Google Android Hacking Common Practices for Newbs

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

First things first you need to know where to go to find help for your self. Usually these sources also act as the place to go for help when you don't feel you can help your self any longer. These locations are filled with experts who donate their time to give you something for free, because they can and because they care. Don't take this for granted when you communicate with them. That being said here are those places.

Biggest and best is probably XDA.
http://forum.xda-developers.com
You can find a giant list of devices each with it's own active sub community. Roms and software are usually found in the "development" sub forums. Be sure you use the search tool because some times solutions to problems are sub sets of larger or different problems. You'll also get a negative reaction from most folks if you don't say/show that you made a best effort to think for your self before posing your question.

Most comprehensive general forum seems to be Android Forums.
http://androidforums.com/
These forums seem to be slightly less focused on development and more on general usage. They do have their fair share of brilliant folks. Being less specifically development focused they seem to have support for a larger variety of devices.

Getting gradually less technical but still useful threads and information at Android Central's forums.
http://forum.androidcentral.com/
Android Central is a pretty well respected Android news website and community. Their forums are less technical than the other two but they still have a great group of people willing to help and some good info to learn from.

Finally the Nook Color specific site Nook Devs.
http://www.nookdevs.com
This site is Nook specific but has some pretty clear concise and useful information and how-to on general Android things like using ADB. It's also the place to go on information about rooting the Nook and Nook Color.

So here's the breakdown on how Android is structured, as I understand it. I think I'm pretty astute and seem to have little trouble rooting/flashing and fixing things gone wrong on Android but I'm also not perfect so I could have some things wrong. So if you know more or see something I got wrong please let me know in the comments!

Baby Savers

I'm dropping the bomb today. For lack of anything better to write about. There is a new game on the horizon for Android users out there from a new company called FatHat Games. The game is titled Baby Savers. You take the role of 1940/1950's fire fighters trying to save babies being thrown from a burning building on the left side of the screen by bouncing them to the ambulance waiting on the right side of the screen. You start the game with five lives and score points each time a baby makes it to the ambulance. You lose a life if you drop a baby. The difficulty ramps up as the game progresses and it's game over if you drop 5 babies. This game is going to be a blast when it's finished. For now there a couple of pre-beta screen shots available on their website at:

http://www.babysaversgame.com

Getting Pictures Off the Playstation 3 the Internet Way

As most of you know I've been playing the snot out of Modnation Racers. One of the sweet features that the game includes is the ability to screen shot your creations and in turn use them as your Playstation 3's wallpaper. Playstation home, Little Big Planet and a ton of other games have this feature as well. The Playstation 3 is super flexible in what it can do and yet there seem to be some pieces missing. For example I can copy the pictures to a thumb drive or external USB drive but I can't send to e-mail accounts from the communications section so there is no networked, internet based way to get this content off the system. I've done some searches to try to figure out how to do it and all suggestions are to use the sneaker net approach. I wasn't having any of that. So here is how to get your pictures off the system using the wonderful world of networking and the internet.

Go to the Playstation 3's browser and navigate to your favorite e-mail service provider. Mine in this case is Google GMail. Fill in your own e-mail address. Then click on your link/icon to attach files. You will now have access to the file browser on the Playstation 3 and be able to select any images you like. Attach away! Google e-mail lets you download multiple files as a zip attachment so I can attach a bunch of pictures and then on my computer I can pull them down in one download. Super simple and effective.

Below are attachments of some of my creations in Modnation Racers as well as some of the other hard work from other players.

Android Tips and Tricks

Let it be known that I LOVE my Motorola Droid and I love the Android operating system. Both are rock solid and fast. The problem is that I'm a power user in every sense of the word. I'm pretty sure they don't make a phone fast enough to keep up with me. That said I strive to get the last little bit of performance out of most of the hardware that I get my hands on. This has led to a sort of crusade to find the best performance tweaks for my Motorola Droid which should also apply to any other Android based phones. Some of the stuff is kind of face palm simple but some other tweaks might surprise you. Lets get started.

