US firm may now go after Motorola and HTC, while Android considered likely to continue to dominate smartphone market
Despite Apple's victory over Samsung in the patent trial, Android is expected to keep control of the global smartphone market. Photograph: Ahn Young-Joon/AP
For Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, who took over from Steve Jobs a year ago, the court victory over Samsung will have been sweet. Normally, patent disputes rarely produce clean victories. But the decision by the nine-member jury in San Jose, just a few miles from Apple's headquarters, is dramatic.
Apple had been suing Samsung for $2.5bn in damages, claiming Samsung's phones and tablets copied its devices' behaviour and appearance; Samsung counter-claimed about $200m, saying the iPhoneand iPad used its wireless 3G standard technologies, and methods for tasks such as sending a photo by email from a phone.
Apple won on almost every count it claimed; Samsung, on absolutely none. It was a dramatic demonstration of the home court advantage. Samsung Electronics can bear the $1.05bn in damages – in the second quarter of this year alone its operating profit was $5.86bn – but the hit to its reputation is substantial. Apple can portray it as a looter of intellectual property, a copyist, an unimaginative follower.
Apple can also now go after HTC and Motorola, its two principal smartphone rivals in the US, with renewed vigour. They may have to consider whether to sue for peace, for Samsung lost despite being the biggest of the mobile makers, the biggest smartphone maker, the biggest implementer of Google's Android mobile software, and extremely rich — it spent $9.5bn on market in the past 12 months, and is a major sponsor of the Olympics.
More than that, though, Apple will hope that this decision will put second thoughts and self-doubt into the minds of every industrial designer and software engineer competing in the smartphone and tablet business around the world.
Apple's key rival here is Google, whose Android software Samsung used to build its phones. But Apple can only go after the handset makers that implement Android, not the creators themselves; even so, by winning on Friday, it will have nervous engineers at the handset makers, who are using Android in ever-growing numbers, pausing as they compare their latest products with the next iPhone. Is it too similar? Will this trigger a lawsuit? Should I change it?
The patent wars have dismayed many, who find the legal fighting tedious, and wish the companies would just work on innovation. Apple, for its part, insists that it is happy with competition — but that rivals should do their own innovation. The rivals shoot back that Apple is trying to patent ideas that have been obvious and implemented before.
Despite this result, Android is likely to keep winning the battle to run the world's smartphones; it ran on 64% of the smartphones shipped worldwide in spring, and 80% of the smartphone shipped in China in that period; the iPhone had 12%. Android is running on phones that are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. It wouldn't be worth Apple's time to sue every company using it.
But in the US, where its most valuable customers are, Apple definitely sees the effort as worth going to. The decision in San Jose may be the first of many. The question now is whether Google, whose Motorola subsidiary a week ago filed a fresh series of patent infringement claims against Apple — claims which could halt sales of the iPhone and iPad, if upheld — can manage to drive the war to a settlement. So far, there's no sign of that happening. And Apple is yet another billion dollars richer.
Will FaceTime on coming iPhone 5 crash LTE networks?
Carriers prepare with new technologies, data plans, but analysts say nobody knows what will happen when iOS 6-based devices arrive
Are the nation's LTE wireless carriers prepared for the video chat data crunch expected to come with the next-generation iPhone and other devices that are expected to launch this fall?
The answer: It depends on whom you ask.
Both AT&T and Verizon Wireless decline to say whether they are ready for the data crunch.
Over the summer, both carriers introduced data sharing plans that analysts believe were timed to help limit a surge in heavy data use expected especially with the use of Apple's FaceTime real-time video chat software on the iPhone.
"If I were a carrier, I'd be rather frightened by FaceTime," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. GoldAssociates. "If everybody used FaceTime, bandwidth would go up dramatically, and the user experience would go down."
Imposing data sharing plans with set fees for specific numbers of gigabytes a month -- and penalties for exceeding the set amounts -- could help top carriers AT&T and Verizon avoid data capacity overload problems on their 4G LTE, and even 3G, networks, Gold said.
"Requiring the data sharing plans is really just another way for carriers to say they are limiting your access," he added.
AT&T has come under fire in recent days for announcing plans to require users to sign up for a Mobile Share data plan in order to conduct FaceTime video chats over its current 3G and future cellular networks.
