kugelfish

My second Android application is a special-purpose calculator for solving some of the problems which often arise when it comes to paying the bill in a restaurant - like computing the tip or splitting the bill among N people. This seemed like a reasonably useful application for a device which the user always carries around and one that is very simple to do. In fact it turns out that tip calculators are somewhat the " hello world " equivalent of mobile application development. To be useful, the user experience would have to be very simple and rapid - not necessarily obvious with the clunky keyboard setup of the G1! The calculator uses a table view of buttons as a virtual keypad for inputting numbers and another table on the top to display the results. The display table is fully specified in the XML layout file, while the cells of the keypad table are generated by the code. There is a menu to select the input fields (price, tax, tip, number of people and currency exchange rate)

While on paternity leave, I wrote this first Android application as a kind of remote baby monitor - even though I would never dare to suggesting using it as such in public... The basic functionality is that when running the application monitors the sound volume through the microphone and if it exceeds a certain threshold automatically dials a number which previously has been configured. Based on existing examples which come with the SDK distribution it is pretty easy to put together the basic application skeleton - including the XML description of the UI layout. If you don't know what you are looking for the documentation on the Android SDK site is a bit sparse but is great to look up details. The application consists of an Activity, the Android abstraction for a single self-contained screen with some associated behavior and user interaction. This screen has a layout and a main menu defined in XML and provides framework methods to handle I/O and life-cycle events. For simple apps

I have been using the new T-Mobile G1 as my primary phone for a while now. It is the first phone which runs the open-source Android mobile software stack. I agree with most of the reviewers that the G1 or even the Android software is no iPhone when it comes to stylish elegance, attention to detail and consistency in the user experience. However, this is somewhat besides the point. Android is a developers dream - designed from the ground up as a 3rd party application delivery platform. I have also played around with the application development toolkit and written 2 small Android applications - which even for somebody without any prior experience in Java or mobile device programming is surprisingly easy. The main criticism for the G1 hardware is that it seems to have been designed by former soviet industrial planers - I can't quite figure out if it is meant to be retro Brezhnev or Khrushchev era styling... I would also prefer a 100% touch-screen driven device instead of the neither