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Archive for the ‘Developer’ Category

Living it UP!

04 Apr

jwbone
This is the second part of a two part post [part 1], now that I have been using the UP for nearly two weeks. So far I like it, and I have found out I am more active than I thought even with long hours spent commuting and even longer hours sitting at a desk. The UP indicates that on an ‘average’ day I am still walking about 3.5 miles. The UP also showed that I was not getting nearly as much sleep as I thought, i.e noticeably less than 6 hours – so I am now going to bed an hour earlier in general.

I haven’t got so much data, with less than two weeks usage under my belt, that I need external spreadsheets and such but there is a Google Docs script that a Jawbone user put together that does a pretty good job of showing the UP data in a variety of charts and I am looking out to see if anyone else has created a similar version for Excel or Open Office.  Jawbone user Aurelien created an UP Google docs analysis script here: http://bit.ly/13FEqSq

Nothing has changed as far as I can tell in the Android App availability department, so my warning from the first post still stands. Try the App on your Android device before you buy the UP. If you can’t get the app because Google Play won’t let you download it – or even worse can’t run the app wouldn’t you rather know this before you layout $129.00+ for the UP?

My stock, non-rooted Xoom running official Jelly Bean was not allowed to download the app from Google play – luckily I got it from another Android user and loaded and ran it just fine. Syncing the tablet with the UP was not a problem but there were a couple of times that I wanted to try timing an activity when of course I did not have my tablet (to sync and see results not to initiate the activity) and it would be cool to run this from my phone so….

I updated my Samsung exhibit over lunch a couple of days ago to Cyanogenmod 9.1, i.e. now running Ice Cream Sandwich. I loaded and ran the UP App just fine. While I had rooted my phone almost from day one to get rid of the installed T-Mobile/Samsung installed crapware, I was still running stock Android with updates. I should have done the ROM upgrade ages ago. ICS on the Samsung exhibit is SO much faster, has noticeably better battery life and a user friendly ICS interface (ICS) all in all its been a good week living with UP!

 
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Posted in Android, News, Review

 

Jawbone UP and Android

25 Mar

jwboneJawbone announced last week that their Jawbone UP was now available forAndroid, which was great news – I had been looking into getting the Fitbit Flex but with their overly long lead time to market (coming in Spring since back in January), I was more than ready to try the Jawbone instead.

Jawbone had some problems with their first generation device, but they seem to have overcome them for this second generation at least according to the iPad crowd.

The Jawbone hardware, so far appears to work very well, exactly as they described and I’m glad that I bought it. However, it appears from my interaction  with them that Jawbone doesn’t quite ‘get’ the Android market. The Jawbone UP app is only available on the Google Play store and is only available apparently to the dozen or so devices listed on the Jawbone  device compatibility list. Google Play will not let you download the app because the Jawbone App manifest is apparently very restrictive as to what devices it will allow. Of course I only  found this out after Amazon delivered my Jawbone in one day and I couldn’t use it.

I called support at Jawbone and emailed them and even though I explained via email and over the phone that  my phone was running 4.0 and my Xoom was fully JellyBean at 4.1.2 there was no joy in getting the  app. They seemed surprised to know that  they could actually put a  link to their own app on their own web site and we Android owners could download for ourselves they didn’t actually need to be in the  Play store and unlike Apple they could allow the app to be obtained directly from them. In fact I received a follow-up email today from Jawbone support explaining  that my Xoom was released with 3.0 and so would not be supported. I’m sending them a link to this blog post so that they get that Android devices just like Apple devices do get updates to newer versions they are not stuck with what was installed at the factory.

Bottom-line if you are not on the list of their supported devices, and even if you  are. Download and install the app before you even think of buying the Jawbone UP. If you can’t  get the app installed before you buy it – the experience will not  get any better when you actually have the Jawbone in hand.

I ended up trying out 4 tablets and 3 Android phones (hoping to get the .APK that I could email to myself) and none of them  worked including a supposedly compatible Samsung LG phone. I did eventually manage to get the app from a kind android user who mailed it  to me and if you want  to risk it, you can try the torrent route (so not recommended). Of course Jawbone may listen and provide a download link but who knows. I’m using the Jawbone with my Xoom and I like it – more about that in my next post after I have more  than 1 day  experience.

 
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Posted in Android, News, Review, Technology, Uncategorized

 

Carrier IQ

02 Dec

I received a security alert about Carrier IQ yesterday evening and it seems well on the road to hitting the mainstream media by the end of the day. In a nutshell, a researcher, Trevor Eckhart,  found that hidden software on his Android phone was reporting back pretty much everything that he did with his phone to a company that he had never heard of (Carrier IQ). The hidden software lied about its presence and when found could not be stopped or otherwise prevented from running on the phone. Eckhart classified it as a rootkit, posted his findings (apparently about a week ago) and then, as the saying goes, “things got interesting”. The company, Carrier IQ, tried to shut him up by threatening him with lawsuits and heavy fines. Eckhart turned to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for help and they backed him up, forcing Carrier IQ to back down. Eckhart’s story and video showing the software at work has gone viral, exposing the fact that this software is being installed by many US carriers and is on Android, Blackberry and while initially thought not to be the case, even Apple iPhones. Windows phones do not appear to be affected and some of the Google experience devices ( Google Nexus One, Galaxy Nexus and Xoom ) also do not have Carrier IQ running.

