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Yet Another DMCA Takedown

21. December 2011

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Another DMCA takedown of one of my Android apps. This time initiated by The New York Times Company for a three year old app titled “NYTimes Article Search”. Instead of having their lawyers send the DMCA notice to Google which immediately suspends the respective app, they could have just sent me an email and I’d [...]

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How to get 4 to 5 stars in the Android market (Appirater for Android)

7. March 2011

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Short answer: Ask your especially engaged users to rate the app (eg. with a tool such as AppRater). iPhone developer Amro Mousa published a post yesterday with recommendations about how to reach a high average rating on the AppStore, since many app users are only remembered to rate an app on uninstalling, which naturally leads [...]

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Translating Telephones — Google Translate now with Conversation Mode

13. January 2011

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The future has arrived — translating telephones. Google engineers are alpha testing a new feature for Google Translate: “Conversation Mode”. This mode captures speech in real time, transcribes it, translates it, and speaks it out in another language with only a short delay. http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/12/android-translations/ Automated real-time translation systems will not be able to interpret deeper [...]

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Android NDK updates, no more Java required

12. January 2011

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Good news for everyone wanting to do more C/C++ on Android: with the newest NDK update (r5, available in Gingerbread) it’s now possible to develop apps and games solely in C/C++, even for sound there is no Java glue necessary anymore. Google’s Android developers also added a full example Activity implemented only in C to [...]

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Advice for Android Developers: Prepare for App Acquisition

17. December 2010

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Here’s a brief but important advice for Android app developers: starting with your first app, prepare for the situation where a company wants to acquire one of your applications. Use a unique signing key (alias) for each app! Else you’ll be forced to either cancel the acquisition or hand out the key you use for [...]

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Amazon Releases Open Source Android and iPhone SDK for S3, SimpleDB, SQS and SNS

9. December 2010

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Amazon has just released an open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) SDK for Android and iPhone which greatly simplifies using S3, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS). A mobile application has two basic approaches for interacting with Amazon’s Web Services: Proxying requests through a server Making the requests directly from the mobile [...]

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How to Setup Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) in Eclipse, including the Galaxy Tab SDK

6. December 2010

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Today Android version 2.3 (Gingerbread, API Level 9) was released, including an updated Android plugin for Eclipse and the API Level 9 SDK. The release includes some very welcome updates for both users and developers, including better text selection tools, access to more sensor data, improved garbage collection, updated video drivers for better OpenGL performance, [...]

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