HBR video on Big Data and Analytics

Back to School @ Indian School of Business

This one is dedicated to a new beginning ...

Its been more than a month since my ISB journey started. And what a month of contrasts it has been !!!

Studying instead of reading...Lecture videos instead of movie trailers on YouTube ..Turning ON the AC in Hyderabad instead of Turning OFF the fan in Bangalore

Lack of sleep...lack of food and the most damaging...lack of a monthly salary !

But the spirit of the Software Engineer lives on..thriving on coffee and pizzas ...battling daily deadlines of economics and accounting...racing away for a quick ice cream between 2 meetings...bantering and bickering with the team...meeting people...jamming and partying...though assignments and problem sets and problem packs and projects and case studies and quizzes and examinations !

All in a day's work at ISB.

adb not detecting your Android Device ?

To debug your mobile application on an actual device, Android requires you to connect your device to your computer and test if it is detectable by Android.

To achieve that , you need to go to -

<android-install-location>/sdk/platform-tools 

and give the command

adb devices

You might not have platform-tools  installed by default.

So install it through the SDK Manager before you read further.

Ideally the output of  the command should be the serial number of your device.

But many times if the device is not read by Android you end up seeing blank.

To troubleshoot , make sure that -

1.  USB debugging is enabled on your Android phone
2.  Ensure that you have successfully downloaded and installed Google USB Driver Package
3.  In case of Samsung devices,install Samsung Kies as it installs device drivers.
4. Goto Control Panel->System ->Device Manager and make sure that none of the drivers show any error.

For Samsung devices Samsung Kies software installs device drivers.

There are different Kies versions for different Samsung devices so make sure you have installed the right Kies

Eg:  Kies 2 supports Samsung Note 2 but Kies 3 doesnt.
If you try to connect a Samsung Note 2 with Kies 3 installed,you will observe device driver errors.
You will then have to install Kies 2

Market share of Mobile Devices circa Q3 2013 - Android Leading,Windows Growing, iOS Nosediving

Types of Mobile Applications: Difference between Native, Hybrid and Web applications

There are many contradictory views on the various types of mobile applications that can be developed for mobile devices

Mainly most mobile applications can be-

1) Native Mobile Applications :
Completely coded using the sdk of the various platforms (like Android and iOS).
The language is used to implement both UI and functionality.
Native applications can use device functionality like camera,contacts et cetera.


2)Hybrid Mobile Applications:
Such applications use a skeleton native application and load web content in it
This web content may be static(where the served html,js,css etc are packaged with the application and reside on a users device) or dynamic (where the content is served from a server)
You can use the various HTML5 technologies and come up with an amazing user interface.
Hybrid applications can use device functionality like camera , contacts et cetera,thanks to the skeleton native application.

3)Mobile Web Application::
This is your traditional  web application loaded on a device browser (Eg : WebKit,Chrome,Firfox on Android)
This may be (or may not be) different from the application that loads in your desktop browser.
For example-m.facebook.com is the mobile web application of facebook.com
Application developers can customize their websites to load content more efficiently ,given the limited resources of a mobile device.
Mobile web applications cannot use device functionality


Check out this really cool video by Intel differentiating between how content is served in a mobile web application and in a hybrid mobile application.