Sunday, July 31, 2011

Android Gets a Build-Your-Own-App

Android Gets a Build-Your-Own-App App

Analysis: Google's do-it-yourself app developer sounds promising, and sounds like something Apple abandoned awhile ago.

By Harry McCracken, Technologizer Jul 12, 2010 9:24 am

Got an idea for a smartphone app? If you've got an Android phone you might be able to build it yourself, thanks to App Inventor for Android, a new Google Labs program for Windows, OS X, and Linux that's designed to make building Android programs as easy as piecing blocks together.

Steve Lohr's story in the New York Times makes it sound sensational; here's a video from Google showing a lady creating her first App Inventor app:

App Inventor is in closed beta at the moment, and Google says it'll let folks in "soon" -- you can sign up here. As you'll see if you fill out the sign-up form, Google sees the program as an educational tool of particular interest to teachers and students.

It's an exciting idea that's more than slightly reminiscent of HyperCard, the brilliant visual programming tool that was a big deal on the Mac more than twenty years ago, and which is missed to this day. HyperCard or something similar would be a boon on the iPhone -- even Steve Jobs has says he thinks so, although Apple apparently doesn't have any interest in building such an application itself, and new restrictions in the iOS developer agreementprevent apps developed with the HyperCard-like RunRev from being distributed on the App Store.

(More and more, I think that the surface similarities between Android and iOS are less interesting than the fundamental differences in emphasis and philosophy -- and the more different the two OSes get, the more interesting they'll be.)

I still have a cranky-old-man rant about PCs getting boring when they stopped coming with BASIC and normal people therefore stopped learning how to write their own software. I can't wait to get my hands on App Inventor -- and to see whether it's capable of creating programs that anyone other than their inventors will want to use . . .

http://www.youtube.com/androiddevelopers

Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software

By STEVE LOHR

Published: July 12, 2010

Google is bringing Android software development to the masses.

The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones.

The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.

The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves.

“The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world,” said Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project.

The project is a further sign that Google is betting that its strategy of opening up its technology to all kinds of developers will eventually give it the upper hand in the smartphone software market. Its leading rival, Apple, takes a more tightly managed approach to application development for the iPhone, controlling the software and vetting the programs available.

“We could only have done this because Android’s architecture is so open,” Mr. Abelson said.

Mr. Abelson is a longtime proponent of making intellectual and scientific resources more open. He is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Creative Commons, and he helped initiate M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare program, which offers free online course materials used in teaching the university’s classes.

The Google project, Mr. Abelson said, is intended to give users, especially young people, a simple tool to let them tinker with smartphone software, much as people have done with computers. Over the years, he noted, simplified programming tools like Basic, Logo and Scratch have opened the door to innovations of all kinds. Microsoft’s first product, for example, was a version of Basic, pared down to run on personal computers.

The Google application tool for Android enables people to drag and drop blocks of code — shown as graphic images and representing different smartphone capabilities— and put them together, similar to snapping together Lego blocks. The result is an application on that person’s smartphone.

For example, one student made a program to inform a selected list of friends, with a short text message, where he was every 15 minutes. The program was created by putting three graphic code blocks together: one block showed the phone’s location sensor, another showed a clock (which he set for 15-minute intervals), and third linked to a simple database on a Web site, listing the selected friends.

An onscreen button would turn on the program, Mr. Abelson explained, for perhaps a few hours on a Saturday night when the person wanted his friends to know where he was.

A student at the University of San Francisco, Mr. Abelson said, made a program that automatically replied to text messages, when he was driving. “Please don’t send me text messages,” it read. “I’m driving.”

A program by a nursing student at Indiana University enabled a phone to send an emergency message or make a call, if someone fell. It used the phone’s accelerometer to sense a fall. If the person did not get up in a short period or press an onscreen button, the program automatically texted or called the person designated to receive the alert.

“These aren’t the slickest applications in the world,” Mr. Abelson said. “But they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.”

The Google tool, of course, works only for phones running Android software. A sign-up with a Google Gmail account is required. The tool is Web-based except for a small software download that automatically syncs the programs created on a personal computer, connected to the application inventor Web site, with an Android smartphone. When making programs, the phone must be connected to a computer with a U.S.B. link.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 12, 2010, on page B6 of the New York edition.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

iPad leads in U.S. brand satisfaction

iPad leads in brand satisfaction among U.S. consumers, though a relatively obscure tablet maker came in a close second, according to IHS iSuppli.

Rivals face a steep challenge in the U.S. because consumers are fixated on Apple's tablet to the detriment of other brands, according to the "U.S. Tablet Consumer Preference" study released today by iSuppli.

"Apple's competitors in the tablet market already are facing major challenges in offering products that can match the iPad's combination of optimized hardware, software, operating system, applications, content and app store," Rhoda Alexander, an analyst at IHS iSuppli, said in a statement.

(Credit: IHS iSuppli)

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 the highest rating, iPad owners gave an average rating of 8.8 for the iPad--the highest rating of the 11 brands, when asked how likely they were to recommend their tablet to friends or family members, iSuppli said. And more than 80 percent of iPad owners rated the tablet at 8 or higher on the recommendation scale.

And of those surveyed, 79.2 percent said they owned an Apple-branded product that was either an iPad or iPad 2, iSuppli said. And 61 percent said they would buy the same brand again.

