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Posts Tagged Android

Android Tips: Astro and Dropbox

Aug 15

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Technology | No Comments

After walking around with a myTouch Android phone for almost a year now, I figured I should share some of my tips.

Email Attachments

The default behavior (at least on Android 1.6) for attachments in the Google Mail app is that you can attach photos to an email but no other type of file. Attaching photos is nice, but sometimes you want to send something other than a photo, like a document or music file. The Astro and Dropbox applictions provide some nice additional capabilities, including email attachments:

Astro

The Astro file manager app provides a full-fledged file explorer for your Android phone. By installing this app you are also provided with an additional email attachment handler so that when you try and attach a file to your email you have the option of using Astro, which allows you to attach any file. You can also “share” files from Astro directly to create an email with the selected file.

Dropbox

Another alternative is to sign up for Dropbox and install the Dropbox app which allows you to “share” any file as a link to your dropbox or as an email attachment.

File Sync-ing

These apps also add some nice file sync features.

Astro

With Astro you can move files around your phone as you would expect from a file explorer; however, you can also install plugins that allow access to FTP servers, or other computers on your network. I was able to connect to my Networked Attached Storage and transfer files to and from my phone while it was connected to my wireless network.

Dropbox

You can use dropbox to sync files between your phone and your dropbox-enabled computers. the nice part is that dropbox will not pull a file onto your phone unless you tell it to… the downside is that currently it has no built-in way that I have found to delete the local copy of a file while still keeping it in dropbox. I did figure out that you can use Astro to delete the file from the dropbox directory and it will still exist on the dropbox server. if you need it back you can just pull it back down. I have used this trick when I purchased Amazon music on my phone so that I could easily add it to my full collection.

The dropbox app is great for keeping files handy when you need them. while I was doing my job search I was able to keep resumes and other relevant documents available as needed and up to date and easily sharable.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Android Nook Reader

Mar 14

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Technology | No Comments

Link to eReader App

I have found it a little odd that Barnes & Noble does not have an Android ebook reader considering the fact that the nook itself is an Android device. I would say that maybe they are waiting until they sell a certain number of nooks first, but they already have an iPhone reader app. The whole thing gets even more interesting when you find out that B&N owns eReader.com, who has a reader for Android. Perhaps they are just in the process or re-branding it or there are some other odd licensing issues keeping them from taking the final step.

But, you can take that step yourself! Download the eReader Android app and install it on your phone (it’s not in the Android market). You can then mount your phone via USB to your computer and add your nook ebooks (pdb files) to the ereader directory of your sdcard. The annoying part, well more annoying part, is that when you open the book for the first time you will need to enter the name and credit card information used to purchase it. It’s your default card data at B&N. I wonder how bright an idea that is considering I tend to swap out the cards I use from time to time… could get interesting.

Anyway, once you enter your credentials you have full access to the ebook, just like reading it on your nook. I would not be surprised to find out that the ebooks on the two sites are exactly the same. I will have to look into it in more detail.

Happy e-reading!

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Curl Up With a Good Nook

Jan 9

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Technology | No Comments

For Christmas this year, my wife got me a Barnes & Noble nook, and I LOVE it.

When I first thought about writing this review, I figured I would include pictures of the nook and its accessories… then I thought that really didn’t make much sense. You can see pictures of it all over the place. It’s not like mine would be any better. What is really important is how it works and how it feels.

My parents are/were both big readers so I have been surrounded by books ever since birth; therefore, I am a reader and have a wall of our office devoted to books. I love browsing around bookstores and finding the hidden treasures of a new author and then kicking back with a good book and a cup of coffee. When I first thought about eBook a few years back, I thought that it wouldn’t really catch on. The eBook readers were PDAs, computers and the odd reader here and there… not very attractive to a devoted reader. Then more recently the Kindle came on the scene and that really put a serious line in the sand for books and readers. Now there was a bit bookseller with a quality eBook reader which was a strong combination. I looked into the Kindle (my Mom actually has had one for quite a while) and found it lacking in some areas, notably the way they handle DRM… so I held onto my books and waited.

