kugelfish

Bluetooth is a relatively low-powered short-range wireless technology, which can among others provide a networking connection between devices and is widely supported in portable devices like laptops and mobile phones.  Low power and ubiquitous support should in principle make Bluetooth an ideal solution for tethering. Nothing beats the simplicity, robustness and performance of a simple Ethernet cable for a tethered network connection - as long as both devices support it. For the upcoming Raspberry Pi model A or certain ultra-portable devices without Ethernet port, Bluetooth might be serious option. Wi-fi would probably be the most obvious choice of wireless networking technology. However using the ad-hoc wi-fi hotspot option for tethering on my Android phone turns it into a pocket heater and drains the battery in no time  - while not so much when using Bluetooth tethering instead. Besides wi-fi networking is very well documented, while there is very little documentation...

On Feb 29, the Raspberry Pi foundation launched the sales of a $25 credit-card sized computer, which sold out in minutes. The goal of the Raspberry Pi is to stimulate computer literacy education in schools, inspired by the impact which the BBC Micro computer had on schools in the UK - compared with a similar wave of popular home-computers elsewhere - e.g. the Commodore 64 . I understand the elements of nostalgia of people growing up around the 1980ies for the time when computers where new and exciting. Around that time, I thought myself programming in C and M68000 assembler on a Commodore Amiga and probably learned more in basic understanding about programming and computer architecture than during the years afterwards in engineering school. The home-computers of that era were hackable enough to encourage tinkering and simple enough to allow really getting to the bottom of how they worked. The gap between what could be produced by determined hobbyists and professional software pu...

I have been very happy with my Nexus One for over two years now, but the news that the Nexus One will not be upgradable to the new 4.0 version of Android put my loyalty somewhat in question. Even though I still prefer the physical look and feel of the Nexus One over the Galaxy Nexus, the larger, crisper display and generally much faster hardware make a switch tempting. There is nothing really in Android 4.0 which is a must-have for me. The new UI design may be crisper, but no quantum leap in usability. One new feature I like is the tracking and control of network usage by application - a feature, I had been missing since day one. With its size, the Galaxy Nexus is practically a "phablet" a phone/table hybrid. It is starting to get borderline in size for me to balance on one hand and still reach all the controls on the screen with the opposable thumb. On the other hand, I find myself to do more reading of news articles than before, using some newspaper apps which have star...

I just finally got the new Android 2.2 release for my Nexus One (it's a long story...). Most of the significant features of this release are behind the scene like increasing java execution performance through just-in-time compilation or increasing javascript performance in the browser by using the V8 JavaScript engine from Chrome. Not sure I really notice much of a difference in everyday use, since I mostly use apps which are UI and framework bound for their performance (no CPU heavy games...) and most web-pages are light in JavaScript and browser performance is limited by network and rendering performance. But still these are very welcome optimization to help improve the platform overall. There are a few small enhancement - most significant for me is the ability to switch auto-correct/complete languages for the on-screen keyboard on the fly, since I write emails and SMS in multiple languages on any given day. There is now also finally a switch to disable the use of cellular data i...

After struggling with a few apps which use lots of battery and network resources while trying to sync half the Internet onto the device, one wonders if Apple didn't accidentally have a point with their claim that most apps don't really need background processing as long as there is a way to push background notifications to the device. This leads to a split application design, where part of the application resides on a server in the Internet, doing whatever the background service on the device would be doing, but with a lot less worries about power and bandwidth. If there is something new and interesting, a small notification is pushed to the device to alert the user, that there is something worth looking at. As long as the device has network connectivity when the user acts on this notification, the details of this notification might be about is loaded on demand. If mobile networks are ubiquitous and fast enough, the resulting experience is almost as good as an app which contin...

By any measure, the new Nexus One is a very nice phone: large brilliant display, high-performance CPU core, high-res digital camera, solid low-profile body. With this kind of hardware spec, the Nexus One establishes itself as the current flagship among Android phones. To my liking, it does not have a physical keyboard, which makes for a much more slim and solid feeling body than the G1 for example. In that sense the Nexus One is what I had hoped for in my original review of the early G1 . In the about 1.5 years since the G1 came out, Android has come a long way. 3 major releases of the platform have added important missing features like an on-screen soft-keyboard and helped harden the platform based on experience in the field. At the same time, developers have contributed a wide range of expected and unexpected applications, and learned how to write them so that they don't drain the battery within minutes. There are now half a dozen or so Android phones on the market and many more ...

