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.

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