EngiGuide

Google’s Android mobile operating system will easily dominate the smartphone market by 2016, and it will be followed closely by Apple’s iOS.
Symbian captured about 36 percent market share in 2010 while Android was running on about 23 percent of all smartphones that shipped last year. Apple’s iOS held a solid 15 percent of the market share, while Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS captured about 16 percent market share last year. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 share was mere 0.6 percent.  Android market share will continue to grow in the next five years. Prediction says that Android will be running on about 45 percent of all smart phones by 2015.
The estimation says that Apple’s market share will increase by 20 percent in 2015, while RIM will touch 14 percent share. It is assumed that Samsung’s Bada operating system could touch a 10 percent market share in 2015. It is also estimated that Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS will have a market share of only 6.5 percent and Windows Mobile will witness even less than 0.5 percent of the mobile operating system market.

Among the Open-Source mobile platforms – MeeGo, Android and Symbian – Android is the clear winner. 500,000 new Android-powered phones and tablets are now being activated each day worldwide. This number is growing at 4% per week. In the last quarter, Apple sold about 19 million iPhones, for a daily activation rate of about 210,000. Including iPads and iPod touches in the survey, Apple’s activation rate was about 325,000.

Does this matter?

Mobile is becoming more like a platform game where the developers are building applications that run on top of mobile devices. These applications are making these devices more valuable to users – market share is a critical component. If Android holds a dominant market share, the way Microsoft’s windows did in the 1990s, Apple will get a setback & eventually iOS’s value as a platform will plunge.  Apple has learned several lessons from its failure in 1990s, one of the factor was competition in terms of price. iPhones and iPads cost the same or less than Android phones.

Apple still has an advantage that it didn’t have in the 1990s – Android is still a fragmented platform with so many different versions and customizations. Fragmentation of different versions of the Android Platform is still a problem for developers.

A smart move from Apple can be to work on the pricing model and plan to sell a ‘cheap’ iPhone to compete against Android threat.

A new Web browser, Rockmelt debuts in limited beta Monday and aims to help you keep tabs on your Facebook friends and your favorite sites, and make your Web searches faster. Backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, Rockmelt was first reported on by The New York Times in August 2009. At the time, Rockmelt was supposedly going to be a next-generation Web browser designed to take advantage of new Web applications and services.

A year later, and Rockmelt appears to be nothing more than another social networking-focused browser similar to Flock. Just like Flock, Rockmelt incorporates your social networking activity into browser sidebars so you can stay up to date on your friends’ activities while you browse other parts of the Web. Unlike Flock, however, Rockmelt features a single sign-on profile tied to your Facebook ID that you can carry with you using any computer running Rockmelt. Both browsers are based on Chromium, Google’s open source project that is basically a test ground for Google Chrome.

If you’d like to try out Rockmelt, you can sign up for the limited beta at Rockmelt.com by signing in with your Facebook ID.

I haven’t had a chance to get my hands on Rockmelt yet, but here’s a look at some of the key features of the world’s latest social-focused browser.

All About Facebook

You can use Rockmelt as you would any normal Web browser by just firing it up and surfing the Web. But Rockmelt’s real power is unlocked when you log into the browser using your Facebook ID. This allows the browser to display a list of your Facebook friends in a slim sidebar on the left side of the browser window; feeds from your favorite sites in a sidebar on the right; and stores your browser bookmarks and preferences.

All of this personalized information is saved on Rockmelt’s servers so that you can access it by logging into the Rockmelt browser from any computer. Rockmelt does not, however, save your Web searches or browsing history, according to an interview with Rockmelt co-founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes by blogger Robert Scoble. The company also says that all of your personal data is stored as an encrypted bundle on its servers to keep it private. It’s not clear if Rockmelt has the ability to decrypt your data, but the company does say they are not interested in your information for the purposes of ad targeting.

It should be noted that in addition to being an investor in Rockmelt, Andreessen also sits on Facebook’s board of directors.

