Droid Sector

Yesterday I’ve read a post “What to install in iPhone after jailbreak” and these apps and hacks were recommended:

sbSettings – quick switch wi-fi, bluetooth, 3G, ssh by swiping down from the top bar.

Activator – use volume buttons to control music player (next/previous track).

iFile — file manager.

Installous 4 — download and install any app from Internet.

FreeSync — patch that lets you use device as usual while syncing with iTunes.

FullScreen for Safari — self explanatory, also adds finger gestures.

Lockdown Pro — password protected apps.

MxTube и YourTube — download videos from YouTube.

PlayAwake — patch, allows to use any song from media library in the alarm clock.

Safari Download Manager — download any file in browser.

StayOpened – patch, prevents AppStore closing after downloading each app.

xGPS — download Google Maps for offline use.

See the trend here? A lot of people saying iOS is better, but they still need to jailbreak their devices and install patches to get the functionality available in Android without rooting.

Zinio provides digital editions of the magazines, delivering the exact same material you get in print – surprisingly big collection and in many languages. PressDisplay is the same, but for newspapers. They are currently available for selected Android devices such as Galaxy Tab. Fortunately you can get a hacked version from this XDA thread or here. It will work on a phone, although it looks much better on a big tablet screen.

Zinio

PressDisplay

The app supports all the basics you’d expect like unread counts, friends, sharing, liking, and starring, but it also has a whole lot more, including:

• Multiple accounts
• Synced preferences
• Full subscription features (subscribe and search from your phone)
• Search

The UI is nice and fast, and the usual “Share” integration with compatible (Twitter, Tumblr..) apps is present. You can enable an option to jump to next/previous articles with the phone’s volume keys.

googlereader.blogspot.com

Twitter client [TweetDeck] recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge. Many Android apps work only on selected Android handsets, running selected Android versions. And this is for handsets that have been shipped less than 12 months ago! Compare this with iPhone, where there are two versions of the software, the current and the most recent predecessor, to test against.

Iain Dodsworth, the CEO of TweetDeck, has responded via Twitter:

• Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.
• @dannysullivan yes exactly! We only have 2 guys developing on Android TweetDeck so that shows how small an issue fragmentation is

I would like to add that we also had no problems with Android development. In most cases you just need two sets of graphics for middle-res and hi-res devices. Our apps have more than one million downloads combined, and we received no reports yet about problems with specific devices.

In addition to Google’s own app marketplace, Amazon, Verizon, and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android. So there will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want, and developers will need to work with to distribute their apps and get paid. This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers.

Contrast this with Apple’s integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.

The app stores from Amazon, Verizon and Vodafone do not exist yet, while there are already two stores for iOS – App Store and Cydia (which contains applications that have been banned by Apple). The Android Market will stay the biggest source of apps, because of a $25 one-time fee and no censorship. In other words, there is no reason for the developers to ignore the Market.

And we also think that our developers could be more innovative if they can target a singular platform, rather than a hundred variants. They can put their time into innovative new features, rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets.

Developers can simply use the Nexus One or similar phone as the main testing device, it will cover 75% of devices available on the market. Create one or two virtual devices in an emulator to make sure that your app will work properly on Android 1.6 (16%) and 1.5 (9%). So, basically, we are dealing with 2-3 versions of Android, not with some “hundred variants”.

One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a seven-inch screen is only 45 percent as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. … This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion.

iPad now has over 35,000 apps on the App Store. This new crop of tablets will have near zero.

Well, Samsung did tablet versions of Gmail, calendar and phone book. Developers can use the provided addon to emulate the Tab and test/tweak their apps.

Maybe its screen is not big enough to create full-fledge tablet apps, but this is also means that most apps from the Android Marketplace will run just fine and the Tab will have about 100,000 working apps on launch.

iPad too did not have many apps in the beginning. Twitter for iPad was released only in September, Skype still does not have an iPad version!

