You can now buy Android Application Using Paypal checkout?

 

When I tried to buy the Car Locator app, I got a strange screen shot. Please refer this. So, have they started it?

 

How to get Official Android 2.1 in Indian HTC Magic

 

I am sure many of the HTC Magic owners must be waiting to taste the flavor of Android 2.1 for the long time. I recently found a way to update my HTC Magic phone with Official Android 2.1 software. Here are the simple steps.

hardware that you need before starting the following steps:

1. Windows XP PC.

2. Wifi connection.

3. 2GB (atleast) SD card

4. Miro USB data cable.

 

1. Download Rogers HTC Android  1.5 ROM from HTC web site link:

http://member.america.htc.com/download/ROMCode/HTC%20Magic%20(Rogers)/RUU_Sapphire_Rogers_WWE_3.05.631.7_R_release_signed_NoDriver.exe

2. Download HTC Sync from here:

http://member.america.htc.com/download/RomCode/HTC%20Magic%20(Rogers)/HTCSync2.0.25.exe

3. You must have a gold card SD card. To create this refer the XDA developer forum here

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=4289899&postcount=1

4. Once making the gold card, insert the SD card (gold card) in to the phone and run the RUU_Sapphire_Rogers_WWE_3.05.631.7_R_release_signed_NoDriver.exe

5. Once the installation is successful, please enable the Wifi on you phone and connect to the wifi network. The phone immediately asks for the official ROM upgrade to Android 2.1. Say yes to download.

 

That's it. Simple steps. I followed the same to upgrade my HTC Magic phone with Android 2.1 ROM. Please note that if there is any issues while doing the above steps, I am not responsible. I am just showing a way to achieve but I cannot take you through that.

Olive Pad in India

 

We are all waiting for an android tablet despite Samsung galaxy tab is launched in IFA @ Germany. But, there are few more vendors from India like Notion Ink, Oliver Telecom are trying to bring Android tablet with full Android 2.1 support. It has been confirmed from the Customer Care representative today that Olive Tab will be available in India by 24th of September 2010.

Happily  saving money to buy Olive Tab.

Update to Android 2.2 for Motorola Droid is now Official

From the twitter, Motorola announces the Android 2.2 update for Motorola Droid will rollout later in the summer.

 

Olive Pad in India

 

It is officially confirmed by a Technical support staff from Oliver Telecom that India’s first Android Powered Tablet with 3G capabilities by August 15th 2010.

The full spec about the Olive pad can be found in Oliver Telecom Website. 

And the technical support person has also confirmed that Olive Pad will be tagged as Rs.25,000 and will be available in all the Major Electronic Outlets.

Gingerbread in LG phones - Rumor

 

From a LGE Engineer, South Korea its rumored that LG Electronics is working in Google’s Android Operating System and its upcoming version known as Ginger Bread.

 

So, let us hope LG phones also getting inside Era of Android which they are lagging behind.

Quick Respond

Quick Respond is an Android application which I developed for my own usage, and I found it would be useful for others too.

The notification bar in the android phone is sometimes fuzzy and dragging down to see the missed caller is a one more extra task you need to do.

with the popup facility, it is easy to notify a user with the numbers and a set of options for that.

In Quick Respond application will show a popup with the recent missed caller information with the

1. SMS
2. Call options once the user unlocks the screen.

thus, it reduces one more step that you do every time.

Map My India On my Motorola Milestone [UK]

 

After seeing the Motorola milestone sold in India having India maps for Moto Nav, I was behind the motorola people in UK. I did not get a proper response and finally Indian technical support said, its never going to get launched in the Motorola Extras where you can download the maps for various counties.

Recently, I have seen a map for south east Asia and I am disappointed to see India is not there in the list of maps. I would like to keep the map application and use it in my car while I am travelling to various places in and out of the city.

Upon searching, I found an Indian company named ‘Map My India’ had the android application for Rs.2500 from Map My India web site. In the web site the support is only mentioned for HTC android devices. But still I took a chance to buy it for my Motorola Milestone purchased in UK. Because, I have HTC Magic also.

I placed an order and with in 4 days, I got the software shipped from Delhi. I followed the instructions to install the application in to my Motorola milestone and surprisingly, Map My India worked pretty well in my Motorola Milestone.

The map my India application named ‘Mobile maps 9’ is not as good as iGo or the Moto Nav application. But still as it is voice based turn to turn navigation its still useful. So, finally here is the India map for Motorola milestone.

Here is the screen shots of the ‘Map my India’ navigation application.

 

I will write more about this after using quite some time.

But, my first thought is,

1. The exit button is hidden some where inside and I am able to catch that after a good time of research. So, I expect at least in the next release they should keep the buttons handy in some way.

App history

This application is one of the very useful app I ever made for my own purpose.

This app just stores the Market information for a particular application in to the SD card of the phone in a Database.

So, when ever you install any application in the phone, your SD card remembers it. So, when you do a factory rest of the phone, just by installing the 'AppHistory' you can have market links to all of the apps you had.

I am going to update the application with more information like,

1. date of installation
2. Number of times you installed / un installed
3. Share the application to your firends via Twitter / Facebook / SMS / Email.
4. Share the application list [as a DB file] to your firends, etc very soon.




Thats it.. Enjoy with the applicaiton.

Bug Reporting Feature in Android Market

We found an interesting feature from May 20th in Android Application Publish page. We hope it is very much useful for the developers.

So far, developers are integrating logging utility and using applications like 'SendLog' to collect the log information while there was some issues. Now, Google has taken it serious to improve the Quality of Service.

Here after the, as an Android application developer you have got an additional responsibility to answer the bugs which are getting reported/logged as shown in the bellow images.