Facebook Friends on the Left

On the left side of your browser window is a thin sidebar that lists the Facebook profile pictures of your “favorite” Facebook friends. It’s not clear how Rockmelt determines which people are your favorite Facebook friends or how you can change that setting.

As you hover over each picture in the left sidebar you see a summary of their latest Facebook activity, such as whether they have an updated status or how many photos they’ve uploaded recently. Clicking on the profile photo opens a small pop-up window where you can see their recent Facebook activity at the top along with a chat area on the bottom for instant messaging.

Your own Facebook profile photo sits at the top of the left-hand column and you can click on it to update your Facebook status from there.

Favorite Sites on the Right

On the other side of your browser window is a second sidebar where you can get feeds from your favorite sites including news sources such as The New York Times or CNN. You can also add other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Rockmelt didn’t explain what the differences are between the Facebook updates on the left side and right side of the browser. If I had to guess, however, I would say that including Facebook in your right sidebar shows you updates from your newsfeed, while the left sidebar features select updates from your “favorite” Facebook friends.

As each site is updated, an unread count appears next to the site’s icon telling you how many new articles or updates there are. Clicking on a site brings up another pop-up window that shows you a summary of the new stuff you haven’t seen. If you’d like to read further, clicking on the link for each article brings it up in the main browser window.

If you put your Twitter account in the right sidebar, you can click on the Twitter icon to send out an update, reply or retweet a message and access any Twitter lists you subscribe to.

Rockmelt also has a share bookmarklet in the browser toolbar to let you quickly share links with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Rockmelt Search

Rockmelt features two search boxes: a regular Chrome-style Omnibox and a special Rockmelt search field. Rockmelt’s search feature is designed to help you get to your Web results faster, and the company said it wanted to make search as “simple as leafing through a magazine.”

Let’s say you were searching for information about flu shots, and the top search results were links to the Center for Disease Control, Wikipedia, and a CNN news item followed by four other site links. Rockmelt would display the results just as you would see them in Google in a drop down menu. You would then see a preview of each site in the main browser window as you scrolled through your results in the drop down menu. So you could preview the content from the CDC, Wikipedia, CNN, and so on until you find what you’re looking for.

If you just want typical Google results then you can use the Omnibox instead of Rockmelt’s dedicated search box.

Rockmelt appears to be an interesting take on integrating social features into your Web browsing and the new search feature could be useful. But Rockmelt has a tough road ahead to gain a foothold in an already crowded browser market that includes Apple’s Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Flock, and many others.

After showing students response to the mobile app dev, we decided to start new thread to our website for mobile app dev.
This is out first tutorial to design your first simple android app.
This tutorial assumes that you are well acquainted with Java, done with Installing of Android setup in your Development Environment or Development Computer and have already created a new project in Eclipse.The application built in this tutorial will demonstrate how to do various tasks in Android over making a truly productive application.

If you don’t know how to install it go through http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html
Application Design:
Let’s see what here we are looking to build:

We are looking to build a Login Application which on Successful Validation, redirect user on Browser. Let’s see in detail.
Setup Application Resources:
Android people did an excellent job creating a project layout that allows you to easily separate data from code. The res/directory in the project stores layout, images, and application data.
Strings
Now let’s see how to set and use different features provided by Android, starting from String, open res/values/strings.xmlwhich holds static strings of the project.
Next add strings named “login_page_heading” by clicking add then select string and press OK. A new String will appear in the list and the input fields to the right should be blank. Enter “login_page_heading” in the name and “LOGIN MODULE” in the value fields both without quotes and save it by CTRL+s. Do the same for other strings we need to create like shown in following screen:

