It’s raining Androids!
Posted on | October 12, 2009 | 2 Comments
Today its not uncommon to run into people who think of human-like robots when you start talking about Android, rather than Google’s cool new mobile phone platform. This is likely to change dramatically between now and Christmas, at least here in the USA. In the past month a number of manufacturers and carriers have announced new Android-powered phones, and there are more to come in the days ahead.
Available today at a store near you …
At present, if you reside in the USA (we’ll have to write the international version of this post later…) your Android options are far and few between. Today you in fact have only three choices:
- HTC Dream (G1): Actually the first Android phone that became available (October 2008). It has a slide out QWERTY keypad and capacitive touchscreen. Its available on T-Mobile.
- HTC myTouch3G (Magic): This device became available via T-Mobile this past summer. No QWERTY keypad on this phone.
- HTC Hero (G2): This phone looks a bit like the G1, only minus the G1’s controversial “chin”. As of this past weekend, it has become available via Sprint Nextel. (October 11).
The other options you have here in the USA is to visit ebay or opt for the unlocked developer phone made available by Google (a G1 I believe…)
Coming soon …
If you can wait a few weeks more, the number of options available to you here in the USA will increase substantially:
- Motorola CLIQ (aka as DEXT outside the US): The US launch with T-Mobile is supposedly October 19. Its actually the same processor as the original HTC G1, but comes tightly integrated with your favorite social destinations via a layer of software added on top of Android by Motorola (MOTO BLUR).
- Motorola Sholes/Tao: According to latest rumors, this device will launch with Verizon as soon as October 30, but others indicate an early December launch.
- HTC Hero/Desire?? In addition to the Motorola android phone, Verizon is to launch a second Android handset from HTC this fall.
- Samsung Moment (InstinctQ): Originally announced by Samsung last Spring, Sprint Nextel has announced a launch date of November 1.
Coming not so soon …
There are also some more options that are further out that you’ll want to pay attention to if none of the above suit your fancy:
- Dellroid: a Dell manufactured Android smartphone to be available via ATT?
- LG GW620: officially announced by LG, this phone will become available sometime in 2010.
In addition to these two, you can be sure that the usual culprits (HTC, Motorola, Samsung) will be shipping a whole raft of new Android phones in 2010. In fact, last week Gartner forecasted that by 2012 Android will be the #2 smartphone, bested only by Symbian. We’ll need a lot more devices out there than there are today in order for that to happen!
Do let me know if I’ve missed any notables in the first two categories above.
My screencasting experiment…
Posted on | October 5, 2009 | No Comments
This semester I’m teaching an undergraduate CS course that has a weekly two hour lab session. Instead of going the traditional route of making up 4-5 programming assignments and assigning them over the course of the semester, I wanted to try and create a set of weekly labs that encourage the students to tinker and explore the concepts more deeply in an experimental sort of way. That is, I wanted to create a CS lab experience that was sort of like what one experiences in a biology course – start with a hypothesis, do some experimentation/observations and come to valid conclusions.
I initially thought about creating a document for each lab session that spelled out in cookbook style the various “coding” experiments, but the tedium tremors set in just thinking about what a massive effort that would be. What I really wanted is something that met the following criteria:
- Minimize “production” time: that is, once the basic ideation for a given lab session was complete (e.g. lab objectives identified, and the code “specimens” written/tested) I wanted to be able to produce the final lab “media” in 2 hours or less.
- Optimize the student experience: I wanted to use something that my students would find interesting and effective, and something they could refer back to after the lab session to review their work. A thick written “lab manual” with lots of gory details would be dead on arrival.
- Easy to distribute: just provide a single link and the students find everything from there, no matter where they are, or what kind of computer they like to use (its a real mixed bag – some kids like Linux, others OS X, and some have Windows).
In the end, I installed ScreenFlow on my MacBook Pro and use it to create screencasts. I provide the students with a lab assignment in the form of a PDF document that describes the lab exercise. However, instead of step by step directions written out long hand, I simply refer to a YouTube link of the appropriate screencast. The students are then asked to respond to questions about the screencast and are given the opportunity to modify/rerun the code and observe the results.
So far this seems to be working out quite well. The students bring their earbuds to the lab sessions and most of the responses so far have been positive. This is a format that they are already very accustomed to, and the 10 minute length limit in YouTube is a convenient goad in helping me keep each segment focused and to the point. We’re starting to see hits on the videos from various parts of the world along with some comments/ratings, so hopefully others can benefit from this as well!
