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Android combines the ubiquity of cell phones, the excitement of open source software, and the corporate backing of Google and other Open Handset Alliance members. The result is a mobile platform you can’t afford not to learn. This book will get you started.
VoteReport for Android 0.9.4
I hate calling things 1.0, so I didn’t – VoteReport for Android 0.9.4 is released and available in the Android Marketplace (like the iPhone App Store). If you have a T-Mobile G1, just open the Market application and search for “votereport” or simply browse under the Productivity category. You can also download it direct at: http://openideals.com/android/VoteReport.apk (and you don’t even have to jailbreak anything!).
The application is free to download, obviously. The code will be shortly, as well. All in all the entire effort took < 10 hours, albeit with lots of prep and design inherited from the iPhone app effort.
What is this mysterious TwitterVoteReport project? Read on…
Twitter Vote Report is an all-volunteer network of software developers, designers, and other collaborators have teamed up with the award-winning blog techPresident to launch this effort. The only resources contributed to this project are the participants’ time and expertise!
Millions of Americans will be voting this Election Day. Many of these voters will have terrific experiences and we’d love to hear about those. But many voters will experience voting problems that we have been hearing about for years: long lines, broken machines, and registered voters who can’t vote because their names aren’t showing up on the registration rolls.
Using Twitter Vote Report, voters will be able to share their experiences and resources with one another to solve problems quickly (e.g. “don’t come now, the line is too long”). These messages will then be aggregated and mapped so that we can “see” voting problems around the country in real-time.
I am hoping to make some improvements on it in the coming day or two, but know there are more important tasks at hand, and just wanted to makes sure the core functionality was out there.
Now get out there and let’s keep this election clean!
links for 2008-10-29
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In the next installment of this Android series, you'll learn how to incorporate GPS and Google Maps into your Android application, so your users can see where they are, all the time.
iUI and Android: Automagic Mobile Web Fun
Earlier this yaer, Joe Hewitt released a great library named iUI for easily developing iPhone-friendly mobile web applications using a basic set of HTML tags. Here’s a brief rundown of what it does:
* Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
* Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
* Ability to handle phone orientation changes
* Provide a more “iPhone-like” experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)
The good news is that since the Android platform uses the same WebKit browser, the iUI library works automagically with devices such as the T-Mobile G1. I had assume this, but to see that it basically works perfectly without changes, is great news. The only issue is that iUI obviously mirrors the user navigation elements and general interaction model of the iPhone native user experience. The iPhone model is highly usable and easy for most users to pick up, so I don’t think that is an issue, especially with the general lack of specific set of user interface guidelines for Android.
So, if you are looking for a quick way to build a usable, friendly, attractive web application that will work on iPhone AND Android, for now at least, iUI is your answer.
Here are some screenshots of the mobile site I developed earlier this year for Globalgrind.com. You can try it yourself by pointing your mobile device (it supports blackberry, wap, sidekick, etc as well) at: http://m.globalgrind.com or texting “ggrind” to 41411
links for 2008-10-28
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A revolutionary and easy to use music player that
plays audio on your website.