android

Emotional rollercoaster: installing Jelly Bean on a Galaxy SII

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Jelly Bean "about" screen on Samsung Galaxy S III’m happy! Here’s why; when I bought my Samsung Galaxy S II a year and a half ago, it came with Android 2.3 aka Gingerbread. Last year Samsung released an official update for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). And while most manufacturers stop after one major upgrade, Samsung promised Android 4.1 Jelly Bean for the aging SII a couple of months ago. And so early this week I took a ride on this Jelly Bean rollercoaster:

    1. Yay, Sammobile reports Samsung started pushing out Jelly Bean for the Galaxy S II
    2. Damn, apparently the ROMS are only available for Spain & China, not for my region yet.
    3. Yay, the Spain version has support for my region after all, downloading.
    4. Damn, can’t shut down my phone to switch to “download mode”, it just reboots.
    5. Yay, re-inserting battery while holding Volume down, Home & Power switches the phone to download mode after all, flashing with Odin!
    6. Damn, flashed and rebooted, but installation wizard hangs, rebooting.
    7. Yay, installation wizard completes after all.
    8. Damn, ADW settings screwed (widgets & some shortcuts MIA)
    9. Yay, almost done configuring ADW (except for the tethering shortcut on my desktop, can’t seem to reinstate that).
    10. Damn, no keyboard selection in notification bar, so no Swype!
    11. Yay, Swype available after all, hidden in “Language & Input” configuration.

So does Jelly Bean put the old S2 on the same level as the S3? Not really, some advanced S3-features aren’t included, think the ones in the Premium Suite for S3 that Samsung released a couple of months ago, especially “multi-window” (which might make less sense the smaller S2 display anyway). Both the Calender application and the mail-client (for my Exchange-mail) changed. Samsung replaced Calender with their own S Planner, which has a more skeuomorphic UI which doesn’t fit with the rest of the OS. Good thing you can install the default Android Calendar from Google Play. Mail got slightly better, with a nice little refresh-button and a timestamp showing when the last connection occurred (I don’t do push mail). But most importantly: Jelly Bean does feel more smooth (thanks to Project Butter) and at first sight battery life seems better as well. So, yeah, I’m happy!

And now you can even have my WordPress password!

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Being slightly obsessed with security, I was delighted to discover that two factor-authentication (OTP) using Google Authenticator client is not restricted to Google applications, but is fully standardized and as such can be implemented without dependency on Google services on any system. There is code (off course varying in quality and scope) available for PHP, .NET, Java and Python (and I’m sure there are others).
As you might expect after reading the title, there is a great Google Authenticator WordPress plugin which I installed in 5 minutes time earlier today. For the Drupal-heads; Antwerp-based Attiks have a module that implements Google Authenticator OTP which looks worth checking out as well (and I’m interested in your experiences with it, actually).

Android battery drain no more!

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Battery drain is a known problem for us smartphonista’s, especially if you’ve got multiple applications (sometimes secretly) connecting to the internet to get and/or push data.
Although the battery of my Samsung Galaxy SII lasted approximately 1 day (which I considered a success, after having battled Firefox Sync, Soundcloud and Exchange mail fetching), a couple of weeks ago I started to manually disable the data network mode at night. Who needs their phones online all of the time after all? This worked like a charm, which made me start thinking about an application that could automate toggling of the data connection. I did a quick search on the web and found this article on Stack Overflow with sample code to access the (hidden) dataconnection API’s.
While reading the comments I understood I didn’t need to find me someone to build such an application; Juice Defender does just that. The basic version is free and although it allows only limited configuration, just activating it with default settings almost doubled my SGS II’s battery life. So if you want your Android phone’s battery to last longer, you really should try out Juice Defender.

