Me, Android and Google Apps

It is funny how much I want to do something but how little time I can dedicate to that task - there are other things that come in front - family, spend the weekend together, movies, educating the kid, that sort of thing. But I spent my fair hour trying to make the Android phone send me events about its accelerometer (I figured out I was probably using the wrong mechanism, or I should be using GAME speed, or I don't know much about the platform as I thought I would), and then I decided to make a bouncing ball using their renderer engine and an object shape.

It is a ball.

It bounces.

It is green.

That is the sort of thing when I didn't know what to do and I was learning to program Basic. It starts simple, then you start playing with sin and cosin (this more or less draws something that will remind you of a bycicle wheel):

(pseudo-code)

for (float rad = 0; rad <= 2 * pi; rad += pi / 64) {
float x = horizontalCenter + radius * sin(pi);
float y = verticalCenter + radius * cos(pi);
line(horizontalCenter, verticalCenter, x, y)
}


Then you play more and more and more and you get a cool application that does nothing.

But in today's world a mobile application should do something with the Internet. IMHO. It should get a picture somewhere, update your status someplace, turn your house light off, I don't know, something. But your mobile phone doesn't know how to handle the external world. The external world changes often, it maybe a lot of trouble to connect to some 3rd platform, and else. So you create your own server app and make your client communicate with it, and then your app communicates with 3rd parties.

Opera does that in their mobile browser.

The PersonalAssistant at PageOnce probably does the same.

PixelPipe probably implements it like that.

And the reason for that is that their mobile app won't break if any of the 25 services they connect to changes their API or gets offline. Do you have to upload a picture and Picasa doesn't want it for any reason? Keep it on your server until it can be uploaded (this is what PixelPipe does, it is a great small app).

But weekend Android developers (unfortunatelly, I am in that category) don't have a server available there, and I found it hard to find free Java Web Application servers. But now there is Google Apps!

... and I have to figure out what I will do.