android

UBports could potentially breathe new life into my old Nexus 5 when purchasing my next Nexus, which would be more than what was possible with my old Galaxy Nexus.

Download Free Smartwatch Faces for Moto 360, LG G Series, Samsung Gear, Sony SmartWatch 3 and Asus ZenWatch | FaceRepo. It says: Watch Faces. For WatchMaker and facer.

start [[Watchmaker Wiki]]. Noted for later, just because it's practical. Watchmaker has a lot of cool stuff in it that you can use for watches. And the weird effects when dimming, which I had initially, are not happening at the moment.

Getting Started with Android Studio | Android Developers. Oh, Google sees the light and offers an alternative to Eclipse as an IDE for Android programming. And then IntelliJ of all things, which I already work with. Nice!

Chathead Basics « Piwaï.info. If you're wondering how these Chatheads in the Facebook Messenger work, here's the explanation. There is a special permission that allows you to draw over other windows.

LiveCode Community Edition Overview | RunRev. Yep, it's out. GPL3 version of LiveCode. And yes, all target systems are included - OSX, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. And they've streamlined it too, the DMG is significantly smaller than the one from the last release (ok, many of the missing things are things that belong to the commercial parts, but still). And it really looks nice, sure, the language is wild, but hey, it's a much better GUI Builder than anything currently delivered with Android tools.

lein-droid Wiki. I'm playing around with alternatives to raw Android Java programming again, and this could be an interesting candidate as you can play with Clojure.

twotoasters/AndrOAuth · GitHub. Check it out, Koken uses OAuth for API security and this has been quite tricky on Android so far. The linked project should make it much easier.

usb-serial-for-android - Android USB host serial driver library for CDC, FTDI, Arduino and other devices. - Google Project Hosting. Very nice, this will certainly be interesting when I delve deeper into the Arduinos. Maybe it even works with the DigiSpark. Building control consoles for Arduino projects with Android would certainly be quite practical.

Controlling Arduino with Android using Processing. This way, you can quickly build a control system and a matching console for the Android phone with simple sketches, without having to pull out the big IDE. And since the Arduino environment is also based on Processing (at least the surface of the programming environment), it should be easy for both Processing and Arduino fans to understand the other side.

Sync API - Dropbox. Finally, a normal sync for Android and iOS. So far, you had to program the sync more or less yourself, but I like this much better when you can simply write local files on mobile devices and the sync then happens automatically in the background.

dashclock - Lock screen clock widget for Android 4.2+ - Google Project Hosting. I'm not a big fan of lock screen widgets, but this one is visually quite nice, expandable, and open source. This could work.

storm-gen - Lightweight DAO generator for Android SQLite - Google Project Hosting. Hmm, I could take a look at that, another ORM for SQLite under Android.

Back To Top: Android vs. iOS. An article about a curiosity in Android that has also irritated me several times. On iOS, you can quickly scroll to the top if you tap the title bar. On Android, there is nothing similar as a system-wide gesture. And it is not so easy to build something universal, as this article explains.

IOIO for Android - SparkFun Electronics. Also an interesting project, a friend pointed me to it today: an IO board for Android smartphones. It simply plugs in via USB and is accessed through a simple Java library. It has various analog and digital inputs and outputs, I2C and other goodies. You can even get a Bluetooth kit for it if you don't want to communicate via radio. Pricier perhaps than what you're used to in the Arduino environment, but still, sounds cool. I'll wait for my Smartduino first, though, which also has Android support.

Run Mobile Apps on Mac with BlueStacks :: Mobile Apps on Mac :: Mobile App Player for Mac | BlueStacks. Hey, the beta can now run any Android apps. I should definitely check it out. So one or the other Android tool would also be practical on the desktop, especially if there are not really good desktop versions available.

Java 3D Engine | Learn Java Programming in 3D. Looks very interesting, especially because it has a close integration into an IDE (BlueJ) with a focus on learning to program. And meanwhile, you can also directly generate Android applications from it and, for example, build your own games or toys.

F-Droid. Quite interesting - an app store for open source applications for Android. So you don't have to constantly check yourself for news. Of course, some of the apps are also in the normal Google Play Store, but not every open source project wants to jump through Google's hoops.

The iDroid Project - Where it presently stands - 0xDEADFA11. On the topic of Android on iPad - it doesn't look good, iDroid was probably the most active project that wanted to provide a complete solution, but the status from July and the project status overview do not look like something will come soon. Too bad.

