What would you like to see for ARM based embedded distro’s?

JamieBennett — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:38:56 +0000

So its that time of year again, we released a great product and instead of being content, we want to make an even greater one next time. It’s scary to think that I leave for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) next week but as a Canonical employee we are all charged with coming up with great idea’s on how to make our particular field of interest even more awesome than it is now.

I personally have been working on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix flavour of Ubuntu and our ARM based offerings. With my experience, I truly believe that ARM has huge potential to break out of its ultra-embedded space and into the mobile ultra-smart phone or netbook area. All my efforts this coming 6 month cycle will be here.

Nokia has a great example of an ultra-smart phone, the N900. If you gave this device a 7″-10″ screen and a near-full size keyboard it would have rave reviews as an up-and-coming netbook distribution. Android is doing the same albeit in a different manner, coming from a very focused Mobile distribution to maybe something more? Canonical’s approach is another top-down example. We have traditionally targeted the desktop and server environments but as netbooks get cheaper (and hardware not particularly powerful) we all need to evaluate where the support line is drawn. The boundaries have definitely blurred on where the smart phone stops and the netbook begins.

Mer is another example of where some ARM distro’s are going. For me Mer is very interesting; Mer traditionally targets the lower horse-powered hardware which follows even closer to what todays phones have to offer. Not all phone hardware (and netbook hardware) is created equal and maybe the opportunity to offer Hi-Def playback and 3D acceleration on all platforms isn’t possible but I would definitely like to see Mer and other open source distributions on consumer-grade phones.

So, what I’m interested in these next 6 months is not just where I as a Canonical employee can take Ubuntu, but where I, as an ARM developer, generously employed by Canonical, can help the whole ARM eco-system. What would you like to see Canonical improve in the ARM embedded space in the next 6 months? All suggestions welcome.

The State of Android Development, the way I see it

Jamie Bennett — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:32:28 +0000

The past couple of weeks I’ve been learning how to develop apps for Google’s Android platform. I’ve looked at it before but only at a high level, these past weeks I have actually been using it for real. So what do I think?

A future conquer?

Well its obvious that this platform has some serious potential. The promise of an embedded Linux platform that is tailored for the mobile, MID and even the net book markets gives a sense of the scale of what Android is trying to achieve. It can look very slick, it can do some really cool things but yet it is distinctly lacking in key areas.

So whats the problem?

There are three major area’s where Android falls behind the likes of the iPhone platform (discounting the terrible state of the Android Market but that’s something else entirely), they are documentation, a stable API, and development tools.

Documentation

Lets face it, the documentation for the Android SDK is poor to say the least. There is a shortage of example code (see my next point) and whist the official documentation looks pretty good on the surface, it too is missing key parts. Books quickly become out of date and the internet is full of potential android developers stumbling at every hurdle whist they try to figure out the way to achieve what they need.

One notable example here is the online books from CommonsWare. The online nature of these publications means that they can be constantly updated and CommonsWare do a great job of ensuring that their text is still relevant. Which leads me on to …

A stable API

The Android platform is very much in its infancy. Parts of the SDK change at a rate of knots and the poor developers have to keep pace if their apps are to work on the latest releases. This may be fine for a seasoned Android developer who will quickly come up to speed with the new changes, but the developer just starting out ends up falling into the trap of obsolete code.

There are a lot of code snippets, example programs and forums talking about how to use the Android SDK but so much of it is out of date. The rapidly changing SDK makes these once valuable resources a hurdle for the new developer, tripping them up until they realize that the way to do what they wanted has now changed.

Development tools

Now I’m not saying that XCode is the greatest development environment out there, it has its own problems, but for the developer just starting out, XCode becomes immensely valuable. Contrast this to the Eclipse integration that Android has. The editor is slow, the ‘interface builder’ (the bit you use to graphically layout screens) is pretty useless and the somewhat temperamental nature when compiling and running the app make it the bucking bronco of development environments. Some parts of the tool are just great, code completion, the vast amount of plugin’s you can use and auto insertion of dependencies make it something that you have to use but never really enjoy.

So whats the answer?

Being an open source developer, one never likes to complain about something without either fixing it ones self of suggesting a way of doing it. Well, this is a tough one.

Google have a tight hold on the official release of the Android platform so the rapid SDK changes aren’t going to go away. Eclipse has performance issues that I would have no idea how to fix so that leaves documentation, something I can change.

From now on there will be an Android section on this blog that will try to keep pace with the rapidly changing development side of Android whist providing some tutorials that the beginner will find helpful. So, stay tuned for more.

linuxuk.org » Android