Plant Base for Android
We are planning to write a fully featured port of Plant Base for the Android mobile operating system. This will be equivalent to the currently available mobile edition for Windows Mobile (5 & 6) PDA's and smartphones. There may also be special variation for the larger tablets and Android netbooks, adapted to the bigger screens.
The Android edition may look and operate a little differently, because Android itself is quite a different system. However, as with the current mobile edition, it will have a full on-board database and not need any online connection to work. The database itself will be similar to the existing mobile one and most likely exactly the same as used by the new Plant Base 2 desktop program.
Though some initial work has already been done, writing the full version for Android is a fairly big job and therefore it will not be available for a while yet.
PBO Viewer ...
In the meantime we have produced a simple Android app that acts as a front-end to our online plant database. It therefore needs web connectivity and gives the same information as our PBO pages. This viewer has its own data interface to the server so that it uses the minimum bandwidth possible, usually about half that of the regular web pages.
  
PBO Viewer is free to all users and the apk file can be download from the link below. It is also available from the Android Market at: -
https://market.android.com/details?id=deeproot.PBOviewer
Requires Android version 1.6 (Donut) or later.
The application should scale for all smartphone displays. Testing has been rather limited, so please let us know if you have problems.
New versions of both PBO Viewer apps were released 31st October 2011. The most significant change is much improved support for a wider range of screen sizes - now from 240x320 phones to 1280x800 pixel 10" tablets. Also works on Android-x86 powered netbooks.
Download PBOVeiwer.apk (159Mb)
And now PBO Viewer Plus ...
We have just released another edition of the Viewer app - this one has a different front screen that gives all the advanced search PBO selection criteria. It is just as easy to use as the basic edition, but with the choice of any combination of up to 32 criteria.
There is a very small charge for this edition (1.50 GBP) and it is installable from the Android Market:- https://market.android.com/details?id=deeproot.PBOviewerPlus
Basic4Android
All our work with Android uses the Basic4Android development environment from Anywhere Software. This is a relatively new tool (released December 2010) from the same company that created Basic4PPC - as used by us for some time to write the Windows Mobile edition of Plant Base.
Both of these fantastic programming languages provide a really efficient way to generate native mobile applications.
If you have arrived at this page because you are interested in developing for Android, either as a professional or hobbyist programmer, then you should get over to theirwebsite and purchase a licence right away - www.basic4ppc.com
Android is a trademark of Google Inc.
Basic4android is a product of Erel Uziel, Anywhere Software
Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation |
