Seeing the changes of a platform which has grown to handle various screen sizes, various OEM alterations, various API tweaks, re-writes and now devices types has been an exciting, albeit challenging experience.

I’ve had the fortune of working with some of the best Android developers out there, but keeping on top of all of this is a must and unfortunately only experience can account for a lot of quirks in Android.

There’s been a number of times where I’ll moan about the method of achieving a task in android despite there being seemingly no reason to alter the initial attempt. Examples of this include:

1. ‘this’ vs getApplicationContext(). A large number of examples when Android first came up passed ‘this’ around when a context was needed. This was later addressed by Romain Guy as being an easy way to cause memory leaks. But the problem is it’s easy to miss these posts and the only time you’ll need to read it is when the application starts to act in weird ways, not really giving an indication that this is the cause.
2. ViewFlipper. There was a very subtle bug in ViewFlipper where it causes a force close after a few orientation changes / moving between activities. The fix was simple, but it was an easy one to miss and release into wild.
3. Helper classes like AsyncTask & ListViewActivity. I will openly admit that this one is largely personal preference but I will still chuckle if anyone discusses the issue with me and later finds it would of been easier if they had taken the initial hit of more work. Starting with the ListViewActivity, I see little point is using this, the code saved in finding the ListView from the layout seems so trivial it is easily out weighed by the fact you can no longer extend a different class. As for AsyncTasks, the code has a great deal of boiler plate and doesn’t really simplify things (From my point of view). But the real issue is you lose freedom to spin off other threads if you need to. Al Sutton did a great talk at Droidcon 2011 on Android multi-threading.
4. Tiling Bitmaps. I’ve found numerous posts where people have had issues with tiling bitmaps. Again this is one of those bugs where even though the majority of the time it works, the odd once or twice it files and you end up with a stretched image. The solution, again simple, request the tiling in code instead of XML.

Back to my point, a lot of things I do in Android is a result of experience and learning off of others.

I regularly try out new things in Android and try to forget some of these issues in the hope that they are resolved. This is only ever done when I’m producing examples, where a force close caused by a bug in the Android source isn’t a real concern.

Today I’ve been working on one of the simplest app’s I’ve ever worked on. A Kitchen Sink application for Android, the main aim of which is to make themes quicker and easier as well as cover off most of the scenarios of input and state.

I’ve not done much work with Android Fragments and been using this app as a learning experience.  But it has revealed an extremely old pet hate.

The Dialog.

I’ve spent a few hours hitting my head against a brick wall figuring out why displaying a DialogFragment and then rotating the device would cause a crash.

The answer was to simply not add the fragment in XML, but add it in programmatically.

These kind of issues scare me. I tend to create bespoke Dialog’s in my own app’s to keep in with a heavily customised UI, but for client code I will tend to opt for the Google code base. With bugs like these, where the outcome is determined by such a fundamental decision, it’s shows Androids infancy.

Android began to stabilise a lot before the release of Honeycomb. Now with the release of Ice Cream Sandwich I get the impression more of these bugs are going to surface. Fortunately the issues will be found faster than ever before thanks to the thriving community of developers.

 Image from Dead Zebra

Been using Heroku for a new project and these are the commands which I must learn and remember. Until then, I’m jotting them down here as I go along:

heroku ps <- Heroku Process State. Lists the currently running processes

heroku ps:scale web=1 <- Scale processes. heroku ps:scale <Process Name>=<No of Instances>

heroku logs

heroku open

Then add something along the lines of:

if [ -d "/home/matt/Development-Tools/android-sdks/tools" ] ; then
PATH=”/home/matt/Development-Tools/android-sdks/tools:$PATH”
fi

if [ -d "/home/matt/Development-Tools/android-sdks/platform-tools" ] ; then
PATH=”/home/matt/Development-Tools/android-sdks/platform-tools:$PATH”
fi

I tried ‘~/Development-Tools…..’ but had no luck.

Anyway, restart your machine and jobs a good’un

Another post on Little Printer? Yeah, you guessed it

I’m not going to say much on it apart from a congrats to Berg for releasing it, it’s a fantastic looking product and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one and secondly the reason I like this is because it’s moving away from digital.

It’s a bit of a weird thing to suggest (especially for an app developer), but a small chunk of paper I can grab in the morning, with all the bits of info I need for the day, that’s pretty handy. The main reason I think it’s going to be successful is because the output is something physical.