Enter the nook (for some reason capitalization has gone out of style). I never really heard many rumors about it until just before it was announced…. and then it was love. The nook has a sensible DRM policy (you can store and backup your books locally while also maintaining a copy on BN’s server), it has the same eInk display as the Kindle, with an additional full color touch screen (for navigation, typing, coverflow, etc), and it’s got full support for PDFs (which the Kindle now has too). A few other niceties are that it has a self-replaceable battery, and a microSD slot for adding more memory. It’s about the same width and height as the Kindle though its a bit thicker and heavier, but not overly so.

The reading experience of the nook is great. The page buttons are on either side of the unit at just the right location for easy access, without being easy to accidentally press. The screen is almost like reading a book page, with the light gray background and nice clean text. One odd thing my mother and I both commented on about both the nook and the Kindle is the lack of some sort of built-in back light; the eInk display does not produce light so you can’t read in the dark without and external light source. There are plenty of book-lights out there so it’s not that big a deal.

One nice bonus about the nook is that it’s based on the Android, which means that they have a good solid platform to develop on and that we may see some additional applications for the nook or even an open SDK for developers to write their own apps. What this also provides is a soon-to-be-released Android phone app for reading your BN eBooks. They already provide a reader for iPhones, Mac and PC.

Purchasing books is simple. You just browse through the online store either on the nook or on your computer and select the book you want. If you are using your nook it will be downloaded right away and you can usually start reading in a minute or two. The nook comes with 3G and Wifi support, though I have not yet set mine up for my home network. The 3G has been fast enough so far.

One thing I recommend is getting a good cover for your nook. I actually bought one of the covers that resembles a book so I still keep things a little bit retro. There are gel covers similar to those you can get for phones and iPods coming out sometime next month.

Lastly, the nook has something the Kindle cannot have… and in-store experience. Supposedly if you take your nook into a Barnes and Noble store you will have free wireless access and the ability to read full copies of any eBook, just like you can when you are in the store looking at normal books. They also said that they will have special nook offers like coupons or free content when you are in the store. I have not yet taking my nook with me so I can’t really comment on that too much.

All in all, I have really enjoyed the nook so far and I am embracing the new digital media revolution… first it was music, then photos, now books. Damn, if I can convert all these books to digital I will have so much extra wall space.

On a side note… something I am hoping will come out of this new rise of the eBooks is that some of the older out of print works will be reborn as eBooks. I would imagine the overhead in digitizing a book is pretty small and then they could start making money on it again.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Coffea Electronica App

Nov 28

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Technology | No Comments

CoffeaElectronica App

CoffeaElectronica App

Well, I have finished my first “real” Android app, the CoffeaElectronica App for Android! Okay, so, it’s not really all that useful or exciting, but it was a good learning experience and it does provide a nice way to interact with this site (I have a few additional features I want to add in). Since I know you are in a hurry to download and install this little beauty, you can go over to my new Mobile page for more information.

I am not going to try and put this app on the official Android market, since it really has very limited use. Also, for now, the app is closed source. I need to clean it up a bit and get a little better with Android development before I share. ;-)

Basically all it does at this point is provide a nice reading experience for reading my posts on an Android phone. You can also click the menu button which provides a “contact me” button and a “go to site” option, both doing what you would expect.

Currently it works on phones running Android 1.6, I have not tried it under 2.0 yet.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Andreview: Astrid

Nov 16

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Programming, Technology | No Comments

I am going to start off a new series of postings called Andreview by reviewing Astrid. Astrid is a simple task manager with priorities, tags, reminders, and alerts.

Usability (4)

Astrid is very easy to use. It has a simple straight-forward interface based on lists of tasks that can be filtered by tag or other criteria. It also provides calendar integration for scheduling tasks as well as easy task creation options.

Functionality (4)

Astrid is all about task management. It is generally responsive and does what you expect from a task manager. It will also sync up with your Remember The Milk tasks, if you have an account. The only piece of functionality that I think would make Astrid better would be some sort of desktop or web-based client so that Astrid could better integrate with other systems. The RTM integration is nice, but an Astrid-specific application would be better.

Stability (4)

To my recollection after having used Astrid for a couple months now, I have never had it crash. It does currently have an annoying bug that is causing me problems right now, but I may join in with the effort to fix it (basically you can’t get a view of all tasks from the widget).

