Robot.Floss

I love Google, and I am always excited by the products the release. However, I am never impressed with what they release. They create interesting tools and products, but the execution is always sub-par. And their product launches make it apparent that they’re a large collection of engineers with too few designers. But at times they miss the boat completely. For instance, the Google API presumes you will only turn your phone counter-clock wise and never clockwise. I am impressed with the Android platform. But there is no excuse for an idiotic oversight like this. This is an arbitrary restriction that hinders user experience.

If you turn the phone clockwise, Android’s native menus and text will appear upside down. I’ve seen a few applications that do a good decent job of letting you turn the phone clockwise, such as the game Bebbled (a good game by the way), but call up a menu in this position and you’ll see upside-down menus.

I am beta testing Super GNES application for the Android platform. Before I continue, let me say the developers are doing a great job with the project. Now on to the part where Google failed to have foresight. You can play Super GNES in portrait mode or landscape. On the G1 I prefer landscape as it puts the trackball under your right thumb, and your left hand is free to mash the keyboard. But every video game controller since the NES has put the direction pad under your left thumb.

A more natural setup for playing the emulator would be a rotating the phone in to landscape mode clockwise. It would put the trackball under the left thumb, place the volume buttons on the top side of the phone to become the left and right shoulder buttons easily accessible by the index finger of your right hand, and your right thumb could use the onscreen A,B,X,Y buttons.

I asked the SuperGNES dev team about exploring this orientation, and here is the teams:

“There doesn’t appear to be a good way to orient the screen landscape with the track ball on the left. I even took a tour through the android framework source code to see if I could hack something together but wasn’t able to find anything. I can manually orient the screen but stuff like the menu and settings have the wrong orientation which is frustrating to use.”

Popularity: 12% [?]

Update (March 2, 2010): I’m leaving this post here for but it is massively out of date in that Android has moved well past Cupcake at this point. Besides, if you want the best Android experience you should be running CyanogenMod. At this point, unless you know what you’re doing and a really bound and determined to roll your own old school phone, so to speak, you shouldn’t be loitering here.

Do you want the US version of Cupcake and you want it now? Mine got pushed to me on the 23rd, and here it is for you. Crown me a saint.

WARNING: Make sure your phone has a full battery or is charged. You don’t want it to die during this process.

Instructions

1. Download the US Cupcake 1.5 (this is hosted here, not elsewhere, so it will work)
2. Rename the file “update.zip”
3. Copy update.zip to the root of your SD card
4. Turn off your phone
5. Turn it on while holding the home key
6. When you see the triangle + exclamation mark icon, press alt + L
7. Then press alt + s
8. The update will apply
9. Then press home + back to reset at which point the radio update will be applied
10. Viola! Cupcake!

Popularity: 12% [?]

I have no need to post blogs from my phone, but the capability exists and I must explore it. This morning I downloaded wpToGo and PostBot from the Android market and ran a quick comparison. Screen shots of the two apps would be a great idea. But this is Saturday morning, and I’m not exerting myself to that degree yet.

Setup – Winner: wpToGo
Both programs are easy to setup and support multiple accounts. This is great because you can log in as different users (ex: admin vs your normal account) on the same blog or log in to different blogs completely. Excellent.

wpToGo has a cleaner user interface in general, and for that it wins the setup round. Although, I think the publisher could do well by removing the post options that are not related to setting up the blog. When you setup a blog you’ll be asked to choose how to place images, what size images should be, how they should be aligned, and what resolution they will be displayed. This should be removed from the setup screen and accessed elsewhere instead.

Posting – Winner: wpToGo
Once again the wpToGo UI dominates PostBot. Not only that, but when you first log in wpToGo pulls a list of the most recent posts. In my case it pulled every post back to the start of this blog. PostBot didn’t have this feature, so editing previous entries is out of the question on PostBot, which is a massive miss.

Both editors give you the options to add pictures, categories, and publish or save as a draft. wpToGo goes an extra step and gives buttons for bold, italics, links, block quotes, and tags. Both editors are pure HTML, so you can always manually add tags where needed. Once again wpToGo could do well by removing some of the options, such as adding a picture, from the main layout and moving them under a menu option instead, which is the route PostBot has taken.

