Android Graphics Methods

There isn’t always one best answer

Due to another new project I’ve been working on, I was able to test out different methods on rendering sprites on the Android platform.

• Method #1: Use OpenGL ES to render to a buffer in C via JNI. This method turned out to be the fastest if polygons are batched via lists in a single (or a few) draw calls, and if using fixed instead of floating point numbers. It also opens up a lot of other effects natively not easily implemented through the other two methods (native 3D and matrices). However, it does not support antialiasing natively as is advertised and as I expected. The OpenGL ES 1.0 specs report “antialiased polygon rendering (with alpha border fragments, not multisample)”, but I could not find any information on this at all, and no antialiasing calls that I tried actually worked. There are methods that would allow antialiasing, but none efficient enough for a phone.
• Method #2: Drawing directly to a pixel buffer in C via JNI. This method came in a very close second place if using memory copying functions to blit images, but that also removes a lot of important effects like translucency. Results were less than optimal when not using direct memory copies (I didn’t even worry about including them below) :-\.
• Method #3: Rendering through the Android API in Java. While this method is the most robust in terms of feature set, it is also by far the slowest.

For my personal goals, I’ve come to the conclusion it would be best to use Method #1 for my heavy rendering tasks, and used baked translucent pixels around the borders in the images to emulate 2D antialiasing. The translucent borders could also be added at load time. I think I may also use Method #3 for some other special effects and overlays, though that will also make it harder to port, but I think worth it for now.

The following are the approximate average FPS results to the speed tests I performed (preceded by column descriptions):

• The Test: 45*45 quads (2*45*45=4050 polygons) drawn to cover the whole screen each frame, none overlapping
• Emulator/Droid: The tests were run on 2 separate systems. An Android emulator running v2.2 on my Intel core i5 2.53ghz laptop, and my Motorola Droid also running Android v2.2.
• FLOAT/FIXED: This is only used on Method #1. OpenGL ES supports (in different functions) both floating point numbers and fixed point numbers. Since phones usually have no FPU, and the ones that do might have very slow ones, it’s much more safe efficiency wise to not use floating point numbers. The OpenGL ES solution was to have non-floating (fixed) point decimal arithmetic numbers that act virtually the exact same as normal integers when used with arithmetic functions, but do not have near the range as either floating point numbers or normal integers. The gain by going from floating to fixed was marginal in my tests. 16 bit integers (shorts), which I prefer, can also be used and showed near identical results to fixed point numbers.
• INDIVIDUAL/ALL: This is only used on Method #1. It means whether all the quads were drawn individually in a different call for each (which draws 2 triangles to make a quad), or in 1 call from a list of all the triangles. The gain by going from INDIVIDUAL to ALL was ~1fps on the emulator and ~12fps on the Droid in my tests.

	Emulator	Droid
METHOD1+FLOAT+ALL	11.2	43.4
METHOD1+FIXED+ALL	11.5	44.2
METHOD1+FLOAT+INDIVIDUAL	9.7	30.4
METHOD1+FIXED+INDIVIDUAL	10.7	32.5
METHOD2	25.5	43.3
METHOD3	6.4	22.8

Android Permissions Improperly Reported

More Android stuff, with even more to come soon

[EDIT ON 2011-01-03 @ 1:32AM]

A fix for this issue has been recommended and I consider it resolved. There was always a fix for this but it had not been given yet, as there was confusion to the problem in the bug report. Other people are still reporting the problem but I cannot reproduce it after the suggested fix.

[END OF EDIT]

It has come to my attention that my Mini Acuity application suffers from a “known defect” in Android, namely, that it “requires” 2 security permissions I did not ask for or use.

The “Storage” and “Phone Calls” permissions are listed in the “Application Info” in the Android settings dialog even though the market does not specify that they are used during install.

This is a result of using an old SDK version as the base of my code. Google actually encourages authors to use the minimum possible SDK version, as Android is backwards compatible, so that as many users as possible are supported. This means my only solution to not having these security permissions listed would be to upgrade the SDK version, thereby disabling compatibility from some older phones. I wish there was a way I could see the distribution of Android Versions for my application’s downloads to help determine if this would be worth it.

I have updated the Mini Acuity project page accordingly with a “Permissions” section.

On a side note, it occurs to me how much of a security hole this [possibly] is. If an application is running on these old SDK versions, and the user sees an application has only network access permission, they might not worry about the application stealing their data while it could! Though, I have not yet done the research to confirm this, or plan on doing so. I feel more and more that Android’s security system leaves a lot to be desired.

Microsoft deserves to die to its competition

How can incompetence of this magnitude be thriving so well? Stop supporting Microsoft!

So Microsoft sold us [company I am currently working for] a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Professional with lies about what it supported (Windows Mobile Legacy Versions [including CE]). When we complained, they spouted how VS2010 supports the newest version of Windows Mobile (Windows Phone 7), which doesn’t even exist yet (they promise a release in “Holiday of 2010”, I’ll believe it when I see it, as this is not the first missed expected deadline). Now they refuse to give us a refund on VS2010, or even let us buy VS2008 from them instead, as it’s “a legacy product”, even though we need it because it DOES support windows mobile legacy versions.

