Who are you and what do you do?
I am a technical evangelist and manage a team of technical experts with the primary goal of educating and
supporting developers on Intel Android tools and devices.
How long have you been at Intel?
It will be three years this December.
How long have you been developing for Android devices?
I have been developing for mobile for the past four years and focusing on Android for the last year.
What did you develop for before, and what got you to move?
I used to be a web developer writing enterprise applications and was involved with the web 2.0 developments.
We started developing mobile web apps for some of our reporting apps which eventually got me to where I am now. Also, how can
you not be a part of the mobile revolution? It is just fascinating with all the things I can do with my mobile
devices.
If you could warn a developer thinking of working on Android about one thing, what would it be?
The biggest issue developers would have is the fragmentation in Android. It is really important to plan out
your development choices and how you will test your applications.
What tools does Intel have for developing for Android?
Intel provides a wide range of tools and libraries for developers from native C++ to HTML5. We currently
provide
Beacon Mountain (beta version) which is a tool suite package that provides productivity-oriented design, coding, and debugging tools for
native apps targeting Android-based ARM* and Intel Atom processor-based devices, including smartphones and tablets. The tools
are compatible with Eclipse and support popular Android SDKs including the Android NDK. We also provide the
Intel® XDK for HTML5 developers. The Intel® XDK is a cross-platform development environment for HTML5 which can generate
packages for Android.
What excites you about those tools?
The tools shorten your development time and analyses and optimize your applications. For example, it takes
many hours to setup a development environment for Android and it is also not easy to keep the environment up to date - Beacon
Mountain does it in less than an hour and automatically updates your tools and libraries. Another example is the
Intel® Hardware
Accelerated Execution Manager (Intel® HAXM)
that speeds up the default emulator many times faster. When I talk to developers about these scenarios they are really excited about what we are doing and that is what excites me the most.
Why should I use Intel's tools when there are other tools out there?
Intel software tools are finely tuned and tightly coupled with Intel hardware to enable developers to
efficiently deliver Intel-level performance for the best user experience. When you are targeting Intel platforms we offer the
best tools and libraries. For example, the Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) or the Intel Compilers will give you the best performance on an Intel device.
Would you recommend a developer first look at Beacon Mountain or Intel XDK (and why)?
Yes for both Beacon Mountain and Intel XDK.Beacon Mountain is the Intel Android tool suite that can setup
your android development environment in less than an hour and it supports both Intel® Atom and ARM* processors which will
benefit all Android native developers. For the HTML5 developers, Intel XDK gives you a suite of tools to create projects,
develop, test, debug and build your cross platform apps. It integrates all the popular tools like the Brackets* editor and
Apache Ripple* editor making it easy for developers. With the Intel XDK a developer can truly write once and run the app
anywhere, as you can build packages using the build tool to eight different platforms. The Intel XDK also supports building
Web Apps for Chrome and Facebook.
What about if I'm creating "apps" using HTML5?
We provide the Intel® XDK which consists of a set of development tools to help developers code, debug, test and build mobile web apps and hybrid HTML5 apps for multiple target platforms including Android.
What if my Android device isn't using (sorry in advance) an Intel chipset?
Beacon Mountain bundles the Android Developer Tools (ADT) and Intel® HAXM which you can use for developing
apps for Intel platforms and other platform devices. Additionally, the Intel® XDK is a complete cross platform HTML5 tool
suite.
Are these tools going to be available for other smartphones (i.e. Windows Phone)?
The Intel® XDK that targets HTML5 developers supports all the popular platforms including Windows phone
whereas the other tools like Beacon Mountain are for Android only.
So other than the HTML5 tooling, Intel is going to only support Android for now?
Beacon Mountain the Intel Android tool suite is currently only for Android.
To learn more about Intel Android Tools, visit Intel® Developer Zone for Android.
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To learn more about Intel tools for the Android developer, visit Intel® Developer Zone for Android.
