The device looks pretty nice (but not iPhone sexy) and has a ton of features. It will go on sale on the 22 October and retail for $179 US.

Initial reviews are mixed but I suspect that this New York Times article hits close to the truth:

“If the HTC’s new G1 cellphone, featuring Google’s Android software, were introduced two years ago, jaws would drop. But Apple’s iPhone already won the wows that go to the first small phone that is truly good at Web browsing.”

and

“my initial take is that the G1 is the PC to the iPhone’s Macintosh…”

Playing with the Android emulator I always suspected that that last quote would be true, still it will be interesting to see how it all goes on the 22nd.

Also released is the final 1.0 SDK and a hint that the beta Android Market will go live on the 22nd when the G1 goes on sale. Guess I’ll have to get cracking with finishing off Bubbles!

Update: Gizmoda has a very good hands on review of the G1 with lots of pictures and video. Check it out.

First off the new version of the SDK (0.9) became available. The APIs have undergone some rather radical changes since m15 but apparently they should be mostly stable now. Its going to take some serious work to get Bubbles! up and running again.

Next all sorts of leaks about the first Android handset (the HTC Dream) starting popping up on the Internet. Gizmodo have some spy pictures of the phone, it looks good but not iPhone sexy. I think the slide out qwerty keyboard is a good idea but it doesn’t help the devices looks.

Google also posted some information about their content distribution system which will be the Android equivalent of the iPhone’s App Store.

“Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it.”

It certainly seems that getting an Android application out into the wild will be far easier (and less expensive) then an iPhone application.

And lastly, today the Android team posted the Android Developer Challenge Winners gallery showcasing the final 50 apps and the winning apps. Some pretty interesting application here.

Its going to be interesting to see how Android and the HTC Dream do against the iPhone tsunami.

Click to see next slide

Here is the PDF: Bubbles! and Google Android Presentation

For those of you who don’t know Googles App Engine is a “free” application hosting environment. It promises to be able to scale Google style (as long as you pay of course).

The free account gives you 500Mb of persistent storage and bandwidth and CPU for around 5million pages views a month which is not bad for free.

Python
For some strange reason Python is the language of choice for app engine. I’ve never really taken to Python and I don’t really like languages where indentation is syntactically meaningful but it wasn’t too painful after skimming some tutorials on the web and running through the tutorial.

SDK
The SDK is only a couple of megabytes to download (you need Python 2.5 installed) and ran fine on my Windows XP desktop and Ubuntu laptop. Having said that the SDK doesn’t give you very much in the way of an IDE, it just gives you a dev web server and a tool to upload your application to the hosting platform. So I just used gedit and Notepad++ (which both have Python syntax highlighting) as my editors.

Platform Features
App Engine provides a pretty easy to use framework for building web applications in Python. The engine is WSGI compliant so you can plugin in any of the common Python frameworks such as Django, CherryPy, Pylons and web.py. Django seems to be the web app framework of choice.

Apart from a web application framework, the engine also provides APIs for email, image manipulation, URL fetching, users and datastorage.

The Users API is pretty cool as it hooks into Google’s user accounts so anyone with a Google account can log into your application (if you want them too).

The datastore is an object based transaction engine with a SQL like syntax. On the face of it is very clean and easy to use but its here that I had the biggest headaches when porting the Bubbles! services.

Porting the services
Bubbles! uses 3 very simple services: popin, popout and getpops (where a POP is a point of presence). These services take input parameters from the query string and return JSON response strings.

Creating a class to represent a Pop in the datastore was very simple; as was creating and deleting Pops in the datastore. The biggest issue I had here was coming up with an elegant way of validating the input parameters.

But when I came to getting things back out of the datastore things went a little pear shaped…

In my Pop class I was storing the latitude and longitude of the POP as floating point numbers. To retrieve the nearby POPs (in the getpops service) I was using a typical SQL like query as follows:

SELECT * FROM POP
WHERE lat >= :1 AND lat < :2 AND lng >= :3 AND lng < :4
ORDER BY lastdatemodified

Where :1, :2, :3 and :4 were set to currentLat-0.001, currentLat+0.001, currentLng-0.001 and currentLng+0.001.

This raised the first issue: Only one “property” can have an inequality clause in a query. Turns out that the datastore has some pretty weird and wonderful restrictions, of course this particular one put a major spanner in the works.

Geohash to the rescue
What I needed was a quick way of calculating if a point in space was close to another one and to be honest the approach I was never happy with the approach I used above because it found points in rectangular area not a circular one.

After a little bit of research (I love the web), I came across this concept: the Geohash.

This cool (public domain) algorithm takes a decimal lat/long and turns it into a string. For instance

-36.843480 174.767138

Becomes:

rckq2uve1mx3

Not only does this give you something that you can stick on a URL: http://geohash.org/rckq2uve1mx3 but more importantly for points near to each other the first few characters of the hash are the same !

-36.843480 174.767138  =  rckq2uve1mx3
-36.844381 174.765611  =  rckq2usmvvsd
-36.848508 174.765451  =  rckq2gumfhjr
-36.848457 174.748261  =  rckq27zy1tg8

So the solution to my problem turns out to be remarkably easy:

1. When creating or updating a POP I calculate the Geohash for the longitude and latitude of the POP. I take only the first 6 characters and store them with the POP
2. When processing getpops, I calculate the Geohash for the current latitude/location, grab the first 6 characters and find any pops in the datastore that have the same stored Geohash.

My select statement is now a simple equals and runs far faster then my original implementation.

Summary
Overall Google App Engine is an interesting platform and baring some quirks it does appear to be a viable platform for building web applications on.

Bubbles! was in the top 25% in all categories (Effective Use, Polish, Indispensability, and Originality) and in the top 25% overall.

This website pulls together some of the scores that have been publicly published.

The 50 first round winners have also been release and there is a pdf with the winners in it (but it seems to be corrupt ?)

During the past few weeks, 100+ judges around the world reviewed over 1,700
applications. They were extremely impressed with the diversity and the
large number of high quality entries submitted. It is clear that the number
of great applications far exceeds the 50 top scoring applications that will
move on to the final round of the Android Developer Challenge.

We regret to inform you that your entry was not among the top 50
submissions.

Ah well it was worth a go. Apparently they are going to be putting up an Android Developer Challenge
Gallery shortly so we will get to see what I was up against.

Bubbles! allows you to create a pop (point of presence) that is ‘broadcasted’ from your phone. Other Bubbles! users in close proximity (about 50m) get to see your pop and you get see theirs. Of course as you move around so does your pop.

A pop is anonymous and consists of a message and a nick name that you choose for yourself.

I was going to implement a feature whereby you could tie a pop to a location. This would allow you to attach messages to a point in space for other users to see. Unfortunately I ran out of time but its next on my list to build.

Here are a few screenshots so you can see Bubbles! in action (click to see them full sized)

I’m also thinking of including the ability to see the history of pops for another user and perhaps even the ability to initiate a chat session with another Bubbles! user. Maybe even overlay the pops unto a MapView (which would hook into Google Maps) .

Of course if I get into the top 50 for the first round of the challenge I’ll have some money to invest into more development. We’ll have to see how I go but here’s hoping.