Overall (4)

Overall I think Astrid is the best task-manager I have seen for the Android OS. It’s clean, fast and simple. Also, baring the one bug I have run into, it’s stable and responsive.

Astrid (free) – U:4, F:4, S:4, O:4

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Andreview

Nov 15

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Programming, Technology | No Comments

I am going to start doing more formal reviews of the Android apps that I use or have tested. I will describe each app and delve into its benefits and drawbacks based on three main criteria: usability, functionality and stability which will each be given a rating of 1 to 5. At the end of the rewiew I will summarize with an average score as well as an overall rating for the app; the overall rating will be based on the average of the other three scores with a bump up or down (+/-1) based on my overall feeling of the app. This overall score gives me a little leeway for times when the average may not really reflect the actual feeling of the app (for better or worse).

Usability
The ease of use and how the user-needs are met in a simple straight-forward manner.
Functionality
Does the app do what you would expect for an app of its type?
Stability
How often does the app crash, if ever? How peppy is it?

At the bottom of each review I will add a simple score card with additional information about the app. It will look basically like this:

Some App (price) – U:3, F:3, S:3, O:3

If you have an app that you would like me to try out and review, please feel free to let me know.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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My Favorite Android Apps

Sep 4

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Technology | No Comments

This was going to be a top 10 list of my favorite Android applications; however, I could not easily narrow it down to ten at this point, so you get the top X (non-games):

  1. Astrid – multipurpose task manager.
  2. FBreader – ebook reader.
  3. Here I Am – plots out exactly where you are and allows you to send the location to others.
  4. Mixzing lite – music player with recommendations
  5. My Tracks – records your path with time, distance and elevation.
  6. PicSay – fun photo manipulation.
  7. Shazam – figures out what a song is from a small bit of it.
  8. Weather bug – weather app
  9. Where – a little bit of everything, food, weather, traffic, etc
  10. Any cut – allows more flexible home shortcuts.
  11. Barcode scanner – scan bar codes for links, text, etc
  12. Compare Everywhere – scan a barcode and find out how much and where you can get it.
  13. Listen – podcast search and recommendations
  14. Radio finder – finds your local am/fm radio stations.
  15. Shop Savvy – another barcode scanner comparison shopper app.
  16. Tip Calc – cool tip calculator and check divider

I also have some that I tried and did not really like:

  • Sherpa – not very user-friendly and never really seemed to find anything useful
  • last.fm – should be called crash.fm and it really only works on a wireless network.
  • linkedin – not really useful for more than accessing your contact information.
  • aCast – pod cast management does not really work well.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Android Deployment

Aug 22

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Programming | No Comments

While playing around with Android app development, I ran into an annoying issue when I tried to deploy my app into my real phone. It was working fine in the emulator, but I kept getting errors when I tried to install it on my phone.

Here is what I was doing:

  1. I ran the proper Eclipse Wizard to export and sign the APK file
  2. Pushed the APK file out to my web server
  3. Pointed the phone’s browser to the APK file to download it
  4. Clicked on the download to install it – and got an error about not being able to find the AndroidManifest.xml file

After some poking around the internet I was able to figure out that the mime type of APK files must be correct for the device to install them properly (picky picky). It must be “application/vnd.android.package-archive” for .apk files.

So, I dove into the apache config (often /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf in case you are following along) and found the configuration for mime types referencing an external default mime type configuration file. I opened that file and as expected there was no mime type specified for APK files. I added the correct directive to the apache config to support the new mime type:

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AddType application/vnd.android.package-archive .apk

I then restarted Apache and tried to do the install again… with the same results. Ok, how else could I ensure the correct mime type? Ah ha! The A tag in HTML has a type attribute used to specify the content type of the link contents.

I created an index.html page for my app and added a link with the correct content type:

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<a href="myapp.apk" type="application/vnd.android.package-archive">MyApp</a>

Surely, it would work now.

It’s didn’t work… and don’t call me Shirley.

I was getting frustrated because all of the documentation I could find about installing apps on your own phone basically said to “just do it” with no more help than that. I figured that I was doing something stupid or missing something simple so I dropped it there for the night.

