QuickSearch was downloaded 1000 times within its first 24 hours in the Android Market. That’s a good sign, at least it surpassed my expectations. Based on currently 50 ratings, the average rating is 4 of 5 stars. The main critic was that it lacks a soft keyboard: another thing I did not expect, because current self-made keyboards are quite clumsy and Cupcake is around the corner anyway. Nevertheless, many users gave QuickSearch full 5 stars, and lots of positive comments were made. My favorite one so far is: “Love it. I’ve removed my Google search widget because of this app. It’s a must have.”

On its first day, QuickSearch also got its first update: V1.1 utilizes the voice recognition feature of the latest Android update (RC33). Instead of typing in your query you can just speak it. I really like how applications can connect to each other on Android!

And thanks to a very nice guy from the Netherlands, who was of great help, I added a Dutch search profile. I hope to add more search profiles soon – any suggestions for this?

I just released QuickSearch in the Android Market. Let me qoute the description from the market to explain what it does: “With just a quick touch you can search in one of a dozen web pages. Just enter the text and choose the button for the website to search in. Includes Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Ebay, Amazon, and also the most interesting social, media and shopping sites. Search profiles can be added – let me know if QuickSearch lacks a site.”
The screenshot illustrates the central UI: QuickSearch saves you time because there is to no URL to enter, no homepage to load, and no search form on the homepage to look for. Instead you get the search results page directly in your browser. The background is the system wallpaper, by the way.
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The current Android SDK and emulator comes with only very few applications: browser, maps, and a contact list. This is going to change soon as two articles on Engadget and Gizmodo suggest, which refer to Android prototypes shown at the Mobile Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Among the new applications are: Email/GMail, Calendar, Music/Video Player, ToDo Lists, Alarm Clock, SMS, IM, and a voice dialer. Nothing spectacular yet, but it’s still good to see the essentials are on their way…

Also from the MWC: Video interview with Rich Miner on Google Android

The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) is currently giving Android’s new UI the finishing touches. Hampus Jakobsson from the Swedish company was so kind to answer some questions. Let’s see if TAT reveals Android’s new UI during the Mobile World Congress 2008 (February 11-14th).

Q: What was TAT’s role in giving Android a new UI?
A: We are part of the open handset alliance working with specifying the platform UI.

Q: What were your primary goals in terms of style and functionality and how would you describe the outcome?
A: We are still working on is as you know, there will be a release in a couple of days. As all UI:s the goal is to make the style fit the target group, and make the right features as accessible as possible. A good UI is seldom noticed, only bad ones. So our goal is to make the platform and the devices built on it as user friendly as possible.

Q: Which particular challenges did you face in doing this particular work and how did you solve them?
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Diego Milano had a good idea on how to measure the performance of Android emulator: start a shell session (adb shell), and run cat /proc/cpuinfo to get the BogoMIPS:

Processor : ARM926EJ-S rev 5 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 280.98

However, this BogoMIPS value is highly fluctuating. Different runs of the emulator result in different values, so it is important to start the emulator several times. Although the typical value for my ~2 GHz system is around 300 BogoMIPS, one run resulted in 38 BogoMIPS. Nevertheless, if we assume the BogosMIPS value is not flawed, we need to find reference values for mobile CPUs. The Wikipedia article on ARM architecture has some:
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The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) is a member of the Open Handset Alliance. What got my special attention about this particular OHA member was that they specialize in mobile UIs. The UI of a mobile platforms like Android is a key acceptance factor for the users. The current UI of Android works OK for most developers right now, but it’s still lame compared to the status quo. And when the first Android devices will ship, the iPhone will have had its first birthday…

So, I was eased to hear that Android gets a new UI soon. It seems Google does not repeat Suns mistake ruining Java UIs by giving Swing those “Look and Feels” that only half-blind engineers could stand. At least if TAT is doing Android’s new UI. I like TAT’s style, which is ranging from reduced to playful, but always classy. But have a look yourself and click for a demo movie (Quicktime):

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Today’s Android Workshop was fun – especially meeting lots of interesting people. The audience of around 100 people had the pleasure to meet Dan Morrill and Jason Chen from Google, Mountain View. After an introductory presentation, Dan and Jason had a really though time answering thousands of questions. The audience was quite diverse – I meet people from all over Germany, Austria and even a very devoted team from Canada.

I was especially curious about the next SDK of Android and hoped to learn some new details about it. Well, I guess we still have to be patient for a couple of weeks to find out what will be fixed and which APIs will be added… It’s going to be released “soon”. From what I heard, one could conclude it might be released in mid-February. My personal guess is February, 20th. There’s one concrete thing Dan said about the new SDK: it will come with a completely new UI. That was great new for me, because I was not particular happy with Android’s current look and feel. So, I am really looking forward to it!

Dan Morrill	Dalvik	New SDK	The “Hackathon”	Jason Chen

PocketGuitar is a cool open source project transforming an iPhone or an iPod touch into a mobile guitar. Android needs multi touch! Den Rest des Eintrages lesen »

Google’s Android is an emerging technology, and neither its implementation nor its documentation is complete. This is the place where I will collect questions I have on Android. Once I find out answers I will share them here, of course.
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Especially if you want to transfer objects from and to a Android mobile device, XML serialization may be an option. XStream is a popular XML serialization tool, however it does not work out-of-the-box with Google Android. Although serialization works, the current XStream 1.2.2 has problems deserializing it: it throws an com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.ConversionException caused by a java.lang.NullPointerException. Fortunately, this was easy to fix and in the course of patching XStream I stripped XStream down a bit. By removing classes that do not work on Android anyway, I could reduce it by about 20%.

Donwload patched XStream 1.2.2 for Android (Java Source)