FaceTime will be available for cellular network use, instead of just over Wi-Fi, in mobile devices running the forthcoming iOS 6, which Apple announcedearlier this year.
Sprint, the nation's number three carrier, has stood solidly behinds its unlimited data plans, and is just starting to roll out 4G LTE technology.
At an event to mark the activation of its 16th LTE location in Baltimore earlier this week, Sprint 4G engineering manager Viet Chu told reporters that "if some abuse the system [with heavy data use] we would address it." He didn't specify what steps the carrier may take.
Concerns about FaceTime's impact on cellular networks are particularly acute, partly because the iPhone is the top selling smartphone model worldwide and because the next model will reportedly support LTE, which would help make the device even more popular.
The upcoming iPhone is also expected to have a larger screen -- more than 4-inches compared to the current modle's 3.5-in. screen -- which would make video chats easier.
That creates problems for carriers because like most two-way chat apps, FaceTime is an enormous bandwidth hog.
Video chat often uses about 3 megabytes of data per minute, though the exact rate depends on encoded software, noted Wendy Cartee, vice president of product and technical marketing for JuniperNetworks.
Juniper develops software that carriers can use to improve bandwidth at cell tower locations. It also sells a Universal Access router that can be installed at individual cellular tower locations to help streamline the data traffic at the point where it joins the backhaul link. Backhaul is the wired (or fiber optic) segment of a network between the wireless portion received at a cell tower and the network core.
Such products from Juniper and other vendors like Cisco and Alcatel Lucent should help U.S. carriers handle FaceTime, or other rich video applications on their LTE networks, Cartee said. "Carriers do plan for these types of changes in apps," she noted. "I'm looking forward to using FaceTime over cellular."
LTE is also inherently faster than 3G (generally LTE networks provide up to 8 Mbps on downlinks and up to 3 Mbps on uplinks) and can generally handle more capacity than earlier-generation networks, analysts noted.
Verizon offers LTE service in most of the geographic U.S. AT&T trails Verizon in coverage but has touted its GSM 3G HSPA speeds where its LTE networks aren't ready.
"Before these data sharing limits, there was no reason for end users to do any kind of self-regulation," he explained. "Now if they use a lot of data, it will cost them."Gold said data sharing pricing plans will help AT&T and Verizon deal with the data crunch as much as the new routers and other technology.
As a result, Gold said AT&T won't get the heated criticism it got for not being able to support the original iPhone five years ago over GSM. "Data capacity will be much less of an issue with iPhone 5 than the first time around, which kicked AT&T's butt," Gold said.
Still, AT&T has expressed concerns about FaceTime data usage, noting its worries in a blog post this week that defended forcing FaceTime users onto its Mobile Share data plans instead of using individual plans.
"We are broadening our customers' ability to use the preloaded version of FaceTime, but limiting it in this manner to our newly developer AT&T Mobile Share data plans out of an overriding concern for the impact this expansion may have on our network and the overall customer experience," said Bob Quinn, senior vice president for federal regulatory matters, who penned the blog post.
He added: "We will be monitoring the impact the upgrade to this popular preloaded app has on our mobile broadband network, and customers, too, will be in a learning mode as to exactly how much data FaceTime consumers on those usage based plans."
Nav Chander, an analyst at IDC, said that AT&T's blog post shows that the carrier is "being very, very careful" with FaceTime. "The blog tries to lower expectations, anticipating the worst case," Chander said.
Chander has also tracked what he called a massive improvement in backhaul capabilities by U.S. carriers in the past two years. Generally, he said carriers have expanded by 50 times the backhaul capability in their networks since the first iPhone was introduced.
In many cases in dense urban areas, a dual copper T1 connection from a cell tower to the wider network (with a 3 Mbps capability) has been replaced by a fiber optic connection with 1 Gbps capacity, he said.
Chander also noted a "huge increase" in the number of cell towers nationally in the past three years. Often, one carrier will own a tower and lease it to several other carriers to allow them to attach antennas.
Michael Howard, an analyst at Infonetics, said carriers are prepared for FaceTime on LTE -- "for the most part. There is a small chance that some areas in some city might get hit with some slowdowns, but I doubt the traffic upsurge due to FaceTime will add any major factor like the unexpected surges of the initial iPhone rollouts."
While some experts feel U.S. carriers will be ready for heavy data usage over LTE, others say there's really no way to know what will happen despite all the technical and restrictive pricing preparations.
