Moonlight on Android

For the past week, the Moonlight team has been busy porting Moonlight to Android devices and today, showed it off at Mix 11.

The video shows Moonlight running on both a Motorola Xoom tablet and a Nexus S phone.

Keep in mind that we're still in the early phases of porting and there's still a lot of work left to do before we can ship a product, but it's still exciting!

Update: For those of you reading my blog from Planet GNOME (or some other planet that doesn't show the video above), you can find it here, on YouTube.

Update: Now you can see Moonlight rendering video with 3D transforms, too!

Installing A Custom ROM on your Samsung Captivate

Like a lot of people, I'm tired of waiting for AT&T to get their acts together to release the long-awaited Froyo update for my Samsung Captivate phone.

I'm about to take matters into my own hands... but where do I begin?

Many of the forum threads out there contain the information needed to install a custom ROM, but the information is scattered about here and there which is confusing and not exactly confidence-inspiring. That's all about to change...

Step 1: Rooting Your Phone

The first step to installing a custom ROM is rooting your phone. This allows you to gain access to protected bits of your phone that you'll need in order to backup your existing data and the ability to install that custom ROM.

The easiest way to do this is to use the One-Click Root application for the Captivate, but before you can do that, first you need to download and install the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and the Samsung USB drivers onto your computer.

Once you install those two pieces of software on your computer, the next step is to download the One-Click Root zip containing the easiest program I could find to root your phone for you.

Now you'll need to configure your Captivate's USB debug settings. To do this, first make sure you are at your phone's Home screen. Then tap the Menu button on the lower left-hand side of your phone and select Settings. Scroll down and tap on the Applications item. You should see a Development option. Select that and then enable the USB debugging checkbox at the top.

Now connect your Captivate phone to your computer via a USB cable.

Unzip the zip file and run the One-Click Root program. This will pop up a window with the Samsung Galaxy S logo and two buttons on the right ("One-Click Root" and "One-Click Unroot"). Click the button that says "One-Click Root".

This will cause your phone to reboot into a mode allowing you to to use your phone's volume buttons to navigate a text-mode screen of menu options up and down. Follow the directions in the blue text-mode window on your computer screen and select the reinstall packages menu item on your phone. Press the Power button to start the process.

After the process is complete, your phone will reboot again - this time it will boot you back into the normal mode that you are familiar with.

At this point, it is safe to disconnect your phone from your computer.

For an extremely helpful video to walk you through the process of rooting your phone, watch this video.

Step 2: Backing Up Your Phone

It is always a good idea to make a backup of your phone before proceeding any further, so here's how to do that:

Open the Android Marketplace application and search for and install "Titanium Backup", the free version is fine.

Once that finishes downloading, run the Titanium Backup program and tap on the Backup/Restore button at the top of the screen.

Select each of the apps you'd like to backup and click the Backup! button for each. Next, tap the Menu button, select More and then Create "update.zip"... and follow the directions on the next screen before finally clicking the button to create the update.zip file.

At this point, you'll want to copy that update.zip file along with the folder named TitaniumBackup off your phone and onto your computer. To do this, first go back to your phone's Home screen and then click Menu. Select Settings, Applications, and then USB settings (if this pops up a menu saying you'll need to disable USB debugging, just click OK). Now select Mass storage and then click Home again.

Re-connect your phone to your computer via the USB cable and then pull down the notification tray from the top of the screen on your phone.

Select the USB connected item which will pop up a dialog box with two buttons: Mount and Unmount. Select Mount. This will allow your computer to view the contents on each of your phone's internal memory drives.

On your phone's main drive, you should find a file named update.zip and a folder named TitaniumBackup. Copy them over to your computer for safe keeping.

Step 3: Install A Custom ROM

Keeping your phone connected to the computer from the previous step, download the ClockWork Recovery zip and then copy it over to your phone, renaming it to update.zip (overwriting Titanium Backup's update.zip if it is still there from Step 2).

