It’s been a while since I’ve updated anything on here. Mostly because there was nothing interesting to “blog” about. So I basically collected all “not-so-important” news and will now publish them as a consolidated blog post.

Yes, I’m a Nexus One owner now…

Android Froyo FRF72 leaked

First of all, I’d like to announce that I’m a Google Nexus One owner now. Yes, I finally made it after coding several apps on the android emulator only – which was pretty cool, but unfortunately it does not give you a real feeling how your apps looks/behaves like on a real device. Also, my Nokia e51 has done a great job, but it was about time to move on with a new gadget. I bought the device on ebay together with a 16 GB SanDisk microSD card, so I got everything I needed to get going. Two days later the device arrived and due to the fact that I had prepared myself for that day, by reading several tutorials and websites about custom ROMs, rooting and unlocking, it did not take long until the phone was unlocked rooted and flashed with a custom ROM (that’s why I love android!). There are three custom ROMs that I’ve been evaluating: Cyanogen 5.0.8 (with the 720p Video hack), Modaco r22.1 or stock Froyo. I started with Froyo (Build FRF50) and it has been so great that I kept that ROM on my device – if you need a turorial on how to install Froyo, check this link. I’ve never tried the other ones. So what I’m going to do now is to wait until Google releases the source code for Froyo and will then upgrade to Cyanogen 6, which will be based on Froyo and will include Cyanogen’s features. Today another Froyo build has been found in the world wide web (FRF72) and I’ve already upgraded today… but I did not see any significant changes.

19/06/2010: mastix@Droid Camp Stuttgart

Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend the DroidCamp Stuttgart. It was one of the best events I’ve ever attended as it was completely free of charge, but came with free food (breakfast, lunch, coffee, sweets,…), a nice DroidCamp polo shirt, a tombola and a lot of great sessions about Android and its possibilities. My phone was also part of a new Blinkendroid world record (the former world record was 38 devices – we had 51):

The twitter hashtag for that event was “#dcs2010″, just in case you want to read the tweets. I’d like to thank the DroidCamp Stuttgart crew for their engagement and also all the sponsors and can’t wait to attend next year’s DroidCamp.

Twitter/facebook updates now available on mastixmc.de

Now that I own a more advanced cell phone (with a better social network integration), I’ve decided to do something that I wanted to do for a long time: I hooked up twitter with facebook in order to see my tweets as facebook postings as well. I’ve not been using twitter a lot, because I had no use case, but now, with my Nexus One, I will twitter moreoften – so if you want to follow me, click here: mastixmc@twitter. I’ve tried several twitter apps for android (also the official one that came pre-installed with Froyo) and I got stuck with Seesmic. The reason why I didn’t use the pre-installed twitter app is the inconsistency of the retweet feature – for some reason the retweet button’s missing in the “By others” retweet timeline, mentions timeline, nearby tweets timeline or search results; the other apps have no such limitation – Hopefully this gets fixed soon, because then I’m going to stick with the official Twitter app. Now that I’m using twitter more often, I’ve added a twitter widget to this page, which will display all tweets containing #mastixmc.

Upgraded WordPress to version 3.0

Last but not least there’s another interesting information: I’ve used the auto-upgrade feature of WordPress to upgrade to WordPress 3.0 and it worked like a charm. Of course I created backups of the database as well as of the folders WordPress resides in before, but it turns out that it wasn’t necessary because everything has been updated perfectly. Great job guys.

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Android, Cell phones, Software Development Android, blinkendroid, dcs2010, development, droidcamp, facebook, Froyo, Google, HTC, mastix mc, Nexus One, twitter, web content management system

It just feels like yesterday when I was trying to think up my New Year’s resolutions for 2009. And here I am, a short year later, already thinking ahead to 2010. Time runs way too fast! It’s about time to start considering what my New Year’s resolutions will be this time around, and instead of pledging to start going to the gym or eating better (which I’ll probably do…until February arrives); I’ve decided not to tell what my resolution for 2010 will be. This probably makes it easier to achieve my goals – speaking of which: This is what Wikipedia says about the success rate of New Year’s resolutions:

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, Private Thoughts, Software Development AIRMail, Android, android market, free sms, google voice, HTC, java, O2 AIRMail, web content management system, web2sms, website

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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Android, Cell phones, Software Development Android, android market, development, emulator, google voice, HTC, java, RecognizerIntent, smartphones, speech recogniton, system.img

Download O2 Airmail

As this is an application for German O2 customers, I will post this entry in German only.

