Novoda

Annual since 1987, Mobile world congress is the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry and with 47,000 in attendance last year, it’s safe to say that it’s worth mobile companies showing face. Since there is so much happening that week it makes sense to plan well ahead of schedule. Everyone has been sharing lists of events and excited talk but no maps. So I thought it might be worth me throwing in my plans in the hope that someone may benefit from my timings, maps and event lists. These timings are in no way guaranteed as a good judge of how you should spend your time but could help make sure you’ve not missed anything really beneficial. Most of my time is going to be spent in App planet but I really want to try and get around as many exhibition stands as I can in my rare few minutes in between. Feel free to say hello to me if you are in attendance. You can catch me on MotoDev’s panel of Android developers on Monday at 11:30am Hall 7.

WIP have very kindly developed an MWC attendance survival guide which I very much recommend if not just for the Exhibition floor plan.

Mobile World Congress 2010 address
Event Details – http://www.mobileworldcongress.com

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Sim Cards

To obtain a prepaid Spanish sim with 3G Internet I’ve been recommended Yoigo. You need photo ID and the address of your hotel to sign up. Remember to get itit on any day other than Sunday and shops close around 2pm to 4pm:

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Monday

09:00 – MotoDev – Breakfast at Motodev in AppPlanet – Hall 7
11:30 – MotoDev – Android Developer Panel – Hall 7
11:30 – MotoDev – Maximise your Android Market Opportunity – App Planet – Hall 7
12:15 – MotoDev – Lunch with the experts – App Planet – Hall 7
14:00 – Mobile premier awards – Palau De La Música 4 08003 Barcelona, Spain 932 957 200
21:00> – Mobile premier awards dinner – Bel-Luna Jazz Club & Restaurant

MotoDev

More MotoDev event details…
Not much has been mentioned in the Android pres about the motodev sessions but I for one am interested in the opinions of anyone developing plugins for my IDE. They have a bunch of sessions planned at MWC a few of which I’ll be attending.

Mobile Premier awards

View event details
To get to the mobile premier awards take the Espanya tube to Urquinaona then walk straight down the road: Carrer de les Jon que res

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Mobile premier awards dinner

RSVP for the dinner here
A swanky affair after the award ceremony which promises to be both an interesting and beautiful meal.

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Tuesday

08:30 – Opportunities with on-device payments and preloaded content – Tanla MWC Seminar
08:00 – UKTI – Challenges in Japan – Location Sala D
11:30 – UKTI – Turkish / UK Partnering Event – UKTI stand?
17:00 – Scottish Development International – Whisky Reception – Stand, 1E66
18:00 – GoMo – Incognito BAR, calle Fusina 6, 08003 Barcelona, Spain
18:00 – Androiders Dinner at MWC

The Tuesday looks like it will be quite businessy until the evening where a bunch of Androiders will be getting together informally to chat and get dinner. So there is no official page or anything like that, just turn up or message someone who you know will be there(I’m @kevinmcdonagh) and we’ll be glad to have you in acquaintance. The plan is to prey on the hospitality of GoMo and turn up for their free bar and food. This plan should work win/win since a bunch of Android experts will be going to meet with mobile businessy people.

GoMo
Event details – http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=180379714149&ref=ts
Here are some directions to get from Mobile World Congress to the GoMo event. I’ll be taking the Espanya Tube to Jamuel:

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Wednesday

08:30 - UKTI – UK / US Panel discussion – UKTI?
09:00 - Android dev lab (Games Dev) – Hall7 App world, MWC
12:30 - Sony Ericsson talk – App world Hall 7
14:00 - Tech crunch Mobile 2010
18:00> - Android cocktails – B Hotel in Gran Vía 389-391, Barcelona (next to MWC congress grounds)
18:30> - Swedish beers – Dostrece, carme 40, 08001, barcelona, Spain , 933017306
19:00> - Carnival of nations party – 7 Sins Bar, Muntaner 7, Barcelona, Spain

There is so much happening on the Wednesday sacrifices will have to be made. I’m really excited to get close to the participants of the Android developer session and get some basic questions out the way from the best in class. I do not currently plan to attend the Tech crunch event as I will instead be using the time to take part in Sony Ericsson’s training sessions. I’m also really looking forward to meeting the Barcelona user group at the Android Cocktails, I’ll have to split my time between this and Swedish beers which will inevitably be more businessy but essential.

