We are starting this week with a new selection of new Android applications. This week highlighted an RPN Calculator, Crossword game, Android VNC, City Audioguides, and a Social rating system for your contacts and locations.

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/

Popularity: 51%

After two weeks of launching the Android SDK, some small applications started to surface from simple calculator, MMORPG game, Twitter and GTalk client, password manager … This is defintely not the full list, since many developers are keeping their project secret for the Challenge, but it’s already a good start. Below some of the applications released :

Android Password Safe: A password manager for Android

Steven Osborn have written a basic password manager for the Android platform. It uses a 128Bit AES to encrypt passwords and sensitive data and requires the user to enter a password to decrypt/access their password safe. Current features include 28 Bit AES Encryption, Password protection, All data is entrypted including notes, website link, description, and finally click through website link, will take you from your entry to the website. Planned features include : Fetching/Caching of favicons and Customizable encryption. Maybe 256bit AES, DES, etc.

Android Calculator

The first Android calculator is also simple and basic written by Bill Meltsner. Features include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and modulo division!, Supports decimals, Displays errors in shiny red text, Indents answers to differentiate them from equations, Restricts cursor movement to the current equation, Only accepts certain keys as input, Gets almost the entire screen dedicated to it, Has all its features end in exclamation points!.

Features not supported include order of operations, but instead parses equations from left-to-right regardless of operator, Treats numbers with a trailing decimal point as malformed instead of disregarding the decimal point, Error detection needs much improvement, Requires keyboard usage; no shiny buttons to press, there are other small bugs which going to be fixed in future releases.

Download Android Calculator.

Twitter Client for Android

Davanum is very active these days on Android application development, he created the first twitter client for Android showing how to make XML over HTTP calls. The application allow simply to send tweets and view your friend’s tweets.

What’s next

At this time it’s interesting to see many developers experimenting development for the Android platform. The Google approach of making application development for Android easier, with java only supported, seems to be very successful until now, the support is great and the community is very active. So we’ll see certainly more amazing experiments in the future, especially that current developments are made by single developers.

Popularity: 20%