Phones as uniquitous computers

For years, cell phones have suffered from square-minded design, by the same '70s and '80s engineers who deemed them as communication "terminals". I was outraged when I saw a little piece of shit that could not do anything more than letting you speak and send SMS priced the same as a full-geared laptop, which enabled you not only that but the full potential to create and transmit whatever you wanted. In that regard I am of the same opinion than Steve Jobs, who I despise as a person, but that quite ofter was right about many things. In particular, he said something like "I hated my cell phone, I could do nothing with it, it was completely dumb". The closed-down mentality of the engineers at Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel... ancient companies which didn't know how to adapt to the 21st century, and forced an incredibly huge market such as the cell phone market to a 10-year delay.

I am quite happy to see that Android has liberated the market to almost any participant (after the iPhone's vision liberated the old-fashioned mentality). I can purchase an Android phone for as low as GBP110 and do the same office tasks that I would do with a laptop.

Welcome to the 21st century, cell phones.

Android SDK

After a month and some days developing with the bare Android emulator provided by the SDK, my new employer has given me a Google Nexus to toy with. The first thing I wanted to do was to connect it to Eclipse.

Basically, what you have to do is to open the Android SDK Manager, and install the USB driver for your phone model (either Google or OEM). It copies the install files to the hard drive, so what you want to do next is to open the Windows device manager and look for the phone device that lacks its drivers. You go to the \android-sdk\extras\google\usb_driver folder and pick them up there.

After that (rebbot if you need it), Eclipse will let you choose where you want to debug the app

This tutorial has a lot of screenshots, detailed instructions and more fancy stuff.

http://visualgdb.com/tutorials/android/usbdebug/

Crisis Trivia

I am back, sorry for the long delay, I have been really busy.

One of the things that I have been up to is a trivia game engine, which as a first example features a financial, economic and political trivia game called Crisis Trivia.

I have set up a separate blog to talk about it and the follow-up games I may come up with.

Please check out
androidtrivia.blogspot.com

Using whatsapp on your PC (II)

First of all, don't use cracks even if you find no virus. They use Whatsapp's verification of your phone number to send messages to I don't know who.

That being said, my fiancée Sali found what I had given all hope finding: a free and competitive Android emulator called Bluestacks App Player.

Even though it is little known, Bluestacks is the BEST Android emulator with a vengeance.

It runs Whatsapp seamlessly, totally recommended.

I know now what the rascals are saying at any time.

Using Whatsapp on your PC

I have never been a huge fan of cell phones. I am one of those people who think that a phone is just a phone, you use it to speak to others and keep in touch, but not to carry Youtube with you all around.

However, my buddies have started to go into silent mode from me and the reason is that they only use Whatsapp now, so no matter where they are they agree to meet or to do anything on short notice. This leaves me in a very miserable position.

What I did is the following:

1. I instaled the Android SDK that comes with an emulator.
2. In the AVG Manager, in the image I created to emulate a Smartphone, I added the property hw.keyboard with the value yes so I could use my PC keyboard to write into the virtual phone. You can also edit your confil.ini that is located under your user directory ~\.android\avd\device.avd\, and add hw.keyboard=yes .
3. I downloaded Whatsapp from the virtual device.
4. I installed the app (believe it or not it was the most difficult part for me, finding out how to reach the downloaded files, I downloaded it three times).
5. During the first execution, it asked me for my real phone number and they sent a regular SMS to my (physical) phone.
6. I then added my friends' phones to my contact in Android and it automatically marked them as using Whatsapp.
7. Then one of them added me to the groups they were using to meet.