This is interesting. I just got an email that I’ll be receiving a free Droid or Nexus One as part of the Device Seeding program for a Top 200 entry in ADC2.

So Google gave out phones at the Android Developer Labs, a boatload more phones for the top developers in the market based on downloads/rating, and now more for ADC2 participants.

I know a lot of developers that weren’t happy because they missed out on the free phones for Market Developers, but they may still get a chance as it looks like the Seeding program isn’t done.

Congratulations! You are one of the top 200 developers in round 1 of the Android Developer Challenge 2. To celebrate your success and encourage you to create more awesome Android apps, we would like to present you with a brand new Android device as part of our developer device seeding program.  

You will receive either a Verizon Droid by Motorola or a Nexus One. Developers with mailing addresses in the US will receive either a Droid or Nexus One, based on random distribution. Developers from Canada, EU, and the EEA states (Norway, Lichtenstein), Switzerland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore will receive a Nexus One. Developers with mailing addresses in countries not listed above will not receive a phone since these phones are not certified to be used in other countries.   

Please do not request specific phones; allocation will be by random distribution and we will be unable to accommodate individual requests. Please allow 2-4 weeks from today for delivery of the phone. If you have any questions or if you have a change of address, please send an email immediately to android-market-seeding@google.com.  

We hope that you will enjoy your new device and continue to build more insanely popular apps for Android!   

Thanks, Android Developer Programs

I still haven’t decided on an analytics company for my iPhone apps yet. I can’t stand the reports at Pinch Media. Flurry isn’t bad, I hope they keep Flurry’s reports over Pinch’s after the merger. I recently moved my iPhone apps to use Motally, so we’ll see how that goes.

But I think I’ve found my Analytics provider for my Android apps. There aren’t as many choice compared to the iPhone right now, so I’m sure things will change in a few months.

As of January 12, 2010, though, here are my notes from looking into Android App Analytics providers. I’m sure there are others, but I lost interest in evaluating any more.

1. Flurry

I’d looked at Flurry quite some time ago, but balked when they required adding LOCATION permissions to your app’s manifest before using their analytics package. They’ve change it now so all they require is android.permission.INTERNET.

The location permissions are optional (android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION or android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION).

This is who I ended up going with. No complaints about the info they provide. All the usual stuff: users, sessions, customizable events, devices, carrier, firmware info.

Actually, one pleasant surprise was that they tracked errors happening with my apps in the field that I had no idea about.

Flurry Rants – ok, I do have a couple of complaints:
- Their main site doesn’t have a lot of details. It’s mostly fluffy marketing stuff. You have to sign up before finding out anything.
- The documentation isn’t the easiest to find on their developer site and it’s pretty minimal as it is.

2. Motally

I wanted to go with Motally because I just moved my iPhone apps to them and have all my apps in one place, but I ran into a quick showstopper.

Make sure to add the following permissions in your application’s AndroidManifest.xml
• <uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE”/>
• <uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE”/>
• <uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE”/>
• <uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION”/>
• <uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.INTERNET”/>

WOW! Location permissions are required and also READ_PHONE_STATE!  I’m sure my users will love it if I add all those.

Pass.

I’ve been told that the next version will make more permissions optional, so I’ll re-evaluate them down the road.

3. mobilytics

No dice. Still in Private Beta.

4. Localytics

To be honest, I didn’t even get as far as signing up here. The Flash reports in the demo turned me off initially, and then when their wiki/documentation site was slow, I didn’t bother going any further.

5. Medialytics

I couldn’t sign up. Rats.

6. Google Analytics for Android

I’m surprised Google Analytics for Android isn’t the best option out there, but it looks like someone’s side project. It would be nice to have my Android analytics in the same place as my website analytics, but this looks like it hasn’t been updated in ages.

Last Monday, I went to the Android Developer Lab event in Mountain View where Google invited Android developers to test out their apps on several Android devices.

