Android Development & Technology
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  • DMCA notice — “Connect 4 Online” now “Four Online”

    About two months ago, the company “Hasbro” sent Google a DMCA takedown notice about our games “Connect 4 Online” and “Don’t Connect Four“. Hasbro apparently owns the trademarks of the terms “connect four” or “connect 4″ (beside more than 4.000 other terms).

    Our two games have been suspended from the Android market, which is especially painful because of the good ratings and the long process to get into the upper spots in the “popular games” listing.

    devconsole2

    It was not possible to edit the information of the suspended projects in the market website. All I could do was sending a mail to the generic Google address which sent me the DMCA notice, with the question if I could update the game with another name and sent them the .apk file. I (surprisingly) got a response, but telling me I would need to submit it as a new project.

    I’ve submitted the game again as “Four Online“, available in “Games -> Brain&Puzzle”. If you happen to have the original “Connect 4 Online” installed, you’ll need to remove it in order for “Four Online” to work.

    devconsole3

    I hope you enjoy the game and maybe it will (again) climb up to a good spot in the popular games listing. If you have any feedback or experience issues, please let me know!

    P.S.: Be sure to check about trademarks before you release your next project! ;-)

  • New Categories in Android Market: Comics, Health, Sports, Themes

    As announced earlier this month in the android developers blog, Android Market got four new Categories for Applications: Comics, Health, Sports, Themes.

    left to right: Application Categories; Comics; Health

    Many of us expected this to happen with the next Android update to version 1.6, which also includes a white Theme for the Market.

    Each of the new categories currently contains about 50 apps. I expect the list to grow rapidly; due to the small amount of applications new apps are a lot more visible to users, and now it would be easier than anytime later to secure a top spot in the “by popularity” listings.

    The next update of MyMarket (planned for today (Wednesday) or tomorrow) will also include the new categories.

  • A sneak peek at ADC2 submissions (Updated)

    A thread at the “Android Developers” Google Group about ADC2 submissions keeps growing, with interesting background stories of many participating teams. Here is the current list of mentioned apps and games and their respective categories (last update @ 22:30 gmt):

    If you know about other submissions, let me know as I try to keep the list updated.

  • ADC2 Submissions Thread (Update 2)

    The Android Developer Challenge submission deadline was reached yesterday midnight, and now a lot of Android developers are curious what’s going on, which apps were submitted and how many submissions there were in total.

    Unfortunately Google seems to dismiss the opportunity to create more emotions and buzz inside the Android community, for example by a quick blog post about the status quo and further progress. The latest blog on the android developer blog is “ADC2 Submissions Closing Monday!”, and the ADC2 homepage still says “Submit your app today!”.

    Nevertheless there is a interesting thread being started over at the Android Developers Google group with the title “Hmm… at last ADC2 is out of our way … tell about your app and experience“. Quite a few developers which submitted to the ADC2 posted about their projects with a bit of background to each. It’s very interesting to read, especially since new posts are coming in all couple of minutes. I’d suggest you guys head over there and give it a heads-up about your projects if you’ve submitted any!
    Read the rest of this entry »

  • MyMarket v1.0 (submitted to the ADC2)

    MyMarket is a customizable overlay for the Android market which allows you to bookmark, recommend, remove, filter and preview items in the listings. Most of the last days we have been working on version 1.0 which we submitted to the Android Developer Challenge!

    Notable improvements in this version:

    • US & EU market results (changeable in the settings)
    • “Recommended” listing displays the number of user-votes
    • Faster update of “My Downloads”
    • In My Downloads, items with updates are listed on top
    • Screen rotation works with filters, search, etc.
    • Autocomplete for the search box (with last 10 searched)
    • Quickfilter: When browsing the apps or games list and adding a new filter, the last clicked items title/dev-name are suggested in the keyword textview (as autocomplete)
    • Last used tabs are remembered everywhere
    • Scrolling really far down works smoothly
    • Various minor bugfixes and improvements

    left to right: Recommended (with votes), Detail & comments preview, Settings

    left to right: Listing, Filters, Autocomplete

    We hope you enjoy version 1.0. Feel free to contact us if you have any ideas, suggestions or problems! More detailed infos and screenshots can be found at mymarket.cc.

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  • MyMarket Update: My Downloads & Recommendations

    This post is a brief summary of today’s update of MyMarket, a customizable overlay for the Android market. The update includes several key features on our roadmap to version 1.0, most notably “My Downloads” as well as the promised recommendation system.

