Following Google’s effort on open social, they are at it again, this time they are trying to do a similar stunt with mobile platforms. Honestly, as an entrepreneur I am a big fan of Google because of their ability to achieve so much success at such a short period of time. Google’s reputation was what got us interested in their Android platform. After discussing among ourselves, we decided to start exploring the possibility on creating an innovative solution on the Android platform.

The initial process to get the platform and development tools up and running is very simple. It took me merely 15 minutes to install and write my first “Hello World” application. Playing with the Android emulator was both impressive and fun. It has all the charm of the iPhone with the additional capability to allow developers to build real applications on it. As much as I like this new platform, there are down sides. These down sides become more apparent to me as I started reading through their documentation and following their tutorials.

Source Code Portability?

The first issue I discovered was the way Android was designed. Activity, intent, service and content providers was the new way Google wanted developers to think on their platform. But wait, the first warning signs lighted in my mind. That means that the applications I write for Android cannot be reused on another Java enabled phone without making major architectural changes to the source code. Bummer! There goes my source code portability, now I got to write one version for Android and another for other Java enabled phones. The new design concept on the whole is good except that it makes reusable code harder to write because now I got to add more layers of needless abstraction in my code to ensure it can be reused on other mobile phone platforms.

Hidden Complexity?

I might be wrong here but while running through the tutorial I started to get the feeling that Android was designed for and by web developers. The concepts and unnecessary complexity seem to have come from a web development mindset. Instead of thinking the normal Object programming model, Android’s programming model indirectly forces you to think tags for GUI, code for event handling, services for facility or code reuse and content providers for managing data. I understand why the web programming model is designed the way it is because the code is often broken up into server and client side then glued together by requests and passing parameters. But why does the Android’s non-web application development model resembles it so closely? Are they trying to attract web developers onto their mobile platform? I personally felt somewhat handicapped by the development model.

In summary, it will take a while before I get comfortable with this new platform. With the prize money that Google is offering, you can be sure that many others like ourselves will be giving it a go. However, whether this new platform can retain its users and developers is still an open question!

Goodbye 2007, hello 2008! A Happy New Year to everyone from Hiitch. In Technology, I hope OpenID takes off in a big way so that we can do away with multiple log in account.

We are going to add compression to our 128 bit SSL streams. This will improve connection speeds on the whole but unfortunately break previous client binaries. In short, members of our current default network before the next upcoming release will have to uninstall, re-download and install the next upcoming client release that supports the new compression feature in order to sign in to our platform. Automatic upgrade is not available for this new release.

Our testings have shown that we are able to improve connection speeds by an average of 5.4 seconds using a common 512KB down stream 256KB up stream broadband line. We are pretty excited about this new improvement and hope that this new and improved technology will help better improve your experience on Hiitch. Therefore as an advance warning, you might want to take this into consideration in regard to your private network implementations of the Hiitch platform.

Do feel free to contact us if you have any questions, collaboration proposals or need better support from us with regard to your own network implementations using our platform.

The Hiitch server is a multi-threaded application server that you can tune to scale it to your desired hardware setup. It also implements customizable security features that you can use to secure your own network’s integrity and privacy. Hence, understanding some of the key concepts in its design implementation is important. We will begin by describing the detail interaction process that goes on in the server that is unique to every individual Hiitch network implementation.

Server Interaction Process

Before any information is communicated between the client and the server, the clients will first request for the authenticity of the server. Each client has an associated digital certificate that ties it to a particular server. The client will then verify the digital signature to see if the content is coming from the intended server and proceed to send its confidential information to sign in to the server. This whole verification process is unique to each network. During the server installation process, our default script will assist you to generate a set of public and private key pair, also known as a digital certificate, that identifies your particular network. Without generating this digital certificate and exporting the cert to your clients, the integrity of your network can be easily compromised. Once the verification process is correctly completed, the clients will start a new secure session with the server.

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When we first started working on Hiitch our focus was mainly on on-line dating. However, as we progressed, we realized that Hiitch was becoming more and more like a dedicated and secure social networking software than merely an on-line dating tool. We like to see ourselves as still in the process of allowing our users discover for themselves what Hiitch really is to them.

In this article I would like to discuss a few examples of how you can make use of Hiitch for your own social networking purposes. Hiitch has many features that can help you deal with your everyday social networking needs that cannot be found in today’s instant messaging (IM) culture. Before I go on, I like to highlight the fact that Hiitch is not and never will be an IM software. IM is only a supported feature in Hiitch and not what it is about. Hiitch is about discovering new people on-line and providing a common ground to communicate and share yourself with others. OK lets proceed with the scenarios that Hiitch can be of use to you.

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