The Nook Has Arrived

1st impressions of Barnes & Noble’s new ebook reader

After being delayed twice, today the nook, Barnes & Nobles eBook reader finally arrived at my doorstep, (literally). The nook came nicely packaged and wrapped, almost iPod-style. After unwrapping it, it took only about an hour to complete charge the already about 70% charged battery. Hooking it up to a WIFI router was extremely easily. The nook discovered the 802.11g router quickly and all I had to do was entering the WPA2 key.

Making ebook purchases is obviously a walk in the park. After setting up an account at B&N’s web site, registering the nook is straight forward and only requires the email address registered with the account. Two clicks later and the first ebook was purchased and downloaded onto the device.

However, not all ebook need to be purchased through Barnes & Noble. For instance, I recently bought ‘Unlocking Android’ at Amazon. The book comes with a free PDF version, which can be copied over to the nook, using the included USB to Mirco-USB cable, which is also needed to charge the device. Anyway, after coping the 10MB PDF document over (happened very swiftly), the document was readable after only a brief moment, required to format the PDF to the nook’s screen size.

“After suffering a series of disastrous defeats at the hands of General Grievous, the Republic’s foothold in the Outer Rim is in jeopardy. Commissioned to protect the strategic world of Bothawui, Anakin Skywalker and his weary battle group are all that stands between the system and domination by the droid army…”

I have probably never prepared harder for a talk and still felt completely unprepared when presenting  at the Univerity of California USC CodeCamp last week. Fortunately, it turned out to be a really great event and I got very posivtive feedback and while I have already started enhancing the presentation for an upcoming event in January, I have also published the slides on slideshare as well as on my side here. Check ‘em out if you like.

Writing a Web Service Client App for Android

Theodore Editor

Way back in fall 2002, I had discovered Thinlets, which I liked for its lean approach. However, because it lacked tools and extensibility, I couldn’t really use it for more serious projects. Still, the concept was intriguing, and while reimplementing it in a more object-oriented and extensible fashing wasn’t an option, the least I could do, was to write an editor .. meet Theodore.

After I had written Theodore 1.0, I was even more convinced that Graphical User Interfaces should be described in XML documents that are parsed and rendered into widgets at runtime, a concept which should become known as the declarative UI paradigm. So in January 2003 I founded the Swixmlopen source project (www.swixml.org) to combine the benefits of Swing (availability of models, extensibility of widgets etc.) with the lean XUL-approach, demonstrated by the Thinlet project.

While my focus was clearly on Swixml, I still kept the Thinled Editor up to date, and eventually released the significantly updated Theodore 3.0 – IDE for Thinlet Developers, which was built with (and shiped with) the classic Thinlet.jar.

Today, Theodore is set free, turns freeware, i.e. there is no freeware editon anymore. The full-featured Theodore 3.0 AP Edition is available for download at http://wolfpaulus.com/software/theodore/ (the webstart version as been updated as well).

Code Camp is not just for geeks, hackers, and code monkeys; and while you may find some of them at the University of Southern California on November 21 and 22, Code Camp is first and foremost a place for software developers to come together, share ideas and experiences, and learn from their peers.
This will be my 2nd LA Code Camp, which compared to the Code Camp up North at Cal State Fullerton, seems more focused on Microsoft and .net related technologies. However, I’m pretty sure this topic will fill a room: Turning the Web on its head – let’s have the server call the client.

Sounds interesting and a couple of implementation ideas may come to mind. After looking briefly into some xml and binary web service protocols, we will take a closer look at the notification mechanism, provided by Java’s management extensions and eventually take a really close look at a full featured implementation of the above mentioned problem.
Interestingly, even when looking at both, the client and the server part of this solution, there isn’t really all that much code to write, which means that even in the little time we have, all the concept and patterns used, can be looked at and discussed. Honestly, all the code, (client and server) that makes this ‘Stock Quote Client’ an event-consumer, instead of a stupid poller, will be shown.

• SoCal Code Camp Los Angeles
• Wolf Paulus: Turning the Web on its head – let’s have the server call the client
• Keywords: Tomcat, Push, non-blocking I/O, JMX, Java, Hessian, Comet, AJAX
• November 21 and 22,

We will take the accepted view that a Web-Client calls (via HTTP GET or POST) a server and turn it on its head. Let’s have the server call the client. It is really not that far fetched, to imaging a scenario where the server, when it has determined that something exciting just happened (e.g., the Dow Jones Industrial Avg. Index jumped 100 points) calls the Web Client, instead of clients constantly polling the server (even when the DOW barely moves).

“I would much rather have gone with Master Luke than stay here with you. I don’t know what all this trouble is about, but I’m sure it must be your fault.”

The Motorola droid is probably the first 2nd generation Android phone and after playing the the HTC Hero and Motorola Cliq, I now had the chance to take a much closer look at the Motorola Droid.

Connectivity

There are two sockets on the droid, a standard headphone jack, which surprisingly works well with iPhone ear-buts (i.e. on/off switch mutes the mic.) and a mirco-usb data access and charging socket. While I have plenty of mini-USB cables, I didn’t have a single micro-usb cable; the one the Motorola has included is short and very inflexible.

Display

The 3.7″ WVGA display (480×854 pixels) is impressive but unfortunately Android’s UI is not really build for it, at least not yet. The icons (48×48 pixels) appear to be way too small now.

Keyboard

I understand that Motorola put a lot of time and energy in getting the Cliq’s keyboard right. Unfortunately, nothing of the teams must not have been talking too each other. The droid’s physical keyboard is hardly more useful than its on-screen virtual keyboard and most droid users will not be able to type as fast on the physical keyboards as iPhone users type on the display.

Buttons

The phone has four physical buttons, and four touchscreen buttons just below the display. As one would expect, the physical buttons are the power button which is way too small, tho. A volume rocker, which is on the wrong side (right), and a camera shutter button. The touchscreen buttons the made possible by extending the touchscreen beyond the display and their haptic feedback really rocks.

Camera

The 5MP digital camera is probably the weakest part of the Motorola droid, delivering 5 mega-pixel of noise even when used at best lighting conditions. Some unedited iPhone and Moto Droid shots can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfpaulus/sets/72157604509087860/

Conclusion

The Moto droid is most likely the best Android phone currently available and geeks and developers will love it. However, when compared to the iPhone, the droid lacks basic functionally and user-friendliness we are now so accustomed to. If Google really wants to push Android, it needs to continue to develop the basic applications like mail, calendar, etc. to a point where they are at least as good at what Apple includes with the iPhoneOS. Like it or not, the iPhone OS and the included apps are the baseline now and basic everyday Android applications like Mail and Calendar are plain ugly.