I tentatively picked it back up in the morning as a background thought. I knew that web-based delivery of Android apps worked because SlideMe delivers their Android Marketplace app that way. That’s when it hit me… what do they do that I am not doing?

I checked the source of their download page and there was nothing special.

I fired up Eclipse’s TCP Monitor and downloaded the app through it to view the headers and wondered why I didn’t think to do that sooner. The response headers coming back with their download were the following (I removed the cookie information, but the rest is as it came):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:35:40 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:35:40 GMT
Cache-Control: store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: application/vnd.android.package-archive
Cache-control: private
Set-Cookie: [removed]; expires=Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:09:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.slideme.org
Set-Cookie: SERVERID=i-5f71cf36; path=/
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

When I did the same thing for my download I got the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:37:26 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
Last-Modified: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:56:29 GMT
ETag: "[removed]"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 64428
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/vnd.android.package-archive

Notice that the content type was set the same in each; however, the slideme.org response header has a bunch of extra cache control headers. I thought maybe they had something to do with it, but because mine was showing up with the correct content type I gave it one more clean try using my phone.

It worked.

All I can figure is that it was either some sort of server or browser caching even though I restarted the server. This may be the reason why slideme.org has all the cache control headers. I will have to play with it for a bit. I will post if I find anything useful.

So what it comes down to is that as long as you have your mime type (content type) set properly, you can install your apps from your web server. The world is right again.

Popularity: 26% [?]

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Goin’ Mobile

Aug 19

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Programming, Technology | No Comments

Mobile version of this site.

Mobile version of this site.

One of the things I have realized while browsing around the internet on a little tiny phone screen is that there are a lot of sites out there with little to no support for mobile devices.

Some sites are generally usable without much pain or tweaking, and some have special versions built specifically to support mobile devices, while there is another category that just does not work at all… I am looking at you DZone. I hate to poke that sore spot but it has been a real pain for me (and yes I am working on an app to take care of it).

In case you did not notice, the image to the left is a screenshot of this site’s brand new mobile version. Okay, it’s pretty weak, but it’s usable. I will keep tweaking it and trying to make it better and more usable.

My Android development time has been going well. I have written the first sputterings of an app; however, I am having trouble actually deploying it to the real device. I don’t really want to setup a Marketplace account for a simple little personal application. I can’t seem to figure out how to install an app directly via USB and doing it over the internet seems to have it’s own issues. I will figure it out, it will just require some Google time.

The actual development is quite interesting. It is has aspects of Eclipse RCP development and Google GWT development… just in the feel of how things are done and laid out. The declarative UI system is great and not too hard to use once you get the hang of it.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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DZone: No Love for Andoid

Aug 14

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Programming, Technology | No Comments

If you are following along, you know that I recently purchased the new T-Mobile Android phone, the myTouch (see “Android Love“). I have started using it for my morning blog reading, which in general has been great, except that a lot of good links come by way of DZone.com (a developer link aggregation and voting site)… why is this a problem? Well, their site is completely unusable on the Android web browser. You can’t even find the link to the actual article as it doesn’t seem to even be rendered. Ouch.

Being a good net-citizen and avid reader of DZone, I figured I would post some feedback about the oversight.

I have loved DZone since way back at the beginnings when it was just Java/Eclipse-Lobby. The site is great, the concept and the content are great… one thing is missing that I recently was shocked to find out. The site is completely unusable on the Android browser. :-(

Are there any plans for a mobile version of the site or a specialized DZone Android App? If it’s a need for developers, I would be happy to assist in either approach.

Keep up the great work!

Chris

DZone started out as a Java and Eclipse article and discussion site and has since morphed into a more broader scope; however, they still seem to be very heavily Java and related technology oriented. The response I got back a few hours later was a bit of a surprise:

Chris,

At this point we dont have any plans for a website that is Android compatible. We are working on an iPhone app and possibly after that we could revisit the potential for something for Android.

Sorry about the inconvenience.

Brandon

And with that the ticket was closed. Wow, ok, way to drink the Apple Juice. Would it be that hard to make a light-weight mobile (meaning iphone, android, winme, whatever) version of the site?

Any DZone-loving Android users out there care to help me out writing a DZone Reader App?

Popularity: 3% [?]

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