. The first developers to leverage AdMob’s new Android ad unit in their applications include AccuWeather, Jirbo, and TapJoy.

AdMob’s new Android ad unit will also allow brand and performance advertisers to reach the rapidly growing base of consumers engaging with applications on their Android devices. Advertisers will be able to use these ad units to drive customer actions such as going to the Android Market to download an application.

“Android’s open platform enables developers to build rich mobile applications that provide a great experience for users,” said Ali Diab, Vice President of Product Management for AdMob. “We are already seeing strong interest in developing applications for Android-based devices, similar to what we saw with the iPhone last summer, and are very excited to take the lead in helping developers monetize their applications on this fast-growing device platform.”

AdMob already serves ads on mobile Web sites on the Android platform and received more than 27 million requests in December 2008. Building on the initial success of the G1 device, Google’s new mobile platform looks to become a major force in the mobile industry with several new devices expected to come to market in 2009.

“We’ve partnered with AdMob to monetize our mobile services for several years now and continue to get great results working with them on our mobile Web site and in our iPhone application,” said David Mitchell, Director, Wireless Services, AccuWeather. “We are excited to extend this successful relationship with AdMob and start monetizing our new Android application.”

More than 6,000 mobile sites and 450 iPhone applications are a part of AdMob’s publisher network worldwide, giving the company unparalleled reach.

About AdMob

AdMob is the world’s largest and highest quality mobile advertising marketplace, serving more than 4.6 billion mobile banner and text ads per month. Incorporated in April 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile Web and enables publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites. AdMob makes it easy for publishers to monetize their mobile traffic and for advertisers to target and reach customers on the mobile Web in more than 160 countries.

AdMob has been named a 2008 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, one of Wired.com’s 2008 Companies to Watch, and VentureBeat’s Mobilebeat 2008 Best Overall Mobile Startup / Best Mobile Infrastructure Company. To learn more about AdMob, visit www.admob.com.

(including screenshots, video and working code for functional multitouch on the G1)

Short story: I have full multitouch scaling and panning working in specially-developed apps on a stock T-Mobile G1 Android phone with a change to just one system classfile (i.e. with no modifications to the kernel whatsoever).

MultiTouch running on the G1 without kernel modification (red and green circles are drawn where touch points are detected)
Long story: read on for full details, including a video of the action, and full source code so that you can run this yourself (assuming you are a developer and understand the risks of doing this — this is NOT yet for end-users).

Touch screens and tinfoil hats

When the T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream was released, it only supported single-touch rather than iPhone-style multitouch. Theories as to the lack of multitouch included hardware limitations, software support for it not being ready in the Android stack, and the threat of being devoured by Apple’s patent lawyers. Dan Morrill, a Google developer advocate for Android, made statements that the device was single-touch and the Android stack had no support yet for multitouch, but that Google would be willing to work together with handset manufacturers to develop multitouch software support when the hardware manufacturers were ready to release a multitouch handset. Eventually even one of HTC’s chiefs chimed in that the Dream was only ever designed to be a single-touch device.

Recently though, videos started surfacing on the net that showed various experiments people were performing on ListViews with two fingers that seemed to indicate the screen supported multiple touchpoints — however the results of these tests were still pretty inconclusive. Finally though, after the source of the Android stack was released, a developer Ryan Gardner / RyeBrye posted on his blog that he had managed to locate some lines in the kernel driver that were commented out that indicated that multitouch was indeed possible on these devices — and he hacked together a demo of two-fingered drawing that proved it.

To use RyeBrye’s solution, you have to recompile your phone’s kernel. It works by removing the comments around some debug statements (lines 132-151 of the the Synaptics I2C driver, synaptics_i2c_rmi.c) that dump motion events out to a logfile. He then wrote a user interface to read the logfile and draw dots on the screen.

Google, of course, continued to remain silent on the multitouch issue, and conspiracy theories grew thicker…

Enabling multitouch on the G1, the real way

RyeBrye did a great service to the Android hacker community by demonstrating that the screen is multitouch-capable. However there are some real limitations to his approach (which he fully acknowledged), such as having to recompile your kernel and having to get at the events by parsing a logfile. Also it looks like nobody yet has picked up the ball and turned his work into a working system.

Actually, it turns out that if you read a little further down in the driver code (lines 187-200 of synaptics_i2c_rmi.c), you’ll notice that you don’t need to recompile your kernel at all to get multitouch working on the G1 — the kernel driver in fact already emits multitouch information! The driver emits ABS_X, ABS_Y and BTN_TOUCH values for position and up/down information for the first touchpoint, but also emits ABS_HAT0X, ABS_HAT0Y and BTN_2 events for the second touchpoint. Where are these events getting lost then?

