Google Officially bidding on the C-block

Friday, Google ofifically announced that they’ll be bidding in the upcoming auction of the 700MHz spectrum.  If you’re interested, here’s the press release.

So what?  So, Google is now positioning themselves to own a piece of the wireless spectrum…i.e. if they win, they’ll be able to operate a wireless network ala. Verizon, AT&T, etc.   FWIW, Google is planning to bid alone, but says they may engage partners to manage the network (*cough* open handset alliance partners *cough*).  So, it sounds to me like they’re trying to buy their way into the game in order to ensure a home for the Android platform.  But what do I know, I’m just some blogger.

9:30 and still working…

Sadly I’m working on “work” and not my Android project. Two tips:

1. If your phone rings from an unknown number after work hours…DON’T PICK UP.
2. If anybody ever guilts you into helping them troubleshoot a problem over the phone, punch them in the face the next time you see them.

Anyhow, I did find enough time to run through the first Notepad tutorial this evening in between conference calls. Pretty straight forward, but I suppose worthwhile to run through. The running narrative that Google provides is pretty well put together though.

I’m hoping to get off this call in time to go play hockey tonight, so instead of writing anything potentially useful, I’ll leave you with a question….

I read somewhere in the docs that all applications deployed on an Android device share the same package namespace. This seems like a bad idea. Say Google decides to deploy some application with package com.google.foo. And malicious user X decides he doesn’t like Google anymore. So along with some useful application, he also bundles in a com.google.foo package with mailicious code. How does Android respond? Which package gets loaded at runtime? Thoughts?

Android: Week 1

Getting Started

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I downloaded the Android SDK and spent some time playing around. Here are a few recommendations for getting started, and my first take on understanding the Android development environment:

1. Read everything on the official Android site.
2. Did you read everything yet? No? Repeat Step 1. Seriously, it’s pretty easy reading, and incredibly useful.
3. Join the Google Android groups and see what people have to say.
4. Download and install the SDK. Need instructions on installing the SDK? It’s just a jar file, not much to know. That said, if you still have questions, Repeat Step 1.
5. Get Eclipse and the Android plug-in. Now I’m no Eclipse zealot. I’m old and cranky, and my first inclination is to do everything by hand (that’s the way we did it in my day, and that’s the way we likesed it). So I set out to build everything with my old friends Gvim and Ant. After an hour so of punching myself in the face, I decided the docs weren’t lying, so I gave up and installed the plug-in. So you use IntelliJ, Netbeans, etc….tough shit! For the time being at least, just consider it a requirement to do your development in Eclipse.
6. Install the run the samples. If you can follow directions, you can get them running. Simple, and kind of cool. I’m only of average intelligence, and total time from start of SDK download to seeing “Hello, World” in the Android emulator was less than 20 minutes.
7. Update some of the samples. Yeah, it’s lame, but you know you want to put your name in “Hello, World”.

* – This screencap was captured using Jing, a lovely tool. Go support them; everything is free, you can do screencaps or screencasts, and it’s all completely intuitive.

My Understanding So Far

OK, I have to admit, the following is more for me than it is for you. It’s helps me to understand new concepts when I have to write them out. So here’s how I understand Android so far. Read at your own risk….

What is Android?
Like almost everything else, Android is a layer of abstraction. An interface to build applications for mobile phones in a device-independent manner.

Why should anybody care?
Platform independence and a standard API will encourage the development community to innovate. The ability to offer location-based services is a huge deal. When everyone’s carrying a cell phone, and they can opt to share info. on their where-abouts, a whole new world of possibilities opens up. I suppose there are ethical big-brother like questions to consider here, but…meh, somebody else will worry about that.

What are the common components of an Android program?

• Activities – These are just screens. Each activity/screen in your application is backed by a Java class.
• Views – The GUI components of your application. Can be created in code, in good MVC form, Android allows you to model your views in xml. Activities get tied to views by calling the setContentView(myView) method. The map between Activities and their xml views is maintiained in an auto-generated (By Eclipse Plug-in) file named R.java. I have no idea why the file is named “R.java”. You can take action on views (i.e. set focus), and you can register event listeners (i.e. on focus) on them.
• Intents – Actions. Intents are used to transition between Activities, and can also be broadcast to other applications in the background.
• Intent Receiver – An intent listener. Listens for asynchronous Intent messages, possibly from external applications.
• Intent Filter – Used to define what Intents an Activity or Intent Receiver can handle. For instance, if you’re just displaying a picture in MyPictureActivity, you’d add an Intent Receiver in AndroidManifest.xml declaring MyPictureActivity’s ability to VIEW.
• Services – Just like a desktop or server service, a long-running, background, Android process.
• Content Provider – A wrapper for sharing arbitrary data (i.e. text, video, audio, etc) between applications.

Wow, I don’t know much, but what can you do? Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a better handle on things as I’m off to go through the Notepad Tutorials now. Until later…take care.

WhereAmI?

My first Android App was going to be a simple little map integration that I lovingly named “Where Am I?”.  It was a modest idea, I just wanted to improve the user experience of getting directions on your mobile by eliminating the need to enter a starting location.  But, predictably, Google beat me to it.  With the release of Google Mobile Maps 2.0, Google now calculates your starting location automatically.  Ok, fine, so they figured out how to use handset GPS, big deal…my friend Kenan is always telling my how location-based services are still a ways off because only 15% of the cell phone market is GPS-enabled.   But Google just took a step towards solving that problem for us.  If you have GPS, great, they’ll use it to accurately pinpoint your location.  No GPS…no big deal, they just triangulate your location based on your relative location to cell phone towers.  WTF, I thought triangulation was just for spy movies and the CIA….now it’s for me too.