Droid Dev Challenge 1

With the success of the Android Bounty from AndroidandMe.com and the Android Developer Challenge from Google, I decided to start up our own little contest. The task: create an Android 1.5 compatible widget. The best submitted widget will win the pot, which will be filled by user donations. More information can be found in the Droid Dev Challenge section.

Jeff Sharkey just released a cool little script he wrote to color code the adb logcat output based on the type of message. As soon as he pasted it into #android on freenode.net I had to try it. I downloaded it to my ~/bin folder and saved it as “logcat”, then chmodded it to make it executable. Now I can run it by just typing logcat in a terminal. For anyone who uses logcat on a regular basis (and is a linux user), this script will be a life saver. Check out his blog to download the script and read more about it.

We all knew they were coming (and those of us running a pre-release cupcake already have some new ones), but having a Google employee write a how-to makes it all the more real. Jeff Sharkey, who brought us some fun apps before being headhunted by Google, is showing how you can build your very own widget in the 1.5 sdk.

I am about 85% sure that I have successfully removed the bridge and from what I can tell I have a working forum. If anyone is unable to login or has any other major forum issues please email me at admin AT android-dls DOT com or find me on irc.freenode.net in #android-downloads so I can look into it.

The forums *might* be going up and down today as I will be performing some maintenance. I have grown tired of the repeated errors caused by a stupid choice I made while this site was still new. While I was creating a download section (which was later made useless by the market) I wanted users to be able to login to it and the forums at once so I installed a Joomla <--> phpBB3 bridge. This bridge was supposed to make logins and other user information seamless across both platforms. While it did make them accessible, it was NOT seamless. There are numerous errors that get reported and with my very limited php knowledge I am only able to temporarily fix them. I will be attempting to remove the bridge by installing a fresh phpBB3 today and hopefully hooking it up to the old database. I started this project last night and was about 90% successful but I made a mistake which caused me to have to revert and start over. If you experience problems logging in today, please be patient and try again later. I will let you guys know when (I think) I am finished. Thanks in advance for the understanding.

If you are like me, you probably check the market for new apps at least once a day. I was excited when I first saw cyrket.com had setup an RSS feed for the latest items and immediately went and purchased the first Android RSS reader that supported notifications. This was then set to check cyrket every 5 minutes for new releases. While that was good while I was away, I did not want to have to pull out my phone to see the latest releases. I recently added the feeds to a bot I run on irc.freenode.net in #android-downloads so that I could see the latest submissions when I am on irc. If you frequent freenodes #android channel feel free to add my channel to your auto join and come idle. If you are looking for a good irc client for the G1, try out Android IRC by nyt. It is not free, but in my opinion it is the best, most full featured client that has been released and it was definately worth the $5 I spent on it.

Also note that I have placed the last 10 apps feed on the right side of the home page.

I have been using his 4.5 build for about a week after he helped me get a semi working apps-to-sd setup working. Today he finalized this and if you use any kind of apps-to-sd mods, you will be able to try out his build. His latest 4.5 build is missing a few things that keep it from being a daily use build for most. Of those few things, the most notable are the inverted colors and upside down picture on the camera and the headphone jack not working (no audio output). While he plans on working on this more in the coming days, If you are not afraid of the bleeding edge, you should try it out. Cupcake is a much needed improvement over Android 1.0 and 1.1 which you can sneak a taste of early thanks to him. >Check out his latest builds here.