I’d only tested my apps on a G1, so I was anxious to test these phones out.  Especially since I get numerous complaints about Force Closes on other phones which I’m unable to reproduce on my device.  At least with my iPhone apps, I can get Crash Reports through iTunes, so I have a better clue what’s going on with those crashes.

Here are the phones they made available for us (and the OS version):
Motorola Droid (Android 2.0)
HTC Hero (Android 1.5)
LG ??? (Android 1.5) [I guess the name wasn't catchy enough for me to remember]
HTC Hero (Android 1.5)
HTC Tattoo (Android 1.6)
Samsung Galaxy (Android 1.5)

I only had time to test 3 phones, but here are my impressions.

HTC Tattoo
The first phone I check out was the HTC Tattoo.  It’s a nice small phone, but I don’t know if the choice to go with QVGA (240×320) was worth it.  This phone caused the most buzz around the room, but not for good reasons.  Many people were complaining how their apps looked on the Tattoo.

I admit that I’ve optimized my apps for HVGA(320×480), and made many UI decisions based on this.  My biggest problem on the Tattoo is that I have 4 buttons along the bottom of my screen, which doesn’t fit the Tattoo at all.  The far right button ends up just getting cutoff.  Plus the buttons look really large and fuzzy, kind of embarrassing.

There are solutions to this that require some effort, so I decided to punt and look at other devices.  To be honest, unless I see that HTC is selling tons of these phones, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to make it work.

Plus, my apps don’t even show up in the Android Market on the HTC Tattoo.  My apps don’t explicitly state in the manifest that they’ll display correctly at QVGA, so they don’t show up in the Tattoo Market.  If people were downloading my apps on a Tattoo and getting a bad user experience, I’d look into fixing this, but I’m going make this device a low priority unless sales are outstanding.

Another weird oddity from a user perspective:  I had problems using this touchscreen.  Whenever I tried to scroll, it would select what I was touching.  I didn’t spend a lot of time investigating this, but it’s something I didn’t encounter on any other Android devices or the iPhone or the Pre.

Samsung Galaxy
I was very impressed with this phone.  It might be my favorite Android phone if not for the Droid.  No complaints about this phone from a developer perspective. (probably because it’s running Android 1.5 and has a normal 320×480 display).

The biggest problem with this phone is that it looks like a toy next to the Droid.

Motorola Droid
The Droid lives up to the hype!  If I were on Verizon I would get one immediately.  The screen is massive and beautiful.

When I first used it, it reminded me more of a tablet or computer than a phone.  Partially because the edges remind me more of a picture frame than the sleek, slimming iPhone style edges.

The Droid’s resolution (854×480) didn’t cause too many problems.  The biggest problem with my apps was that my fonts were tiny and unreadable.  This was an easy fix, though.  I changed my fonts from Points (ex: 10pt) to Scale-independent Pixels (16sp), and things were great on the droid and other devices.

Unfortunately that was all I was able to test since there were limited numbers of each phone and waiting lists.

I missed these the last time I posted about events.  Here are a few more mobile/geo events around Silicon Valley this summer.

July 21
Web Map Social Mountain View, 7pm
NASA WorldWind, Brightkite, WeoGeo + networking

July 22
Silicon Valley Android Developers Palo Alto, 6:30pm
App demos and how to program in Android

July 27
iPhone Business Meetup Santa Clara, 6pm
Challenges and Opportunities for iPhone in Enterprises

July 28
Verizon Developer Conference San Jose, CA

July 28
Palm Pre, Mojo, and webOS Meetup Sunnyvale, 7pm

August 7
GTUG Campout Mountain View
Weekend Hackathon on Google Technologies

So I went to a Hackathon sponsored by Symbian at Jillians yesterday. Fun event, they gave out phones for people to create apps on and then take home. I got a Nokia E75, and it looked like they were giving out Nokia 5800s earlier. I also won a Flip HD camcorder for the widget I created.

