Archive for May, 2010

Open Source Android Apps for Developers: MyTracks for Android

My Tracks is a popular Android app owned by Google, which records your GPS tracks and shows live statistics such as time, speed, distance, and elevation – while hiking, cycling, running or participating in other outdoor activities. Now it has been released as the open souce Android app by My Tracks team at Google:

“As many of you had already heard from me, we’re releasing the full source code to My Tracks. It has now been posted entirely to the Google Project Hosting website.”

Apps Description
My Tracks records your GPS tracks and shows live statistics such as time, speed, distance, and elevation – while hiking, cycling, running or participating in other outdoor activities. Once recorded, you can share your tracks, upload them to Google Spreadsheets and visualize them on Google My Maps.

My Tracks Features includes:

While recording tracks, you can:

1. See location / progress on a map
2. Monitor real-time statistics: time, distance, speed, elevation
　1. View elevation profile by time or distance
　2. Zoom, pan elevation profile
3. Create waypoints
4. Create statistics waypoints (splits tracks into subtracks)

To share tracks, you can:

1. Upload to Google Map (example)
2. Upload to Google Docs (example)
3. Email as a Google My Map link
4. Embed Google Map on a website
5. Email as .gpx or .kml attachments
6. Export as .gpx or .kml to phone SD card
7. Tweet your My Map link on Twitter using Twidroid

Project Home
http://code.google.com/p/mytracks/

Project owners
My Tracks team at Google

Version
1.0.14

Apk Downloads
You can download the latest package on the download section at My Tracks project home.

Source Code
First Create your own clone

Create a clone of the mytracks repository hosted at Google Code.

A repository clone is a server-side copy of a project’s repository and can be created by anyone that wants to contribute to a project. For more information, see the Mercurial FAQ.

Then use the Command-line access:

Get a local copy of the mytracks repository with this command:
hg clone https://mytracks.googlecode.com/hg/ mytracks

Version control Overview

My Tracks uses Mercurial, a distributed version control system. What this means is that, even though this page hosts a central repository, there can be many clone repositories with changes of their own, and then some of those can be merged back into the main repository.

The model we’ve chosen for developing My Tracks is the following:

1. Each developer creates an google code hosting clone of the main mytracks repository. This clone is hosted on Google servers.
2. The developer then makes a local clone of his code hosting clone, which is then at his local machine.
3. The developer writes new code into his local clone and commits it locally
4. When a change is ready to be integrated back into the main repository, that change is pushed from the developer’s local clone to his code hosting clone
5. He then requests a code review by opening a new issue under “Issues” above, saying which clone has the code to be reviewed, what it’s supposed to do, and what are the relevant changesets
6. The code will be reviewed on the user’s clone – if any further changes are suggested, the process repeats from (3)
7. Once the change is approved, a member of the My Tracks team will merge it back into the main repository

Even though this may sound complicated, this process makes code reviews easy and allows a lot of people to work on changes in parallel.

Posted by Cute Android

Open Source Android Apps for Developers: CallMeter NG

Apps Description
CallMeter NG is a very useful Android application, which is used to sum up your call and text logs. Different billing modes and periods are take into account on summing. With CallMeter NG all calculation is done in background, only new log entries, limits and cost is calculated every now and then.

Currently CallMeter NG is translated to following languages: English, German, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Czech .

Project Home
http://code.google.com/p/callmeter/

Project owners
felix.bechstein

Version
2.3.5

Apk Downloads
You can download the latest package on the download section at CallMeter NG project home.

Source Code
http://github.com/felixb/callmeter

Installation
You can install CallMeter NG via following Barcode:

Screenshots
Read more…

Tips for Android developer: Project contains errors

I have met a problem when I used Eclipse to run as Android project today, it remained me that “Project contains errors” but nothing is obviously wrong.

I find a lot by Google, most of the answers can not solve my “Project contains errors” problem, except this one:

SOLVED – Eclipse problem with “Project contains errors” and nothing is obviously wrong

The solution is to go to Eclipse Project, Clean the selected project, and reompile the Android project. This will clear the error in the project and allow it to compile.

If you still face the problem after cleaning the android project, another way to solve the problem is delete the Android project from the Eclipse and re-import the Andorid project again. I can not guarantee that this method is feasible, but I’ve tried and it solved my “Project contains errors” problem.

Posted by Cute Android.

Keynote Day 2 Android Demo from Google I/O 2010 (Full Length)

This is the full length Android Demo video(Youtube) from keynote day 2 at Google I/O, a cute android video where you can learn all of the details about Android 2.2 with funny from Vic Gundotra, Google vice president of developer platforms.

According offical android developers blog, the following five areas about android 2.2 are highlighted in particular:

Performance & speed: The new Dalvik JIT compiler in Android 2.2 delivers between a 2-5X performance improvement in CPU-bound code vs. Android 2.1 according to various benchmarks.

New enterprise capabilities: We’ve added Exchange capabilities such as account auto-discovery and calendar sync. Device policy management APIs allow developers to write applications that can control security features of the device such as the remote wipe, minimum password, lockscreen timeout etc.

Faster, more powerful browser: We have brought the V8 JavaScript engine to the Android browser as part of 2.2. This has resulted in a 2-3X improvement in JavaScript performance vs. 2.1.

Rich set of new APIs and services: New data backup APIs enable apps to participate in data backup and restore, allowing an application’s last data to be restored when installed on a new or a reset device. Apps can utilize Android Cloud to Device Messaging to enable mobile alert, send to phone, and two-way push sync functionality. Developers can now declare whether their app should be installed on internal memory or an SD card. They can also let the system automatically determine the install location. On the native side, a new API now gives access to Skia bitmaps.