"There's really no way of telling if carriers are ready for an LTE iPhone," said Seamus Hourihan senior vice president of strategy at Acme Packet. "There are many different constraints in networks and one is the area of bandwidth. But there's no such thing as unlimited bandwidth."
Acme provides software to carriers to improve network efficiency.
"Bandwidth in 4G LTE networks initially is not going to be a problem, but over time, if you use it for interactive video or watching moves, yeah, it's going to be a problem," Hourihan said.
A common complaint with FaceTime even over Wi-Fi has been video freeze-ups and dropped calls that make the experience difficult. If LTE isn't available at the tower near a FaceTime user, 3G networks might offer a worse experience than Wi-Fi.
FaceTime connections will also depend on what spectrum band carriers use for LTE. Lower frequencies carry signals farther, just the same way that a low base guitar can be heard further away from a rock concert than a high pitched singer.
Both AT&T and Verizon worked to get 700 MHz spectrum at the lower end for LTE for that reason, Gold said.
Image from NASAA rock-zapping laser and telescopic combination called ChemCam is getting a lot of attention with NASA's rover Curiosity landing on Mars.
But what is it?
Here's an explainer, as well as more details about the mission.
ChemCam can look at rocks and soils from a distance, fire a laser to vaporize the materials and analyze them with an on-board spectrograph that measures the composition of the resulting plasma. NASA says ChemCam can also use the laser to do less destructive things, such as clear away dust from Martian rocks as well as use a remote camera to acquire extremely detailed images.
Roger Wiens, ChemCam principal investigator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a tutorial on how the instrument works at a recent news conference.
"Curiosity's remote sensing instrument [is] designed to make a large number of rapid measurements in some sense to help guide the rover to the most interesting samples," he said.
He also talked about ChemCam's imaging capability and said in routine operation the team plans to take images either before or after the laser operation or both, but not during the laser operation.
"The camera is very high resolution. It's sensitive enough to image a human hair quite easily by seven feet away," he said.
After nearly two weeks on the dusty red planet, Curiosity is doing warm-up exercises and getting ready to take off for its first drilling for a rock sample -- to a place 1300 feet away scientists have named Glenelg, a spot where three kinds of terrain intersect.
In the next few days, the one-ton, six-wheeled mobile Mars laboratory will exercise each of its four steerable wheels, turning each of them side-to-side before ending up with each wheel pointing straight ahead. Curiosity will continue warming up by driving forward about 10 feet, turning 90 degrees and then reversing about sevn feet.
Artist's Concept of Curiosity. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechArtist's concept of landing.Tonight the rover will zap its first rock -- one which scientists have dubbed "Rock N165," a three-inch wide Mars rock that sits about 10 feet away from Curiosity.
"It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, it should be pretty cool too," Wiens said.
Want to hear the rest of the news conference for yourself? Visit NASA's USTREAM site, where it's all yours.
NASA has dedicated an entire section of its website to its Mars mission and really everything you'd want to know about it is right there.
Facebook to backup its servers with low-power storage devices at 'Sub-Zero' data center
By Alexis Santos
Data backups come in all shapes and sizes. For some, they take the form of external hard drives or a slice of the amorphous cloud. As for Facebook, its upcoming solution is low-power deep-storage hardware contained within a 62,000 square-foot building in Prineville, Oregon near its existing Beaver State data center. Unofficially referred to as "Sub-Zero," the facility will store a copy of the social network's data in case its primary servers need to be restored in an emergency. Rather than continuously power HDDs that are only occasionally used, the new setup can conserve energy by lighting-up drives just when they're needed. One of the company's existing server racks eats up around 4.5 kilowatts, while those at Sub-Zero are each expected to consume approximately 1.5 kilowatts once they're up and running. Tom Furlong, Facebook's vice president of site operations, told Wired that there are hopes to create a similar structure alongside the firm's North Carolina data center. Since the Prineville project is still being planned, Zuckerberg & Co. have roughly six to nine months to suss out all the details before your photos are backed up at the new digs.
So much for the stock hiccup after last month's earnings call -- Apple's valuation now tops $600 billion.
Less than one month ago, shares of Apple plunged after the company's third-quarter earnings "disappointed" the bean counters on Wall Street. Less than a month later, shares of Apple are up more than 12 percent and are again trading at an all-time high. In fact, earlier today, Jefferies & Co. raised its price target from $800 to $900, as Apple's valuation now tops $600 billion.