Microsoft has done this kind of thing to me, people I know, and pretty much everyone in the world too many times to count. They will never be receiving my business or money again. It feels great to see Google beating them hands down in every market Google decides to compete with them on.

Time to see if we can’t switch over to Linux or Android on these handheld systems as an alternative... (though unfortunately they seem to be locked in to running Windows CE *sigh*).

---

[Addition on 6/17/2010]

And Microsoft lied to me once again, though at least this time I was expecting it. I later found out I also had an MSDN subscription that came with VS2010, and called in to activate it, as online activation wasn’t working (don’t even want to mention all the mistakes they made during THAT process). I was told on the phone during this proceeding that the MSDN subscription license I had was compatible with the “VS Pro MSDN (Retail)” license, and was pointed to a list of products I could download from the MSDN Subscriptions page as soon as my subscription was activated (which took 3 days...). Low and behold, this was not true and I can not download many of the things I am needing and was planning on getting when the subscription came through (including VS 2005 or 2008), as the license is not compatible at all with what they told me.

Microsoft thrives on lying to their consumers and knowing they can get away with it. Microsoft specifically targets CEOs and tells them how important it is that they make their shop 100% Microsoft, giving completely falsified numbers and arguments to support this mockery. Microsoft jams their advertising so much into the heads of these non-tech-savvy individuals that when their IT staff tells them anything against the loud spoutings of Microsoft, the truth is lost in the wind, and even sometimes loses jobs. I have seen this happen at multiple companies, and have seen Microsoft’s lies and falsified reports more times than I can remember.

This somehow needs to be stopped.

Android is not as open as is advertised

Giving the impression of complete freedom

One of the main selling points for me for the Android platform was that, as I understood it, the system was supposed to be very “open” in nature. It would allow a programmer to create virtually any application imaginable that they wanted to for users, as long as the user’s security is maintained. This is, of course, the antithesis of Apple’s philosophy with the iPhone/iPod Touch. However, I find this much spouted openness to not be the case at all. Security permissions are way too tight across the board, especially regarding interfacing with the hardware, making many things next to impossible to accomplish. This is especially true when interfacing with the phone functionality. While a programmer is free to do what they want within the scope of their own application(s) and their GUIs, working with the rest of the system can be a major PITA, or even impossible.

Some of this functionality can be gained back with rooted (jail broken) phones, but it is not always easy (or completely safe) to get one’s phone to such a state. It was simple with the Android 2.0 platform, which I originally had on my Motorola Droid, but not so much with the v2.1 software. Version 2.1 is (currently) a major PITA to root, as it entails having to restore the phone to its original state first, losing everything on it (which can, of course, be restored manually). I also, at this point, do not consider it worth it putting in the time to build things for rooted-only phones as the market is much smaller, and I myself haven’t even bothered rooting my phone on the current Android version.

Anyone can also compile their own version of the Android platform as it is open source. This would be worth it, for example, if an organization wanted to distribute their own compilation with modifications internally. However, it doesn’t much help application programmers like myself that want to reach a wide audience. I am also under the impression that putting your own flavor of the Android platform on your phone would lose certain functionalities/things included by the image provided by the provider of the phone (usually cell phone network carriers).

I really like how they did one section of the security system, which is, allowing an application to request special permissions from the operating system. A user is informed of the requested permissions before they install an application from the market place. The main problem is, though, that so many permissions are unavailable that should be possible. Another major downside is that way too many applications request permissions that they shouldn’t be requesting. This leaves users high and dry with applications they consider critical only available if they accept things they don’t want to. For example, many programs request full internet access with no need for it. It would be great to be able to selectively turn off these permissions, but I doubt the option for this is going to happen. I’m going to do more research myself on if an application can be written to do this, but I am not going to get even the slightest hope up on this possibility.

There are even examples of listed permissions that cannot be accessed by user submitted applications! For example, the INJECT_EVENTS permission can only be used by applications signed with the same signature as the system. I was unable to find this tidbit of information anywhere in the Android documentation and references (or the Internet). This all goes back to the problem of the documentation being less than optimal, as it leaves out a lot of important information.