At the bottom of the pane there are 2 tabs, resources and strings.xml. Click the strings.xml tag to view the raw XML of the file, which is visible in above screen. You can add String manually by switching to raw XML mode of the file.
Android Layouts
Android builds display components out of views. The views are built from XML files that tell android how to build the display. These layouts are stored in res/layout/. Open the res/layout/main.xml layout file. The Eclipse SDK includes a visual layout tool that should have come up.
We have used RelativeLayout amongst plenty of Layout provided by Android. Let’s create our login application layout.
RelativeLayout
The RelativeLayout is simple Android layout. RelativeLayouts allows you to position objects relative to other objects on the page. Right click on res/layouts/ and select New > Android XML file. In the dialog box enter anyname.xml for the File. This is to create new layout but we are using main.xml which has been, by default, provided by Android.
Click on TextView and drag it into the view from the left Panel under “Form Widgets” option, once done you would be able to see a TextView in your view screen and in bottom pane you could change its properties as usual, set its id to “@+id/TextViewHeading” something relative to its job, set its width and height according to screen, what text you wanted to display in this TextView so set text field to “@string/login_page_heading”, a string we already added in previous section in string.xml file, now after making such changes you would be able to see few changes in your view panel.
Same way you can add different widgets in the screen and set their positions according to each other or previous and later one as Relative layout positions components relative to each other, and change their properties.
Let’s see a ScreenShot which explains what we have done up till now in this Layout Section:
We are going to explore visual layout tool, to design a layout for our login screen:

Here in above screen we have shown how you can design an attractive User Interface for your application.
Android Manifest file
Android Manifest file is simply a doorway to any Android Application as it checks which of the permissions this application is asking for and which are the activities listed in the application and what are their role. We can say like as in Java main() is the starting point of an Application, here its AndroidManifest file.

<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifestxmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
package="com.motionfrog.example.LoginBrowser"
android:versionCode="1"
android:versionName="1.0">
<applicationandroid:icon="@drawable/icon"android:label="@string/app_name">
<activityandroid:name=".LoginBrowser"
android:label="@string/app_name">
<intent-filter>
<actionandroid:name="android.intent.action.MAIN"/>
<categoryandroid:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/>
</intent-filter>
</activity>
	</application>
	<uses-permissionandroid:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/>
</manifest>

Notice the manifest starts with the standard xml tag. Then there is a manifest tag that links to the schema and defines the package, versionCode, and versionName attributes. Nested inside the manifest tag is an application tag. The application tag has the attributes android:icon and android:label that define the applications icon and the label respectively. The application tag contains the activity nodes that define the accessible activities of the application.
When the project was created the first activity for LoginBrowser was pre-populated into the file.
The intent-filter tag is used to declare the intents for the activity. Intent is simply a tag defining an attributes of the activity. The action tag with a name of “android.intent.action.MAIN” and category tag with a name of “android.intent.category.LAUNCHER” allows the activity to be an initial activity and will list the activity in the Android application launcher.
If you want to add new Activity you can simply add these statements in raw XML mode

<activityandroid:name="NextActivity"
android:label="@string/app_name">
</activity>

Or you can add by Visual View of it.

Press Add and provide necessary information with respect to create new Activity.
Build Java File
Now when we are almost ready with UI and other work, what is left is to code for our Login Application which intense to open a Browser on Successful Login.
When we created a new Project it by default comes with following code:

packagecom.motionfrog.example.LoginBrowser;

importandroid.app.Activity;
importandroid.os.Bundle;

publicclassLoginBrowserextends Activity {
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
publicvoidonCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }
}

Let’s add such functionality that on button click it check whether Username and password equals to something, on matching we will redirect user on browser with a URL.
Create two Buttons, two EditText so that we can verify them and set some action to them and two strings for simple validation purpose.

private Button mButtonLogin, mButtonReset;
privateEditTextmUserInputBox, mPasswordInputBox;
private String mUserName="motionfrog", mPassword="motionfrog";

