Well, they are doing it agaqin this year but in a different way. We just received an email including those sweet words:

“As you might have guessed, Android will have a big presence at this year’s event. To make sure you’re equipped to make the most of your Android experience during Google I/O, we’d like to mail you a Nexus One before the event. “

well, guessed we have. Google gave lots of devices to participants during local shows recently and the I/O folks might also be the perfect bunch to use those devcices. The reasoning is clear: They wanted to get rid of this looooong waiting lines after the announcement. People wasted quite a while waiting in line instead of sitting in one of those high energy sessions. Those sessions are still the main reason to be there if you are interested in whatever Google is working on/with. Well done!

There will be a Google I/O app which helps planning for the event too.

Anyways, we can’t wait to be there to learn about Android plan, GWT and all the other APIs which are waiting for us. Again. Ah well, it will also be start of year two for Google Wave. What will we hear from down under?

Usually quite straight forward and kinda boring the Ninja unboxing of an Nexus One package is playing in another league. Just watch them 3 small Ninja’s getting to the “meat” and have fun. Oh, don’t try this at home (as long as someone watches that is).

If you are using IntelliJ 9 with the Android plugin the error message looks like this:

Well, the idea to just update all components to the current state and then to compile a project to check it out on this backup development system went from a 10 min cruise to the unexpected question “Whats wrong?”.

Looking at the error message it was clear that the build process wanted to use a certificate which timed out. The Android SDK is using certificates to sign all the apk files even ther files which run in the emulator (fair enough). The cert is usually valid for just 365 days which means that you get the same error next time shortly after forgetting how you’d solve it last time.

The simple solution is to just delete the file “debug.keystore” which is stored in your home directory under “~/.android” (OSX, Linux). A Windows Vista/7  user will find the file in the “C:\Users\<user<\.android folder.

After deleting the file just “clean” your project and build int from scratch and the error should be gone.

To prevent this brain training procedure for a while a decided to generate a key which lasts 1000 days instead of just the full year. Startup the OSX terminal app or the Linux terminal and go to the “.android” folder. Delete the old certificate file first. Then issue the following command from the command line:

keytool -genkey -keypass android -keystore debug.keystore -alias androiddebugkey -storepass android -validity 1000 -dname “CN=Android Debug,O=Android,C=US”

Now there should be a new certificate file sitting in the folder which lasts 1000 days – enough to really forget how you solved this issue last time around .

When starting the browser you will see a new tab called “local” while the current “known” location is also shown under the search text field.

If you select the “Local” tab you will get a list of categories to search for:

Inside of the category there might be more sub categories:

If you select one of the found entries you will get some more detailled information about the entry:

It is possible to change the location for upcoming search queries and to “Starr” your personal local favorites for further reference:

The keynote started with a power outage and this has been the best part of the event since we could talk with others about tech news (i came from a nice Samsung event with lots of sparkling ideas). After about 20 minutes Ballmer finally was able to start his keynote. And he talked about Windows 7 (the one which does what Vista was supposed to do years ago). And he’d talk about Windows Mobile (the old new and long delayed 6.5 that is). No news about Windows 7 Mobile, which is expected to be announced/showed off in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress in february.

We heard about how successful that mighty Xbox360 (some years old) is including the info that the rumored new version may be in the shops this holiday season (including the project Natal natural gesture recognition stuff which actually IS interesting). Then we saw a nice demo of a new version of Halo. We saw and heard that the good ol’ arcade games are now officially supported on the XBox and will be released in the thousands as a current stream of excitement for us arcade afficionados over the next years. Arcade games from the 80’s as the game winning idea? Gotta kidding me.

We heard about the Mediaroom software which could be used on PCs now. Capable of streaming 4 HD streams – if the streaming source could provide this feature at all.

And we could get a glimpse of a new “slate” device product family. Ballmer did not mention any activity from Microsoft directly but showed just 3 prototypes from third party devices. One from HP seems to actually work, but runs plain Windows 7 for now. He had the chance to lead the slate crowd with a real announcement including convincing ideas. Failed. Will it now be Apple with the iSlate announcement end of the month which gets the attention? We would not be surprised.

I must admit that i usually had fun watching a Microsoft keynote at CES in the recent history once in a while. I liked how Conan O’Brien has been chatting with Bill Gates some years ago for example (i remember that some demos did not work either). Or Bill doing the first Mobile/CE announcements some more years back.

This latest keynote with Ballmer has been a boring experience from start to finish. At least i was out fast catching the Monorail which got me outta there fast an easy. The power outage is the only thing people will remember.



The video shows the typical use cases for a “follow me” scenario with the MID being a main part of the story.

