XPERIA Arc S - Thermal Image

A good friend of mine took this with a thermal camera. This is XPERIA Arc S after been online for 5 minutes! The picture says it all.

Unlocked a Samsung Galxy Ace through ADB

Just finished un-locking a Samsung Galaxy Ace - S5830, that was locked on the 3 network - UK. We don't get to see lots of locked phones in Egypt, and the last time I unlocked a phone, it was through a paid service.

I didn't do much, rooted the phone and then followed the procedure in this xda thread to unlock it via ADB. It worked like a charm. Now my English friend can enjoy using his phone freely with an Egyptian SIM card.

Note: The method for temporary rooting the phone, mentioned in the thread above, didn't work with me, so I rooted the phone permanently.

An Icon Pack

Here is a work-in-progress icons I'm working on. I'm not so sure if I'll ever the time to complete these to what I imagine, but they're fine as they is now!. Royalty Free! Enjoy!

 

Any.DO vs. Taskos

First time I saw these two apps, I was under the impression that they were made by two competing friends, or probably one of them has taken the idea from the other, and created a new app. They have almost the exact same functionality, down to the small details, like shaking the list of tasks to clear completed ones, and of course their icons. The icons of both apps is a white tick mark on a sky-blue background.

But that was the first impression.

Now, having used them both for quite some time, alternating between them, I see myself drawn more towards Any.DO, as it provides the sleeker interface, and some smart functions, though sometimes intervening.

Any.DO is almost a 6MB download, while Taskos is 750kB, which is really inviting, given that it provides almost the same functionality.

Both apps sync with your Google account tasks, but Taskos does a better job at that. I actually had several occasions when I needed to go to my Google account and clean things a little bit, before doing the sync with any.DO.

On the other hand, any.DO has a very well accomplished user interface, nice graphics, option to choose between two themes (white vs. black).

Functionality-wise, any.DO catches the missed calls and set customizable reminders to call back. It also catches your meetings, on any of your calendars, and interactively generates any to-do's that might have resulted from the meetings. I had some problems with the meeting follow-up function in a previous version of Any.DO, but they're gone now.


Bottom line here, in my opinion, is that if you're looking for a nicer looking tasks app that acts smart, though sometimes intruding, Any.DO is the choice. If you have concerns regarding the size, don't want the intervention or looking for a better syncing, then Taskos is the one for you.

	Any.DO	Taskos
Size (MB)	0.75	5.8
Interface
Widget	YES	YES
Missed Call Reminders	YES	NO
Meeting Follow Up	YES	NO
Shake to Clear	YES	YES
Categories	YES	YES
Sorting
Sorting in Widget	NO	YES
Different Widget Sizes	YES	YES
Swipe to Mark as Done	YES	YES
Sync with Google	YES	YES
Automatic Syncing	Buggy	YES
Forced/Manual Syncing	YES	YES
Customizable Reminders	YES	YES
Snooz Reminders	YES	YES

Basic4android .. Clever!

I can't deny it. I'm addicted to BASIC.

Although through the years I've used several programming and scripting languages, the BASIC programming language, being my first love, is the nearest and closest to my heart. I've done complete working applications with MSX BASIC, MS-Basic, GW-Basic, QBasic, Visual Basic, RealBASIC and even ones like Gambas.

Few days ago, I found something called "Basic4android", and immediately downloaded the free trial version from their website, and currently playing with it a little. So far, it seems good enough.

One thing that actually got my attention was that they use the emulator, or an actual phone, as a visual GUI designer. Clever, isn't it? Instead of coding their own visual designer, which is the reason some similar projects have ended badly, they're just using the actual device.

The only drawback I see so far is that it is only released for Windows.

From what I can see, so far, the produced apps are small in size and performs really nice. I haven't done any benchmarking, not yet anyway, but they seem quit equivalent to those written in Eclipse/ADK.

Another Reason to Burn Down Windows!

I'm already annoyed for using Windows on my notebook, and not being able to get the full potential of it under Linux. This said, it seems like Windows doesn't want to leave it that. I used my work computer to log on to WLM, only to find a message on my next login telling me that my account has been hacked. OK, might happen, although I thought it was a mistake from Microsoft's Live.com. But two days later, after changing my password, I'm faced with the same message and required to change my password again.

This time, after finishing all the identification process and changed the password, I went to check my SENT folder. Right to the point, it was full of spam. About 50 messages that I haven't sent. What stupid hacker sends emails from my account, and forgets to delete them from my sent folder?

Investigating the problem, it seems that it was caused by me logging to WLM from my work computer. This one has Windows XP on it, and is managed by the Company's IT team. I can't even do a proper scan on it, as I don't have the proper privileges.

So, until I get Linus properly setup on my notebook, I'm sticking to my Android phone for online services!

eType for Android -- First Impression

I'm working, or trying to start working, on a full "PC Suite"-like application to deal with Android phones. One of my intentions is to have a feature that allows the user of the application to type on his/her PC physical keyboard and see the output on their phone, whether the phone is connected via USB cable, Bluetooth, or WiFi; a feature I used to intensely use with MyPhoneExplorer for Sony Ericsson phones.

