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I'm considering making an existing mobile app into an open-source project. It has an Android and iPhone version.
While I have used open-source projects and submitted feature requests and bug reports, I have never created an open-source project nor contributed with a patch to an existing one.
What are the top things that I should take into account before opening the source of my project? What specific steps do you recommend taking for open-sourcing a mobile app?
You are lucky as when I started to run open source projects I did not realize this great book exists,
http://producingoss.com/
It provides general tips in almost all aspects of running an open source project, and you can add your own for mobile world.
You can publish you code on googleCode, SourceForge or Github, use all the power of theses websites (documentation, notes etc..) will help contributors.
And don't forget to comment your code ;-)
GoogleCode is a good place to upload your project.
There you will have an issue tracker and a wiki to write about it.
For a truely awesome OSS application I would suggest that you use git. Free hosting for git is provided by github. A good starting point for using git is http://learn.github.com/
As far as FOSS development is concerned, its not very different from usual development. But here you will have to don different roles like product manager, developer and tester too.
Other things that you need to take care of.
Since you are the initiator of it, you need to take control of its development.
Your code should be easy to be understood by others. Documentation is of utmost importance for other developers to start off.
Dont be offended if someone creates a fork of your project. Know to protect yourself by putting appropriate license, like, GPLV3 or any other that you find appropriate.
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We have a social responsibility project aiming encourage young people to learn mobile application development. The main problem we face mostly is language. Most of the young people in our country don't have sufficient english knowledge to be able to search or learn something in english. That's why our one of the biggest difference from the world wide tutorial/learning sites is being in native language.
As a supporter of the project in the technical side, we answer questions, write blog posts and try to help people learn mobile application development in their native language. One of the problems i face with while helping people is the inability of providing official references(in native language) about the responses we gave. This problem pushed me thinking about translating whole android sdk documentation to our native language :) I know it's a huge job, we may try to crowd-sourcing it i dont know but the thing i want to ask here is just suggestions about implementation of such a project.
What kind of technology would you use, how would it be possible to stay synch with the recent versions of the sdk. Do you think the current android sdk documentation pages auto-generated completely? Is it just java-doc? How to support multi-languages with java-doc? Or with any other way?
I hope questions will not be closed being unrelated, it is a completely technical question.
Thanks everyone
Interesting question!
I guess not only do you want the Java documentation, but also the tutorials and everything that is provided by developers.android.com.
I think you should ask Googe / the developers of Android directly for support, e.g. here. I'm pretty sure they like the idea and support you with that by giving you access to some feed that keeps the tutorials up-to-date.
An independent solution would be to implement a crawler for developers.android.com and track the changes yourself. Yet I don't know how much effort you can/want to spend on that.
For the crowdsourcing: I did a project once for crowdsourced writing error correction, where we used Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is used for translation too. It is quite easy to build your custom tasks for the crowd and to automate the whole process. They provide a Java API, for example. It costs some money, but is quite cheap in comparison to professional translators.
Just some suggestions...
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I have developed apps on my own, but now I'm working with a mate.
What is the best way for multiple people to work on the same project and submit the changes?
Is this possible without a 3rd party server? Are their plugins for Eclipse that can solve this problem?
There are plenty of tools that will let you accomplish this.
Version control software such as subversion, mercurial, and Git will all accomplish this task. Git is currently the most popular of the three.
Depending in if you care about keeping to code private, the simplest path forward would be to create a repository on GitHub (private repo's cost money) or BitBucket (allows private repos for free accounts).
If you don't want to involve a 3rd party then you'll need to setup a repository on a computer that both you and your collaborator can access.
3rd Party approach
BitBucket is an online hosting site for Git and Mercurial which also offers a hosted wiki, issue tracker and source code. But you asked for an approach without a 3rd party (which I find perfectly reasonable) so here are some pointers
Doing it on your own
For Version Control: Git. "Bare Repositories" allow you to share code w/o a Server as simple as by a shared network directory.
