Android Prototyping Templates

I couldn't find much in the way of Android prototyping tools on the internet so I decided to create one of my own.

This is for hand sketching ideas out. When printed on 8.5x11 it comes out almost the exact size of the G1 screen.

Why I love my MacBook

One of the most under publicized features of the Intel (maybe older?) MacBooks and MacBook Pros is the multi-touch trackpad. First off it has a much larger area than any PC laptop I've had which makes for less drag-lift-move-drag motions. Second the acceleration and resolution are perfect out of the box. Third double tap right click and double finger scrolling ANYWHERE on the pad makes things so much better.

How much better? I like the trackpad so much that reaching over to use the attached mouse is a hassle. I thought I'd never say anything like that. As far as other trackpads are concerned, I'd rather spend a half hour getting a mouse even for 5 minutes of use. They're just that bad.

Its just another example of Apple's attention to details that makes them a much better experience.

T-Mobile's Android root runs shallow

T-Mobile's only Android device, the G1, isn't as open as you would think. The device lacks root access and the bootloader requires a signed image. Older versions of the OS have had a successful jailbreak but the most recent (R30) over the air firmware upload "fixed" that.

I jumped on the G1 bandwagon the day after it was announced hoping that it would live up to the openness Android was claiming. To be fair, the SDK does allow access to quite a bit more than the iPhone's SDK does which makes for some interesting applications not do able on the iPhone (for now). But the Google/T-Mobile team has stopped a bit short when it comes to moving from one Android device to another. There's no desktop client nor is there a backup/restore client! Think about that for a moment. When the time comes that you have the option to move to another Android device or, as in my case, have to replace your current one you're out of luck.

I searched the internet and even posted in a few google read forums (groups.google.com/groups/android-developers, forums.t-mobile.com) about how to move from one to the other. I read about the jailbreaking < R30 and the R30 hacked image if you already were jailbroken. I was told that it's T-Mobile's fault and to stop complaining. I was even told by one person that they clear their phone all the time for app testing and it only takes about 10-15 minutes and isn't a big deal. That person obviously isn't really using their phone.

T-Mobile customer support isn't much better either. They say you just have to download the applications again from the market and accept the data loss or they'll tell you about the jailbreak and how R30 shut it down and it's "impossible" to hack this new version. When you try to tell them that you want T-Mobile to provide root access or unlock the boot loader they tell you that Google writes the code and HTC makes the phone. They have nothing to do with it. This is a lack of understanding on the support staff's part. Google writes the base code, but it's modified for T-Mobile and only runs as a signed image.

Basically it seems that what's happening is that Google released some software prematurely as usual with their code but this is a very different case than the web were only the Google devoted will pick up the software before it's ready for prime time. T-Mobile pushed out the G1 as a iPhone replacement when it is not because of the build quality, the hardware itself and the premature OS. Now that they actually have real users with real problems that should have been caught long before in acceptance testing, they just want to ignore them. And they'll be able to because most people using the G1 won't know any better. There's always the Google apologists (and in some cases the Android devs themselves) that will say it's not their problem. There's no way to actually get in contact with someone who actually knows something about this level of detail about the G1 at T-Mobile. And finally, we already paid and signed a contract and are well past the 14 day return period. So the only way out is to pay more money to T-Mobile.

For anyone out there looking to develop on Android and the G1, PLEASE, PLEASE just spend the extra money on the Google Dev Phone 1 (http://code.google.com/android/dev-devices.html).

• No Contract


• No $18/$36 upgrade/activation fee (which is a whole different kind of BS)


• Full Control of your phone. Add new images. Root access.

To me this is what the G1 should have been. This is what Android was to represent.

Firebug Console for power users == REPL

There have been many, many posts through out the internet explaining why Firebug is the greatest thing ever for the web developer from the CSS editor to the AJAX transmission viewer to the javascript debugger. I'm going to throw one more thing in; javascript REPL.

REPL stands for Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop for those that don't know and basically means it's an interactive shell into your program. Most of us know about the console in Firebug but how many know about the power it gives? When you open Firebug the console tab is selected by default. You may know this as the place those console.log() messages go. At the bottom is a blank line denoted by ">>>", this is the interactive part. You can execute a line of javascript here. If you click the circle with the up arrow on the right you open the multiline console. I recommend this as the way to go. You can write multiple lines, such as functions, and execute with ctrl-enter or command-enter.

Anyway, back to that REPL. The console lets you interact with any loaded javascript on the page. You can change global variables, call functions, pretty much anything javascripty. This is where the power comes in. You can define functions meaning you can redefine functions! And it'll work when some element or function on the page calls it.