There are at least 3 applications ATM I wanted to create but could not due to permissions:

• Call recording: I have written on this previously, but this functionality is unavailable, and Google is not commenting as to why. There are also countless other applications that could use the ability to access a call’s audio. This functionality was available on some older versions of the Android platform (and there are applications out there that take advantage of this), but it seems unavailable on newer versions for 1 of 3 reasons:
  • Legal reasons: It’s illegal to record calls in some areas (which would be dumb to revoke accessing call audio because of this because it’s legal in so many other places, including where I live in Texas).
  • Technological reasons: Some phone manufacturers might have it so the audio never even makes it to the operating system (it’s kept on the phone’s radio stack).
  • Google reasons: They decided it was a feature they no longer wanted to support. The fact of the matter is the interface is provided by the platform to do this, but bugs have been introduced into it and it no longer seems to work.
• Automated call menu: I would love to make an application that created an automated call menu on the phone, which could include leaving messages. I would personally use this so I could keep my phone on when sleeping, allowing the phone to direct the caller to either my [local or remote] voice mail or to wake me up if it’s an emergency. This is not possible due to the inability to access a call’s audio, as is explained in the above unimplementable application, but I am betting that there would be many more permissions that would make this not possible.
• Global Key interception: I have somewhat solved this problem, as I will be explaining in a post most likely coming tomorrow.

Android Stuff

Yet another platform/library to learn. It never ends.

Having recently finished my first Android project (and hopefully not last), I decided to supply some notes I took about the process.

While I am going to try and keep impressions to a minimum on the rest of this post, and keep it to tangible notes, I must first comment that trying to find out things for the Android platform was often like pulling teeth. While its typical Java reference online documentation is all there with all the classes and cross-linking, that is about all it is, very dry and virtually useless beyond a base reference. The comments on variable parameters (and many other sections) in the reference are often coarse and not descriptive at all, for example, one parameter named mask has the basic description as “this is a mask”. Some functions don’t even have descriptions at all.

Perhaps I am getting too complacent as a programmer and getting used to excellent documentation like for Python or GTK (I’ve even grown to love Microsoft documentation after having used it for long enough!). After all, most required information is just a Google away, and being a programmer is often just about finding the proper magical incantations to hook into a certain library. Unfortunately, however, even web searches were often yielding less than fruitful results when dealing with Android, as the platform is relatively new.

• Some useful tasks and some problems:
  • Using the virtual (soft) keyboard without a TextView:
    • Showing the virtual keyboard:

      ((InputMethodManager)getSystemService(INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE)).toggleSoftInput(InputMethodManager.SHOW_FORCED, InputMethodManager.HIDE_IMPLICIT_ONLY);

    • Hiding the virtual keyboard:

      ((InputMethodManager)getSystemService(INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE)).hideSoftInputFromWindow(getWindow().getDecorView().getApplicationWindowToken(), 0);

      Note: “getWindow().getDecorView()” can also be replaced by a View on your screen
    • Getting the keyboard input: Add the following function to the Activity that opened the keyboard:

      @Override public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent msg)

      Note: This will not work if you’re not using default keyboard input (like if it’s set to enter Japanese or Chinese characters).
  • Determining the physical dimensions of the screen:

    This should be a trivial task using the DisplayMetrics (getWindowManager().getDefaultDisplay()) interface to get dpis and multiply by the screen dimensions getWindowManager().getDefaultDisplay().getWidth() (and .getHeight). However, it doesn’t always work as it should.

    The best method to get the DPI would be to use “DisplayMetrics.xdpi” and “DisplayMetrics.ydpi”, but unfortunately, these are misreported by at least the Motorola Droid. I’ve found “DisplayMetrics.density”*160 to be pretty accurate, but if true accuracy is needed, a calibration screen might be required.

  • Inform user of touch events: Many Android widgets (Views) change their visual state (highlight) when the user presses down on them to let the user know something is going to happen if the user lifts their finger while still on the widget. Unfortunately, there seems to be no text widget or layout view that does this automatic highlighting by itself (ListViews do in groups). The following is some example code to produce this effect.

    import android.view.View.OnTouchListener;
    
    public class CLASSNAME extends Activity
    {
    	@Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
    	{
    		View HighlightView=findViewById(R.id.THE_VIEWS_ID);
    		HighlightView.setOnTouchListener(HighlightState);
    	}	
    	
    	private OnTouchListener HighlightState = new OnTouchListener() { public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event)
    	{
    		if(event.getAction()==MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN)
    			v.setBackgroundColor(0xFF0000FF); //Set background color to blue
    		else if(event.getAction()==MotionEvent.ACTION_CANCEL || event.getAction()==MotionEvent.ACTION_UP)
    			v.setBackgroundResource(0); //No background color
    			
    		return false;
    	} };
    }

  • Retrieving the names and IDs of all resources in a resource group:

    import java.lang.reflect.Field;
    
    Field[] FieldList=R.drawable.class.getDeclaredFields();
    String[] Names=new String[FieldList.length];
    int[] IDs=new int[FieldList.length];
    for(int i=0;i<FieldList.length;i++)
    	IDs[i]=getResources().getIdentifier(Names[i]=FieldList[i].getName(), "drawable", getClass().getPackage().getName());

  • Setting a color matrix on an image: If you have 2 ImageViews that display the same resource image, and either has a color matrix set on it, the will both share one of the color matrices. If this occurs, copy the image the resource, or use a separate image resource. For kicks, here is an example of setting an inverse color matrix on an image.

