Fascinating morning keynotes

Android Open was jam packed with activities including a pre-conference day of workshops and then two days of main conference. Each morning of the regular conference began with a series of five to twenty minute long keynote talks and panels. You can see a complete listing of the speakers for both days in the conference schedule. You can also watch the keynote sessions via the Android Open 2011 Youtube video playlist (click here to access). I would encourage you to watch as many of the keynotes as possible; they contain a lot of interesting and inspirational material to get your Android juices flowing!

O’Reilly founder & CEO Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) kicked things off with his Day 1 opening keynote “What Android can learn from Steve Jobs“. Definitely an interesting choice of title for an Android conference! But Jobs’ passing the week before presented O’Reilly with an opportunity to discuss some of the key principles behind Apple’s success, especially the notion espoused by Jobs that a company needs to be “true to its soul”. O’Reilly examined Google’s “soul” at length, suggesting that it needs to never forget its original mission to help connect people to all the world’s information. Key takeaway for Android developers and businesses: Stay true to yourself and your mission while holding Google to its own high ideals, too.

The next keynote that caught my attention was a conversation between conference co-chair Marko Gargenta (@markogargenta) and Robert Stephens (@rstephens), CTO of Best Buy. Stephens is a pretty technical guy, even going so far as to say that Best Buy ought to get rid of their DVD section and replace it with an Arduino section! As you might imagine given the crowd, this was well received.

The thing that really stood out for me as a mobile payments developer, however, was Stephens’ discussion of the many issues with NFC deployment. He said Best Buy may bypass at least some NFC generations completely, going straight to purely cloud-based payments solutions. This joins the rising tide of anti-NFC sentiment and pragmatism that seems to be building, and echoes some of the many things PayPal has said publicly about NFC weaknesses in recent months. Takeaway: Watch major retailers such as Best Buy closely to pick up the beginnings of big shifts in mobile payments.

Day 2 saw a couple more morning keynotes that stood out for me. The first, “Android in Space” by Will Marshall (@wsm1) of NASA, dealt with building very cheap microsatellites based upon Android-based Nexus One smartphones, aka “phonesats“. “Very cheap” in this case means tens of thousands versus millions or billions of US dollars.

Marshall noted that because of the conservative nature of space flight, the CPU in phonesat Nexus Ones will actually be the fastest CPUs onboard a satellite to date when they’re launched into orbit later this year. He also asked the audience some provocative questions such as “What if we could each have personal satellites?” and “What if satellites became a software domain?”. Thing to note: Android software and off the shelf mobile phone hardware can reduce costs in some areas by two or more orders of magnitude versus traditional ways of doing things, and that could change everything in those areas.

You can read more about the phonesat project from this report from O’Reilly correspondent Alex Howard (@digiphile). Among other things, Alex links to an excellent documentary on early phonesat rocket launch testing.

The final keynote that fascinated me was “The African Laptop Killer: Android and the Developing World” by Claire Hunsaker (@chunsaker). Hunsaker discussed the tremendous rise of mobile technology in Kenya and elsewhere and how that technology is revolutionizing lives and economies. Some of the statistics quoted include:

• 99% of Internet access in Kenya is via mobile device.
• Cheap Android phones have dropped Internet access in Kenya from 31% of an average worker’s annual income to about 5%.
• Fully 20% of Kenyan GDP runs through the mobile wallet (predominantly M-PESA).
• According to Hunsaker, “Facebook will have access to most (Kenyan) users before thy can even own a mobile handset themselves” via borrowed/shared mobile handsets.

Please watch Hunsaker’s talk. It may change your perspective on the power and importance of mobile techologies.

Session highlights

There were a lot of great sessions at Android Open. Here are some notes from my favorites:

• Aleksandar Gargenta (yes, Marko is his brother) presented an excellent “Securing Android” session discussing how security is enforced. He made a number of comparisons to Java ME and desktop Linux security, noting that “Anytime something is in RAM, there are ways of recovering it”. I’d recommend spending a little time reading through Aleksandar’s slides (click here).
• Eric Burke (@burke_eric) from Square gave a nice “Beautiful Android” talk. I’d been hoping for a few payments fireworks, but Burke stuck closely to how to build attractive and functional Android apps. Among the things he noted, Android clip paths don’t handle antialiasing. This leads to very ugly interfaces unless you use offscreen bitmaps.
• Nick Farina (@nfarina) spoke about the importance of using WebViews in “From iOS to Android” (also, XCode is painful).
• Sean Byrnes of Flurry knocked it out of the park with his “Android App Engagement by the Numbers” talk! In particular, he called out the importance of releasing early and quickly to your followers, as statistics show that on average, an Android developer loses 38% of their users on the day they install your app, 50% in one week.
• Jesse Vincent (@obra) talked in “Dancing App Stores” about the somewhat suprising fact that new app versions dramatically increase sales, even with minimal changes to the app itself. He also made some good suggestions on secondary and tertiary app markets besides Google’s Android Market; check out his slides for more details.

All in all, the sessions had enough code and technical details while still being able to spark ideas in a wide variety of attendees, some Android programmers, some not.

Additional coverage and news from the conference

Conference organizers made a number of other news and information sources available to attendees. You can search some of the best via these links:

• Read the round-up of news and coverage curated by O’Reilly.
• Access all of the speaker slides provided to the organizers.
• View official conference photos.

One more highly recommended resource: The online show “All About Android” (@androidshow) broadcast live from Android Open at the end of Day 1. The conference co-chairs along with several speakers including Tim O’Reilly make appearances on the show. It’s probably worth your time to watch and get their perspective on the major Android developments flowing out of the conference.

Did it blend?

I found this first ever Android Open to be a great mix of community and technology. It struck the right tone of openness and provided both developer how-to and business oriented material. If you are interested in Android and appreciate a balanced perspective of the entire ecosystem, I would recommend this conference as a good place to tap into all things Android.

Click here to access the full article on X.com.

I was recently privileged to attend both the O’Reilly Android Open and X.commerce Innovate conferences back-to-back in San Francisco. Both were mind and network expanding events, and I’d highly recommend either to developers and business colleagues considering attending next year.

I hope to write more about my key takeaways from Android Open at some point in the future. For this article, let’s focus on Innovate.

So much transpired in a few short days that it would be impossible to capture everything in one short article. I’ll do my best to give you the overall flavor and major highlights, then I’ll dive a bit deeper to discuss some of the particular technical “breakout” sessions I attended.

Ready? Let’s go!

Keynotes and major announcements

The conference began each morning with a series of general session keynotes. You can access the conference schedule to see a full list of speakers, or better still, watch the keynotes (as well as breakout sessions) from the Innovate 2011 video site (click here to access).

Watch the Day 1 keynotes for yourself below (click here if the embed doesn’t work below):

Naveed Anwar, head of X.commerce community, discussed many of the key Day 1 developments in his blog post here. Some of the big ticket items for developers and merchants included:

• Launch of the “X.commerce Fabric“, a message-broker based system allowing developers to integrate and use various commerce capabilities. The Fabric ties together various components from eBay, PayPal, Magento, and other eBay companies with capabilities built by third parties, large and small. Much more on this to come.
• PayPal debuted “PayPal Access“, a new online “commerce identity” comparable to social identity, but for making commerce transactions faster and easier for the consumer. Read more about PayPal Access from the Janrain blog; I’ll also have much more to say about PayPal Access in coming months.
• Magento launched much tighter integration with eBay, allowing merchants to push products from Magento into eBay with just a few short clicks. You can read a third party take on the many and central Magento-related announcements via AuctionBytes (click here).
• Facebook announced Open Graph integration with Magento and GSI Commerce enabling, among other things, “Want” and “Own” buttons analogous to the already ubiquitous “Like” button. You can read much more about the eBay-Facebook partnership in this ZDNet article.

With the major announcements out of the way, the Day 1 afternoon and Day 2 morning keynotes could focus on inspirational higher ordered bits. These sessions were great motivation for attendees to take advantage of all of the technical tools at their disposal to make the world a better place. Whether by building corporate giving into their fundamental commercial business model, or by thinking about the effects of the current recession and the innovation that could get us out of it, or by imbuing everything we do with thoughtful design, these sessions were all meant to light the creative spark.

I particularly enjoyed seeing Steven Cooper (@developersteve), whom I featured in an interview article for the X.com site last year, receive a community award at the beginning of the day 2 morning keynotes. You can watch the awards presentation and all of the Day 2 keynotes here:

If the embed fails to load, you can alternatively click here for the Day 2 morning general session.

