Android update for Memento Browser

I'm pleased to announce the updated version of the Memento Browser for Android is now available. It's taken me a few months to update the UI, add some functionality, and fix some bugs that lingered in the old version. There are still some things I'd like to improve, but I wanted to get it out there before JCDL 2013 in two weeks where I'll be showing off the iOS and Android versions of the browser.

Please give the app a test-drive on your Android phone or tablet, and let me know what you think.

Update on 7/16/2013

You can now get the Memento Browser from the Google Play Store!

Android student projects

The fall semester has turned out to be much busier than I anticipated, but I wanted to take a moment to write about the Android course that I'm teaching this semester. Although I've joint-taught an Android course before, I revamped the course to have more group work and focus more on software engineering principles by following the direction of David Janzen's Android course at Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo.

Seventeen upper level CS students are teaming up with 12 upper level Graphic Design majors to work on eight Android applications with the intention of releasing a working beta on the Android Market in December. The projects range from kid apps to useful utilities and everything in between. I'll share more details about the projects in a blog post later this semester.

This is the first time I've been able to coordinate a joint project with our graphic design students. Not only will the joint venture lead to better looking apps, but I believe my students will benefit greatly from having to interact with non-CS majors who use a different vocabulary and see software differently. I'm thankful to Stacy Schoen, a colleague of mine in the Dept of Art and Design, who is helping me in this experiment.

Android App Development in Fall 2011

I'll be offering an Android Application Development course this coming fall. The prerequisites are Comp 245 (Data Structures) and Comp 345 (OOP) or consent of the instructor.

I'm toying with the idea of offering an on-line, not-for-credit version of the course which will run concurrently with the live course. I would create a series of 30 minute videos that participants would watch on their own time, and then there would be a set time each week when everyone taking the course would join together in an on-line environment. I would be able to answer questions and go into more detail about the week's topic. There would also be some homework. Let me know if you think this is something you would be interested in. The fee would probably be around $150-200.

Some tutorials I created for developing an Android tic-tac-toe app are available on Google Code University. The tutorials teach you how to render graphics, save state information, play audio files, etc. I created the tutorials when I taught the first Android/iPhone programming course last spring. I'll likely be augmenting the tutorials this fall.

I ran across this article last week from the Wall Street Journal reporting that smartphone developers are increasingly in demand (see the figure below). Just a little more motivation to take my course!

Android Workshop at SIGCSE 2011

I'm offering a workshop on Android application development at SIGCSE 2011 in March 2011: Audacious Android Application Programming. (The workshop name was shamelessly stolen from Michael Rogers' iPhone workshop from last year's SIGCSE.)

Here's a brief description:

As smartphones and mobile devices become ubiquitous, many CS departments are adding mobile computing electives to their curriculum. Google’s Android OS is a freely available and popular smartphone platform with applications programmed in Java. Workshop participants will be introduced to mobile app development and the Android SDK. We will write some simple Android apps with Eclipse and run them on an emulator. For those interested in teaching an upper-level Android course, reusable programming labs and projects will be distributed, and we will discuss some teaching strategies. Participants should be capable of writing Java programs in Eclipse and should bring their own laptop preloaded with Eclipse and the Android SDK.

The workshop will be held Wednesday, March 9, from 7:00 - 10:00 pm at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel in Dallas, Texas. Cost is $65. More details will be made available soon on the workshop website.

Memento Browser for Android is available

I've just created a home for the Memento Browser for Android, a project I started working on this past summer. The free Android app allows you to view older versions of web pages by merely selecting a date. The browser uses the Memento protocol to find archived versions of the page and displays whatever page is closest to the requested date.

For example, the screenshot below shows the browser viewing cnn.com:



If you wanted to see what this page looked like on Sept 7, 2007, you could select that date, and in a few seconds be looking at this archived page from WebCite:



Note that the page displayed is actually one day later than the requested date. That's because the browser was not able to find an archived copy on the exact date requested. The browser is only displaying archived copies from Internet Archive, WebCite, and a few other archives. While they have a huge amount of the web archived, they certainly don't have everything archived.

You can download Memento Browser here. I am working on an iPhone version of the app with a colleague of mine, but I don't have an ETA for it yet.

If you don't have an Android device, you can still download the MementoFox add-on for the Firefox browser which does the same thing.

Finally, you can watch a demo of the browser in action here.

Loving my Droid X

I've had it less than a week, and I'm hooked. The Droid X's screen is large (4.3"), sharp, and bright. The keypad is easy to type, the touch interface is extremely accurate and responsive, and reaction times are quick. The video playback is fantastic. It's quick to connect to the Verizon 3G network or local wifi, and I've gone nearly 3 days without having to recharge. It's running Android 2.1, but Froyo (2.2) is supposedly coming out soon.

Below is a photo I took from chapel this morning using the Droid X's 8-megapixel camera. Not bad considering the lighting. I'm standing in the pit at the front of the auditorium with my fellow faculty members. (The singing, as you could imagine, is awesome with a packed auditorium.)


One small negative: When I first entered my Facebook account credentials, it sucked up all my "friends" and put them in my list of contacts. Now my 500+ contact list is full of people I haven't seen in years and certainly don't contact on a day-to-day basis. If I want to remove an individual from my list of contacts, I'm told I have to remove them from my list of friends on Facebook. Boo.

I haven't added many apps yet (the phone comes with approximately 30 apps pre-installed). But one I did add was the Bible app from YouVersion. It allows me to simply say "Genesis chapter five verse twenty", and boom, you're there. Won't this be fun to play with during Bible class on Sunday.

Hey Apple, when are you going to create an iTunes for Android? This is probably the only reason I will hang on to my iPod Touch for now. (Yes, I've heard of doubleTwist, and I'll give it a try soon.)

Any other apps I should install?

Transitioning from Android to iPhone

This week I finished teaching Android programming in my Mobile Computing course. I've created a number of useful tutorials and teaching aids, and I'm weighing my options of putting them out on my blog or website or publishing them in a book form on lulu.com. The tutorials cover graphics and sound, data persistence, custom event notification, using the Google Map API, and a lot more.

After spring break, Gabriel Foust will take over the Mobile Computing course and teach iPhone programming. I'm very curious to see how long it will take the class to climb the steep learning curve and be competent enough to write a useful app. With Android it took a little over a week.

I read just read this morning that Microsoft is turning away from their earlier Windows Mobile OS and focusing on a new OS called Windows Phone 7 Series. (Hello, Marketing department, are you sure you want to compete with Android and iPhone using the name WP7S?) The OS features a sleek new interface, and apparently XNA and Silverlight will be the main method of writing native apps. It's good to know that my efforts learning XNA last fall will pay dividends on this new platform. Maybe next time we offer Mobile Computing, we'll be using WP7S.


Update:

Joel Coehoorn commented on my Facebook note that you can develop applications on the iPhone using Mono, an open-source project that runs .NET applications (C#, VB.NET, etc.) on a number of operating systems. I've done a little investigation into this, and it appears that Mono support for the iPhone is somewhat limited. The UNITY platform allows development with C# and JavaScript, but at a cost. MonoTouch is another commercial option. Otherwise you're stuck with development on a Mac using Objective-C.

How do my students really feel about me?

Sometimes students tell you right to your face what they think about you or your class. Sometimes they let you know anonymously through teacher evaluations. And sometimes they think of more creative means.



This was from an assignment in my Mobile Computing class where I had my students develop a tic-tac-toe game for Android. My wife said she was going to have nightmares tonight after seeing this.