Imagine for a moment that your trying to create a new function or debug a function on your production server where you have to interact with the real data. You can't just change the code, check it in, build and deploy each time due to various issues like time and the client noticing the site going up and down. What you can do, and what I had to do recently, is open the console, paste in the fixes to the definition of the function, evaluate it, and then go about interacting with the page. It becomes a much faster solution that has a couple of benefits.

1. No redeploy until you know it works
2. Don't have to worry about anyone else getting in there and using your code while you're testing it out
3. Interaction with the real problem, with the real data causing it.

If you go about writing your javascript code with the console in mind there are some great uses for it.

• Have your logging statements controlled by a global variable. On the page it's false and not printing. When you need to see what's going on in Production or some other uncontrolled by you environment, just change that variable to true and you get your logging.
• Fire functions and events while developing so you don't have to keep reloading the page and waiting for template recompiles. I like to use this when writing something with AJAX calls while working on the backend. I create a refresh() method ,that is the initial loader on the page anyway, and call it from the console.
• Last, but not least, a personal favorite, testing out javascript expressions. We all have been there where you can't remember exactly how substring() works and you'd just like to try on the page instead of googling it and then interpreting what you find to fit your scenario. I use this all the time for things like figuring out a complex Prototype.js expression on the page to see how it works and tweet it before putting it on the page for real and going through the refresh cycle. In fact I'd go as far to say it'd be very, very hard to do without and I'm starting to wish for one in Java (aside from things like groovysh and jirb)

I hope this opens up some options and makes life easier for you developers out there. At least when working in Firefox. Firebug does have the downside of making you feel that much more helpless when you have some stupid IE bug.

Google, T-Mobile and HTC invent English

Imagine for a moment that the year is 2008 BC and Google, T-Mobile and HTC get to get together and create a new language called English. "Its wonderful", they say. "It can be used for communication during business. Its open, any country can adopt it and change it as they see fit!" yada, yada, yada.
And its true. England, the US and Australia all want in. So they turn to HTC and T-Mobile to give us a platform to introduce English to the world.
They call together members of the press to announce their darling creation and what do they bring to the stage?

A half retarded, southerner with one leg named Andy. Sure he meets all the requirements; human, vocal cords, at least one eye, some type of self awareness. But something's off, he's not quite there. He talks with a drawl. He takes a bit too long to form sentences and has a slight stutter. He really can't remember all that much. He can sing but is off key unless you provide him with some other piece of equipment. He can't dance but is open to learning. Actually, he can't do much but is always open to learning as long as someone else teaches him. He "shur' as heck ain't gonna'" learn on his own. Oh, and to top it all off T-Mobile won't let him go any further than 1Km from his house without taking his other leg off. (But they'll reattach it at the beginning of the next billing cycle)

Andy, ambassador of English to the World! (I think the World might want to stick to the romantic languages)

This is what "The big G and the pink T" gave us yesterday. Some phone from 2005 with a flashy new interface. What is it about the G1/Dream that HTC needed so much time to develop? Sure the digital compass is new, but other than that it's a smart phone from before there was an iPhone. It seems that they didn't take any ideas from the iPhone at all. Why isn't the Touch HD the android phone? When you preemptively answer the "Why HTC" question in your press conference, you know things aren't going to go over well.

I'm sure the spin machines at those camps will try to say that "Oh, no this is better than the iPhone because it's open and unrestricted.." at first. Then when they get tired of saying that, they'll get angry and start with the "Well, this was never intended to be an iPhone killer."

Another underlying cause of concern for me is that Google didn't stop this train wreck. Either they seem to really be confident and are just treating this like another Google Beta or they don't care. Someone there had to know that this was not a good phone. No one voiced any concern? And to stand on stage, even with all the phone's shortcomings, and tout it as something so great in a post iPhone world is disheartening.

And T-Mobile, unless you have another android phone coming, I really think you've got yourself a Zune to At&t's iPod. Congratulations!

EDIT 9-24-08
T-Mobile has started taking steps in the right direction. They are reducing the 1Gb cap from a hard, fast rule to a reserved right for those that abuse the system. Also, phones after the first shipment will contain a 3.5mm headphone adapter.

T-Mobile Address Manager export "Hack"

Edit: Thanks to yincrash for pointing out that they changed their namespace on this object to TMO.ABPORTAL.

