2Lines Software

After releasing a couple of products into the Android marketplace you get a little more familiar with the OS and framework. Looking back you start to realize that Android has a number of methods and tools that, if you took the time to learn them first you would have saved yourself a ton of time.

Search after search related to problems I ran into always seemed to direct me to one page. The page didn’t always have the answer to your problem but more than once it indicated that maybe I’m asking the wrong question in the first place!

Well here it is the single most important page in the entire Android framework!

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html

I can’t stress this enough. Read this page in its entirety. When you are finished go back to the start and read it again. Don’t do any coding until you understand how your program gets executed!

This should be required reading for any Software Project Manager.

http://www.stevemcconnell.com.nyud.net/rdenum.htm

Although for you jaded and older programming types you should play the “Been There” Bingo with that page. I’ve been on projects that scored well over 20/36!

I just got back from Heli/Cat skiing at Chatter Creek, B.C. http://tinyurl.com/b7s5wv. It’s great to be skiing all day and equally great to disconnect from the internet for a while. I’m back now and look for more posts.

I’m away part of the week at a conference on the Role of Media in Supporting Informal Science Learning. It should be a good conference and their is a strong lineup of participants. I’ll be posting the summary when I return later this week.

Thanks,
John

It seems pretty clear that the future of mobile development will be based around smartphones. Given the success of Android, RIM, iPhone, Symbian and WinMo platforms it doesn´t look like many device manufacturers will be heading back to the old days of custom OS builds (Motorola, Sony you´ve done well with your own firmware in the past but its time now.). This report highlights the growth of mobile applications based on smart phones.

So the question is, Given that smartphone users are many times more likely to download and pay for mobile applications is there any point in developing for the mass-market phones anymore?

Just thought I pass this little bit of information on. Fedora 10 (and Ubuntu also) is a little screwy when it comes to connecting the ADP1 device to Eclipse for testing.

Any USB device automatically gets connected as read-only which means the adb server and Eclipse won´t see the device when you plug it in.

This post gives a little information on how to fix it.

The idea is to create a rules file that listens for the Android device and sets the permissions differently. The rules are all located under /etc/udev/rules.d. So in detail,

Create a new rule for Android devices

vi /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android.rules

Add the following code

SUBSYSTEM=="usb",SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4",SYMLINK+="android_adb",MODE="0666"

And run

udevcontrol reload_rules

Plug it in and it should work.