In a very quick bit of non-CES news, check out this picture taken during Tuesday’s solar eclipse by photographer Thierry Legault. It shows the International Space Station in front of the Sun as the Sun itself is partially occluded by the Moon. Amazing.
What’s even more amazing is that Thierry had less than one second in which to take the photo – that’s how quickly the ISS passes across the Sun. You can read all about how the photograph was taken over at Bad Astronomy.
Smashing Magazine just keeps coming up with great stuff. This time they’ve got a beginners tutorial on how to develop for Android using Eclipse, XML and Java.
Starting with an introduction by way of “Why Develop for Android”, it takes the user through installing the development environment Eclipse and the Android SDK, before setting up the Android Virtual Device, so that would-be developers can test their applications without actually loading them onto a phone.
The article proceeds to build a simple tea timer application by first creating the interfaces in XML, then linking code and listening for events in Java. Before you know it, you’ve a working Android app. Coffee drinkers will just have to go with the flow.
I’ve never developed for Android, though I used to tinker with C on Sun Sparcstations, but I had this all up-and-running within an hour, and that included downloading and installing the software.
I know that HP Palm’s WebOS is very similar especially with their Ares app builder, but I’ve no idea about developing for Apple’s iOS. Regardless, it’s clear that the barrier to entry for mobile application development is now extremely low.
(On a completely different note, I imagine that Smashing Magazine will very shortly have their November wallpapers /backgrounds available for download.)