Android – First Steps

Bought a new phone in April – it’s an Android phone. After some playing around bought a book about Android, loaded down the SDK, read the online documentation. In order to start

  • you don’t need to buy a Mac (as for the iPhone)
  • you don’t need to use archaic GNOME libraries (or modified QT desktop as for Maemo)
  • you can use Java – and the SDK seems to be structured and sensible (actor/message oriented)

So I started to try it out for a simple project – Androku – a remote control for my Roku Soundbridge – and after about a week reading the book, the online documentation and searching the WEB for code snippets, the application, or let’s say the ALPHA seems to work.

I know, there are other applications in the market, but I shall publish it as freeware. Currently the GUI is a bit rough, and behaviour on other platforms is unknown. But on my Desire it seems to behave pretty well:

  • it doesn’t drain any battery, when the display is off
  • it watches the wifi state: disconnects, when wifi is off, reconnects, when both wifi and display are on
  • it even allows roation

So let’s see how the Android market works!

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3 Responses to Android – First Steps

  1. bob says:

    Is possible to play stream videos with subtitles during ? If not,do you plan it?

    • bebopfreak says:

      Usually you cannot deduce the location of the .srt file/stream from the upnp video stream uri. So it won’t be possible without nonstandard upnp extensions. You should try at the server side and transcode video files with subtitles.
      Anyway, see it as a challenge to improve your foreign languages competence!

  2. miscellany says:

    I wanted to THANK YOU for UPnPlay. Thank you for making it a free app and Thank you for investing the time on it to make it bug free, your app was the only free app that “just worked” out of the box letting me render music from my android smartphone to a Raspberry PI!!!!

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