Recent research shows that while 52% of participants in a resolution study were confident of success with their goals, only 12% actually achieved their goals. Men achieved their goal 22% more often when they engaged in goal setting, a system where small measurable goals are used (lose a pound a week, instead of saying “lose weight”), while women succeeded 10% more when they made their goals public and got support from their friends.

The number one on the list of new year’s resolutions is to lose weight. Of course, that’s on my list every year, either. To help you to achieve your goal when it comes to lose weight, I’d like you to see this little video – this will show you some little tips to lose weight successfully:

So what happened in my 2009?

I thought about the things that I was doing this year and only two major achievement came into my mind. All the others would not be of interest for you as they were just – you know – “normal”… yeah… kinda had a normal life in 2009.

Hello new website: Yes, this blog post wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the year 2009. Yeah on August 5th I wrote my first blog post here on my new website. Yes – this summer I’ve moved from a static “offline CMS” called Rapidweaver to an “online CMS” called WordPress, with a new design and new features. This new content management system now helps me to keep the website more up-to-date and of course to edit it from almost everywhere. My first blog entry can be found here: http://www.mastixmc.de/2009/08/05/first-entr.

Test on AndroidPIT.de

Android AIRMail released: The weather was getting darker and colder because the autumn was about to show its dirty face (I’m kind of a summer guy), so I’ve decided to spend these uncomfortable evenings coding a new application for Android mobile phones. As you might already know, software development is my hobby, which is why I thought that it would be a fair compensation for the bad weather outside. Android AIRMail became pretty successful for a German App that only O2 customers can use. The current version is Android AIRMail v0.67 – it’s still free of charge and still beta, but will become final next year.

Android AIRMAil has been tested by AndroidPIT (German):

„Android AIRMail“ macht genau das, was es soll – und das sogar sehr gut. Interface und Bedienung sind schlicht, dafür effektiv und selbsterklärend. Die Applikation kann damit getrost als „Must-Have-App“ eingestuft werden, zumindest für o2-Nutzer mit gebuchter Internetoption.

See Test:  Android AIRMail Test von AndroidPIT

As our world grows another year older… Here’s wishing that you get the biggest slice of happiness and good luck to fill your heart and home today and the whole year through. Happy New Year!!! I’d also like to thank all donators and testers that have been supporting my work on Android AIRMail for the last few months – with your ideas you’ve been helping me to make this app that successful – thank you.

With regards,

Sascha

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Android Market on the Emulator

Yesterday, I’ve tried to find a way to install a firmware with closed source apps on my Android 1.6 emulator. And let me explain why I did it and of course how.

I wanted to have a look at the Android Speech Recognizer API (RecognizerIntent) and was really impressed by the fact that there are only a few lines of code needed to use this feature. But after some digging, I found out that you would need an application on your device to take care of the speech analysis. Only with this app, you’ll be able to use this feature – and yes – there’s no app packaged with the emulator to provide that. The only application I knew was Google Voice… but: Google Voice is closed source and therefore not installed on the emulator. I had to find a way to get it somehow… Android Market? No, closed source -> not available.

So I made up my mind and remembered that someone told me once that the firmware images on the phone and on the emulator are pretty much the same. I’ve checked the AVD (Emulator = AVD = Android Virtual Device) folder to see how it stores its files… and yes, there were *.img files. If you don’t have such a directory, you need to create an Android 1.6 AVD first (you can use eclipse or command line) – I’ve created an AVD with a 1024MB sized SDCard.

You will find this directory in your home folder (e.g. on Linux/Mac):

~/.android/avd/MastiX_Donut.avd/

On HTC’s developer website they offer the Android Dev Phone Firmware (ADP1) to download… So I’ve downloaded the following file:

signed-dream_devphone_userdebug-img-14721.zip

I’ve tried the ION firmware (signed-google_ion-img-14721.zip) as well, but I was not able to get an internet connection. Link seems not work with Firefox (Ubuntu) and Chrome (Mac). But I can download it successfully using Safari 4 on my Macbook. Please try this. The problem is that you have to accept a license agreement, which is why I don’t want to/can’t provide that file. Maybe you need to install Safari 4 to download the files… could someone tell me if it worked with Safari 4 on Windows?

Edit: I’ve found a link that should work – BUT PLEASE READ THE LICENSE AGREEMENT ON HTC’s DEVELOPER SITE BEFORE DOWNLOADING THIS FILE.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1676562/signed-dream_devphone_userdebug-img-14721.zip

Also Gmail, Google Talk, etc. are available

Ok, let’s continue… After extracting the downloaded file I was able to see that there’s a system.img file in there. This system.img did not exist in my current AVD folder, but I could see that it existed in the SDK folder:

./Development/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/platforms/android-1.6/images/system.img

Fortunately the AVD itself supersedes this AVD-wide SDK setting as soon as it includes its own system.img file. The trick is to just copy the system.img file into the MastiX_Donut.avd folder. After that I’ve (of course) tried to run the emulator with the new firmware, but unfortunately it failed with the following exception:

emulator: ERROR: system image file too large for device's hardware configuration (78MB > 72MB)

This error is pretty easy to fix, you just need to put the following line into the AVD config file (.android/avd/MastiX_Donut.avd/config.ini):

disk.systemPartition.size=96MB

That’s it! I’ve started the emulator and after a quick boot sequence it forced me to enter my Google account credentials… (you need to switch to landscape mode to enter them – on a Macbook it would be Fn + Ctrl + F12!).

Now I was able to download Google Voice from the market and tested the speech stuff without any problems. It also synced my Google contacts to my emulator. Of course, I deleted the firmware after my test phase and returned to the standard emulator ROM!

Happy emulating,

Sascha

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