This led me to do a quick search about the subject, and I stumbled upon an app in the Play store called eType, from DoMobile. So, I downloaded the free version to my phone, and started playing around for a few minutes.

Here's what I found.

The app's idea is actually impressive, on the creativity side, that is. It ba sically sets a web server on the phone, that you open via your browser and type. Whatever you type in your web browser, on your PC, is then transferred to a med-app in form of keyboard, or input method, that is identified by the phone's OS.

Unfortunately, it works only via WiFi, meaning that there should always a WiFi network that both the PC and the phone are connected to, in order to utilize this app.

Now, if the idea was really creative, the implementation was very poor, in my opinion. Yes, the app works, and the text does appear on the phone's text container, but I couldn't not notice that the app doesn't actually work in real-time; instead it refreshes the text container every half a second, according to my estimation. And when I said "refreshes" I really mean that the app deletes and retypes all the text in the text container each time, about twice a second. This causes two annoyances: first, if you type fast on the computer's keyboard, you'll really feel the lag of the text appearing on the phone. This would even be worse if you decided to look into the phone's screen and type, instead of looking into your PC's monitor. Second, refreshing the whole amount of text in a relatively large document, I'm talking two paragraphs, for instance, results in blinking. With the refresh rate being about twice a second, one feels the phone really flickering.

I still insist on that the idea is nice, probably DoMobile would work more on it to overcome the negative sides.

The Effect of a Beautiful UI

I blog from my Android device, sometimes. Because of that, I've tried several blogging clients over the time. Currently, I'm trying BlogPost, which seems very promising and is rich in features.

But, while surfing through different apps in the Play Store (I don't like the new name, btw), I came across the newly updated WordPress app, with its newly designed interface. To be frank, the new interface is stunning, to the extent that I was evaluating my options for moving my blog from blogsopt/blogger to WordPress!!

This idea, in itself, got me wondering: could a beautifully designed user interface be enough to push the user from one service provider to another? to sacrifice some of the features, and the comfort of being "used to" something? Would a user be willing to actually abandon a service he trust to, at least, try a new service?

The idea in itself feels both very possible, and scary. Very possible, because I've experienced the effect of the user interface design in the mentioned example, and was really (and still am) evaluating my options now. But it is also scary, for the programmer-side of me, as this means a nicely designed interface could take my users away (I'm not a very good UI designer).

Another example struck me, also from the Android world, as I recall how I found two brilliant pieces of software: AnyDo and Taskos. Both apps do almost exactly the same thing, they both have almost the same icon, a white "check" mark on a light blue background and they almost have the same screens.

At 750KB, Taskos seemed to be the better choice, vs. over 5MB for AnyDo. It gets the job done, in the same mechanism as its competitor, with the same features. But on my phone now, resides an installed copy of AnyDo, not Taskos. AnyDo, despite being larger in size and a resources-hungry app, has a much beautifully designed UI than Taskos. I'm serious. The difference is huge. To be frank here, I doubted that AnyDo developer used Taskos source code, and polished the UI a bit, judging by how almost identical the apps are.

The bottom line is ... I need to start making friends UI designers!

Never Liked TouchWiz

Having had several Android phones over the past two years, I got to develop a taste when it comes to the vendor's default launcher. Between phones from acer, Samsung, Motorola, HTC and SonyEricsson, I would say that the most annoying and less comfortable default launcher is Samsung's TouchWiz.

TouchWiz, developed to imitate the interface on older Samsung touch-screen mobiles' interface, is, in my opinion, the worst thing on good phones such as the Galaxy S2. I'm not really talking about performance. I'm talking about how things look and feel. The TouchWiz feels rigid, out-fashioned and doesn't give you the Android feel that you might get from the Sense interface, though originally designed for Windows phones, or get from the XPERIA interface, for example.

From my point of view, TouchWiz, being designed for feature phones, cannot be used for smart phones. It is a different animal, all together.

That said, I must admit that the TouchWiz on my Galaxy 551 was the main motivation for me to root and install a custom ROM on the phone, only 10 days after purchase -- and it was my first rooting.

Eclipse IDE and the ADT: Missing requirement: Error

Setting up my laptop for developing Android applications under Ubuntu, I was faced with the error message:

  Missing requirement: Shared profile 1.0.0.1308118925849 (SharedProfile_epp.package.java 1.0.0.1308118925849) requires 'org.maven.ide.eclipse [1.0.0.20110607-2117]' but it could not be found

This was during the installation of the Android Development Tools (ADT) under eclipse. When I googled the problem, it turned out to be something related to "administrative" privileges (under Windows platform), and seems to be related to Indigo version of eclipse.

Anyway, I figured that if it's something related to "administrative privileges", then I might solve this by launching the eclipse in su mode. Alt+F2 got me the command dialog, where:

gksudo eclipse

Setting up the ADT using the google repository https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ as described in the official document was a matter of waiting for the download to complete, after that.