2009 Android Wish List
January 1st, 2009
What would you like to see Google (and others) do with Android in 2009? Here are some things I came up with.
- Multitouch.
- Bluetooth APIs.
- Explicit support for unit testing, with clear examples and IDE support.
- Step-by-step OpenGL tutorials, along the lines of the excellent Notepad tutorial.
- A first rate IDEA plugin.
- A damn good GUI builder.
- Winchester hard disk drive support.
- Longer G1 battery life
- The ability to install apps on the SD card, and make it obvious how to put SQLite DBs on the SD card.
- More standard actions and reusable activities. For example, make it easy to select pictures from the filesystem, crop photos, etc. These pieces are all there, but not always included as public APIs. Over time, I hope to see more reusable building blocks, making application development easier.
- A pre-built JAR file containing all the SDK sources, so I can download a single JAR and drop it into my IDE.
- Improved navigation on the Reference Information web site. There are a large number of examples, but the web site is hard to navigate. At a minimum, some kind of breadcrumbs would be nice. It’s really easy to get lost on the current site.
- Never, ever release another phone without a standard headphone jack.
- Improved contact management. My main gripe is when editing contacts, I get duplicate email address conflicts, with no smart merging of the duplicate entries.
- ** Update: Flash support (see Michael’s comment below)
I suspect we’ll have most of these items sometime in 2009.
You forgot to mention releasing Android compatible FLASH which was already demoed by Adobe back in November to work on the G1.
,Michael Martin
http://www.googleandblog.com/
“More standard actions and reusable activities. For example, make it easy to select pictures from the filesystem, crop photos, etc. These pieces are all there, but not always included as public APIs.”
There is a project called OpenIntents, which tried to collect as much useful intents as we could find:
http://code.google.com/p/openintents/
- REAL 3G Tethering (bonus for wireless tethering option)
- On Device screen capture (that doesn’t require root)
- Theme/Skin ability
- Widgets (starting with that Clock, grin)
- Support for non-image file attachments in Gmail app
- Video recording
- Better support for Google Docs
- Better support for Google Reader
I’ve one major gripe. Not exactly a bug, but rather a lack of a feature.
Contacts that have a company name but no First Name or Last Name are listed in the contact list as a phone number. And you can’t even Search for them!! So at the top of my contacts listing, I have a list of about 25 phone numbers which are completely useless to me.
They’re nothing special, but definitely useful on a daily basis – local fast food delivery places, support numbers for my hosting company and isp, etc. They shouldn’t require a first name / last name. To top it off, they show up correctly on GMail, so why not on the application based on the GMail contacts api?
I’d also like the ability to better control incoming and outgoing calls (via code).
Ad-hoc wifi would also be nice, so we can tinker with the possibility of a massive mesh network.
And definitely multi-touch, better battery life and flash.
Contacts. Calendar. Memo. To Do. These are the four basic apps the Palm Pilot had dedicated keys for about 13 years ago when it launched. Android does just two of them. Sure, they synchronize very nicely but that’s just two our of four.
To Do list and Memos. Memos should have two-way synchronization with Google Documents and To Do should probably sync with the Tasks feature of Gmail.