So you plugged your Android phone into your Windows machine having forgotten to switch on USB debugging…
Menu > Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging

Then Windows detected your device as a USB-Mass storage device and won’t change the settings, regardless of how many times you uninstalled the device. Thread on it here.

This solution worked for me and didn’t require editing the registry settings (I don’t know if the reboot is unnecessary).

(1) Plugin phone
(2) Uninstall any drivers that mention “HTC Android Mobile USB Device”
(3) Unplug phone and restart
(4) Install and run USBDeview
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html
(5) Using USBDeview find the Android device (for some reason Windows hides uninstalled drivers instead of deleting them), right click on it and uninstall.
(6) Follow the official instructions to the letter this time.
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html

Happy developing.

I have a bit of time off between finishing job A and starting job B, made up of a combination of unused leave, unpaid overtime and a slightly delayed starting date (see Gardening leave).

It turns out my Krankenversichern (German private medical insurance provider) will let me be off work (unemployed) for up to 4 weeks as long as they get paid every quarter (not sure of the details, so ask them yourself before quitting).

So its June, and my Düsseldorf appartment lacks a garden.  Looks like I will be forced to improvise…

So I am between jobs and I have to give back my Android G1 and use my old Nokia 6600 for a few weeks.  That means moving over my contacts, which turns out to be a lot easier than I expected:

1. Android G1 contacts are synchronised with my Google mail account.  So log into Gmail, then click Contacts > Export.  Export “Everyone” in “vCard format”, saving the .vcf file to your Nokia MMC card.
2. Download and install Best vCard for S60, and use it to open the .vcf file on your MMC.  Import all contacts and you’re done.

All the regular issues:

• Umlauts are corrupted, i.e. characters üöäÜÖÄß become split pairs (surrogate pairs), or Mark Münsterman becomes MÄ$nsterman.
• Contact labels are missing.  So instead of having a Business, Home and Mobile number for someone I have 3x numbers labelled “Telephone”.

Clearly there is room for a global standard for moving, updating and synching contacts between systems.  Most people I know find themselves moving between systems (Outlook, phone, webmail, Facebook, etc) and spend time maintaining their contacts, or just don’t bother at all.

The world awaits my next invention.

…I here by declare that I have not developed, sold or distributed applications or services over the Android Market and Google checkout payment system.  Please do not begin an investigation into my activities, as I am mealy a hard working bunny who only manages to file his German tax explanation forms on a semi-annual basis.  Please do not crush my dreams under weight of bureaucracy and threat of criminal prosecution.
Mark

[RANT]
It turns out that selling applications over the Android market seems to be a sure fire way of getting myself investigated by the tax man (all of them, not just the German one apparently).

Developers are required to set the sales-tax rate for the local where the customer is buying.  That means customising the correct rate for every state in the US (and individual city’s apparently), European country, province of Zanzibar, etc.  I do not happen to know the tax rate in California, and I expect that nobody would inform me if it were to change the day after I entered it manually into the Market web page.  Developers are not international tax experts, and Google have abdicated their responsibility by charging a blanket ~30% “carrier tax” without taking responsibility for Tax processing itself.

I can hear the sound of iPhone developers (who have this taken care of for them) laughing at us right now.
[/RANT]

P.S. Here’s an idea, how about Google do a *Tax* session at their Google I/O conference?

Some relevant links:
[Question: Legally, is the developer selling the app or is Android Market selling it to end user?]
[Campaign: Android Developers International & Tax Consultation]
[Question: Do I need company to sell applications?]
[MARKET QUESTION: Selling applications on the Google Market]
[MARKET QUESTION: Selling applications on the Google Market]

• 8GB On board memory (I wonder how much will be left for apps?)
• 5-megapixel camera with LED flash (nice)
• 3.5mm headphone socket
• Extended battery (can’t wait to test)

I am not with O2, so I will be looking to get my hands on a developer phone as fast as I can.

If this releases on June, it will mark the end of the HTC monopoly over Android and their stupid 70MB app space restriction.  This would have the obvious knock on effect of improving sales on the Android market.

That’s enough blogging for now, time to get back to developing my killer app for Android.

Two big news items today:

• Oracle now own Sun.
• Google App Engine now supports Java.

Oracle on Sun
What I think is being overlooked here is that Oracle have now *inadvertently* bought MySQL (now owned by Sun), i.e. their only serious rival.  This sounds like an anti-trust case to me.

Google App Engine on Java
I came *this* close to binning my GoDaddy account and switching to the App engine for my next big idea (a work in progress).  However I’ve been warned by a current user to be wary of the Google-style process timer limits, and sure enough, looking through the documentation…

Source:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html

“Application code only runs in response to a web request or a cron job, and must return response data within 30 seconds in any case. A request handler cannot spawn a sub-process or execute code after the response has been sent.”

Forcing developers to make their systems responsive is just good programming from Google, however I need to run a low intensity spider in the background once every hour.  Currently this takes about two minutes to complete, but I expect it to run much longer on production data.  Hence I can’t afford to have Google killing my code every 30 seconds.

“An application cannot write to the file system. An app can read files, but only files uploaded with the application code. The app must use the App Engine datastore, memcache or other services for all data that persists between requests.“
Log4J files anyone?

I’ll have to keep an eye on this to see if anything changes, as “Free lunch” Google hosting sounds too good to resist.

23.4.2009 EDIT
Log4J support is here.

24.4.2009 EDIT
I stand corrected.  It seems that the feature “Task queues for performing background processing” is high in the App Engine product roadmap for a June 2009 release.  Maybe I’ll get my free lunch after all?
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html

Thanks to all on this thread.

Prerequisites:
- Android SDK
- Android USB driver

To extract APK files:
(1) Plug your “Routed” Android phone into your computer via the included USB cable.
(2) From your computers command line type “adb shell“.
(3) Switch to root user “su“.
(4) “cd data/app“.
(5) List all the installed apk files with “ls“.
(6) In another command window, pull one of the files on to your computer:
Format:
“adb pull /data/app/.apk .apk”
Example:
“adb pull data/app/com.zedray.snowball.apk snowball.apk”

That wasn’t so hard was it?

The Android OS has effectively no protection for downloaded executables, so applications developers should seek alternative mechanisms for securing their applications against piracy.  Now (don’t get me wrong), I’m coming at this not as a user wishing to pirate software, but as a developer looking to sell the fruits of my labour over the Android Market.

Google have implmented their own reginal/device based locking with limited success (e.g. developers can’t see their own applications on the store).  However, I think a real solution would be to allow matching devices/users accounts to actual purchases, so applicaiton developers can monitor legitimately purchased applications on the server side.

HTC G1 Application storage limitation:
Both the HTC G1 and the forthcoming HTC Magic suffer from having extremely limited on-device Application storage.  This amounts to about 70MB after all the default OS applications (email, browser, etc.) have been installed.  This is a serious drawback for the device because Android Market applications can’t be installed off the SD card.  Meaning that a user will be able to typically download ~10 applications before their phone complains of lack of space (so much for trying out the thousands of free applications on the store).  I believe this is an issue which Google have no intention of fixing because of the security problems described above.

This is a real deal breaker when anyone asks me if they should get themselves a G1, and should also be considered by anyone trying to make money by selling applications on the Android market.

This problem will be solved over time as other manufactures start putting out devices with 8GB or 16GB+ of on-device storage.

Overcoming this limitation:
I am told that executing an APK file from an SD card currently requires a Linux file system partition (which I haven’t attempted).  My aim is to remap the SD card to the “data/app/” directory, so I can install Android Market executables directly to my 8GB SD card.  Then I could download and use hundreds of applications at the same time.