AppCreator

Wallace Jackson has authored a book for people with no programming experience, who are interested in developing Android Apps. The book Android Apps for absolute beginners is published by Apress and covers all you need to know to get started in Android development.

The first part of the book looks at getting your development environment set up, using free open source tools such as the eclipse IDE. It goes on to introduce the Android framework before looking at the components of an Android App.

Since the book assumes no prior development experience, it takes you step by step through building an Android App from screen and UI design to handling events, understanding content providers and intents. It seems to be a great book to start your Android development journey.

The Drupal Downunder site for the conference in January 2011, is live now. It has been evolving over the last couple of months while we build up to what looks to be a very exciting conference. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the people involved in organising the conference and website. Special thanks go out to Sheree and Jeff from Marmaladesoul, who I have been working a lot with lately. Chris from Univate and Sean.

With the opening up and support of API's on mobile devices, HTML5 has the potential to eliminate the need for device specific development.
The w3c has specifications outlining best practices for Mobile Content and Mobile Web Applications
Features like Canvas, SVG, indexedDB and access to Accelerometers, Gyroscope and Cameras will eventually allow web developers to build a HTML5 site that functions like a native App on iPhone, iPad or Android.
The mobile user just needs to visit the site in a browser, bookmark the page and an icon will be added to the desktop, with all necessary data downloaded and stored locally so that it can work again offline. The Apps can be designed to sync with online data sources.

Browser makers are starting to include these features now.

I got my Google Android App Inventor invite early this week and had some trouble connecting the Blocks Editor to my Samsung Galaxy S. So I thought I would post some tips for anyone else experiencing similar issues using App Inventor on Ubuntu. Firstly I must say the Galaxy S is a brilliant phone/mobile computer and I have no trouble connecting to it from ubuntu as a mass storage device. I can plug it in and share files between them easily.

These steps are for Ubuntu and the Samsung Galaxy S although they should work with other Linux distros and phones and at least point you in the right general direction on other Operating Systems such as Windows. I found most of these points at App Inventor Troubleshooting page and from the App Inventor Group mailing list.

• Ubuntu ships with open-jdk unfortunately this doesn't work well with App inventor, so you will need to uninstall openjdk, openjre and any other openjava related packages and install the equivalent Sun versions.
• Check what versions you have installed:
  dpkg -l | grep jre
  You need sun-java6-jre
• Once you have the correct Java installed enable debugging in the Java Control Panel
  javaws -viewer
  Click on the Advanced tab and under Setting > Debugging select the checkboxes.
• Create or edit the /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules file.
  
  cd /etc/udev/rules.d/  
sudo nano 51-android.rules
  
  Paste in:
  SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="04e8", ATTRS{idProduct}=="681d", MODE="0666"
  Make sure you look up the correct vendor id and product id.
• Check your firewall and make sure port 9997 is enabled.
• If you have also downloaded the Android SDK, make sure Eclipse is closed.
• Make sure you browser is set to open the .jnlp file.

The momentum behind Android is amazing. I have been keeping an eye on Androids progress and it is simply staggering. Many of the biggest phone manufacturers such as Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson have released Android phones and have many more in the works. Not all the best phones are making it to Australia and some are getting here too slow. Australian carriers are starting to get behind Android and competition to release the best handsets and plans seems to be heating up.

The Android market has somewhere in the region of 70,000 apps and is growing rapidly. One of the great things about Android phones as you can get apps from anywhere. You are not tied to a specific site or application. AppBrain is a site that enables you to browse the apps in your desktop browser and install to your phone with one simple click.

Google have just released App Inventor a simple to use, with No programming required app builder. This should make building quality apps easy and hopefully it wont flood the market with copy cat apps all doing the same thing.