Not always, apparently.

Google have launched a tool that will anyone (anyone, not just developers) to build applications for the Android mobile phone platform.

All the details are here.

It looks like a very powerful tool: I’ve signed up for access, which is being rolled out incrementally by Google as it’s a Beta program.

I went to a lecture yesterday given by the excellent and entertaining Yorick Wilks, in which he explained the concept and evolution of companions – digital agents that accompany humans through their lives, helping them and improving the quality of their lives.

The project he described combines face recognition in photography, speech recognition and natural language parsing, some very clever artificial intelligence and the ability to mine the rich data of the Internet (Wikipedia, your Facebook account, all manner of data from the semantic web) and gives it a user interface that a person can converse with. Example applications might include teaching the software about your photo library so it can reminisce with you, researching for you on the Internet, even telling you about things it thinks you would find interesting.

I’m over-simplifying the science part here (it’s advanced and the lecture wasn’t meant to be deep, he said) but it seems to me combining all these technologies and data sources, and giving them an interface people are comfortable speaking to is a pretty exciting development. It’s the combination of several advanced technologies into one application, and the use of that software to learn over an extended period so it can adapt and improve over time that I find interesting.

Prof Wilks points out that some people are already creating digital avatars of themselves for posterity, and suggested a well-trained companion could answer questions about your life after you’ve passed on, help you remember things if you start forgetting them, and the project specifically looked at how companions could help the elderly live happier lives.

What I want to understand is whether I could start sending my companion to meetings in my place any time soon, or at least responding to my emails.

I’m now eager to find other expressions I can include in my emails that suggest I have attached something. Do phrases like “here’s the file” or “please find enclosed” also trigger the code?

How many “and here’s the email again, only with the attachment this time” emails will this clever bit of software eliminate?

- Backed up my database using mysqldump
- Made a new directory for the latest WordPress software
- Downloaded it using Subversion (svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0 . was the command I used)
- Copied the wp-content folder from my old blog directory to my new one using rsync
- Copied wp-config.php and .htaccess from the old blog directory to the new one
- Changed the root directory of my blog by editing its Apache conf file
- Logged in and updated the database, which WordPress did automatically

The whole process was slightly complex, perhaps I made it so, but it was safe, as I never over-wrote the working blog in the old folder. Everything seems to be working fine now.

First of all, it’s a great device in its own right. Very fast, a great screen, the on screen keyboard is great, and the music player works really well with my itunes collection.

The fact that it has desktop widgets rather than an application launcher like the iPhone means it’s very easy to personalize in a useful and attractive way. My homepage currently contain links to my favourite applications (as with the iPhone) but also buttons for calling people, a dynamic weather feed, news feed etc, and a tiny music player. It makes the things I do all the time much easier than they are on the iPhone.

The app store (called android market) is useful, with lots of free and commercial apps. I’ve installed WordPress (with which I’m writing this post), Ocado and a program that reads business cards and converts them to contacts automatically. There doesn’t seem to be the same breadth of apps as you see on iTunes, but there are many, and the range is growing daily. There’s no Apple police to delay launch of new apps, so I expect there will be a lot more innovation long-term than there is on the iPhone: the presence of Flash, Python and a great scripting environment on the phone all argue for this. We won’t see debates like there were about Skype and spotify on the iPhone. By the way: Skype and LinkedIn, please release an android applications soon.

It syncs perfectly with Zimbra, our work email system, and with Google mail, and even links up your Facebook and Twitter contacts with your address book, though there could be privacy concerns with this.

So all in all this is a very useful and impressive device, personally I would say much better than the iPhone, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens as it evolves. The location based features, using gps and cell mast triangulation are the next area of exploration for me.

When Wembley Stadium was being built, I remember all sorts of media stories about how badly the project was going, how incompetent the company doing the work must be, and what a disaster it was. Now we have this fantastic stadium, that we’ll be using for decades. Even my recent new kitchen was painful. Often, because of my role, I’m involved in projects when they get painful, and it’s made me wonder once or twice if stress-free projects are really the goal. Of course we can optimise all our processes to make things as smooth and as slick as possible, we can use our experience to avoid issues that are likely to arise along the way. I’m wondering, though, if that’s really the right thing to do, if the goal is to get a project done as quickly, as efficiently and as well as possible? The project will (hopefully) be short, and our enjoyment of its output will (hopefully) be long, and perhaps that’s the main thing?

If this makes sense, perhaps it means those of us who work on projects should have thick skins, and come prepared for adversity, rather than spending too much time making sure everything progresses in a smooth, flawless way.

I’m not suggesting that we should discard good practise and professional delivery at all, only that perhaps we should all be prepared for the tough times, and accepting of them when they come, because it will be worth it in the end.

I also got quite a lot of feedback after that post (my most popular blog post ever, unexpectedly) that I should look at MAMP, an easy to install MySQL / php / Apache application for the Mac, so when Entropy didn’t work, I thought I’d give MAMP a try. Unfortunately, MAMP runs an old version of php, and Magento needs version 5.2, so that was no help. My team tell me I can update MAMP to run a more up to date version of php, but that seems perverse when MAMP is one of those tools everyone describes as ‘easy to use’ and ‘no hassle’. So I continued looking.

Yesterday, I found a solution that works: Zend Community Edition, available from here. I downloaded and installed it, and found it had installed its own copy of Apache (as an alternative to OS X’s), a current version of php, and MySQL, as well as some interesting management tools I haven’t got into yet. I loaded the database into MySQL, set up the hosts file entry described in my original post, and copied the Magento code to Zend’s htdocs folder, then ran the installation, and it worked perfectly.

I’ll write a Zend version of the installation instructions soon, but for anyone else having the same problem, Zend works with Snow Leopard and Magento, and is a viable solution, at least for R&D and demos like those I need to do locally.