Introduction to Android

Now that the accepted GSoC projects were announced, I was informed that my proposal was not accepted.

The Maemo project got 87 proposals this year. Here you can find the list of accepted projects:

http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/org/home/google/gsoc2010/maemo

I asked my potential mentor (he commented on my proposal) about the reason my proposal was refused.

Valério Valério to me

show details Apr 26 (8 days ago)

Hello,

- Hide quoted text -

Bela Balazs wrote:

Hello.

I am sorry to waste your time. But I would like to ask why my GSoC proposal (http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/user/balazsbela/maemotodo) was rejected.

I just want to know so that I can improve in the future. Please be very honest with me, I won't take it personally. I just want to know the reasons.

I understand that you got a lot a proposals and the places are very limited.

Just a few comments would satisfy my curiosity. What do you recommend for my next gsoc proposal.

Your proposal ranked 1/8 among the to-do application proposals, the simple reason was that we did not picked that project, otherwise your application would be chosen. I can't tell you what is in the private reviews, but is very positive.

From my side I can't point anything and would like to have you as student, due to your OSS background, but we can't pick all the projects :(.

Best regards,

Valério

Thank you very much.

So yeah, that's that. So many ideas in the idea list and only 10 projects get accepted.

I wish them good luck and may Maemo become competitive as soon as possible.

In the mean time I will spend my summer with learning new technologies.

One of these new technologies is Google's shiny new operating system: Android.

So I went ahead, installed the sdk, set up Eclipse and I've dived into Android development.

I wrote my own traditional Hello world type applications, the BMI Calculator.

Here are the images:

The message and the android image is changed according to the result, when Calculate is pressed.

I really like the development environment and the APIs seem cool. The designer is very limited though and I spent too much time searching trough the properties to get a design I'm satisfied with.

I hope they start supporting Qt soon, that would be awesome (since it would work on Maemo and other Qt supported platforms too). Still I don't know if this will be happening any time soon.

I miss signals and slots.

I'll continue to study Android development and if I get the hang of it, maybe I'll implement my GSoC proposal for the Android platform and publish it in the market.