Showing posts with label android. Show all posts
Showing posts with label android. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

I love my Galaxy S Android Phone's Battery Life!

At Technoracle, we regularly test out devices for long term reliability, performance, and durability.  Mobile devices often vary dramatically from the manufacturer's claims and real world tests reveal the true nature of a specific device.  For example, some smartphones have claimed 4-day standby time.  No device I have ever used has ever met such a claim while we were using it.  Most users we know are happy to get 24 hrs out of their devices with real world uses.

Four days of use from a single charge might be possible if you disabled all functions other than sitting idle and left the phone in a cool room with no magnetic interference.  For most users, add in email account monitoring, some web browsing, navigation and a few calls and the time goes down significantly.  The major reason I went from iOS to Android is that I hated the idea of someone sealing my battery into the phone.  I want two batteries and the ability to swap them out as they get tired. Nevertheless, the Samsung Galaxy S has amazed.


The above screenshot clearly shows that the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone has amazing battery life very close to what the manufacturer claims.  The approximate 65% charge is after 1 day 3+ hours between charges with cell standby and use.  What I have noted is the following tips work well on Android for saving battery life:

1. Reduce screen brightness.  Do this manually.  The auto-detection itself uses energy when woken up.
2. Configure email not to push automatically or synch.  Do this manually.  What point is there for you to have email pushed to you that you will not read?  Wait until you want it, then fetch it.
3. Disable GPS when not in use.
4. Disable Bluetooth when not using.
5. Regularly check the application and memory manager and clean out programs that you are not actively using.
6. Disable notifications from applications (Twitter, Facebook, news, weather, etc.) that you do not need.  When I go on my boat, I do require that severe weather be pushed to me.
7. Disable auto-orientation.  The listener that detects position changes runs the accelerometer, a piece of hardware that consumes battery life.  Luckily the feature can be disabled from the pull down menu.

End result?  

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Mobile Development with Flash Builder (Tutorial and Source Code)


Today I am releasing a set of two applications, one built using the Flex 4.1 SDK and one built using the Flex 4.5 SDK (Burrito version of Flash Builder using the "Hero" framework).  Although the base application is essentially the same, the differences are astounding in terms of development ease and performance. 

The project itself is a simple project to demonstrate how to read/write to a file system.  The application is named LetMeC (“let me see”).   The screenshot below is of the application built using Flash Builder 4.01 overlaid with the AIR 2.5 SDK.  This one uses the FileSystemDataGrid component and has several helper classes.  The source code for the AIR 2.5 project is available here: 

FileBrowser.fxp (Flash Builder 4.01/AIR 2.5 SDK project - 76 kb)
FileBrowser.apk (Android Package - 1.02 MB)
Installed application size = 1.02 MB (without graphics, icons, splash images etc)



This second screenshot (below) is basically the same application written using the Flash Builder 4.5 Burrito preview.  This application is open and you can use it or install it on your device:

MobileFileBrowser.fxp (Flash Builder 4.5 project - 840 kb)
MobileFileBrowser.apk (Android Package -1.78 MB)
Installed application size = 768 kb (with graphics, icons, splash images etc)



Note that the installed sizes of the applications vary.  The first one is larger even though I never used any graphics for icons, splash screens or other bits.  The Flash Builder 4.5 Burrito application has a larger installer, however on the Google Nexus 1 disk, the installed application is only 768 kb, of which roughly 398 kb is images alone coupled with 230 kb of icons!  The Hero framework rocks! Here is a screenshot.




The differences in development are vast and I am definitely favoring the direction Adobe is running towards with respect to the Hero framework.  Mobile development in Flash Builder 4.5 is much easier.  For starters, there is a notion of "views" and features such as screen orientation are supported.  The first thing you will notice is that the list of components is greatly reduced.  The version of this I built using 4.1 used the component.  This component by itself is very heavy weight (it is still MX or Halo qualified, not Spark).  The scroll bars are difficult to use as the hit area on a touch screen is very small.  Also the orientation is something you have to do manually if you want your application to resize and reorient when the phone is tilted.

