Tech Guides - Mobile

We've been joking for years that in the future we'll be ruled by Android Overlords - we just didn't think it would be an operating system. In 2015, it's predicted that Android shipped over one billion devices - a share of the mobile market equating to almost 80%. In our 2015 Skill Up survey, we also discovered that Android developers were by far the highest paid of mobile application developers. Android dominates our present - so why is it likely going to be vital to the world of tomorrow too? IoT Will Run On Android (Probably) Ask any group of developers what the Next Big Thing will be, and I bet you that more than one of them is going to say Internet of Things. In 2015, Google announced Android stepping into the ring of IoT operating systems when it showed us Brillo. Based on the Android kernal but 'scrubbed down by a Brillo pad', Brillo offers the possibility of a Google-backed cohesive platform for IoT - something potentially vital to a tech innovation increasingly marred by small companies attempting to blaze their own trail off in different directions. If IoT needs to be standardized, what better solution than with Android, the operating system that's already the go-to choice for open-source mobile devices? We've already got Smart Fridges running on Android, smart cars running on Android, and tons of smart-watches running on Android - the rest of the Internet of Things is likely just around the corner. Android is Colonizing Desktop Microsoft is still the King of Desktop, and Windows isn't going anywhere any time soon. However, its attempts to enter the mobile space have been miserable-at-best - a 2.8% share of the mobile market in 2015. What has been more successful is the idea of hybridizing the desktop and the mobile, in particular with the successful line of Surface laptops-come-tablets. But is the reverse likely to happen? Just like we're seeing Android moving from being a mobile OS to being used for IoT, we're also seeing the rise of ideas of Android Desktop. The Remix OS for PC operating system is created by former Google developers, and promises an "Android for PC" experience. Google-proper's own experiments in desktop are currently all based on the Chrome OS - which is growing fast in its market share, particularly among the education and student sectors. I'm an enthusiastic Chromebook owner and user, and when it falls short of meeting the full requirements of a major desktop OS, I'll often turn to my Android device to bridge the gap. According to the Wall Street journal, Google may be thinking similar and is considering folding Chrome OS and Android into one product. Consider the general praise that Microsoft received for Windows 10 mobile, and the successful unification of their platforms under a single OS. It's easy to imagine the integration of Google's mobile and desktop projects into a similar single user experience - and that this hybrid-Android would make a serious impact in the marketplace. For Apple, the Only Way Is Down Apple has banked on being the market in luxury for its mobile devices - and that might spell its doom. The pool of new buyers in the smartphone market is shrinking, and those late adopters are more likely to be price-conscious and enamored with the cheaper options available on Android. (After all, if your grandmother still complains about how much milk costs these days, is she really going to want to shell out $650 for an iPhone?) If Apple wants a bigger share of the market, it's going to need to consider a 'budget option' - and as any brand consultant will tell you, nothing damages the image of luxury like the idea that there's a 'cheap version'. Apple is aware of this, and has historically protested that it's never happening. But in 2015, we saw the number people switching from Android to iOS fall from from 13% to 11%. Even larger, the number of first-time smartphone buyers contributing to Apple's overall sales went from 20% to 11% over the same period. Those are worrying figures - especially when it also looks like more people switched from iOS to Android, than switched from Android to iOS. Apple may be a little damned-if-it-does, damned-if-it-doesn't in the face of Android. You can get a lot for your money if you're willing to buy something which doesn't carry an Apple logo. It's easy to see Android's many producers creating high-powered luxury devices; it's harder to see Apple succeeding by doing the opposite. And are we really ever going to see something like the iFridge? Android's Strength is its Ubiquity Principal to Android's success in the future is its ubiquity. In just six years, it's gone from being a new and experimental venture to over a billion downloads and being used across almost every kind of smart device out there. As an open source OS, the possibilities of Android are only going to get wider. When Androids rule our future, it may be on far more than just our phones. Dive into developing for Android all this week with our exclusive Android Week deals! Get 50% off selected titles, or build your own bundle of any five promoted Android books for only $50.

