A short tutorial has been released by Pocket Journey, an Android project in development which describes itself as an “online travel community supporting micro-publishing of high quality location-aware content.”.   The tutorial itself explains how to draw transparent panels on top of Android panels, in this case, MapView.  It includes code examples and a project file.

Out of all of the projects being announced for Android (or for the iPhone SDK), geotagging photos, notes, and documents seems to be the big feature.  While it certainly is the largest advancement that the new breed of mobile phones has to offer, I am curious how large the space will be for startups to jump in and fulfill users geotagging needs.  I look forward to my expectations being blown away when the phones are released later this year.

Source: Tutorial 1:  Transparent Panel (Linear Layout) on MapView (Google Map) [blog.pokerjourney.com]

Davanum Srinivas has really been having fun with Android this week, releasing new source code on an almost daily basis. Today he releases a *totally* unofficial Gtalk client for Android. He also includes source code for sending and receiving XMPP messages and authenticating with Gtalk.

Source: Totally *Unofficial* Gtalk Client For Android [davanum.wordpress.com]

Davanum Srinivas has been having some fun creating Android tutorials and releasing his sample code since the platform was released last week. Yesterday, he released his sample concept code for a Twitter client.

Over the weekend, he released his BrowseMap 2.0 sample code for using Overlay to draw Starbucks locations onto a map, as an update to his earlier BrowseMap code which finds the nearest Pizza restaurant. He has also released source code for the result of the Hello Android tutorial, and written a tutorial on sending XMPP messages.

Source: Show Me The Code! [davanum.wordpress.com]

Reto Meier at Google Blogoscoped has written an Android tutorial on his experiences creating an application for Android which merges the maps, location api (GPS), contact book and phone dialer together. His application, Where are my Friends (WamF), leverages the core GUI and location API to figure out and map where your friends live in relation to where you are at the moment. This is an application idea suggested in Mike’s Androidology videos on Youtube, and it has quickly been achieved here in practice.

Rob also gives some basic insight into the development environment, his chosen setup of Eclipse in Windows, and a general overview of Android foundations, so that any new Android developer can get a basic understanding of how to use Intents in Android to request and deliver information to each of the Android components that are required to perform your tasks.

Tutorial Link: Where Are My Friends