ActiveAndroid | Active record style SQLite persistence for Android. Hmm, let's take a look - another ORM for Android, but one with quite interesting syntax. The source also promises a few more things like e.g. Joins. If migrations are also reasonably implemented (this is often lacking), the project could definitely motivate me to switch my little tinkering project.

couchbase/Android-Couchbase. Might be interesting as an alternative to SQLite - especially if you work less with structured data and more with documents. Because CouchDB offers real advantages there. Additionally, you get a sync infrastructure for automatic replication of database changes to a central server. And without having to build text exports with Dropbox-Sync like with SQLite solutions. Although the latter works surprisingly well in the situations where I need it.

Android-x86 - Porting Android to x86. Hmm, could this be a fun toy for my old eeeBook? I mean, it would be a pretty fat tablet with an integrated keyboard and an incompatible processor, what could possibly go wrong?

Pyjnius: Accessing Java classes from Python | Txzone. Very interesting side project of Kivy - with this you can quite easily integrate and use Java classes in Python without having to switch to Jython. It is based on Cython and JNI and integrates directly into native Python. Kivy is slowly becoming a real alternative for Android development that I should take a closer look at.

RFO BASIC! for Android. Fun system to play interactively with Android stuff - and especially to do that on the go. Basically a souped-up Basic with support for various Android sensors and access to all kinds of system services (e.g. SQLite), so you can really do a lot with it. Basic programs can even be converted into APKs that can be distributed as standalone apps. This brings back the feeling of programmable calculators from the 80s - amateur programs, but self-made hacks and tools.

Android Bootstrap. Hmm, maybe I should check it out - it should help you get a framework for an application done faster than if you manually put all the pieces together yourself. The idea behind it is a bit like the various HTML and CSS bootstraps - a base that you then further edit. Although I don't find the normal Android APIs so terribly complicated in general.

Buildroid for VirtualBox | BuilDroid. An alternative for AMD CPU owners and VirtualBox users to the previous part from Intel: this starts Android in VirtualBox and makes it available as an emulated system. Sounds quite interesting, especially since I already work a lot with VirtualBox and therefore this might be less stressful for me.

Supercharge Your Android Emulator Speed - Developer.com. Interesting - Intel has its own Android images based on x86 and a virtualization driver that allows the Android emulator to run at native speed. The downside is that it conflicts with VirtualBox and you can only run one or the other. But if you absolutely have to work with the Android emulator (e.g. because you don't have a developer device with you or because you can't have all device forms as hardware), this is definitely still interesting.

KDE Necessitas project - Welcome to KDE Necessitas project. Hmm, it has received a new homepage, but more importantly, a new Alpha4 which will soon become Beta1. And from Beta1, ABI compatibility is guaranteed and then it will be a real alternative for Android development. Ok, C++ is not really much better than Java for me - quite the opposite. But it has the advantage that you can write apps with QT and C++ that can be made available as desktop applications with little effort. So just take a look when I find the time.

commonsguy/cwac-anddown. Another Markdown implementation - this one uses sundown internally and JNI and the NDK to have a fast implementation of Markdown on Android. Worked flawlessly for me with the Nexus.

mitmel/SimpleContentProvider. Looks like a simple ORM that automatically generates an Android Content Provider. This makes the creation much slimmer in code.

sattvik/neko. Also noted for later, Clojure for programming Android applications with a few bindings for the Android APIs. Although the question remains whether they have tackled the startup problem, or if that still limits the use of Clojure.

ActionBarSherlock - Home. For later use: this allows you to use the ActionBar in code even on older Android versions, it automatically uses a backport if no native ActionBar is available.

Getting started · jberkel/android-plugin Wiki. And here is the central element for Scala programming for Android. This provides various sbt commands that handle Android integration and delivery.

Android programming with Scala. A bit stilted language, but useful content. The article provides a nice overview of what you gain when using Scala for Android programming. I need to take a closer look at this myself, as typing in Java sometimes gets on my nerves. Additionally, a workflow with sbt and a normal editor sounds much leaner than the various Java IDE environments. And some Scala language features practically scream to be used in the Android environment (especially traits).

OrmLite - Lightweight Object Relational Mapping ORM Java Package. Let's take a closer look, an ORM that can also be used in Android. Programming SQLite directly with SQLiteDatabaseHelper just isn't that much fun for me. It's a bit too low-level.

Create a package for Android for Kivy. I think I need to take a closer look at Kivy. They are now working with Python for Android, their own Python distribution that brings a customized interpreter for Android and a coupling via Cython, NDK, and JNI to the Android SDK. This way, you can produce real APKs that can be installed normally on devices - but write everything that makes up the application itself in Python. Of course, the question remains how fast it will run - Python is interpreted after all. But it would definitely be interesting for tools, especially since you can also run Kivy applications more or less directly under desktop systems.