Eric Wastl created the website Advent of Code, a website that published a new programming exercise from the first of December until Christmas. I came across this website somewhere in the first few days of December and as I participated in the ACM ICPC in the past, I expected I should be able to solve these problems. I decided it would be a good idea to use Swift to write these solutions. While solving the problems, I came across one problem that I was able to do really well in Swift and I'd like to explain that one in this post. Introduction After reading the problem, I immediately noticed some interesting points: We can model the input as a graph, where each wire is a vertex and each connection in the circuit connects some vertices to another vertex. For example x AND y -> z connect both x and y to vertex z. The example input is ordered in such a way that you can just iterate over the lines from top to bottom and apply the changes. However, the real input does not have this ordering. To get the real input in the correct ordering, one should note that the input is basically a DAG. Or at least it should be, otherwise it cannot be solved. This means we can use topological sorting to sort the vertices of the graph in the order we should walk them. Although in the example input, it seems that AND, OR, NOT, LSHIFT and RSHFT always operated on a wire, this is not the case. They can also operate on a constant value. Implementation Note that I replaced some guard lines with forced unwrapping here. The source code linked at the end contains the original code. First off, we define a Source, which is an element of an operation, i.e. in x AND y both x and y are a Source: enum Source { case Vertex(String) case Constant(UInt16) func valueForGraph(graph: Graph) -> UInt16 { switch self { case let .Vertex(vertex): return graph.vertices[vertex]!.value! case let .Constant(val): return val } } var vertex: String? { switch self { case let .Vertex(v): return v case .Constant(_): return nil } } static func parse(s: String) -> Source { if let i = UInt16(s) { return .Constant(i) } else { return .Vertex(s) } } } A Source is either a Vertex (i.e. a wire) and then it has a corresponding string as identifier, or it is a constant and then it contains some value. We define a function that will return the value for this Source given a Graph (more on this later). For a constant source the whole graph does not matter, but for a wire we should look up the value in the graph. The second function is used to extract the identifier of the vertex of the source, if any. Finally we also have a function that helps us parse a string or integer into a Source. Next up we have an Operation enumeration, which holds all information about one line of input: enum Operation { case Assign(Source) case And(Source, Source) case Or(Source, Source) case Not(Source) case LeftShift(Source, UInt16) case RightShift(Source, UInt16) func applytoGraph(graph: Graph, vertex: String) { let v = graph.vertices[vertex]! switch self { case let .Assign(source1): v.value = source1.valueForGraph(graph) case let .And(source1, source2): v.value = source1.valueForGraph(graph) & source2.valueForGraph(graph) /* etc for other cases */ case let .RightShift(source1, bits): v.value = source1.valueForGraph(graph) >> bits } } static func parseOperation(input: String) -> Operation { if let and = input.rangeOfString(" AND ") { let before = input.substringToIndex(and.startIndex) let after = input.substringFromIndex(and.endIndex) return .And(Source.parse(before), Source.parse(after)) } /* etc for other options */ var sourceVertices: [String] { /* code that switches on self and extracts vertex from each source */ } The operation enum has a static function that allows us to parse a line from the input into an Operation and a function that will allow us to apply it to a graph. Furthermore, it has a computed variable that returns all source vertices for the operation. Now a Vertex is an easy class: class Vertex { var idx: String var outgoing: Set<String> var incoming: Set<String> var operations: [Operation] var value: UInt16? init(idx: String) { self.idx = idx self.outgoing = [] self.incoming = [] self.operations = [] } } It has an ID and keeps track of a set of incoming and outgoing edges (we need both for topological sorting). Furthermore, it has a value (which is initially not set) and a list of operations that has this vertex as target. Because we want to store vertices in a set, we need to let it conform to Equatable and Hashable. Because we have a unique string identifier for each vertex, this is easy: extension Vertex: Equatable {} func ==(lhs: Vertex, rhs: Vertex) -> Bool { return lhs.idx == rhs.idx } extension Vertex: Hashable { var hashValue: Int { return self.idx.hashValue } } The last structure we need is a graph, which basically hold a list of all vertices: class Graph { var vertices: [String: Vertex] init() { self.vertices = [:] } func addVertexIfNotExists(idx: String) { if let _ = self.vertices[idx] { return } self.vertices[idx] = Vertex(idx: idx) } func addOperation(operation: Operation, target: String) { // Add an operation for a given target to this graph self.addVertexIfNotExists(target) self.vertices[target]?.operations.append(operation) let sourceVertices = operation.sourceVertices for v in sourceVertices { self.addVertexIfNotExists(v) self.vertices[target]?.incoming.insert(v) self.vertices[v]?.outgoing.insert(target) } } } We define a helper function that ads a vertex if not already added. We then use this function to define a function that can add operation to the graph, together with all required vertices and edges. Now we need to be able to topologically sort the vertices of the graph, which can be done using Kahn's Algorithm[MA6] . This[MA7]  can be done in Swift almost exactly using the pseudo-code explained there: extension Graph { func topologicalOrder() -> [Vertex] { var L: [Vertex] = [] var S: Set<Vertex> = Set(vertices.values.filter { $0.incoming.count == 0 }) while S.count > 0 { guard let n = S.first else { fatalError("No more nodes in S") } S.remove(n) L.append(n) for midx in n.outgoing { guard let m = self.vertices[midx] else { fatalError("Can not find vertex") } n.outgoing.remove(m.idx) m.incoming.remove(n.idx) if m.incoming.count == 0 { S.insert(m) } } } return L } } Now we are basically done, as we can now write up a function that calculates the value of a given wire in a graph: func getFinalValueInGraph(graph: Graph, vertex: String) -> UInt16? { let topo = graph.topologicalOrder() for vertex in topo { for op in v.operations { op.applytoGraph(graph, vertex: vertex.idx) } } return graph.vertices[vertex]?.value } Conclusions This post (hopefully) gave you some insight intohow I solved one of the bigger Advent of Code problems. As you can see Swift has some really nice features that help in this case, like enums with types and functional methods like filter. If you like these kinds of problems I suggest you go to the Advent of Code website and start solving the problems. There are quite a few that are really easy to get started. The complete code for this blogpost can be found at my GitHub account. About the author Nicky Gerritsen is currently a Software Architect at StreamOne, a small Dutch company specialized in video streaming and storage. In his spare time he loves to code on Swift projects and learn about new things Swift. He can be found on Twitter @nickygerritsen and on GitHub: https://github.com/nickygerritsen/.

This is the first of a series of posts that will focus on using PhoneGap, the free and open source framework for creating mobile applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that will come in handy for game development. In this first article, we will introduce PhoneGap and build a very simple Android application using PhoneGap, the Android SDK, and Eclipse. In a follow-on article, we will look at how you can use PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build to create iOS apps, Android apps, BlackBerry apps, and others from the same web source code. In future articles, we will dive deeper into exploring the various tools and features of PhoneGap that will help you build great mobile applications that perform and function just like native applications. Before we get into setting up and working with PhoneGap, let’s talk a little bit about what PhoneGap is. PhoneGap was originally developed by a company called Nitobi but was later purchased by Adobe Inc. in 2011. When Adobe acquired PhoneGap, it donated the code of the project to the Apache Software Foundation, which renamed the project to Apache Cordova. While both tools are similar and open source, and PhoneGap is built upon Cordova, PhoneGap has additional capabilities to integrate tightly with Adobe’s Enterprise products, and users can opt for full support and training. Furthermore, Adobe offers PhoneGap Build, which is a web-based service that greatly simplifies building Cordova/PhoneGap projects. We will look at PhoneGap Build in a future post.   Apache Cordova is the core code base that Adobe PhoneGap draws from. While both are open source and free, PhoneGap has a paid-for Enterprise version with greater Adobe product integration, management tools, and support. Finally, Adobe offers a free service called PhoneGap Build that eases the process of building applications, especially for those needing to build for many devices. Getting Started For this post, to save space, we are going to jump right into getting started with PhoneGap and Android and spend a minimal amount of time on other configurations. To follow along, you need to install node.js, PhoneGap, Apache Ant, Eclipse, the Android Developer Tools for Eclipse, and the Android SDK. We’ll be using Windows 8.1 for development in this post, but the instructions are similar regardless of the operating system. Installation guides, for any major OS, can be found at each of the links provided for the tools you need to install. Eclipse and the Android SDK The easiest way to install the Android SDK and the Android ADT for Eclipse is to download the Eclipse ADT bundle here. Just downloading the bundle and unpacking it to a directory of your choice will include everything you need to get moving. If you already have Eclipse installed on your development machine, then you should go to this link here, which will let you download the SDK and the Android Development Tools along with instructions on how to integrate the ADT into Eclipse. Even if you have Eclipse, I would recommend just downloading the Eclipse ADT bundle and installing it into your own unique environment. The ADT plugin can sometimes have conflicts with other Eclipse plugins. Making sure Android tooling is set up One thing you will need to do, no matter whether you use the Eclipse ADT bundle or not, is to make sure that the Android tools are added to your class path. This is because PhoneGap uses the Android Development Tools and Android SDK to build and compile the Android application. The easiest way to make sure everything is added to your path is to edit your environment variables. To do that, just search for “Edit Environment” and select Edit the system environment variables. This will open your System Properties window. From there, select Advanced and then Environment Variables as shown in the next figure. Under System Variables, select Path and Edit. Now you need to add sdkplatform-tools and sdktools  to your path as shown in the next figure. If you have used the Eclipse ADT bundle, your SDK directory should be of the form C:adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20131030sdk.  