AppAware - outrageous adoption...

Just two weeks ago in my last blog entry I reported about Andrea's first release of AppAware. We already got a thousand users after the first day, it was just incredible.
The week after it got even better when different blogs started talking about AppAware. Currently we have about 5000 active users creating more than 10.000 events (i.e. install/remove/update) per day!!! That means if you have the app running on your phone almost every second you receive update.

This massive adoption actually motivated Andrea to take the next step: to allow to filter for local events only. Accordingly, you can find out which applications are being used and installed around you. So if you arrive in a new city you can find out which apps are being used there...try your self it's really exciting!

AppAware - find out which Android Apps are hot

Our group has again released a new mobile phone application. AppAware allows to share online your Android application installs, updates, and removals. Out of these events, AppAware calculates a popularity measure. As such, users can learn from each other which apps are hot and which are not. Additionally, the install/update/removal events can also be shared via twitter.

If you want to try it out install AppAware from the Android Market (search for 'AppAware') or scan this barcode. You can also browse the recorded apps from your desktop computer: http://appaware.org

Please provide us with your feedback.

Try TwiPhone

A Ph.D. student of us, Andrea Girardello, has developed TwiPhone which logs calls, text messages and their position by constantly monitoring the mobile phone device (just have a look at Twitter for current logs). This allows users to share their personal communications on the Twitter online social network.

If you are interested, please feel free to download/install TwiPhone through the Google MarketPlace and try it for some days. In any case, your comments are very welcome, also if you decide not to tweet anything or just send your a feedback on this project.
We am looking forward to your comments. Thanks a lot for giving it a try.

Visiting the Tutorial @MuM2009

Today, I had the great chance of visiting the tutorial "Introduction to Programming Applications for Mobile Devices" at MuM 2009. Jamie Costello and Andrew Rice gave a great introduction to programming on the different mobile phone platforms and taught us in 3h how to build an Android app that takes a picture, reads GPS location, and uploads the annoted photo. The tutorial was very well prepared: the code was step-wise extended by Andrew and displayed on the projector, additionally, a step-by-step list allowed to keep track, and, if completely lost, from a website the entire code could be downloaded in the course. Inbetween Andrew walked by and really managed to solve all 'unexpected' problems - so in the end the app worked at all the 20 participants laptops. Just incredible! However, being on myself from now with Android will be yet another adventure, I'm sure!