I pulled apart the Android stack and scoured it for the location where these events are passed through to Dalvik through JNI. It turned out to be very difficult pinpoint where input events were getting received MotionEvent objects populated (because they are processed on an event queue, the objects are recycled rather than created, and it happens in non-SDK code — egrep wasn’t much help either). The exact point at which multitouch information is lost though turns out to be $ANDROID_HOME/frameworks/base/services/java/com/android/server/KeyInputQueue.java. This class is the only code running on Dalvik that ever gets to see the raw device events — and it promptly discards ABS_HAT0X, ABS_HAT0Y and BTN_2. (It doesn’t seem to do so intentionally or maliciously, it just ignores anything it doesn’t recognize, and it is not coded to recognize those event symbol types.)

Now we’re getting somewhere. I recompiled the whole Android stack and tested detecting these events, and sure enough, I could now detect the second touchpoint — without recompiling the kernel (but, unfortunately, after having to modify part of the Android Java stack).

Two touch points being detected, with blue bars indicating the column and row of each touch point

Implementing functional multitouch on the G1 in a backwards-compatible way

I wanted to find a way to pass multitouch events through to user applications in a way that was as minimally invasive as possible, i.e. that didn’t require a major replumbing of the whole MotionEvent system, and that was backwards compatible with single-touch applications. It turns out that there is a field in MotionEvents, “size”, that does not appear to be used currently. It is actually mapped to MotionEvents’ size fields from the ABS_TOOL_WIDTH attribute emitted by the Synaptics driver — however the value seems to be ignored by the Android UI, and the value seems pretty chaotic. I suspect the driver actually uses it to represent some attributes of a tool used on similar Wacom-style tablet devices.

Anyway the driver specifies that ABS_TOOL_WIDTH can be in the range [0,15] (and this is mapped to the range [0.0,1.0] when it is placed in the size field), so we have four spare bits in each motion event that are unused. I modified KeyInputQueue.java to generate either one or two motion events depending on whether or not BTN_2 was down, and then marked each event with a bit (bit 0) signifying whether the event was for the first or the second touch point. I then used two more bits to attach the two touch point up/down states to each motion event, BTN_TOUCH and BTN_2, so that individual touch states of the two buttons could be known from either event type, and then, for backwards-compatibility purposes, I set the button-down state of each generated event to the state of (BTN_TOUCH || BTN_2). This is done to keep the semantics of the button-down status of MotionEvents consistent with what the event pipeline would expect, specifically so that the up/down status doesn’t alternate between emitted events.

The result is an Android stack that behaves normally for single-touch, generates events that can be separated into two streams by multi-touch-aware applications, and at worst only generates a series of events that appear to jump back and forth between two points on the screen when two fingers are touched to the screen in a single-touch application — e.g. if you are using a standard listview and hold down two fingers, the list will just jump up and down between the two fingers as you move them around.

VIDEO OF WORKING MULTITOUCH ON THE G1

Here is a video of a multitouch application that I wrote to exercise the modified Android stack.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=enAinQizxyM

The REAL reason for no multitouch on the G1 at time of release

Note that I mention in the video that the multitouch screen for some reason “was disabled at the time of release”.  I do not at all believe this was an intentional curbing of the phone’s functionality — it just (1) was not in the design specs to have this feature for the first phone release, (2) would not have been ready in time (the hardware support for it is not polished, and the software support not started in the G1), and (3) was not central to the core mission of what Android was trying to achieve.  Honestly having looked through some of the ENORMOUS mass of source code in the Android stack, I don’t have any idea at all how it was all pulled together in time for release, and how the release happened with so few 1.0 problems.  The Android software stack is an incredibly well-engineered and well-brought-together stack — and it exhibits some amazing engineering and some amazing project management that all the pieces could have been developed separately and finally integrated into a single working product in such a short time.

As it is probably clear from the video, there are some technical challenges to making multitouch work on this hardware. The main technichal problem is that the Synaptics screen is not a true 2D multitouch device. It is a 2×1D device, or contains two sets of orthogonal wires and firmware for analyzing the resulting two 1D projection histograms of capacitance across the screen. This leads to a number of problems, in approximate decreasing order of severity:

1- When there are two touch points on the screen separated diagonally, there are two peaks in each projection histogram, but the hardware has no way of knowing if this represents a forward diagonal configuration or a reverse diagonal configuration. As a result, points that are being tracked can swap over each other (hard to explain, see the video).

An example of the touch points crossing over each other

2- When points get too close together in one dimension, their histogram peaks merge together in that dimension, giving an undesirable “snapping” of the points to each others’ ordinates (one of the two coordinates). The radius of touch points on the screen is quite large (because the peaks in the projection histogram have to be quite well separated to be counted as separate peaks), so when fingers get close together, both points can merge into a single point, meaning your fingers can’t start really close together in a “zoom in”/”pinch-out” gesture.