So it doesn't cure cancer, solve world hunger or even global climate change - but it's still a pretty nice phone! At first glance, the large, crisp high-res display get's all the Uhs and Ahs, including how snappy the UI responds thanks to the 1Ghz Snapdragon chipset. With its speed and responsiveness, the phone is a pleasure to use! The form-factor is thin, sleek with ergonomically rounded corners and lies well in the palm of ones hand. The teflon coated plastic case gives it a nice high-end feeling texture. The biggest improvement in software features for my use case is the ability to sync multiple accounts for the contacts and the gmail app - now I can get notifications for email arriving on any of my gmail accounts. My only serious gripe so far is with the placement of the on/off button, which I need to press each time before and after using the phone. Its location at the top edge, is very un-ergonomic for single handed use - i.e. fishing the phone out of the pocket with...

One of my latest favorite discoveries in the Android market is aLogcat , a must-have for Android developers and power users, who want to know more about what is going on on the device. It is named after the logcat command which can be run in the debug shell, typically via the adb tool from the Android SDK, which requires the device to be connected to a host PC through a USB cable. aLogcat allows to display a log console on the device itself, color coded by levels with options to filter by levels or arbitrary substrings. By default the console updates continuously with new messages as they appear in the log, but it can also be frozen to allow scrolling back through the log history without interfering screen updates. Since logs can also be sent via email, it subsumes the functionality of earlier log collector apps. Now that the number of devices, configurations and version of Android are exploding, it is less and less likely that a developer can reproduce a particular problem, since t...

I now have a cellphone plan, where all outgoing calls are metered and very expensive, except for unlimited calls to 3 favorite numbers, which are included in the plan. For our international calling, we are already using a discount carrier activated through a dial prefix, which also supports a local land-line dial-in access to be usable from mobile phones. By declaring the access number as one of my favorites, I can make unlimited calls from my mobile phone at the substantially lower rate of the discount carrier. The only problems is that making calls through the indirection of a voice-prompt menu is very cumbersome! This is where Phonecard Express comes in. This highly customizeable application inserts itself almost transparently as a filter between the Android system dialer and the telephony subsystem. Whether a call is made from the dialer, the address book or any other intent, the call setup is intercepted and potentially routed through a calling card service. In addition to suppo...

One of the problems debugging Android apps in the field is that the system error messages are quite generic and meaningless - e.g. Application not responding or application has stopped unexpectedly. All the interesting details like the java exception stack trace in the case of crashing apps are logged to the system log. This log can be looked at by running the "logcat" command from the background debug shell, usually by connecting over USB via the "adb" command from the Android SDK. But what to do if a problem occurs in the field, when you don't have a computer handy with USB cable and Android SDK installed? I recently came across a few apps on the market which address this issue by running logcat in the background from the application, capture the output and bringing up an email message with the output to be sent to somebody - either yourself or the developer of the crashing app, who had been desperately asked to see the logs. The source of one of the Log Col...

Android has a nifty component framework, where each screen - called " activities " should be self-contain can be called up by anybody through an event distribution mechanism called " intents ". Activities can also register to handle arbitrary intents, which allows applications to delete certain functionality without even knowing which app is going to provide this functionality. Certain intents are pre-defined - e.g. the NoiseAlert app uses the ACTION_CALL system intent to delegate the making of a phone call to the dialer app typically, or whoever can handle it. Anybody can define new intents, but to pull off useful delegation of functionality between completely unrelated apps is usually a bit harder to pull off. But here is an example of that. A while ago, a user of the BistroMath tip calculator was asking whether I could add the functionality of recording and tracking dining expenses over time. I can see this would be a very useful functionality. But I also thin...

I understand that one of the Google's ulterior motives with Android is to promote a mobile experience where the user is always connected to the Internet and the G1 is pretty much built around that "always on" networking paradigm - including the special flat-rate data plans from T-Mobile. On the other hand, data services are not universally cheap yet everywhere in the world and it would be nice to give the user more control over the mobile data usage. Both current commercial Android phones (HTC G1/Dream and G2/Magic) have two types of radio for data usage: GPRS/EDGE/3G cellular data connection IEEE 802.11 WiFi wireless LAN interface Since the Wifi interface is faster and was not exactly invented with power saving mobile devices in mind, it is presumably more power hungry than the cellular interface. In the implementation on the G1, Android gives precedence to the Wifi connection if enabled and available when the phone is active - i.e. when the screen is on. Once the screen...