Final Verdict: wpToGo wins by a long shot, but its editing screen can take some lessons from PostBot.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Engadget is reporting that the US version of Cupcake is being rolled out OTA. However, it is only hitting those of us who applied the UK version of Cupcake.

I can confirm this. My UK-cupcaked phone received the US Cupcake last night, but something went haywire and the update was a fail. I had to revert back to RC29 and move myself all the way backup again.

Also, on this round, I found that after getting back to RC33 for some reason I can no longer install my favorite application, which is the Advanced Application Manager.

Ho-hum. I’ll just sit pretty at RC33 and wait for the push.

Popularity: 7% [?]

I love my G1 and I abuse it to no end. For instance, I’ve easily tried 250+ (if not 350+) apps on it. That much installing and uninstalling can lead to problems. And I finally decided I needed to hard reset my phone, because it would easily become sluggish and unresponsive during simple tasks.

Before I did the hard reset, I downloaded the UK version of Cupcake, because I have no patience and the US version has not been pushed out OTA (over the air) yet. I’ve used it for a few days, and I think it is finally pointing Android in the correct direction. But when the US version rolls out (the UK Cupcake is missing Amazon MP3, IMing aside from gChat, no voice search, and a few other things), I’ll need to downgrade and upgrade back to RC33 and then grab the US Cupcake OTA.

I hard reset my phone, and then it took me a frustrating amount of time to find the proper downgrade and upgrade files. To save other people some time and frustration here are the files – these are the official, OTA, and properly signed files. Also, if you’re not aware each update to Android has a radio update too. Radio updates are included in the update packages, so there is no need to go hunting for those.

Warnings:

1. Do not trust your battery during an downgrade or upgrade. Plug in to a wall.
2. Do not interupt your phone during these procedures – let the G1 finish its business. It will often reset, then continue the update, or will apply the radio update on reboot – so follow the on-screen prompts carefully and be patient.
3. I will help to a degree with questions pertaining to this. Anything else should be directed to a G1 forum.
4. I am not responsible if you fuck up your phone.

DO NOT DIRECT LINK TO THESE DOWNLOADS OR I WILL TAKE THEM OFFLINE IMMEDIATELY. BE KIND TO MY BANDWIDTH!

Note: These are the OTA, signed files. You cannot use these to root your phone.

G1 – RC29

1. Download and unzip the RC29 file
2. Format your SD card to FAT32 and place
3. Place the DREAIMG.NBH file on the SD card (do not place it in a subfolder)
4. Turn on the phone while while holding the home key
5. When you see the triangle icon, hit ALT+L
6. Now press ALT+W to wipe the phone
7. Turn the phone off
8. Power the phone in to bootloader (power it on while holding the camera key)
9. The G1 will detect the RC29 image and it will proceed from there
10. Follow any on-screen prompts

G1 – RC30

1. Download and unzip the RC30 file – what you want is to have a file that is called “update.zip”
2. DO NOT unzip “update.zip” – leave it the way it is
3. Copy update.zip to the root of your SD card
4. Turn on the while while holding the home key
5. When you see the triangle icon, hit ALT+L
6. Press ALT+S at the menu
7. When prompted, press the home and back buttons
8. It should reboot and now update the radio
9. Finally it will reboot to the normal Android screen
10. Viola, you’re done.

G1 – RC30 to RC33

1. Download and unzip the RC30 to RC33 file – what you want is to have a file that is called “update.zip”
2. DO NOT unzip “update.zip” – leave it the way it is
3. Copy update.zip to the root of your SD card
4. Turn on the while while holding the home key
5. When you see the triangle icon, hit ALT+L
6. Press ALT+S at the menu
7. When prompted, press the home and back buttons
8. It should reboot and now update the radio
9. Finally it will reboot to the normal Android screen
10. Viola, you’re done.

G1 – RC33 to UK Cupcake

1. Download and unzip the UK Cupcake file – what you want is to have a file that is called “update.zip”
2. DO NOT unzip “update.zip” – leave it the way it is
3. Copy update.zip to the root of your SD card
4. Turn on the while while holding the home key
5. When you see the triangle icon, hit ALT+L
6. Press ALT+S at the menu
7. When prompted, press the home and back buttons
8. It should reboot and now update the radio
9. It may reboot a time or two, and then it should go to the classic “Android” boot screen.
10. Viola, you’re done.

Popularity: 29% [?]