The Hoccer Apps for Android and iOS will now display preview images of content which takes some time to download:
This greatly speeds up the time until you see what has been delivered and hence improves the overall perception. We also added this feature to the Hoccer Wall at http://wall.hoccer.com. Now it’s ultra fast! Try it your self!
Because we wanted to use the Hoccer Wall for our Linccer Tech Talk at Droidcon Berlin, we added a useful Lock-Feature:
If restrict to last thrower is activated, the Wall will only display content which comes from who ever had thrown the latest picture. So if you like to give a presentation and don’t want to be interruped:
We have finally released Hoccer 2.0 for Android, iOS and the Web! The look and feel has not changed much but the new Linccer backend improves usability enormously: Handshaking two devices is ultra fast and file up- and download will happen at the same time as can be seen by the progress bars:
Our improved Web App focuses on one-to-one sharing simply with the dragging gesture. If your browser is able to provide location information, then desktop to mobile transfer is a matter of a single click:
The M-Days in Frankfurt have been fun and brought us many interested cooperation partners. Only the evening before the trade show our booth was not crowded.
See our Slide-Deck from Thursday’s talk explaining our Linccer Product:
We are happy to announce public beta status of our cloud service Linccer. With it’s very simple RESTful interface, Linccer enables you to transfer informations between internet devices at hand. There is no special hardware or setup required. We provide SDK’s for iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch), Android, Java and Ruby. Other platforms and languages will follow.
The service is free of charge right now. So if you are interested in creating a product which uses Hoccer-like device linking, check out our Developer Page and sign up for an API Key.
Hoccer will participate at the just announced Always On Festival Berlin at 24. Februrary 2011 in Meistersaal Berlin.
In the future we are “always on”. We are constantly networking with our friends, have full data access on the road to e-mails, corporate data and intelligent knowledge databases, whether on the phone, a tablet computer, on screen or with an e-book Reader.
The always-on-Berlin festival takes this trend to a hype. It elaborates how the mobile Internet will change the life of today and tomorrow and highlights the technological development in economic, cultural and political perspective. In the spirit of a festival together with celebrated actors innovative applications in an entertaining manner will be shown. But some criticism for the digital society are also in rumor.
Enthusiastic app testers from androidapptests.com have reviewed Hoccer and were extremely pleased. Hoccer enables you to send data from one-to-one and one-to-many smartphones with simple gestures. It’s just dragging the picture from one screen to other. Throwing a file and catching on one or many devices functions too. Yes, it is difficult to believe. Some of their quotations are: ‘Transferring pictures, music and Contacts works reliably’. ‘Operating the program is intuitive and easy’. ‘Everything works very precisely.’ ‘Conclusion: highly recommended.’
Hoccer is nice when it comes to spontaneous content transfer between devices at hand. But there are so many other ideas where a location based device connector could provide a superior user experience. So we took the call and extracted the Linccer API: A simple RESTful Web Service which connects devices through a set of matching meta informations derived from the environment. We are very happy to announce our ongoing private alpha which enables you to use this technique in your own App:
If you are interested in some of the details please contact us and check the slides we presented yesterday at Fraunhofer Web Symposium:
We decided to remove all advertisements from our Hoccer clients. Because user experience is so important to us, we only showed Ad’s in the History before. They’ve never been in the way when doing actual sharing but nonetheless made us uneasy. We are very happy to announce that you will not longer be disturbed by Ad Mob’s blinking and colorful banners when using our App. The Android Version 1.78 is already available in the Market. Unfortunately iOS users still need to wait until Apple approved our Ad-free update.
People who bought our “Paid App”-Upgrade for €1,59 will be happy to here that there money is still good invested: We have some great features on our Roadmap and you will be treated exclusively.
Michael A. Jackson once stated “The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don’t do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don’t do it yet.”
Of course we needed to measure execution times before jumping to action and spending valuable time on performance optimization. We found the android.util.TimingLogger helper class from the Android SDK very helpful so here comes a short description on how to use it:
Whithin the method or class in question create an TimingLogger object, execute some code and dump the statistics to the android log.
TimingLogger timings = new TimingLogger("TopicLogTag",
"preparePicturesFromList");
// ... your time consuming code
timings.dumpToLog();
Note that the output will only be dumped to the log if you set the VERBOSE log level for the given log tag (here named “TopicLogTag”):
$ adb shell setprop log.tag.TopicLogTag VERBOSE
now start your Activity and make sure the code you want to measure is executed
$ adb logcat -v time TopicLogTag:V *:E
...
D/TopicLogTag(14857): preparePicturesFromList: begin
D/TopicLogTag(14857): preparePicturesFromList: end, 2711 ms
For more informations about log levels and filtering the log output see the Andorid documentation about debugging, the Log reference and especialy the isLoggable() method.
If the informations you get from this measurements is to coarse you can split the timings into sub-tasks with the addSplit(“split label”) method:
TimingLogger timings = new TimingLogger("TopicLogTag", "preparePicturesFromList");
// ... time consuming code which creates picture objects
timings.addSplit("creating picture objects");
// ... time consuming code which generates thumbnails
timings.addSplit("generating thumbnails");
timings.dumpToLog();
The log output will then look like
$ adb logcat -v time TopicLogTag:V *:E
D/TopicLogTag(14857): preparePicturesFromList: begin
D/TopicLogTag(14857): preparePicturesFromList: 1999 ms, creating
picture objects
D/TopicLogTag(14857): preparePicturesFromList: 712 ms, generating
thumbnails
D/TopicLogTag(14857): preparePicturesFromList: end, 2711 ms