Tips and Tricks for Android Users
Applications
Nook Sideload Launching
Nov 22nd
One of the most annoying aspects of working with a stock Nook for development is trying to load up your application after you install it. The arcane series of buttons you need to press, and tapping on the speaker icon. Just stupid. And the fact that you need to reboot the device in order to get it to recognize a newly installed app – it’s like they don’t want you to create apps for the platform.
There are a few different workarounds, like launching using an adb command (ie. adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.example.myapp/com.example.myactivity). But my favorite so far is simply installing a new launcher application. I grabbed the Home sample from the Android resources, compiled that, sideloaded and launched it with the adb command.
Now when I hit the ‘n’ button on my device I have the option of launching into the Nook default home or the Home Sample application. From the Home Sample I can just pick the app I want directly, and I don’t need to reboot the device to see anything new I put on there. Great for when I’m poking around with a bunch of new stuff.
Bonus tip: On OS X you can use /etc/fstab to keep your development machine from mounting up the device every time you plug it in, resulting in an annoying error if you unplug without ejecting. Just add a line like this to keep it from mounting by default:
LABEL=MyNOOKcolor none msdos rw,noauto
When you do want to mount it, you can either do it from the command line or fire up Disk Utility.
Using Your Android Phone as a Remote Control
Feb 14th
What I initially set out to do was find a program for my G2 that would allow me to use it as a Bluetooth trackpad and keyboard with the Mac mini I have hooked up to my television. I use it as a media PC, but it’s also a general purpose system. Every now and again it’s convenient to be able to control it using a full keyboard and mouse.
I haven’t yet run across the right tool to get my phone to work as a Bluetooth HID device for my computer. But there are some decent VNC clients that do interesting things. I’ve started using AndroidVNC as my default. I wish I could turn off the screen on the device completely. As is I turn the color depth all the way down. Because I’m sitting in front of the computer I can watch the pointer onscreen, transferring the video data over my G2 just cases it to lag.
The essential part to making it work well is to go into the settings and swap the pointer mode to trackpad. That way you can use the touchscreen on the device as a trackpad instead of having to pan around and touch directly (or use the tiny directional trackpad). You still need a VNC server on your PC, but I’m running one anyway so it’s not much of an issue for me. Still, would be nice to be able to use the Bluetooth HID version for other cases. Surprised at the lack of Bluetooth based Android hackery.
Installing Firefox Mobile on a Samsung Captivate
Aug 27th
Mozilla just released a mobile version of Firefox for Android devices. Unfortunately they haven’t directly published the link to the apk. If you follow the download link from a desktop system it takes you to the desktop installer. From a device it takes you to the apk, but I’m on a Samsung Captivate I haven’t rooted yet, so I can’t install from the browser. Instead I downloaded through the browser, sucked the file out using ADB, and the installed that way:
- ./adb pull /sdcard/download/fennec.apk ~/fennec.apk
- ./adb install ~/fennec.apk
Dear Mozilla, great idea directing folks to the right download automatically, but please take this case into consideration. Lots of folks on AT&T devices who can’t install directly. Or, alternatively, AT&T could stop being idiots. Slim chance of that though.
Essential Android Apps for Geeks
Aug 25th
A few essential apps for those more technically minded Android users out there. If you know of others that should be in here let me know in the comments.
Terminal
This one is almost a no-brainer. Everyone who knows Android is Linux underneath (and who knows Linux) normally heads for a command line to check things out right off the bat. You can get access via ADB, but having direct access right on the device is killer. This app gives you access to the command shell built into the device.
Market link: Android Terminal Emulator
ConnectBot
ConnectBot is an SSH client application for your phone. It’s a fantastic application for quick access to remote systems. If you’re on a device without a physical keyboard it’s not quite as slick to use (I wouldn’t recommend trying to use vi on a remote system from a Samsung Galaxy for instance), but for quick tasks it can be fantastically convenient.
Market link: ConnectBot
Advanced Task Killer
This seems to be a pretty consistent tool in most advanced user’s toolboxes. Android apps can keep running in the background. Most of the ones that do give you good ways to control when they run, and the OS itself does a generally good job of managing them. But if you tend to poke around with lots of apps and try out all the different tools you hear about you’re bound to run across one or two that misbehave every once in a while. When you do, Advanced Task Killer can help you figure out what’s going on and set things right again.
Market link: Advanced Task Killer
Astro File Manager
This is the free version of a file manager application. There’s a paid version that includes a ton of additional features, but so far I’ve stuck with the free version. Nice interface for browsing around and seeing what files are on your device. Includes built in viewers that generally handle text and image files well.
Market link: Astro File Manager
Dropbox
Dropbox is a free service that lets you store files online and sync them between systems. If you don’t already have an account and want to try it out please sign up using this affiliate link (I get credit for the signup and get some free space on Dropbox if you do). They have an Android application that allows viewing, downloading, or uploading. Together with an application like Astro you can upload arbitrary files from your phone to Dropbox as well. From within Dropbox use upload from the menu, and then select any file and use Astro to complete the action.