One item that works well on PC, Mac, and Linux is AIR’s “openWithDefaultApplication()” method.  No such luck on Android as the architecture uses a notion of “intents”.   It is easy to write code to access the functionality rather than accessing the notion of a "file".  One line of code will open up an SMS, URL, or even phone someone.  As the code samples from James Ward illustrate below:



Last thoughts?  I am now addicted to mobile development!  Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 rocks (even though it is a preview and somewhat "beta").  The most beautiful thing is that I can use 95% of my code for a desktop application too.

Try it for yourself.  Download the Flash Builder 4.5 preview from http://labs.adobe.com

I will post a video of this whole process very shortly on this blog.

Peace, love and may your code compile on the first try!

Monday, November 15, 2010

Free Android App with source code

James Ward and I collaborated and wrote a simple demo app called "Scribbler".  It demonstrates some really simple concepts such as detecting screen capture and saving to the local file system on Android.  This application is a regular Flex applications that uses standard Flex 4 components (Not the new Hero/Slider framework) hence demonstrating that in some cases you can use MXML to build mobile apps.    The application is available now on the Google Android Marketplace.  We made this lame icon with "Sp" based on an indecisive moment of what to call the damn app.  If you end up having to explain it to someone say SP stands for "Sribbler Pad".



The full source code is downloadable from here.  Have fun with it!  Please tweet this (button is below) if you think others might like it.  More to follow if we are encouraged properly!

Thursday, November 04, 2010

AIR for Android Tutorial (Part 2)

In the first AIR for Android tutorial, we showed just how to get started.  This tutorial is a complete video along with the source code.  This blog post includes the necessary instructions for building your first application and then adding a transform gesture.  With many smartphones using touch screens, the desired behavior is to allow an application to scale upwards but never scale below a certain minimum size.  This tutorial and the accompanying source code or Flash Builder 4.1 project explain how to accomplish this task.

Untitled from Technoracle on Vimeo.


Source Code: (download)

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Some awesome webinars on building multi-screen content

For developers, we want to invite you to a series of webinars on authoring content and code for mobile screens. Yeah - there has been a lot of talk about how you can just "write once, run everywhere" but the devil is in the details. Developers who have been at the cutting edge are preparing to reveal some best practices and tips, tricks you should at least be aware of when authoring for multiple screens to take advantage of new features of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. These webinars will run from June 22-24, 2010.

Best practices in optimizing web content for Flash Player 10.1
Tuesday, June 22, 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time - REGISTER

The quickest way to build cross-platform apps with AIR 2
Tuesday, June 22, 1PM – 2PM Pacific Time - REGISTER

Rich Internet App development with Flash Builder 4 for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2
Wednesday, June 23, 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time - REGISTER

Multi-screen web content development with Flash Pro CS5
Thursday, June 24 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time - REGISTER

Thursday, May 20, 2010

AIR 2 for Android Public Beta!

They AIR team did it!! While at Google I/O this week developers are getting blasted with awesome news and new technology, Google and Adobe have worked hard on this and IMO it is a top 5 event of the week. For those of you who don't know AIR, Adobe AIR for Android enables developers to build standalone applications that run on Android devices, like the Nexus One (my all time favorite smartphone). You can use any text editor and the free SDK to build applications and easily deliver applications that work across Linux, Mac, Android, and PC. When developing for Android, you must use the AIR for Android SDK.

By joining this Public Prerelease program, you will have access to a beta version of the AIR SDK with support for Android. Before signing up for this program, there are currently limitations that you should be aware of:

  • In this early stage of development, you should be comfortable with using command line tools.
  • Flash Professional CS5 now has a new extension that allows developers to publish directly to Android-powered devices. The extension adds a new AIR for Android publish setting that works in the shipping and 30-trial versions of Flash Professional CS5.
  • The Flex 4 framework has not yet been optimized for mobile devices; for this prerelease, we recommend building applications using ActionScript only. We're currently working on creating a highly productive, cross-platform solution for mobile development using Flash Builder and Flex, which we expect to be available in public preview by the end of this year.
  • You will be able to build and test AIR applications on Android devices, but you will not be able to deploy on the Android Market or share them with end users
  • You will be subject to terms of an NDA which allows you to display your application publicly, but you will not be permitted to disclose anything outside of Licensee’s own personal development experiences of a beta Android application(s) using this beta AIR SDK.


If you are interested in joining our Prerelease program, just go here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/android/

I'm going there now!