Underdev

My last post was about google releasing their Andoid SDK. I’ve been exploring it and coding something really simple.

Meet Twitteroid, a twitter client for Android.

Currently it allows you to login using your account, displays your friends timeline with status message, date and the user avatar.

I’m using a database to store messages, it doesn’t spend much bandwidth since only the updates are downloaded, not the whole thing. I’m also storing the avatars on disk to prevent downloading several times.

Network wise it basically uses a reactor pattern which queues requests for files and uses a single http connection at a time via HttpClient.

I had to manually implement the row layout to include an image, date and other fields. The SDK is currently lacking in this area, it should be possible to do it with XML, but it’s not that big of a deal.

It currently looks like this:

I will eventually release the source code and apk files if someone wants them, I just need to refine some things.

So Google just surprised us with their Android platform, so why is this awesome?

Well, for starters everyone was waiting for the annoucement of a gphone more sooner than later, as a developer stated there is no planned gphone but they are on their way to make many kinds of gphones through their mobile framework.

It’s really noteworthy that everything is being developed on a free software stack, virtually allowing us to do anything with the architecture, we’re talking about the kind of freedom that lets us replace phone-specific applications such as the dialer and others.

Google picked java for exposing their API, I’ve seen some people arround me complaining about it, I really don’t care since it’s just a tool. What I want is a well defined and documented API, and google already has that.

So, probably you’ve heard of OpenMoko, where does the preview release of the Android SDK put openmoko? I’d say in a difficult situation, OpenMoko is a great iniciative, they are using the same tools one would use in a regular computer. By using things like GTK, X and others they can assure a mature platform however it’s arguable that one should use the same tools in a mobile phone.

This takes me to the next point, google is an influent media beast, they have partners on this such as Motorolla and Intel, the hype generated around Android is huge and it’s still in a preview state.

So, I went ahead and downloaded the SDK, the eclipse plugin and toyed around with the emulator. To be fair, I was pleasantly surprised everything seems to be up to speed and from the simple programs I hacked up today I’d say it’s a solid platform with a bright future ahead.

Google is also opening a developer contest with lots of prizes, check it out.

Now, if only we could have the mobiles to run it.

Just a sidenote, folks at OpenHand managed to get Poky Linux running on the emulator, is this cool or what?