Android Cocktails
Event details – http://eventuo.com/event/HN9foG5u6NI
An informal get together with the Barcelona Androids located beside MWC in the Nuñez i Navarro B Hotel

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Swedish Beers
Event Details – http://swedishbeers.blogspot.com/
A small scale yet still international event for businesses interested in mobile.
To Swedish Beers from the Android Cocktails event take the Espanya metro to Liceu:

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WIP Carnival of Nations party
Event Details – http://wipjam.com/party-carnival-of-nations/
In the unlikely event that I’ll have time to get to the Carnival of Nations event it is only 10mins walking distance away: Walking round the corner 10min away:

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Thursday

08:00 - GetJar Demo – App Planet Auditorium, Hall 7, FIRA, Barcelona, Spain
9ish -  WIP Jam – App Planet Auditorium, Hall 7, FIRA, Barcelona, Spain
11:45 – Join people Luncheoning form WIP – Hall 7
15:30 – More WIP Networking type interaction – Hall 7
18:00> Londroid – London Android Meetup

I’m obviously going to give the London Android Meeting a miss this time and instead I’ll be trying to make new WIP friends. Thankfully I can spend the whole day in the same place so no need for running to different locations.

2010 promises to be an interesting year for Android. Starting off on the right foot I’d like to share some key dates and projects of general interest with everyone.
If there are any other events on the horizon we’d love to know about them so please get in touch and share.

Community Calendar

The closest thing a a community calendar in the Android world is the one started by a bunch of blogger sites including androidguys and anddroidandme
To subscribe to the community maintained Android global events calendar see here:
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=g72pef2iiuu28hmedcnce5h0u4%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe%2FLondon&gsessionid=ycdhn2eV3gvznWmB8IIIlQ

Upcoming Android Related Events

Mobile World Congress (MWC), Barcelona
15 – 18th Feb
€599 – €4,999
http://www.mobileworldcongress.com
The world’s largest mobile event

Google IO, San francisco
May 19th & 20th
$400/$500/ student $100
http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/
Google’s annual global get together.

Londroid – The London Android meetup
Monthly, free
http://www.meetup.com/android
http://www.londroid.co.uk
Skillsmatter London
- Jan21, Feb18, Mar18, Apr22, May20, Jun17
Our fave monthy meeting. Very much recommended.

GeoMob
Monthly meetings, London 21Jan
http://gmdlondon.ning.com/

Droidcon Berlin, Nov? TBD £100
Droidcon London, Dec? TBD £100
Last year’s explicitly Android themed conference events. Dates will likely be announced within a few months.
http://www.droidcon.de/

Android Meetup Barcelona
16Feb (while MWC)
http://eventuo.com/of/barcelona-androides
A month;y get together in Barcelona. We’ll be attending the one held during MWC.

Android Stammtisch Berlin, C-base
http://www.android-in-berlin.de/
Jan 27, Feb 24
The monthly meetup held in Berlin’s excellent C-base hackspace.

JavaUserGroup
Monthly
http://jroller.com/javawug/

Chigago Android eco-challenge hacakthon
Feb 6th, $1
http://chigtug6.eventbrite.com/

Mobile Monday London
Monthly meetings
http://momolo.org/

FosDem, Brussels Belgium
6-7th Feb
http://fosdem.org/2010/

AppJam
http://www.meetup.com/App-Jam/

Mobile Geeks of London
Monthly meetup
facebook group

CTIA Wireless, Las vegas
March 23-25
http://www.ctiawireless.com/

WhereCampEU
March 12,13th
London
http://wherecamp.eu/

Podcasts

Androidguys – http://www.blogtalkradio.com/androidguys
Motodev – http://www.blogtalkradio.com/motodev
The Java Posse – http://javaposse.com/

Community hotspots

IRC – irc.freenode.net  – #android, #android-dev
The most active community channel for developers just generally getting together and chatting has been the IRC chat room from Android’s conception. A regular haunt for the members of Google’s Android team this chatroom is a the closest thing to a point of contact with the Android team.