The Samsung Tab has many strong points: it’s smaller and lighter (good for an e-reader device), has cameras, Flash, widgets and more.

What if you are going on a trip to a place where mobile network is unavailable or will cost you a fortune? Here are the tips to convert Google Maps data to GPX for further offline use.

Converting driving directions and waypoints

Go to Google Maps and search for places, addresses or driving directions. Then use GMapToGPX bookmark to generate the GPX file.

Converting custom maps

If you have created a path and saved it in My Maps in Google Maps, click on a View in Google Earth link. Then convert the downloaded KML file with GPSVisualiser.

Open the GPX file in Maverick or other GPS app

There are two ways to do it:

• Send the GPX file to yourself by email or use Dropbox. Then simply tap on the file and Maverick will import it and store in an appropriate folder.
• Manually copy the GPX file to a “/maverick/tracks” or “/maverick/waypoints” folder on your SD card.

Looks like all tech blogs today have posted an article about an Android trojan app. I really want to know the purpose of it. I realize why Kaspersky Lab did it, and in the Russian version of the article they write:

“Kaspersky Mobile Security for Android is planned for Q1 2011″.

But why are other blogs posting this? To protect people? From what? This fake video player app is obviously not on the Android Market. How many people in the world will search for a video player on the web, download it from an unknown web site and install it accepting a permission to send SMS?

That’s not a security hole in the Android OS. Nothing can be improved on the Android Market side to prevent this. You don’t need Lookout or Kaspersky on your phone. Just stop for a second and read permissions required by the app you want to install.

An update from security expert Jon Oberheide:

Again, not a whole lot to it. Since these are Russian SMS short codes, any non-Russian phones probably won’t be able to SMS that premium shortcode and therefore won’t incur the toll charges. It’s important to note that the application has no viral spreading capabilities nor command and control functionality. It simply relies on users being tricked into downloading, installing, and running the fake movie player application.

The media hoopla around this trojan release is a bit overblown, as mobile SMS toll fraud (especially overseas) is nothing new. Attackers continue to take the path of least resistance to monetization and, as usual, simple toll fraud is much preferred over any highly technical attack. But hey, it gives AV companies a great opportunity to fire up the mobile security hype machine and snake oil generator…

Update no. 2: an original story, translated from Russian:

I was browsing the Web with Opera Mini and clicked a link to an .apk file. I downloaded it and started installing; the system asked for permissions to send SMS and make calls. For a sake of experiment, I turned on Dr.Web protection and allowed the system to install the app. I had 34 rub (about $1.17) on my account. After running this app, I’ve got 3 messages about insufficient funds to send SMS. … Since I didn’t had much money on my account, I haven’t lost anything. Even if I had more money, I wouldn’t risk and install this app.

That’s it, all we know for sure is that one poor fellow has installed this fake media player, but even he figured out there must be something wrong and turned on his anti-virus app.

Launcher Pro has a very customizable dock, you can basically place there anything you want: apps, bookmarks, playlists, even FourSquare venues!

Recent versions have up to 3 scrollable docks. This is just one simple idea of how you can use it:

The 5-10 favorite contacts are now easily accessible from any home screen.
Tapping on a contact photo will invoke a QuickContact menu:

Related links:

• Adobe Flash showcase for mobile – m.flash.com
• Kongregate Games – m.kongregate.com

To enter a full screen mode on the Nexus One, tap and hold until you get a semi-transparent bar with two buttons. Tap the first button to enter the full screen mode.

The idea behind mSpot is quite simple: select music folders or iTunes library to sync, and the uploader will store your music in a cloud. Then you can listen to your music on the mSpot web page or in Android (2.1+) client.

This is how the playlist page looks like:

The first two are smart playlists. Quick-List contains selected albums, artists or songs. You can quickly add the current track to the quick-list by tapping on the big Q button. On My Phone playlist simply lists all the tracks cached on your SD card – very convenient if you are offline.
Read more…

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

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

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

Download: Automator App.