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But entering the cavernous Android App Market for the first time can be daunting. Where do you start? Well, Pocket-lint’s here to hold your hand, give you a biscuit and tell you everything will be all right. Here’s the first five apps you should immediately download for your handset:

Taskiller

One of the biggest benefits of the Android platform over the iPhone is that you can run applications in the background. However, that benefit is double-edged because it can be quite easy to choke your phone up with a million background processes you don’t actually want or need.

So kill them. Kill them dead. Taskiller offers a fully-featured task manager, complete with a homescreen widget that lets you clear the board with a single tap. There’s a free and a paid version, but the only difference between them is ads in the free option, so plump for that. Oh, and top tip – be sure to add apps you need to keep running to the ignore list, so you don’t accidentally stop the touchscreen working.

Price: Free

Bonsai Blast

Unfortunately, one of the areas of the Android Market that’s most lacking is the games section. The majority of Android games aren’t worth the time to download them, and the preloaded game, Teeter, will only last you so long. But thankfully, there’s one or two standouts in the market that’ll help you pass those long train journeys.

The best is called Bonsai Blast. It’s a variant on classic puzzle game Bust-a-move set in a Japanese Zen Garden that sees you frantically trying to match up coloured balls to eliminate them before they reach a hole in the ground. At which point the world ends, obviously. Download this, and you’ll spend half of next year completely oblivious of the fact that your bus has just sailed past the stop you normally get off at.

Price: Free

Spotify

If you’re a music fan of any description, and you haven’t tried Spotify yet, you’re missing out. Imagine the world’s biggest jukebox in the sky with the ability to play anything at a second’s notice, create and share playlists, and even operate without an internet connection – in rural areas or on the tube, for example.

It was those features and more that won it the coveted Product of the Year status at the 6th Pocket-lint Awards. The Android version is almost as good as the desktop client, and certainly superior to the iPhone edition. But you do have to pony up for a £10 per month subscription to the premium version, which also removes ads from the desktop edition and ups the audio quality. If you used to buy even just one CD every other month or so, it’s worth it.

Price: App is free to download, but £10 per month subscription required to use it

GyPSii

Location-based services are developing at a rate of knots, becoming more and more useful. Android’s default Google Maps is great, but even better is GyPSii – a mobile social network that attempts to connect up the real and virtual worlds.

It lets you do simple stuff like geotag photos or videos and bookmark particular places, but it can also hook up with your friends on the service to see where they’ve been bookmarking and view their geotagged photos too. You can then share all your content through other social networks. Very powerful, very useful.

Price: Free

Beebplayer

The BBC’s iPlayer has been a revolution in video-on-demand, but it’s quite tricky to get it working on many mobile devices. Not so on Android, where Beebplayer offers radio and live television streams across any connection – Wi-Fi, HSDPA, 3G or even GPRS.

Sure, the quality isn’t great – especially at the lower end of connectivity, but you can see what’s going on and you should be able to get a reasonable radio connection at least through any data service. You can’t yet download programs to watch offline at a later date, or access older content – it’s restricted to live streams – but it’s the best streaming app around for getting BBC content on the go.

Price: Free

What next?

You’ve almost certainly got some favourite Android apps, too, and we want to know what they are. See that comments box below? Tell us there what your must-have applications are.

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]]> http://www.msino.com/top-five-android-apps-to-download/feed/ 0 http://www.msino.com/webview-applications/ http://www.msino.com/webview-applications/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:59:39 +0000 msino http://www.msino.com/?p=75 Around two years ago I asked why there weren’t that many successfulJava ME consumer applications that weren’t games. I went on to conclude that the few that were successful were just a window on more open, capable and consistent processing somewhere else.

It’s interesting to see that a number of development frameworks for several development platforms have evolved around this model of having a view on what’s essentially mainly happening at a server somewhere. In fact, even without these frameworks most platforms (except Java ME) have some kind of webView that can be embedded within an application.

WebView apps give many of the advantages of full native applications (use of phone APIs/features and discoverability via app stores) with the main disadvantage that the application itself needs a data connection at the time the user uses the application. Also, using a web oriented interface sometimes isn’t as usable as an equivalent interface made up of the phone’s native controls.

