Category Archive: Android

May 20

Galaxy Nexus ICS 4.0.4 – Regaining su privileges

About ten days ago I finally received the OTA update for my Galaxy Nexus that would take it from 4.0.2 to 4.0.4. Of course it didn’t show up at a convenient time despite my numerous checkin requests over the previous two weeks, I was on the motorway, using Google’s Navigation app. Ten minutes later however …

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Mar 24

Dear Samsung… you’ll never be Apple

Samsung is a company that has successfully renewed itself in recent years. If I want a good quality and feature packed TV I look at Samsung, not Sony. And If I want a good looking, up-to-date Android device then they have some fantastic hardware that performs well and looks good. At Google I/O I got …

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Dec 14

Social Apps on Android

At this year’s Devoxx, Google’s Tim Bray gave a thought-provoking keynote which covered several areas but what stood out for me were his comments around writing applications for Android. In summary his message was “give software away and sell a service” and “make it social”. Giving software away and selling a service is a whole …

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Sep 22

Android, Grails and Heroku

Having published a first Android application Audio Clock in the Android Market my attention has turned to developing something new. Audio Clock was simple but this new application is on a whole other scale. Audio Clock had a minimal UI – in fact just some configuration views and a notification bar entry – and ran in the …

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Jun 19

Galaxy Tab 10.1 USB File Transfer Issues Explained

Having struggled, cursed, been derided by iPad owners and got really irked over the synchronisation issues with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 I have spent some more time in the last few days looking into the problem in more detail. I was prompted to do this by the arrival, over the air, of Android 3.1 – …

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May 16

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Google I/O Edition) – First Impressions

At Google I/O this year I was lucky enough to receive a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, one of the latest Android tablets to ship with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). However, being a Samsung item it does have its downsides. Samsung for some reason known only to themselves have endowed it with Samsung Kies, a synchronisation utility …

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May 05

Using Maven for Android Development

As a habitual Maven user I’ve got used to the ease with which I can run through a build and test process and get a deployable artefact out at the end of it. I’ve been playing with Android for some time, and now I’m ready to do some serious development it is only natural that …

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Nov 12

Writing a simple Android widget

A widget in Android is something that sits on the home screen and does something more than just allow you to start an application. Android ships with some built-in widgets and many applications provide widgets of their own. In this post, and its associated download, I aim to demonstrate that widgets can actually achieve a …

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Sep 18

Get Your Act Together, Google

Having purchased and immediately returned one Android tablet because it lacked the Android Marketplace I’ve been doing some research into exactly what is available, or will shortly be available, in tablet form. There are a few promising things on the horizon or already here from some relatively big names – Samsung with the Galaxy Tab, …

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