While Android aims to be an Open Platform for mobile handsets, it remain closed at different levels, even for bug reporting ! After SDK launch many developers started reporting bugs in the discussion group, which is not really useful. Android team were tracking issues internally, but it’s also very interesting for developers to know different issues. Today the issues list finally goes live and everyone is able to report bugs, and we started believing that it was an open source project. The next Android SDK release is going to be BIG according to Dan :

We’ve been improving that “early look” and are preparing for the next big SDK release, so it’s time to take the whole thing up a notch. As we move toward the first handsets, it’s time to formalize the process, and the first step in that is to enable an issue tracker for developers to submit feedback.

Issue Tracker is available at this address : http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list, everyone is welcomed to submit any issues encountered with Android SDK, but always be sure to check if the issue have not been submitted before by someone else.

Popularity: 20%

Google is offering $10 millions to create amazing new applications for its new Android mobile platform, and today is the first day to submit your application for the challenge. So if you decided to develop an excellent application for Android, here is where you have to go next : ADC submission page. Pick one of the three available forms based on whether you’re working alone, in a team, or for an organized company. Then attach your .apk application file, add documentation file in PDF or text format, and everything should be in english even if you are planning to develop for other languages.

Be sure to read carefully the terms and conditions for the challenge, which explain also how the challenge is going to happen. There are some important details in the terms and conditions concerning the qualifications, four important points that you have to focus on while creating your application :

1. Originality of Concept - Does the application introduce a great new idea; for example, a new angle on social applications?
2. Effective Use of the Android Platform - Does the application take advantage of Android’s unique and compelling features, such as built-in location-based services, accelerometer, and always-on networking?
3. Polish and Appeal - Is the application easy to use and aesthetically appealing?
4. Indispensability - Is the application compelling and essential, such as a game the user just can’t put down or a utility she can’t live without?

So let’s the game begin and good luck for everyone.

Popularity: 21%

McObject announced today that Perst, its all-Java object-oriented, open source embedded database, has been verified as compatible with the Android mobile device platform backed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance.

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.

Popularity: 38%

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: 17%

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: 49%