 

Here is the new feature looks like in the Android publishing page.

 

Some more information captured in the android market application publish page.

 

One of the crash report in the bird’s view.

 

A brief view of the crash in another page.

Bar Code generation in Android

 

I had an assignment in which I must how the sensor values as a bar code. For that I searched internet for the libraries. I found one here.

In the world of android who would pay to get such a library. If they are able to do it, even I can do it. Thanks to Google and XZing team. So, I finally found a way in the xzing site.

I downloaded the source code and created a jar file with the exact classes needed. The file can be download from here.

 

The code which I used to generate the bar code is here.

 

private void    generateBarCode()
    {
        img                 =   (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.img);
        Code128Writer c9     =   new Code128Writer();
        mBitmap          =   Bitmap.createBitmap(450, 150, Config.ARGB_8888);
        try {
            BitMatrix   bm  =   c9.encode( swapped? "tel:12345345": "tel:13453432", BarcodeFormat.CODE_128, 450, 150);
            mBitmap          =   Bitmap.createBitmap(450, 150, Config.ARGB_8888);
           for(int i=0;i<450;i++)
           {
               for(int j=0;j<150;j++)
               {
                   mBitmap.setPixel(i, j, bm.get(i, j)? Color.BLACK:Color.WHITE);
               }
           }
        } catch (WriterException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        if(mBitmap!=null)
        {
            img.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
            img.setImageBitmap(mBitmap);
            showBarCode.setVisibility(View.GONE);
        }
        else

    }

 

The above code sets the bar code image to the view.

 

Please comment here if you need more help.

Android 2.1 for Motorola Milestone

I flashed the German release of Android 2.1 by Motorola and I can see some of the issues I found with Android 2.0.1 is no more there in 2.1. Specially the orientation issue. The orientation issue is pathetic which does not allow to attend the incoming calls.

The improvement I see in Android 2.1 for milestone are:

1. Better battery life

2. Orientation issue is fixed

3. Few good features which I do not use, because live wallpaper consumes more battery.

4. The media dock application. this has real good improvement with a ‘bigger’ home screen button. Handy!. 

Make Opera Default Browser

Yah...

This app I made it to set the Opera Mini as a default browser when ever I click a URL or what ever.

This is a very simple app sits in the phone memory uses just 12KB of space. :)

Lets try it and see..

Please give me your comments and feature requests here.

How to kill the Android application completely?

ActivityManager actmgr=(ActivityManager)Settings.this.getSystemService(Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE);
actmgr.restartPackage("<absolute package here>");

My Android phones

 

Here we go!.. two of the Android phones I own. I like the Motorola Milestone for now.

 

 

I still see few bugs in the Milestone while turning from landscape to portrait mode.

Working with Google Maps in Android programming

 

I was searching for a good tutorial as this is going to be very important feature I am going to experiment in google maps of Android phone. Here I found a beautiful link for the same

 

http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/using-google-maps-android

Let me go through and quickly do some implementation and shortly I will update with the crisp results.

Uploading Multipart Image

 

After a long struggle I found a way to upload an image in a multipart method using POST. For this, it is required to use the apache’s jar file rather than using the Android’s native HTTP apis. This makes the process simple.

Before going to the code, its is required to download the required jar files.

http://www.java2s.com/Code/JavaDownload/PostMethodExample.zip

The above source code bundle has the required jar files in its lib directory. You need to add this in to your android project’s lib directory and use the following code.

 

static boolean doUploadinBackground(final byte[] imageData) throws Exception{
        String responseString = null;
        PostMethod method;

        method = new PostMethod(Constants.hostAddress+Constants.imgUploader);

                org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient client = new org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient();
                client.getHttpConnectionManager().getParams().setConnectionTimeout(
                                100000);

                FilePart photo = new FilePart("photoData", new ByteArrayPartSource(
                        "photoData", imageData));

                photo.setContentType("image/jpeg");
                photo.setCharSet(null);
                String s    =   new String(imageData);
               Part[] parts = {
                                new StringPart("mobileNo", “12345”),
                                photo
                                };

                method.setRequestEntity(new MultipartRequestEntity(parts, method
                                .getParams()));

                client.executeMethod(method);
                responseString = method.getResponseBodyAsString();
                method.releaseConnection();

                Log.e("httpPost", "Response status: " + responseString);

        if (responseString.equals("SUCCESS")) {
                return true;
        } else {
                return false;
        }
    }

 

I hope this helps you. If you have any doubts, please email me at rames.p@gmail.com

How to save the application variables and screen values while the phone is rotated?

 

Having the EditText boxes filled with the values, rotating the phone clears the data. this is just because the Activity is getting restarted on the configuration change. The orientation and hardware keyboard show/hide are the common reason which is a part of the configuration change. Due to this, the EditText and other Widgets in the Android Activity can get reset.

To avoid this, the following flag must be used in AndroidManifest.xml file.

 

android:configChanges="keyboard|keyboardHidden|orientation"

I hope this will help your code!..

Tutorial to make a common contact api

 

As I promised here is the link which talks about how exactly the program has to be written to support both the versio of android os [1.6 and 2.0] while accessing its contacts.

 

http://www.higherpass.com/Android/Tutorials/Working-With-Android-Contacts/2/

Android Contact API for Android 2.0 and above

 

The contact API is really complex to understand at first.

As per my experience, I am using the android 1.6 contact api to write the data in to the contact database. But, while reading the contact information, I am in need to use the Android 2.0 specific apis. Soon, I will post how to write a generic code to access the contact data in both the Android 2.0 and above the devices along with the Android 1.6 devices.