Posts for the ‘Mobile Tech’ Category
Monday, December 22nd, 2008
Another first from Brilaps. A brand new native G1 application to search the blogosphere.
Andorati is a Technorati.com client that brings the blogosphere search to your G1 Phone. Pick your tag, or type your search. You’ll get the latest of what’s being blogged around the world.
Andorati also features an easy bookmarking mechanism. You can add the blog, and the blog post to your browser bookmarks. This way, you can also access those sites from the G1′s web browser later on. (*hint: Andorati also implements a multi-select bookmark cleanup feature)
The initial beta release of Andorati is “Andorati4Geeks“. Andorati for Geeks require that you have an APIKey from Technorati to enable the searches. The APIKey is assigned to you when you register a free account on Technorati.com (http://technorati.com/developers/)
Andorati4Geeks 1.1 Released on 2008-12-22.
Release Notes: AndoratiReleaseNotes
Posted in Android, Mobile Tech, News | Comments Off
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
This post is about my battle of building, installing and configuring the Android Platform and the Android SDK on Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit x86. Insult to the injury, all that is happening in a VirtualBox VM on a Mac running Snow Leopard.
Please remember, this is NOT intended to be a step by step instruction manual. RTFM 
Follow the regular installation instructions and possibly throw in the following in the mix, when and if you have to.
You will need the Android Source to build (doh!). Here.
Obstacle #1. No Java 1.5.0 in Ubuntu 9.10. Gotta have it, otherwise Android “make” barely bothers to launch.
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index_jdk5.jsp is a starting point. I grabbed the rpm build.
Assuming you have the “rpm” (otherwise apt-get install rpm), install the downloaded package. –force-debian –nodeps flags may be required.
Now you have Java 1.5.0 in place, you need to setup your environment properly.
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| sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_22/bin/java 50 |
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| sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_22/bin/javac 50 |
** change your jdk1.5.0 path if necessary
Getting close.
The “apt-get install” in the documentation http://source.android.com/download includes “sun-java5-jdk“, so take it out and run the command as follows:
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| sudo apt-get install git-core gnupg flex bison gperf build-essential zip curl zlib1g-dev gcc-multilib g++-multilib libc6-dev-i386 lib32ncurses5-dev ia32-libs x11proto-core-dev libx11-dev lib32readline5-dev lib32z-dev |
Try the “make” now.
Next is installing the Android SDK on Ubuntu 9.10. Grab it at http://developer.android.com . Unzip, move it around etc.
Starting with Android SDK r3, you need to pick and choose what you want to download and install. “./android” under the “tools” directory does that for you. However, every single time I tried this on my Macs, I got the “You might want to force download through HTTP in the settings.” error. So be it, go the the options, simply check the “Force https://… sources to be fetched using http://…” option and download happily ever after. This was a no-go in my Ubuntu 9.10. The trick to properly enable and utilize that checkbox is to run:
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| export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true |
Now, you should be able to download the SDK without the https:// mallarky.
After all this, hopefully, you should be Android’ing in your Ubuntu box in no time
Good luck.
Posted in Android, Code, Hacks, Tips, Tricks | 7 Comments »
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Another cool gadget from Brilaps just hit the wires.
iMia is a web application focused on bringing a standard iPhone web interface to the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! content management systems. Yes, the iPhone does have a full web browser that is capable of displaying any site, so it is possible to use these content management systems without iMia. However, the experience is often less than appealing since users must constantly zoom in, zoom out, pinch to expand and contract, etc. As with most web sites and/or applications, these content management systems were coded with the desktop browser in mind. This is were iMia comes in…
iMia brings a simple web interface to the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! content management systems for iPhone users. The application is designed in accordance with the recommended iPhone interface design guidelines laid out by Apple. iMia makes use of the iui project’s fabulous efforts in this area.
Learn more on the product page here – http://wiki.brilaps.com/wikka.php?wakka=iMia.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, Mobile Tech, News, iPhone | Comments Off
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Since I introduced myself to Google AppEngine, I’ve always liked it. It’s truly a joy to develop on the AppEngine platform. Due to hectic work schedule, I wasn’t able to get my head around to thinking of a new toy project so I could get into AppEngine again. Well, this weekend I decided to take a break from work-work and build something on the side for a change.
When I was working on the NewsXperiment project, I was neck deep in the RSS/Atom feed world. All the news feed sources that I had accumulated for NewsXperiment was hanging around to be used for another purpose. So came “News Fishing“.
I needed a way to quickly peek at what’s happening “right now” without being lost in a jungle of “stuff” on a web page or in an RSS reader app. I wanted to see “one” news item at a time, and if my interest in intrigued I wanted to dig in more by clicking on the link to the original page. If not, keep fishing. That was my initial and only requirement and it turned out to be the premise of “News Fishing“.
