Burke did a fairly impressive demonstration of coding an application (in this case a mobile browser) inside 8mins (or 7mins 58 seconds to be exact - he timed it on stage).
Burke did say: “We’re really serious. We want to see serious innovation. We want operators and application developers to spend less time on little silos and more time building great stuff.” At the end he added an advert: “we’re hiring in Europe”.
During Q&A he said he hadn’t “heard” if Android will support Flash Lite, but he did say the Webkit would support Netscape style plugins.
How come Google is only releasing the full source code when the handsets hit the market next year? He said Google wanted to wait until it really worked on handsets before releasing the code.
What about the difference with the OpenMoko project, an open source mobile platform? “The difference with Moko is this [Android] is real,” he said “We have a lot of momentum with key partners. We are not talking about specifications, we’re just building it and trying to get support.”
It is all well and good chatting about the platform, but what can this thing do? The best way to see is to watch the demonstration video below:
This is pretty exciting stuff. The key points that I gleaned out of this video were:
Webkit browser: The browser shown uses Webkit and has rich touch screen interaction with the fancy phone. The visual history is really nice too. It is great to see a full browser built in, a la iPhone. This can be a great gateway to getting a nice interface to users
OpenGL: When you need more, you can get really low level. The world time application uses shows this off, and then you see Quake in action. A great platform for mobile games!
Street view in the Google Maps application looks fantastic
How the various applications integrate with each other, allowing you to share Services via Intents
Noticing the differences between the simpler model, and the fancier model.
The key is a fully fledged API to get as low level as you want to build very rich applications for mobile.
Oh, and did you get to the end of the video? You should. An Android Developer Challenge will award money from a pool of $10 million dollars to developers who build great apps for Android.
Slightly different to another platform that makes you hack it to get an SDK to build applications?
Joe Hewitt is the chap behind the iPhone Facebook interface, which is the top iPhone specific site out there. It is so nicely done that you often find yourself wishing that the normally Facebook interface was as clean and simple.
I got to sit down with Joe to discuss the Facebook app, how he develops on the platform, the iPhone in general, and what he would love to see from Apple. We also got to talk about the upcoming Android release and what he is looking to see out of that mobile platform.