Initialize those views created in Xml file, like two EditTexts for Username Password, two Buttons for Login and Reset.
mButtonLogin=(Button)findViewById(R.id.ButtonLogin);
mButtonReset=(Button)findViewById(R.id.ButtonReset);
mUserInputBox=(EditText)findViewById(R.id.EditTextUser);
mPasswordInputBox=(EditText)findViewById(R.id.EditTextpassword);
Now put an OnClickListener event on both the buttons:
mButtonLogin.setOnClickListener(newOnClickListener() {
@Override
publicvoidonClick(View arg0) {

}
});

Now within this OnClickListener read inputs of EditTexts we have created for Username and Password and validate them with strings we created up above, just to check that whether user has entered username = “motionfrog” and password = “motionfrog”.

if(mUserInputBox.getText().toString().equals(mUserName)
		&&mPasswordInputBox.getText().toString().equals(mPassword)){
}
else {

}

Within this If condition add an Intent to open up a browser with passing a static URL

Intent browser = newIntent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
browser.setData(Uri.parse("http://www.motionfrog.com"));
startActivity(browser);

And within else you can add code to show a Toast to inform user.

Toast.makeText(LoginBrowser.this, "wrong username or password", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

Let’s see an Output of above code:
I know you are facing it hard or little bit complex, but i am here you can comment your problems will replay ASAP.

So Start Android now

1. WOT or Web Of Trust (www.mywot.com):

WOT is a great place to test the reputation of your favorite website. WOT gives real-time ratings for every website based on the feedback that it gets from millions of trustworthy users across the globe and trusted sources, such as phishing and malware blacklists. Each domain name is evaluated based on this data and ratings are applied to them accordingly.

rustworthiness signifies the overall safety of the website. A poor rating may indicate that the site is associated with threats like Internet scams, phishing, identity theft risks and malware. For more information on phishing, you may refer my other post on how to identify and avoid phishing scams.

Vendor reliability tells you whether a given site is safe for carrying out buy and sell transactions with it. An excellent rating indicates superior customer satisfaction while a poor rating indicates possible scam or bad shopping experience.

Privacy indicates about “to what extent the site respects the privacy of it’s users and protects their personal identity and data”.

Child Safety indicates whether the content of a given site is appropriate for children. Site contents like sexual material, nudity and vulgarity will have a poor Child Safety rating.

In most cases, the WOT ratings are found to be highly accurate. To check the reputation of any given website, just visit www.mywot.com type-in the address of your favorite website and click on “Check now”. This tool alone can tell you a lot about the reputation and safety level of a website. However, in addition to this, I am giving you another 3 handy tools to identify safe websites on the Web.

2. McCafee SiteAdvisor:

McCafee SiteAdvisor is a free tool that is available as a browser add-on. It adds safety ratings to your browser and search engine results. You can download it from www.siteadvisor.com.

3. StopBadware:

Using this tool, you can check whether a given site is said to have involved in malware activity in the past. To check this, go to http://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch and enter the URL or domain name of a website and click on “Search Clearinghouse ”. If the search does not return any result, that means the site was never involved in any of the malware activity in the past.

4. Google Pagerank:

Google PageRank is another great tool to check the reputation and popularity of a website. The PageRank tool rates every webpage on a scale of 1 to 10 which indicates Google’s view of importance of the page. If a given website has a PageRank of less than 3, then it is said to be less popular among the other sites on the Internet.

However, PageRank will only tell you how much popular a given website is and has nothing to do with the safety level of a website. So, this tool alone cannot be used to evaluate a website’s safety and other factors.

PageRank feature is available as a part of Google Toolbar. You can install Google Toolbar from http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ie/index.html.

Is Google+ the Facebook killer?

Google+ started hitting the streets in late June, quickly soaking up press and attention everywhere. Folks had been anticipating a social network from Google for a while, especially since Google’s Buzz service seemed to lack the full development and attention Google lavishes on the rest of its products. Google+ was immediately hailed as the social network to kill Facebook.