If you want to understand why, cue up the 1960s' hit by The Happenings, "See You in September."
That's when the iPhone 5, the biggest, worst-kept secret in techdom, is expected to be announced. Peter Misek, the Jeffries analyst responsible for Friday's price upgrade, described the upcoming product launch as "the biggest handset launch in history." Earlier this week, longtime Apple analyst Gene Munster suggested that Apple will sell 26 million to 28 million devices in its September quarter should its latest iPhone land 10 days before the end of the month.
Apple may also be getting a lift from a Wall Street Journal report this week that Apple and certain cable operators were talking about how to "use an Apple device as a set-top box for live television and other content.
How those who live in repressive regimes break into the free world
By Jon Thompson
Using the site IP address can sometimes bypass DNS-style blocks
In a speech at Stanford University in February 2008 Bill Gates said he wasn't worried about online censorship: "I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the internet," he said. He was wrong.
While the world debates the need for legislation to stop the downloading of illicit copies of commercial digital products, governments are increasingly using censorship as a reason to "protect" us from what they consider undesirable. In some countries, that protection extends to the suppression of basic human rights and news about atrocities.
Even in the UK, the chances of accidentally stumbling upon paedophilic images online are very remote. They're so illegal that they're kept hidden away behind paywalls. Politicians, however, still insist there's a real chance of bumping into such material, and use it as a reason to censor the internet.
We're sensible, law-abiding citizens; given that we will not seek out illicit material, we deserve an uncensored internet. So, how do people go about bypassing online state censorship?
An imprecise art
The main problem with online censorship is that it's a very imprecise art and is usually done on the back of moral panics, or even on the whim of unaccountable individuals. In some cases, censorship is done to look good in front of voters rather than to solve real problems.
The issues are also technological. Unless you know where all the holes are in your censorship scheme, and have the resources to do so, you can never hope to plug them all. Sites may be blocked by the state for a number of reasons. Sometimes, however, those reasons seem arbitrary, or have more to do with the moral compasses of the people making the censorship decisions, rather than any real threat to society.
In some countries, internet censorship is ordered by special state agencies and carried out by individual ISPs. In others, the police simply decide what is to be blocked. In China, for example, the list of banned websites is circulated to ISPs, who are expected to implement it without question. This list changes almost weekly, as the political climate changes.
China also employs a large army of internet enforcement officers whose job it is to monitor forums, blogs and websites and report on what they find. Without question, if the state doesn't like it, no one in China will see it.
Search for the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 in China, for example, and you'll find only tourist information, or maybe a warning not to search for such things. In Finland, unaccountable members of the police decide what is to be banned. In the fight against "child pornography" the Finns have banned a disproportionate number of websites, including some in favour of same-sex marriage and even those critical of the bans.
In Saudi Arabia, censorship even extends to online clothing catalogues showing swimsuits. Such actions tell us more about the attitudes and proclivities of the people doing the censoring than the people they're apparently trying to protect.
Ad hoc circumvention
Some internet censorship systems can be bypassed in an ad hoc fashion. This can be done when such systems simply check the URL you want to access against a banned list. When this is the case, if the URL can be made to seem in any way different, the system can be defeated.
The first thing to try is shortening the URL. You can easily shorten a URL using a service such as Bit.ly. If the filtering product keeping you away from a domain knows this trick, it expands the domain name, checks it against the banned list and blocks it accordingly.
It's time to up the ante by using the raw IP address in the browser's URL bar. The ping command (from the command line: 'ping <domain name>') will request and display the IP address of a domain from the local DNS server. However, some filtering systems weed ping traffic out for this reason. If we can't even use the ping command, how do we get at it?
The solution is to use one of the many free online domain IP address lookup services. Unless all these services are also blocked, this should work, thereby also hinting at the problems of trying to censor something as complex and interconnected as the internet.
One lookup service is the aptly named IP-Lookup. Simply enter the name of the domain you want to reach without the 'http://' preamble, and press 'enter'. The IP address appears, but the site also attempts to contact the domain itself and produces a thumbnail of the web page to show that the IP address is good. Copy the IP address into your web browser and press 'enter' to attempt to bypass censorship.