Sites

Android neighbourhood – http://okmijnt.appspot.com/ – The AndroidNeighbourhood was started as an extension to the official android site listing all of the upcoming worldwide Android events.
Android and Me – Popular Android enthusiast website with good periodicals and reporting
planetandroid.com – The big daddy Android aggregator. If you watch one site for Android news, watch this one.
anddev.org – This forum has remained one of the most active communities in enthusiast Android development since the early betas
android-devices.net - nice source for upcoming Android devices.
androidbloke.co.uk – UK based news source
androidguys.com – A popular community for android developers and enthusiasts alike
Open intents Group – The chat group for Open intents

Projects

The most important open source projects are undoubtedly:
Open intents -  Open intents is a project to publically declare agreed standards for intents outside Google. The source repo for open intent projects is here: http://code.google.com/p/openintents/
and the open intents registry – http://www.openintents.org/en/intentstable ,
Open Android Alliance – http://code.google.com/p/open-android-alliance/

Although there has been very little movement from the open android alliance, open intents are very active.
Some notable other libraries that which we believe are useful:

Android – source.android.com
Commonsware – Lot of very interesting and useful Android projects including code for caching, tutorials and helpful Adapters.
Droid-fu – A utility library for your daily Android needs
Calculon – Story based functional tests
Angle – an open GL game engine
Live Android – An Android Live OS CD for x86
Android x86 project – x86 ports
Android on Github – Mirror of Android repo
Phone Gap – Take advantage of platform specific features through a generic Javascript API

Signpost – A light-weight client-side OAuth library for Java
RESTProvider - Automatically parses RESTful API responses into a Provider in Android
Maven-android-plugin maven build plugin for android, useful for continuous integration.
OAuth dashboard / providers – An OAuth Library/application for Android. Acts as a dashboard for users permissions that they have allowed/dissalowed to applications and for developers gives them an easy way to securely authenticate using a thirdparty android OAuth implementation.

Busybox – See here for how to install on Android. Adds chown, chgrp, awk, sed, grep, du, vi, pidof, less, tail, gunzip, gzip, tar, bzip2, clear, crontab, crond, diff, httpd, telnet, xargs, su, wget, which
DoomForAndroid – http://code.google.com/p/doom-for-android/ – Doom
androidscreencast – http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/ – Control an android device remotely

Twitter

Most popular twits: http://wefollow.com/twitter/android
A list of Android related people I think are worth following on twitter here: http://twitter.com/kevinmcdonagh/droids/members

Google IO 2009 was held in sunny San Francisco and Novoda’s presence acted as a technical bridge for the Royal Veterinary College, London Knowledge Lab and the wider Bloomsbury Colleges as they further explored Google’s Android platform as a potential tool for the collection of medical & veterinary data. As I was acting on behalf of Academia the trip was very kindly funded by JISC, so a big thank you to them.

Google event’s are renowned for merging developers’ unique personalities with the approachable yet cutting edge image of Google technology. There were brightly coloured bean bags, qr-code scavenger hunts, make shift Google street view holo-chambers, arcade cabinets and robot wars but they were all in aid of furthering the interaction of developers and getting them conversing on areas of tech. As if the fact that all the attendees received free G2 HTC magic phones was not reason enough for conversation.

Talks

The talks were generally of a very high standard with a whole section dedicated to each Google interest  including mobile (Android). Outside of each speaking area was an alcove where Google advocates were freely available for questioning on the intricacies of each specific technology. Each recorded session lasts about an hour so specifically, I recommend watching the following:

Writing Real-Time Games for Android w/ Chris Pruett is well delivered with captivating game development content. Chris considers the resource usage on Android from the perspective of a developer used to a similarly constrained C++ mobile environment.

