Tips and Tricks for Android Users
Posts tagged cyanogenmod
ADWLauncher Settings
Nov 28th
I’ve mentioned the preview setting in ADW Launcher previously. Recently I installed the Cyanogenmod 7.1 release on my Nexus S and started using that as my daily phone for a bit. There are a few additional settings in there I’m really liking. I like the dockbar a lot more than the main dock. What I really like to tune for is density of the screen. I wish there was an effective way to swap to the dockbar all the time. Instead what I’ve ended up doing is:
- Enable the dockbar
- Bind swipe up to show the dockbar
- Bind swipe down to app the app drawer
- Disable hiding the dockbar on app launch
And what I end up with is a dockbar I can drag shortcuts into/out of, and I just use the swipe action to open the app drawer. My homescreen ends up looking something like this:
You have to use the swipe up to bring up the dockbar instead of the main dock, but once you do it sticks around.
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.
Android Scripting Environment is now SL4A
Jul 22nd
I downloaded and installed the latest Android scripting package, now called Scripting Layer for Android, or SL4A. I had some issues with it under CyanogenMod5 (probably my own, but I never debugged). Today I updated to a CM6 release and it seems to be working a whole lot better. There are links to a whole bunch of examples on the Tutorials page.
The application interface itself is pretty simple. When it first loads up you won’t have any interpreters besides shell. If you go into the View menu, select interpreters, and then select Add from the menu under there you can add other interpreters. The interpreters generally come with example scripts, which will show up in the main list view once they’re loaded:
There’s a preferences screen, which covers mostly visual options:
If you long press on a script you have an option to edit it:
The editor that comes up is just a simple but effective textbox, so at least you can edit scripts in place on the device:
And then you can run a script, in this place displaying a toast message over the keyboard when I run the hello world program:
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.
How To Unlock and Root a Nexus One
Jul 8th
I have a Nexus One that I’ve been fooling around with. It normally doesn’t have a SIM in it, I’m just using it to fool around with. So I’ve muddled my way through installing Froyo on it manually and taking it through a few updates. Generally I’ve been brute forcing my way through the processes based on following forum posting after forum posting.
Finally tonight I took some time to actually search around some and try to find “the right info” to get a rooted version of a custom firmware onto the device. The wiki area of the Cyanogenmod site is definitely the right place to go. They have some “Full Update Guides” linked from the front page which walk through step by step the different processes you need to go through, including a process for installing a Cyanogenmod firmware starting from a stock Nexus One. Exactly what I was looking for. It walks you through all the complementary processes too, like unlocking the bootloader and installing a recovery image.
I went with the stable Cyanogenmod release, so I’m slightly downgraded in terms of the Google release this bases off of. But there’s a bunch of capabilities in the new recovery image as well as root access to weigh that against… and right now root access is definitely winning.