ADOBE FLASH
After a comment on a previous post from George Medve on Flash I though it best to share my take on it. I’m doing this as a post because it’s probably of interest to some people who wouldn’t read the comments on the other post; In terms of Flashes security, I think this article says it all. 2 days ago Adobe were patching a bug which could crash machines and/or allow remote users to take control.
OUYA DOESN'T NEED TO BE PURE ANDROID
The #Ouya Kickstarter has nearly crossed the US$5million mark. I’ve read all the negative press, a lot of which was written before this weekends Android XBMC posts by Kieran Gutteridge and Jason Parker. If you bear in mind that Apple apparently sold more than 2.7 million Apple TVs' in the first half of this year (http://goo.gl/K9ldI), a US$99 XBMC capable device which has the ability to run apps and games as well seems to me to have a good chance of being a success.
BUILDING ANDROID JELLYBEAN ON OS X
Building AOSP JB on OS X 10.7 with XCode 4 takes just a little tweak to your build. Instead of running just make you need to run; make CC=“gcc” CXX=“g++” Which will allow the build to complete.
EXPERIMENTING WITH THE NEXUS Q
It’s always fun when you can pull the birds on a new device :) Hopefully my posts messing around with the NexusQ have shown you that it is just an #Android device and that most apps would work on it with little to no effort as long as they don’t require things like a camera or multi-touch input. If the Q were combined with a simple control system (e.g. an app on the phone which worked as a touchpad for the Q) you’d have yourself, in my opinion, one of the best Android living room experiences currently available.
ACCESSING THE SETTINGS ON A NEXUS Q
If you enable USB debug mode on the Q, then use adb shell you can start the settings app using the command; am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings Once you have done this you can “configure” it using; input keyevent xxxx where xxxx is one of the key events from http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/KeyEvent.html (e.g. input keyevent 20 is the same as pressing down on the dpad). It’s a bit time consuming, but it should be enough to get the Q working with a mouse ;)
NEXUS Q IDEAS
After chatting with Billy Rutledge yesterday I’ve got a few ideas spinning for how people could use the #NexusQ so I thought I’d put them out there as they seem to revolve around one theme; The Q as a hub device. Multiplayer gaming could use it as the server/co-ordinator for multiple devices running on the same WiFi network so that no-ones individual device needs to be nominated as the primary device (and take the processing hit), and any peer-to-peer co-ordination alogrithms could be offloaded onto the Q creating a star topology instead of a mesh, which tends to be more efficient.
ANDROID ON GOOGLE GLASS
Did I mentioned I was told yesterday that Googlers already have some Android apps running on Project Glass? I had an OMG moment when I was told that, then I remembered Sergey Brin’s “US-only” statement, and once again I felt like a mug spending over US$2500 in flights, hotel costs, and the ticket, and, over the course of IO, spending over 21 hours on a plane for a round trip and spending a week away from my office.
ANDROID LAUNCHERS
Sometimes you have to put your money where your mouth is…. Not so long ago I mentioned that writing a home screen / launcher app which changed with the environment around you wasn’t something I thought would be too hard and certainly wasn’t something I thought would take tens of thousands of dollars to write. I had some spare time, so to back this up I’ve put together a quick and dirty prototype for Android 4.
ANDROID ICS ROLL-OUT
t’s now over 6 months (OK, 6 months and 1 day) since the #GalaxyNexus was launched in the UK. Even if the Android release cycle was stretched out to one release every 12 months that means we’re half way through a release cycle and currently the installed base is around 5% of devices. 5%, or 1 in 20 devices, is a small percentage of the market. To put this in context developers could extend the appeal of their apps to more end users by translating English apps into Korean than by adding ICS features.
BUYING NEXUS DEVICES THROUGH THE PLAY STORE
Seems to be the day for rumours about Google selling the next range of Nexus devices through the Google Play store. Given that currently you can only buy the Galaxy Nexus in the US via the Play Store I personally don’t see this is a good route to take. I know a lot of non-US developers were pretty pi**ed off when they found out that only the US Xoom was a Google Experience device, and the non-US Xoom has suffered severe OS update lag since.