Firefox Mobile 16 & 17: continuous improvements

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I updated Firefox Mobile Beta on my Samsung Galaxy SII a couple of days ago to version 16 and out of curiosity I participated in the pissing-contest which is html5test.com. It scored a whopping 372 points, which apparently makes it the best mobile browser (for now).
More important, as it is an immediate and noticeable advantage: reader mode. Reader mode,  as seen in the screenshots on the right, allows me see articles on e.g. the chaotic, non-responsive dewereldmorgen.be in a non-crowded context which is optimal for reading the article.
I also installed the latest Firefox Mobile Aurora (version 17) and I’m pretty pleased to see support for iFrame sandboxing (which would up the html5test.com score to 377) and integration with a.o. the upcoming Firefox Marketplace (which will also be core to Firefox OS).
So yeah, for me Firefox Mobile remains the best mobile browser no-one uses.

The SoundCloud of extreme battery drain

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Never mind my initial enthusiasm about SoundCloud on Android; I uninstalled the bugger after noticing extreme battery drain, which seems linked to its background synchronization. Before uninstalling, I tried to:

  1. switch on “wifi only syncing”, which did not help
  2. disable all 4 items (left part of image) being synced, which did not help
  3. disable SoundCloud sync altogether, which did not seem to help either
  4. remove the SoundCloud-item from the list of synchronization sources, which inconveniently also logged me out of the app rendering it pretty useless

I contacted SoundCloud support, who confirmed they are working on a fix (although the release notes mentions battery drain a couple of times, guess this is not an entirely new issue). But until then I guess I’ll have to download the individual tracks from the SoundCloud website to listen to “It is what it is” on my Galaxy SII, no?

Hey you, what’s that SoundCloud?

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I had already created my SoundCloud-account two years ago, but I only started to use it earlier this week after searching the web for DJ-sets by Kevin Saunderson (whom I heard play a mesmerizing set on “Studio Ibiza” shortly before). I clicked around and also found Four Tet, Floating Points and Flying Lotus and well … I was hooked. To my disappointment SoundCloud does not offer RSS-feeds, but I found CloudFlipper to be a nice workaround and started adding feeds to my RSS-reader.
Great and all that, but it turned out to be pretty cumbersome to add individual SoundCloud pages to my RSS-reader that way. After logging into the web app and installing SoundCloud’s magnificent Android app I found it a lot more convenient to just follow all those great artists (mainly electro) and seeing their work stream by on the dashboard.
So there I am, in trapped in that great walled garden that is SoundCloud (although they integrate nicely with that other closed social ecosystem). Now back to listening to Laurent Garnier‘s amazingly eclectic “It is what it is” radioshow.

Feedreading on the move with Tiny Tiny RSS for Android

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I’m a RSS-junk and I use Tiny Tiny RSS as my needle, so I was happy to find an official tt-rss client for Android a couple of weeks ago. Works like a charm, quirks included. Especially the “Offline” functionality is a great help to read up on what’s happening while on the train, where the data-connection can be … flaky.
Now if all you guys & girls can make sure your blogs push out full feeds instead of those frigging teasers?

WP YouTube Lyte on Android: native or in-browser playback?

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With the latest release of WP YouTube Lyte I fixed a problem where iOS users had to click twice to view a LYTE-embedded video; once to activate the iOS YouTube player and once to start the actual playing. On Android that problem does not exist, as LYTE embeds can be played inline in the browser.
Based on my own tests however, performance and quality aren’t always optimal when compared to the experience the native YouTube app provides. So now I’m wondering; wouldn’t it be better to not only detect iOS, but also Android and have both of them play in their respective a native players, even if on Android this isn’t an absolute requirement?
Advantages:

  1. better video playback performance/ quality
  2. somehow feels more professional (it’s the way the YouTube mobile site seems to work as well for example)

Disadvantages:

  1. you force visitors out of the context of your webpage
  2. a small percentage of Android visitors will get an ugly error message as they do not have a native YouTube player
  3. only works for single video’s, not for playlists (or at least so it seems) and the audio-only trick obviously won’t work either

What do you think? Speak now or be silent forever!
And let me throw in a vid (Spiritualized with “Hey Jane” live) just for the heck of it;

Spiritualized - Hey Jane (live @ Maida Vale for BBC 6 Music)
Watch this video on YouTube.

And if you’re on Android you can click here to trigger the YouTube app to see the exact same thing.