Mobile software development evolution

Yesterday was Düsseldorf's yearly Marathon and in good tradition, several runners from Vodafone tackled the full track or the famous relay run.
In 2007 I developed a J2ME application which transferred the current location from each runner to a server, so that the guys at our camp could watch the runners on Google earth.
Thursday evening I decided to implement the same functionality using today's mobile and server platforms (android and Google App Engine).
Long story short: The thing which took 5-6 days of development in 2007 (not inculding several test-runs outside) and which was still very shaky and unstable at the end, was build in 26 hours today.
Why? Mainly becasue server and client development has become so much easier. On the server side a deployment to app engine only takes minutes. In the past I had to set up my Jetty somewhere, re-configure the frontend apache, deploy a new DB to MySQL and create the schema etc...
On the client side android enables quick turn around times and most important: A stable runtime compared to the J2ME implementations which often crashed or looses connections.
The hardware of course is getting better, where in 2007 nearly no phone had GPS, I had to connect to an external one via bluetooth and implement the NMEA protocol, today's GPS location is just an API call away.
The good news: You get way more things done in less time than 4 years ago ;)

Statistics comparison

Wow, good timing for my log-file parser, Google just released more detailed statistics on the android market. You can check the device distribution of your app based on installations, so I was curious to compare them with my useage stats.
Here are the results from Google for my app:

1. Samsung Galaxy S 23.4% (128)
2. HTC Desire 20.5% (112)
3. HTC Desire HD 9.5% (52)
4. Motorola Defy 7.0% (38)
5. HTC Wildfire 6.4% (35)
6. Samsung Galaxy Tab 4.8% (26)
7. HTC myTouch 3G 3.5% (19)
8. SEMC Xperia X10 3.1% (17)
9. Motorola Droid 2.0% (11)
10. Samsung Europa 1.5% (8)

That looks quite familiar, Samsung Galaxy S and HTC Desire the top 2 devices by far, Desire HD on 3rd, then it's getting a bit messy, but in general it meets my expectations.
Will analyze the results more deeply the next days, finally Google shares some of the information they own with us.

Google Maps Navigation with roaming

A short post regarding my experiences with the new google maps navigation client and offline maps.
I took the opportunity to test the praised feature of google to be able to navigate offline with the new google maps client during my latest short trip to the netherlands using my Nexus One

First try: Route to the destination from Germany (home network). I switched data roaming off and entered the destinatation. As expected everything works fine. A few kilometers behind the boarder, mobile lost data connectivity and it still had > 200 KM to go. To my suprise, routing was done perfectly to the end, sometimes map-tiles have been missing, but the routing worked well.

Second (harder) try: Route without data network back to Germany. It turned out that the client needs a data connection to generate the initial route, so I switched Data Roaming on, calculated the route, switched it off again. Again the client was able to route me back without any hickups.

Overall: Pretty good job google!

Useful Android Apps

In this post I'd like to share my experiences with useful android applications for travelling. My scenario looks like this: We planned a 3 weeks trip to Canada and I wanted to keep my roaming data as low as possible, means 0 if possible, and only rely on cached data on the SD-Card or sporadic WiFi connections.

The following Apps turned out to be very useful and worked well during this time:

• Maps: Maverick lite

I tried several Mapping applications which promised to be able to cache Map-tiles on the SD-Card. I also wanted to have support for different map-providers (Open Street Map, Google, etc.) and a comfortable way to generate & download the tiles. To make it short: Maverick lite worked perfectly, and I think I really pushed it to the extreme by pre-loading over 1 GB of tiles to the SD-card with google map tiles for car navigation and Open Street Map tiles for hiking trails in the national and provincial parks. With Mobile Atlas Creator, you can easily batch download and prepare map tiles.

• Dictionary: QuickDic

Simple & straight forward, QuickDic puts a 25MB data file on the SD-card and provides english <-> german translations for not commonly known words. Works perfect!

• Currency Converter: Currency

Works offline, and does not complain too much if there is no online connection available.

And don't forget to get some casual games for the long flight which also works in an offline situation, my recommendations are:

• Hotel Mogul lite
• Bistro Cook
• Fishin' 2 Go lite
• and of course: Flight director

Some other thoughts on offline / cached data:
Beside the fact that data roaming is horrible expensive and slow, it turned out to be really comfortable to work with offline data as it is incredible fast to access. Due to tha fact that coverage is not always given, your nice online-services will leave you lost in many areas.
No one would rely on an online-only contact list, would you? You'd like to have it synced with an online service, but cached or stored on your device as well.
I hope that we'll see more Apps, especially for maps which supports a smart & easy way to cache data on the phone.