Clearly Carrier IQ is facing the prospect of some serious class-action lawsuites, if not criminal charges (wiretap laws do still exist) and of course the carriers that installed this (unless they can throw Carrier IQ under the bus and somehow claim lack of knowledge) are also going to be facing some tough legal action. Of  course if it turns out that this is an outgrowth of the older NSA warrantless surveillance suites that got AT&T into trouble then they will face no legal action as they can just say the government told us to this so you can’t sue us (the government gave the carriers a get-out-of-jail-free card for things like this) and that would of course make us all feel so much better right?

One other issue that may come about is a return to the question of the carrier data usage discrepancies. A number of people and researchers have shown that they have been charged for far more data usage than they have actually used and the carriers have always denied that there is a problem. Of course this was before Carrier IQ but now that we know that the carriers have also installed hidden software that can send every button push, text message, email, web click or URL that you visit even when you are on WIFI and not supposed to be using the cellular connection then you have to wonder, privacy concerns aside, who is paying for that bandwidth and will there be other lawsuits for the overcharges?

Interesting times – Don’t Blink.

 
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Posted in Android, News, Observations

 

Pocketbook IQ 701 meets the Android market

15 Feb

      I have been using the Pocketbook IQ 701 tablet/reader primarily as an e-reader for books and magazines and to catch up on a few video podcasts that I used to watch on the laptop.

      I did add a couple of other apps but the e-reader is still the primary use. Adding apps to the Pocketbook IQ (or pretty much any Android tablet) ranges from easy to somewhat frustrating. The frustration is because tablets are not yet officially supported in the Google market so there is no official way to register and get access to the market from a tablet and for some reason software publishers that would have once put up the app on their web site even if they also put it in the market, now only put their apps into the Google marketplace. This means like it or not, while there are some alternatives, if you can't get to the market on your tablet there will be some apps that will be difficult to get because they are only officially distributed through the market. In my case, I was watching Adam Curry's Big App show through its RSS feed but apparently when he made the Android app he stopped the feed and then inexplicably only made that app available through the android market.

Pocketbook goes to Market

The easiest way I found was to load Repack's experimental Pocketbook IQ 701 firmware (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116736) onto your Pocketbook IQ. Even without the Android Market I found this to be a very stable, much faster version of the standard firmware – plus it comes with Launcher Pro and removes that oh so annoying welcome message at start-up.  I did not try to get A2SD (or app2sd), which also comes installed, configured and working as comments indicate that this can actually slow down your Pocketbook. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Android, Developer, News, Technology

 

Pocketbook IQ 701 an Android e-reader tablet.

17 Jan

 

        I bought a Pocketbook IQ over the holidays and have already used it to read a Repairman Jack book, Fatal Error, and a couple of graphic novels (comic books to the uninitiated). I needed to replace my Sony E-reader which went walk-about sometime in October. I was also looking forward to trying out the color capabilities of the newer devices since that meant that I could actually read standard CBR and CBZ formatted media in color. 

     I was strongly considering the Archos devices because they were getting all of the press but at the end-of-the-day, Archos was all talk and no product. When I heard good things about the PocketBook IQ and also that I could almost by two of them for the price of one Archos device, I immediately ordered the unit from Pocketbook.   

        The Pocketbook IQ comes with software for reading and downloading ebooks from their  Bookland.net e-book store and, which is unusual for low cost tablets, an ability to install 3rd party Android applications. You can't directly install from the Android app store but that is a Google App Market store restriction for any non-phone Android device, and if you really want to you can install App Market on your own as well.  

     The  PocketBook IQ shares some lineage with the Pandigital Novel device and the Cruz tablet but the PocketBook is a much more solid device with a metal, instead of plastic, case. Since the PocketBook IQ can install apps, it isn't limited to just e-reading. There are apps for just about everything: you can send and receive email, use it as a calendar and day planner, browse the internet, download and send files, use Google Maps, get news updates, setup slideshows, play videos, music, etc. Hardware wise, the unit comes with 2GB of memory, 256MB RAM, a full-size SD card, mini USB port, WiFi, two speakers, and headphone jack. The lack of an SD card slot and USB were the main reasons why an iPad was never even under consideration for me. The PocketBook IQ also has a 7" TFT LCD screen with a very nice resolution of 800 x 600. 

Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Android, Review, Technology

 

An Android development “quickie”

13 Jan

How about this blog as an Android app? Yes, I know about time right? I haven't had a lot of time to play around with Android. I decided against  upgrading my phone to an Android model just yet, but I did pick-up an Android based tablet – more on that in another post. Anyway, with a real Android platform other than the PC emulator, what better place to test a custom Android App? You can get this blog as an Android app just by clicking on the Downloads link in the sidebar – you do have to be a logged in (i.e registered) user to grab it though. Registration is free as is the app. Enjoy!

