Adaptive Software Solutions

This is the seventh in a series of videos published by Google on Android programming. In this video the speaker starts an app to track photos his buddy publishes on Flickr. He can keep this application running in the background, so while he is browsing or checking his email, this application will constantly track the photos and notify him if a new photo has been uploaded.

This is the sixth in a series of videos provided by Google on Android programming. Index: 00:00 Introduction 00:32 Zebra crossing application 01:35 Library app 02:14 A GeoSocial app which combines user GPS, user created photos, and Compass My Takeaway: Android applications do not have any borders. They can use data from other applicatiosns, they can use hardware available on the device such as camera, compass, GPS, accelerometer, etc, and they can also use content from the web API's. The first application called Zebra Crossing is an application which can pull information from bar codes and QR codes. So if you photograph a product's bar code and give it to the application, it will pull up information about the book from the web. If on the other hand you give it a QR code from the back of a business card, it can extract contact information about that person which you can use to call or send email. The Zebra Crossing app also publishes intents, to allow other applications to commu

This is the fifth in a series of videos provided by Google on Android programming. This video shows how we can use the WebView to create applications that render HTML pages. Along with being able to embed HTML and Javascript web pages in apps, the most exciting thing I found in this view was the fact that the Javascript in a webpage can communicate with Java code and Java code can communicate with javascript. This is really cool.

This is the fourth video in the series of videos provided by Google on Android programming. Index: 00:25 Dianes ringtone app 01:08 App to create a shortcut to anything on the system 01:36 Replacing the home screen (End at 02:17) My Takeaway: This video shows that all applications created on the Android platform are equal. Even though I have not done any iPhone development, I believe applications written for iPhone do not have access to everything the way Android applications do. So this is a positive for Android development. In this video we see how to a custom application can change the ringtone on an Android phone, how another application can create shortcuts to anything on the phone, and how we can also change the 'Home' application.

This is the third video in the series of videos provided by Google on Android programming. Index: 00:00 Introduction 00:16 Android API's 00:24 Location Manager 01:25 XMPP 02:42 Notification Manager 04:08 View System 06:00 Conclusion (Ends at 07:05) My Takeaway: In this video the speaker talks about API's provided on the Android platform to developers. The LocationManager API allows an application to get the location of the device it is running on. This information can be used to register intents, which will inform the user if they are close to an interesting location such as a Ice Cream shop. I can also think of another use. If traffic information is available, then we can also use the location manager to inform us if we are getting close to a high traffic area. Interestingly this API uses whatever information it has to determine the location. If GPS information is available then it will use that, otherwise it will use cell tower information. XMPP Service is used to send mess

This is the second video in the series of videos provided by Google on Android programming. Index 00:00 - Introduction 01:00 - How Android integrates apps written by different authors. 07:50 - Conclusion (Ends at 08:16) This video walks us through a hypothetical use case, where a user opens their email, reads a message which contains a link to some location. The user then clicks on the link, opens the browser and views the location on Google Maps. While engaging in these activities, the user starts various applications (processes) and also navigates back and forth among them. The video explains how Android manages resources and the application stack so the user can navigate across their apps seamlessly. My Takeaway From the video it seems like Android supports a maximum of 4 running processes. One of those processes is the System process, so a user can have at most 3 applications running simultaneously. However, this does not mean that a user cannot open more applications. When the use

I have been getting interested in Android programming, so I went over to their website and found some introductory videos. Here's the first one with a little index of what is discussed and my take away from the video. Video Index: 00:0 Introduction 00:40 Linux Kernel 01:09 Native Libraries 03:09 Android runtime 04:13 Core libraries 04:31 Application framework 07:00 Applications 07:25 Application building blocks 09:37 Example of re-using components in Android 12:18 Conclusion and resources 12:48 End My Takeaway: Architecture wise the Android platform has several layers: Linux Kernel Native Libraries Android Runtime Core Libraries Application Framework The applications that we make are build on top of the "application framework" layer. The Linux Kernel was chosen because of it's stability, services, security, and presence of several device drivers. Native Libraries consist of various components for rendering graphics and fonts (Surface Manager, OpenGL, SGL, Freetype), a