The Web Runtime platform is really easy to work with once you get things set up. Although one thing that would have been nice to have at the event would have been a simple handout with instructions how to setup the dev environment and create a Hello World app.

I used to develop J2ME apps for Series 60 ages ago, and that’s one thing that is difficult with Nokia is finding what you need just to get started. Since there are so many Nokia platforms, it’s tough to find the right place for information, plus Forum Nokia is filled with all kinds of legacy information that, while correct at one time, is not necessary still valid, so it’s pretty confusing.

I’ll write up a separate “Getting Started with WRT” article in a separate post based on the things I found. The easiest way to develop for me was to work mostly within Aptana with the WRT plugin. For thornier debugging, I used Firefox and Firebug. Finally I ignored the emulators and deployed to the phone via bluetooth for device testing. I’ll detail this more elsewhere.

The Symbian Web Runtime itself is a killer mobile platform. I mean it’s just html/javascript/AJAX, stuff that’s second nature to most people by now. After working with J2ME, Android, and iPhone/Cocoa, it’s refreshing to be able to work this way.

The biggest surprise for me was how easy it is to get location information through Javascript. I know a lot of web developers who have cool ideas for location-based mobile apps, but they’re scared off by having to learn new technologies (cocoa, java, etc.). WRT is perfect for them.

There was one issue, though, that I ran into took a lot of time to figure out. I’ll describe it here just in case someone else runs into the same problem and stumbles upon this page.

Symptoms: Unable to install my widget on the phone. I succeeded in pairing my phone and macbook via bluetooth and successfully sent my widget to the phone. After opening up the message on the phone, the installation started properly then goes directly to “Installation Complete” or something like that. There was never a prompt asking whether I want to install directly on the phone or the card as expected.

Other Clues: After opening up Applications, the icon for my widget isn’t there. But when I go to the App Manager, there are two entries for my widget for me to uninstall.

Solution: It turned out to be a problem in my setup. Even though I was deploying my widget over bluetooth, I had my phone connected to my laptop through a USB cable. (since it was just out of the box, I thought I needed to charge it up, but later realized it was already charged. I’m not sure why it made a difference, but removing the USB connection allowed the widget to install smoothly.

I’ve been working on a native iPhone version of Metosphere for a while, but after talking to several people I’ve decided to go in a slightly different direction. I’m about to submit this to the AppStore, but I wanted to bounce it off a larger audience first.

I’ve run into several web developers who want to make cool webapps for the iPhone using its location information.  Unfortunately, even though they’re killer web devs, there are several hurdles to overcome such as not having a Mac, needing to learn Objective C, obtaining a certificate, etc.

So I proposed we just create a generic, skeleton, native iPhone app that would access our websites using UIWebView and do all the heavy lifting on the web side.  A generic browser with a URL bar at the top but providing CoreLocation information to the website.  Essentially, like Safari but allowing the website access to location information.

This solved several of the issues we’d been thinking of:

• We don’t all have to pay the SDK fee and spend weeks/months learning it.  Web developers can focus on web development.
• Each of us doesn’t have to go through the hassle of creating an app, getting it approved, and maintaining it over time.  We can just share the generic browser/client.
• The App Store is just going to get more crowded, I’m already getting tired of installing apps and uninstalling them right away.  A general location browser allows someone to quickly try out a site without having to find and download an app.

I’d like to see this project open-sourced, although there’s been a lot of confusion recently if that’s allowed with the current SDK agreement.

There are some folks working on similar concepts like PhoneGap and WebToNative, but I think there’s room for a completely simple solution like this.

Ideally, location information would be an option to expose within Safari, but I’m not convinced that will ever happen.  There are serious privacy issues if something like that were built into Safari, and it’s definitely not for most people. But there’s a subset of folks out there that have a use for something like Metosphere.  Kind of like the location info provided in Google Gears or  the Skyhook Firefox extension.