The new version of the Android platform - 1.5 "Cupcake" - is now being shipped with the new HTC Magic phone from Vodafone and is also already available for some versions of the HTC Dream/G1. Since an OS update in the field is aways a scary business - T-Mobile is likely going to take it slow to upgrade all of the reportedly over a million sold G1 phones. Cupcake seems to be a relatively minor major release - a few significant new features (on-screen keyboard, video), some UI face lift and some improvement behind the scenes (battery life, performance). For my own use, there are two features which have made the upgrade to Cupcake a big deal for me. The touch-screen virtual keyboard is the big one. I have never been a big fan of the G1's hybrid touch-screen plus keyboard design and the virtual keyboard is more than good enough for me. In fact it is a lot better, since I for small text input, work flow from touch-screen navigation to text entry and back is a lot quicker a...

After some ego-surfing, here are a few reviews on my Android apps, at least in the languages, I can understand... BistroMath AndroidApp Review Source Android Market Place Rankings Review on www.androidpit.de (German) Planete Android (French) NetMeter Android Market Place Rankings Review on www.androidpit.de (German) Der Sicherheitsgurt für Android (Auslands)nutzer (German) NoiseAlert AppVee Android Apps Review Android Apps of the Week: 01 Top 5 Most Clever Android Apps for your T-Mobile G1 Android Market Place Rankings

Cyrket.com provides web based interface to browse the Android Market. Sadly this is something which the official market site or the developer console still do not provide (and Google wouldn't even have to reverse-engineer their own protocol). Here are the most recent ratings & comments on my apps: BistroMath NoiseAlert NetMeter

BistroMath, the tip calculator is by far the most popular of my little Android applications. While introducing paid applications, the web interface has been revamped a bit. BistroMath even made it into the list of featured applications.

My third android application grew out of the frustration for not knowing what is going on with device behind my back. Many of the early apps - probably written on the emulator or with little field test and experience on real devices are pretty aggressive in resource usage - some of them in the background. From my own experience with Android programming, it can be pretty hard sometimes not to mess up and do something which is very power-consuming merely by accident. Mobile programming requires a particular style and attention to resource efficiency, which many programmers from a desktop/server background are not used to. NetMeter makes use of data from the /proc filesystem of the linux kernel which is deep underneath the Android platform. As opposed to using supported and documented APIs this is quite a bit more hacky and uncertain to work on any device or even future releases. On the other hand, the /proc filesystem is a pretty standard mechanism for making kernel state accessible to u...

My second Android application is a special-purpose calculator for solving some of the problems which often arise when it comes to paying the bill in a restaurant - like computing the tip or splitting the bill among N people. This seemed like a reasonably useful application for a device which the user always carries around and one that is very simple to do. In fact it turns out that tip calculators are somewhat the " hello world " equivalent of mobile application development. To be useful, the user experience would have to be very simple and rapid - not necessarily obvious with the clunky keyboard setup of the G1! The calculator uses a table view of buttons as a virtual keypad for inputting numbers and another table on the top to display the results. The display table is fully specified in the XML layout file, while the cells of the keypad table are generated by the code. There is a menu to select the input fields (price, tax, tip, number of people and currency exchange rate) ...

While on paternity leave, I wrote this first Android application as a kind of remote baby monitor - even though I would never dare to suggesting using it as such in public... The basic functionality is that when running the application monitors the sound volume through the microphone and if it exceeds a certain threshold automatically dials a number which previously has been configured. Based on existing examples which come with the SDK distribution it is pretty easy to put together the basic application skeleton - including the XML description of the UI layout. If you don't know what you are looking for the documentation on the Android SDK site is a bit sparse but is great to look up details. The application consists of an Activity, the Android abstraction for a single self-contained screen with some associated behavior and user interaction. This screen has a layout and a main menu defined in XML and provides framework methods to handle I/O and life-cycle events. For simple apps ...

I have been using the new T-Mobile G1 as my primary phone for a while now. It is the first phone which runs the open-source Android mobile software stack. I agree with most of the reviewers that the G1 or even the Android software is no iPhone when it comes to stylish elegance, attention to detail and consistency in the user experience. However, this is somewhat besides the point. Android is a developers dream - designed from the ground up as a 3rd party application delivery platform. I have also played around with the application development toolkit and written 2 small Android applications - which even for somebody without any prior experience in Java or mobile device programming is surprisingly easy. The main criticism for the G1 hardware is that it seems to have been designed by former soviet industrial planers - I can't quite figure out if it is meant to be retro Brezhnev or Khrushchev era styling... I would also prefer a 100% touch-screen driven device instead of the neither ...