This kind of feedback isn’t really a surprise. Facebook has always struggled with privacy issues, PR scandals, and legal battles. These are exactly the kinds of problems that become a recipe for internet disgruntlement, and by comparison, Google is frequently hailed as the “do no evil” white-hat among big companies. It makes sense that so many internet denizens would leap at the opportunity to abandon Facebook in favor of Google+.

But how do the services actually compare? What are the benefits of Google+ versus Facebook? Let’s break down some of the biggest differences.

Circles are a big part of Google+

Circles: Controlling the stream
The key difference between Google+ and Facebook is the concept of Circles. Essentially, you categorize and add all of your Google+ friends by placing them into one or more Circles. Each Circle represents a group of people in your life: friends, family, coworkers, schoolmates, and so on. Then, when you look at your friends’ posts, you can simply tell Google+ you want to read the posts from a single Circle at a time.

This answers a problem that many folks struggle with in Facebook and Twitter: How do you keep up with all that traffic? Facebook and Twitter both offer limited tools for mitigating the infinite chatter found in a huge diaspora of friends, but Google+ has made the control central to its service.

The people you classify into Circles know you follow them, but they don’t know the name of the Circle in which you’ve placed them. As a result, you control exactly who you see on your inbound Google+ traffic and who you do not.

The downside of Circles is that they involve some work to set up. After all, if you’re socially networked with a few hundred people, it’s going to take time to neatly classify them all into appropriate groups. Once you get that done, though, Circles are truly a blessing.

A fresh approach to privacy
It’s no accident that Tecca provides a guide to finding and setting up your privacy options for Facebook. Finding those options independently on Facebook can be a little frustrating, and they definitely feel incomplete. For example, Facebook has no option to disallow your friends from resharing your content. It’s always felt like the social network giant plays a little fast and loose with its users’ information, and the experience leaves most veteran Facebookers at least a little wary when it comes to the subject.

Google+ makes controlling your privacy options easy. While your basic Google Profile must be public, you can control virtually every other aspect of your account’s public availability. You can control whether other people can see your friends, your posts, and even choose whether your friends can reshare your own posts. Every time you post to Google+, you choose which of your Circles can see that post, so you always control how public your posts will be. Google obviously takes privacy very seriously in its burgeoning social network.

Hangouts make video chat easy

Hangouts get you in the mix
Another huge part of Google+ is its Hangout system. You simply choose to start a Hangout and share that with whichever Circles (or individuals) you wish. Folks click to join you in your Hangout, and you’re all instantly put into a video chat conference.

Hangouts are hardly the first video conference system on the internet, but Google’s version is smooth, easy to use, and streamlined. It even has a built-in YouTube function that lets you share your favorite videos onscreen with your friends. The Hangout system supplements Google’s extant video chat that’s part of its Gtalk service.

While Facebook recently introduced video chat in its own messaging system, it’s restricted to one-on-one conversations. It seems like Facebook should be able to do very well in this arena, but Google+’s system still seems smoother, bigger, and cleaner.

Where are the apps and games?
One of the fun things about Facebook is its wide variety of apps and games. Sure, it’s a nuisance when your friends spam your news feed with invites and game updates, but the ability to play games with friends is a big draw for the social network. As of right now, Google+ has nothing similar. We can probably expect something like these games to hit Google+ eventually, but there’s not been any word so far.

In Google’s defense, however, Google Docs and its associated suite of apps have proven incredibly powerful over the years. So while Google+ doesn’t feature a huge list of games, it wouldn’t be accurate to say Google doesn’t offer any apps or other utility at all.

Which is better?
Google+ is coming out of the gate incredibly strong. The two places it most lags behind Facebook is in providing social games like FarmVille and of course in existing users. Google+ is still in limited beta, so not everyone can join the network at their whim. If enough people do jump ship from Facebook, though, you may find yourself using Google+ instead of Facebook.