Once you've downloaded the zip file containing your chosen custom ROM (I'll be installing the latest version of Cognition), you'll need to copy the downloaded zip over to your phone's internal memory drive.

Once you've done that, disconnect your phone from your computer and turn off your phone. Next, hold down both volume buttons and the power button at the same time. This should boot you into an Android system menu.

Select reinstall packages using the volume-down button to select it and then pressing the power button to activate. This will install ClockWork Recovery and then bring you back to a green text-mode menu screen (if it doesn't, select reboot system now, turn off your phone and try the procedure again).

Select the install zip from sdcard option using your phone's volume buttons and press the power button.

At the next green menu screen, select choose zip from sdcard.

Navigate the file system to select your ROM zip file and then press the power button.

Finally, confirm that you want to install the ROM by selecting the Yes menu option.

At this point, your phone should be installing the custom ROM that you've chosen. This will take a few minutes, so go watch some TV, update your Facebook page, or go tweet about how you're installing your custom ROM on your Captivate phone (make that a few dozen tweets, because installing will take a while).

Note: If the "Installing..." screen stays at "Finding update package..." for more than a minute or two (this always seems to happen to me), something is probably wrong. Simply pop out the battery and then boot the phone into recovery mode and try again.

Once the install is complete, you'll find yourself back at a green menu. Select +++++Go Back+++++. At the next green menu screen, select reboot system now and press the power button.

The first boot up will likely take longer than normal (Cognition's ROM gives you cool female computer voice updates explaining what it is doing), so don't be discouraged if it takes a good 5 minutes or so to boot up.

Congratulations, you've just installed your custom ROM!

Step 4: Restoring Your Applications

The first thing you'll need to do is open up the Android Market application and install Titanium Backup again (or you could connect your phone to your computer and copy the update.zip that was created by Titanium Backup program back onto your phone and reboot it into recovery mode to install the update.zip that way).

If you installed Cognition, like I did, then it will come pre-bundled with Titanium Backup so you'll have everything you need.

Launch Titanium Backup and tap Backup/Restore. Next, press your phone's Menu button and select Batch. This will bring you to a menu of actions with a "Run" button next to each one. Scroll down to Restore missing apps with data and then tap the Run button next to it, following the instructions that follow.

At this point you may need to reboot your phone in order for some of your apps to be seen by the phone (since some may need to be there at boot-up), so go ahead and do that.

You are now finished!

I am Disappoint: No Love for Froyo on Galaxy S

Based on an anonymous post on the XDA Developer Forums, the reason behind the lack of a Froyo update for Samsung Galaxy S phones in the US appears to be because Samsung is greedy.

The following quote is the entirety of the message as it appears on the forums for your convenience (with added emphasis by me).

Hello,

I’m going to step across the NDAs and explain the issues behind the Android Froyo update to Samsung Galaxy S phones in the United States. I think most of you have come to this realization yourself now: the withholding of the Froyo update is a largely political one, not a technological one: Froyo runs quite well on Galaxy S phones, as those of you that have run leaked updates may have noticed.

To explain the political situation, first, a primer on how phone firmware upgrades work for carriers. When a carrier decides to sell a phone, a contract is usually written between the phone manufacturer and the carrier. In this contract, the cost of updates (to the carrier) is usually outlined. Updates are usually broken into several types: critical updates, maintenance updates, and feature updates. Critical updates are those that resolve a critical bug in the phone, such as the phone overheating. Maintenance updates involve routine updates to resolve bugs and other issues reported by the carrier. Finally, feature updates add some new feature in software that wasn’t present before. Critical updates are usually free, maintenance updates have some maintenance fee associated with them, and feature updates are usually costly.

