It is not always easy for an Android user to choose the most suitable application for a particular task from the great number of applications available. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic approach to extract feature names from Android applications. The case study verifies that we can associate common sequences of Android API calls with feature names.

Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are suitable as elements underlying wearable and ubiquitous computing thanks to their low power consumption. A technique that uses less power to drive 1-pixel LCDs is proposed. It harvests the charges on the LCD and stores them in an external capacitor for reuse when the polarity changes. A simulation shows that the charge reduction depends on the ratio of the capacitance of the external capacitor to that of the LCD and can reach 50%. An experiment on a prototype demonstrates an almost 30% reduction with large 1-pixel LCDs. With a small 10 × 10mm2 LCD, the overhead of the micro-controller matches the reduction so no improvement could be measured. Though the technique requires longer time for polarity reversal, we confirm that it does not significantly degrade visual quality.

Logging the execution process of a program is a popular activity for practical program understanding. However, understanding the behavior of a program from a complete execution trace is difficult because a system may generate a substantial number of runtime events. To focus on a small subset of runtime events, a dynamic object process graph (DOPG) has been proposed. Although a DOPG can potentially facilitate program understanding, the logging process has not been adapted for DOPGs. If a developer is interested in the behavior of a particular object, only the runtime events related to the object are necessary to construct a DOPG. The vast majority of runtime events in a complete execution trace are irrelevant to the interesting object. This paper analyzes actual DOPGs and reports that a logging tool can be optimized to record only the runtime events related to a particular object specified by a developer.