One brand--clearly not a household name in the U.S.--was a surprise, however. China's Shenzhen Zenithink Technologies came in just below Apple at 8.75, though iSuppli qualified this a bit by saying the overall sample for Zenithink was small. Samsung Electronics, with a large respondent sample, was third, scoring an average of 8.5.

Overall, iSuppli believes this survey validates a previously-published forecast. "Apple will account for the majority of tablet sales through the year 2012 and...will remain the top-ranked seller of such devices at least through the year 2015," iSuppli said.

Page Speed Service: Web performance, delivered.

Update 7/29/11: We were notified of a bug in the measurement tool that sometimes causes incorrect measurements. If your results indicated a slowdown on your pages, please run the tests again, and make sure you specify a fully qualified domain such as www.example.com. We apologize for any inconvenience and confusion this may have caused.

Details:
Measurement tests run for bare domains (such as example.com, without the prefix www) previously indicated that pages were loading more slowly, rather than speeding up, when using Page Speed Service. The test results page now prominently notifies you of this when you visit this page, if this error applies to you. Please check your old measurement results page if this bug applies to you. Running the tests again with the fully qualified domain such as www.example.com usually fixes the issue and gives you the correct measurement.

Two years ago we released the Page Speed browser extension and earlier this year the Page Speed Online API to provide developers with specific suggestions to make their web pages faster. Last year we released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite web pages. To further simplify the life of webmasters and to avoid the hassles of installation, today we are releasing the latest addition to the Page Speed family: Page Speed Service.

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, please sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. We are diligently working on adding more improvements to the service.

At this time, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later. You can request access to the service by filling out this web form.

Ram Ramani is an Engineering Manager on the Make the Web Faster Team in Bangalore, India. He is a believer in "Faster is better".

Google Rolls Out Free DNS Service

Google Public DNS, Google's own free Domain Name System, is an attempt to make Web pages load faster at a time when millions of users are accessing the Web several times a day, triggering multiple DNS requests and bogging down the Web page rendering process. Google says Google Public DNS focuses on improving DNS speed, security and the validity of results. Read on to find out how it works and what information Google stores.

In its latest effort to accelerate the rate at which Web pages load for users, Google Dec. 3 launched its own free Domain Name System, Google Public DNS, into a crowded market that includes several providers already.

A Domain Name System is basically a hierarchical naming system for computers or any resource connected to the Internet. However, because it is not something the average Web user sees on the surface, it helps to think of the DNS as a sort of phone book for the Internet because it translates computer host names into IP addresses. Prem Ramaswami, product manager for Google Public DNS, explained:

"Most of us aren't familiar with DNS because it's often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the Web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names—e.g., www.google.com—into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers—e.g., 74.125.45.100—that computers use to communicate with one another."

Google Public DNS is the company's stab at making Web pages load faster at a time when millions of users are accessing the Web several times a day, triggering multiple DNS requests. This can bog down the Web page rendering process, which means users are sitting at their computers, waiting to view Web pages.

Ramaswami told eWEEK that Google Public DNS is focused on improving DNS speed, security and the validity of results. He explained how it works: When a user loads a Web page, that triggers a DNS query to the ISP, which in turn has to go out across the Web to get the correct answer. For example, when a user searches for mail.google.com, his or her ISP resolver will go ask the dot-com servers what Google.com's server is, then go ask Google.com's server what the IP address is for mail.google.com and return that to the Web user.

This process takes longer, Ramaswami noted, because the DNS has to crawl the Web and ask several servers to get the correct answer. Google Public DNS issues DNS queries constantly, regardless of whether people have queried the DNS. This means Google always has the query info in its cache. Each question comes with a "time to live." Before the time limit of, say 300 seconds, expires, Google will ask the question for a big range of domain names.

Google is essentially keeping the caches warm, a method it calls "prefetching," Ramaswami said. He also said this approach minimizes packet loss.

Security is another major area Google is focusing on. Read about how Google is mitigating against DNS cache poisoning and DoS (denial of service) attacks here on the Google Code Blog.

Savvy readers will find their curiosity piqued because Google Public DNS deals with domain and IP addresses, but Google is clear about its privacy measures for the service. Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the user's computer to spot DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks; Google deletes these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours. Google pledges not to keep personally identifiable information or IP information in the permanent logs.

Google has more information about Google Public DNS in its FAQ here, as well as instructions on how to configure a network to use the DNS. Google's Public DNS IP addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Google also offers domestic and international phone numbers to call for help support.

Google spokesperson Nate Tyler told eWEEK that Google Public DNS is part of the company's "Make the Web Faster" campaign, which includes Google Chrome, Google Chrome Operating System and SPDY, an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the Web.

Google Public DNS is launching amid a crowded DNS field that includes OpenDNS, UltraDNS and Tucows.

But Tyler said Google Public DNS is less about competing with those providers and more about taking what Google is learning about how to improve the DNS system and offering that to Websites. "We're actually trying to improve other services," he said.

That's a noble overture, but it's unclear how the existing DNS providers, all of which are making good money from their services, will feel about this. Again, Google is entering another niche of the Web where it has the potential to be disruptive; recall the release of the free Google Maps Navigation GPS system.

GPS stocks soured. How will existing DNS providers fare after the emergence of Google Public DNS?