Other things I found striking during the second morning’s general session:

• Marshal Cohen spoke at length about the current recession and what might need doing, especially in the United States, to innovate our way out of it. One item in particular stuck with me: He pointed out that while the current recession is not the longest in US history (yet), it is the deepest by job losses. I have to agree with his conclusion that a fundamental shift is underway and many of the lost jobs aren’t coming back, so it’s more important than ever to focus on new commerce opportunities. Build your business to take advantage of inevitable innovations and the sky’s the limit.
• X.commerce developer evangelist Praveen Alavilli (@ppalavilli) showed some live X.commerce code in front of thousands. Always a gutsy move! Access his demo code yourself from GitHub here. By the way, Praveen has written a great blog post about getting started with the Fabric since Innovate completed; click here to check it out.
• Hip-hop artist Chamillionaire (@chamillionaire) stole the show discussing how he used community and tech skills to build his fan base from the streets of Houston to the Grammys and beyond. What an amazing innovator! I’d highly recommend watching at least his portion of the day 2 keynote; prepare to be impressed and inspired.

I could write several more articles about the various keynote speakers and their stories. Instead, I’ll encourage you again to watch the videos for yourself.

Partner pavilion and a free O’Reilly book for you

There was a wide range of X.commerce partners showing their wares in the Partner Pavilion during and in between sessions. Somtimes I wondered just how they were packing so many thousands of attendees in such a small space! (The secret, of course, was lots of free coffee, snacks, and soda.)

Here’s a shot I took the first day of the X.commerce booth to give you a feel for the foot traffic:

One other cool thing going on in the Partner Pavilion, in my not so humble opinion, was that O’Reilly Media was giving away printed copies of the new book “Building eCommerce Applications”. This book is a collection of some of the most interesting and varied articles written by contributors to the X.commerce DevZone.

Even if you weren’t able to attend the conference, you can still download a free e-book copy from O’Reilly (click here to get your copy).

And yes, yours truly does have four articles included in the book, so I am a bit biased. Still, you can’t beat free, right?

Session highlights

I attended a number of interesting sessions at the conference. Rather than try to list them all, I thought I’d focus on the key points from the most interesting and useful for me.

• Two related sessions, “Introducing the X.commerce platform” and “From Code to Capability“, showed developers how to get started with the dive deep into the new X.commerce Fabric. I’d highly recommend clicking on the session titles and watching the sessions to get up to speed asap. You should also download the X.commerce Developer Package and the X.commerce Innovate demo code so you can try it out for yourself. Fabric will be a very important piece of the commerce development puzzle in the months to come.
• We all know mobile commerce is a BIG opportunity, right? What you might or might not know is how to take advantage of the various social, local, and mobile development strategies to capitalize upon it. “Commerce goes SoLoMo: Social, Local, Mobile” discusses what’s possible, focusing on Milo and Where.com (both eBay companies) in particular. I’d also recommend watching the “Mobile face-off: HTML5 vs. native apps vs. mobile platforms” panel to get a grip on the realities of native, HTML, and hybrid mobile development. I enjoyed both sessions and took away the point that we can do almost anything with today’s mobile technologies (boy have we come a long way since WAP and J2ME!).

Things to watch in the coming year

In summary, Innovate was crammed full of technologies to watch and good information on getting started with them. I’d recommend trying out Fabric and Access as soon as possible and paying attention to both as they roll out in the months ahead. There are also some very nice Magento and Facebook commerce opportunities coming; pay attention, and profit!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the conference, the news coming out of it, and the new commerce possibilities available as a result of those announcements. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think. And happy commerce hacking!

Click here to access the full article on X.com.

As part of the ongoing dialog I hope to have with you I wanted to ask you about your opinions for what I should write about on the Health Graph blog.

I’m considering a variety of topics to cover. Some of the many things I’d like to write about include:

• How to get started with the Health Graph API, a “Health Graph 101″ series
• Partner profiles and interviews with developers on how they take advantage of the Health Graph in their apps
• Third party libraries, bindings, wrappers, and other tools that make using the Health Graph easier
• Application launch announcements and success stories
• Slide decks and video presentations on using the Health Graph (hackathons, here I come!)
• Application ideas and features requested by the RunKeeper user community
• Tips and tricks to build apps using the Health Graph as quickly and efficiently as possible

What do you think? What would you like to see in future blog posts?

