Developer World

Today, Sony contributes three new plugins to the Jenkins software tool: Build Failure Analyzer plugin, Metadata plugin and External Resource Dispatcher plugin. Jenkins is a software development tool that is used for building and testing software continuously during the development. At Sony, we are heavy users of Jenkins, and we like to contribute to making it even more useful for everyone else using it. And by making these plugins available, we can get valuable feedback from the Jenkins community. Learn more after the jump, as Robert Sandell and Tomas Westling from our software tools department explains more!

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Did you attend Big Android BBQ in October? At the event, Oskar Anderö, Senior software architect at Sony, held a presentation about the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH). This is an open source GitHub project, that we made available earlier this year, which made us the the first manufacturer to release such a sensor framework. For all of you who missed the presentation at Big Android BBQ, or if you want to re-visit it, feel free to download Oskar’s DASH presentation.

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A few weeks back our friends at the Xperia™ news blog posted a piece about Xperia T being HD Voice certified (in fact, the coming Xperia™ V is also HD Voice certified). Now, we will dive deeper into the HD Voice technology. This is a technology that enables you to get superior voice quality during calls, thanks to speech codec, acoustic design and signal processing enhancements. Read more about how HD Voice works after the jump!

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Today, XDA-developers comes with some great news, as they have announced that Sony is named OEM of the year. We’re really honored by this, and we’re glad to see that our collaborations with the tech community are being so appreciated. We would actually like to send a big thank you to all of you in the community, especially highlighting the FreeXperia team for all their work. Going forward, we will continue to support the tech community. Stay tuned to Developer World, more dev-friendly initiatives are coming soon! Read more about Sony being named “OEM of the year” on the XDA website.

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If you have a new and innovative app, service or game designed for multiple screens, or if you have a unique idea for such a use case, then the new Sony-sponsored Multi-Screen UX Competition might be something for you. If  your user experience (UX) is designed for a smartphone, tablet, TV, PC, or SmartWatch – or any combination of these devices, you might get promoted in Sony stores or highlighted as a showcase listing on the sponsor websites. Read more about the competition and what you can win after the jump.

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Facebook just made an interesting blog post about how the Ringmark mobile browser test suite is being adapted by the mobile industry. Among others, it’s highlighted that the latest Sony Xperia™ smartphones (Xperia™ T) include improvements to the Android™ browser based on priorities set in Ringmark. It’s a good read if you want to know more about the progress of Ringmark. Check the full post on the Facebook HTML5 blog.

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For some time now, Jean-Baptiste Quéru (JBQ), technical lead of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) at Google, have been working to get the AOSP running on Xperia™ S. Today, we are moving the AOSP on Xperia S project from the main branch of the AOSP to a Sony git on GitHub. This is because while JBQ considers the Xperia™ S AOSP experiment a success, from Jelly Bean MR1 Xperia™ S will not be kept as a target device on the main AOSP branch. However, as we can see a great interest from the community we will continue the work on a Sony git and keep it open for external partners and developers to contribute. Read on as Björn Andersson and Johan Redestig, software engineers at Sony, explain more!

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If you’re thinking about extending your app with support for a Small App, here’s some inspiration for you. A Small App is an app that can run on top of other activities on the Xperia Tablet S. But how is it like to develop a Small App? I talked to Paco Salazar, who developed the Task Changer Small App, to learn more about how he used the Small App feature in the Sony Add-on SDK. Get the full story after the jump.

And don’t forget that you can get a free Xperia Tablet S by telling us about your Small App!

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Did you miss Droidcon and the VHack in London last week, or do you feel like re-living some of the action? No worries, we’ve gathered up some of the highlights, as well as images and presentations from Sony. Droidcon London is one of biggest and most influential Android events in Europe, gathering about 1100 attendees this year. And the VHack gathered about 70 top developers from all over Europe who celebrated five years of Android by hacking their way through Friday and Sunday. Check it all out after the jump.

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Have you heard about Linaro? It’s a non-profit organisation made up of eight members working to improve the Linux kernel for ARM architectures (ARM is one of the largest processor developers in the industry). At Sony, we think this initiative is really great, and we can see clear benefits of cooperating in Linux development. Read on as Tony Månsson, Linux developer at Sony, explains why Linaro is so important, and how you can get started on working on the kernel yourself.

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