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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It’s well know that Netbeans supports Glassfish very well. One of the features I like most is incremental deployment, because it can save you a lot of time during development. Adam Bien posted some performance figures. Even for a large project it takes just 6 seconds using Netbeans’ incremental redeployment.

Compared to Netbeans, Eclipse with WTP seems to offer only 2nd class support for Glassfish. Unfortunately, this did not change with Eclipse 3.4 and WTP 3.0. For example, directory deployment is not supported. Publishing a EAR project to Glassfish always implies creating a new EAR File. I played around with it a bit and decided to switch back to ant. It requires just a simple ant script to copy the files into a directory structure and to call asadmin deploydir. This reduced deployment time by 20% for my EAR project. Another advantage of exploded directory deployment is that changes in JSPs (including JSF) do not require redeployment. Changes are immediately visible after copying the JSP files.

The next observation was that antivirus software had a major impact on deployment performance. Den Rest des Eintrages lesen »

There are a couple of how-to guides for installing Glassfish 2 and getting started with it. This article links to some guides I considered worth reading and gives you additional information.

Basic Installation and setup
Before pointing you to a guide for the basic steps, I suggest to check out what’s the newest release of Glassfish at its download site. To download Glassfish 2 Update Release 2 (April 2008, English only, 54MB):
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Here, you can download an Ubuntu 8.04 (Desktop) VMware Image. This virtual Linux system with all its applications is usable out-of-the-box (e.g. with the free VMware Player). Thus, it is perfect to test drive Ubuntu or as a secondary operating system running within Windows. The image already comes with the current VMware Tools, Java 6, and Eclipse 3.3 Europa.
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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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I just released a new version of the compact RSS feed reader. The Eclipse plugin can be installed using the update site http://www.junginger.biz/eclipse. Please check the full announcement for details.