Google Fusion Tables

I played around with Google Fusion Tables today. I tried to use it to visualize data from my android application, in this case an Intensity Map. It's quite easy to get quick results, but I miss customization features for the map.
Anyway I think it's great for people who are not into programming at all, so maybe I'm the wrong audience ;)
I used my default Demo-Data, check the results here:

http://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S189272gOKp

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 Instant

Google launched instant previews on mobiles and while trying it out I got curious how they build that. It doesn't feel that you leave the browser when you click on the magnifier which takes you to the screenshots of the pages, but you it also doesn't look & feel like a classic mobile webpage.
So I emulated an android user-agent in chrome and inspected the source. Actually it is a XHTML page with some nice CSS animations and script magic.
Why is that interesting? AFAIK this is one of the few commercial products (Google's mobile search, not a small fish) which uses modern web-technologies providing a user-experience beyond classic web-page browsing.
Well done Google.

Sync, offline, online

Techcrunch pointed today to a side project of some googlers called Camlistore. Since the weather was great today I didn't had much time to check it out but it looks quite interesting.
As I mentioned in a previous post I still think that it's crucial for a good mobile experience to have content online AND offline availble whithout bothering the user with details.
Google contacts implementation on android is a good example. Your address book is in sync and online while you have full access to it even when you're offline.
Now it's getting of course more complicated when you're looking into things like photos or music where you want only a subset of your contents offline due to your limit storage on your mobile.
Anyway I'm curious how the guys from Camlistore proceed, it looks like the first really interesting open-source sync solution for me.

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!

How accurate is Google's My Location?

I've done some tests (with the help of some colleagues) with the My Location service of Google mobile maps. We know that the service works based on cell-id, means that there is cell-id database at google which maps the cell-ids back to coordinates. Question is: How accurate is the database? To answer that, we did some measurements in the 2.5 G network in germany.
We just compared our current location (via GPS) with the result of the My Location service and calculated the distance. We did 132 measures.

Here's the result as a graph:



To summarize, My Location is 707 meters inaccurate on average.
80% of the measures are less then 1075 meters accurate.

So this is (of course) far away from GPS based LBS, and it depends on the use-case of a service if this is sufficient.

Android on Mobile Monday

I joined the android part of the mobile monday in munich this week.

Nothing really suprising happened there, but I collected some facts from the Q/A which might be interesting for you.

• A new SDK is on the way with a complete new User Interface
• The first mobile will have a H-VGA display
• The D-BUS system will be kicked out in final release
• Applications will only be self-signed by the developer
• Minimal hardware requirements for an android platform:
• 200 Mhz ARM 9
• 64 MB RAM
• SD-Card
• QVGA or bigger
• WIFI/bluetooth

JavaFX Mobile on DevDays

Unfortunately I'm not able to join the first Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days in Santa Clara but I decided to watch the live stream of the session "Developing Applications for JavaFX Mobile" to find out a little bit more about Sun's mobile operating system.
First of all: The live stream worked really good, and there's also a chat attached to the session you're watching where you can ask questions. I took the chance to dig a bit deeper into the Web-side of the story and asked for SVG and Java PlugIn support of the WebKit based browser. Unfortunately Sun is not implementing this in their first release.... too bad. I'm wondering why they are putting so much effort on their new Java Plugin of the update N release if they don't put it into their mobile platform...
Anyway, the whole JavaFX Mobile operating system is clear competitor for android with the huge advantage that Sun is able to run 100% pure Java SE on it.
Check out the slides of that session, it's really worth it.

still alive

I haven't blogged for quite a long time, sorry for that. I'd like to write about so many things, but time is currently missing... Anyway, let me bring some light on some web 2.0 services I use...
First of all.... Picasa. I like the client software and the integration of it into the web-albums. Check my public pictures here.
Then... Twitter. A bit useless, but I like it. Check my profile here.
And the one I like the most is: NoseRub. "NoseRub?" you might ask, what the hell is that? I don't want to copy the pretty good introduction on their site, so check it out, it's some kind of meta-social-network. A friend of mine set up a NoseRub server on the Amazon EC2, check it out here. I linked my Twitter and my last.fm account to that server.
Oh, and of course this blog ;)

The android landed...

... and disperse a lot of dust in the mobile world.

My first thoughts, relatively unordered and not well consolidated...

• What a cool SDK!!! Everything you need! Very cool documentation (try the search box), Eclipse PlugIn, working samples, emulator, debugging and logging, everything for free on Window, Linux and Mac. Feel free to compare that with the
  
• WTK for JME (nearly equal)
• Symbian S60 SDK (sucks)
• Windows Mobile (not free, installs tons of crap on your PC, and so on...)
  
• iPhone SDK? (We will see...;) )
• Why have those guys re-invented all the JSRs? The only reason for me is licensing issues. Too bad for the developers.
• A pretty cool concept of handling application life cycle whiting the OS.
• I like the approach of a generic data model on the phone, I also like the idea that there are no "native" apps on the phone. Everything is Java. Looks a bit like the SavaJe idea (do you remember that?) but in cool ;)
• They build in a java - browser bridge! How cool is that?
  

Let's see where Google drive this game. Many open questions.... How will Google avoid fragmentation? What parts will really become open source? And so on and so forth...
We will see... But nevertheless, this will bring again some action to the mobile world, and changes can't be bad ;)

An android comes from outer space...

Google announced andriod today. Together with an impressive list of cooperation partners (check the open handset alliance) Google created an OS for mobile phones based on open standards (as they claim) and will open source it. There are tons of rumors out there and less facts, so it's hard to come to a conclusion right now, but somehow I have the feeling that this will be a very big (and good!) thing...
Mobile developers: Keep your fingers crossed, the SDK is coming! ;)

Street View

I just tried out Google Street View and it's pretty impressive. I found the diner where I had an excellent dinner as well as the hotel we stayed and many other places in San Francisco. Unbelievable that this runs in a browser without any additional software installation. Excellent job!