But what if the IP address of the target domains is also blocked? This is where we need to think like hackers and become a little indirect.
Indirect bypassing
When you use Google Search, many of the results are based on cached versions of the web pages, rather than the live pages themselves. This is useful for getting around web censorship measures, because along with the title of the pages in most Google Search result lines there is a 'cached' link. Click this and you read a version of the page stored and accessed from Google's cache server farm.
However, as new features are added and old ones tweaked, the user interface to Google changes frequently. In some browsers the cached links are not available due to cookie issues.
There is a way around this, however. Search for the website you want, then copy the URL from the search results back into the search input box. Add 'cache:' at the start and press 'Enter' to read the Google cache version of the page.
This technique is great for individual pages, but if you click on any content in the cached version, Google will attempt to load the real thing. You have to load each page by hand.
If you want more freedom to surf, you'll need to use a public online proxy. A proxy is like a fulcrum on a lever. You move one end of the lever so that the other end points to wherever you want it, and all the action pivots around the fulcrum.
Similarly, a proxy server acts as a focal point, relaying your requests for web pages to the sites you want to surf and collecting the results to pass back to your browser. Any web censorship software in place only sees your web connection to the proxy server, not to the sites you request.
Plenty of free public proxy servers exist that will act as such a fulcrum to bypass censorship. A searchable list is maintained here. This list refreshes itself in real time and lists the country, IP address and relevant port, and the speed of proxy servers. If you sort the list by response time and click 'Update Results' you can find a good fast server with plenty of throughput. Note down the IP address and port number.
Configuring your browser to channel your surfing activity through a public proxy is easy. In Internet Explorer 9, click 'Tools | Internet Options'. In the window that pops up, click the 'Connections' tab and click the 'LAN Settings' button at the bottom of the window. A sub-window appears.
Click the 'Use a proxy server for your LAN'. This enables the input boxes for the IP address and port details you noted down earlier. Enter these, tick the 'Bypass proxy for local addresses' box, then click 'OK'. Click 'OK' on the mother window and try surfi ng to a site.
In Firefox 12, click the orange Firefox button at the top left of the browser window and click 'Options'. In the resultant window, click the 'Advanced' tab and click the 'Network' sub-tab. Finally, click 'Settings'. A sub-window appears. Select 'Manual proxy confi guration' and the input boxes become enabled. Enter the IP address and port of the proxy server.
In the box marked 'No proxy for' enter the network number of your local network in the form '192.168.1.0/24'. That fourth number is always zero, but substitute the local subnet for the first three numbers if they're different. Click 'OK' to finish and also click 'OK' on the parent window.
The response from any websites you now surf to will seem to be slower and the connections can be flaky. But using a proxy is the go to method of bypassing censorship for millions of people living under regimes who control information.
Getting esoteric
Activists have developed esoteric uses for common web services in the search for information about the world. One such service is the translation services offered by Google, Babel Fish (babelfish. yahoo.com).
The idea is to translate a target web page from English into another language and back again. As this is done, the translation engine fetches the page itself; you never have to surf to it directly. The quality of statistical translation is now so good that in many circumstances the nuances of language survive this process.
Be prepared for some hilarious mistranslations, however. If you just want information rather than direct access to web pages, RSS may be the solution. Not all sites carry an RSS feed, but if the filtering system blocking access only deals with web traffic (HTTP and possibly HTTPS) then installing an RSS reader might be the solution.
One such RSS reader is FeedDemon. You can download and install it by accepting the default settings. When it runs the first time, FeedDemon will set up some default feeds and begin populating them. If you see the number of feeds to be read increasing in the left hand pane, then RSS traffic is not being blocked and you can happily read away.
Another way of dodging censorship is provided by Web2Mail. If a URL is banned, send an email to www@web2mail with the URL of the web page you want to access. The service should email you back the web page so that you can read it in your email client.
So, there are ways around even the most repressive regime's online censorship efforts. The problem for governments is that the web developed organically, without any central plan. This makes it incredibly difficult to censor without the world agreeing to it. So information will always get out and how long that continues is up to us
Mayank Sharma shows you how to create an app without even writing any code
Think you need to be fluent in Java to write apps for Google's Android mobile OS? What if you could write an app simply by navigating through a bunch of menus, without installing any piece of software and, more importantly, without writing a single line of code? Thanks to Andromo, it isn't a question of what if' but what is.
Andromo's app-creation process is totally idiot-proof. If you have a mouse, a web browser and an imagination, the world's your oyster. Anyone, including someone who doesn't even have a whiff of programming knowledge, can whip up an Android app in a matter of minutes. Best of all, it costs nothing.
But don't let that fool you into thinking of Andromo as a tool only for newbies. It's also got lots for the seasoned app developer who likes to spend time customising their apps to the hilt. For a fee, pro app developers can resell Andromo-created apps and even list them on Google's Android Store, Google Play.
If you still aren't convinced to try Andromo, here's another gem: Andromo can help you generate revenue. That's right. To cover its costs while making the tool available for free, all Andromo apps display small non-intrusive strips of ads, 50 per cent of the revenue from which it'll share with you!
Click, click, done
Andromo runs completely inside a web browser, so you don't need to install any additional software, unless you want to test your Android app inside an emulator.
The Andromo interface is divided into tabs with each representing a step in the app-creation process. After making changes inside a step, remember to click the 'Save Changes' button at the bottom of the page, before moving on to another tab. You can also exit the process at any step and return to it later.
Dress it upThe first step is to describe the app. An important part of this step is to select an icon. You could go with Andromo's default icon, but it's best if you choose your own. If you're not familiar with creating icons, there's no dearth of royalty-free icons available on the web.
Then there are different steps for customising the various aspects of your app. For example, in the Styles tab you can select from one of the two predefined Android themes, depending on whether you want a light or a dark background colour.
From under the Action Bar tab you can customise the appearance of the bar that appears at the top of your app. Besides displaying your app's name, users will use the bar to navigate between the various components in your app.
The most important screen, which you need to spend time decorating, is the home screen. Head to the Dashboard tab to alter its look. Here you can choose to apply a variety of backgrounds. You can upload images, as well as fine tune their alignment.
Bring in content
The meat of the app-creation process lies in the Activities tab. This is where you select and define the capabilities of your app.
The external services that Andromo can bring in data from include Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Google Maps. Additionally you can pull in a website, or an RSS/ Atom news feed, or stream audio over the internet using HTTP progressive and live streaming.Andromo currently supports a total of 13 activities with 11 free activities, and a couple of Gold-only activities available to paying members. The tool supports two kinds of activities: one that pulls in data from external services, and others that display data bundled with your app.
While all activities have similar configuration elements, such as a name and a custom icon, each has its own additional configuration options and nuances. So if you want to display a Facebook page with the social network's activity you only need to enter the name of the page as it appears in the URL.
Similarly, using the Flickr activity you can display images of a particular user by mentioning their Flickr User ID. Or you can display images from various sections of the website, such as the most popular photos on Flickr, or a user's favourite photos, by pointing to the relevant Flickr feed URL.
Bundle content
Then there are activities that let you bundle content along with the app. One you definitely need to use is the About activity. It's designed to include information that describes your app as well as yourself, thanks to optional URLs to your Facebook page, or your Twitter feed, or profiles on LinkedIn or Google+, or even your website.
With the Audio activity you can bundle normal audio tracks with the app that users can play with Andromo's customisable music player, which has visible media controls. Or you can include short sounds that are played back with the soundboard that lacks any media controls.If you need more flexibility you can use the Custom Page activity to create the About Us page or a Contact Us page. It includes a full-featured HTML editor to help you design the page.
But be cautious while using this activity or else your app will become very bulky. Currently Andromo limits the size of each audio track to 6MB. Furthermore, if you wish to put your app on the Android Market, remember that only apps up to 50MB in size are permitted.
Testing the app
The only real shortcoming with the process is that you can't test your app before first building it. So double-check those colours! When you're done creating your app, Andromo will build it on its servers and email you a download link when it's ready.
After downloading your app, you can test it on an emulator or run it on your Android device. Read these instructions for setting up the Android emulatoralong with the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) and the Android Debug Bridge.
You can also download the app directly onto your Android handset and install it, after setting up the phone to install apps from other sources in addition to Google Play.
Step by step: create an Andromo app
1. Register with Andromo
Before you can create an app you need to register with Andromo.com by picking a username and password, and providing an email address. After you've registered, log in and edit your public profile. You should also get a gravatar if you don't already have one. You can also change your password and email address from here.
