Oh what a difference a year makes.

As you all know, we are at Google I/O this week in San Francisco, which kicked-off on Wednesday with a lengthy keynote of different speakers and presentations outlining Google features to come.  (You can read TechCrunch’s play-by-play here or BusinessWeek’s abbreviated version here).  One presenter in particular, Sundar Pichai, Google’s SVP of Android, Chrome & Apps, delivered part of the keynote that really resonated with us as it was, in sorts, a walk down memory lane.

We all know that the mobile market is rapidly evolving, but Sundar illustrated it with numbers.  Ones which were staggering.  Ones with a lot of zeros behind the commas.  During the past five years, over 900 million phones that run Android OS were activated.  Google Play has had 48 billion app installations to date.  As Sundar said, from 2005 to 2013, the world has indeed changed.

And that brings us to our world.  The Bitbar world.  The world of the red-headed stepchild—different, outcast, ignored, who is now … not so alone.

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First in market with a global reach, cooperation with leading OEMs and 1.5M+ Android activations per day provide proof-points for Testdroid’s success among mobile ecosystem

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Although we understand that *most* mobile developers aren’t Formula 1 drivers, they are just as awesome, and what mobile developer wouldn’t want to have the opportunity of test driving one of their apps on the latest and greatest from Sony?  Correction:  make that Testdroiding.  Yes, you just read that right.

We’re collaborating with Sony Mobile to deploy their Xperia line of devices on Testdroid Cloud so that you—mobile developer/tester/racecar driver extraordinaire—can Testdroid your apps and games on these full HD devices, for free.  Our priority is providing you, our users, with tools that make your mobile development and testing life easier, and access to the most fantastic screens used in Android devices is now within your reach.  Testdroid Cloud running Xperia devices offers a combination of features that enables you to:

·         Maximize device support instantly and with minimum effort: just upload, select and run.  Results will be delivered to you by email in minutes;
·         Develop, test and deploy apps and games in a fraction of time. Build tests for your app and run them at Testdroid Cloud;
·         Ensure your apps are differentiated on full-HD resolution screens;
·         Rapidly and accurately capture, verify, and replay your tests, with quick delivery of functionality and performance metrics;
·         Access the devices anytime, anywhere.

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Sandboxes. We’ve all sat in them, built castles in them, wrestled toys away from other children in them. The definition of a sandbox is quite simple: a box filled with sand where children play.

Next week, May 15-17, we’ll be in the most recognized sandbox in the technology playground, the Google I/O Developer Conference Sandbox, and we are fired up to be part of this elite group! The Developer Sandbox showcases demos from a wide range of developers who have built applications based on products and technologies that are being featured at Google I/O. This includes us. We’ll be rubbing elbows and exchanging ideas with talented minds as we introduce Google+ sign in to all Testdroid products. Earlier this year, Google launched its Google+ sign in as a standard way to log in to online services. We support Google’s initiatives in whatever they do, even more so when developers are at the heart of these initiatives. Move over Facebook, now you can sign in with Google +!

This will be the second year that we’ve showcased Testdroid at Google I/O. Last year at this time, while some developers showed limited, web-based app testing capabilities in iOS, we were the only ones there that demonstrated the power of cloud-based app testing. This year we expect to see many more like-minded developers, even though we remain first-to-market with a global reach. We view our second year participating at Google I/O as a milestone that not only marks our growth over these past 12 months – confirming that we are on the right path and doing some cool stuff – but is testimony to the evolution of the Android testing platform industry as a whole … like more children playing in the sandbox.

We look forward to our three days in San Francisco next week at Google I/O and are excited to be in the Sandbox. Oh, and we promise to play nice!

Hi All,

Since the last Testdroid Recorder release three weeks ago, we’re proud to introduce you the new version of Testdroid Recorder. In this version the main goal was to improve recording and playback experience according to WebView (what entail web page recording as well). Now it’s faster and more accurate. We also improved issues in reporting system and fixed a few bugs. So, the main items that were improved in Testdroid Recorder 4.1 are as follows:

Better recording and playback with WebView

For the version 4.0, we refactored completely the core of Recorder, but skipped the WebView and moved all of that work to version 4.1. Now we’re happy to say that it is much faster, accurate and able to catch many more elements. Improving the accuracy entailed also another important fact – now we are also able to record web pages which uses sencha touch. We also did some improvements on playback side and managed to improve the playback performance in order to provide a smoother experience to users. Also, there are more events sent through JavaScript so that test script can more easily simulate real clicks and text typing into HTML elements on page.

Improved reporting system

We did a lot of changes to our issues reporting system. Firstly, we made it more stable as sometimes some customers have had issues to send us their reports. Secondly, the logic of sending reports was enhanced with the instant reporting capability from every wizard – not only from Recording wizard – and for this, we added a field with custom message to describe the issue. This provides users more information about the issue as the Eclipse log file isn’t necessarily describe the issue in decent level (e.g. issue may not have anything to do with Exception occured in Eclipse but something else). And finally, we added a field with a custom email so the user doesn’t have to be logged in to our public cloud. And for users who have the private servers can send us those reports as well as users who are not logged in to Recorder.

Fixed issues / Enhancements

• Automatic updates after clicking “Update” from the Info dialog
• If more than one device is connected, the recording preparation is done only on single chosen device (not on all)
• Wrong coordinations calculation when Activity go to landscape mode for x,y clicks
• Enhanced and made sending reports stable
• Weird UI behaving when switching between Testdroid and Report Problem page in Preferences
• Recorder opens TestdroidRecorderCore automatically if it is closed

Updating your Testdroid Recorder

You can update to the new version directly from Eclipse (About Eclipse -> Installation Details, selecting Testdroid Recorder and clicking Update)