Using Slidy

The slides for this class are HTML files which both validate as XHTML 1.1 and pass the WAVE Accessibility Checker.
They are made to look like slides using a Javascript called Slidy.
The following keystrokes do useful things in Slidy:
- h - help (see all the commands)
- f - fullscreen (gets rid of the links at the bottom of the window
- space - advance a slide
- left/right arrows - forward or back a slide
- up/down arrows - scroll within a slide
- a - show all slides at once for printing
- n - add a note to a slide in a given namespace (a student of mine Sriram Krishnan added this extension)

Getting started with iPhone Development

We will begin the semester talking about iPhone development for a bit. We will then switch to Android development and cover how to do it. We will alternate back and forth as the semester continues
To develop for the iPhone you need an Intel-based Mac.
You also need to sign-up to become a registered iPhone developer.
To sign-up you can go to
http://developer.apple.com/iphone.
This allows you to download the free SDK. Using this, you can code iPhone applications -- you just can't put them on devices.
For this you need to sign-up for the iPhone Developer Program which costs $99.
You can also do this through the iPhone University Program.
For the first homework, it will suffice that your program runs in the simulator.

The IDE used to develop for the iPhone is called XCode.
You can either download it directly from Apple. Or you can look under developer tools on your install disk and install it from there. You should then update to the latest version.
The IDE has lots of useful tools for quickly building iPhone applications such as Interface Builder.
The programming language used to write code for the iPhone is Objective-C.
This is an object-oriented language extending C developed in the early 80s.
It was popularized in the NeXTSTEP OS which served as the basis for the Mac OSX operating system.
The Cocoa Touch API is based on Mac OSX Cocoa and is what we'll use to write our iPhone applications.
At its heart the iPhone runs over OS X and so has many of the low level Unix APIs.

Several things about the iPhone environment are different from a traditional personal computer environment. Many of these also apply to Android.

Multi-tasking model is different from on a PC.
Only one Window at a time.
Limited Access - only can touch file system that was created for your app. Can't access low numbered network ports. Etc.
Your application needs to be snappier -- you need to get things loaded and displayed as quickly as possible. Pressing the home button should exit your app as quick as possible.
Limited Screen size. 480 x 320 pixels (Quarter VGA) on 3GS and earlier models is a lot less than most desktops. Even for iPhone 4, which has a resolution of 960 x 640, the physical dimensions of the screen are much smaller so you need to do things different than on a Desktop.
Limited Resources: ARM Processor 412 MHz with 128MB RAM for iPhone 3G and earlier; 256MB, ARM Processor 620 MHz for iPhone 3GS (often a lot of which is used by the OS); A4 Processor 1GHz with 512 MB RAM for iPhone 4. Still, iPhone often needs to do graphics heavy stuff. This compares with multi-core processors running at a few GHz and gigabytes of RAM for most modern Desktops.
Some things in Cocoa like garbage collection are not in Cocoa Touch.
iPhone does support multi-touch events, locations, and a built-in accelerometer.

Android is an open source mobile application platform developed by Google (Open Handset Allicance).
Android is a software platform so can be used by different mobile devices.
Currently, there are several handsets which make use of Android such as those by Motorola (Droid), HTC, Sony Ericsson, Nexus, Samsung, G1, etc.
It has a Linux based kernel, with these underlying components written in C and C++.
User applications though are built in Java.
Android applications are compiled to byte-code and run on the Dalvik virtual machine which is free from Sun licensing issues. (Oracle is currently involved in litigation with Google over Android.)

The Android 2.2 SDK can be downloaded and installed using the instructions at:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html.
After downloading and unzipping the SDK, you should add its location to your path environment variable.
You can then do development directly from the command line, creating Ant projects, and be hard-core... Or you can install Eclipse and use the Eclipse Android plug-in.
To install the plug-in, in Eclipse you go to Help > Software Updates... Click on the Available Software tab. Add the site:
https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/
Then check and install this software and restart Eclipse.