 
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Posted in Android, Developer

 

Android Development Continues

19 Oct

Okay, flush with the success of getting my version of "Hello World" running within the Android emulator, I'm ready to try something that ties a web page to the mobile application experience. I had noticed forum references to something called Phonegap and after a little time spent with Google I decided to try out the Phonegap framework.

If you've been following along with my Android development posts then you probably have about fifty percent of the Phonegap prerequisites already installed on your machine e.g. eclipse, jdk. If you followed along from some of my earlier posts then you also have a Ruby environment, GIT and possibly ANT installed as well. If you don't already  have these setup then you will need to install them – you will have to decide if the non-trivial exercise of installing all of these applications is worth the trouble. You can find excellent instructions for installing all of the components over on the Phonegap wiki. I am not going to duplicate the excellent information instructions found on the Wiki in this post, so just go over to the Wiki and scroll down to the Android Tutorials section for the details. If you really don't want to have to install Ruby and Git then the Wiki has instructions for using Phonegap with Eclipse and without Ruby and the Ruby droidgap script.

Once you have the requisite environment built then you need to install the Phonegap framework for android (you can also pull down frameworks for Blackberry, iPhone, Palm etc). In this case create a Phonegap directory and from within that directory issue the command:
git clone git://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-iphone.git

Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Android, Developer

 

Android Development

12 Oct

I am thinking about getting an Android based smartphone as I mentioned in last week's post, partly because of the possibility of doing some mobile application development. It really isn't too difficult to get started and to build the obligatory "Hello World" app in Android just to ensure that everything is installed and working correctly.The big benefit to Android development is that the cost to entry is low – you don't need to run out and buy new hardware and software and you don't have to learn a platform specific semi-proprietary language before you can get started either.

I already had the latest Java Development Environment installed so the only thing that I needed to do was to get and re-install Eclipse. I Don't really like Eclipse ever since I had to work with IBM's version which forms the core of IBM's Rational Developer Tools.  I know Eclipse is powerful and can be used as a collaborative development IDE for a lot of languages but to me, it has a kind of kludgy Windows 98 era feel with a generally non-intuitive interface.. Eclipse also seems prone to subtle configuration errors that make it very difficult to determine the cause of problems. Eclipse generated error messages have a neat trick of being numerous while remaining almost completely devoid of useful information. That said, I installed Eclipse, the Android SDK and then the device manager. One trick that I learned while working with the IBM Rational Tools version of Eclipse when you get a workspace configured the way you like it make a copy (its just a folder). When you make a change or create a new project make another copy – preferably keeping the earlier copy around as well. When you run into one of those weird configuration problems or you find that creating a project hoses your workspace just delete the entire workspace and replace it (copy) the backup version in place and try again. This is much quicker than trying to troubleshoot, debug and/or fix problems indicated by the obtuse Eclipse error messages that you will get (in my opinion).

Anyway Eclipse was installed and I followed the tutorial over at whyandroid.com to build the hello world app.It took a little while for the App to show up but it did work. Of course now I have to go back over the build and configuration steps to figure what I actually just did :-)

 
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Posted in Android, Developer, Just Business

 

OOMA – Time to take it to the next level

29 Apr

OOMA, the VOIP upstart has been selling the buy the hardware and your phone calls are free service for about three years now. I am a satisfied OOMA user myself, having owned one for about six months now and yes I am now in the ownership period where my phone calls are indeed free. I am also a regular contributor on the OOMA forums and that is why I am going to say to OOMA “It’s time to take it to the next level”. You are no longer a start-up but you’re not yet a ‘big’ company – if you want to play with the big guys you’re going to have to take your game up a notch or three:

Drop all the QOS discussions in your marketing materials – you’ve landed all the tech user, early adopters you need – QOS marketing is irrelevant as most users don’t care, don’t understand or they are just not interested. You should make OOMA as bandwidth efficient and clear sounding as possible, which you are doing, just stop positioning your box as a general network router, server and firewall where folks plug in everything else behind the OOMA. Just manage yourself and stop trying to manage and support everything else on peoples networks, your support calls will drop when you become just another box on the network and not network central.

Drop the “free phone service” line, you’ve proved your point but going forward free phone service sounds like snake-oil – consumers are very well aware that you get what you pay for and when you tie “free” to “phone service” you run the risk of losing your audience because they are now busy looking for “the catch” and not hearing your message. Get your marketing folks to create campaigns to play up the huge savings “at least 70 percent off your phone bill – guaranteed” or something similar, but lose the “free”. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Developer, Just Business, Observations

 

OOMA call log statistics with Ruby (Part 2)

23 Mar

In my last article (part 1) I described the OOMA Logger application that I had running on my development machine, and I promised to make it available by deploying it to Heroku which is a cool service for deploying web based Ruby apps.  The application is now live at http://oomalogger.heroku.com (nice name right!)

First off, I ran in to a couple of unforeseen problems like the fact that heroku apps are for all intents and purposes read-only (which meant for example, that I had to figure out the Nokogiri parsing problem and not use the file-system work-around hack that I had come up with).

Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Developer, Ruby Notes, Web Services

 
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