2. Create new project
Once registered, you can start building your app. Begin by entering a name for your app, which you can change later. This lands you at Andromo's tabbed app creation control panel. The first step is to describe your app by editing its name, entering a description and a version number, and categorising it under one of the Google-approved categories.
3. Upload an icon
To help people find your app and to distinguish it from other apps, you can (and should) also upload a custom icon for your app in this tab, replacing Andromo's default icon. You can find lots of free icons on the web or you can create your own. Just make sure the icons are in the dimensions and file format mentioned on the website.
Customise the app
1. Pick a theme
Andromo lets you customise various aspects of your app. Head to the Styles tab where you can choose the background colour of the app as well as the colour of the headings, date and various other pieces of text. You can either enter the hex colour code or pick it up from the colour picker. Make sure you click the 'Save Changes' button before moving on.
2. Action Bar
This is the bar at the top of your app. It requires four colour schemes for the four elements it displays. The first is the single colour or a two-colour gradient background. Then there's the font colour for the foreground text. Pressing the action bar will display a drop-down list of activities in your apps, and your can alter their colour schemes as well.
3. Dashboard
This is the main interface of your app and therefore has lots of customisable elements. You can select a single colour or a two-colour gradient for the background, or a textured image that will fill the screen irrespective of the phone's orientation. Additionally, you can upload images for the background – one for the portrait mode and one for landscape.
Add content to your app
1. My Projects
Log into your account and create an app if you haven't already done so. To continue working on an existing project, go to the My Projects section, which lists all your apps. Navigate to the app you want to edit and click on the 'Edit' button underneath it. This will bring you to the app-creation control panel where you can review your app's description.
2. Select an activity
Next, define the functionality of your app by adding various activities from the Activities tab. So, if you're a Star Trek fan, your app can have the Facebook activity to point to your Star Trek fan page, and the website activity to point to the official website, as well as the Audio Player activity to play the theme music and different sounds from all the Star Trek series.
3. Customise the activity
After you've picked up an activity, say Audio Player, customise it. That includes naming it, uploading an icon for it and selecting a background image. Since you need both an audio player (to play themes) and a music board (to play Klingon pronunciations), add multiple audio player activities, then upload the relevant audio files for each.
4. Arrange activities
By default the activities appear in your app in the order in which you added them. To rearrange the order of the activities, modify their Order column value in the Activities tab. Activity with the lowest number is displayed first. Click on the 'Edit' button next to the activity you want to move and specify the new number in the Position field.
5. Advertising
After you've added and arranged all the activities, head to the Ads and Analytics tab to customise the advertising options. You can choose from three ad modes. The first will show Andromo ads. The second option will split the ad space with ads served by your AdMob account. Or, you can turn off ads altogether by switching to the Gold Upgrade Package.
6. Build and showcase your app
That's all there is to it. Now head to the Build tab and ask the service to turn your app into an Android app. When your app is built, you can download it from the emailed URL, then share it with others. You can also share the app with other Andromo users by adding it to the Andromo Showcase, from under the Showcase tab.
Share your app
After you've created your app, you need to ask the Andromo service to process it and generate an .apk file for you. Once it's done, it'll email you a link to download your app. The link is valid only for an hour, so if you need to distribute your app to other people, you need to download it from Andromo and host it elsewhere.
If you want to restrict the app to a small group of people, you can email the .apk file to your group, or host it on your own website. To install the app, others will have to tweak the settings in their phones to allow installation of apps from sources besides Google Play.
The other option is to upload the app to Google Play. But before you can upload your .apk file to Google Market, you need to register by paying a registration fee of $25 (about £16), even if you're going to distribute your app for free. After you've registered, you can upload your app along with a couple of screenshots, an application icon and app details.
Gold upgrade
For the most part the Andromo service doesn't cost you anything. But to keep it that way, the service displays ads in your apps. In fact, they'd even share half the ad revenue with you if you want (or you can let them have all of it).
You can also turn off the adverts altogether by subscribing to Andromo's Gold Upgrade Package. It costs $99 (about £63) per year per app. Besides giving you the ability to turn off in-app adverts, you get several other features with the upgrade.
For one, you can remove the Andromo branding from the About section of the app, which would be of use if you want to sell the app via Google Play or customise it for a client who wouldn't want third-party branding or advertising.