Please fill out the Google Docs form below to share your opinion. Note that if you would like me to be able to contact you, you should provide an email address in that optional field; if you want to remain anonymous, please leave it blank.

I’m also considering having office hours where I’m available to chat about whatever Health Graph issues you’re having via Skype or a Google Hangout. If you’d find either or both of those options useful, or have a suggestion for a different mechanism, please indicate that on the form, too.

Thanks for your input!

• Nice 3 part video series on "Managing Body Weight" http://t.co/chPT5ni http://t.co/PyxJe9D http://t.co/F6phVZA via @RunKeeper TV #

PayPal X Platform

• @Magento resources http://bit.ly/nhL2ju #
• New @PayPalX site http://bit.ly/pjQOSH launched Monday Aug 29 #
• A @Magento community update http://t.co/hx80BIm #
• I will be attending @AndroidOpen http://t.co/u0OfofQ and @X_commerce Innovate http://t.co/Rj7oShX in October in San Francisco #

APIs and development

• I love how Codecademy http://t.co/P5PIn6d jumps straight into learning, then worries about signups later (more: http://t.co/S1M3ccZ ) #
• Handy side-by-side PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby reference http://t.co/Reabhz6 via @newsycombinator #
• SSH remote server productivity tips http://t.co/z8cCtX0 #

Personal things

• Of all the things Steve Jobs is known for saying http://t.co/XDnepRZ I find his Stanford commencement speech far and away the most wonderful #
• How to space out your tweets http://t.co/PupkTYV using @bufferapp (I also like @tweetdeck for this) #

Running

• Easy 5k, neg splits 10:22, 10:11, 9:36, and 8:29. http://t.co/7sZROAP #RunKeeper http://t.co/gTR9DjA #
• Hot mid-afternoon 4.00mi run. http://t.co/uiPEsPJ #RunKeeper http://t.co/S3x7HHu #
• 4mi including 2mi marathon pace (target 9min/mi; actual 8:52 and 8:54). http://t.co/pPXzGhR #RunKeeper http://t.co/hvNPKUT #
• #Irene dashed our flight to Boston today, so I ran 14mi instead. http://t.co/O6sKYEB #RunKeeper http://t.co/hwlwTGk #
• I've been tracking my weight for the last two years. Happy I've stayed in a good range for last year+. http://t.co/dAC2Aap #

Google promised that the Google In-App Payments API would offer:

An easy, effective way to make money while keeping your customers engaged in your web app, and it’s priced at just 5-percent.

Problem was, it wasn’t available yet.

Last month, Google made one small step to address that shortcoming by releasing in-app payments to developers with US bank accounts.  As they noted in the blog post announcement:

Today, we’re making Google In-App Payments available for all web application developers to integrate with their web apps wherever they’re hosted, including the Chrome Web Store. Integration is simple with just a few lines of code. And pricing is set at just 5-percent.

Amit Fulay, Google Product Manager, went on to say:

In-App Payments is initially available for developers with a United States bank account and for buyers in more than 140 countries. We look forward to expanding to additional developer locations as quickly as possible.

So if you have a US based bank account, you can sign up to give Google In-App Payments a try.  They require quite a bit of private and public business information as you can see below.

It’s no secret that I believe PayPal’s payment solutions to be superior to Google’s for most developers.  As I wrote in my recent Alternative Payment Systems series concluding article:

Google Checkout does not provide anywhere near the full capabilities of the complete PayPal X Platform.  It compares most directly to PayPal’s Website Payments, Fraud Management Filters, and Embedded Payments technologies.  Even if you include Google In-App Payments and Google Wallet…Google solutions still fail to provide the full functionality available commercially today in the PayPal X Platform.  Given the choice between the two, I would recommend the PayPal X Platform in most cases unless a merchant was already locked in a fairly tight business relationship with Google.

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network including some resources to consider if you do fall into the “tight relationship” camp.

Bitcoin is a relatively new digital currency. But there’s much more to it when you dig a bit under the covers. Shall we?

What is Bitcoin?

