Key Dates and projects beginning 2010

Posted on 20. Jan, 2010 by admin in Android, Blog, Business, Conference & Events, Development

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

3 Comments

Fom2008 and coming articles

Posted on 22. Nov, 2008 by admin in Android, Blog, Business, Conference & Events, Development, Training & Speaking

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 Carl presenting at Fom 2008 with Kieran Gutteridge

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

0 Comments