We will check out what’s going on in regards to Android during CES and post our results here.

It will run on a OMAP 3430 CPU at 550 MHz (the Beagleboard an Steroids), has 256 MByte RAM and 512 MByte Flash ROM (130 MByte available for the user). The device sports a capacitive 3.7″ WVGA display at a resolution of 480×854 pixels, a 5 MPixel camera (capable of taking videos up to 720×480 pixel) and supports GSM 850/900/1800/1900 and CDMA 800/1900. According to the data sheet the device is able to render videos up to the 720p resolution.

The data connection does not seem to be too fast with EVDO Rev A. and GPRS support.

The XT800 comes initially with Android 2.0 (API level 5) according to the official information.

More info here.

Motorola has also announced the next release V 1.1 of  the Eclipse based MOTODEV Studio for Android. Information about the tool is available here. Direct download.

Apparently the whole app is now available as an open source package due too the fact that the main programmer Nicolas Gramlich was not able to invest too much time into the project recently with no changes to the better ahead.

AndNav2 is not really a beauty in regards to modern UX (user experience) but still may be worthwhile to be checked out. Maybe some members of the community are able to pick up the ball and improve the app itself.

Check out the sources here.

The numbers are smaller in camparison to the iPhone 3GS which had already a large installed customer base. While the iPone sold in several counries at ince the Droid numbers are US only numbers. The Droid is on sale from this week in Germany for example via O2.

The central statement from Flurry: “Taken in this context, Droid sales of 250,000 units during its first week from a standing start and in just one country, is a strong result for Motorola and Verizon. Also, by Flurry’s measurement Android does have an edge over iPhone app usage, with the average Android session length at four minutes vs. two minutes for iPhone apps.“

In short: The Android momentum is growing. Sounds convincing, doesn’t it?

And it is also good news for struggling Motorola which bets its mobile phone business on the Android platform.

The tutorial explains all the needed steps involved and does also cover the resulting file structure and how to access the logs later on. At the end it very briefly covers the topic of Content Providers with another short example.

Check it out and you have your first Androiud 2.0 app running in about an hour.

Anyways, everyone interested in learning more about Google Wave check out this comprehensive online book titled “The Complete Guide to Google Wave”. This community driven online book will be available also as a PDF and a printed version. For everyone interested in Wave this book is a very good starting point because it covers a LOT of ground regarding Wave.

Follow the main authors on Twitter.

And while you are at it, watch this video which explains Wave better than anything else.

And if this caught your attention to the subject look at this list of extensions.

Yesterday Google pushed the Eclair sources into the AOSP repository. For everyone interested get them by using the the familiar repo sync command. More information of how to set up yopur system to download and build Android can be found  here.

It seems that Android modder extraordinaire Cyanogen has been able to port it togehter with either older (1.6 Sources) or existing binary components (Droid) onto the G1 in a matter of hours.  He posted the following screen

According to his posts it took a few tweaks to get it running smoothly even on the “old” G1 (it is just a year but it surely feels like 3 if you look at what happened in the last 12 months). Currently audio and video do not seem to work but that should be solved soon.

Follow Cyanogen on twitter.

In general it is NOT possible to build a running system image based on the open source variant of Android 2.0 so far. As Jean-Baptiste Queru explains in his detailled post there are parts with proprietary code from some third party companies missing. He explains that after he unsuccessfully tried to build a runnable variant with a quick hack he concentrated on preparing the basic sources for a fast release. The now available initial source drop (Nov. 11th) is newer than the source drop used for Droid (Oct. 15th).

Some main statements of JBQ:

• I will create a branch in AOSP based on the current state of master (i.e. Donut + community contributions), in addition to having an Eclair-based master.
• We will be working together to try to build a functional version of an Eclair-based master branch that can run on ADP. The one proprietary file that gave me a very hard time was one of Qualcomm’s camera libraries, and there’s got to be a reasonably simple way to just build a system without camera support. I’m hoping that with a reasonable level of effort we’ll manage to quarantine all such areas and still have a system working well enough on hardware that AOSP contributions in the upcoming Eclair-based master tree will be testable on actual devices.

With this kind of planned branching it would at least be possible to use the latest sources with code fragments which have been used to glue them to third party code earlier on. In another post JBQ explained that the latest sources are indeed “somewhat” incompatible with the Droid’s sources, since they are newer.

Thanks to a wonderful plugin for Wordpress, which drives our site, we are now able to provide optimized content for mobile devices sporting modern browser technology. The plugin is called WPTouch and translates the content into chunks which are more suitable for browsers running on an iPhone or Android. The menu structure is shown in a drop down list with icons. You can find post in the archive, the current list or via the categories.

