Connecting KIES to the Samsung Galaxy S

 

I have waited until today to update my SGS to Froyo and installed KIES finally. After reading the horror stories about KIES, you can imagine my expectations. It was actually not that horrifying. However I did keep having an issue connecting the phone to the KIES. The Galaxy MTP application says it is connected, but in KIES it states it is trying to connect.

To keep a long story short, while your phone is connected, right click on My Computer, select Device Manager and you will probably see an entry called GT-I900 with a warning sign.

Right click, select uninstall and then disconnect.

Connect the phone again, and Windows will install the drivers again, and you should be able to connect with KIES.

Android development continued

Sometimes this Eclipse is killing me After I added a menu.xml, it kept giving strange errors like, XML cannot be parsed, size 0, bla bla. I double checked the xml and couldn’t find any problems. So maybe it could have been an Eclipse issue, so I restarted it.

After restarting Eclipse, this time I got the message:

Unparsed aapt error(s)! Check the console for output. <ProjectName> Unknown Android Packaging Problem.

Checking the console, revealed no errors What to do now. Again Google Fu learned me how to resolve this issue as follows:

Right-click on the error message in the Problems view, and deleting the error. Modify the xml for forcing a build and magically it worked.

Samsung Galaxy S Tips

I was just surfing and encountered some tips on the usage of the Samsung Galaxy S which will help me/you to get the most of this excellent phone.

1. Contact screen: Swipe to left to create a text/SMS message to the contact
2. Contact screen: Swipe to right to call the contact immediately
3. Contact screen: Move your finger in the alphabet to quickly navigate to a contact starting with the letter, then while pressing move to left to move within that letter, eg. after D you can navigate in everything starting with D by moving to the left
4. Press and hold HOME key to get a list of recently used apps, which can be used to switch between applications (not specific to SGS)
5. Press menu and Edit in the home screen to delete and/or reorder the home pages. In order to reorder: touch and hold the screen which will allow to drag them
6. If your brightness is not set to auto, you can swipe from left to right in the notification bar to set brightness to maximum and the right to left to set brightness to minimum.
7. You can have the SGS announce the title/artist of a song from the Music player by pressing and holding the Up Volume button while a song is playing
8. You can "lock screen" while watching video by pressing Power Button while a video is playing. This is great at preventing unintended clicks while holding the phone watching a video
9. In the browser: Access to the bookmark button and address bar by tapping the Menu button (no need to scroll all the way up)
10. Open soft D-Pad by tap-and-hold the "?123" key on the standard Samsung Keyboard or swipe from the Swype button to the SYM button in the Swype Keyboard
11. Pressing and holding the Power button (keep pressing it after you get the shutdown/airplane dialog) will perform a reset.
12. Holding the Menu key for a second, will bring up the search dialog (emulating the search button available in other Android phones)
13. You lock the camera screen to only take a shot, by pressing the Power button for a very short time. This will show a paddock on screen.
14. When receiving a call press the volume down button to mute the ringer
15. Use the volume +/- in camera mode to zoom in and out

For more technical tips see the also the XDA forum and see also a list of cool apps to use with the SGS.

Fireworks tips

There is denying it, Adobe Fireworks is my favorite Adobe App. I have been using it for ages it seems and am still satisfied with it. (I haven’t used CS5 version yet… but I am sure I will not be disappointed with it). For images and projects for the web, it is perfect. Photoshop is mostly overkill. What I especially like about Fireworks is that is a hybrid image program; you can work on pixel level and still use vector tools.

Here are some tricks and tips I use often in Fireworks.

Convert images to Grayscale

Converting images to grayscale can be done by using the Creative menu.

 

Pasting new image

One useful feature of Fireworks is that is monitors your clipboard. If you have copied and image to the clipboard, you can start editing it by pressing Control-N (New) which will open up the new image dialog with the size of the image in the clipboard. After just pressing OK, you can paste it directly.

Fading images

Fading images can be done by using the Commands – Creative – Fade Image menu

You can further customize the fade by clicking on the layer mask, which shows you the gradient controller.

 

Setting layer preview size

I usually do not make any changes in the preview size, however there are some situation where you would to see smaller or bigger previews. This can be easily changed by clicking on the Layer option dropdown – Thumbnail Options item.

 

Useful keyboard shortcuts

Below is a list of keyboard shortcuts which I use most of the time

TAB	Hide/Show panels
Control – Alt – D	Duplicate current selection/layer
Control – Shift – D	Clone selection/layer (similar to duplicate, however duplicate moves the copy)
Control – K	Full display
Control – Numpad +	Zoom in
Control – Numpad -	Zoom out
Control – Mouse scroll	Zoom in and out
Control – G	Group selected
Control – Shift – G	Ungroup (grouped) object
Control – Alt – V	Paste as mask
Control – A	Select All
Control – D	Deselect
Control – Up	Bring Forward
Control – Down	Send Backward
Control – T	Transform
Control – Shift – T	Numeric transform

You can also customize your keyboard shortcuts via the Edit – Keyboard shortcuts menu item.

See also the CS3 manual.