Tips and Tricks for Android Users
Tips
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.
Samsung Captivate Tethering for OS X
Aug 17th
When I plugged my Samsung Captivate into my OS X machine I was surprised to see a network connection dialog pop up on my laptop and what looked like a tethering app pop up on the device. Given that AT&T tries to kill off tethering in every way possible with the iPhone, I figured it wouldn’t be on with my Captivate either. Or at least not easy to get working. No problem though. I just needed to figure out which set of settings to put in the network connection dialogs in OS X.
In the main network settings screen under System Preferences:
- leave telephone number blank
- use ‘WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM’ for Account Name
- use ‘CINGULAR1′ for Password
Then click the advanced button and setup:
- Vendor generic
- Model GPRS (GSM/3G)
- APN is ‘wap.cingular’
- CID set to 1
After that starting up a network session with my Captivate attached over USB yielded a pretty quick network connection! Now if only they could fix these GPS issues….
On Device Packet Capture
Aug 5th
When I need to capture network traffic from my device I normally capture traffic at a router to see what’s going on. I had seen some mentions of running tcpdump on device and pulling off the pcap file to a desktop to inspect, but Androshark was what people mentioned the most. And it didn’t seem to be actively developed any more. I ran across Shark for Root and Sharkreader recently however. It’s an app for packet capture and a simple packet capture viewer directly on the device. Works out pretty well. Requires root access, and it seems to be working quite well on my Nexus One with CM6. Screenshots below.
Start/stop capture, writes to the sdcard by default:
View packet dump stream:
View contents of an individual packet:
Pirate Boot Logo
Jul 25th
Every proper hacked device needs to boot up with a pirate theme. Fortunately the boot animation is trivial to replace on a Nexus one. I’m currently running CyanogenMod6, but I believe this will work other places. I replaced the boot animation with just a single image of a skull and crossed swords:
There’s plenty of info out there about replacing the boot logo and what the files do. Here’s how to get it up and running through:
- Download the pirate boot animation zip file to your system
- Remount the system partition read-write: adb shell mount -o rw,remount /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
- Push the file across to your device: adb push pirate_bootanimation.zip /system/media/bootanimation.zip
That’s it, reboot and enjoy! If you want to poke around and change it, it should be pretty easy. There’s a writeup of what the contents of the bootanimation.zip are, which is very useful. Supposedly, also, the zip needs to be uncompressed to work. But that just means setting compression level to 0 when you run zip. This is the command I use on my OS X machine: zip -0 pirate_bootanimation.zip desc.txt part0/boot_00003.png”. That should make it easy to swap in any other picture to customize.
Voice Input Under 2.1
Jul 21st
I’ve been playing around with voice input under Android 2.1. It’s a feature that’s easy to miss, cause the key that starts voice input only appears on the keyboard if you’re on a general text entry field. So for instance, I started up GMail to give it a try the first time, but there’s no speech input button. I assumed it wasn’t enabled and went hunting around for additional options. Turns out I just needed to move past the address field and go to the subject or body. Makes sense, but wasn’t completely obvious to me.
I could see the feature being useful for text messages for instance. But for me the accuracy is still a bit low. Got errors trying it while enunciating strongly in a quiet room. Some of the problems I’m having saying it’s going to be a useful feature are that it’s really difficult to go back and edit out those mistakes. The entire sentence I just dictated is underlined as previous input once the detection is done. So a backspace to try to replace the last word for instance – that erases the entire input. And if it just got a sentence correct and I want to go on, I need to hit the speech input button again to go ahead and dictate some more.
I’m sure the issues are because this was born out of a “voice search” usage and not a general dictation application. Just something to keep in mind if you’re planning to use it. I’ll have to get a 2.2 rom on the phone and see if there are any additional options in there that address this.
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.
Getting the Most Out of Froyo
Jul 14th
If you’ve got Froyo on your phone now and you’re looking to make sure you know about all the changes, check out this Android 2.2 review from AnandTech. It walks through all the differences compared to the 2.1 release, and there are a few good points in there. Everyone knows about the hotspot functionality for instance. But I had missed the automatic updates from the Marketplace till just now. Maybe there’s something in there you missed too.
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.
Keeping Recovery Image After Reboot
Jul 11th
I’ve been trying lots of custom images on my N1 and G1 recently. One minor annoyance was that after installing a custom recovery image like Amon Ra to flash different base images I seemed to revert back to the default recovery image after a reboot. It wasn’t too annoying cause I kept the recovery.img on my sdcard and just did a flash_image before rebooting whenever I wanted to apply updates. But still, annoying.
Then I ran across this description of replacing the recovery partition, which explains that part of the boot process is writing the recovery.img from /system/recovery.img. That explains a lot! That page also describes how to replace the /system/recovery.img so that you keep your new recovery image after each boot. Ahh, now I have my full set of menu options whenever I hit recovery.