Of course I am not planning to repeat what others have done just right. I found the official  “Hello World” tutorial from Android’s developers site very complete and helpful to get us started. There is even a complete website titled “Hello Android” dedicated to publish Android’s tutorials among other things. But what I am really exited about is to start reading and actually coding by following “Hello Android: Introducing Google’s mobile development platform” on its third edition by “The pragmatic bookshelf” folks.

This is not the first book I buy from “The Pragmatic Bookshelf” and I have to confess that I am a bit addicted to their books. I found their writting style and the way they organize their books very attractive and practical. If you are the kind of geek who learns by doing I would not be surprise that you will feel the same whenever you read books from this developer’s book shop.

This time the pragmatic programmer’s surprised me with a concept that I had not experienced before, well I have to confess that I did not read the first or second edition of this book so for me a section called “Fast-Forward” at the end of each chapter was pretty innovative. Basically if you need to get a grasp of what each topic is about and jump right into coding by just reading the target chapters this is what you need or even if you have already read the whole book but just happen that you want to refresh the concept before an intensive coding session “Fast-Forward” is what you want to go through to find out what you want to read again.

At the time of writing this article I had not finished reading the book so coding examples are still to come from my side, rather that showing silly code I would like to show a more hearty “Android’s Hello World” but for that I need to prepare few server side Restful interfaces to play with from my very first Android’s application. So this is the plan; I need to extend a web application to manage customers information and what a great first Android’s App such I can also manage my customer’s from a smart-phone.

LG’s a big name in the wireless phone industry is just coming up with a similar strategy proposing a family of smart-phone devices called “Optimus” sporting latest Android’s 2.2 “Froyo” way ahead of anyone else including Samsung so far. LG’s Optimus which may also will follow Samsung’s approach to be open to all US carrier’s with similar and competitive hardware options including Android’s based tablets as well.

Once a dream of bell labs gurus including Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thomson the original creator’s of the Unix OS way back in the late nineteen sixties and a group of high profile computer scientist including Rob Pike and Douglas Mcllroy among others tried to come up with the idea of having a small but powerful OS (Plan 9) capable of running networked appliance devices and taking advantage of the Internet endless possibilities. Today it is not “Inferno” but Android OS which as any other microkernel OS “Unix Like” operating system such as “Linux” highly leveraged key interconnectivity concepts from Plan 9′s original proposal but at the end the vision is getting to become reality among commercial and consumer electronics market. Both Samsung and LG already well established tech appliance device’s giants seriously pushing Android’s capable devices which are not only aiming at the smart-phone’s market but literally we are talking about serious companies getting into the whole spectrum of cloud portals kind of devices such as mobile, home and business appliances running Android’s OS platform there will be no limits.

References for my academic “geek” fellows

1. Plan 9 authentication in Linux, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 42 , Issue 5 (July 2008) Research and developments in the Linux kernel, Pages: 27-33, Year of Publication: 2008
2. The use of name spaces in Plan 9, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 27 , Issue 2 (April 1993), Pages: 72 – 76, Year of Publication: 1993
3. What’s GNU? Plan 9 Part II, Linux Journal archive, Volume 1995 , Issue 12es (April 1995), Article No.: 5, Year of Publication: 1995
4. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Proc. of the Summer 1990 UKUUG Conf., London, July, 1990, pp. 1-9 (
5. Plan 9, A Distributed System, Proc. of the Spring 1991 EurOpen Conf., Troms, May, 1991, pp. 43-50 (

Competition is good and seriously it is getting darn good! A list of Android’s devices is somewhat kept up to date at wikipedia. Besides HTC and Motorola that has been front runners so far but the big players in the low end of wireless devices such as LG and Samsung are emerging with very appealing and affordable options for the rest of us. On top of that PC maker’s such as ACER and DELL are also aggressive with their hybrids smart-phone/entry tablet devices…

At Verizon you can get an Android phone staring from 49.99 (LG Ally) up to HTC Droid incredible for 199.99. But as incredible as it sounds Verizon is already making space for the newest Motorola Droid X which is aiming to compete front to front with HTC EVO 4G and the so expected iPhone4. Thanks there are options and many of them. Similar offerings from other wireless carriers are coming as well, so an smart-phone for everyone seems likely the future to be.

On the Nokia front of course this is not Android but Symbian OS based the Nokia N8 has been also announced and looks pretty promising if price point . Palm is getting stuck with the Palm Pre and Pixi offerings and it does not sounds like there will be anything new before HP’s take over gets completed. We can not rule out neither Nokia or Palm since they share of the overall wireless market is still strong.

But if you are a hard core developer and aiming for trying Android SDK to create Android Apps then you may be waiting just like me for a discounted Nexus One or an Android Development phone, yes these smart-phones are not leading edge in regards to feature set and they are not subsidized unless you want to get engaged with T-Mobile  which is not the most appealing option in the USA northwest at least for me. Getting a development friendly device means it is hardware unlocked, it features a plain boot loader which usually means you can upgrade to the latest Android release as soon as it gets available and you may be able to run not signed apps to test them before you get them up to Android Market or any other distribution way you may choose.

I have to say it again, seems to me that there is no better time for a software engineer to be get into the “Apps” software development wave, just choose a couple of targets to start with and get ready to amaze the millions of potential user’s that are awaiting for your next “App”.

Preparing the development environment is the first step

In my case I am running Ubuntu 10.4 LTS – 64 bits workstation operating system on a desktop computer. Android’s SDK is Java based so the first think is to make sure Java JDK is all set up. Yeah, Android folks have a specific “Ubuntu Linux Notes” section, it is not great. Seems like I need to make sure I got “ia32-libs” and “sun-java6-jdk” packages installed.

Lucky me! I got all that stuff installed already, go figure that would be the case for a software geek, well I am not embarrassed in any way.

Ok. Seems like Eclipse IDE for Java developers “Galileo” version is a recommended one, this one I know I do not have installed while I do really prefer the Bash shell and a trusty plain text editor like “Emacs” or “Vim” but I do not think it will hurt having this tool as part of the arsenal just in case is really needed one day. I am not going to explain the whole Eclipse installation which involves downloading a “tar” file, unpacking its content and create a application launcher. Instead I will make a reference to John Paulett instructions which I followed to have this task completed.

Well, seems like that is it to get ready so let’s get into the subject matter now.

Getting the actual Android SDK is next …

Good, this part is also pretty straight forward. It requires to download Android SDK core files, unpack them under your home directory and add a reference to system path to make programs within tools folder available. So far everything has been business as usual with no problems following Android’s page instructions, nice!! The content of the core SDK folder is shown in screen-shoot below.

Seems like Eclipse IDE is a real deal …

Well, Android SDK installation instructions dedicate a section to help you configure Eclipse’s required Android Development Tools plug-in. If you are looking for using the shell this step is not necessary. I am getting the feeling that Eclipse is a big deal for Android development or just a big deal for Java developers in general, I can not make an opinion on this topic by now but I am intrigued to learn more about it so I will go ahead and have this ADT plug-in setup. Wow, to get to the actual ADT plug-in installation instructions you have to navigate for a couple of links, here it is a shortcut to the actual “Downloading ADT Plug-in” page. Configuring this plug-in involves several steps as shown in screen-shoots sequence below.

Step 1. Open up you freshly installed Eclipse IDE and select from menu. Help -> Install New Software
Step 2. Adding plug-in site information. Click OK.
Step 3. Select developer tools to be installed and click next.
Step 4. Well, if you want to continue you must agreed with terms and conditions. Nothing to be afraid here with a GNU Public License.
Step 5. Well, I did not expect this message but seems like Google still need to work with the Eclipse folks to have ADT packaged signed. I would not worry about this and click OK.
Step 6. Well, Eclipse needs your confirmation about accepting this unsigned certificate. Yes, no problem click OK.
Step 7. What??? Three times to convince Eclipse IDE that I really do not care about Google’s unsigned package problem. Click OK.
Step 8. Cool, after few minutes we got this ADT plug-in installed. wonder if other Eclipse plug-ins also get force to pass over all this clicking OK and Next buttons sequencing. Seems like we are good now!

Finally installing Android SDK components …

I guess this is the installation step we have been waiting for. Time to install Android SDK platform and extra components. After reading the brief explanation I decided to go for the “FULL” install. One more click takes me to “Adding SDK Components” page. There are many ways to do this including a very easy and straight forward via bash but we have got our Eclipse IDE and ADT plug-in installed already then let’s try the GUI way this time. Just had to open up Eclipse IDE again and followed the steps as shown in scree-shoots sequence below.