It’s easy to believe that everything should be in the cloud and to be honest I keep the majority of my content in cloud. At the end of the day  I don’t want to worry about back-ups and how to access content when I’m away from my usual computer. However, with this mentality comes a sense of letting go of all things physical, paper notes, CD’s, DVD’s, even hard drives, but should that be the case?

The root cause of my interest stems from the loss of physical attributes which occur when shifting to the cloud. This was peaked during a completely different discussion about applications like bump with one of my close friends Andy Coghill, who has a background in product design.

After starting a conversation around substituting a physical business card for a digital one, the first thing Andy focused on was the loss of touch.

Taken back I probed further questioning why he didn’t like the idea of things like NFC, QR codes or bump, thinking NFC was the most natural way to do it and Andy simply moved onto to push that touching, feeling and owning that card was far more powerful. I had to agree. My software engineer background went to the toolbox and found the usual tools of the trade, cloud computer, NFC & mobile devices. His product design background went to the toolbox and found the materials, the user perception and everything he knows and loves.

Now consider Little Printer, you can see how that might apply. Having a physical receipt sized piece of paper with the vital bits of info you need for the day has a number of physical properties that you could easily overlook. All this printer offers is a link between the cloud to the physical, something which has been overlooked all too much these days.

If you want to find more info then check out: http://bergcloud.com/

Being one of the first Qt projects I’d worked on, I was amazed at how easy it was to get to grips with Qt Quick, Nokia’s technique for developing applications in QML and Javascript.

After the application was finished Nokia asked if we would be happy to talk about our experience developing with Qt and you can see the result below.

If you wanted to hear other developers experience with Qt then look no further than http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/Videos/.

Oh yeah.

The site was looking a little bit outdated and it wasn’t quite fitting my needs:

1. I struggled to adding sections to the site at a whim, at least now it consists of small chunks of content I can add, edit and remove.
2. It was old and looked it
3. I wanted an excuse to play with a little HTML5
4. I wasn’t particularly happy with the format of the blog and hopefully the simplified look and feel will encourage me to post on a regular basis.

If you find any problems with the site please give me a shout, otherwise go and check out gauntface.co.uk and enjoy the blog.

p.s. I’m sorry for out right blocking users of IE9 or less . . . . but unfortunately I don’t want to cater for such a small portion of my visitors by building vasts amount of backwards compatibility.

Also extra note with the phone – *Work as a good replacement for an ipod (i.e. big hard drive, easy sync tools)

I don’t know enough about Microsoft’s advertising strategy to comment on it, because I very rarely give Microsoft any notice (Especially when you consider that I work in an office of Apple Lovers and spend my time following Open Source fanatics on Twitter), so whether these videos are just advertising techniques or not, I can’t say.

But the Courier is grabbing my attention, so rather than trawl the web everyday for new information I set off a Google Alerts Feed to let me know of new Courier info, and to be honest, I wish I hadn’t, because it get’s filled with utter rubbish.

So here’s my take on everything Microsoft is currently doing, what I think the Courier is (vaporware or not?) and finally what happens next.

Microsoft Where Have You Been All My Life

I make it no secret when writing these posts that I am not a fan of Microsoft, it’s nothing to do with their ethics or anything like that, I just found Mac OS X and Linux were more than suitable for ANY person to avoid Windows, so I just wrote off Microsoft in terms of OS, their old mobile devices are ugly and while Windows 7 Phones seem to have a lot nicer interface, I’ll have to see how I feel after I get time to use their SDK (Past experience has been pretty bad in terms of customisation and I am all about the aesthetics).

But recently I’m seeing them in a different light, sure I think Windows 7 is still pretty bad and I hate it when my other half calls me up with the first sentence “My laptops broken”, but Microsoft seems to fixed up their attitude to mobile devices “to a degree”.

They’ve looked at mobile devices (Phones, Tablets, Other), considered them and said to themselves, “They aren’t computers”.

One team point to Microsoft right there! Yeah I admit, they are computers, but the UI needs to be different, you can’t just put a UI that works on a nice big screen straight onto a tiny screen and hope it will work just as well. I am in 2 minds about this point though, Microsoft have sat back and come up with this great Courier concept and their Windows 7 Phones (even the new Kin phones), but what the hell happened with the HP Slate?

