Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2009

NetMeter

My third android application grew out of the frustration for not knowing what is going on with device behind my back. Many of the early apps - probably written on the emulator or with little field test and experience on real devices are pretty aggressive in resource usage - some of them in the background. From my own experience with Android programming, it can be pretty hard sometimes not to mess up and do something which is very power-consuming merely by accident. Mobile programming requires a particular style and attention to resource efficiency, which many programmers from a desktop/server background are not used to. NetMeter makes use of data from the /proc filesystem of the linux kernel which is deep underneath the Android platform. As opposed to using supported and documented APIs this is quite a bit more hacky and uncertain to work on any device or even future releases. On the other hand, the /proc filesystem is a pretty standard mechanism for making kernel state accessible to u...