On the techie – geeky side of things, News Fishing uses quite large set of features that are provided by the Google AppEngine platform; Crons Jobs, Task Queues, Memcache etc. I opted on using YUI 3.0 as the javascript library of choice on the frontend.
- As I’m typing this, two mobile apps (for iPhone and Android phones) for News Fishing are in the works.
http://newsfishing.appspot.com
http://wiki.brilaps.com/wikka.php?wakka=NewsFishing
Posted in Mobile Tech, News | No Comments »
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Since the day it came out, I’ve been an avid user of my G1 and a fellow developer of a few applications on the Android Platform. I firmly believe that G1 is one of the best gadgetie devices made. It’s pretty ugly, and outdated by now, but none of the more recent Android based phones were able to steal my heart. Being a quite heavy user of my G1, all my contacts, calendars, emails were constantly being synced up with the device. Probably for the very first time, I didn’t have to worry about moving contacts from one phone to the other. At the time I was assuming my next shiny phone would be another Android based phone. I was wrong! Recently, I started using a Nokia N97 Mini. And I got it for free (one of the perks of working at “connecting people“).
Of course, the immediate problem I faced was the contact syncing. My phonebook was nicely stored somewhere in the clouds of Google, where I must absolutely not worry about them getting lost, or being sold soliciting purposes. That data must be moved. But how?
I had a few options for moving all that data on my phone.
To begin with, the good old, “export / import” way. That was too much work! And, the calendar involvement in the mix would make things just more difficult. And there came, iSync to the rescue, which was allegedly perfectly capable of synching Google Calendar, Contacts to the many devices. And my new shiny N97 Mini was in the list. It seemed like, I had a winner method of syncing.
By the way, as the title suggests, all this is happening on a Mac, a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. *I don’t do Windows on my personal time, even though Windows 7 looks like, Microsoft got it right : )
I had to jump through a few hoops, and Bing’ed, and Google’d around. And when I think, I got it right, I decided to share a quick summary of my “Nokia N97 Mini and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iSync, Google Contacts, Google Calendar” adventure here.
The basic steps are:
- Sync your Google Contacts to the “Address Book.app”
- Sync your Google Calendar to “iCal.app”
- Download and install the N97 Mini (or your device) the compatibility driver thinger to your computer, so “iSync.app” will know about your device.
- Try to find, where the heck the “Sync Now” button in the “menu” is.
- Sync Now
Sync your Google Contacts to the “Address Book.app”
This is very straightforward. Launch the “Address Book.app”. Take a peek at the link below.
http://www.google.com/support/contactsync/
All you need to do is enable the “Synchronize with Google” checkbox, and enter your Google username/pass in the “Configure” dialog.
Sync your Google Contacts to the “iCal.app”
This is also very straightforward. Google explains it perfectly. Link below.
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical
In summary, they say;
To set up CalDAV support for Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal, follow these steps:
- Open Apple iCal, go to Preferences and then the Accounts tab.
- Click on the + button to add an account.
- Under Account Information, enter your Google Account username and password.
- Under Server Options, add the following URL:
https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUREMAIL@DOMAIN.COM/user
Replace ‘youremail@domain.com’ with the email address that you use to log in to Calendar. Make sure to include the ‘@domain.com’ portion (which is @gmail.com for Gmail users) in this section.
iSync.app
When you launch iSync, and start the “Add Device” process, iSync will scan around to see if any devices are connected (USB or Bluetooth). I believe, even though iSync was able to see my N97, it showed me an error about compatibility. Hence, you need to go to http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/isync/compatibility-and-download and download the compatibility plug-in for your phone/device.
Download and install it. The rest is really easy. Nokia already has a very good tutorial on how-to, so just follow it. http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/isync/how-to/using_isync
If you can see your phone/device in the iSync app, you’re pretty close.
The trick for me was, I read somewhere in the docs that, after installing the compatibility plugin, click “Sync Now”. That was a hard part. Where the heck was “Sync Now”?
It’s on your “menu”, where all the little icon thingies are.
And if you cannot see it there, in order to add the Sync menu to the menu bar, open iSync, choose iSync > Preferences, and then select “Show status in menu bar.” That’s how you start the “Address Book” and “iCal” sync as well.
That’s hopefully it. Good Sync’in!
*disclaimer: this is not intended to be a tutorial on how to do all this. simply a compilation of a few official links, and tips/tricks. if you have trouble during any of the steps, i’m certainly not the one to help you resolve them.
