Android Diary I

tbray.org

14 points·astrec··5 comments

I'd be rather curious to see how advanced the Android hackers have gotten. Something I'd really like to see would be the ability to run apps outside the standard Android framework/jail, so that those with a dev phone straight from Google could, for instance, run an SSH server, or run X11 apps written in C/Python/etc.

I have a Freerunner, and I like being able to write my apps in Python/Gtk, and while the Android port for it looks really interesting (once Android finally gets a real on-screen keyboard that is), I don't want to give up my ability to write in a language that isn't Java.

Edit: and the Dev1 case looks a lot better than the standard G1, too. ;)

There's a pretty good write-up of installing a Debian userland on the G1, but the link seems dead today. Maybe this will work later: http://www.saurik.com/id/10

In the meantime, here's the Google Cache version: http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:qTYLZQyrPnQJ:www.saurik....

Unfortunately, the steps involved in that process seem an exercise in insanity. I'm thinking more along the lines of: the developer phone has an unlocked bootloader, therefore I would like to be able to flash an Android image that already has a userland set up and working. :P

Java/Android certainly does not have the benefit of Xcode's slick Interface Builder, definitely a lot less inspiring when it comes to creating an app with a beautiful UI

You may be amused or appalled to hear that we mock up an Android UI (plus some initial functionality) in Visual Studio and VB.NET before running the result through a translator to get the equivalent Android Java code in an automatically initialised project. A great way to jump-start an application.

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