Production time varies, but I’m definitely in the ballpark. Screenflow works very well for creating the screencasts, and the learning curve was fairly flat. Here’s a sample screencast introducing students to network programming in Java:
I’m linking to my complete set screencasts on my Screencast Tutorial page. In addition to the videos links, I’ve also included download links for the source code used in the screencasts.
I’m interested in comparing notes with others who have used this approach in teaching (CS or areas as well). In particular, let me know what tooling you have found useful for creating/editing screencasts and any other lessons learned.
Mobile Applications & Services Lab Launched at GVSU
Posted on | September 24, 2009 | 2 Comments
MASL is located in C2-217 (second floor of Mackinac Hall in the CIS office suite)
The Mobile Applications and Services Lab recently held its first research group meeting at GVSU’s School of Computing and Information Systems. In addition to myself, the group currently consists of five CIS graduate students and two undergraduate researchers. A variety of topics were discussed at the initial meeting, and perhaps most importantly we discussed our mission statement. We expect this will be subject to some refinement in the months ahead, but this is how it reads at the moment:
“The Mobile Applications and Services Laboratory aims to combine emerging mobile technologies, social media, and pervasive network services in ways that effectively enhance the lives of real people and the communities within which they work, play, and socialize.”
The MASL Research Group meets weekly on Wednesday afternoons to discuss ongoing research projects.
We also discussed a vision statement with regard to who/what we want to become as we successfully execute our mission.
“By contributing original research results, enhanced educational experiences, and entrepreneurial opportunities, MASL aims to become established as a recognized center of excellence in mobile technology, within the GVSU community, the State of Michigan, and beyond.”
Our dedicated laboratory facility is located in C2-217 Mackinac Hall, and consists of new iMac and Dell workstations and a stash of new mobile devices. There’s been a flurry of activity here in the past couple of weeks as students have begun working on various projects. A lot of effort has also been put into getting our development environment in place (Thanks John!!)
The "black box" on wheels is the MASL "toy box" - our stash of mobile devices.
In the months ahead we hope to post details of our progress here on this page. In the meantime, we’re interested in hearing from you, whether you are part of the GVSU community or beyond. Do drop us a line.
MASL researcher John Spencer leads a discussion on iPhone development at a weekly group meeting.
My desert island iPhone apps
Posted on | September 9, 2009 | 2 Comments
TweetDeck for the iPhone.
Rick Broida over at CNET recently posted his top 5 desert island iPhone apps. What follows is my choice of five apps were I stranded on a desert island.
1. Facebook: What better way to keep up with your friends around the rest of the world? This is a fairly functional facebook client. My only gripe is that there is not more ability to filter my news feed. Regardless of how much time I have to spare or how boring the island is I will NOT play Mafia Wars.
2. TweetDeck: From what I’ve tried, this is the best free twitter client out there. It also integrates with Facebook.
3. FlyCast: Being a classical music nut, I got hooked on WMFT Chicago during the time I lived there. WFMT is now streamed by FlyCast. In a day when good local classical music stations are hard to come by, I can now listen to the world’s BEST classical music station even from a desert island!
4. YouVersion.com Bible: As a person of faith, I derive much instruction and comfort from reading the scriptures. This version gives me online access to many English translations, and downloadable offline copies of versions no longer subject to copyright constraints such as the KJV. I can even practice my Dutch by reading the Statenvertaling.
5. Stanza: A free ebook reader program, with enough free classics available to last you a lifetime (Project Gutenberg) as well as the ability to buy more recent books as well.
Those are my five choices. What are yours?
7 future proof assumptions for mobile app developers
Posted on | September 1, 2009 | 2 Comments
Recently I was speaking with a person who is managing a fairly sizable team of developers that is creating a mobile application. They anticipate seeing the application launched within the USA in around six months or so. The person explained to me that their biggest challenge to-date is coding for and testing various Java ME versions of their client app which must run on hundreds of different handsets, all with different form factors, and on a variety of different operator networks. When I asked why they were spending so much energy on their Java ME client the response was that their customer required the client to run on 80% of the handsets in use by consumers today.
If I were in their position, I’d spend more time and energy convincing my customer of the reality that is upon us and leave the Java ME slogging to my competitors. The mobile application landscape has and will continue to change rapidly in the months ahead, thanks to strong growth and innovation in the smartphone category. A recently published Gartner study reports that in 2Q09 the overall handset market declined 6.1% while the smartphone category increased by 27%. If you are currently developing a mobile application or soon will be, here are 7 future proof assumptions that I think you can safely make.