My friend Candice got a 1st Gen iPhone on the cheap and needed to get her numbers from T-Mobile's new online Address Manager (TAB). It does syncing to and from a regular T-Mobile phone but the iPhone isn't a regular T-Mobile Phone. The app is new and they have a note about it not syncing changes made on the website to the phone yet and either by design or evil plotting there was no way to export the contacts.

My vocation to the rescue! They were using the prototype.js library to run the app and after some digging around I found the data store.
TMO.ABPORTAL.ABIHM.ContactManager is the object that manages the contacts' actions and the _datas property is an array of contact javascript objects. So in the firebug console I wrote some code to get the contacts and wrote a csv file to an empty div. I then took that div into Wordpad to get the lines to break correctly on Windows and did an import into Windows Address Book. The rest is history!

Here's the code I used:

var data = ["firstname,lastname,name,homeMobile,homePhone1,homePhone2,workMobile,workPhone1,workPhone2"];
TMO.ABPORTAL.ABIHM.contactManager._datas.each(function(person) {
    var a = [];
    a.push(person.firstname);
    a.push(person.lastname);
    a.push(person.name);
    a.push(person.homeMobile);
    a.push(person.homePhone1);
    a.push(person.homePhone2);
    a.push(person.workMobile);
    a.push(person.workPhone1);
    a.push(person.workPhone2);
    data.push(a.join(","));
});
$('L_footer_pane').update(data.join('\r\n'));

Playing with the Struts 2 Dispatcher

Due to the nature of our permission handling on a project at work I am in need of a way to pass URLs in to the Struts dispatcher and get back the class name and method of the action to invoke (possibly the results as well...). See we have our classes implement a "SecurityAware" interface that returns an array of [OR'd] permission names required to view a page. We also have a permission based menu system that sometimes requires different permissions than the page the menu item points to. I had run into a problem in trying to find all those needed permissions between the database and the source code which was a lot of manual work. So you can see why I'd want to just pass in the URLs from the menu and get the action, call the security method and display the needed permissions for the resulting page.

What I did was start taking a trip through the Struts 2 source and the test classes for an idea of what was going on. I started at the FilterDispatcher since that's the one class that I define and is the starting point of my (any?) Struts2 applications.

The filterDispatcher creates a Dispatcher object. This seems to be the core configuration beast of the system. This has an ActionMapper injected into it. This is where my problems begin.

How are things injected into the FilterDispatcher since I'm "creating" it in the web.xml? There's a ConfigurationManager that is created inside that loads the struts config files and I've had luck printing out parameters that I've set in my struts.xml so I think it's loading correctly. What I'm now having trouble with is the ActionMapper. I'm playing with this in jRuby and I have no idea how to deal with Java5 Generics (I guess I could Google it...) so I took the route of just injecting my created actionMapper.

actionMapper =  DefaultActionMapper.new
dispatcher.configurationManager.configuration.container.inject(actionMapper)

This does have an effect in that I can set struts.enable.SlashesInActionNames to true and then call actionMapper.slashesInActionNames? and have the result be true (it defaults to false, so there is a change).

I should mention that I'm running this code in the struts blank example app's WEB-INF/classes directory. I can create a MockServletRequest and pass in URLs that should and shouldn't work. It errors out appropriately when the URL doesn't end with ".action" and I can get it to parse the namespace portion correctly, but I'm having no luck with the Method. For example /example/Login_input.action should result in an ActionMapping with:

• Name: Login_input


• Namespace: /example


• Method: input

Or at least that's what I'm expecting, but I never get anything for the method.

Here's my code so far.

require 'java'

import 'org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.Dispatcher'
import 'org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher'
import 'org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.mapper.DefaultActionMapper'

import 'org.springframework.mock.web.MockServletContext'
import 'org.springframework.mock.web.MockFilterConfig'
import 'org.springframework.mock.web.MockHttpServletRequest'
import 'org.springframework.mock.web.MockHttpServletResponse'


filterConfig = MockFilterConfig.new
servletContext = MockServletContext.new


dispatcher = Dispatcher.new(servletContext, {})
dispatcher.init
Dispatcher.instance = dispatcher

actionMapper =  DefaultActionMapper.new
dispatcher.configurationManager.configuration.container.inject(actionMapper)


request = MockHttpServletRequest.new(servletContext, 'GET', '/example/other.action');  
response = MockHttpServletResponse.new;

actionMapping = actionMapper.getMapping(request,dispatcher.configurationManager)
puts "Name: #{actionMapping.name}"
puts "Namespace: #{actionMapping.namespace}"
puts "Method: #{actionMapping.method}"
puts "Result: #{actionMapping.result}"