The upgraded apps are also placed higher in the build queue and get priority over non-Gold apps. Usage of Gold apps can also be tracked via Google Analytics. Finally, the Gold Upgrade enables business users to add activities so users of their apps can contact them straight from within the app itself, either via phone or email.
Google Play Smart Updates Save Data Costs and Time
By Daniel Ionescu
Google has rolled out a new feature in the Play store that will save you time and data costs when downloading apps. Dubbed smart updates, the feature enables you to download only the updated part of the app from Google Play, instead of the entire package, as it was the case by now.
Also known as delta updates, the feature was announced at Google I/O in June and Android Police spotted it was enabled on Friday. So, for example, when you download the newly-released Instagram for Android update, instead of downloading the entire 13MB app, the delta/smart update will be only around 3MB.
Delta updates for Google Play apps have several advantages. First, if you are out of Wi-Fi range and you want to download an app, the toll on your data allowance won’t be as substantial, helping you save on megabytes in the long run.
Perhaps the biggest advantage is that you will save time when downloading updates to large applications. Games in particular can easily run more than 500MB in size, and an update over a slow Wi-Fi connection can take hours. But with delta updates, you will download a much smaller file.
It’s not easy to notice when you download a smart update, though. When you trigger an update, Google Play will still show the full size of the download package, but it will install the update as soon as the delta update has been downloaded. The feature does not seem to rely on the latest update of the Play store itself, as it appears to be implemented server-side with Google, so it should work with older versions as well.
Apple’s App Store does not have delta updates capabilities, and it’s unclear whether this feature will be part of the iOS 6 update arriving this fall. iOS does, however, make use of delta updates for system updates.
Firefox Add-On Collusion Shows Who's Tracking You Online
By Ian Paul
If you're concerned about advertisers tracking you across the Web, Mozilla can now help you see exactly who's following you online with a new experimental Firefox add-on called Collusion. The browser extension creates a real-time graph of all the tracking cookies being deposited on your browser as you move around the Web.
The add-on can differentiate between behavioral tracking (cookies that record links you click on, what content you view, searches you make on a site, etc.) and other potential tracking cookies. Collusion's graph also makes it easy to see which sites are using the same behavioral tracking advertisers. Collusion was originally developed as an independent project by Mozilla engineer Atul Varma. Mozilla is now developing the add-on with the support of the Ford Foundation.
Getting started
After you've installed Collusion from Mozilla's Firefox add-ons gallery you have to enable it by clicking on Tools>Add-ons>Extensions and then click "Enable" next to Collusion. After that you should see a small red circle on the bottom right of your browser. Now, just start browsing the Web as you normally would. To see the tracking graph build up, click on the Collusion icon in the bottom right of your screen. This will open a separate browser tab with your Collusion graph.
Collusion graph after visiting the Android Market, ESPN, IMDb, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo.
The glowing circles represent sites you have visited and each line growing out of that circle is attached to a cookie the site or its advertisers have placed on your browser. Red circles are behavioral tracking cookies, and gray circles represent non-behavorial tracking cookies. But, Mozilla says, those gray sites may still be tracking you across the Web. In my tests, the gray circles tended to be cookies from social networking sites such as Facebook, MSN, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Twitter. A visit to IMDb, however, deposited a non-behavorial tracking cookie from Amazon on my browser.
Tracking cookies connected to The Wall Street Journal.
After you've visited about four or five sites, the graph tends to get really confusing and it's hard to tell which advertisers are connected with which sites. To cut down on the confusion just hover over any of the sites you've visited and Collusion will highlight only the cookies connected with that site.
You can also do the same for advertisers. If you wanted to see how many of the sites you visit rely on Google's DoubleClick for advertising, you could just hover over the DoubleClick circle. In my case, this shows me that almost all of the sites I previously visited during my short test relied on DoubleClick's cookie. This is helpful information to know since, as Mozilla points out, when the same sites rely on the same tracking cookies, advertisers are able to effectively track you across the sites you visit building up valuable data for market research.
Mozilla says that all tracking data Collusion collects is stored locally on your computer and never leaves your possession. You can reset the graph at any time to delete Collusion's database. The add-on also features an export function, but in my tests this feature wasn't functioning properly.
Collusion can only show you who's tracking you right now, but future plans for the add-on include the ability to turn off tracking cookies when you don't want to be followed as you browse the Web.