Here’s the high level description of what Bitcoin is and provides from its Wikipedia page:

Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009, based mainly on a self-published paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. (It) enables rapid payments (and micropayments) at very low cost, and avoids the need for central authorities and issuers. Digitally signed transactions, with one node signing over some amount of the currency to another node, are broadcast to all nodes in a peer-to-peer network. A proof-of-work system is used as measurement against double-spending and initial currency distribution mechanism.

The Bitcoin site WeUseCoins.com provides a high level video overview of what Bitcoin is, how the coins are created, and what you can buy with them (click here if the YouTube video fails to load below).

For more detail, you can also watch a short Ignite presentation from the current Principal of the Bitcoin project, Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen). Click here to watch Gavin’s presentation on YouTube if the embed below isn’t working for you.

You can get a feel for the frequency of Bitcoin transactions by watching them occur via the Bitcoin Monitor site.

Interested in the nitty gritty of how the system works? You can dig deeper by reading Nakamoto’s original “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” paper (click here for PDF). There is also a Bitcoin wiki with links to much more information, a FAQ, discussion forums, and developer information; click here to jump to the wiki. You can also link to more information on the Bitcoin project and community via Bitcoin.org.

One very important thing to note:

The Bitcoin system is based upon public-key cryptography. Without the crypto, you’d have no Bitcoin. Bitcoin being crypto-currency leads to some interesting properties, not the least of which is that it cannot be inflated by a central bank or governmental authority. This means that Bitcoins have commodity-like properties similar to gold and other precious metals.

Bitcoin’s being based upon public key cryptography also means that there are concerns about it being used for nefarious purposes. Governments and organizations interested in cryptography, money laundering, and cyber attacks are taking close looks at Bitcoin. We’ll discuss these issues more later.

Acquiring and storing Bitcoins

In order to use Bitcoins, you must first have a Bitcoin wallet.

You can either download a piece of wallet software to install on your computer (click here for links to download the official Windows, Mac, or Linux client or here to grab the source from GitHub) or use an online wallet. There are options for the latter listed on the “Getting Started with Bitcoin” page from WeUseCoins.

The official Windows wallet starts up like this (note that the provided Bitcoin Address has been removed from this screenshot):

Here’s an example online wallet, Instawallet, which creates a new wallet for you by default when you visit their homepage:

To continue using the same Instawallet in the future, you would need to bookmark the unique wallet URL assigned to you. The Instawallet site notes that you should only view this option as a “spare change” wallet, rather than store a large amount of Bitcoinage here.

Whether you choose to use a downloaded wallet or an online one, there are some potential gotchas to consider. If you lose your downloaded wallet, say through a system crash or theft, you also lose any coins stored in it. Likewise if you use an online wallet such as Instawallet and lose the URL or authentication information for that wallet, or the service provider disappears, or anything else keeps you from reaching your online wallet, you may also loose coins. So be sure you have a backup and security strategy in place to avoid any problems later.

Whichever approach you choose, once your wallet is ready you will have a new Bitcoin Address. You use this address to send and receive coins.

So how can you get some Bitcoins to try the system out? There are several options listed on the aforementioned “Getting Started with Bitcoin” page. But perhaps the easiest option is to use a free service from Gavin Andresen, Free Bitcoins. Gavin’s service will transfer a small amount of coinage (0.001 Bitcoin, or BTC, as I write this) for free to whatever receiving Bitcoin Address you specify. The only catch is that you do need a Google account (free to acquire if you don’t already have one).

For example, I entered my Google account information and Bitcoin Address for Instawallet into the Free Bitcoins “faucet” and it sent 0.001BTC my way.

After a little bit of time for the network communication and computations to happen in the background, the Bitcoinage appeared in my Instawallet.

There are a number of other ways you can add coins to your wallet. You can earn them, purchase them in a market (check out Bitcoin Charts for a view into the various markets and currency-to-Bitcoin purchases), and even buy them over the counter (OTC). Bitcoins can also be created via a process known as “mining“, but for most consumers and merchants interested in Bitcoins for commerce but not in becoming a mining business, the amount of computational horsepower required may be prohibitive (see this ZDNet article for more on mining).

Using and accepting Bitcoins

However you acquired your Bitcoins, once you have some you will probably want to start using them. There are a wide and growing variety of legitimate services and merchandise being sold today for Bitcoins. Visit the “Trade” page on the Bitcoin wiki to see a list of many of the available items.