    My Downloads

    “My Downloads” displays a list of your installed apps and games with available updates, as well as a quick-link to uninstall a specific app. Users can refresh the list manually via “Menu” -> “Refresh”, and MyMarket can automatically search for updates (can be changed in “Settings” (via the main Activity’s menu)). A click on the red X icon brings you straight to the “Uninstall Application” dialog of the Android phone.

    left to right: Update, My Downloads, Remove Item

    Recommendation System

    We finally had enough recommendations from users to build a working recommendation system based on the users votes. The recommendations are hourly generated, and Applications and Games get in the list by having more than 3 votings by users. The more votes (recommendations) in the last weeks, the higher the app is up in the list. I hope this becomes a really interesting recommendation system, especially since an app will never stay on top because it historically had a large amount of votes. If there are enough users recommending apps in MyMarket, perhaps we can add other categories like “most recommended in last 2 days”.

    left to right: Main Screen, Recommendations, Description with first comments

    Read the rest of this entry »

  • MyMarket Update: App Details with Description, Downloads

    We just released an update for the Android app MyMarket, which includes a very interesting new feature we hope you will all like: Detail information about any app in the Market. If a user clicks on the light bulb (left icon), a pop-up opens with the description of the app, the downloads and the number of ratings.

    left to right: options, detail infos, enable/disable filter

    MyMarket can be found in the category “Applications” -> “Tools”. Please let us know what you think about it, as well as any ideas, comments and suggestions!

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  • Serializing Data - JSON vs. Protocol Buffers

    JSON and Protocol Buffers are two methods for serializing data, primarily used for lightweight server-client and inter-server communication. In this post we are having a look at the performance of the latest Protocol Buffers (version 2.2.0) compared to JSON, using Java on a G1 Android phone and Python with CJSON and SimpleJSON on a typical Linux system.

    • JSON serializes data using UTF-8 / 16 / 32 encoding, with turn-key libraries for most programming languages. Any data structure can be serialized with JSON, although binary data (such as an image) has to be encoded with an algorithm like Base64 before.
    • Protocol Buffers is an open-source project developed by Google and released under the BSD license. It uses a binary encoding which makes the serialized data a bit smaller and does not require binary data to be encoded before. The data-structures have to be described before serialization by creating a .proto file, compiling it with protoc and including the header files in the project. The libraries from Google are available for Java, Python and C++, with third party implementations for most other programming languages.

    For the performance tests we imagine a news aggregator application, which requests 10 news items from a server. Each item has the following data structure (using around 2.3 kilobytes with an 48×48px image):

        class NewsItem {
        String title;
        String text;
        String link;
        byte[] image; /* 48x48px */
    }

    The app could be faster by receiving just the infos in a first request and the images in a second, but to compare the serialization speed of JSON and Protocol Buffers we use one combined response (JSON: 23.6kb with base64 encoded images, PB: 18.3kb due to binary encoding).

    1. Library Size

    Let’s start with having a look at the different libraries and their size in kilobytes:

    Protocol Buffers isn’t the smallest library which might not matter on many systems. Using it in an Android app would often 5 to 10-fold the application size, whereas JSON is integrated in the Android stack by default.

    2. Serialization Performance - Python

    The following chart portrays the (de-)serialization time for one request with 10 news items, measured in 1.000.000 runs on a typical Linux system: Read the rest of this entry »

  • MyMarket Update with Custom Filters

    We have just published an update for MyMarket, which includes two major improvements:

    • SQLite3 Database: The data about removed and bookmarked items was stored in the /data/ directory, and has now moved into a database on the SD card. This makes is not only easier to query the information, but also enables users to reinstall the app or even reset the phone without loosing any stored infos.
    • Customizable Filters: It’s now very easy to exclude any keywords in the title or the dev-name. Just click on “Menu” -> “Filter”, and you have a nice overview with checkboxes to enable/disable any one.

    left to right: menu item ‘Filter’, enable/disable filter, remove

    The next steps on the roadmap include a search function and displaying available updates in the bookmarks. This could be useful if a user is interested in a specific app, but wants to wait for the next update. We have a couple of other ideas as well, and would be very happy to keep hearing what you think about this project!

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  • “MyMarket”, a customizable Android Market overlay

    Recently we have been working on My Market, an Android app which is a customizable overlay for the Android Market. The simple aim is to bring more fun into browsing new and popular apps and games. We found ourselves to be bored when scrolling down the “by popularity” listings, seeing the same items all the time.

    • “My Market” enables users to remove items, to clear the list of the clutter (undelete is possible anytime)
    • Bookmarking items is another feature. If you are browsing and spot an interesting app, you might just want to bookmark it, to have a second look at it later.
    • Furthermore we are working on a recommendation system where users can get clever suggestions for possibly interesting apps and games.
    frontapps_allremoved
    A short click on an item opens the menu, a long click opens the Android market

    We are happy to have released version 0.9 today in the Android Market (in Applications / Tools)! Any ideas, suggestions and bug reports are strongly appreciated — please let us know in the comments below, or by mail.

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