But: Git is quite complex. You might want VisualSVN which is an easy GUI-driven Subversion-Server capable of running on one of your PCs.
For Issue Tracking: JIRA offers a 10$ edition bundled with other useful tools like Bamboo.
A Wiki for Documentation: Many options here.
Turnkey Redmine is a virtual appliance (downloadable image of a virtual machine). Just download and run i.e. inside VirtualBox and you quickly get a Version control, issue tracker, Wiki and other services in short time.
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I am writing an application which I hope to build a client for in Android.
However, I am fairly inexperienced in Android development and am looking for droid devs who would be willing to contribute to my open source client.
Where can I find such people? I dont care where they are, just as long as they have a strong grasp on the english language.
*edit: to clarify - I am not trying to recruit people through stackoverflow, merely where such people would register as willing contributors looking for a project, so I can look through their profiles and get in contact with them.
I would post you project on an open source repository website like GitHub or Google Code. And start making commits and post information on the app. Most open source projects start with a few devs and the community kicks in once you have a decent user base. I feel like the best way to recruit people to to put your project out there and show people that it has potential. Then people will want to contribute to it.
Maybe you are looking for Android contributors group.
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As a thesis for my graduation I'm going to start an open source project: My idea is to port a complete set of mathematical libraries to Android, to perform numeric and symbolic operations, in the form of a programmable calculator like matlab or sage.
I want to release this project under GPL, because I believe that ideas need to be free to work, but I also know that i will spend a lot of money to buy multiple device to do debug and fine tuning.
I thought about selling the prepacked app on the market for 0.99, while giving the source to compile on the site for free. It would be like a small tax on laziness.
What do you think? How do you think I could fund this project?
Note: Feel free to correct my poor grammar and remove this note.
Making money out of open source projects is not an easy task, but it is possible. Clojure's creator Rich Hickey made a wonderful post covering ways to do it. Good luck.
check out Pledgie. There are thousands of open source projects on there, which are getting funded.
http://pledgie.com/categories/open-source
Probably you are already done with your master thesis' , but still though I love the question. I think that open source projects that have more or less an link to academia, there is another opportunity to fund it. National funds are often financing projects, often these are PhD projects but I would assume that there are also possibilities for master thesis' projects.
Another possibility is to try to find a commercial sponsor. As long as you do not need to make a living out of it, it should be comparatively easy to find a company to pay a couple of devices (maybe even HTC, Samsung, Google or any other droid phone manufacturer).
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I need to work on my Android development skills. Which blog has the freshest and most walkthroughs, code samples, and tutorials?
the freshest and most walkthroughs, code samples, and tutorials?
Unfortunately I don't think this is the best approch. Many of these tutorials are a year+ old (when Android was still in its alpha release); a lot has changed in terms of the API and UI conventions.
Included API Samples
I recommend being familiar with 1)simply creating a project and then 2)reviewing all the API samples included in your Android dev install. These samples should be in the \samples\ApiDemos\src\com\example\android\apis folder of your Android install path.
Android Tutorials
About 6 months ago I presented an Android overview at NYU's ITP with a simple hello world tutorial. It details how to get Eclipse and your first app up and running. It can be found here:
http://perkmobile.com/tutorial_helloworld/Perk%20Mobile%20Android%20Tutorial.html
Also, we provided an mapping tutorial that demonstrates how to use web services in conjunction with Androids mapping control. Most importantly it shows how to safely makes use of background threads for managing HTTP requests.
http://perkmobile.com/itp.html
You might want to look at the list of blogs at planetandroid.org the list is on the right side.
Well at least the "official" Android development blog contains pretty recent entries at http://android-developers.blogspot.com/
Tutorial series for 2D and 3D on droidnova.com - Android Development
If you are looking for a comprehensive introductory tutorial for Android development, please check out my own (Game of Life) tutorial: http://www.quesucede.com/page/show/id/conway_game_of_life_android.
Areas covered include (but not limited to): implementing a custom (orthogonal grid) component, a so-called 'game loop,' and the implementation of and the subsequent interaction with a preferences activity.