In the past, most phone updates would mainly consist of critical and maintenance updates. Carriers almost never want to incur the cost of a feature update because it is of little benefit to them, adds little to the device, and involves a lot of testing on the carrier end. Android has changed the playing field, however – since the Android Open Source Project is constantly being updated, and that information being made widely available to the public, there is pressure for the phone to be constantly updated with the latest version of Android. With most manufacturers, such as HTC, Motorola, etc. This is fine and considered a maintenance upgrade. Samsung, however, considers it a feature update, and requires carriers to pay a per device update fee for each incremental Android update.

Now, here’s where the politics come in: most U.S. carriers aren’t very happy with Samsung’s decision to charge for Android updates as feature updates, especially since they are essentially charging for the Android Open Source Project’s efforts, and the effort on Samsung’s end is rather minimal. As a result of perhaps, corporate collusion, all U.S. carriers have decided to refuse to pay for the Android 2.2 update, in hopes that the devaluation of the Galaxy S line will cause Samsung to drop their fees and give the update to the carriers. The situation has panned out differently in other parts of the world, but this is the situation in the United States.

Some of you might have noticed Verion’s Fascinate updated, but without 2.2 : This is a result of a maintenance agreement Samsung must honor combined with Verizon’s unwillingness to pay the update fees. In short, Android 2.2 is on hold for Galaxy S phones until the U.S. carriers and Samsung reach a consensus.

Some might wonder why I didn’t deliver this over a more legitimate news channel – the short answer: I don’t want to lose my job. I do, however, appreciate transparency, which is why I'm here.

Having bought a Samsung Galaxy S phone back in August with the expectation that it would get the Froyo update soon, I am disappoint.

This is just one more annoyance added to my growing list of annoyances about Android-based phones and my Galaxy S phone in particular.

Bitch and moan about Apple being evil all you want, but even Apple doesn't do this to their users. I will never ever buy another Samsung Android phone again. This really rubs me the wrong way.

Update: People have been commenting that Android devices have gotten better OS update support than iPhones. This is simply not the case. The iPhone 3G came out ~6 months before the Android G1 and the G1 stopped getting updates (latest update was Android 1.6) looooooooong before the iPhone 3G stopped getting updates. Apple at least kept providing updates to the 3G through iOS 4.1.x, latest update being this past fall. So even though the iPhone 3G is older than the G1, it got OS updates until long after updates stopped coming for the G1. My point is that to even compare the G1 to the iPhone 3G in terms of time supported by new OS upgrades, the G1 would have to at least have Android 2.2 (which came out how long ago?? I mean, even 2.3 is out now). In other words: Apple pushes all OS upgrades for their iPhones for at least 2 years (length of a contract) while no Android handset maker ever has - the G1 got OS upgrades for what? 6 months?

One Week With Android

Well, it's been just over a week since I got my Samsung Captivate (which is selling for $50 right now!) and I figured I'd share my experiences switching to it from my old iPhone 3G. Sadly, I have to say it's still a bit rough around the edges. I've had a number of problems with it, but none of them have been insurmountable.

The Good

Even though I'm still on Android 2.1 (FroYo, aka 2.2, won't be pushed on my phone until September or so), I've had no problems at all with performance. Everything starts up pretty quickly for the most part (occasional lag spikes, but I got those on my old iPhone as well). The 2.2 update will supposedly make my phone even faster, so I'm excited about that.

All the apps I cared about are available in the Android Market (things like a twitter client, Amazon shopping app, Google Maps (duh), Fandango and a handful of others). I was also able to find apps like Adobe Reader and Quickoffice for loading pdfs and MS Office documents (which is handy and something that I never found on iPhone).

Likely due to a higher-resolution screen, the YouTube video quality on my Samsung Captivate also exceeds that of my old iPhone 3G. Not sure how it compares to the iPhone 4.

What I really like about the Android is that editing my Google Contacts auto-updates my phone within seconds of making the changes which is really nice. I didn't pay for the MobileMe service for iPhone (which supposedly adds this feature), so it's a nice bonus that has saved me a bit of time and trouble already.

