Our Android app in Top 100 Best Smartphone apps of all time!

Well oil my bike. Our first Android app, Tub Thumper, has just been listed in the "Hot 100 best apps" by T3 Magazine.

We still get plenty of feedback about the free version (mostly positive thankfully) and we're trying to get the Pro version out ASAP.

I'll be very interested in seeing how it runs on my Motorola Droid phone, when it arrives, given it has a multitouchscreen...

You can view the gallery here: http://www.t3.com/feature/t3s-hot-100-apps

Update - here's a shot of the app at number 1 in this months T3 magazine!

Google Chrome OS Beta first install

No posts for a few months, mainly due to the lack of mobile development action over here!

Just downloaded the first build of Google Chrome-OS and installed it on a VMWare virtual machine.

First impressions: Booted up very very quickly. I can definitely see the use for it in low-cost netbooks and for couch surfing. However, there are a couple of things which I can foresee might scupper it: No iTunes/Media playing and no image editing. All very well sticking your photos on Picasa or Flickr, but how are you supposed to get them off your device and edit them without any means of installing desktop editing software, or without provision for storing files locally?

I currently use a Macbook for surfing on the couch and for dragging photos off my cameras and onto Flickr. I would have considered Chrome-OS an alternative for this (farewell Apple at last...) but without just a few more niceties I can't make that switch.

Anyway, here's some screenshots of the login screen and the first screens you'll see.

All those apps you see above are of course just links to websites, although Google have mentioned in their design documents that they are hoping to use popups for sub-tasks, like the one shown below.

If you want to try it yourself, head over to http://discuss.gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/general/download-chrome-os-vmware-image/ and grab the VMWare image. (If you have trouble logging into the virtual machine, try the username "chronos" without a password).

New Tub Thumper Version

Today we released a minor update of our Google Android application Tub Thumper.

Tub Thumper is a touch screen drum machine for the Google Android platform and has proved immensely popular since its release last November.

This version is a minor release with a new hip-hop style drum kit, to wet people's apetites for our upcoming major release.

We've been hard at work developing Tub Thumper Pro, which will feature many new cool things. Notable assignable drum pads and the ability to sequence beats, similar to using a Roland TR-909 drum machine.

As it's not yet ready I'm not saying much more, but here's a sneak preview of assigning some drum sounds:



We're aiming this release for the Cupcake build of Android, which will have hit everyone's phones by the time we release it.

At SASS, we spend most of our time working on client projects; developing web and mobile applications for clients. It's nice to get a break from this to work on some of our own projects such as Tub Thumper and it gives us a great opportunity to try out new development ideas and increase our knowledge as developers. There does not seem to be a huge amount of Android developers around Manchester and Cheshire so it often feels like we're out on our own, but we'll continue to experiment and release new Android apps to showcase our ideas.

You can grab Tub Thumper from the Android Market. Just search, or check out the most popular Multimedia apps.

UK G1 Owners - Get Android Cupcake early!

The rumour mill has been in full swing with regards to the early push out of Android 1.5 "Cupcake" to UK T-Mobile G1 users. Whether or not they really have started the push remains to be seen (I've not had it) but the folks over at Andblogs.net have posted how you can get it early.

First things first, grab the update: UK 1.5 Cupcake Update (CRB17) (5)

Save it to the sd card, named “update.zip”. (If you use windows, be sure you aren’t naming it something like “update.zip.zip”.) Reboot your phone in recovery mode (hold down ‘home’ while booting until you see the diamond warning.)

Now time to update! Press Alt-L. (This will turn on logging, so you can see what is going on.) Then Alt-S will apply the update.zip from the sd card. When it finishes, it’ll reboot.

I'm just trying, fingers crossed!

Oh, and don't blame me if you brick your phone, like I said - I've not tried it yet! Don't know if this works for countries other than the UK either, I'd suspect not but feel free to comment if you know otherwise.

Update!

My phone exploded in a huge fireball! Just kidding, after a nerve wracking few reboots with some cryptic logos I finally got a shiny new animating silver Android logo and I'm now smothered in delicious Cupcake.

Here are a couple of money shots:

The much-talked about touchscreen keyboard.


New homescreen icons (and check out my sweet (get it?) NIN Downward Spiral wallpaper, in your face iPhone!):


In the inimitable words of fake James Hetfield, sprinkles GOOD!

iPhone 3.0 Features

After a mammoth 2.14Gb download, the iPhone 3.0 SDK beta finally landed on my Mac.

I'm not taking any chances installing it on my iPhone yet, but there didn't seem to be any problem running the simulator in 3.0 alongside 2.2.1.

On the surface, things seem like business as usual. The one major thing you notice is the new Search function of the homepage.



You now get a little magnifying glass icon on the main screen:

Swiping the screen left gives you a search box. Weirdly, this only seems to search the installed applications. I had assumed that it would be similar to the search widget on Android, whereby you can search Google straight from your homescreen. Certainly this doesn't seem to be the case for the simulator anyway, we'll see when I get it running on a phone.



With over 1000 new API's there are clearly some major new things going on with iPhone 3.0. To get you ready for the change, Apple have created some good documentation about ensuring backwards and forwards compatability with your apps. Log into the iPhone developer center and check them out.

Android RC33 for the UK coming soon

Whilst US users of the T-Mobile G1 received the latest update to Android, the so called "RC33" release earlier this month, UK users have been somewhat left in the dark, still stuck on RC8.


RC33 brings a number of cool things to Android, notably voice search and Google Latitude. Note that this isn't the long awaited "Cupcake" branch of Android - it'll be a while (if ever) until we get that on a G1.

According to a comment on this blog post, someone called T-Mobile support and was told to expect the update "sometime around February 20th".

Let's hope they're not lying - I've been developing on Android SDK 1.1 without a hardware device to test it on!

Incidentally - if you want RC33 but don't want to wait, you can follow the instructions here to get it. Don't come crying to me if you brock your phone though... ;-)

Second Android Handset unveiled

During this week, the Mobile World Congress has been in progress in Barcelona, and whilst we were expecting to see a whole raft of Android gubbins, it seems that the only big news is the release of the second Android-powered handset, in the form of the HTC Magic.

The Magic will be available exclusively on Vodafone and will be the first handset to feature the Cupcake branch of Android.

This is major news for us here at SASS Digital as Cupcake features signficantly improved Audio-APIs which will help no end in our ongoing development of music applications.

The big question is - will it support multi-touch? I suspect I know the answer...