China has by far the strongest interest in purchasing tablets, with consumers surveyed in that country suggesting an 80% interest in purchasing tablets, versus just over 40% in North America, 50% in Europe, just under 50% in the Middle East, and about 65% in Asia-Pacific.

Going by geographical spread of our app downloads, we can totally see this huge force on the horizon. More and more users are coming from China to download our apps. And that’s a wonderful thing.

Installation of Honeycomb

As an initial step , update your sdk with Android3.0. You can follow steps mentioned on this official documentation page. In ADT AVD Manager you should be able to Android 3.0 API entry.

As a next step you will be required to chose whether to optimize or to upgrade your existing Android application.

If you have an existing app for an earlier versions of Android , then you can optimize it for a tablet – style experience on Android3.0 , by considering the following steps:

1) First add in your Android manifest file.

By targeting the Android3.0 patform , the system will automatically apply Holographic theme to each activity , provided you dont have your custom theme applied , otherwise it will overrride the inherited holographic theme.

Or you can achieve device specific theme by adding a declaration in res/values-l1 folder -

Other custom themes can be declared under res/values/styles.xml

Now your application will automatically switch to the holo theme if running on HONEYCOMB or later.

2.Continue to build your application against the minimum version specified by android:minSdkversion.

3. Provide alternative resources for xlarge screens – Every application should provide alternative resources to support specific device configurations. For example , you can create a new layout for xtra large screen by specifying xlarge qualifier

you can place the layout under res/layout-xlarge

we can also specify landscape resources with land qualifier

like res/layout-xlarge-land

The resource directory structure of an application supporting different screen sizes and densities can be as follows -

res/layout/my_layout.xml // layout for normal screen size
res/layout-small/my_layout.xml // layout for small screen size
res/layout-large/my_layout.xml // layout for large screen size
res/layout-large-land/my_layout.xml // layout for large screen size in landscape mode
res/layout-xlarge/my_layout.xml // layout for extra large screen size
res/drawable-lhdpi/my_icon.png // image for low density
res/drawable-mdpi/dpi/my_icon.png // image for medium density
res/drawable-hdpi/my_icon.png // image for high density

res/drawable-nodpi/composite.xml // density independent resource

Now you can test your application by building in Android3.0. and publish it to Android Market

If you want to Develop a New App for tablets and similar devices then

First thing to do is to add minSdkversion to 11 and set the support for other screens as false.
External services such as Android market may use the information provided in manifest file to filter application from devices that do not have an extra large screen.

your manifest file must have these declared –

Now you can just use the new APIs introduced in Android3.0 to build your Application .

Hope this was useful. Do share your feedback by downloading our Honeycomb ready CollegeFinder app. It’s still little rough but we are working on it.

Download Chand Ka Tohfa from iPad App Store

Download from itunes: http://bit.ly/d7Eso5

We are very excited to announce the release Android version of CodeMunch application.

CodeMunch Android application manages all employee follow-ups in one place. You can add a follow-up for your employee. This saves a lot of time by keeping track of all the follow-ups for your employees in one place negating the need to remember them.

To get started you need to install CodeMunch application from the Android market place. Alternatively, you can use QR code to scan and install.

Once installed, launch it and start adding contacts. After adding contacts you can create follow-ups for the respective employees. This is a faster and easier way of adding follow-ups.

For the geeks – this was our first ‘official’ Android project and we had lot of fun developing it. Main APIs we used include Contact API for fetching the contacts, SQLLite to store data. App supports Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and the latest Android 2.0.1.

Here are some screen shots -

Please share your feedback and suggestions on CodeMunch feature discussion forum
Complete overview on CodeMunch website

Amazon had compute scalability in Amazon EC2, storage with Amazon S3, messaging using Amazon SQS and monitoring service using Amazon CloudFront. Today they introduced Amazon RDS. Think of it as a MySQL on cloud. Customers have been asking for better SQL based data store and now they have it. This will be disruptive in many ways. Mysql administration, ongoing maintenance and patch support will all be taken care by Amazon. And that’s a big relief. MySQL server will be available in following configuration:

You can specify any one of five server instance classes:

* db.m1.small (1.7 GB of RAM, $0.11 per hour).
* db.m1.large (7.5 GB of RAM, $0.44 per hour)
* db.m1.xlarge (15 GB of RAM, $0.88 per hour).
* db.m2.2xlarge (34 GB of RAM, $1.55 per hour).
* db.m2.4xlarge (68 GB of RAM, $3.10 per hour).

This is going to be useful at many levels. Not only we can migrate our existing applications to this MySQL environment, RDS APIs will also let us invoke MySQL commands from external apps.

During beta phase, Amazon is allowing 20 databases with every AWS account. With each one going up to 1TB, you can feast on 20TB storage in this phase. Enough to satisfy majority of the web applications. Hourly charges will apply -

RDS usage is charged by the DB Instance hour. As noted above, there are five instance sizes and corresponding hourly rates. You’ll also pay 10 cents per GB per month for your provisioned storage and 10 cents for every million I/O requests

Also there are plans to replicate MySQL instances across availability zones -

* Reserved DB Instances so that you can pay a low one-time fee and then receive a substantial discount on your hourly usage charges.
* A High Availability offering so that you can easily and cost-effectively provision synchronously replicated RDS instances in two different availability zones.

Rightscale has useful insights on this announcement:

The way I think of an RDS instance is as a virtual appliance or a special-purpose server. You really get an EC2 instance with an EBS volume running a specific version of MySQL plus automation for backups and resizing the storage volume. The API is designed such that additional versions of MySQL and other databases can easily be added in the future. Just like a regular server, each RDS instance lives within an availability zone and access is controlled through a security group (plus the mysql authentication).

For more on Amazon RDS:
Documentation
Libraries
FAQs

We will start testing RDS service by migrating our CodeMunch development database to RDS. Icing on the cake is Amazon’s announcement to reduce 15% price on compute cycles. Sweet!

World of IT is getting rebooted thanks to the wonderful (and scary!) confluence of cloud computing and social media. There is lot to learn and lot to innovate around. Apptility has long been committed to the science of social computing – yeah we have tools and experiments to prove that!

In recent months we had been working hard to push innovation in the areas of social crm and social recruiting. We believe we are witnessing how forces of conversation and engagement are basically re-architecting enterprise boundaries and changing the rules of engagement. Not many people have strong grasp on where things are going (friend recently joked that this is the reason why we have so many social media experts!) but there are many baby steps to be taken here. We are taking it and our clients are taking them as well. Together we hope to learn and iterate.

Share your IT challenges, tell us what problems to focus on, how smartphones are impacting your business and how are you planning to tame this new beast called ’social’.