Custom Drawn Interface/Android - Lazarus wiki. Hah, there is also quite a bit for FreePascal and Lazarus (the FP IDE with a touch of Delphi) regarding the programming of Android apps. It's all still a bit wobbly and hacky, but it's making progress. The idea is quite funny - a minimal Java app with minimal activity and then the integration of Pascal code via JNI. The idea there is to be able to continue using the LCL - the GUI library of Lazarus - so that you can program across systems. And you can then also use the built-in GUI Builder.

Basic4android Basic for Android - Rapid Application Development. Heh, nice, a kind of Visual Basic for Android. Unfortunately only for Windows. Too bad.

Android - Processing. Oh, that's interesting. The latest Processing 2.0 Alpha can also directly support Android - and it's really simple, just write a Processing app, switch to Android and use "Run on device" to bring it all to the device and start it there. That sounds really interesting for the typical small hacks, especially if you want to play around with graphics (that's the focus of Processing).

necessitas / Home / necessitas. Hmm, sounds quite interesting - a QT version for Android including an IDE for programming apps. Maybe I'll check it out when my Nexus is here.

Lumiya Viewer - About Lumiya. Very nice - a graphical SL and OpenSim client for Android. I must definitely try this out in a few days. For iOS, I still only know Pocket MV, but it can only do maps, chat, and stuff like that, no graphical rendering of the environment.

Epistle - Android Apps on Google Play. And another Markdown editor for Android, which is less Wiki and more a simple Markdown editor, but still quite interesting - it also comes with Dropbox support.

JWBs blog: Ema Personal Wiki for Android and Windows. Since I was just talking about Markdown - here's a personal wiki that uses Markdown for various systems, including Android. According to the description, it's quite similar to Vim Wiki.

[[New App]] Impressive: AIDE Is An IDE That Lets You Write And Compile Android Apps On Your Android Device, Begs For The Yo Dawg Treatment. Android development on Android devices (preferably tablets). That is so meta.

PySide for Android thp.io. That sounds very interesting - this way I would have a much more favorable programming language at my disposal to build Android programs. However, the start time of Activities written in Python might be quite significant due to the loading times of the Python stack and the Qt libraries. But for building a few small tools for personal use, that shouldn't matter.

Samsung Galaxy S Phones Ice Cream Sandwich Update. Well, HTC has already done the same for a series of devices with Gingerbread - just because their stupid overlay story doesn't work with the new system on older hardware (and we're not talking about really old hardware - these are devices that are a year old and usually still under contract with the provider!), there's simply no new operating system. Because this silly overlay story is much more important than current system releases. And not only are the users being screwed - the developers too, because since these devices are not really old, they then have a beautiful jungle of systems to deal with. And users will eventually have to root and install Cyanogenmod or similar if they don't want to live with old (and yes, unfortunately often quite buggy) system releases. The freedoms that Google grants device manufacturers are the biggest problem in the Android world. Bigger than any patent threat that Apple can build. The real enemies of Google's Android vision are neither Microsoft nor Apple, but the device manufacturers and providers. Because they are mentally still in the 90s and put their own control above everything.

How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%, Nuxeo Developers Blog. Badly blogged, as we will probably soon play around with apps and the Android simulator is extremely slow - testing with it makes almost no sense, as with Phonegap applications, you could outperform the browser rendering with paper, pencil, and eraser, so slow is the image build-up. With the solution here, you don't have an exact test of an Android device, but at least for the first feeling tests, it should be sufficient, as with Phonegap it is more important that the rendering engine is the same than that the CPU is the same.

Groklaw - A Brief Explanation of Microsofts Anti-Google Patent FUD ~ by pj. Since the whole patent mess around Android is already somewhat opaque, I think it's good when sites like Groklaw comment on it: "Again, Google is pointing to the main issue, not that Microsoft and its satellite helpers are meanies, but that what they are doing is illegal. They are attacking the open source community, with patents as the weapon and not just as individual companies but as an artificial group designed to 'strangle' Android. And if you look at the mobile litigation going on as we speak, ask yourself: who is suing and who is being sued? Does it look coordinated to you?"

Get Started Guide « PhoneGap. Just blogged for future reference, because I will definitely need this again when I play around with Phonegap and Android. Quite bumpy, it would be nice if Phonegap simply included a ready-made project template. But well, it works anyway - my Hello World appears. On the simulator. And I don't have to touch nasty Java for it, just nasty JavaScript.

HTC Desire wont be getting an official Gingerbread update. Of course, Android is so great, but device manufacturers ruin it with their useless extensions and deliver devices with too little equipment, so that new system releases stay out. If I really switch to Android, it will probably only be one that is directly supplied by Google, then at least I don't have to deal with such nonsense like Sense (or be blocked from new system releases by its forced installation). Yes, I know, I can root and rom - but that's just as much of a non-argument for me as jailbreak on iOS devices.