If you cannot find your Android SDK, search for your ADT. In our case, the two directory paths we add to the Path  variable are C:adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20131030sdkplatform-tools  and C:adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20131030sdktools. Once you’re done, select OK , but don’t just exit the Environment Variables  screen yet since we will need to do this again when installing Ant. Installing Ant PhoneGap makes use of Apache Ant to help build projects. Download Ant from here and make sure to add the bin directory to your path. It is also good to set the environment variable ANT_HOME as well. To do that, create a new variable in the Environment Variables screen under System Variables called ANT_HOME and point it to the directory where you installed Ant: For more detailed instructions, you can read the official install guide for Apache Ant here. Installing Node.js Node.js is a development platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime engine that can be used for building large-scale, real-time, server-based applications. Node.js is used to provide a lot of the command-line tools for PhoneGap, and to install PhoneGap, we first need Node.js. Unix, OS X, and Windows users can find installers as well as source code here on the Node.js download site. For this post, we will be using the Windows 64-bit installer, which you should be able to double-click and install. Once you’re done installing, you should be able to open a command prompt and type npm –version and see something like this: Installing PhoneGap Once you have Node.js installed, open a command line and type npm install –g phonegap. Node will now download and install PhoneGap and its dependencies as shown here: Creating an initial project in PhoneGap Now that you have PhoneGap installed, let’s use the command-line tools to create an initial PhoneGap project. First, create a folder where you want to store your project. Then, to create a basic project, all you need to do is type phonegap create mytestapp as shown in the following figure. PhoneGap will now build a basic project with a deployable app. Now go to the directory you are using for your project’s root directory. You should see a directory called mytestapp, and if you open that directory, you should see something like the following: Now look under platforms>android and you should see something like what is shown in the next figure, which is the directory structure that PhoneGap made for your Android project. Make sure to note the assets directory, which contains the HTML and JavaScript of the application or the Cordova directories that contain the necessary code to tie Android’s API’s to PhoneGap/Cordova’s API calls. Now let’s import the project into Eclipse. Open Eclipse and select Create a New Project, and select Android Project from Existing Code. Browse to your project directory and select the platforms/android folder and select Finish, like this: You should now see the mytestapp project, but you may see a lot of little red X’s and warnings about the project not building correctly. To fix this, all you need to do is clean and build the project again like so: Right-click on the project directory. In the resulting Properties dialog, select Android from the navigation pane. For the project build target, select the highest Android API level you have installed. Click on OK. Select Clean from the Project menu. This should correct all the errors in the project. If it does not, you may need to then select Build again if it does not automatically build. Now you can finally launch your project. To do this, select the HelloWorld project and right-click on it, and select Run as and then Android application. You may now be warned that you do not have an Android Virtual Device, and Eclipse will launch the AVD manager for you. Follow the wizard and set up an AVD image for your API. You can do this by selecting Create in the AVD manager and copying the values you see here: Once you have built the image, you should now be able to launch the emulator. You may have to again right-click on the HelloWorld directory and select Run as then Android application. Select your AVD image and Eclipse will launch the Android emulator and push the HelloWorld application to the virtual image. Note that this can take up to 5 minutes! In a later post, we will look at deploying to an actual Android phone, but for now, the emulator will be sufficient. Once the Android emulator has started, you should see the Android phone home screen. You will have to click-and-drag on the home screen to open it, and you should see the phone launch pad with your PhoneGap HelloWorld app. If you click on it, you should see something like the following: Summary Now that probably seemed like a lot of work, but now that you are set up to work with PhoneGap and Eclipse, you will find that the workflow will be much faster when we start to build a simple application. That being said, in this post, you learned how to set up PhoneGap, how to build a simple application structure, how to install and set up Android tooling, and how to integrate PhoneGap with the Eclipse ADT. In the next post, we will actually get into making a real application, look at how to update and deploy code, and how to push your applications to a real phone. About the author Robi Sen, CSO at Department 13, is an experienced inventor, serial entrepreneur, and futurist whose dynamic twenty-plus year career in technology, engineering, and research has led him to work on cutting edge projects for DARPA, TSWG, SOCOM, RRTO, NASA, DOE, and the DOD. Robi also has extensive experience in the commercial space, including the co-creation of several successful start-up companies. He has worked with companies such as UnderArmour, Sony, CISCO, IBM, and many others to help build new products and services. Robi specializes in bringing his unique vision and thought process to difficult and complex problems, allowing companies and organizations to find innovative solutions that they can rapidly operationalize or go to market with.