Additions to Android Market: Android Market provides Android Application Error Reports, a new bug reporting feature, giving developers access to crash and freeze reports from users. Developers will be able to access these reports via their account on the Android Market publisher website.

Posted by Cute Android

Android 2.2 Official Video from Google I/O 2010

The hottest topic for Andorid of course is Android 2.2 “Froyo” now, because Google released Android 2.2 “Froyo” during the second keynote of Google I/O, which has many incredible features. Following is Android 2.2 official video Google I/O 2010 in Youtube, may be this video will give you a visual impression for those features in Android 2.2:

Posted by Cute Android

Interesting blogs for Android developers

As Android developer, Stack Overflow is my favorite website to find some Android related questions & answers. Yesterday, I found a question about “Interesting blogs about developing for Android” in Stack Overflow, that was intersting. I know a little about other Android blogs & websites, and those site may have some Android developing tips which I can learn, following is the voting from Stack Overflow users.

Interfuser http://www.inter-fuser.com/

My life with Android http://mylifewithandroid.blogspot.com/

Warriorpoint http://www.warriorpoint.com/blog/

Androidrians http://smartandroidians.blogspot.com/

PocketJourney http://blog.pocketjourney.com/

And then also the forum www.anddev.org and the google mailing list

This online book http://androidapps.org.ua/

And this tutorial site http://www.helloandroid.com/

And last but not least http://stackoverflow.com

I like the Android Developers blog

You might consider just subscribing to Planet Android, as it aggregates a whole mess of blogs, including some that are more development-specific.

www.developer.android.com its covers everything. moreover

www.anddev.org

www.androidandme.com

www.androidcommunity.com

mylifewithandroid has some good tips.

Simon Judge has great insights.

Posted by Cute Android

Five Android Logcat Related Open Source Apps for Developers

Android Logcat is very useful for Android developers, which provides a mechanism for collecting and viewing system debug output. By logcat, logs from various applications and portions of the android system are collected in a series of circular buffers, which then can be viewed and filtered. Here is five Android Logcat Related Open Source Apps.

1. Android-logger: Android logcat viewer

Android-logger is a way for you to view the logcat output on your phone. Each type of log message is displayed with a different color. You also have the ability to filter the output to only show you debug, info, warn, error and verbose. You can switch back to seeing all messages by selecting the filter menu option and choosing All from the list. Below are a few screenshots of the application, it is available under the GPLv2 and available to the right, in the Downloads section and in the Android Market.

Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/android-logger/

For more details about android-logger, you can find by the previous post in Cute Android: android-logger

2. aLogcat: Android Log Viewer (logcat) Application

aLogcat is the well-known developer tool logcat, in the form of an Android application.

Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/alogcat/

3. Android-log-collector: Collects the log and sends to a developer

Collects output of logcat and sends it to a developer using email or messaging. Can be used as a standalone application or invoked through the intent API by another application. Usage example is provided for developers who would like to integrate with the Log Collector through the intent API.

Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/android-log-collector/

4. LogcatActivity in android-random

LogcatActivity is a sub-project of android-random, which is a predecesor to RemoteLogcat, allowing you to view the Logcat output on the handset, and optionally save a limited history to a file on the device.

Android-random is a collection of extended examples for Android developers.

Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/android-random/

5. Android-logcat-reader: An app for Android phones to view Logcat

Based on LogcatActivity in android-random, this application adds a few extra, essential changes.

The main difference is this project has support for filtering and writes the log to an accessible location for non-rooted phone users.

Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/android-logcat-reader/

Posted by Cute Android

Open Source Android Apps for Developers: SmartLink

Smartlink manages personal associations of words with semantic data on android to interconnect applications. Smartlink is currently available in a very early beta state, integrating only very few applications so far. Maybe the developing of Smartlink stopped early, but as Android developer, I love the idea of SmartLink.

Apps Description
Smartlink is an open source project trying to improve the user experience for advanced usage scenarios of a mobile phone and is targeting the Android platform.

Smartlink is about making our mobile device acting a little bit more like a human secretary by learning personal associations of words (like “Maria” or “KDE homepage”) with semantic data (like a corresponding contact entry in our address book or a bookmark in our browser) and offering to utilize the data of these associations (eg. the phone number to make a call, or the URL to forward to someone) whenever we use plain text in any application (eg. in a tasklist application). In other words, Smartlink interconnects different applications (that do not need to know of each) based on plain text associations in a smart way.

Smartlink is an open source project that not only encourages developers to contribute to it, but highly depends on other projects and developers to “smartlink-enable” their applications to integrate with the Smartlink approach (with the current status of just a handful of applications being smartlink-enabled it is of very limited use). What “smartlink-enabled” means and how an application can be made “smartlink-enabled” is documented in the pdf document contained in the zip file available via the downloads.

Project Home
http://code.google.com/p/smartlink/

Project owners
oliver.noelle

Version
0.1

Apk Downloads
You can download the latest package on the download section at SmartLink project home.

Check Out Source Code
svn checkout http://smartlink.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ smartlink-read-only

Installation
To experience SmartLink you need not only the SmartLink application itself, but also some “SmartLink-enabled” applications. It is therefore recommended to:

install SmartLink.apk (this requires the SDK as of Version m5-rc15)

install NotePad.apk (a modified version of the example application shipping with the SDK that has been “SmartLink-enabled”)

install ContactsWrapper.apk (a little wrapper application that “SmartLink-enables” the Android built-in contacts application)

install BookmarkWrapper.apk (a little wrapper application that “SmartLink-enables” the Android built-in bookmark database)

Posted by Cute Android