Sometimes it’s possible to use a webview instead of a plain text view to show application information. This allows information such as help or troubleshooting to actually reside online somewhere where it can be changed easily. Alternatively, it allows advertisements to be easily embedded in applications results because most ad systems are oriented towards embedding code in web pages.

I have done a few feasibility studies recently where a webView type application made a lot of sense. They tend to be applications that people will use for the specific unique content as opposed to those that need to compete with other applications on features or user experience.

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It offers multiple configurations (both a 2×1 and tiny 1×1), and updates four times daily with the latest forecasts. You can also insert multiple widgets to keep track of the weather in different locations. And tapping the widget brings up a detailed forecast for the next few days. Here are some quick screenshots:

First, here’s the source code under an Apache 2.0 license. And you can grab an APK here.

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Darren Waters of the BBC says…

“Google has committed to being a multi-operating system company and they will continue to produce services for all phones on all platforms.”

… in other words… hedging their bets.

Viewing paid listings requires an update to the phone firmware. So far, this only seems to have happened to some phones in the US. My phone in the UK hasn’t updated its firmware and is still showing the old store application with just free listings.

Playing with the Android Market developer console shows that it would not be possible to price my already free applications. This is expected because the Android Market T&Cs state that free applications must always remain free for people who have already downloaded them. Even uploading an update doesn’t allow an application to go from free to paid. Instead, it’s necessary to create a new application if you want to create a paid updated version of your free application.

One consequence of this is that developers who have built up good comments and ratings will lose these when they go from free to paid.

Incidentally, I don’t plan on converting my Android applications to paid. They will always remain free.

System.nanoTime();

An elapsed time timer just calls this twice and subtracts the end time from the start time.

The boom-mobile source code has a great StopWatch class that you can use as a basis of a timer.

    private synchronized void enableKeyguard() {
        if (mKeyguardLock != null) {
            mKeyguardLock.reenableKeyguard();
            mKeyguardLock = null;
        }
    }
    private synchronized void disableKeyguard() {
        if (mKeyguardLock == null) {
            mKeyguardLock = mKeyguardManager.newKeyguardLock(Log.LOGTAG);
            mKeyguardLock.disableKeyguard();
        }
    }

where

mKeyguardManager = (KeyguardManager) getSystemService(Context.KEYGUARD_SERVICE);

I have also come across a great class, ManageKeyguard in the source of SMSPopup. This provides an example how to disable the keyguard, show your activity and re-enable the keyguard without letting someone get past the keylock to other activities. There’s also more about this discussed on the Google groups.

TelephonyManager tm = (TelephonyManager)getSystemService(TELEPHONY_SERVICE);
tm.listen(mPhoneListener, PhoneStateListener.LISTEN_CALL_STATE);

and…

private PhoneStateListener mPhoneListener = new PhoneStateListener()
{
        public void onCallStateChanged(int state, String incomingNumber)
        {
                try {
                        switch (state)
                        {
                        case TelephonyManager.CALL_STATE_RINGING:
...
                                break;

                        case TelephonyManager.CALL_STATE_OFFHOOK:
...
                                break;

                        case TelephonyManager.CALL_STATE_IDLE:
...
                                break;
                        default:
                                Log.d(TAG, "Unknown phone state=" + state);
                        }
                } catch (RemoteException e) {}
        }
};

In many applications, the next stage is to do something based on an incoming telephone number. The number is given by the String incomingNumber parameter shown above.

Also don’t forget the following in your manifest…

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE"></uses-permission>

Here’s an example from com.android.phone.PhoneInterfaceManager…
String url = createTelUrl(number);
if (url == null) {
return;
}
Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_CALL, Uri.parse(url));
intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);
intent.setClassName(mApp, PhoneApp.getCallScreenClassName());
mApp.startActivity(intent);


createTelUrl is defined in com.android.phone.PhoneInterfaceManager

Don’t forget to add…
<uses-permission id="android.permission.CALL_PHONE"/>
…to your manifest.

Note also that there’s a reported problem on the G1 (RC30) if you wish to send many DTMF tones.