Your making an Android app and want to take advantage of Google Maps, you’ve been bashing your head against the desk attempting to work out what is going wrong.

So welcome to this little checklist of things I’ve forgotten to do when doing this task:

1. Right click on your project in eclipse and go to properties. Then under Android select Google APIs with the correct platform number, click apply then Ok
2. Open up your Android Manifest file, under the application tab scroll to the bottom and under the Application Nodes click on Add, then double click on “Uses Library”, now for the name enter the following – com.google.android.maps
3. Your activity which is going to be displaying the map isn’t a plain old activity, it needs to be a MapActivity like: public class MapExample extends MapActivity
4. Finally your map view in the layout file should look something like <com.google.android.maps.MapView android:id=”@+id/mapview” android:layout_width=”fill_parent” android:layout_height=”fill_parent” android:clickable=”true” android:apiKey=”YOUR_API_KEY”/> where your api key can be found by doing as mentioned on the Google Maps site -http://code.google.com/android/maps-api-signup.html

This should get you up and running with lots of mappy goodness.

I just read this article over at Slashdot:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/21/239247/Google-To-Take-On-ITunes

Now there are a host of people commenting on audio players and different things, but it’s not Google’s thing, they advertise, most new technologies have some sort of advertising / searching (Which leads to advertising) element to it. Android – You end up using Google products, Maps, Gmail etc all leading to advertising. Google Chrome – Your using their browser, navigation bar meaning Google searches, which leads to advertising.

Now look at Spotify – you get something free (music) and in return they get to give you advertising. That sounds like Google’s kind of business. So Google audio, do i reckon it’s an attack at iTunes? Maybe, but I would have a guess that they are aiming more towards Spotify’s market and if Google can offer something that Spotify can’t (i.e. the features that you get with a Spotify premium account) then they might be able to pull it off and no doubt hurt iTunes business in process.

Anyway my 2 cents worth

Yep, that’s right, I said it, iPhone is going to be a winner.

But this isn’t over any hate towards Google, Android, Cyanogen etc. but just more of the fact that Android is at a point of heading down 2 roads. One road leads to Android being fragmented, losing alot of it’s value. The other road leading to a community using different devices but one central set of app’s. I better explain what I’m talking about.

Motorola recently announced that they are using a “derivative” of Android. I knew they weren’t using the stock Android as they have added their own user interface “Blur”. But they’ve recently explained the reason for them having their own SDK (Software development kit). It’s so they can offer developers custom API’s. Now for the non-technical folk, this basically mean I can write an app that will do cool things on Motorola phones, but that same app won’t do the same cool stuff on other non-Motorola phones. In one sense this is great, if Motorola open up the Blur API it might make adding social networking into an app more exciting and easier, BUT on the other hand this means if I’m writing an app and decide to use Motorola API’s, then I won’t get the same experience on another Android device. So I now have to test it on 2 devices to check for differences (Possibly developing for 2 different API’s) or I only develop for Motorola. (Just for the record, I do understand that at the moment all Motorola API’s are fully compatible with the standard Android API, but how long is that going to last?).

Now lets take this whole Cyanogen fiasco, firstly I have to side with Google on them telling Cyanogen to stop distributing the Google apps i.e. Mail, Calendar etc. BUT where I side with Cyanogen is there seem’s to be no reason why he can’t include Android Market. Think about it, if you had an Android device without the Android Market, it loses alot of functionality. Put it on the device you’ll probably download Google Mail and Calendar straight away. So why don’t Google just allow everyone to use Android Market in their ROM’s, then Google can monitor who is downloading their apps.

So the alternative, someone creates their own market place app, which ROM makers like Cyanogen can include with their ROM’s, but even if everyone uploaded their app’s onto this new market, how good would the market itself be? How good would the app’s be, especially the app’s to replace Google Mail etc? And surely this just fragments everything, the Android version running on the phone, the markets on the phone, then chuck in a bit of API differences along with the ROM differences and you run into a bit of a mess.

The beauty of the iPhone is that everything is in one place, sure you have jail broken devices and a market place for those devices but overall people are happy with the stock iPhone OS, using the one app store. Android is heading down the road of multiple app stores, multiple API’s, multiple ROM’s and it’s just going to mess everything up for the common user.

I just hope Google finds a way that they are happy for ROM makers like Cyanogen to continue their work, with out making the ROM’s virtually useless, by simply giving the ROM makers the Android market to include so users can download the Google Apps that, for now, are the best options available.

I just read an article over at linux insider http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/67982.html and it basically discusses the confusion between Android and Chrome OS – My question is, what confusion?

Android in my eyes has always been a mobile phone platform, now I admit mobile phones, smart phones, smart books, its all blurring a bit so my definition of what should be running Android – a device which can be used for making phone calls, has a small screen making full aplications difficult to use, processor and memory (RAM) is limited. Something along those sort of lines. Or devices that don’t necessarily require a full blown OS, something more light weight.

I don’t think this is suitable for a netbook, so for instance, swiping my screen to view different parts of my desktop. On a phone with touch screen = intuitive, on a netbook, little backward no?

My main gripe about the whole (Android on a netbook) is, what software am I expected to run on an Android netbook? ooo of course the apps I download from the Android Market that are designed on a mobile skinned emulator, tested on a mobile device and also developed to perform tasks you might want a mobile phone to do.

The article also goes on to say how there are companies releasing Android Netbooks, one company I have never heard of, i.e. a small company who thought they could get in there before some of the big players, and also an expected Acer netbook. Now I admit I find it a little odd Acer are still going ahead with this after announcement of Chrome OS. Still I was never surprised by the lack of netbooks running Android,  it wasn’t designed for that. What makes more sense is that Chrome OS is going to be opened to developers in a year or so, which to me says Google have been working on this for quite some time and informed vendors of this.

With Android, Google worked with HTC to release the first phone, and Google again have said they have been working with vendors to create this OS for netbooks and desktops. So if the vendors were asked to participate with a Chrome OS, why bother looking at Android when you can probably guess Chrome OS is going to provide a far superior user experience on a netbook?

These are 2 OS’s for 2 totally different environments of usage. I.e. when I’m out about and only have my mobile phone on me for quick internet, quick tasks on apps etc, and a netbook or laptop would be used for more intensive work, so document editing, photo manipulation, multitasking in essence.

Final remark to finally put the nail in the coffin for Android on a netbook, Android memory management is quite cut throat, if it needs resources, it will kill any background Activities. Now if I was on a netbook and wanted a couple of apps running and the last app restarted, that would kinda get annoying. I mean will like a little music while we work.

Will Google Chrome OS knock Microsoft’s hold on the OS market? Not really, it will shift some linux and tech enthusiasts over to try it out, whether they’ll stick to it I’m not sure. But it will be cool to see if Google makes use of tools already used by other Linux distributions and whether development for programs will be aimed more towards the Chrome OS. Anyway that’s a whole different conversation I’m not getting into for the moment.