    ((ImageView)findViewById(R.id.IMAGE_ID)).setColorFilter(new ColorMatrixColorFilter(new float[] {-1,0,0,0,255, 0,-1,0,0,255, 0,0,-1,0,255, 0,0,0,1,0}));

  • Setting to full screen:

    requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE); //This must be called before "setContentView", and hides the title bar
    getWindow().setFlags(FULLSCREEN ? WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN : 0, WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN); //Turns on/off the status bar

  • Starting another local activity: Instead of using Intent(String action) for Context.StartActivity, as the Reference explains, it is much easier to use Intent(Context packageContext, Class<?> cls) like the following: (called from inside an Activity)

    startActivity(new Intent(this, OTHER_ACTIVITY_NAME.class);

  • Creating a timed event that updates the UI: A function running through java.util.Timer cannot interact with the GUI. One solution to make a timer is with the android.os.Handler interface.

    import android.os.Handler;
    
    public class ExampleActivity extends Activity
    {
    	final int InitialDelay, RepeatDelay; 
    	Handler TimedHandler=new Handler();
    	
    	public void ExampleFunction()
    	{
    		TimedHandler.postDelayed(new Runnable() { public void run() {
    			//Do GUI stuff...
    			TimedHandler.postDelayed(this, RepeatDelay);
    		} }, InitialDelay);
    	}
    }

    
    Another solution is to post to a Handler from the Timer function.
• When dealing with putting on the market place:
  • Getting an account to put applications on the Android Market cost $25.
  • Screenshots shown on the Android Market description page are somewhat buggy, and seemingly randomly either stretch properly or crop. Viewing the full sized screenshots does seem to work properly.
  • Seeing as there are a number of applications on the market that have both a “Free” and “Full” version, you’d think this would be an easy thing to accomplish. Unfortunately, the marketplace uses an application’s package name as its unique identifier, so both versions have to have a different package name, which is again, a bit of a nuisance.

    One method of remedying this is just having a recursive string replace through all the files to change the package names. However, if using eclipse, so you don’t have to reopen it, it’s quicker to update the string first in the manifest, and then renaming the package under the “src” folder by pressing F2 (rename) on it when it is selected.

    Also, unfortunately, if you do this, when a person upgrades from the lite to the full version, preferences are not automatically transferred :-\.

  • The publisher’s market place page is very sparse and leaves a lot to be desired. It also seems to update only once every 24 hours or so (not sure of exact times).
  • If an application is put up, it WILL get downloads immediately. For example, I put up an application with a description of “This is a test, do not download this” for doing security tests that I took down within like 10 minutes. It already had 2 comments/ratings on it within that time ~.~; .
  • Google Checkout: Fees. When a copy of your application is purchased, the user has 24 hours to return it. The money is not deposited into your bank account until after this time (when it’s not a weekend). If you want to give your application to someone for free, they need to purchase it through the market, and then you can cancel the purchase transaction before the 24 hours are up. Unfortunately, this has to be done every time they want to update the application. It also seems you cannot buy your own applications, as the purchase server throws an error.
• Application Protection:

  You can download any Android application by default from your phone to your computer, modify them, and reinstall them back to any phone. An example use for this would be to crack a shareware application where just a single byte probably needs to be changed to make it a full version.

  The applications themselves are in an .apk file (which is just a .zip file), and the source code (classes) are encoded as a “Dalvik Executable” file within it (classes.dex), which as I understand it, is optimized Java bytecode. So, AFAIK right now, there is no way to decompile the .dex file back to the original source, like you can with normal Java. However, the Android emulator, part of the Android SDK, includes a tool called dexdump, which allows you to decompile it to bytecode.

  Once you have the bytecode, you can use that as reference to modify the compiled .dex file however you want, which is pretty much synonymous with assembly editing. Once that is done, the signature and checksum of the .dex file must be recalculated (Java source by Timothy Strazzere), and then the apk file must be resigned, and then it’s good to go!

  The marketplace also has an option to turn on Copy Protection. When this is turned on for an application, the user cannot backup or access the applications package file. I would assume however with a rooted phone you could still grab it from “/data/app-private”, and the rest of the process should be the same. I have not tested this as rooting Android 2.1 is much more of a pain in the butt, ATM, than I want to deal with.

Droid Impressions and Custom Ringtones

Yay, new Google phone

I finally gave in and got myself a Motorola Droid phone, as I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time, but was reluctant to do so due to some known problems with it. I have been incredibly happy with it, and find it leaps and bounds better than the iPhone platform (and many other smart phones).