Step 1. From Eclipse IDE select from Menu. Windows -> Android SDK and AVD Manager.
Step 2. I am committed and went ahead selecting all “Available Packages”. Click “Install Selected” button.
Step 3. Yes, I am sure. select accept all radio button and click “Install” button below.
Step 4. Things are looking promising now, just need to wait until all these components are downloaded and installed.
Step 5. Cool, Eclipse installer found a dependency. Well I accept it. Clicked Yes and things continued.
Step 6. Cool, it all done. Click “Close” and got back to Eclipse IDE, no errors!

Final comments…

The installation process indeed is not complicated but it takes several steps and different applications to be executed, at least for Linux 64 bits version some basic Linux shell knowledge is definitely required. Seems like Eclipse IDE is optional but there is a lot of documentation that suggests that is a good idea to use it not only for installation but for executing common Android development tasks as well. I will be writing about “Hello World” Android application tutorial and other findings in a separate articles. Now we are ready to create Android projects from Eclipse IDE as shown in scree-shoot below! Yeah.

In a previous blog I mentioned why getting into Android’s speed boat might be a good idea since these platform aims not only to the mobile devices but also to home, retail and enterprise  “always connected” devices; and for always connected I mean to the INTERNET cloud of services.  In another blog I also mentioned that Android’s OS was also worth considering for being the one showing the biggest growing trend in the market, since then I have been trying to find someone actually writing about latest figures to avoid getting stock with 2009 data.

Today I got blown away after reading “Tomi Ahonen” article “Deciphering Android’s Smartphone Sales Figures“. Android OS is selling at a ratio of 100,000 units a day, yes you read ok a “DAY” and to put it simple this is coming from “61 different device models from 21 different manufacturers” as noted by the author. If you are really interested, I recommend you to also to read “Smartphones Bloodbath 1Q 2010: Full Market Analysis” from the same author.

As recommended by wise people, never put all your eggs in the same basket, and as recommended by “W. Chan Kim” and “Renee Mauborgne”; Try to find a “Blue Ocean” to navigate towards a more certain success, it is also wise to choose at least a couple of more development platforms to bet on. At this point I am leaning towards “MeeGo” and “WebOS” and the rationale behind it is that both platforms seems like would be the most “OPEN”, “FREE”, “BLUE” and “DIVERSE” from the rest of the pack but I hope you would do your very own due diligence before choosing the boat to ride this wave.

You may be asking why is that I am not even mentioning “iPhone OS platform” as an option. An I have to disclose that iPhone OS platform is very appealing, robust and stable so it is worth to be considered. Hope you were a history class fan during middle school and at least learned that reading all those books and narratives fulfill many purposes for your own formation but one of them is to teach you that learning from past experiences of our ancestors will place you in a better position to resolve similar situations at your present and possibly position yourself to have a better future. And also some wise people has said that the “Man” is the only animal that falls down by hitting the same rock.

The only argument I have is that Mr. Steve Jobs and the flock of Geniuses at Apple inc. are repeating their early eighties story, they had the best personal computer hardware and the best OS at a very early stage in the wave but they never went OPEN and lost against the flock of companies offering IBM compatible PCs. Today Apple may have a great smart-phone device and a great OS but again it is embracing a CLOSED strategy with only a handful device models, only one wireless carrier per region, only one way to deploy apps etc, etc, etc. Until Mr Steve Jobs and company do not demonstrate that this time could be different I am betting on the “OPEN” and “BLUE OCEAN“  like proposals instead and hope I am not wrong by relying on history this time.

Today, Samsung and Sony are about to offers SDKs for their TV sets and Yahoo in collaboration with TV makers also offers a TV widgets SDK. TiVo media SDK much like the Google TV but without the search component just yet. Apple is still to announce an SDK for its Apple TV that would presumably be competing against Android Market too. Microsoft with its media center SDK was a pioneer on this end but for some reason it has not gotten into the consumer’s stream but an option to be considered which has not an appliance factor yet.

JUST A HUMBLE OPINION: After so many years of operating systems battle in the PC arena, seems like the PC is becoming the less attractive emerging platform to deploy applications and the platforms showing a winning trend are Unix/Linux like operating systems in pretty much all fronts. As a Linux Desktop user for many years now I am not surprised of how things have been evolving. While Microsoft designed their operating system platforms to incrementally be extremely HW demanding with every new release (which I suspect to accelerate PC market replenishments)  Linux like operating systems has always bet on small footprint and performance which is finally paying back on the mobile devices arena and will be certainly aiming to the web enabled devices at homes, retail spaces, factories and enterprise offices in the near future.