I was hoping to provide Lat/Long information to websites through HTTP headers, but that’s not available in UIWebView, so webpages that want location information from the Metosphere browser will need to include a simple Javascript function.

Here’s a summary of how this works:

1. Install Metosphere on your iPhone (hope it gets approved!)
2. Create a webpage with a Javascript function called updateLocation that looks something like this:
   <html><head>
   <script language=”javascript”>
   var latitude=0;    //these will be set when the Metosphere browser calls updateLocation()
   var longitude=0;function updateLocation(metoLat, metoLng){
   latitude=metoLat;
   longitude=metoLng;
   document.getElementById(“message”).innerHTML = “Your latitude=”+latitude + ” and longitude=” + longitude;
   //now do something cool with latitude and longitude set
   }
   </script></head>
   <body>
   <div id=”message”>Location not available</div>
   </body>
   </html>
3. Enter your webpage’s URL in Metosphere’s location bar and your page should have access to the latitude and longitude.
   
4. Create a webpage/webapp that does something cool with this location information.

Anyway, that’s the current direction for this project.  Some cool features to add down the road would be:

• integration with Yahoo’s FireEagle
• a setting to allow the browser to periodically update location info at set intervals
• the ability to create extensions like Firefox

Aaargh, Nokia’s iPhone-killer is going to be running S60?

Bummer. I had high hopes for a cool device to work on.

Software could trip up Nokia’s iPhone rival

First Nokia touchscreen phone could be a disappointment, analysts warn

When Nokia’s first touch-screen phone eventually comes out, looks will be important, but software is what could make the difference between success and failure.

Richard Windsor, of Nomura International, said that when he tested the latest version of the S60 operating system, understood to be the software the Nokia touch phone will run on, he was “deeply unimpressed.”

He warned that unless there is a “meaningful improvement” to the user experience before the phone is launched, it could fail to catch on and become profitable.

“While the device looks great, we think that the software that runs it could easily end up being a massive disappointment,” he said.

link

Yikes, my life has been crazy this past month, but I’ve got more time to work on Metosphere again.

I’d been holding off on adding a lot of features after seeing the changes from the M3 to M5 Android SDK, but I’ve decided now’s the time to crank and flesh out this Android app so it’s more than just a proof-of-concept.

So I upgraded the Metosphere app to M5, which was trickier than I expected. While I was making changes, I also incorporated Wikipedia points of interest through the cool GeoNames Web Service.

The idea is that you’ve got your GPS-enabled Android phone and using Metosphere you can see what Wikipedia pages are near your location.

You can download the newest version here.

I also modified the demo web mashup to display the concept of nearby Wikipedia points.

Damn, it’s late! I’ve got to get up early for Mashup Camp.

Woohoo!

ARM to show Google phone prototype next week

FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters) – British chip designer ARM (ARM.L) will show a prototype mobile phone based on Google’s (GOOG.O) Android platform next Monday at the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona, a source close to the company said on Thursday.

….

….

Research firm Strategy Analytics has estimated that Android will be in two percent of smartphones this year.

The December issue of The Economist had some great articles on Augmented Space.  That’s really the ultimate goal for the Metosphere.

Real and virtual worlds – Better together
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10251972

The next step is to call up information about your surroundings using mobile devices—something that is starting to become possible. Beyond that, “augmented reality” technology blends virtual objects seamlessly into views of the real world, making it possible to compare real buildings with their virtual blueprints, or tag real-world locations with virtual messages.

All these approaches treat the internet as an overlay or an adjunct to the physical world, not a separate space. Rather than seeing the real and virtual realms as distinct and conflicting, in short, it makes sense to see them as complementary and connected. The resulting fusion is not what the Utopians or the critics foresaw, but it suits the rest of us just fine.

Reality, only better
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10202623

Mark Livingston, head AR researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, says his team is developing “3-D ink” writing methods that will allow soldiers to paint virtual symbols or text onto the real world, so that other soldiers who arrive at the same spot later can see them.