Android media framework w/ David Sparks contains good graphical representations of media call life cycles from the native system upwards and addresses the techniques while dealing with all forms of media.

Coding for Life — battery life, that is w/ Jeffrey Sharkey offers a primer on how to be mindful of your applications specific actions how they are affecting a device’s power consumption.

Supporting Multiple Devices with One Binary w/ Joe Onorato & Romain guy addresses the problem of standarising the presentation of a UI of multiple ‘densities’ on different devices.

Although not based on Android, another talk which is well worth mentioning was the second day’s big topic of conversation ‘Google wave’ which it has to be said is an exciting convergence in persisted communications.

Attendees & Exhibitors

It was difficult choosing to not attend talks and venturing away from the Android alcove but there were some worthwhile exhibitors.

EA consistently sets a high technical standard on all platforms and the same can be said about their android offerings, Sim city, The Sims, Tetris and Monopoly. Close by them was the extremely nice Spotify (premium content) app which sports intuitive & innovative UI design. Each of the bottom tabs can be slid upwards to reveal a more detailed selection of options within that tab’s context which is a nice touch on an already very usable app.

Mobile media company 1Cast were showing off thier app’s streaming capabilities and the fact that it can search through a huge catalogue of their partners premium content. The very snappy responsiveness signals a mobile media viewing experience which is slowly entering the big leagues.

Swedish Game development company Illusion Labs had their games on show including my personal fave ‘Labyrinth’. Labyrinth works the same as the traditional wooden games but the real charm of this particular port is that it provides such pleasant tactile feedback whenever your metal ball hits against the sides of the wooden box. The subtle feedback makes this an exemplar experience for tactile interaction within mobile games.

Catalista also had a very nice location aware application which allows user to find nearby volunteering opportunities.

Some guys from Tubaloo demonstrated a personalised VoIP build of android which they are planning to soon offer the Latin American market. The threat of VoIP to traditional phone services has been looming on the horizon and we’ve recently seen some movement from Skype onto cellphones but could this signal the start of competition in this market?

Also worth a notable mention even though they weren’t technically exhibiting was the Czech Republic based company Inmite who impressed me with both their development knowledge and their popular ‘Lokola’ application which finds searches through the online portal’s directory of resources relative to the device’s global positioning.

Post Google IO

Eager to network with universities, I was surprised to speak with very few groups doing exploratory research on Google Android especially since I encountered such wide acknowledgment of it’s potential in this area. There were the notable exception of San Francisco State University who are just beginning to look into the possibilities of mobile applications within their current work in blood & disease analysis. Hopefully we can soon establish some talks between them and RVC to exchange experiences. If you yourself know of universities working on with the Android platform then please do contact us!

I was lucky enough to spend some time with the developers from the well intentioned ODK project who are developing free tools to aid the collection of standard data by providing an easy click through forms interface. They wished to emphasize their eagerness to receive participation and feedback which I hopefully helped them with by suggesting some commercial and academic use cases.

Some of  the world’s largest media networks for games, music and television were at Google IO to show off their polished offerings to a standard which has until recently has been reserved for the IPhone. This is encouraging because as industry draws attention to the platform, media companies will invest in the relevant training and as a by product we should hopefully see an explosion of free and organisational offerings. ADC2 itself would usually have had entrepreneurial developers inquiring into Google’s offered cash prize but team this with the fact they have given free devices to their most loyal developer audience ensures that there will soon be fresh activity hitting the Android market.