 
An example of “snapping” when two points get too close together horizontally or vertically (regardless of their separation in the other dimension)

3- If the second finger is kept down and the first finger is lifted, then suddenly the second point’s location is returned in the first motion event (this may cause problems for application writers)

4- The thresholding algorithm in the hardware is not calibrated well, so in multitouch mode the peak-detection threshold is slightly different for the two axes, and points can “lose an ordinate”, jumping across to align with the other point in one of the axes. This gives very messy sudden motion events when the finger is placed down and raised.

5- Several smaller problems also exist, such as adding a second finger decreases the overall pressure measurement returned in the event, because pressure has not been correctly calibrated for multitouch.

These problems, especially the first two, are serious for general multitouch usage. This is almost certainly one of the biggest considerations behind the decision to not support multitouch on the G1. (And there is probably a financial reason, patent worries or other. There’s always money involved in anything you don’t understand…) The biggest problem, the inability to distinguish between forward and reverse diagonal configurations, means that general multitouch gestures involving rotations simply won’t work in the general case. (But see motion estimation workarounds below.)

The good news

Actually though it turns out that you don’t need rotation gestures for most multitouch operation that people would be interested in, because we work mostly with axis-aligned documents — maps, wordprocessing docs, web pages… and as long as your fingers are not too close together in either axis, you can get all the info and resolution you need for iPhone-worthy zooming and scrolling from the G1’s hardware events.

Scaling a map (at least, the image of a map) — note that the points have inadvertently swapped, but the scale factor is still chosen correctly

Additionally the G1’s touch screen has a slight advantage for two-fingered (axis-aligned) touch gestures, such as sliding two fingers down or across the screen: if the two touch points are almost aligned in one axis, it locks them into alignment, making two-fingered gesture detection more natural (ok, that’s a stretch )

Scaling an image, with points snapped horizontally. Scale factor is not affected too dramatically by point snapping, because the distance between snapped points and actual finger positions is fairly similar.

As is demonstrated in the video, the system should work fine for zooming and panning maps and web pages.

It turns out that the multitouch events generated by the driver are very noisy (i.e. not well tested or polished). I had to do a lot of complicated polishing of event noise to get the system usable to this level. As well as the problems with loss of accuracy around axis-crossings as described above, quite a number of events can give wildly inaccurate X and Y coordinates just after and just before a change in up/down state. There is still a little more tuning and polishing that needs to be done, but the code is below if you want to play with it and improve it.

What can be done to fix or work around the remaining problems

The system could be made more natural to use by building in motion estimation (inertia and damping) in the vincinity of the discontinuities where touch points cross over each others’ axes, so that if the user is in fact doing a rotation gesture by moving strongly towards the axis crossing point, events will continue to be generated that smoothly cross that point. Of course there is still the potential for error here though if the user stops or reverses direction.

Getting and running the code

So I mentioned that you wouldn’t have to recompile your kernel… but you still have to recompile one system class of the Android java stack, or all you can do with the demo code is operate one touch point as normal (i.e. just drag, not stretch).

Unfortunately the version of the Android stack that made it onto the G1 was derived from a snapshot of the code taken quite a while before Android 1.0 was released, so you can’t just patch the one class, recompile that class’ .jar file, and re-install a single .jar on your phone — that .jarfile, built from the publicly-available Android 1.0 source (or, worse, Cupcake/1.1), won’t likely work with the rest of the .jar files on your phone. So for now you need to build the entire 1.0 stack with the patch and then flash your entire phone.

Note the following:

• The Android 1.0 source in git builds a system that is a little bit broken in a lot of ways. Expect things not to work, and as a result expect multitouch to not be available on your primary phone until someone produces a more polished release from source that you can use.
• Cupcake is still not ready, it is very broken right now. Use 1.0, don’t use Cupcake.
• If you try this, you take full responsibility for anything that goes wrong, and if it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. You agree to not hold me responsible in any way if you lose important data or brick your phone, or if anything else goes wrong.
• This is not yet ready for mainstream. If you are not a developer then wait until someone develops a working system that you can use easily.

Steps to follow:

1. Get the Android source here
2. Get my modified KeyInputQueue.java and overwrite the original in the Android source at $ANDROID_HOME/frameworks/base/services/java/com/android/server/KeyInputQueue.java .
3. Get root on your phone, build the whole patched Android stack, and flash it onto your phone by following these instructions (except that you should use the 1.0 branch in git, not the cupcake branch). You could consider using JesusFreke’s RC30 v1.3.1 instead of v1.2 that is specified in those instructions. NOTE: all of these steps are highly dangerous to your phone, you must know what you are doing before you attempt this, and you agree to take full responsibility if anything breaks.
4. Download and run my demo application which receives the patched events and splits them into separate events for each touch point.  (This is the application that is demoed in the video.)

