Taking a Different Road

I received my Nexus One on Thursday. It is flat-out fast. I’m really liking it, even if it doesn’t have a physical keyboard like my G1.

I was pretty excited to load my latest development game on it. However I found that the Ubuntu USB settings that I had setup for the G1 didn’t work for the Nexus One, even though they’re both HTC phones. I had setup Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) for the G1 based on these instructions: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html. As of Jan 9 2010, this page does not have a USB vendor ID for the Nexus One/Google. The “0bb4″ vendor ID for HTC does not work. The Nexus One shows up as “?????????” in adb/Eclipse.

I did some serious Googling for a solution and found two hits with instructions, but they were both saying to use “0bb4″ for the USB vendor ID. That’s what I had and that doesn’t work. I then read an post that said Google updated the Windows SDK USB driver for Nexus One. I downloaded this to one of my Windows boxes and looked at the vendor ID in the .inf file - it is “18D1″ for Nexus One.

In short - follow these instructions:

1. Follow the instructions at  http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html
2. Replace the vendor id of “0bb4″ with “18d1″ in /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules. Or add another line that reads:
   SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="18d1", MODE="0666"
3. Just restarting adb after this didn’t work for me. I had to reboot Ubuntu. That took me a while to figure out.

After the reboot I was up and running. Development cycle times are now much faster because installs are faster.

The new features of this Text Twist-like scrambled word game include an improved dictionary and the ability to view Global High Score maps right on your phone!

If you have an Android phone - especially the new Verizon Droid - you should check out this game. It’s available on the Android Market in a Trial and Full version. More information is available at http://AlphaMixr.net.

AlphaMixr, my Android game for T-Mobile G1, et. al. is on sale for $.99 this weekend (through 7/26). You can beat the price - it’s less that a hamburger on the $1 menu at McDonald’s! Get it while it’s hot!

AlphaMixr was picked as the #1 G1 Game or App on this blog.

You can read the review for AlphaMixr at Android Tapp where it got 4 out of 5 droids.  You can also read AlphaMixr user reviews on Cyrket.

You can see screen shots and more information about AlphaMixr at its website: AlphaMixr.net.

After an overly long delay, Wicket Web Beans 1.1 has been released. I really appreciate Daniel Toffeti’s contributions.  Also thanks to Cemal at (http://jWeekend.com) for pushing us to get this release out. jWeekend is gracious hosting the live samples for us (see below). Looking forward, Daniel is going to start on the Wicket 1.4 migration. And, maybe someday, I’ll get back to WWB 2.0. The code for it is on the 2.0 branch and you can experiment with it if you want.

Some News:

The project is now hosted on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/wicket-web-beans/
Try out the live samples http://jweekend.com/wicketwebbeans-examples-1.1/WebBeans/

Enjoy!

AlphaMixr, my game for Google Android (T-Mobile G1, et. al.), was reviewed the other day and got 4 out of 5 “droids.” You can read the review at Android Tapp.  You can also read AlphaMixr user reviews on Cyrket (an online Android Market browser).

In other news, AlphaMixr Demo hit the 10,000 download mark today at Android Market.  I think this will pick up even more as additional Android-based devices are released globally this year.

You can see screen shots and more information about AlphaMixr at its website: AlphaMixr.net.

Google released paid apps today on the Android Market today (2/20/09) and so my game, AlphaMixr was released into the wild. AlphaMixr is a scrambled word game in the spirit of Text Twist and Jumble. It adds another dimension of Global High Scores so you can compete with other players around the world.

You can read a glowing review from a friend of mine who’s been a beta tester at http://titusj.blogspot.com/2009/02/alphamixr.html

Visit http://AlphaMixr.net to see all of the game details and Google Maps of the high-scorers.

I was trying to declare a array variable this morning:

Map<String, String>[] mapArray = new Map<String, String>[2];

However, the compiler reports an error with the above statement: “Cannot create a generic array of Map<String,String>”. I had to replace the statement with:

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
...
Map<String, String>[] mapArray = (Map<String, String>[]) new Map[2];

!?! If one of the goals of generics was to eliminate casts, it certainly failed here.

We were working on some refactored code today that wasn’t refactored properly. The tests had been changed to make the refactored code pass. My colleague said that I should write-up my “profound” comment on the situation:

If you’re performing a refactoring and you find yourself changing asserts in existing unit tests, something should smell bad. You’ve probably done something more than refactor the code.

I got a G1 on Wednesday and I’m liking it. I’ve had an iPod Touch for over a year now and I’ve liked that, except for the keyboard. The introduction of Apple’s App Store and the revocation of apps from it concerns me.

On the G1, I definitely like the keyboard and its ability to switch seamlessly between Wi-Fi, T-Mobile Hotspots (included with the data plan), 3G, and Edge. It’s also a 4-mode phone which means you can take it pretty much anywhere in the world. I think Android has a lot of potential. It’s got some rough edges right now, but I’m sure it will get better. I also like the call audio quality and signal strength. Much better than Verizon so far.

It comes with a 1GB SD card - I just ordered a 8GB microSD card today for $20 (frys.com).

I didn’t like the fact that they didn’t launch with accessories - like a holster (!). I was also told that it shipped with a USB/headphone  adapter. It doesn’t. It is a USB/earphones/microphone and the earphones suck for music. I have some nice Bose headphones I’d like to use, but no accessory to be found. I’m breaking out the soldering iron this weekend!

The apps so far are free and pretty decent. Shazam has an app too. I never used Shazam before. It is cool. Riding in your car listening to a tune and want to know what song it is? Shazam listens to the music for 20-30 seconds and very reliably (hitting 100% for me) identifies the song. It then provides links to buy it on Amazon’s mp3 store and to YouTube.
I’ll keep you posted as I gain more experience with it.

If you haven’t got it yet, go get the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. I think applications should have this kind of feature. Instead of navigating menus, etc. have a shortcut that takes you where you want to go or helps you do a task.