bingshui.org » Android

Android Notifier and Blueman on Ubuntu

dzimney — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:21:39 +0000

After getting Android Notifier working on my machine by installing OBEX, I installed Blueman on my Ubuntu 10.10 machine. I’m not sure why, but Blueman seems to work better with Android than Gnome Bluetooth. I like the interface of Gnome Bluetooth better than Blueman, but I could only get file transfers to run from Android to Ubuntu and not the other way around. Additionally, it’s fairly easy to change the download directory for Bluetooth file transfers to Ubuntu using Blueman. If anyone has a solution to either of these two issues, I’m all ears.

Anyway, back to Android Notifier. Once I installed Blueman, the notifier stopped working. Everything was still paired correctly and all that, but Notifier just wasn’t getting the messages. Turns out, Blueman seems to use an Indicator plugin that hijacks those notifications. Solution? Turn off the Indicator plugin. From what I can tell it doesn’t do much anyway… of course maybe I should retest sending/receiving files from my Nexus.

QUICK ANSWER:

Right click on the Blueman icon in your Notification Area. Select Plugins. And now un-check Indicator from the list on the left side. Done.

Again, I don’t know if there are any adverse effects to turning off Indicator. But I can’t imagine it’ll break anything.

Fix for Android Notifier on Ubuntu via Bluetooth

dzimney — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 21:53:23 +0000

I’ve been using the Android Notifier with my MacBook for some time. If you haven’t checked it out, please do. The application sends notifications to your desktop for everything from incoming texts to a low battery warning to third party notifications. It’s a great little app if you’re into that sort of thing. So when I made my switch to Ubuntu, naturally I wanted to get the Android Notifier working with my new machine.

I won’t get into how the application works or how to pair your phone with Ubuntu. There’s plenty of info on those out there. The issue that I was running into, was with my Nexus S paired and being able to send files to and from Ubuntu, I could not get Android Notifier to pick up on any of my test notifications. When setting up Bluetooth on my computer to allow for file transfers I’d discovered that Android uses OBEX to push and receive file transfers over Bluetooth. So, with this in mind, I decided to investigate how Android Notifier listens for notifications. After checking out the wiki on the project page for Notifier, I found this article regarding the protocols used by Android Notifier (thank you to the Notifier team for posting the documentation on this). Turns out for the Bluetooth connection, Notifier uses a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) when sending notifications.

QUICK ANSWER:
While this may vary between distributions of Linux, on my Ubuntu 10.10 setup, I had to install the UUID command-line tool in order to get Android Notifier working. To do this, run the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install uuid

I hope this helps someone solve their issue using Android Notifier. I’d hate for someone to miss out such a sweet app.

Android Tablet

dzimney — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:09:19 +0000

Android 2.2 on Nexus One

dzimney — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:15:07 +0000

It’s here! Well, sort of. You can get Android 2.2, aka Froyo, on your Nexus One if you’re brave enough to install the new OS manually. Thanks to the folks at Android SPIN, there’s a pretty easy way to get the Android 2.2 SDK and get it installed onto a Nexus One. I have no idea of this will work for any other phone running Android.

You can download the Froyo update here: http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-FRF50-from-ERE27.1e519a24.zip

Once you have the download, if you want to flash the downloaded update file, follow this guide:
http://forum.androidspin.com/showthread.php?t=2631

Google I/O Conference

dzimney — Sat, 22 May 2010 18:28:09 +0000

This past week marked Google’s 3rd Annual Google I/O Conference in San Francisco, CA. The event which spans the course of two days is a platform for Google to share it’s latest goodies with the world among other things. As an Android convert, I was excited to see the Day 2 Keynote which highlighted all of the new features in Android 2.2 (aka Froyo). If you love android already, make the time to watch this presentation. It’s all very excited stuff. If not, maybe take a look and see what Android has to offer over the leading brand. You may be surprised.

For me, I love how dedicated Google has become to being “open”. Their mission is to make the Internet great and easy to use for everyone, which is more than I can say for some other groups out there. I not only support the amazing technologies that they’re producing, but also support the way they’re doing it. The essence of the Internet is in openness, and Google has been a leader in keeping it that way.

Those hackers did it again: Android ported to the iPhone

dzimney — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:39:35 +0000

This is really pretty amazing. Nothing of this magnitude has happened in the iPhone/Mobile world since the iPhone was first jailbroken. This is the feat that was previously said would never be done. Why you’d want to run Android on your iPhone over on an native Android device is beyond me, but I guess being able to run both OSes on the same device is cool. I can only hope it will bring people to realize how awesome Android really is and create some converts. I’ll probably be trying to install this on an iPhone this weekend. Sweetness. This is really really exciting, in a totally geeked out way.