Droid Sector

Seriously, it’s great that I can write Android apps on Mac, as well as on Windows and Linux.

Let’s create a simple Automator app to make installing apk files a little easier.

• Download the Android SDK for Mac and extract to Android folder in your home directory.
• Launch Automator and create a new application.
• Add action “Run Shell Script” with sh shell.
• Paste this command: ~/Android/android-sdk-mac/tools/adb install -r “$1″
• Add another two actions shown below if you want a feedback from the script.
• Save application to the Applications folder.
• Associate apk files with your new application.

Now you can install Android apps by double clicking on apk files.

I’ve already received multiple emails from people who are excited for iOS 4’s multitasking because they can’t wait for this to finally stop being an issue, because they think Instapaper will be able to download articles periodically in the background.

It’s painful to respond, crushing their hopes, to tell them that the iOS multitasking system doesn’t allow me to do that.

By naming these features “multitasking”, Apple has set customers’ expectations to include what apps can do in a traditional computer multitasking environment.

It’s going to mislead people into expecting such behavior from apps, but we can’t actually deliver most of it.

Some people will notice that no apps can do these things and properly focus their disappointment on Apple. But many others will only notice the shortcomings in one particular app that they need to do the “impossible” and blame that application, leading to dissatisfaction and negative thoughts about the app.

As long as iOS “multitasking” can do much less than traditional multitasking — which will probably always be the case — this is going to be an issue.

www.marco.org

Latest SDK now allows developers to create and run virtual devices with tablet-size screen. Just create a new device and set size to 1024×600 or bigger.

Developer Console now have a new “Feedback” link near all uploaded apps. It shows user comments (not working yet) and freeze/crash reports. Very cool! No need to explain to customers how to use SendLog.

Update: the link was removed, perhaps this feature will be announced at Google I/O later this month.

We’ve seen many upcoming Android tablets, but apps from the Market were never showcased. Some people tend to think that the apps will look bad in high resolution, so I’ve decided to check it. Below go the screenshots of apps running on Android 1.6 x86 in VirtualBox. Screen resolution was set to 1024×768.

Read more…

An excerpt from Service API changes starting with Android 2.0 by Dianne Hackborn / Android Developers Blog. Learn how to manage background services and make your phone faster:

Our final issue to address is the case where there are simply too many service running in the amount of memory available on a device. This may be due to bugs or design flaws in installed applications, or the user simply trying to do too much. Historically users have had no visibility into what is going on at this level in the system, but it has become important to expose this, at least for lower-end devices, as the use of services has had an increasing impact on the user experience.

To help address this, Android 2.0 introduces a new “Running Services” activity available from the Application system settings. The main content is a list of all running services that may be of interest to the user, organized by the processes they run in. In the example here, we see three services:

• GTalkService is part of the standard Google application suit; it is running in Google’s “gapps” process, which currently consumes 6.8MB. It has been started for 3 hours 55 minutes, which on this device is the time from when it was first booted.
• ActivityService is part of the Phonebook app, and its process consumes 4MB. This also has been running since boot.
• SoftKeyboard is a third party input method. It has been running since I switched to it, about 4 minutes ago.

The user can tap on any of these services to control it; for normal services that are running because they were explicitly started, this will present a dialog allowing the user to explicitly stop it.

Some other services, like the input method, are running for other reasons. For these, tapping on the service will go to the corresponding UI to manage it (in this case the system’s input settings).

Finally, along the bottom of the screen are some obscure numbers. If you know how to interpret them, this gives you a lot of information on the memory status of your device:

• Avail: 38MB+114MB in 25 says that the device has 38MB of completely free (or likely used for unrequired caches) memory, and has another 114MB of available memory in 25 background processes it can kill at any time.
• Other: 32MB in 3 says that the device has 32MB of unavailable memory in 3 unkillable processes (that is, processes that are currently considered to be foreground and must be kept running)

For most users, this new user interface should be a much more effective way to manage the background applications on their device than the existing “task killer” applications. In the vast majority of cases the reason for a slow running device is too many services trying to run. This prevents the system from being able to run any background processes (which speed up app switching), and ultimately can result in thrashing through the services when not even they can all be kept running. The Running Services UI is intended to provide very specific information about the services that are running, to help make a good decision about what should be stopped. It also does not use the API to force stop an application, which can unintentionally break applications in numerous ways.

If you are interested in writing Android apps, this tutorial is a great place to start:
http://www.vogella.de/articles/Android/article.html

More detailed guide about installing ADB/USB drivers in Windows:
http://theunlockr.com/2009/10/06/how-to-set-up-adb-usb-drivers-for-android-devices/

On Mac, just add path to the SDK to file .bash_profile in your home folder. If you don’t have Path Finder or other file manager that shows hidden files, here is a small guide:

1. Extract SDK to your Documents folder, as example.
2. Open Terminal from Applications/Utilities.
3. In Terminal Type “ls -a” and see if there is a .bash_profile in your home folder.
4. If not, type:  touch .bash_profile to create this file.
5. Now type open -e .bash_profile to open it in TextEdit.
6. Add the following line: export PATH=${PATH}:~/Documents/android-sdk-mac/tools

Sony Ericsson is planning to open Android Store soon and developers can already submit programs for review. But looks like it’s not that easy.

App submission is a six(!) step process. On the first screen you need to enter category, app name and description. After this things are getting worse:

1. You need to upload 170×170 and 120×150 cover images.
2. Screenshots 170×170(?) is also required.
3. On step 2 you’ll need to download pdf file and select a “price level”.
4. Only zip files are accepted. Ironicaly apk files ARE zip files.
5. Their site knows it – it says “Zip file type is not allowed” if you upload apk file.
6. This is where I stuck: Update: it works now.

Sony Ericsson released add-on for the Android SDK that includes the Android 1.6 system image with small customizations:

• Sony Ericsson splash screen
• X10 colour backgrounds
• A “skin” of the X10 which is a simple graphic of the front of the phone
• A hardware.ini file to set the operating parameters for screen, camera, audio and so on.

No custom X10 media app inside, just skinned Android 1.6.  This add-on is only useful for developers who might want to test how their app runs on this phone.

Download add-on

Installation:

• Extract the files in the zip archive into the “add-ons” directory of the Android SDK.
• Create a virtual device (AVD) with X10 as target.