1. Wifi ON. Traditional logic would say if you activate wifi and 3G that you are running twice as many chips so twice as much power usage. As it turns out Android is very very wifi friendly and will re-direct traffic to Wifi when ever it has it and will sort of low power mode the phone radio. I've gone from getting just about a day out of my phone to closer to a day and a half. Here's how on Android 2.0 and later:
1. Menu Icon
2. Settings
3. Location & Security
4. Check "Use wireless networks"
2. Turn OFF GPS. I've all ready found 3 family members who's Android phones came with GPS on by default and didn't know it. Obviously if they didn't know what the little satellite dish icon is about they certainly didn't know how to shut it off. So here's how on Android 2.0 and later:
1. Menu Icon
2. Settings
3. Location & Security
4. Uncheck "Use GPS satellites.
3. Set display brightness to automatic. Android has been designed pretty brilliantly to know when a screen needs to be fully lit or can be dimmed so setting the display brightness to automatic will help extend your battery life. Again it's pretty easy to get there. Here's how:
1. Menu Icon
2. Settings
3. Sound & Display settings
4. Brightness
5. Check "Automatic Brightness"
4. Finally get a good task manager. While this doesn't necessarily save battery it makes your phone feel snappy and "new" which makes you forgive any battery life short comings your phone may have. On Verizon both the Droid and the Droid Eris come with a manual task manager installed by default. Manually running a task killer is a waste of time and seems silly on a phone so grab the "Automatic Task Killer" app from the marketplace. It's free and will keep you from having to manage your tasks as it sits in the background and does what it's name implies. You can  whitelist/blacklist apps that are to be automatically killed and which ones are untouched. You can also set the time out where the app will wait a certain amount of time after screen sleep then kill your blacklisted apps. I haven't manually killed an app or worried about app management in at least a month.

iPad Hubbub

With the iPad launch upon us I feel the need, finally, to expound on my thoughts and ideas about it. For those of you who know me you will know I value Apples usability and quality of product but at the same time their increasingly restrictive ecosystem is kind of scary. The end result is that I equally desire and yet shun Apple and their products. It saddens me that such an innovative company in the area of usability and quality in their products is also such a capitalist pig that it goes to lengths to create lock in for the express purpose of milking every last dime from it's customers. It seems to me that a great product at a great value would go even further than their great product designed to stick it to your pocket book. This is why Android is gaining ground so rapidly. Apple continues its trend of tyrannical product lock in with this new, innovative, iPad device.

It seems few people are paying attention to the tidal wave of tablets that are about to hit the market. Most note-ably is a pair of devices coming from Asus. Both presumably on the same or similar hardware to one another but one running Windows 7 and the other running Android. If you own any other mobile devices besides an iPhone then these are really going to be the devices to look for. While the features that make a tablet unique are pretty obvious what is less obvious is interactivity with your other devices. Imagine having all your contacts, e-mail, documents and browsing experience being identical across all your devices. Apple has all ready drawn the line between their mobile platform and desktop platform. While they are similar they will never be the same and there will be a disconnect of sorts in that respect. However Google is poised to unleash true standardized cross platform experience as Android finds its way from phone to tablet to netbook and finally desktop. The standardized experience will continue on to the desktop via Google's Chromium OS. All this sameness gets tied together by the "cloud" so that a change on the phone is reflected every where else. Truly transparent cross device computing.

Mark my words Google has something truly useful going far beyond the neat sparklies that Apple is currently dangling in front of the short sited masses.

Android Needs A Style Guide

I’ve suggested this for discussion on a few Android related blogs and yet to see this get any talk time. Android needs a style guide. In kind of a bad way. While it’s seeing a lot of up take and it’s gaining ground on market share it’s headed for a bad spot if Google doesn’t take some steps to clean some things up. I’m not saying everything needs to look and act the same every where but having a mostly common UI for things I think would help the uptake of the platform immensely. For example if they simply released some suggested guidelines for how far away from the edge of the screen is good/best for button elements to be or standardize common locations for common buttons e.g. File, Edit, View in the Windows world.

I’m not saying Google has to crack down on it or anything but may be put a system in place similar to the way they maintain the OS and offer a ‘Google’ stamp if programs meet the minimum style standards or something. That way I always know how to find the settings for a program and I get to feel at home even with a new media player. Comfort and familiarity play in to usability as much as originality and style.

Google Android Needs a Style Guide

I've suggested this for discussion on a few Android related blogs and yet to see this get any talk time. Android needs a style guide. In kind of a bad way. While it's seeing a lot of up take and it's gaining ground on market share it's headed for a bad spot if Google doesn't take some steps to clean some things up. I'm not saying everything needs to look and act the same every where but having a mostly common UI for things I think would help the uptake of the platform immensely. For example if they simply released some suggested guidelines for how far away from the edge of the screen is good/best for button elements to be or standardize common locations for common buttons e.g. File, Edit, View in the Windows world.

I'm not saying Google has to crack down on it or anything but may be put a system in place similar to the way they maintain the OS and offer a 'Google' stamp if programs meet the minimum style standards or something. That way I always know how to find the settings for a program and I get to feel at home even with a new media player. Comfort and familiarity play in to usability as much as originality and style.