Apple iPhone – Came with a totally mew UI

Android – Came with a new UI (although alot of similarities to iPhone)

Apple iPad – New UI (Sure the front screen is the same, but the apps have opened up into that screen real estate nicely, and I bet Apple have given Developers a new set of UI elements to take advantage of)

Windows Phone (Old) – Well Windows have scroll bars on them, Start button goes in the corner, nice and small, and no one cares about silly UI pictures to make things pretty, grey is pretty right? *Designer cries in the corner

So this new UI spree that Microsoft have gone on is a great thing for their products, but how real is it? That’s gotta be your call, I think other parts of Microsoft have locked into this new approach, but the core of the company . . . maybe not so much.

When, Where, How Much . . . The Courier Ain’t Real Mate

Straight off . . . . Is the Courier Vaporware? . . . . answer: Maybe

Microsoft have old videos of “Courier like” devices, the UI looks old, ugly and not too user friendly, but it has some big similarities to the original videos.

You can see the UI is very different, but it’s a thought provoker, has this been in the works for a long time, or did they forget it a long time ago and now figured this is the time to launch it?

I get the impression they asked a design team to take the Codex concept (above) and turn it into a viable, attractive product. This team produced the first video below.

Then the Codex team who probably created the prototype, took a look at this and figured, we can do this this and this, but probably not this, but maybe like this. Right, said the design team, so now we need to show you what you want the new UI to be and how it’s going to work.

That’s is where we are up to, plenty of blog’s are going nuts over a video Microsoft released with regards to using a stylus and fingers on a touch screen the size of a table (Microsoft Surface). Yes the Courier uses a stylus, I see the link, but come on, a table size screen compared to a small notebook, they aren’t directly related, take away that they are trying to prove that stylus’s mustn’t be banned (Especially after the Steve Jobs quote declaring war on stylus), but they shouldn’t be doing this to prove the product is good, just let the product do that itself.

Vaporware – maybe, maybe not, anyone declaring yes or no, ssssshhhhh . . . . you don’t actually know anything [Neither do I].

What Happens Next – Well Microsoft Launch It Surely?

So this section is more of a discussion about whether or not it’s feasible to make a Courier type device, regardless of who does it.

The answer is obcourse, Computer’s are powerful beasts, so I reckon it’s easily done.

To start off with, the hand writing recognition (which I think is a pretty important part of the Courier), can be achieved with good accuracy. According to my colleague @mattcolliss (Twitter, look him up), who is doing a lot of work  in a different text recognition area, thinks text recognition of this kind is pretty much a done deal, it can be accomplished, and it can be accomplished well. I believe him, but if you dont, check out this video from Mark Cummins, a developer of Plink Art an image processing tool for photo’s, the accuracy is insane, so hand writing should be fine.

Then consider the actual task being performed. The first thing to notice is that each screen is essentially a different application. You could argue that it is a single application and by all means take that point of view, but I tell you what, designing a single app to perform the tasks that you want, would quickly become a pain to develop for. So from this point on, I’m going to take the view that they are 2 seperate applications running on each screen. Therefore the obvious is needed, multi-tasking. This never used to be a big deal, but iPhone changed it to be a big functionality. Phones don’t need it, the fact the iPad doesn’t have multitasking is a big shocker to me, but this thing will have to have it, but there are processors that can do this, and 2 screens means the casing could have the space to store and power the screens and applications that will run on them. (As a proof, think of your netbook running Linux, can run a browser and open office right?)

So multi-tasking is easy to get on this device (We assume). The applications can be developed independently (great for devs, or is it?) We see that nice flicking from one screen to another, this is great, but how does this actually happen from a developers point of view? The best way I can think of achieving this, is the platform (or OS to some), which the applications run on top of, must be able to take some image from the first application and performing the animation from one screen to the next (Taking the problem away from the individual application) then dropping the image back down in the second application.

This is something that you may take for granted, but I know that Ubuntu has a similar funcionality when you drag and drop an image from a folder into Gimp and it’s essentially the same functionality without the animation

But Courier is rumoured to run on Windows 7 Phone or Zune platform, now if they have added in a similar concept to Android’s Intents, then this should be perfect for the platform being able to take out and put in different images and data with a nice animation. If they don’t do this, then 3rd party applications don’t stand a chance because I can’t see how my application would take in an event of this image being dropped in my application and I REALLY wouldn’t want to have to handle the animation of the image once it reaches my animation.

In my mind, Android seems like a good idea to use for Courier, but I’m an Android Dev and I’m giving Microsoft the better of my doubt and assuming their new Windows 7 Phone is a vast improvement over the old Windows Phone SDK and therefore has a well thought out way to achieve this goal.

