Say "Hello Android!"

Android is all around you, isn't it? It's in your smartphone, in your tablet - and chances are not too bad that you already wrote your own app for your device.

Me myself is still using an old-school Nokia 6230 that is used more often as watch than as phone or even internet device.

This is nagging me. I'm looking for a new phone. A smarter phone. A smartphone.

I'd like to have this one.

A phone which I can use to explore the internet, write emails, and even to write apps for myself (and sometimes to call people).

Unfortunately, I've no knowledge about how to write apps with Android. How about you? Do you know how to write apps in Android? How smooth was your start with Android?

For beginners (and experts alike) Lars' blog vogella.de is an excellent resource to learn about Android and related technologies.

However, not all details are yet covered in tutorials and two weeks ago Lars asked me wether we couldn't run Code Recommenders on Android?

It took me a few hours to figure out but yes - Code Recommenders is capable to learn models for Android too!

The only disadvantage with Android is, that there are not too many open source projects available. That means, that is quite tricky to get a reasonable amount of data to train Code Recommenders. Thus, we have to come up with a purely community driven approach that allows developers to share their knowledge about how to use Android directly from their IDE and - in turn - generating new models from this usage data on a daily basis. With such a system in place we think it should be possible to create a continuously growing knowledge base for Android.

Since my spare time is currently very low, I'm glad that Andreas Frankenberger signed up to implement this upload-train-deliver life-cycle for Android in his bachelor thesis. I'm really looking forward to his results. Until now he has collected a set of 119 open source Android applications (taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_Android_applications) which he will use to train the initial Android recommendation models used as proof of concept before implementing the upload and train cycle.

If you like the idea let us know. We will soon create an early set of recommendation models for Android and we would be glad to get your feedback about it. In addition, if you know any other open source Android projects not listed above, please feel free to give us a pointer to them (preferably as Eclipse ADT projects). Andreas will be glad to add them to the initial training repository.

If you have any other comments or ideas on this idea just discuss them here on the blog or in our forum.


See you!
Marcel

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