So this is, from my point of view, a very much strategic decision, placed just at the right time. Android’s finally deployed to a number of new devices, not only by HTC, but also Samsung and other vendors are now adopting it. So after this first hurdle being taken, Google realized that there is more to mobile devices than PIM functionality and a browser, plus some location based gimmicks. Games are a massively growing market inside the mobile universe. And they want to have a part of that cake, but without a Native Development Kit and the ability to interface graphics directly from real machine code, the speed impacts induced by using a Virtual Machine to execute code are still too high for big games. Can I prove it? Well, no need to, to cite google here:

In a future release we hope to support linking with OpenGL ES and audio libraries, which should enable high-performance games.

By releasing this kit, Google finally opens Android to all those people not willing to write Java Code that perfoms well ( which is not the way Java is handled anywhere else ) and let’s developers to the optimizing of raw code themselves. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the results.

After being opened by Eric Schmidt, the whole Keynote thingy mainly concentrated on HTML5 features. These features are really impressive, be it a video-tag, the canvas element ( max ), background-worker processes and other related stuff that is quite handy and really capable of improving every developers live. It’s also nice to see that every major browser vendor, excluding Microsoft, seem to be well-prepared for the upcoming changes.

The clear development towards web-based everything not being distinguishable form “normal” locally-ran applications is also supported by new caching mechanisms and subsequent possibility of using e.g. gmail even with no connection, a  highly useful feature certainly leading to a broader acceptance of web-based applications.

Another thing remarkable is google’s view on android and it’s wide market adoption. In contrast to popular tech opinion, they seem to be quite satisfied, and predicting a strong year for android to come. An indicator may be that this session room I’m sitting in is overcrowded. Another is the wide range of apps presented, including gmote, a remote control application working on all platforms providing a simple to use remote control feature for your desktop, including touchscreen-to-mouse translation, remote media control and even the possibility to watch movies and pictures ( in fact, everything renderable ) stored on your computer on your handset. Nice.

I’m looking forward to the rest of this day, especially, tada, for my free htc magic. Stay tuned.

I’m still exploring the API, and Android as a complete product, and the more I learn, the more I’m getting caught by it. And I’m sure that a few years from now, many people now using costly, unhandy notebooks will be using devices based on something like Android.

But let’s try to stick to the title of this post. First of all, I’m really looking forward to Google I/O. I booked a flight, it’s my 2nd time in San Francisco ( I don’t know where to sleep yet, but there’s some time left to figure it out, hints welcome ), excited. And I’m working towards finishing my own keyboard implementation to show it off. I’m not going to talk about it in detail as long as there is no working demo available, and it will take some time, trust me.

I’m also waiting for Cupcake. Cupcake, for the ones of you who are not familiar with Android, is a read-only development branch, meant to publish non open-source development efforts. These efforts also include the creation of an Interface to implement custom Input Methods, be it a Keyboard or anything else that allows for input of textual data. One could very well think of a Morse-to-Text button ( idea for a tutorial ), a rotate-to-write or an application using an artificial neural network to do some lip-reading using the phones camera. Though the last one will be quite resource-consuming, the point is, anything can be done using the very generic API.

Once again, if you want to use it, get yourself the Cupcake Sources. It’s well explained at source.android.com. I somehow made it, without spending more than about 30 minutes, to build emulator images and the rest i needed to get going. And although the Eclipse plugin reports an error, it’s working even for cupcake.

Luckily, when building the stuff you need the docs are also being created, explaining what you need. I especially recommend to take a look at the built-in keyboard’s implementation, as it’s very readable and self-explaining.

I’m really hoping to find some time to publish a tutorial on this topic, but I’m not able to promise anything.