Using the demo application

• Roll the trackball left and right to switch between the two views
• Press the trackball down (center-press) on either screen to toggle extra debug info. (Debug info starts “on” on the first screen and “off” on the second.)
• All other interaction is performed by dragging one or two fingers on the screen.

Future development

There is considerable work that could be done to polish this and tweak it for optimal usage. A lot of the demo code (event noise smoothing etc.) could be moved into the Android stack, and motion estimation could be added to this to make things smoother. There are still sometimes glitches when you lift one finger off the screen after a multitouch operation, as well as when one finger hits the edge of the screen (due to some edge-logic in the lowlevel driver, I think).

Getting this patch upstream is probably unlikely, because ultimately this is a hack, especially the hijacking of the MotionEvent size field — but the actual impact to single-touch applications is very low: just some weirdness/jumping when you have two fingers on the screen. Note though that the G1’s default software stack has its own weirdness here (as the very first grainy “we think there’s multitouch on the G1″ YouTube videos showed), and because of the hardware event noise when you lift one finger from a multitouch event.

I suggest someone write a .odex editor tool that can selectively excise one class from a .odex tool and replace it with one from another Dalvik-compiled class — then “all” that you would need to do to get multitouch on your phone would be to get root and then patch your system. Everything else should keep working as normal.

Ideally someone would then graft this patched .odex file into JesusFreke’s RC30 image, so that all you had to do was reflash your phone and you’d have a phone that is full working, but with multitouch support too.  (At the moment it’s either-or…)

I want to also put out there a challenge for someone to build a MultiTouch frontend for Google Maps and WebView.  In the demo, I just scale static images of a map and a webpage.

You can also use my code if you need a testbed to start developing your own multitouch software, so that you’re ready for the day that multitouch is officially supported by Google.

I am unlikely to do any more with this code myself, I just had to show it could be done

That’s it!  Have fun.

Please discuss among yourselves in this Google Groups thread.

You can also read comment from original post here.

Movit is a Mobile Internet Device / Mobile social networking service. The WiFi-enabled Movit lets you browse the web and share content on your favorite social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Giinii Movit Mini using Android

You can do everything with these devices except making phone calls. Just find yourself a wifi hotspot so you can enjoy Movit :

You can watch streaming videos (that are large enough to really see) and use the built-in video camera as a mini-web cam. But best of all, Movit is Skype™-enabled with a built-in microphone and speaker (with Bluetooth option), allowing you to call other Skype users for FREE! That’s right: free calling wherever you find a WiFi hotspot

Movit features include :

• WiFi for hotspot use anywhere
• Skype-enabled
• Built-in microphone/speaker to make Skype calls and more
• Bluetooth 2.0 if you want to use a headset or pair with other Bluetooth device
• Video & still camera can be used as webcam
• Address book gives you easy access to desired phone numbers
• 4.3” or 7” screen
• Stream video and audio
• Built-in lithium battery so you can take it anywhere
• Easily connect to social networks like Facebook™, MySpace™, Twitter™, etc.

The device showed on the CES was a Movit Mini and was using Android platform. Giinii website did not mention anywhere the usage of Android on its devices. At the time we posted this article, we have requested confirmation from Giinii, but we got no answer since two days. According Gizmodo (photos credits), Giinii Movit will be available for $149 US.

Giinii Movit Mini running “Cupcake”

The device itself showed at the CES was using  the Cupcake development edition of Android since no keyboard is provided with Movit – except the virtual one.

More information on Giinii Movit could be found here http://www.giinii.com/movit_detail.html

Christof Wittig, CEO Servo Software, Inc. (formerly db4objects, Inc.), told OHM in email :

This will give Servo Software, Inc. (formerly db4objects, Inc.) the opportunity to focus entirely on its ground-breaking Servo user data management solution. Servo remains in stealth-mode until the announcement of its first deployed service in 2009, with several of the world’s leading wireless service providers and a number of leading wireless device manufacturers.

In the transaction, Versant acquired the assets of db4objects’ database business, including db4objects’ database software, related customer and community relationships, trademarks, websites and other intellectual property. Carl Rosenberger, founder and CTO of db4objects, Inc., has joined Versant as Chief Software Architect, db4o product line, together with several other personnel who managed the db4o business for db4objects.

The db4o business acquired by Versant provides a highly popular object database software native to Java and .NET under both open source and commercial licenses to a large open-source community of approximately 50,000 registered members in 190 countries. With some 2 million downloads since 2001, the db4o business has established the relevance and remarkable efficiency of the open-source model. The feature-rich db4o technology has been deployed by many innovative companies.

Joining Versant’s larger database business will give the db4o solution increased community presence worldwide, as well as an expanded field engineering and support organization. With these additional resources, it is expected that the db4o business will be best positioned to reach its full potential and further increase its footprint as one of the major database technologies.

You can read the full press release here http://getservo.com/open/Press.aspx