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.

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)

An Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) VMware Image is available here for download. 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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Regulary, people ask me how to install Eclipse plugins offline. My update site http://www.junginger.biz/eclipse/ is not an option for offline users, and there is no dedicated download. Fortunately it is possible to download the plugins using my update site directly. Some background information follows, but for your convenience, here are the direct links to my plugins: Den Rest des Eintrages lesen »