Installous download folder

Been experimenting with old 2G iPhone (iOS update, jailbreak, etc). Just a quick note: If you ever wanted to know where the downloaded IPA’s are on your phone/pad, check the /private/var/mobile/Installous/Downloads folder. You can use a tool like DiskAid to connect to your device and store them locally.

I am currently doing the other way around.I am in principle against iTunes and avoid as much as I can, so I will try to see if I can install downloaded IPA from Installous. I think it should work.

PS. Coming back from Android to iOS, I realize how good Android is and how restricted iOS is.

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.

Multiple rundll32.exe instances

 

Recently I have been encountering multiple run32dll.exe instances in my taskmanager (windows 7). Of course I was alarmed and googling indicated a probable virus. I was almost sure that this was not the case on my machine, but better safe then sorry. Scans resulted nothing, which was as I expected.

It was time now to actually investigate what triggered the rundll32.exe. With process explorer I found out it was Chrome…. Aahaa… now I had more context for googling. It turns out that the current Chrome Canary version 9.0.583.0 (Official Build 66097) had this issue.

It seems it has already been fixed in the latest development build, see http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64006

So if you are using Chrome Canary build and see a lot of rundll32.exe, then you know

Windows 7 Printer not printing

 

Sometimes Windows is not really helping when you never reboot. I like my Windows 7 Sony Vaio laptop, especially the hibernation function. Quick start everytime, but sometimes Windows need to be rebooted, especially when things are becoming slow or stop functioning. This week I had a problem during printing: I was unable to print, each time it failed. My guess was that the printer spooler got lost somewhere.

So a quick tip:

Open command prompt (with Administrative priviledges: right click on shortcut, select Run as Administrator):

Issue the following command:

net stop spooler

and then

net start spooler

Your printing issues will be gone (unless something is really messed up)

(for more info see this link)

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.

Android development

After a long time not using Eclipse, I recently started it again to experiment further with Android development. 3 things came up, which I would like to share with you and what the fix is.

 

After creating a test Android project, the following error showed up:

ERROR: Unable to open class file <path>\gen\com\example\test\R.java: No such file or directory.

It seems that the java compiler cannot create this R.java. In order to fix this, do the following:

1. Open Eclipse
2. Open Window/Preferences
3. Expand JAVA option
4. Select Build Path
5. Check the option "Project" and uncheck "folder" options
6. Click on OK
7. Restart eclipse IDE

These steps fixed my problems regarding this issue.

 

 

When trying to run the application, the following error came up:

An internal error occurred during: "Launching test".com/android/ddmlib/ShellCommandUnresponsiveException

The fix for this was to update the Android DDMS by going to Help -> Software Updates select the Android DDMS and press Update button.

I had updated the Android Development tools, but had forgotten to update the Android DDMS.

 

 

Unable to view manifest files from within Eclipse, when you open the main.xml

When you try to open an application's manifest file from within Eclipse, you might get an error such as this one:

An error has occurred. See error log for more details.
org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.StructuredTextEditor.isBlockSelectionModeEnabled()Z

Try reverting to the 3.0 version of the Eclipse XML Editors and Tools. If this does not work, remove the 3.1 version of the tool. To do this in Eclipse 3.4:

1. Select Help > Software Updates...
2. Select the Installed Software tab.
3. Select Eclipse XML Editors and Tools.
4. Click Uninstall.
5. Click Finish.
6. When you restart Eclipse, you should be able to view the manifest files.

In my case, I just uninstalled them and it magically worked

 

Hope these were useful for you if you encounter the same issue.

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.