Tuesday, December 01, 2009

My first Google Wave Gadget: an old fashion chatroom

Just spent a while to take a curious look at the Google Wave API, and ended up with a little gadget:

http://focuser-sandbox.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/gadgets/chatroom.xml

The lasting impression is that it's so damn easy to write a gadget, at least to get started with. Remind you that I'm not that experienced when it comes to HTML and JavaScript.

Limitations:
- Sometimes your message gets eatten/ignored/blown-away/killed
- Not sure how well it works for multiple participants... I only tested by talking to myself. I assume the mighty google wave will take care of the rest. :)
- It's going to be slow if you chat too much.
- Since I just threw in everything being typed in, and all the content typed in are not escaped... so basically you are able to break the gadget pretty easily.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Installing Cyanogen 4.2.1 on a Google ION

  • boot the phone in fastboot mode by holding BACK key while rebooting.
  • In COMPUTER command line, type "fastboot boot cm-recovery-1.4.img"
  • nandroid backup
  • download CM 4.2.1 http://www.cyanogenmod.com/downloads/rom
  • download Android 1.6 "Recovery Image" from http://developer.htc.com/adp.html#s3, NOTE: NOT the ION image, it's the ADP imgage.
  • put both zip files on sdcard
  • "fastboot flash recovery cm-recovery-1.4.img"
  • press MENU to power off and HOME+POWER to boot in recovery mode, don't use "fastboot reboot"
  • wipe
  • apply Android 1.6 "Recovery Image"
  • reboot
  • HOLD HOME key while rebooting
  • apply CM 4.2.1 image
  • reboot
  • done!

This is basically what the official guide on xda says, and is much easier than the guide on cyanogen wiki: http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/Full_Update_Guide_-_G1/Dream/Magic32B_Firmware_to_CyanogenMod

Other good references:

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

New eyes free UI for phones?

User presses a combination of keys or makes some gestures on the touch screen, the phone gives back audio feedback, and launches a predefined application.

This should be useful before mobile devices become smart enough to actually talk with people.

Monday, April 06, 2009

PhoneGap and alike

I came across their website (www.phonegap.com) a while ago, but to be honest, I'm not a fan about what they are doing.

At the first glance it may sound like very cool -- write once, run on every phone! It sounds reasonable to add another level of indirection to sum up all phone SDKs. But the problem is that there are enough significant differences between these platforms that would make guys like PhoneGap having to design a super set of all libraries and frameworks. Now it comes to the question how well PhoneGap guys can
understand ALL the platforms they want to support, and how well they can interpret that in the meta language they choose. Even if they did a good job on these (i.e. their APIs are at least as good as that of Google and Apple and RIM and include them all), I still don't see how they make writing code for different platforms easier, since I still think the barrier of learning an SDK is not the programming language
but the libraries and frameworks.

Not to mention the design problems and bugs they could introduce as a middle man. And the fine-detailed tuning needed to write a high performance app -- remember how much effort did we put when trying to make MF run faster?

If you don't believe me, take a look at that crappy TransLink app. :) (that's the only meaningful listed apps I could find in the Market, the other app HAL just shows a button by clicking which it plays some funny noise) -- it looks awful, doesn't support Android's hardware menu, and doesn't work well when sliding out the keyboard, etc. I don't know what to blame, their coding skills or their choice of PhoneGap. :)

IMHO to write serious apps on different platforms while saving cost, a practical approach is to hire human programmers to handle UI and hardware dependent code for different platforms, and rely on cross compilers to produce core domain code -- this is where things like PhoneGap or XMLVM could be useful.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

In the world of variety, iphone the only phone won't dominate

Everyone in the world is different, and they may like different kinds of phones.
Apple, with the only phone iPhone, is not trying to satisfy everybody, in fact any individual company wouldn't try and is not able to do that.  But the whole industry can. Every single weird requirement will be filled by someone in the industry.  That's why I think Android phones would finally win over iPhone -- it's a battle between the whole industry  and a single company.