1. You will stop porting and start creating. Moving forward, there will be a small number of highly portable mobile application platforms that really matter, and likely a few more that will be mostly irrelevant except for limited niche audiences. Its somewhat early to forecast who all will be in which category, but it is likely that the iPhone and Android will be in the former. From the application developer’s perspective, the good news is that gone are the days in which deploying your app meant building hundreds of different binary Java ME jars and testing them on myriad devices. There will always be some porting or supporting of multiple app clients (e.g. an iPhone version and an Android version) but in general, a small number of builds will cover large swaths of your intended audience. Not only does this mean you have a crack at launching a successful mobile application, it also means you will be able to spend a lot more time and $$ in the future on innovating and creating compelling mobile application experiences. The mobile application revolution is just beginning.
2. Your users will have unlimited data plans. Even if you did have a magical “porting machine” that could generate binaries for the vast majority of the legacy mobile devices still in use, you would still face a huge hurdle in that most users of such devices do not have data plans in which they can affordably download and use an application that requires network data services. In the smartphone category, at least here in the USA the situation is quite different. Many smartphones are purchased under contracts that require a mandatory data plan. In addition, many of these phones also support WiFi which the user can take advantage of in addition to the wide area mobile network.
3. The mobile application gatekeepers will be around for a while, but they’re fairly broadminded. Even though it is gated, the Apple iPhone application ecosystem is a “sneak preview” if you will of how easy it will be to distribute mobile apps moving forward. While Apple’s rejection of apps due to “objectionable content” tends to get a lot of media attention, the amazing number of apps in the store at present and the billion downloads seems evidence enough that its not all that difficult to make your mobile application available on the iPhone. The gates for getting and keeping an Android application in the Android Market are even lower. Nevermind for now the fact that the iPhone App Store currently sells 250 apps for every app sold in the Android Market! Eventually these gates will disappear altogether, but we’ll save that for point 5 below.
4. The user interface bottleneck on the mobile has all but disappeared. The mobile application UI was painful until the arrival of the iPhone. Now things have changed dramatically. The iPhone has proved that a mobile app can actually be a pleasure to interact with. Mobile app creators can safely assume that their target devices will have nice high res color display, an easy to use touchscreen interface with either a QWERTY keypad or soft keypad that makes text entry relatively painless, at least when compared to the multi-tap entry of the past. Additional hardware features such as accelerometers and locative technologies can also be used to improve the user interface in innovative ways. It seems that successful mobile speech interfaces will remain effective for the time being, only in tightly integrated application experiences, such as Google Mobile for the iPhone. The technology and standards required for introducing an integrated distributed speech recognition modality as a generalized application service are just beginning to emerge.
Demo of the speech modality in Google Mobile for iPhone.
5. Rich Internet applications will eventually triumph over native installed mobile apps. There are a couple of factors to consider here. First, the WebKit foundation all up and coming mobile web browsers (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, etc.) have in common should not hurt when it comes to writing web apps that run well on the devices that matter. Second, a raft of new RIA inspired features coming in HTML5 should go far in helping you write web apps that look and feel like native installed apps. To get a glimpse of what’s coming down the pipe in HTML5 be sure to watch some of the 2009 Google IO presentations. To be clear, native apps are still important today, and you may very well have to create iPhone/Android apps to kick start your mobile app franchise in the near future. However, we believe these emerging developments will eventually create a situation in which the complications of authoring and deploying native applications are supplanted by rich Internet apps that really do run everywhere with minimal effort. Companies such as Appcelerator are already pushing the envelope in this area, and we expect to see a lot activity moving in this direction.
Google IO talk on HTML5.
Appcelerator talks about their Titanium platform.
6. De facto exploitation of features that for the most part uniquely belong to mobile. By default your users will expect their apps to fully exploit the unique capabilities of the mobile phone. The mobile phone was a communication tool long before it morphed into a general purpose application platform. Moving forward people will expect mobile applications to incorporate communication and social media features. They will expect to be able to leverage their social graph in a meaningful way in any mobile context they happen to find themselves. In addition, users will expect the context sensing equipment (camera, location, audio, etc.) that is now standard on virtually all smartphones to be utilized by their applications. Locative app features will abound and be standard fare in mobile apps moving forward.
7. Battery life will continue to be a problem for your users. All of this good stuff does not come for free. Those bright screens, multiple radios, etc. will very quickly take their toll on today’s portable energy solutions. Instead of charging their phones up every 36 hours, users will find themselves charging up every 8 hours! Developers need to be conscious of this and develop their applications accordingly.
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About
Jonathan Engelsma is a computer scientist, programmer, teacher, mobile technology enthusiast, inventor, and life long student. He is currently an Associate Professor in GVSU's School of Computing, where he leads the GVSU Mobile Applications and Services Laboratory.
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