Tips and Tricks for Android Users
Posts tagged free
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Toggle Settings
May 25th
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:
- Turn on and off airline mode
- Turn on and off autosync
- Turn on and off bluetooth
- Turn on and off GPS
- Turn on and off Wifi, and show what network you’re connected to if you are connected
- Control the brightness level and screen timeout, or disable screen timeout completely
- Turn on and off silent mode
- Control the volume