Pros (when compared to other phones/platforms on the market):

• It’s on the Verizon network, which, from my experience, has by far the best coverage and quality
• The Android platform keeps things running in the background so you can go in and out of applications freely, as opposed to only being able to run 1 application at a time on the iPhone. This multitasking approach is much better because...
  • This means that applications can continue to run/process in the background for necessary tasks, like periodically talking and receiving data from servers (without push notifications, which aren’t as powerful)
  • Applications, since they remain open, take no extra time to start back up every time you want to go to them
  • Keeping applications open has (as I understand it) next to zero, if not zero, drain on system resources if they are not doing anything in the background
  • If the phone is running out of memory, it will kill an application that is not in use
• I find the touchscreen much more responsive and accurate than the iPhone
• The voice recognition is spectacular (especially useful when combined with GPS/mapping programs)
• It’s not Apple :-) (and it’s Google!)
• It has a physical qwerty keyboard (see Cons)
• The lock screen protection is pretty neat and quick (gesture-like unlocking)
• The platform is open source, which has many powerful advantages for programmers
• Music/books/etc are directly loaded from an SD Card with no need to go through something like iTunes. This can, however, be slow when indexing from the SD card after changes
• Music sorts first by folder and then by album. While this would have been great for me a year or so ago when I got my iTouch, it no longer is as useful as I have already gone through my whole music folder and properly re-tagged everything (and it has actually caused a few bugs in my music organization)
• Free tethering to a computer through PDANet (1 month trial that blocks HTTPS sites afterwards, but I SSL tunnel my connections anyways :-) ). [Edit on 5/25/2010]: Google has just announced Android 2.2 has a new added feature “a portable Wi-Fi hotspot that can be shared with up to 8 devices.”
• Great [5.0 megapixel] camera/video recorder
• Applications can use self signed certificates for distribution. Signed applications prevent tampering (which has both advantages and disadvantages :-) ), and self signing means you can develop for the platform for free

Cons:

• It cannot be on the Internet and a phone call at the same time (Verizon [CDMA] problem). This is especially problematic when tethering
• Even though the system is Linux based, working with the terminal emulator leaves a lot to be desired
  • Most of my standard bash commands [coreutils] are not there
  • Permissions are so tight you can barely do anything without rooting
  • The shell itself is missing a lot of functionality (problems with finding files even though they are in the “path”, bash-type arrow shortcuts [autofill, history], etc)
  • Motorola has seemingly [possibly?] even removed some of the utilities that should have come with the Android platform (they are on the Android emulator at least) like the command line SQLite program
• The physical keyboard is a lot harder to use than my last phone (VX9800, I’ve been using one since 2004), and also leaves a lot to be desired. It’s better than having no keyboard though!
  • Since there is no spacing between the keys, it is very easy to make a mistake
  • The number of keys is very small and not always in typical qwerty layout (for numbers and symbols), so it’s hard to find some characters
  • Some characters (like the pipe | ) are not even listed, and you just have to know how to get to them (alt+shift+comma for the pipe)
• The phone does not let you record call conversations. This seems to be a hardware issue specific to the Droid (and possibly the Nexus One) and not necessarily because of the Android platform. I cannot find any official or confirmable information on the reason. [Edited this bullet on 3/1/2010]
• It’s made to interface with Java when programming, and you don’t have much of a choice with this :-( . However, C/C++ modules can be made that directly interface easily with the Java base.

Anywho, the original intent of this post was not to talk about the Droid itself, but I figured I might as well get that out of the way while I was on the topic :-). The real point was to talk about a problem I ran into and the solution.

I had a lot of trouble finding a way to quickly set a ringtone to many people. As I have many hundreds of contacts in my phone, and I need groups of people set to different ringtones (and sometimes just one individual), it would have taken many hours to accomplish the task of assigning ringtones to these contacts. I found the perfect solution though in an application, not on the market, called JUSTones (also called “Just Tones”). Not only does it allow you to set ringtones for many people at once, but it also lets you set SMS tones for contacts (Yay!), which is not native to the platform.

Unfortunately, it was made for a depreciated version of the Android platform, and did not work on my phone. I have been in communication with the author, and after sending him the solution to my main problem, he has sent me a new working version (with many more fixes for bugs I mentioned too) ^_^. He even refunded my original purchase and told me to not worry about paying for it, which was pretty cool of him. It’s nice to find other software authors as nice and willing to work with you as this :-).

The problem was that the ringtones being set through the program were not actually being set to the contacts. The reason was that ringtone values are now set in 2 separate places in the OS, and only 1 of them was actually being used. I presume the old location of the value was still being set so legacy applications could still read the ringtone for the contact, but not necessarily set it.

The following is the code I sent to him that copies over the values from the old value location to the new one.