What if you want to accept Bitcoins as a method of payment? The same wiki contains a Merchant Howto to help you get started. It provides information on both manually accepting Bitcoin and automating Bitcoin based purchases. And you can automate purchases via existing shopping cart solutions (for example a Magento Payment Gateway Plugin) or programmatically yourself using a JSON-RPC interface.

For more information on the Bitcoin ecosystem, I would recommend reading through the linked resources on Dave Mackey’s “A Bitcoin Primer“.

Threats and opportunities

As Bitcoin has gained somewhat wider acceptance and much wider visibility, criticism has been heaped upon it. There have been exchange data issues, threats against the system because of its use in black market purchases for illegal items such as drugs, and claimed heists of large sums of Bitcoinage. There has also been some incredible speculation which saw the value of 1 BTC, as expressed in US dollars, climb nearly 1000% in a single month earlier this year!

Things have gotten so heated in this space that even the CIA is studying up on Bitcoin. So what are the significant threats and opportunities for Bitcoin?

One major threat to Bitcoin’s longterm success is ease of use. Needing to have a working knowledge of “crypto-currency” and “peer-to-peer” may not turn off techies, but it certainly confuses a lot of other people. If people can’t understand Bitcoin, they won’t use it. If not many people use Bitcoin, it will continue to see non-sticky value jumps versus other currencies. And large swings in value lead to a further lack of confidence in any currency or commodity.

The opportunity inherent in this problem lies in making the Bitcoin system very easy to use. Implementers need to concentrate on bulletproof clients and merchant software if they hope to maximize Bitcoin uptake. And for goodness sake, hide the cryptography details and never use the acronym “p2p” in getting started guides and consumer-oriented documentation!

Another threat to Bitcoin’s viability is that it has in fact been used in certain high profile illicit markets. The opportunity here is for legitimate Bitcoin users and supporters to educate their governmental representatives on the many legitimate uses of Bitcoin. Just as with dollars or any other currency or commodity, Bitcoin is inherently neither good nor evil. But unlike the other more established value stores and means of commerce, Bitcoin is terribly new, and therefore poorly understood, which in some cases leads to fear. Education is the only way out of that.

Click here to read the complete article on the PayPal X Developer Network including discussion of the biggest potential impediment to Bitcoin’s long-term viability.

• Nice @Launch coverage of FitnessKeeper's growth, @HealthGraphAPI, and prospects http://bit.ly/qpwmDy (more: http://bit.ly/rtKwS4 @RunKeeper) #

PayPal X Platform

• For @PayPalX, @Magento, and other developers sizing up the new X.commerce world: eBay developer resources http://bit.ly/qOlYrj #
• My latest: @X_commerce #Android Apps the Easy Way, Part 1: Understanding App Inventor http://bit.ly/pbIic3 http://bit.ly/pzyiN1 #
• Part 2 http://bit.ly/rlbtEt of my @X_commerce #Android series http://bit.ly/rkxjTU focuses on accessing web APIs in @AppInv apps (@PayPalX) #
• How to build native #iOS #Android #Blackberry & other apps with @PhoneGap and @PayPalX http://bit.ly/r35dlO using HTML, JavaScript, & CSS #

Wireless and mobility

• "An iOS Developer Takes on Android" http://bit.ly/pojAfc by @nfarina should be read, and re-read, by #iOS and #Android developers alike #
• Strong words from Google against Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle: "When patents attack Android" http://bit.ly/mTMIS1 #AndroidFTW #
• Microsoft's response to Google's #Android patent related claims does make the GOOG look pretty stupid, though: http://tcrn.ch/mPGx7D #
• "How to find the perfect Blogs and Websites to tell the World about your App" http://bit.ly/qikZNm via @appbackr (hint: Google @AdWords) #
• No more Symbian in North America. As @rww puts it: "The death spiral of Nokia's smartphone brands continues." http://rww.to/n7WO1A #
• Designing for #Android tablets http://bit.ly/qCKLyK from @smashingmag (follow-up to previous Android design article http://bit.ly/qL1FuV ) #

APIs and development

• Tips on designing command line interfaces http://bit.ly/n4wYVC #
• Seven handy new API consoles from @apigee http://bit.ly/njzavH including consoles for @bitly and @nytimes #
• Google+ Platform blog launched by the GOOG http://bit.ly/q0dXhi #