You like to store the link to a post in you favorite bookmarking service? Just procced to the end of the post and click on the “bookmark” icon (second from right). You will be able to post to Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Magnolia, Newsvine, Reddit. Write a comment right from your mobile. Send us an email. We just plain like that plugin.

Check it out and use this coolest of the cool plugins on your site too! You can switch back to the “normal” view on each page by clicking on “Mobile Theme” if you dare.

We will check out the various customisation options when time permits.

Anyways, Stephanie and Lars were in Munich and talked about what happened with Wave in the meantime. Stephanie promised to keep or even increase the pace of allowing new Wave members in with additional invites. Lars explained then some upcoming improvements. Some of them as a result of the success of the public waves (which they indended to shut down but they learned that this would be a bad idea). Sending waves to another person will be possible only if the recipient opts that person in or has it in the contacts. This is to reduce spam. The reject statisticts would also be used to automatically mark an account as a spammer which also would reduce the spam factor.

Lars kept on talking about the potential of Robots: “We should finally make them useful” he responded in his typical kind of humour. The current robot examples are already quite interesting but he wanted to make clar that this technology has a way higher potential. Asked about the business case of wave he explained some ideas like selling extensions and robots in a new appstore, to provide access to high res pictures instead of the compressed pictures currently stored  and of cause also to integrate Google ads: “Currently our UI does not leave any space for ads or anything else” he said too, but the UI could be changed.

Regarding the burning questions of when Wave will be completely (besides the closed source Google extensions) open sourced Lars said: “I hate to be on stage there (at next years Google I/O) not keeping my promise”. Lars explained that there are still a lot of hurdles to take. One major problem is the currently very tight connection to Google’s internal services – something which is unlikey to be open sourced.

Wieland Holfelder explained the Privacy Dashboard project which is done in Munich. Dashboard helps the user to define which kind of information Google knows and tracks about any user. The overall goal is to add transparency to this very delicate subject of privacy. Step by step all Google services should be included in the Dashboard. He also explained the goal to allow any user to export the stored data (contacts etc.) to be able to change the service provider.

Brian Rakowski then explained the Chrome and ChromeOS activities. HJe admitted that the Chrome team did a “terrible job” of marketing the browser and its features so far. The bad press in Germany especially did not help either and he stated that Chrome usage is significantly lower in Germany: “We try to understand and to learn what went wrong”.  Brian explained how the Chrome team tried to carefully provide services like “safe browsing” without breaching privacy. He admitted that the technology has not been explained good enough to be understood.

The OSX version of the chrome browser should be in beta this year (his words felt like around christmas).

Brian then explained and ChromeOS. No technical news here but he also promised that there will be the first open source package (pre-beta) out end of this year. This is good news. According to Brian the first product ready ChromeOS solution can be expected mid of next year. He got asked about Android vs. ChromeOS and his response: “ChromeOS comes from the desktop stripping all unneeded applications and providing everything through the browser interface. Android comes from the mobile device. Both meet in the netbook world. We think that both make sense there.”

The GTUG Munich event has been very interesting and i urge everyone in the area and interested to learn more about mighty Google to show up there once in a while to get a fresh update. Lots of thanks to Google to bring in the guys able to talk fist hand and Nils Hitze for organizing the event.

Other persons involved in the general project and key figures later on are Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, Len Kleinrock and Jon Postel.

The ARPANET went on to grow and grow from the initial 4 nodes in ‘69 to a whopping “15″ in 1971. The first nodes in Germany were still counted in the two digit number area (anyone remember “Walhalla” of Unido?). Well, the military driven ARPANET grew further into the University and research realm and ultimately went “public/commercial” in 1990 (really this late?).

I has not been easy to get an internet account in those early days. Somehow i managed to sneak into an university network over the phone line – at around 100 baud sending my first email. Then the days of CompusServe and AOL came (remember all thos CDs?) and went by. ISDN, DSL, broadband cable and public WiFi made it more and more an easy task to get the daily dose of the Internet.

I myself heard Bill Joy talking about the “network is the computer” during one of the early Sun Developers conferences in downtown San Fran and i also waited for the first Pizza to be delivered after the first eCommerce transaction over at the campus of UC Santa Cruz (the Pizza guy got the wrong adress and we waited for hours) during an SCO conference.

Today i carry around not one but many “internet devices” with me. Maxwell Smart, the funny guy talking with his shoe and transferring an ongoing call to his tie to proceed talking nonsense is finally an reality.

The Internet change our world. Only a few saw the big thing coming in those ealry days but guys like JR Licklider were already developing ideas. The Internet is changing our world. The speed of change is tremendous and is increasing all the time after the big bang 40 years ago. How will it be in 10 years?