Market link: Dropbox
Scripting Layer for Android
An app that allows for accessing native Android functions from multiple scripting languages. Once you install SL4A you can use it to pull down interpreters. A bunch are available, like Unix shell, Python, Perl, Ruby, and others. Then you can run scripts in those languages that tie into Android specific functions. SL4A is not available in the Marketplace however, so use the info on the Google Project page to download the apk directly. If you’re on an AT&T device like the Samsung Captivate and haven’t hacked it to allow direct third party installs you’ll have to load the apk files using ADB. As of right now, it seems you need to download the core SL4A app and then separate downloader shims for the different interpreters. The base sl4a seems to only have shell installed by default. But once you install something like python_for_android_r1.apk and click install within that app you’ll get Python support in sl4a.
Commodore 64 Emulation
Jul 24th
I was happy to see there’s a Commodore 64 emulator in the Marketplace for Android, the Frodo emulator. I played around with a bit, but what I really wanted to do was hack around a bit with some old school basic. This is one of the computers I grew up with, and I get nostalgic for the old days every once in a while. However, I was having a really hard time figuring out how to get the version of Frodo under Android to create a new disk for me to save stuff to. If you can’t save the stuff you’re playing with what’s the use? I could save out the whole state, but I figured there had to be a better way.
So I downloaded a version of VICE for my desktop system. That has a much richer set of controls, one of which is creating and attaching a fresh image (it’s a ‘file’ menu item). I figured if I was lucky the image created with VICE would work to at least get me started on Frodo on my device. And lucky me, yes it does! Actually, now I can push the d64 images back and forth, use the emulator on my desktop to do a little poking around and push the file over to my device to take with me. Very nice! Just remember, save with replace is ‘SAVE “@0:FILENAME”,8′. Otherwise an attempt to overwrite a file will just silently fail. Ahhh, nostalgic.
Nook Reader for Android
Jul 23rd
Barnes & Noble released an Android version of the Nook ebook reader. It’s the same path that Amazon followed. They have a hardware device for reading ebooks. But as other mobile devices start to get more popular they also allow those devices to hook into the same content. Effectively putting your library “in the cloud”, so that you can download the books you’re reading to your different devices and keep your reading position synced across them. I’m already an avid Kindle user on iPad, iPhone, and Android. But I gave the Nook reader a try just to see what it’s like.
If you’re on your Android device right now you can hop to Nook in the Market directly, or just search for “Nook” in the Marketplace app. Compared to the other readers I’ve seen, the Nook feels a bit amateur. The reading experience itself is the real laggard here. I’m hoping they can polish this thing up in future revisions. A few screenshots to show you what I mean.
This is the main library interface:
I downloaded a free book. One of the Google Books scans, which is nice. Like the other platforms they’re tying into the free content at Google to provide a ton of free scans of classic and public domain works. Kudos on that. Some of the Google Books efforts include direct scans of pages instead of the text. Here’s what a scan page looks like:
And a page of text:
That lack of margin on the reading screen is really killing me, and I don’t see a way to adjust it. I also like to read with full justification, which doesn’t appear to be an option either.
Here’s a shot of the ebook store, just for the sake of completeness:
The storefront is pretty decent, about on par with the others.
Overall though the interface is still a bit clumsy, the reading experience itself needs some work, and the app itself is buggy (I’ve had it crash twice in the short time I used it). I’m very happy to see an additional ebook reader out, but this one needs some more work before it’s ready for prime time.
Screenshot on a Rooted Device
Jul 20th
In addition to capturing a screenshot with a computer using the Android SDK there’s also a screenshot application (available on the market, called simple ‘screenshot’, I’m not sure how to find out the package name to create a market link for it. It only works on rooted devices, but all of mine are. One nice feature is the “shake to capture a screenshot” option. So that instead of having to keep hopping into the screenshot app to setup a shot, back to the app, wait, hop back to setup another time delayed shot, back to the app, etc. Just setup screenshot to capture when you shake and go through whatever set of screens you want.
Battery Graph Application
Jul 13th
I’ve started using an app called Battery Graph (marketplace link) by Morgan H to try to monitor changes in my battery drain. It’s a background app that collects battery charge info over time and displays a graph on device. That makes it easy to spot major changes to discharge rate. Say if you install a new widget some time early afternoon, and later that evening you see the discharge rate increased some time after lunch, you know the widget is doing something heavy and impacting your total battery life.
In the menu area there’s even an option to export the set of data to CSV so you can suck it into a spreadsheet or use it to drive some of your own tools. Would be great actually if there was an option to record a list of running processes along with the battery status info, so that it could attempt to spot which processes are sucking up the most resource.
WordPress for Android
Jul 9th
The WordPress folks put out a new release on the Android market a few days ago. The new version seems to be working great thus far with the WordPress 3.0 install I’m running now. There’s a setting in the Settings/Writing area you need to check to enable XMLRPC to get it working initially, but it’s pretty trivial.
From what I can tell, the stats feature might only work with WordPress.com accounts (or maybe I need a plugin I don’t currently have installed to get it working). But everything else I’ve tried so far is working great. The previous release added video upload and geotagged posts. Quite a list of features and capabilities there.
If you’re on your device you can pop it up in the Marketplace using this link.
Downloading Marketplace Info
Jun 2nd
One of the annoyances of the Android Marketplace (for developers at least) is that there’s no easy way to get the info to use in your own applications. Fortunately some folks have reverse engineered the protocol used by the marketplace app to create an open source project that queries the marketplace servers. I’ve been fooling around with android-market-api, great project. I actually had issues with the latest latest code from the svn repo. But if I pull from the 0_3 tag I can compile my own programs that do things like run through the categories. Nice!