The only one thing I can certainly say is that there has not been a better time to be a Software Developer and it is getting better every day. There are tons of options to capitalize and grow on the apps market with hundred of millions of potential user’s in the playground.

So the trick was published by the scratch team on their “Scratch on Linux” web page but here it is a short version;

1. Download your debian package from “Scrath download page” to your desktop.
2. Open your trusty Gnome terminal, get to your Desktop directory and run;
   • sudo dpkg -i –force-architecture ./scratch_1.4.0.1-0ubuntuX_i386.deb

Note that “X” before “_i386″ is the version of your Scratch DEB package in my case it was “scratch_1.4.0.1-0ubuntu5_i386.deb”. Now enjoy programming with your kids using Scratch programming language which underneath is really running Smalltalk 80 programming instructions.

After install is completed just run Scratch from your “Programming” applications menu;

Start scratching !!!

NO, I am not crazy.

I do really want to check if this solution works. To demonstrate that I am committed, I have also added a “Contact” form at the “About” page with no CAPTCHA or silly questions asked. I am ready to dive into messages if necessary. Give me your best shoot.

There are APIs (Application Program Interfaces) for almost any electronic device out there but most of its SDKs (Software Development Kits) allows you to write programs on your computer to interact with their respective electronic device and there is almost a different API for each device even within devices sold by the same company. Now Smart-phones allow intrepid software developers (mostly companies) to create arbitrary “Apps” (Software Applications) that run inside the smart-phone device; what a cool thing!! the question is which one to choose among an open ocean of options and restrictions.

Why is it so attractive to create Smart-phone “apps”?

In my opinion these devices are very appealing due its portability, connectivity, usability and now a days it’s coolness. Needless to say that those little things are used daily by millions of people and they are becoming increasingly addictive among Yuppies (Young Urban Professionals) and not so young one’s too.

Now getting into the subject matter;

Lately I have been struggling trying to decide which smart-phone to get now that my 5 year old LG cellular phone is about to die so you can imagine how conservative I am in regards to sticking to things that just work well. It is difficult to make a decision for many reasons but mostly because new smart-phones have the ability to be programmed (create “Apps”) and as a hard core software engineer anything that can be programmed is something I instinctively try to hack. So instead of looking for a trendy phone showcased on a mall store or kiosk I went ahead and got to review the variety of software development kits to see if I would get some affinity to anyone in particular.  Yes, I am weird.

There are plenty of options to choose and not surprisingly many of them look alike but they are not fully compatible with each other so sticking to one or two technologies would represent plenty of effort just for having fun besides some recent surveys (Ovum’s Cripps) suggest that three platform would be the sweet spot for developers. In regards of platforms; Gizmodo and InfoWorld among other’s reputable gadget sites already consider around five of them such as Apple, Google, RIM, Microsoft and PALM which are the big players in smart-phone category but I would add a couple more to include Nokia and Samsung since they are big players in the mobile industry overall. Let’s make a quick assessment to see which one could be more appealing based on the following characteristics; Native Phone OS, Phone Application Architecture, Supported Programming Languages, Development OS, Development Tools and Deployment Infrastructure.

The list of contenders;

List below is ordered by its 2010 Smart-phone market share based on comScore.com report, Nokia and Samsung at the end due they do not appear in this report:

This is how smart-phone development platforms compare;

This assessment is based on information provided by SDK links in the list above and it should not be considered authoritative since it is only expressing the author’s opinion, interpretation and may be bias by author’s own affinities. Note that I am not currently participating in any of this development programs yet. From information in table below I can conclude that is a good idea to refresh my C/C++ and Java skills if I want to get into the smart-phone development market as well as to be open for embracing a multi-platform development environment to effectively be able to learn and produce smart-phone apps on at least a couple of these development platforms. So far both Apple and Google are more appealing to me.

Yes indeed, the smart-phone development market is a RED ocean but if we could find some BLUE ocean I feel heavily inclined towards the open and free proposal from Android which is the one that is recently ramping up and positioning as a serious contender.

More to think about; commercial printers also have Apps …

Commercial printing industry is also reacting to mobile and cloud computing trend; now relatively inexpensive printer’s are cloud capable where smart-phones can locate and print to these devices while they are connected to the internet cloud. This is not something new for enterprise printing but for commercial printing is a matter of survival since millions of user’s spend more time dealing with their smart-pone than with their personal computers and this is a huge opportunity to drive pages to be printed on paper. Lexmark and HP had launched similar initiatives and even Google is about to launch its “Google Cloud Print” initiative.

Lexmark printer apps and HP’s ePrint Center initiatives and their development approach are very similar to the smart-phone development market but this time the apps are able to control and drive features such as Scan, Store, Fax and Print engaging these printers to the always connected ecosystem on any imaginable way. So these add more complexity to the apps world market while you can create apps that runs on smart-phones which are capable to connect and interact with your apps running on your printer devices to create a whole new experience for people and businesses.

In summary, The upgrade process is simple but it is not something you can leave unattended, the steps below will show you all the screens that requires attention during the upgrade process and the ones you should provide a mouse click or hit enter in your keyboard. I am pretty sure Ubuntu image mirror servers where overloaded yesterday and possibly will be still overloaded for a couple of days so be prepared for long waiting hours while new distribution packages are downloaded and then installed. All my applications and development environment remained intact including all applications not supported directly by Canonical organization and I was able to work business as usual right away after restarting the system and login into my freshly 10.4 LTS OS so no complains so far but will be reporting any issues or findings along the way if necessary. With no more to add here it is the story:

Step 1 Late on April 29th, 2010 but surely Ubuntu 10.4 upgrade icon showed up and temptation was just a click away. I am guilty I could not resists so I clicked over the upgrade button on top.
Step 2 Hey, any modern and serious product including the opensource ones had to offer any sort of release notes before you acquire a product so this is the one for “Lucid Lynx” release. Click on the upgrade button again and you will be on your way.
Step 3 Wait few seconds for upgrade files to be downloaded. No clicks necessary here unless you want to cancel the upgrade operation at this point.
Step 4 This is a common warning/disclaimer from Ubuntu organization since they provide warranty on their own supported packages. In my experience I have never had a problem with third party packages after an upgrade. A click is necessary here.
Step5 Waiting for software channels to be established. In my case it took about 10 minutes on the day of the launch I can just think Ubuntu servers would become overcrowded.
Step 6 Waiting a couple of minutes more while the necessary changes were calculated.
Step 7 This is a second warning about all applications that will be not supported by the new version which usually means there will be a new one replacing it not necesarily that it will be lost. After browsing over the list you need to click “Close” button to continue.
Step 8 The summary of changes to be made is presented along with some warnings about the upgrade; basically do nothing while upgrading to be sure there are no conflicts. Note that this distribution is about 787 MB and the calculated download time relatively on my connection speed was about one hour. At this point you will need to click “Start Upgrade” button which basically means “Start Download” of packages.
Step 9 The download process starts and I notice that we always have the chance to “Cancel” this operation with no consequences except the time invested so far. I started downloading packages about 4:45 pm PST. Initial ETA time was 1 hour and four minutes, yeah that must be right today.
Step 10 Well, 171 packages out of 1446 so far at this point and as I was expecting in a very busy day like this; download ETA predictions will be skewed a bit and after about 45 minutes the average ETA time showed was around 6 to 7 hours. I started to wonder if someone is counting the number of upgrades happening on the launch day. At this point I was wondering if in some point Ubuntu servers would fail or just stop serving packages to the hungry crowd.
Step 11 In some point the download process was completed with no problems and I do not have any record of the actual time but this morning after more than 12 hours I woke up and notice one more pending message waiting for my input. This time Grub boot loader asking for some information. The help mentions something like if you do not know choose all of them but I did know so I selected the good one and clicked “Forward” button.
Step 12 Wow, the install process continued I was wondering if it could be stalled after all I left it unattended for several hours. After 20 minutes the installation portion gets completed. Yeah !!!!
Step 13 Now, Ubuntu upgrade program asked me if I wanted to keep all previous garbage or to remove it. I just clicked “Remove” button confident that there will not be any big consequences on my decision.
Step 14 Waiting for about 3 minutes while all not necessary packages and files were removed. Nothing to do here but just staring at all this removing messages hoping for the best part that was about to come.
Step 15 Fantastic, this is the time I have been waiting for … Impatiently clicked  ”Restart Now”  come to Papa baby.
That is it!! It is all done, everything is in its place. Even Google chrome showed up as the default browser. By now all is happiness lets start digging in on what is new on this distribution.