Code Android meetup 30th Oct 2010

On a very wonderful Saturday of 30th Oct 2010, Code Android Malaysia had yet another interesting meetup.

The agenda for the meetup was :
1) Google App Inventor demonstration by Ikhwan Nazri, OfficeKami aka @tekong
2) Various Android devices demonstration by Yap Wen Jiun @wenjiun, CodeAndroid Malaysia.




Ikhwan Nazri demonstrated how to use Google App Inventor to easily create Android apps without learning how to code.


Photo : Screen is showing the Blocks Editor, how the app is made up on-screen.

He developed a couple of apps that uses graphics drawing, interaction as well as geolocation and accelerometer.
The live-demonstration involves switching between the App Inventor and his Samsung Galaxy S to show the actual changes made and how it worked on his Android phone.
How interesting!

Watch a brief video by Google showing how an app can be built by App Inventor:





Bernie sharing with the crowd how mobile apps are developed with various IDE.



Wen Jiun brought a whole lot of Android devices (Android phones and tablets) for this meetup and everyone had a chance to play with them.

He talked about the differences of such devices, including features, screen size, resolutions and also their resistance to touch! (Resistive touch screens)



Here are the devices attendees get to play with: (clockwise from top left)
1) WITS A81E (7")
2) Haipad G10 (7")
3) Zenithink ZT-180 ePad (10")
4) Dell Streak (5")
5) Samsung Galaxy S (4")
6) HTC Dream/G1 (3.2")
7) Nexus One (3.7")


Some were there looking for Android developers, and we're glad to inform that we have a job listing page here: http://www.codeandroid.my/jobs-listing
Let us know if you would like to post some of your projects or if you're a developer, lookout for opportunities there.
Most of all, just join the group, join us.
We do not require you to be registered as a member or whatever.
Just follow us
Facebook
Twitter
Google Group

Our meetups are free for entrance too (so far). :-)

And we do need to thank iTrain for making these meetups happen.

World Time

Fancy an app that shows time around the world? There are some on the market, but one should not need to pay for utilities like this ;)






Scan the following to download:

CodeAndroid.MY Meetup In October

To all Android enthusiasts, be there!

Time:
30 October · 11:00 - 13:00

Venue:
iTrain, 7th Floor, Block C, Megan Phileo Promenade
Jalan Ampang
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia


View Larger Map

Agenda:
Google App Inventor demonstration by Ikhwan Nazri, OfficeKami.
Various Android devices demonstration by Yap Wen Jiun, CodeAndroid Malaysia.
Chit-chat

Register for the event on Facebook.

Maxis Android Speedtest app

Maxis Malaysia has released the second Android app - Speed Test into Android Market.

You can download the app by searching for 'Maxis' or 'Malaysia' in your phone's Android Market.

Press Begin to start the speed test.



Download and upload speed can be display in a few formats from the Settings menu.



Test results are stored in the Past Results link.

Maxis has previously released FINDER301 app, application to find places like restaurants, banks, ATMs, police stations, clinics and Maxis Service Centres nearby.

KL Web Traffic - Faizal M Zain

Malaysia Faizal M Zain has developed an Android app to view traffic images from ITIS.

Search for 'kltraffic' or 'Malaysia' to find this app.





List of Video Cameras



Image of a selected traffic surveillance camera




#kltraffic tweets from Twitter.

Inspecting APK

Suppose that you are given an APK file, do you know what are the configurations, permissions, and application components of this application? In my work, I am required to automate extraction of application icon, package name and version code information from APKs. The Android SDK provides a handy tools, Android Asset Packing Tool (aapt), for this task. aapt allows developers to package Android application into an APK file. It is usually used by IDEs to build APK file. It can also be used to inspect an APK file.

aapt is located in <sdk>/platforms/android-X/tools/ folder, where "X" is the platform version (i.e. 8). appt is a very powerful tools with many possible options, you can find out more by running aapt without any argument in your terminal. I will be sharing some examples in this post.

aapt list antollroid.apk

This command lists all files in my Antollroid APK, full paths are shown. You can specify -v and -a switches to get more information.

aapt dump badging antollroid.apk

This command prints the package name, version code/name, icon path, and required permissions. If you need to keep track of multiple applications and versions, you can use package name and version code to uniquely identify applications and versions.

aapt dump xmltree antollroid.apk AndroidManifest.xml

This command prints the AndroidManifest.xml in a formatted (tree structure) manner with indentations. It does not recover the original AndroidManifest.xml file but it contains all information in the manifest file. You can also retrieve information from other XML files (i.e. layout, string values).

This is only tip of the iceberg. You use aapt to generate an APK and also modify existing APK file. I have a suggestion for readers. The last example shows how to get information from XML files, but the output is not in XML format. I encourage you to write an application that take this output and format into a valid XML. :)