On{x} – notes from GDG October – Tel Aviv

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on{x} is a new product by Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) for Android which is made out of basically two components:

1. An Android app

2. A web interface

the web interface allows you to add and send java script based commands to the android app which enable you to automate your smartphone to do something automatically based on events, such as:

  1. 1. send an SMS to my wife when I get in my car saying “I’m on my way”
  2. 2. start the Waze app when starting to drive for over miles an hour
  3. 3. turn on the lights on my garage when I’m 100 feet from there (based on some hardware/software support which must be present at home)

this platform uses anode.js which is somewhat an expansion of node.js (Event-driven I/O server-side JavaScript environment) supported by Azure for scalability etc..

the product as weird as it may seem is for developers only, due to the fact that normal everyday users won’t be able to construct js scripts to control different elements on the Android. of course that I can see that the potential in this kind of API which exposes the android API via js API is really big, and the platform itself must be serving some other future or in-house purposes, however, I don’t think I’ll download it. this is the first time Microsoft is releasing an API to be interacted with Android, I do believe this is some sort of power and capability declaration, but maybe I’m just skeptic and suspicious by nature Smile

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