Personal things

• "The jobless future" http://bit.ly/oWfUnR by @jeffjarvis needs to be read and brainstormed by our best and brightest; pay attention D.C. #
• Tips on running a software business http://bit.ly/o1p8Qq applies equally well to writing and many other endeavors #

Running

• Dream run: Down the South Kaibab Trail into the Grand Canyon http://bit.ly/o2CkMG preferably all the way rim-to-rim #IWillMakeItSo #
• Hot 10mi run. But marathon long, slow distance run #1 completed! http://t.co/OEGoAaW #
• Here's the exact same 10.00mi run recorded on my @Garmin 405cx for comparison http://bit.ly/pfzNKV #RunKeeper #
• 5k recovery after yesterday's 10mi. 92 deg F at start, 98 at finish. http://bit.ly/r1yEx7 #RunKeeper http://bit.ly/qI77Vb #
• 4mi running in the 70s is much nicer than 90s or 100+ deg F! http://bit.ly/oG47aK #RunKeeper http://bit.ly/pwuwgY #
• Ran 5 miles in 51 mins and felt great. Temps in 70s after much needed 4in of rain this morning. Pure joy! http://bit.ly/q7L8LY #
• Great fun running 4mi in the cool rain! Splits 10:17, 9:57, 9:27, and 8:56. http://bit.ly/qGH5dO #RunKeeper http://bit.ly/n8zOkC #
• 12mi cool and cloudy. Saw another runner fall, roll to his left, and pop up running! http://t.co/U5byy1B #RunKeeper http://t.co/VjeCnyq #

As I mention at the beginning of that series, I’m always looking for tools and techniques that make mobile commerce apps simpler and faster to build, debug, and deploy.  App Inventor can take you a very long way for Android apps, especially for building rapid prototypes, but what if you want to build apps for multiple platforms?  And what if you want to build those apps from one codebase, to run natively on all of the major smartphone platforms, with access to device hardware such as sensors and device data such as contacts?  Is that even possible?

Turns out, with PhoneGap (@phonegap) it is.

In the words of PhoneGap’s originators, PhoneGap is an:

HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best… HTML and JavaScript.

PhoneGap takes your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript based app and wraps it in a chrome-less browser for each supported platform.  As of this writing, PhoneGap supports iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, HP/Palm’s WebOS, and Samsung’s Bada platforms.  You can learn more about the basics of PhoneGap from this introductory video (click here to watch).

PhoneGap enables all this native goodness by providing JavaScript-to-native and native-to-JavaScript hooks so that your app can talk to the native services provided by sensors and other such things.  I’ll leave the details to the PhoneGap Ecosystem presentation included below (click here to watch); suffice it to say that the integration is pretty slick and lets you use one consistent API to build an app that can be packaged up and run on all the previously mentioned platforms.

Important things to note about PhoneGap:

• It’s open source, and free (as in beer).
• Getting setup to develop for PhoneGap is pretty straightforward for one platform, but a bit much if you’re targeting several.  Click here for information on targeting each supported platform.
• Because of the multiplatform packaging complexities, there’s a free “PhoneGap Build” service that will build your apps for all supported platforms in one fell swoop, providing you with downloadable, packaged, native apps suitable for uploading to the various mobile app markets in use across the different platforms.
• The PhoneGap site provides an API Documentation reference; there’s a lot of additional information including tutorials on the PhoneGap wiki.

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network including links to PayPal PhoneGap plugin information.

What’s caught my attention lately? Google’s App Inventor for Android (@AppInv) and X.commerce web APIs allow you to build commerce apps quickly and visually using web based communication.

This article is the first in a series in which I’ll examine how to use App Inventor along with eBay’s web APIs to build Android commerce apps. In this installment, I’ll introduce App Inventor. I’ll discuss what it is, how to setup the development software and start using it, how to share App Inventor built projects and apps, and some of the limitations of this approach versus developing Android apps in Java using the Android SDK.

Future articles will look at how to access RESTful web APIs from App Inventor and what you can do with the eBay APIs. The final article in this series will build upon all the previous ones to walk you through creating an example Android eBay commerce app built using App Inventor.

What is App Inventor?

If you follow technology news, you know that Android has been a shining star of mobile success for Google. We’ve written quite a bit about Android here in the DevZone, and for good reason: It provides an open, flexible, widely adopted mobile application platform that enables you to build just about any kind of app you can dream up. But in order to develop for Android and use the Android SDK, one needs to be relatively facile with Java programming.

