Google has recently released a scripting environment for Android that allows you to write Python, Lua, or BeanShell scripts that interface with Android functionality. From the project page:
There are a bunch of examples of using WebView to display HTML content loaded from the web in an Android app, including the sample from Google for the WebView class. However the ones I found generally don’t load new pages on their own. I can load up Google, but if you click on anything in the app it launches a browser and takes the user out of the app. The answer to the problem is in the additional points on that Hello, WebView page – you need to set a new WebViewClient to handle the URL load requests. Their example is very helpful, but I prefer to do the override with an anonymous inner class:
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
WebView webview = new WebView(this);
webview.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
webview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
@Override public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
view.loadUrl(url);
return true;
}
});
webview.loadUrl("http://google.com");
setContentView(webview);
}
However, if you follow a link to an image it downloads instead of opens in the view. That’s the same thing the built in browser does, but wasn’t the behavior I expected. I’ll have to figure out how to handle that a bit better.
Here’s a tip for monitoring network traffic from your Android phone using OS X. The same thing works for iPhone (or any other mobile device you can configure to use a wifi connection). I frequently use it to see how some bit of client/server interaction is done.
And that’s it, you should now get quite readable dumps of what applications are doing to communicate. Lots of interesting things you can learn digging into how folks structure their client/server interaction.
May 29
Intuitive to Nokia users, but I don’t think folks coming from other platforms have picked it up. If you press and hold the home key you get a list of recent apps, which makes switching around a lot easier if you’re bouncing back and forth. Here’s what the app list looks like when it comes up:
May 28
Another widget I’m running now that I have Cupcake installed is “Launcher Dock”. It’s a 1×1 widget that holds launchers for up to 8 apps. I put some of my less frequently launched (but still relatively frequently used) apps in there so that I can have all their icons on the main screen. This is a shot of my main screen with a configured Launcher Dock by the bottom right corner, just above the San Mateo weather widget:
When you tap the widget once it brings up a selector with launchers for each of the apps you’ve added plus an icon to start the widget configuration interface. Here’s what mine looks like after tapping on the widget:
And what the configuration interface looks like if you tap on that center icon:
I think it’s a pretty slick widget. Great way to increase launcher density if you have a few widgets taking up some space. And it looks pretty good there on the home screen.
I wanted to try out compiling some native C code for use on my device, but I wanted to do it using my OS X machine. I found this post about using the prebuilt toolchain over at Android Tricks, but figured I would write up some additional details for those who might also be looking.
Now you should be ready to compile a program and download it to your phone. This was my test app:
#include <stdio.h>
int main( int argc, char **argv ) {
printf("Hello from Droid Hacks!\n");
return 0;
}
And you should be able to compile it with “agcc hello.c -o hello” and end up with a hello executable:
~ > agcc hello.c -o hello ~ > file hello hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped ~ >
And you can move the file across to the phone and run it. You’ll have to make a directory to push it into. The sdcard is marked as noexec, so you can’t run stuff from there. And the data directory has more restrictive permissions. So you’ll have to su and create a directory on the data partition, and relax the perms on that directory:
~ > adb shell $ su # mkdir /data/droidtest # chmod 777 /data/droidtest # exit $ exit ~ > adb push hello /data/droidtest 418 KB/s (6747 bytes in 0.015s) ~ > adb shell $ cd /data/droidtest $ ls -l -rwxrwxrwx shell shell 6747 2009-05-27 08:56 hello $ ./hello Hello from Droid Hacks! $
And of course you can run the same thing from the terminal on your device as well:
I imaged my development phone with the Android 1.5 images from HTC. I was able to su to root when I connected to the phone using “adb shell”, but wasn’t able to get root when using the terminal app on the phone itself. There’s nothing that keeps you from setting up a mechanism to get root from the handset though. Just do this from an adb shell session after you su to root:
Some of the instructions I found online suggested just calling the new binary su, but I was concerned about that overriding the default su depending on what path is getting used. So I just created a whole name “user su” which won’t reject the handset user when I try to change to root:
May 25
Normally I have a few quick toggle applications sitting on my home screen to quickly switch on and off Bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, etc. It really saves a ton of battery life switching off hardware when it’s not in use. I just ran across the free Toggle Settings app from cooolmagic. It has all the hardware switches, some cool status info (like what wifi network you’re connected to), and new toggles for stuff like auto-sync. Very useful, and it looks pretty slick. Just search for “Toggle Settings” in the market and you should find both the 1.1 and 1.5 versions of the app. Here’s a quick rundown of the controls:
