Ubuntu 9.10 and ADT 0.94 tangle

Last night I had a bright idea and upgraded my Android SDK 2.0 system from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

Everything went (almost) perfectly. The Eclipse 3.5 dev environment runs fine. I can create and run Android 2.0 emulators with no issues. But ddms (the Dalvik VM tool in Android SDK Tools) is no longer able to identify my real android cell  phone. It sees the device, but doesn't pick up any information from it. Instead, I get a string of "???????" where the device ID should be.

I'm assuming it is a security / permissions issue post-Ubuntu upgrade....and hope to sort it out later. I'll update this post if I work it out.....or not.

Be warned that any such upgrade as the one above isn't likely to be seamless.

2009-11-04 - Update: This is definitely a permissions problem. Trying to list the device with adb gives:

List of devices attached 
???????????? no permissions

Now...How to set the permissions? I've set up the policy files. They don't appear to be working. I've seem some bugs listed on Launchpad for Policykit. Not sure how to interpret what I'm reading.

This bug on Launchpad seems to explain things. They appear to have made some changes without regard to usabililty.

Trying to access the  phone with ddms give me more permissions errors:

55:16 W/ddms: Unable to get frame buffer: device (????????????) request rejected: insufficient permissions for device
55:18 W/ddms: Unable to get frame buffer: device (????????????) request rejected: insufficient permissions for device

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkbox/+bug/435714

I have also tried running it as sudo:

steve@media:~/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/tools$ sudo ./adb devices
List of devices attached
????????????    no permissions

No good.

Android App of the Day: Feedr

Feedr is a greet app for collecting all your RSS / news feeds together in one place. I used to have the Gizmodo app, the Slashdot app and other bits and pieces for keeping track of news and articles from a variety of tech and general news sites. Feedr's ability to gather them all together in one easy-to-use, appealing app let me uninstall most of them.

Feedr presents your feeds in a list with each entry telling you how many articles there and how many of those remain unread. You touch the feed you want and it moves to the list of articles. You can scroll up and down the list using your finger or the trackball or D-button and arrows if your phone has either one.

If you touch an article, Feedr gets the content, text and images, and presents it in the app. If you want to read more, you can touch "Open" and go to the site. Or you can "Share" it. The "Mobilize" button presents the web content in the browser in a form more suitable for mobile devices.

Feedr's main menu lets you update your feeds, search feeds, add / delete feeds, import / export from Google Reader, organise feeds, clear the cache , search history, display the status and mark all as read.

Within a feed, the menu provides access to feed-specific functions, including; mark all as read, update the feed, search the feed and flip orientation. You can also make shortcuts. These are Feedr icons placed on the Home screen and bearing the name of whichever feed you wanted the shortcut to take you to.

I like this app. It's feature rich, simple to use and doesn't get in the way of the content. It's easy to use, read and manage.

Top marks to Feedr. It's on my (constantly changing) "must-have" list.

Android App of the Day: Mobile C64

Definitely a niche app, "Mobile C64" is an emulator that lets you run a virtual Commodore 64 console on your android phone. It's one of a number of C64 emulators (Android C64, Frodo C64). They are all worth looking at if you're interested.  Some are better than others. I have not tried them all.

Commodore 64 systems were the PlayStation of the 1980s and very early 90s. Millions of people wrote their first programs in BASIC on systems like this before moving on to larger, more capable systems that came later. But these devices were relatively cheap, a huge proportion of young boys had them.

Image files for games and other apps can be downloaded for free from C64.com. Some games don't work well on phones that don't have a 'hard' keyboard as, so far, emulator developers have not included support for phones that only have soft keyboards.

Software is still being written for the platform. There is a twitter client (Breadbox) you can run in your C64 emulator if it supports networking. If you want to discover the dawn of cheap home computing, brush up on your BASIC programming or re-live your past, load this app (or one like it) on your phone. Or maybe you were a Sinclair ZX80 fan.

Android App of the Day: Color Pop!

"Color Pop!" for android is one those cool wee apps that more or less does one thing and does it well. Color Pop! lets you take any image and it will remove all colour from it. (Click on the screenshots for full size).

You can then put back whatever pieces of colour you think would be best. Or you can start with all the colours and remove just the pieces you want to remove.

You can create some striking effects with not too much effort. My own efforts so far have been fairly pedestrian, but I'm sure with a little experience the imagination will kick in and anyone using this app will making some seriously cool images for phone or PC backgrounds or maybe as illustrations for web sites, home made cards - whatever. In the smaller image below, I took a pic of a rose in our garden and swiped the colour back into the flower in a few seconds. Far from finished, but you get the idea.

Color Pop provides you with several basic controls and the brush tool. You can make the brush large for the wide open spaces you want to sort out quickly.

For finer work, you can magnify the image and decrease the size of the brush - right down to pixel level. To help you avoid making mistakes, the "Move" button turns off the Pop (removing colour) and unpopping (putting it back) so you can move the brush tool safely. You quickly get into the habit of using "Move" once you've dragged the brusch accidentally across an area you just painstakingly perfected!

You can also set the level of saturation. You may not want all the colour back at the same level....or yo might want to pour it on and over-saturate the image.

It's a fun app. More productive than playing a game...and you end up with some cool images. Here is one my own efforts of some flowers in our garden. This image isn't as large as the original Color Pop! produced. I right-click-saved this one from my twitpic uploaded image, so it's the default twitpic.com size.

Close-up with the Android 2.0 Emulator

Just upgraded my Android SDK from v1.6 to v2.0. The upgrade process was flawless and the documentation up to the job. On my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 Linux system, it's all running like a dream.

