We announced today a new solution to dual boot Android and Ubuntu on the same device. Over the last few weeks I have recently blogged about a Contacts import app for Ubuntu and Techfunder, an Android app for crowd funding projects. What I didn’t mention before is that I have been developing and testing both in the same device!
I have been dog-fooding and developing a small part of our dual boot solution for a couple weeks now. During that time, I’ve not only been able to boot between Android and Ubuntu as a user, but also as an application developer.
Dual boot brings no compromise to the SDK experience of either operating system. I run Ubuntu SDK with QTCreator and Android’s ADT (eclipse-based) on my 12.04 LTS laptop. And while the SDK for Android is more mature and fully featured, I still find Ubuntu (an particularly QML) much faster to prototype apps.
Dual boot is also about making the application developers life easier and cheaper. Having to buy extra devices for testing new apps can be a put you off. You can now develop for Ubuntu by jusr re-using your Android device.. without having to disrupt your android projects! For example, yesterday I was working on applications on both sides, and I was easily booting back and forward and collecting logs in each side.
I hope to see more integration in between both development environments, I think it will be particularly neat to have something like Android Monitor tool (aka DDMS) working for both OSs.
Btw, I have just released version 2.0 of Techfunder! Including home screen widgets, search and more categories. Don’t forget to check it out:
Victor Tuson Palau 