Posted in Hacks, Tips, Tricks, Mobile Tech, Nokia | 2 Comments »
Monday, November 9th, 2009
After getting a few very interesting emails, I decided that I should provide a bit of a historical and informal insight to those who might be curious about what that “Save My Ass” may be.
SaveMyAss (Save My Ass) a convenient way to clear the Call and/or the SMS records on the Android based phones. The delete (or purge) process runs automatically upon the app launch without further user intervention. The app either deletes a preset number of messages set in the preferences, or by age (i.e. last 10 min, last 2 hours etc.).
Why did I build this app? Just because. *this is the easy answer (i could’ve said, just for shits and giggles 
)
Why did I build this app? Just because, I thought it would be an interesting challenge. I worked extensively with Android Messaging app and SMS internals during the development of “Txtract – SMS Backup for Android“, “Save My Ass” would be the icing on the cake in terms gaining more expertise on Android.
Why did I build this app? About five months ago, I was about to get a ticket because a polica officer thought that I was on the phone while driving. I swear, I was not on the phone, or was not doing anything on my phone. I was pulled over, and I had to show the officer my call and message history to convince him that he stopped me for no reason. That incident was indeed the spark that made “Save My Ass” built. I don’t want to give anyone any ideas about how they may use the application. The rest is up to the users’ imagination
About the “Save My Ass” name; it’s supposed to be just funny and provocative. Nothing more, nothing less. I can only hope that no one will find the name offensive.
Docs @ http://wiki.brilaps.com/wikka.php?wakka=SaveMyAss
Support at; http://forum.brilaps.com/index.php?board=20.0
Posted in Android, Blog | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
Brilaps released an update for the Txtract – SMS Backup for G1 today.
The new version is Txtract 1.3, code name cloudcat.
You can find the release notes here.
*This screenshot needs an update !
For support on Txtract, please visit http://forum.brilaps.com
Posted in Android, Mobile Tech, News | Comments Off
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Txtract 1.5 Release on 2009-01-10, and finally with a much readable HTML export support.
Much to our surprise, Txtract passed the 10K download mark in just over a month in the Android Market. We‘re loving it.
Here are some comments from the users of Txtract:
- Html makes this awesome. Use astro app (file explorer) to get to it. Thanks so much. Good job! (Vinnie)
- Html export works awesome!! Only thing it now needs to be better is options to fine tune exports (especially such as file location, html alignment tag (Matt)
- Awesome, thanks for the update html works now. 5 star app (Don)
- …..
Release Notes
Release date: 2009-01-10
Codename: lufthansa (a significant portion of the code is written on a plane)
Txtract 1.5 introduced the long awaited HTML export.
Enhancements:
- HTML Export
- Code optimizations
Bug Fixes:
- Incorrect escaping of quotes and commas in the CSV export.
Sample HTML Export of SMS Messages
That’s it for now. Txtract still have a few goodies in the bag to come out soon.
Posted in Android, Mobile Tech, News | Comments Off
Friday, February 13th, 2009
Here comes a newer, better faster Txtract on the Android Market.
Txtract 1.6 on a Friday the 13th.
Version 1.6 supports
- Selectable Styles for HTML backup
- Email the backup
- Better look & feel
- Faster
- Minor bug fixes
And a few more goodies in this release.
Posted in Android, Mobile Tech, News | Comments Off
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
Txtract in business...
When I got my TMobile G1 Android phone, I was really enthusiastic about what it has to offer, and it has not failed me yet. Knock on the wood!
As a user of the device, the only thing I can say is, it is fabulous. The application market place is not that rich yet, as the “other” device. However, it looks like getting there. I am not much of a person who would download everything and clog my computational devices, but more of a minimalist who would have only what he needs. Same thing for my G1 phone. I have the Twitroid (frequent user), imeem (once in a while I check what’s tuning), Wertago (i like the idea, but the recommendations around my area are not too accurate), Bank of America’s Mobile Banking app came in handy a few times (had to show my ginormous balance to my friends, j/k) and a few others.
After starting to exchange more SMS messages with my friends, I realized that, those messages accumulate and slows things down a wee bit. Deleting the entire threads of messages was an option, or deleting the entire Message database another option. Deleting the messages one by one was NOT an option. I would rather pull a few all nighters, deprive myself of sleep for a week, and write a programs to do things, such as extracting those messages, instead of doing a manual deletion.That’s how the “Txtract” project started.
Readable link: http://wiki.brilaps.com/wikka.php?wakka=Txtract
This is a textbook description of what Txtract does. 1.1 release does not support HTML output.
Txtract generates a device-independent (XML, CSV, HTML) backup of your Text Messages (SMS) off your Android G1 Phone.
(more…)
Posted in Android, Blog, Mobile Tech, News | 21 Comments »