We’ve discussed Windows 7 Phone, Zune, Android, what about the rest?

iPad - I’m sorry but no go, the main reason for this, is that it would be a big pain to implement an app that would have a browser on one half of the screen and a note taking app on the other. Plus I don’t want to have to type in lots of text, I want to write it out, much more natural on this kind of scenario. Sure I could use a stylus, but will the screen work with it and be precise enough? Then let’s say you want to use the iPad Browser and a notepad application, you could probably do this, but the beauty of the Courier is taking the information (images, text, videos, pdf’s) from one source and editing, putting into new notes etc, so going in and out of different app’s will just become impractible. Don’t get me wrong, some awesome developer or team will produce some great utility apps and take ideas from the Courier but I doubt it would be as fluid.

Chrome OS - I’m not sure if this is a.) a good idea b.) possible

The reason I’m thinking it might be a bad idea is that you instantly limit it to HTML5, which is coming on leaps and bounds, but is it up to the stage of a customised UI with bells and whistles? It may well be and can do all this, but I just can’t help but think Android would be a better choice to better manage applications. I’m not convinced myself so this is a totally open ended question because I’m not convinced by Chrome OS but I’m also quite optimistic judging by some of the talks I’ve attended on the topic.

The reason I’m not sure it’s possible is after asking a Google engineer about whether HTML5 supported multi touch gestures, which is pretty essential to any touch screen device, the response was that it isn’t standard in HTML5, but it is in implemented in Webkit, so it’s probably working it’s way into Chrome and Chrome OS, but a long way to go to be as smooth as Android’s widget elements? (I have no idea just for the record)

(Finally) Linux - Yes, No, Maybe, Linux can do some great things, but it needs a lot of work to make applications that look as nice, work as nice and be as well integrated to work like the video’s shown above. Linux does support tablets, and we have seen other versions of the desktop Linux to work better on net-books, but will Linux be able to specialise a separate version of itself for these devices?

An open source project like this would need the money, time and attention, which is sometimes Linux’s biggest fall, and anyone considering doing this task has to ask whether a Linux implementation is better than opting for a custom Android version (I know Android is a platform on top of Linux, but in my mind they are targetted at different types of devices).

Conclusion

I’ve discussed a number of different topics, and mainly the result is, I still want one, I think Microsoft is toying with the idea of releasing and might be seriously considering it, I am certain it can be done, and if Microsoft don’t do it, someone else will.

Things that will kill this for me though, requiring me to use Microsoft Stuff, I don’t use hotmail, sorry no export to thunderbird and poor spam filtering killed that for me, I don’t want to use an online Microsoft Office, Google Docs is what I use at work, it’s what I use for personal projects and everything else has latex of Open Office and if Microsoft has an online sharing tool, that doesn’t fit into any of these categories, just please let it work, and please let it work well.

Microsoft phones and this have made me consider there is hope for Microsoft yet in terms of products, but it’s still way up in the air.

Take Away Point – Tablet, Netbook, Desktop Computer, Laptop, Courier are ALL different types of devices with different use cases. Treat them that way where-ever appropriate.

http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/archive/2008/10/01/microsoft-research-codex.aspx

However another article cropped up and apparently it’s called Windows 7 Starter, which will only be able to run 3 applications and have some of the limited features of Windows 7. Now I don’t have a problems with the concept of a cut down version of Windows 7, it makes perfect sense because lets face any weight we can cut out of the Windows OS would be a great idea to save resources on the netbook.

But these features are still there, installed on the netbook but not enabled until you pay for an upgrade.

Now this has a number of things wrong with it in my mind, if the netbook can run more than 3 applications why not allow it? If the features are installed why not enabling them?

I understand this is tough for Microsoft since they need a cheap OS for the netbook market, so this way will give them more money by charging the end user rather than the netbook manufacturer.

I know I’m a biased point of view as I am a user of Ubuntu a free linux distribution, which for the Asus eee pc they made it so it would run without any problems, which poses the problem of why would I ever want to use Windows Starter with all its limit with a free option which has none of the limitations?

I can only imagine the messages that will pop up persisting to explain how and why I should explain to the full versions of Windows 7. The only thing I can imagine being an advantage of Windows 7 over a Linux OS is iTunes. All other applications (In my opinion) have a perfect open source partner.

Anyway that’s just my point of view and anyone and everyone is welcome to pitch in there 2 cents about it all.