Android experiment with Linux 64

Today I took an initial look into Android in my Linux 64 bit. After some time of initial hiccups with my eclipse IDE (Galileo), I was able to install Android development plug-ins onto eclipse.

Repository to install android is

https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/

After installing I tried creating a new Android project, but my Android preference complained me about my ncurses.so.5 (Unfortunately I have not installed i686 binaries of this library).

$ android-sdk-linux_86/tools/adb version

Rpmfind came to my rescue here in finding the rpm for me. Link to download ncurses.so.5 (32 bit) - This is for FC12

Download and try a yum localinstall

yum localinstall ncurses-libs-5.7-3.20090207.fc12.i686.rpm

After installing adb is giving me version

$ android-sdk-linux_86/tools/adb version
Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.25

Here is a snapshot of downloading android SDK through eclipse

After downloading create a new Android project from eclipse.

I created my first Activity like this

import android.app.Activity;

import android.os.Bundle;

import android.widget.TextView;

public class FirstActivity extends Activity 

{

    /** Called when the activity is first created. */

    @Override

    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) 

    {

        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        TextView tv = new TextView(this);

        tv.setText("Shinus first Android test");

        setContentView(tv);

    }

After this start your emulator (I tried from console prompt)

./emulator -no-audio -avd Test_Console &

Here -no-audio is required otherwise it didn't started fine for me (Fedora 12 64bit). Please be patient. It took almost 2 minutes to see the android mobile desktop.

And Test_Console (Android Virtual Device) can be created using the following command

./android create avd -n Test_Console -t 1

List of Virtual devices can be listed by issuing this command

android list avd

After this I tried deploying the app I created using eclipse first from console. Here is the command to do that

./adb install /home/shinu/workspace/android-space/FirstAndroid/bin/FirstAndroid.apk

Here is the screenshot of my first android app running in FC12 64bit

Happy Android Coding :)

Google and Charity

Year end email from google, the year end gift from google, is something very special this time. Hats off again google.

See Google's Gift

Orkut New

Its very unusual that I visited Orkut on a Sunday eve. Orkut gave me the option try out the new build. I clicked on the the big 'O' with my fingers crossed to see the surprise from google. But I was a bit shocked after seeing the first look which is not at all impressive from gooogle. The UI is not at all impressive saying that I'm not so sure that whether its an issue with my Opera (Non supported by google wave) browser. But this time google did not warned me even that I'm using an untested browser. The UI I feel like below standards. Lot of issues with css rendering, and the font also not looks so great. 

Here is a ksnaphot and gimpify of my orkut homepage

Google has to definitely revisit this design. From an Orkut user perspective there should be lot of improvements needed in this page.

Google wave

Google did it again with the new innovation named Google wave. I came to know about this today from Toolz tweet. Watch this short youtube video to get more idea on what is wave. Currently only limited preview is available. So don't wait go ahead and register. I'm eagerly waiting to see how it works. Clearly this is going to be the next generation collaboration tool.

Google video chat

Yet another fundoo from google. Yes the simplicity again, video chat in google. Really amazing, but one thing which i didn't like is this So yes i need to wait for some more time :(

Google's ajax search api

This api is available for quiet a long period of time, but i noticed this api today only. After going through couple of blog posts and search api homepage, i feel like writing a blog entry about this api is really worth. One of the striking thing with this api is, this api can give you an aggregation of various search options available in the google homepage. Its a kind of all in one shot. This api can crawl through web searches of various flavours including * Web * Local search * Video * News * Image * Books * Patents It is very simple to incorporate this ajax search api into the web page. We can call the appropriate javascript method will give you the search result in json. Include the script src url and load the script using google.load("search","1") Create a GSearchControl instance and call the predefined method. searchControl.addSearcher(new GlocalSearch()); // Local search searchControl.addSearcher(new GwebSearch()); // Web search searchControl.addSearcher(new GvideoSearch()); // Video search searchControl.addSearcher(new GblogSearch()); // Blog search searchControl.addSearcher(new GnewsSearch()); // News search searchControl.addSearcher(new GimageSearch()); // Image search searchControl.addSearcher(new GbookSearch()); // Book search GSearchControl can control the draw modes also, it can display search results in Linear mode (GSearchControl.DRAW_MODE_LINEAR) or Tabbed mode (GSearchControl.DRAW_MODE_TABBED) These are some of the exciting features. But still more inside this set of API. Do read the - documentation section in google

Yet another browser!!!

Yes its a fact, Google is coming up with a new browser named as Chrome. Its going to be real buzz soon - will this be an end of Firefox era? I'm afraid :(. The google analytics report says that the 8.6% of the internet users are hitting the internet apps from Chrome browser. This is defenitely not a small amount of users. At this point of time most of the people will be downloading this software and testing this application. I believe google can really grab the browser market with their simplicity. Some of the real addons google team says about this browser when compare with other browsers are

• Well designed to execute todays applications (web2.0)
• This browser can load javascript faster than other browsers
• Loading of components to the browser is multi-threaded. (All the other browsers load content single threaded. For eg:- if the browser is loading javascript, it won't do any other set of operation) Google addressed this as one of the major enhancement as this is going to increase web2.0 apps performance drastically, because of this asynchronus architecture
• Tabbed browsing
• One of the interesting feature - If the browser crashes while loading one of the webpage due to some bug (either in code or in browser code) it wont crash the entire browser, just the tab will be crashed. User can continue using all other tabs (Great feature isn't)
• Each tab will be addressed in diffrent memory space. When ever we close a tab, the memory will be freed up and the total process is going to end
• From google chrome's task manager user will be knowing how much memory a particular website is taking to load (All the tabs, plugins are run as seperate process)
• Webkit is the renedering engine google used for renedring the webpages
• The url bar offers not only visited url's, but also search suggestions, popular sites, ranked sites that you have not visited and more interestingly, you can search over the url bar history.
• The home page browser is going to change, The new browser is going to give users a tab which contains the most recently visitied 9 pages and a search engine towards the right of the screen
• This browser can work in read-only mode also. If the user do not want to save any of his/her visited url's cache etc on to the hard disk, user can do this if they start the browser in read only mode (Cool one)
• Chrome can automatically detect malwares and can block the further actions of these malwares. Chrome code can block this malware to a particular tab and once we close that tab, the malware will also go off with out much harm
• The entire user experience is sandboxed. Sandboxed security is enabled to the users and plugin
• When we login to a phishing website, chrome can really warn us. This is available with the help of google search engine crawling logics. Anybody can make use of this feature as this is a Public API from google (Now gmail warns emails from phishing websites. Might be the same feature)
• And the last but not the least "Open Source" - like all other google apps. (I hope google won't come up with a paid version which can give X times faster). The entire browser code is available in the internet

Google has not released a Linux version of this browser yet, I'm eagerly waiting for that to come up. I'm praying that they won't tell users to run the application using wine (Like they disappointed Linux user when release Picasa). I hope google will come up with a Linux compiled chrome. The entire scraps i have taken from this finely readable help approach from google. I really like this simplicity google. My hats off to you folks.