The Android 2.0 in the emulator is a bare-bones system, but many of the new features are there, including the new hardware support. I picked one of the larger screen resolutions for the second AVD I created. It fills most of the screen on the PC.

As you can see from the screenshot, the new Contacts app allows you to kick off apps related to the pieces of contact information you have for each contact. For example, if you have an email address for the person concerned, you'll be able to touch the email icon and send them an email. The Contact entries for each person are many, including phone, email, IM, Postal address and several others. This could be quite powerful.

I'm focusing on actually writing something (learner level) to run on the phone, so will get back to that.

 [2009-11-03 Update: Some additional screenshots]

The Settings now include Quick Launch and Running services. This fills a gap in managing running applications.

Some new icons for the usual basic services. As mentioned above in the main post, the contacts have been enhanced. 

The app tray contents. 

The browser has been enhanced. Looks better IMHO. 

National want to privatise water

Why is it the only business model National's mates in the business community seem to know is to seek a monopoly on an essential resource, courtesy of their political agents and clients, and then clip the ticket?

They're at it again.

This time, the government plan to privatise our water, handing it over to private operators. We've been here before with TranzRail, Telecom and Air New Zealand. This will see us all paying more for water and workers in the water services paid less. The difference will be the "profit".

Same old story. Are people really dumb enough to let them get away with it? Again?

Guess we'll find out.

Android App of the Day: Better Terminal Emulator Pro

This app won't be for everyone, but I like it a lot.

"Better Terminal Emulator Pro" (paid app -US$3.99) gives you a full Linux terminal, with "Almquist" (ash) shell on your Android phone. There are free versions, but they don't include all the functionality of the Pro version and they aren't always the latest releases.

You don't need root access to your phone to install and use this app as a user on the phone's system. There will be files and directories that are read-only to you unless you do "root" your phone to gain read-write access to them as the root (Administrator) user.

Better Terminal Emulator Pro has a lot great features. You can define special keys to perform tasks otherwise not possible on a phone keyboard, like Cntl+anything or ESC. You can define shortcuts to perform commands using the various buttons on your phone that aren't part of the keyboard, like volume, back and camera. You can email the contents of the screen buffer to email address (or addresses).

Preferences lets you choose font size, colour and column format. You can enable full screen mode and decide whether or not the screen will sleep or not. You can turn the shell off and on, set the shell's command line, or specify an initial command to be executed when the shell starts. you may want to run "top" each time you open the emulator, so you can quickly see what's eating your processor. You can define the height of the soft keyboard in both portrait and landscape modes. You can define a "control" key - separate from the special keys functions already mentioned. You can set the phone to vibrate on arrow keys.

It also serves as a quick file manager for those adapt at using the command line to perform routine file management jobs like copying, renaming and deleting. For deleting groups of unwanted files (rm -ir unwanted.txt, for example - wiping out all files, intereactively and recursively, called "unwanted.txt", in a directory tree), there is no better alternative

If you're a command line person, then turning your phone into a real linux box with Better Terminal Emulator Pro will be irresistible. If you want to root your phone, then this app will be indispensible.

Android App of the day: SwiFTP v1.11

SwiFTP is an FTP server app you can run on your Android phone. It only works on Wifi. I'm assuming the telco firewalls would make access over 3G problematic. I like it because it's simple and it's one more way you can get data on and off your phone with simple tools. In this case, you're making data available to anyone on your IP subnet with an FTP client.

SwiFTP seems to run fine in the background, so you can carry on doing other things with your phone while it's busy serving data to whatever clients may be accessing it or uploading files to it.

With a web browser, you'd go to the URL the app presents. Mine was "ftp://192.168.2.101:2121/". But uploading using a web browser can be problematic. Instead, I used "ncftp" (free FTP client app for most OSes) and that was the best of all. I was able to connect to the phone and upload / download what I wanted. The ncftp command that worked for me was:


ncftp -P 2121 -u userid -p password 192.168.2.101

Used once, ncftp let me save it as a 'bookmark' called "Magic"...and I can now access my phone's files on the sdcard via the SwiFTP server by simply typing in "ncftp Magic" and pressing enter. SwiFTP supports passive mode data transfer by default.

As all data on the sdcard is accessible by any app on the phone, any file uploaded to your phone is immediately available for whatever purpose was intended. SwiFTP provides a quick way to copy files to your phone from any local PC on your network without having to connect it to a computer with the USB cable. It also appears to support multiple logins from the same user, though I have not tested simultaneous data transfer from two clients. I'll have to test it to see. :-)

Changed appearance

I was thinking about how much I like the lighter, brighter aesthetics of the new Android software....and sitting there looking at my (formerly) dark, dreary looking blog....and decided to make a few changes.

Hope you like the new look. I do.

Android App of the Day: WiFinder

Android already had several reasonably good WiFi apps. I've used WiFi Analyzer and WiFi Buddy for the past several months. They were good at detecting WiFi, but limited, at best, in their ability to connect to the WiFi they found.

Then a couple of weeks ago, an upgrade for WiFinder (from pgmsoft.com, based in Poland) became available and set a whole new standard, in my view, for WiFi apps on Android. It does everything I want it to do.

If you start it and WiFi isn't on, it asks you if you want it on. If you close it using the Back button, it asks if you want to stop your WiFi. No need for a WiFi widget, then.

WiFinder can connect to anything using any common form of encryption (WEP, WPA/WPA2).

WiFinder has a very fresh, clean look that I like very much. It doesn't Force Close. In short, it looks great, does all it needs to do and does it very well.

Even better, it's one of the many very good free aps available on the Android Market. This one is on my "must-have" app list.