Android SDK at time of writing was: 1.5_r2

Citations & Research

• Google IO logo sourced from cvander’s Flickr account

On Tuesday 18th November Novoda attended London’s Future of Mobile 2008 and gave a short workshop introduction to Android in conjunction with Kieran Gutteridge of Intohand. The talk was aimed at developers experienced in a variety of other mobile and embedded platforms but who were not familiar with the various specifics of Android. All the attendant’s benefited from the presentation, but ideally more resources prepared for the event would have increased it’s value for everyone. In light of the questions asked to us by developers at FOM we will present on this blog, a series of articles based around the lesser explained points of Android’s underlying architecture and design.

Carl presenting at Fom 2008 with Kieran Gutteridge

A Summary of coming articles

In this series we will seek to offer value over Google’s own very well prepared documentation by layering external developer experience and context to each of the areas we cover. This series is intended for seasoned developers who wish to gain a well documented, experienced technical insight into the platform. The following articles are planned:

Android Architecture Overview

Android is often cited as a ‘full stack’. This means that the platform is provided with an OS, sys bins/libs, JRE and SDK. The full shabang is open source from top to bottom but the documentation only lightly covers the Dalvik Virtual Machine. We explore the specifically built packages that make up android from the kernel to the Java libraries in the hope to completely orientate developers with the inner technical workings within most current Android package.

AndroidManifest.xml

The AndroidManifest.xml serves as an application’s contract between it’s end environment and the other installed applications. Through the AndroidManifest.xml an application can choose to expose its intentions, services and content to outside applications. We look into the alternative situations in which the AndroidManifest.xml’s role affects an application and expose its implementation.

Activities

An activity is embodied as a screen and breaks up high level functional elements in an Application. When navigating through an android system the forefront process operates upon the ‘context’ of the shown Activity. We examine the relationships between different types of activities in an attempt to completely understand their life cycle and how it affects the surrounding system.

Intents & BroadcasteReceivers

In Android, actions and re-actions across processes and activities are carried out through means of Intents and BroadcastReceivers. Instead of hard coding the intended application path, applications can choose to leave their journey open to re navigation and simply declare their intentions to the rest of the system. By preemptively declaring their intentions, both the user and other applications can choose to supplement any behavior upon their phone with any other piece of software that offers the same functionality. We explore the extents to which you can choose to customize the experience and look at the practical aspects and challenges that lie in deciding how to best share with the rest of the system.

Views and Resources

External resources are subject to localization and more commonly changed than the internals of an applications inner code. For this reason amongst others the layouts of views are marked up in xml. Binary resources such as images and audio files are also more prone to change and security issues and so are located within a predefined area. The Android SDK makes all resources available through an automatically generated and local binary registry. An application can easily access any of it’s resources via this registry throughout it’s operation. To what advantage has xml been used in such an unconventional why does the Android SDK choose to enforce the location of all binary files so rigidly?

Services

Services have no user interface and can run locally within an application or can take on a life of their own outside any one application, adhering to Linux’s inbuilt security model. Remote Services are shared via Android’s own IDL (Interface description language). The majority of the code for this external communication is generated for a user after declaring the interface by which the data is to be exchanged.

Content Providers

The architecture of Android applications is designed around the idea of opting into a degree of sharing within a community of applications. And application can choose to what extent it makes its data available through content providers. Content providers promote the idea of global data inter exchange and reuse within every system and we look at how Applications can best take advantage of this unique feature upon the Android platform.

We would be very happy to hear comments, criticism and requests so if you have anything to say on anything we cover then please leave a comment.

Citations & Research

• Official Google Android Overview: “Anatomy of an app”
• Google’s official videos overviews of Android Architecture:
  part 1, part 2, part 3
• Android developer reference: AndroidManifest.xml
• Android Technical Docs: android.app.Activity
  
• Android developer reference: android.content.Intent
  
• Android Technical Docs: Android.content.BroadcastReceiver
  
• Android developer reference: Security and Permissions in Android
  
• Android Technical Docs: android.view
• Android Technical Docs: android.view.View
• Types of views in Google’s view gallery
• Android Technical Docs: android.app.Service
  
• Android developer reference: Security and Permissions in Android
  
• Android Technical Docs: android.content.ContentProvider