Seit heute findet ihr die neue Version von O2 Airmail auf dem Android Market.  Bisher wurde das Tool ca. 160 Mal aus dem Android Market heruntergeladen und nochmal über 100 Mal von der Projektseite – nicht schlecht für ein Tool was noch keinen Monat alt ist. Des Weiteren hat O2 AIRMail auf dem Market eine durchschnittliche Bewertung von 4.93/5 Sternen bei 15 Bewertungen (Stand: 08/10/2009 – 22:30 Uhr).

Update: Auf Grund eines Bugs in v0.53, der so wie es aussieht nur auf einem echten Device auftritt, wurde gestern noch schnell Version 0.54 released (Titel wurde bereits angepasst).  Der Bug, verhinderte bei einigen Usern das Senden der SMS. Dieser wurde nun behoben. Des Weiteren stieg nach dem Update auch die Downloadzahl aus dem Market an, wo wir nun bei 217 Downloads sind (Stand 10/10/09 – 14:30 Uhr).

Mit dem neuen Update, werden sich die Werte hoffentlich noch ein bisschen bessern, denn endlich ist auch ein Feature drin, was sich viele gewünscht haben: O2 AIRMail speichert nun die SMS nach dem Versand auf dem Telefon als “Gesendete SMS”. Doch was bringt das? Ganz einfach, wer nun Fremdapplikationen wie ChompSMS nutzt, sieht nun die über O2 AIRMail gesendete SMS in seiner alltäglichen SMS-Kommunikation. Alle Nutzer der App, werden nun über den Market über ein Update informiert werden.

Hier mal eine Zusammenfassung was mit dem Update auf O2 AIRMail v0.53 alles dazu kam:

• O2 AIRMail ist nun keine ALPHA mehr, sondern wurde mit 0.5 eine BETA, da die Grundfunktionen nun implementiert sind
• Gesendete SMS werden nun auf dem Telefon gespeichert
• Ein neues Hilfe-Menü erklärt nun grundsätzliche Funktionen
• Das Einstellungen-Menü wurde komplett umgebaut und spart nun eine Oberfläche und ist ressourcenschohnender
• Es können nun verschiedene Verhaltensweisen der Applikation über das Einstellungsmenü eingestellt werden
• Die Masterpasswort- und auch die Benutzernamen/Passwort-Oberfläche wurde komplett entfernt
• Das Masterpasswort wird nun nicht mehr zum Start benötigt, nur noch für den Einstellungs-Dialog
• Hat man keine freien SMS mehr oder überschreitet man diese mit dem Versand, wird man vor Versand gewarnt
• O2 AIRMail nutzt nun GZIP als HTTP Compression, um den Versand über GPRS/EDGE zu beschleunigen
• Außerdem wurden einige Fehler und Probleme der vorigen Versionen beseitigt

Das Tool unterstützte seit der ALPHA v0.3 folgende Features:

• SMS-Versand
• Speicherung der Daten (verschlüsselt)
• Flash SMS
• Anonyme SMS
• eigene Absenderkennung
• Telefonbuchzugriff
• SMS an mehrere Teilnehmer
• Applikation heißt jetzt O2 Airmail
• Funktioniert nun im Landscape mode
• Benutzt nun den internen Apache HTTP Client für die Connections
• Neues Hintergrundbild mit Android Logo
• Neues Anwendungs Icon
• Große Codeumstrukturierung um den Speicher zu entlasten und die Performance zu erhöhen.
• Durch das Austauschen des Hintergrundbildes und der Nutzung internen Systemicons konnte auch die Dateigröße vermindert werden (vorher 93kb – jetzt 63kb)
• Kleine Änderungen an der Benutzeroberfläche
• Löscht nun das Versendeformular nach einem erfolgreichen Versand der Nachricht
• Wurde nun auch auf Android 1.6 (Donut) getestet
• Unnötigen Webseitenaufruf beim Versand rausgeschmissen
• Bug beim Ersetzen des Masterpassworts gefixed

Vielen Dank auch an alle, die Probleme und auch neue Ideen auf der Projektseite gemeldet haben! Ich rufe weiterhin zu einer aktiven Teilname auf. Diese “Issue-List” dient mir als To-Do, um neue Features ins Produkt zu bringen und gleichzeitig auch gefunden Fehler zu beseitigen. Hier könnt ihr euch subscriben, um immer zu sehen, was mit eurer Meldung passiert ist, bzw. ob sie vielleicht schon gefixed wurde und in der nächsten Version verfügbar sein wird. Ich habe hier schon viele gute Ideen bekommen, von denen ich einige auf jeden Fall umsetzen werde.

Wer den Link hierzu noch nicht kennt:

http://code.google.com/p/web2sms4android/issues/list

Viel Spaß mit der neuen Version,

mastix

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Android, Cell phones, Software Development Android, beta, free sms, Hero, HTC, java, Magic, O2 AIRMail, o2online.de, smartphones, web2sms