//Prepare to read from the old contacts database
Cursor cur=managedQuery(People.CONTENT_URI, new String[] { People.NAME, People.CUSTOM_RINGTONE }, null, null, People.NAME + " ASC"); //Query the old contacts database
cur.moveToFirst(); //Move to the first record of the old contacts database

//Prepare queries to run on new contacts database
ArrayList<ContentProviderOperation> ops = new ArrayList(); //This holds the queries to run
do //Loop over each [old] record of the database
{
	String TheName=String.valueOf(cur.getString(cur.getColumnIndex(People.NAME))); //Get the name from the old record
	String TheRingtone=cur.getString(cur.getColumnIndex(People.CUSTOM_RINGTONE)); //Get the ringtone from the old record
	ops.add(ContentProviderOperation.newUpdate(ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI) //Prepare a query on the new contacts database
		.withSelection(ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME + "=?", new String[]{TheName}) //On any record where the Name = OLD_NAME
		.withValue(ContactsContract.Contacts.CUSTOM_RINGTONE, TheRingtone) //Set Ringtone = OLD_RINGTONE
		.build());
} while (cur.moveToNext());

//Execute the queries on the new contacts database
try
{
	getContentResolver().applyBatch(ContactsContract.AUTHORITY, ops);
} catch(Exception e) { }

No Phone Signal at the Grand Canyon

“Can you hear me now?” ... Thor, did I just do that clichéd line? x.x;

Hmm, I’m currently stuck at an outlet mall between Las Vegas and Hollywood for 3 or so hours while the highway is closed down. They are apparently blowing up a chunk of a mountain so they can expand the highway (I-15 South). My vacation has been very event filled so far, with barely enough time to get stuff done, so I figure while I’m stuck here, I might as well get one of the posts I’ve been meaning to do out of the way :-).

The highlights of my vacation so far have included:

• 2 days at Disney Land, which was lots of fun :-)
• 3 days in Las Vegas which included:
  • A little gambling
  • Seeing lots of casinos and free shows
  • My travel companion’s wedding
  • Destroying my ankles from walking to each casino to catch all the shows in time. Each Casino is 3-6 blocks long and has so much in them, it feels overwhelming! There’s just too much to see!
• The Grand Canyon, which was magnificent, majestic, and breathtaking. We also crossed over the Hoover Dam on the way there.
• We are now heading to Hollywood for the rest of the vacation ^_^.

I am still kind of anxious to get back home, see my kitty, and resume normal life though. This is a lot of activity for an extended period of time for me.

Anyways, Verizon has failed me for the first time ever in the US :-(. I got no signal at the Grand Canyon, doh. That’s all I had to report though, heh. And I’m not really complaining, because Verizon still gets far better signals in far more places than the other phone services I’ve tried.

The IPod Touch

And IPhones

So I decided to go over to the evil side recently and get an IPod Touch. I originally wanted to just try it out in The Apple Store, but I just couldn’t find out all I wanted to about it there, and was getting highly annoyed by the completely ignorant sale reps, who couldn’t answer any of my questions anyways, hovering over my shoulder. And, yes, I asked them a few questions and neither they nor their managers had a clue. >:-(

However, all the sales reps I’ve been talking to lately at different stores about the IPod Touch and other electronic products I’ve been interested in buying have been pushing me to just buy them, and return them if I’m not satisfied. This sales tactic is a bit new to me, and I don’t like buying something and returning it needlessly, but they suggest it, so I decided what the heck! I guess it’s assumed most people will buy it and either decide they like it, forget to return it, or are too lazy to return it! So I decided to go to Fry’s to grab one (IPod Touch 2G v2.2) for testing and possibly keeping if I liked it because The Apple Store were really uncool about a lot of things, and also charged a hefty restocking fee on return... jerks. The jury is still out on if I’ll be keeping it or not, but I decided to share some of my findings.

When I talk about the IPod Touch here, I am also talking about the IPhone, because they are basically the exact same product. The IPhone just has the camera and the phone features, but the rest of the software is all the same (they run on the same OS). I also have a few IPhone specific comments below, as a good friend of mine got one for XMas and I helped him out with setting it up and found out a few things about it at the same time. Whenever I refer to the IPod Touch from here on out, I am referring to both IPod Touches and IPhones.

First of all, as is advertised and highly touted, The IPod Touch has style. The design is wonderful, it has a lot of nifty features, and has lots of useful applications in the App Store, many of them free. The product itself is by far better than anything else I’ve tried on the market for music playing and general PDA (personal digital assistant) purposes.

The Blackberrys I’ve tried out at a Verizon store (the Storm and Curve IIRC) weren’t even in the same league as the IPod Touch. I also tried out a G1 (Google phone) at a TMobile store, and initial impressions were not spectacular. However, I can’t make a solid judgment on the G1 because I didn’t spend as much time with it as I could have, as I knew I couldn’t use it anyways. This is because I refuse to switch from the Verizon network because the signal quality and customer support I have received from them are worlds better than what I had ever received from Cingular (now AT&T), AT&T, and Sprint.

Now that I’ve gotten the initial information out of the way including why the IPod Touch is nice; on to all of the problems I’ve found with it.

• Apple has horrible draconian policies regarding what can be put on an IPod Touch. Applications can only (legally) be put on the IPod Touch from the App Store, and Apple specifically regulates what is in the store, only allowing in it what is “best for their interests”. This, of course, includes denying any application in the App Store that “duplicates functionality” of an Apple product. This is bad for many reasons.
  • First and foremost, it’s not Apple’s place (though they argue that it is) to say who can develop and what can be developed for the IPod Touch, as long as it is not malicious in any way.
  • Apply very specifically blocks, quite often, products that would be excellent with great functionality because it “competes” with their generally inferior applications. Of course, one can unlock older IPod Touches, and I’m sure newer ones will be unlockable soon enough, so this problem can be bypassed. When a phone is unlocked, it can be theoretically used on a compatible network (not AT&T), and you can install any application you want to on it for free (as long as you can find it). The legality of this is questionable, but it’s not really risky.
  • This can force developers who have spent their time and effort to build a good product to not be accessible to the market, thereby completely screwing them after the fact. Apple is not specific on what can be put on the store, and is very subjective about the whole matter. Unfortunately, many developers have found themselves in this position after submitting their application to Apple for inclusion in the store.
  • Apple can decide to block a product after it has been released and people have bought it, deleting it from their phones without refund. I believe (but have no proof) that this has already happened when a product “duplicated the functionality” of a new application or feature in an application of theirs that was added after the fact.
• The SMS (texting) interface on the IPhone is horrible. It only allows you to see part of the message that you are typing at any time (40 characters as a hazy guess). This could easily be fixed through a third party application, but Apple blocks any application that has SMS as it is “duplicating” the functionality of something they built. See the above bullet for more information.
• The keyboard correction on the IPod touches leaves much to be desired, and there is no text prediction (suggesting words you are typing).
• The virtual keyboard itself, while far ahead of any other virtual keyboard on a cell phone I have tried as far as usability goes, also leaves a lot to be desired, and can be quite annoying. I did get used to it pretty fast, but mistakes were very often and easily made, and I do not believe one could ever type as fast on a virtual keyboard, like the IPod Touch’s, as a physical keyboard, though I haven’t spent near enough time practicing on it to confirm this. The Google phones (at least the G1) solves this problem with its flip-out keyboard interface.
• No multitasking. Period. The IPod Touch can do a few things at the same time (mainly play music), but 2 applications cannot run at the same time, and trying is against their developer agreement. Apple did this to control the user experience, so that a user doesn’t try running too many things at once, creating a bad user experience on the product from lag, which they would blame on Apple. Granted, the IPod Touch isn’t that powerful and it would be easy to bog down the system if too many things were running, but some things need to continue running in the background, with minimal processor time, to create a good experience.
  One of many examples of this is AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). When you start the application, it signs you on, and it keeps you online AIM until you specifically sign off (or perhaps if you turn off the phone, but I doubt it). This means that if you exit the AIM application after signing on, it shows other people that you are still online and receiving messages, even if you aren’t getting them. When you open the application back up, it retrieves all of the queued messages that were sent to you while the application was not opened. How hard and taxing would it be on the system to pop up a message informing the user a new message has come in while they are in other applications? Apparently too much, as Apple has to be black and white about the multitasking issue instead of allowing developers to petition for the right. Further, this queued AIM message system also tips one off to the fact that ALL AIM messages are sent through their servers to get to your IPod Touch, instead of your system directly connecting to the AIM servers, which is essentially an invasion on your private conversations.
• Crashing. The IPod Touch itself has crashed on me twice within the first 2 hours I used it. When this occurred, I could not even start most all of the applications, even after turning the IPod Touch on and off (all the way, not standby mode). The only way I found to fix this was installing a new application from the App Store, or updating an application that had a new version ready. Go figure.
• The IPhone can only take pictures, and not video. While there are products that allow taking video on the IPhone, they can only be installed by unlocking the phone, as Apple will not allow them on the App Store (see the top bullet for more information).
• No searching for text on the current page in the web browser (Safari). This really bugs me as it is an essential feature I need in my web browser :-(.
• I don’t trust installing Apple applications on my computers. I actually ended up using VMWare to use ITunes for this reason >:-(. ITunes likes embedding itself in your system in lots of places it shouldn’t, much like AOL since version 5.0. I do not believe it uninstalls itself completely either if you try. Also, when I tried uninstalling bonjour (an Apple communication protocol, which the program that runs it is also named, It used to be called Rendezvous) it didn’t even TRY to uninstall itself from my system. It just took the program off of a few lists and left all the files there. Even worse, I noticed that Bonjour was hooking a bunch of other processes it shouldn’t have been *sighs*.
• I’ve saved my biggest complaint for last. All music on the IPod Touches (all IPods actually, and Zunes and Zens too) organize music by the MP3’s ID3 tags into genre/album/artist/etc, and do not allow organizing the music in folder based structures. While for most people this is not a problem, it is a big one for me. This is not a problem for people “new” to the MP3 player scene that buy their music straight from the ITunes Store, as that music is already organized for them with proper tags how they want it. My, and many other peoples collections, that have been being built for well over a decade (from CDs myself or friends have ripped ourselves for the most part), are not all tagged very well, as it never mattered. While I could go through my whole directory and tag everything properly, this would take upwards of hundreds of hours to do, and would be a waste of my time. Even so, I feel being able to organize by directory can be easier to navigate and organize then straight up genre/album/artist listings. This is a very basic functionality of all MP3 players I have had up until this point.
• The above problem is actually solvable by playlist folder structures. Unfortunately, these are only available on some of the IPod types (for example, the Classic and Nano, IIRC) but not on IPod Touches or IPhones :-(. Further, building these nested folder playlist structures is also a minor pain. I started writing a script to do it for my music collection until I realized it didn’t work on my IPod Touch. ITunes transfers each folder to the IPod Touch as a flat playlist of all the songs in the playlists under it, but again, this is not a problem on some of the other IPod Systems. Unfortunately, if I was to spend the money on an IPod, I would like it to be a PDA too with much more functionality, which the IPod Touch satisfies, and the others do not.