The Bad

While the music player on Android isn't bad (it's quite usable), it lacks some finishing touches that Apple put into theirs. For example, iPhone's music player remembers the most recent audio track and position you were listening to when you launch it. No amount of browsing your music collection will confuse it. This is not true with Android's. A "Go back 30 seconds" button would also be a really nice addition to Android's music player that iPhone has and I've found to be quite useful over the past 2 years.

When making a call, the iPhone's display is much much nicer than Android's and the Contacts app itself is more intuitive. I don't even understand what most of the tabs are in Android's Contacts app, for instance.

The Ugly

The following 2 problems are the absolute worst usability problems I have encountered, and they are pretty bad.

It took me a while to figure this out, but when you plug your Android phone into your PC, the PC won't see your Android device over USB Mass Storage at all until you open up your phone's "Notifications" area and tap on the notification saying something about connecting via USB. Once you do that, it opens up a dialog with the option to mount the drives. Only after you take these steps does the Android device show up as a USB Mass Storage device on your PC. This is just awful. Why are these manual steps even needed at all? If I have edited my phone's settings and selected "USB Mass Storage", it should just assume that's what I want to do when I plug it into a PC. There's no good reason for it to make me manually go through those steps. It also seems I'm not the first to be confused by this as there are a number of users complaining about this on various Android forums. From what I've seen, things have gotten better in Android 2.2 (it no longer makes you navigate to the "Notifications" area, but it still requires you to interact with a Mount/Cancel dialog).

The above photograph is what happened when I tried to place a call to about half the people in my contacts list. Yea, that's right, it crashed. After a bit of fiddling, I was able to figure out what it was about those contacts which caused the problem and submitted a bug report. Luckily, the workaround that I found was trivial and so I just loaded a web browser and edited the Birthday field info for those contacts and waited a second or two for the Android to auto-sync. Had I not been able to find a solution to this problem, I would have returned my phone and gone back to iPhone.

TL;DR

Android has a lot of room for improvement (buggy, unpolished), but if you are a Linux Desktop user like myself, you'll probably feel right at home.

New Phone (Android)

Ever since the first Android phones came out back in October 2008, I've been keeping an eye on their progress. I didn't care for the original HTC Hero, but the newest phones based on Android 2.1/2.2 look very impressive. Now that my iPhone 3G contract is up, I decided I'd get one. Since I'm on AT&T and wanted to stay with that provider, I went with the Samsung Captivate and a screen protector for it. My friend/co-worker, Michael Hutchinson, recently bought a Samsung Vibrant (he's on T-Mobile) and has been very happy with it. Another friend/co-worker, Gonzalo has also been happy with his switch to the Captivate on AT&T, so I expect that I'll be pleased as well.

One of the reasons I decided to get an Android phone is that the Mono team is working on MonoDroid, a port of Mono to Android phones. While I'm not on the team working on the port, I am interested as a potential Android developer in using MonoDroid to write some of my own applications for Android phones.

10 years ago, when I first started working for Helix Code on the GNOME desktop for Linux to help make Linux usable for average Joes, I never expected that I'd ever have a phone that ran Linux! Especially a Linux-based phone that is taking the smart-phone market by storm! These are very exciting times for me, and I'm sure for the Google folks working on the Android project!

After I get my feet wet for a week or so with using my new Captivate phone, I'll try to write up a review of what I think, so stay tuned!

More Exciting Updates on Mono/Android

Looks like Koushik Dutta has been kicking butt getting Mono onto Google's Android platform:

• Compiling Mono under the Android Build Environment
• Microsoft's DLR and Mono bring Python and Ruby to Android
• Mono/Dalvik Interop

Keep up the awesome hacking, Koushik!

Also of interest is his article on why JNI sucks compared to doing the same thing in .NET: JNI in Android (and a foreword about why JNI sucks)

I never actually used JNI back when I was doing Java development in school, so when people told me it sucked I just took their word for it, but always wondered just how bad it was. Now I know. All I can say is: Ugh.

Hopefully the Java community replaces JNI with something as clean and elegant as what we find in .NET.