Some smart folks at Google Labs thought it would be interesting to try removing that Java programming restriction. Enter App Inventor.

As Google describes it on their “What is App Inventor” page:

App Inventor lets you develop applications for Android phones using a web browser and either a connected phone or emulator. The App Inventor servers store your work and help you keep track of your projects.

The key pieces of software that you use to build your app include:

• App Inventor Designer – used to select components for your application
• App Inventor Blocks Editor – once you’ve select components in the designer, you specify their behavior by assembling them together here
• Android emulator – used to execute your applications; alternatively, you may connect a real Android-based phone to your system and test deploy your apps to it (recommended if you have an Android handset)

We’ll step through how to set up and use the App Inventor software later in this article. To get a feel at this point for how App Inventor works, I’d encourage you to watch the App Inventor introductory video below (click here to jump to the video on YouTube if the embed below isn’t working for you).

Hopefully you now have a feel for what App Inventor is and the basics of how to use it. It’s time to get it installed and give it a test drive!

Setting up the software

You should follow the provided App Inventor setup instructions to get up and running quickly. Click here to access the instructions.

Important points:

• You need a Mac, Windows, or Linux system (detailed specs in the setup instructions linked to above)
• You need a relatively recent version of either the Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Internet Explorer browser (again details in the setup instructions)
• You need to have Java 6 installed and properly configured to be able to run Java Web Start applications

You should test your installation by loading the App Inventor Java test page at: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/ode/JWSTest/AppInvJWSTest.html

Assuming the first part of the test (browser configuration check) passes, you should then click the orange Java icon “Launch” button to test launch a simple provided Java Web Start application (in this case, a Notepad). If all goes well the Notepad will launch and you should see something like this:

Once you have passed the browser and Java configuration stages, you still need to install App Inventor Setup into your development system. This contains the Android emulator and drivers for various Android hardware (the designer runs in the browser and the block editor via Java Web Start). Download and install the setup program via the instructions appropriate to your operating system:

• Mac OS X
• GNU/Linux
• Windows

Getting started

After installing the setup software, you are ready to do one of two things: Either setup your Android phone for development or build your first app with the emulator.

Although there are certainly some development and testing advantages to using a real phone, and I would recommend you do so for serious application development, we’ll stick with the emulator for consistency’s sake for the rest of this article. So, click here to start working through building a simple app in the emulator.

Google has provided very detailed instructions for you to follow as you build your first App Inventor app. The instructions being here: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/setup/hellopurr/hellopurremulatorpart1.html

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I thought I’d just call out the major steps and let you get all the details you need from their instruction page and the previously embedded example video. The main things you need to do to get a new project underway are:

1. Navigate to http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/ (this will launch App Inventor in your browser)
2. Create a new project
3. Drag and drop a “Button” component into the viewer (Screen1)
4. Upload an image for your button (I chose to use my ugly mug as shown below) and remove the unwanted button text as directed in the directions linked to above.
5. Launch the editor by clicking “Open the Blocks Editor” in the designer browser window (this will launch a Java Web Start download and may require you to approve several steps via popup windows before the blocks editor launches in a separate window)
6. Launch the emulator by clicking “New emulator” in the editor window (as noted in the screenshot below, this may take several minutes before it’s ready)

Once everything is launched and you’ve swiped right to unlock the emulator screen if necessary, click “Connect to device” in the blocks editor window and select your emulator instance; more magic will happen (this may also take awhile) and then, presto, you should see your app including the button image you specified running in the emulator.

Now you are ready to complete your application. Click here to work through the second part of the provided example including adding some text with a “Label” component and a “Sound” which you wire up to play when a user clicks on your image button.

The only thing left to do now is to make your app available for others to use. You do this by selecting “Package for Phone”. From there you can choose to:

• Show Barcode – provides a QR code that Android users can scan to install your app
• Download to this Computer – lets you save a local Android Package (.apk) containing your app which you can then use or redistribute to others as you see fit
• Download to Connected Phone – lets you deploy immediately to any phone you’ve been developing with

And that’s about all there is to building a simple Android app using App Inventor!

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network including a discussion of limitations of using App Inventor versus the full Android SDK.