Droid Hacks » settings

Samsung Captivate Tethering for OS X

Lead Hacker — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 03:59:12 +0000

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….

ADW.Launcher Preview

Lead Hacker — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:20:55 +0000

One of the great sets of enhancements using a CyanogenMod rom instead of a stock rom is the launcher. Cyanogen includes an altered launcher called ADW.Launcher that includes lots of extra settings and interface tweeks. One of my favorite is the “preview” option, which gives you an expose (as in OS X Expose) style view of everything across the different homescreens on your device. By default you can bring it up by long pressing on the dots on the left or right bottom of the screen that show you which area you’re currently on. However, in the ADW.Launcher settings you can change the keybinding for the home key if ADW is already the active app. By default it just snaps you back to the main screen, but you can swap it to preview instead. Great usability change for me, lets me scan through my apps and widgets very quickly.

Launcher Dock

Lead Hacker — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:02:28 +0000

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.

Toggle Settings

Lead Hacker — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:05:18 +0000

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