As previously mentioned, I might not be keeping the IPod Touch, as I cannot justify the cost of it mainly as an MP3 player while I’ve already had other solutions that are almost as good for a number of years. I was one of the first adopters of MP3 players (of the MP3s on CD variety) back in 1998, I believe, and they still work great. However, I would probably get an IPhone were I able to use it on the Verizon network because it combines all the features I like on the IPod Touch with a phone. I would love to be able to use its excellent web browser (as far as cell phone browsers go) anywhere, not just when an accessible WiFi network was handy. The cost of an IPhone is more proportionate to what I’d like to spend since I’d be getting a phone and a music player out of it. Unfortunately, when unlocked, IPhones (and G1s) cannot work on Verizon, like it can the other networks, because Verizon uses a different kind of technology for its carrier signals (CDMA instead of GSM). Alas :-\.

Oh, yes, one more thing I wanted to mention. Apple was originally turning a blind eye to the unlocking IPhone market because most of them were going oversees to markets untapped by Apple, which is good for business for them. However, when Apple started expanding into other countries and this practice no longer served their needs, they added on a section to the AT&T contract you are forced to sign up for when buying the phone. It basically stipulates that if you cancel the AT&T contract (which incurs a fee after the first 30 days anyways) that you have to return the IPhone too. This way Apple is guaranteeing people can’t use the phone outside of AT&T.

Text Message Storage Limits

We need open source cell phones

So I’ve been rather perturbed for a very long time at the 50/50 inbox/outbox limit of stored SMS text messages in all LG cell phones.  Other phones have similar limits, like a Samsung I have is limited to 100/50, and it just erases messages when an overflow occurs, as opposed to the nice prompts on my LG VX9800, with its QWERTY keyboard, which I love.

I have done some minor hacking on cell phones and tinkered with the firmware, but without a proper emulator, I would never be able to find out where the 50 cap is set and be able to make a hack for phones could store more.

So today, I was at a Verizon store [unimportant ordeal here] because I got a little bit of water on my LG phone and it was having issues.  Immediately after the spill, it had a bunch of problems including the battery thinking it was always charging, buttons on the front side sending two different buttons when pressed, and some other buttons not working.  I immediately set to shaking it out at all angles to get most of the water out (which there wasn’t much to begin with...), and then I thoroughly blow dried every opening into the inside circuitry.  This fixed everything but the worst problem, signal dropping.  Basically, the phone would lose any connection it made after about 5 seconds, so I couldn’t really answer or makes calls.  Fortunately I was still able to send and receive SMS messages, but received ones didn’t signal the server they were received, and I kept receiving them over and over and over until a connection finally stayed open long enough to tell the server I got it.
So I took it back to the store to see if they could fix it, and all they tried was updating the firmware... but they said I could trade it in for another phone for $50, which I figured from the beginning is what I would have to do, and was a good idea anyways because of this [temporarily down].
So they realized they had no replacements in stock... or at the warehouse... for the VX9800 OR the VX9900, which they said they’d upgrade me too if they couldn’t find and VX9800, and I wanted (yay).  So I was told to call back tomorrow and try again.  Bleh. Anyways, I was at the store where I found out why this was.  Apparently, cell phones start slowing down considerably with too many stored SMSs.  I was told of a lady that had come in the previous week with 600+ stored messages and the phone took very long intervals to do anything, and clearing it fixed it.

I know that, on my phone at least, each SMS message is stored as a separate file, so my best guess as to the reason for this problem is that this creates too many entries in the file system for the phone to handle.  This seems like a rather silly and trivial problem to work around, but the cell phone manufactures can get away with it, as they have no good competitors that fix problems like this.

This is why we really need open source cell phones.  There have been word of open source phones in the works for years... but nothing too solid yet :-\.

So ANYWAYS, I had already started taking a different approach in early January to fix the problem of backing up SMS messages without having to sync them to your computer, which is a rather obnoxious work around.  I had been researching and planning to write a BREW application that extracts all SMS messages into a text file on your phone so that you don’t have to worry about the limits, and could download them to your computer whenever you wanted, with theoretically thousands of SMS messages archived on your phone.  Unfortunately, as usual, other things took over my time and the project was halted, but I will probably be getting back to it soon.