It’s very early to say that Google+ will end up being a “Facebook killer,” but it certainly seems like a smoother, more trustworthy social media experience than Facebook so far.

This article basically covers how businesses large and small are accelerating their efforts to build a mobile application strategy to deal with an explosion in App Funding, mobile devices, operating systems, and capabilities.

People are spending more time inside mobile applications on average than they are on the web, according to an analysis from Flurry, a mobile analytics firm.

So what are people doing in those apps? Gaming and social networking, which absorb 79% of people’s time, according to Flurry. The rest is news, entertainment, and other apps.
Apple’s iPhone App Store is still crushing its peers, especially in the number of applications available to consumers.
Mobile apps have been around for years, but Apple was the first to make them popular with normal people. Now everyone else in the mobile industry is struggling to catch up, and it’s been a big advantage for Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
We thought for sure Android’s Market for apps would have blown past, or at least caught up to Apple’s iPhone App Store by now, but a look at the most recent numbers show it still has some work to do.
Apple has 350,000 apps in its App Store to Android’s 250,000. However, the rate at which apps are coming into Android’s store is faster than Apple’s App Store. In the next few months we expect the stores to be equal.

Apple’s iPhone app lead over Android will disappear by the end July says app analytics firm Distimo after analyzing the latest data on app store growth.

It extrapolated the chart below from month over month growth rates of app stores. You can see the gap between Android and iPhone closing to 40,000 by the end of June. At the end of July, they will be equal.

2011: The Race to Build a Mobile App Strategy

The proliferation of apps, devices, platforms, and capabilities is causing businesses large and small to race to define a sustainable mobile strategy. This quarter, Appcelerator and IDC introduce a new “Mobile Maturity Model” to identify three phases of mobility adoption shaping up in the enterprise and consumer markets: ‘exploration’, ‘acceleration’, and ‘innovation’.

Last year, most respondents (44%) said they were in the exploration phase of their mobile strategy. A simple app or two – typically on iPhone – and a focus on free brand-affinity apps was standard practice. This year, 55% of respondents said they are now shifting into the ‘acceleration’ phase. This phase is defined by the following trends and mobile strategies:

• basically covers try On average, each respondent said they plan to develop 6.5 apps this year, up 183% over last year.

• Businesses are increasingly taking a multi-platform approach. On average, respondents said they plan to deploy apps on at least 4 different devices (eg: iPhone, iPad, Android Phone, Android Tablet) this year, up two-fold over 2010.

• Ubiquitous cloud-connectivity: 87% of developers said their apps will connect to a public or private cloud this year, up from only 64% deploying cloud-connected apps last year.

• Always connected, personal, and contextual: in addition to cloud services, integration of social and location services will explode in 2011 and will define the majority of mobile experiences this year. Interest in commerce apps is also on the rise, with PayPal beating Apple as the #1 preferred method for payments.

• Business models are evolving along with these more engaging mobile app experiences. Developers are shifting away from free brand affinity apps and becoming less reliant on $0.99 app sales. Increasingly, the focus is on user engagement models such as in-app purchasing and advertising, with mobile commerce on the horizon.

• Outsource goes in-house: the enterprise takes control of its mobile destiny. 81% of respondents said they insource their development, with the majority saying they have an integrated in-house web and mobile team.

Conclusion:

One of success factors for a smartphone is developers; developers play a very important and key role in making a very successful mobile ecosystem. iPhone/Android Eco-system is best example for that.

Points which attract developer to develop applications for iphone and Android:

Factors like Great SDK, where a single installable file contains everything from Simulator, IDE to on device debugging tools.  App Store is the next factor, it enables developers to not only develop apps but also earn by developing those apps which is one of the best point about this ecosystem. Developers Develop for those platform which has lots of user base, so that their application reaches to maximum number of customers.

Thanks to MotionFrog for this inspiration article.

Message for developer is more money and more user using apps.

Come let’s create a career in Mobile Application Development Industry which is waiting for passionate people.