It’s doubtful many remember Nintendo’s failed games console, the Virtual Boy, which was one of the worst commercial nose dives for a games console in the past 20 years. Commercial failure though it was, the concept of virtual reality back then and up till the present day is still intriguing for many people considering what the sort of technology that can properly leverage VR is capable of. The most significant landmark in this quarter of technology in the past 6 months undoubtedly is Facebook’s acquisition of the Oculus Rift VR headset manufacturer, Oculus VR. Beyond using the technology purely for creating new and immersive gaming experiences (you can imagine it’s pretty effective for horror games), there are plans at Facebook and amongst other forward-thinking companies of mobilizing the tech for transforming the e-commerce experience into something far more interactive than the relatively passive browsing experience it is right now. Developers are re-imagining the shopping experience through the gateway of virtual reality, in which a storefront becomes an interactive user experience where shoppers can browse and manipulate the items they are looking to buy ( this is how the company Chaotic Moon Studios imagines it), adding another dimension to the way we can evaluate and make decisions on the items we are looking to purchase. On the surface there’s a great benefit to being able to draw the user experience even closer to the physical act of going out into the real world to shop, and one can imagine a whole other array of integrated experiences that can extend from this (say, for example, inspecting the interior of the latest Ferrari). We might even be able to shop with others, making decisions collectively and suggesting items of interest to friends across social networks, creating a unified and massively integrated user experience. Setting aside the push from the commercial bulldozer that is Facebook, is this kind of innovation something that people will get on board with? We can probably answer with some confidence that even with a finalized experience, people are not going to instantly “buy-in” to virtual reality e-commerce, especially with the requirement of purchasing an Oculus Rift (or any other VR headset that emerges, such as Sony’s Morpheus headset) for this purpose. Factor in the considerable backlash against the KickStarter-backed Oculus Rift after its buyout by Facebook and there’s an even steeper hill of users already averse to engaging with the idea. From a purely personal perspective, you might also ask if wearing a headset is going to be anything like the annoying appendage of wearing 3D glasses at the cinema, on top of the substantial expense of acquiring the Rift headset. 3D cinema actually draws a close parallel – both 3D and VR are technology initiatives attempted and failed in years previous, both are predicated on higher user costs, and both are never too far away from being harnessed to that dismissive moniker of “gimmick”. From Facebook’s point of view we can see why incorporating VR activity is a big draw for them. In terms of keeping social networking fresh, there’s only so far re-designing the interface and continually connecting applications (or the whole Internet) through Facebook will take them. Acquiring Oculus is one step towards trying to augment (reinvigorate?) the social media experience, orchestrating the user (consumer) journey for business and e-commerce in one massive virtual space. Thought about in another way, it represents a form of opt-in user subscription, but one in which the subscription is based upon a strong degree of sustained investment from users into the idea of VR, which is something that is extremely difficult to engineer. It’s still too early to say whether the tech mash-up between VR, social networking, and e-commerce is one in which people will be ready to invest (and if they will ever be ready). You can’t fault the idea on the basis of sheer innovation, but at this point one would imagine that users aren’t going to plunge head first into a virtual reality world without hesitation. For the time being, perhaps, people would be more interested in more productive uses of immersive VR technology, say for example flying like a bird.