SevenClick! Mobile Technology Evangelists

Thanks to Xataka Móvil, we know about the Boincoid project, an Android port of BOINC platform, that is one of the most famous platforms for grid computing.

BOINC was released by Berkeley University and serves as the foundations for grid projects like SETI@home (a reference in grid computing), Rosetta@home, ClimatePrediction and many others.

Now, an Israel-based team has managed to port its 40,000 lines of open-sourced C++ code to Android platform. They have announced an upcoming Java platform version, as well.

Their first goal was Android Developer Challenge, but once they are not in the Top 50, we hope they will go on with the project.

Anyway, mobile grid faces some barriers that makes its adoption a bit harder than PC-based grid computing. First, power comsumption. Battery life is a very precious thing in mobile devices - despite PCs, where it can be simply not considered. Second, data plans. Nowadays, data plans of mobile carriers are not cheap enough in order to people spend their money on grid computing.

Via XatakaMovil
Link Boincoid

We had already talked about QuickOffice, the suite that brings Office document support to Palm, S60 and UIQ users.

Now, in a recent meeting with PC Magazine they showed a new version for Android running. Moreover, they declared to be working on an upcoming release for iPhone.

More accurately, Quickoffice for Android lets users edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents, access online Google Docs, and access documents stored on home PCs through the Internet.

The last functionality comes from a partnership with SoonR, a company which has a remote-access technology for PC files.

Via EngadgetMobile
Link PCMagazine

The Android Developer Challenge, the one with the $10 million in awards for the best 50 mobile apps, has finished its initial phase with the amazing count of 1788 mobile apps participating.

Submissions are now closed, with USA as the number one in participants, followed by Germany and Japan. The lucky winners will be announced next 21th July.

Via XatakaMovil

Link

Next 6th of May, HTC is going to present his new phones.

Among them we can probably see a mobile booted Android and the other ones booted Windows Mobile interface Manila (new version of TouchFLO).

Moreover, they could surprise us with a new model with two different version (with and without sliding QWERTY board, the far left model and the far right of the second row in the picture).

Via: Xataka

Google Android guys have announced a new update of the SDK. The name: M5-rc15. It still sounds like a Star Wars droid name, and we love it.

A couple of week ago, a vulnerability was found in image files handling functionality. This is the main  issue solved in this new release, along with other minor bugs and a more complete documentation.

For all of you developing with Android SDK, this is a strongly recommended update. Gentlemen, update your sdks!!!

Google keeps on making efforts to support early Android developers. Now, Google has announced the creation of a new project called ‘apps-for-Android’ in their Google Code site.

The goal for this project is to include sample applications that will demonstrate different aspects of the Android platform.

The first sample application is ‘WikiNotes for Android ‘, a personal wiki that helps people to organize personal information. It remains small in size and features to make it easy to understand, in words of Dick Wall, one of the bloggers of ‘Android Developer Blog’. Indeed, “though more features will be added to make it more useful, a sample version with the minimal functionality will always be available for developers new to the Android platform”.

This is a very interesting innitiative that will help to centralize the access to up-to-date sample code for Android.

Link AndroidDevBlog

Here’s a video of Andy Rubin running Google Maps Street view and Quake on a 300 mhz touchscreen phone and it looks pretty great.

“Google says they are driving the Android initiative because they want to see internet-style development on mobile platforms in the way that the openness of the web has given rise to Facebook and the Web 2.0 movement which should be able to migrate to the mobile phone”.

It seems that Android is trying to create an OS on cell phones like Apple´s Iphone

Via BBC News

The so called Android SDK m5-rc14, is available since past week. This good news was announced on Android developers blog.

In this new prerelease, both Android APIs and the developer tools have been updated. Some highlights are GUI related stuff, new media codecs and the updated Eclicpse plug-in.

It seems that Google has considered feedback from third party developers. Some blogs congratule about this fact.

As far as I’m concerned, I have not put my hands on Android SDK yet. I hope to do it in the coming weeks, as it looks great!

But what I wonder is if last MWC08 demos on Android might have cool down the expectations of most enthusiatic people, since they showed that Android are pretty far from be running on a real world device, ready to hit the market. It’s really been a bit disappointing.

Link Android

As was expected, some manufacturers are showing off several Android prototypes. But we have not yet any real prototype in a closer-to-launch step.

Texas Instruments is making use of a non-branded cellphone to demo the OS running on an OMAP 3430 at 500 MHz. NEC / Wind River is also showing Android platform running on a Medity2 testbed (also at 500 MHz).

Both two use GSM radio, and have no operative browser. They are just pretty early prototypes!

Via engadgetMobile

WebGarden, a Czech company, has developed a plugin for my favorite IDE, NetBeans 6.0.

As a similar plugin was recently released for Eclipse, it was very likely that someone might migrate it to NetBeans.  WebGarden accomplished the task and included this functionality:

• Create / edit Android projects.
• Smart code completion and refactoring hints.
• Run / debug your project with the embedded NetBeans emulator.
• Support for Windows, Linux and Mac.

I have not tried it yet but, we are scheduled to start Android development soon and I’m pretty sure that we will use it in depth. If we found any interesting feedback we might update this post or write another one.

Download the plugin here and check out some screenshots.

Download NetBeans 6.0 here.