| Chris DiBona, Android, Jello |
[Oct. 8th, 2008|04:41 pm] |
Today Chris DiBona, the open source program manager at Google, gave a talk at MSU on open source communities. Most of the tidbits I had heard before, but he had an Android-powered mobile phone to demonstrate and pass around (though, unfortunately, it never reached me). He did a short demonstration of how easy it is to develop and deploy your own applications for the phone using Eclipse. The phone's hardware contains a camera, an accelerometer (for switching the screen from portrait to landscape mode dynamically), and a GPS receiver, along with the Android stack of open source applications based on Linux. Pretty awesome setup. After my somewhat disappointing experience with developing software for my Palm Treo, I'm excited that these phones are finally really opening up. These things in our pockets are computers, even the cheap ones that you get for 99 cents (two year contact required), and it's long overdue that the manufacturers and network operators let us use them as such.
DiBona also talked about the Summer of Code program, and there seemed to be some genuine interest among the other students. I would certainly participate again, and I hope that we can get some more MSU involvement next time.
As a closing aside, when DiBona asked someone for a recently-used Google search string, someone offered "nail jello to a wall". Naturally, Google has the answer. |
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