Stilll learning about Android

All new terminology with Android to learn.

Just been a normal user of Android since I put on the CyanogenMod thing onto the phone. The phone does mysteriously boot up by itself every now and then, but I just have to live with that. So long as I notice I have 4.2.2 on there now and I like having got rid of the bloat from Samsung. Would be great if I could just get the phone to the same version of Android I am running on the Nexus 7. On iOS it was great to always be running the same version of the operating system on all of my devices. I have to admit that sometimes I don't really know what I am doing, the terminology seems foreign to and I am guessing a lot of the time. In the ROM Manager App it tells me there is an update and then tells me there isn't. I start a download and then it reboots before it is finished it seems. I don't know if the reboot is part of what it was doing with the download.

Now I have told it to do a Fix Permissions. It seems to be taking quite a long time to go through all of the files. I suppose there are a lot of files. With luck the phone will run better what that is done. On the Mac fixing permissions is a good idea from time to time. Maybe then I will be able to try out a different ROM. When I put on the CyanogenMod I had instructions that was doing a clean install I think and the guy told me that next time he would should the process to do a dirty install. Maybe the phone company and Samsung can get together to give us an over the air upgrade to the Galaxy S3 phone. Even though I really like the phone still after six months of use I still wonder if I should have waited and got the Nexus 5 when it came out. It is rather good when you can have the latest OTA update before most everyone else because I have a Nexus / Google device.

Camera on the Galaxy S3

I have got some decent pictures of the phone and it has been OK for a camera phone. I find that I am not that impressed with the images though sometimes. I looked at a set of images I took one day and it was a fairly sunny day - I wasn't too impressed. The images seemed a bit muddy in therms of colour and rather soft. I reckon I have a need for a better camera to carry around with me. Something with a decent lens and decent size of sensor. Even so, it is still better to have some sort of camera with me even if it is a mobile phone camera.

Nexus 7

I am loving the Nexus 7 and I carry it everywhere with me. Great to have it for reading material even in the smallest room. I got the device updated to 4.4 by downloading the file that Google provided and only a couple of days later there was another that came to me as an OTA update. TO be honest I have not noticed much difference between what was there and with the 4.4 Kit Kat. Some changes had been made but it seemed that it was deep in the system and one or two cosmetic changes. Not much in terms of extra features to play with. The operating system on the Nexus 7 is loads better that the Galaxy 3 has ever behaved.

Do I miss iOS

Not at all.

Custom ROM install on Galaxy S3

It didn't really work out too well to begin with

Still not quite sure how exactly what I did that was wrong, but it didn't work at first. I used the shortcut in the ROM manager application to boot into recovery. I had already done the backup as per the instructions and then I moved on to step three which was to wipe out the data and do a factory reset. The next step was to do a cache partition wipe and up until that point everything went okay. The next step was to do a wipe of the dalvik cash which was supposed to be in a section called advanced. Unfortunately, I didn't see any possible way to get into an advanced part of the process.

I thought that maybe I had set up the deletion of a certain part of the cache within the ROM Manager application, so I went ahead with trying to install the custom ROM. The file for the custom ROM was sitting in the correct place on the phone and I was able to navigate to it from within the menu in system of the recovery mode. I selected it and gave it the go-ahead to process and after a short while I got a message to say verification failed. This was some verification of a signature which is required so how or other and there was no getting past this problem.

Making use of the backups

Within the recovery mode there was the possibility to go to backups and to select the Nandroid backup and try to run it. That didn't work either and I got another error message. It is a bloody wonder that anybody is able to do any installations of custom ROMs to a Samsung Galaxy S3 phone as for sure, it really isn't easy. As you can see I was getting frustrated at this point in the game.

I had to go back to the standard installation of the phone that came when I bought it. I was pleased that at least I was able to do that without any problems. There weren't any problems, but there is a pain in the arse of having to set up all of the applications that I had before, once more. The first thing to do was to reinstall ROM Manager and my Helium backup application. There was a certain amount of messing about having to put in my Google details for the phone with the relevant passwords. Some applications were having to be downloaded from the Google Play App Store and some applications I was able to bring in again from the external storage. This is the procedure that is in process at the moment and I'm not able to do much else apart from wait. I didn't get all the way and I thought I would try again after I had the apps on there to be able to do so.

I haven't given up yet!

I am getting some help from somebody on the Google plus community called Rooted Samsungs. The only problem with this is the fact that it is not a direct conversation with somebody helping out, but a back and forth of posts within the conversation I started. It would work better if I could do a Google Hangout or maybe a Skype instant message or any other instant message service. As it is I am waiting for the guy to return the answers to my questions and he is probably doing the best he can while he is doing something else. He might even be at work!

Success at last - Running cyanogen mod

I kept trying to work out why it was the booting into recovery mode kept on taking me to the standard recovery mode when I was trying to get to the specific ClockworkMod recovery mode. I moved files from one folder to another and tried again and eventually something clicked and it worked for me. I found that by downloading the CyanogenMod file from within the ROM Manager application and also the same for the Google apps file that was required, worked better than downloading through the Mac. The ROM manager application put these files into specific places and this could have had an effect upon whether it was going to run properly or not. In any case, it all worked in the end!

Lots to do to finish off the job

I couldn't believe it when I finally saw the CyanogenMod spinning logo on the screen. To a large extent I just kind of followed my nose with doing things and clicking buttons to continue the process. I realised that I had to get back into the ROM Manager application in order to install the Google apps thing and I was very happy that it was quite seamless in the way that part of the job worked.

I'm also delighted with the fact that the applications that I had on the phone beforehand are automatically being updated from the backup that was made as part of the ROM Manager job. It was taking some time in order to get these applications downloaded again so I made sure that I had the other backup application loaded, Helium Pro. I was then able to quickly get some of the applications reinstalled from the backup which was residing on the external SD card.

It doesn't look all that different - At first

After reinstating and setting up the application Nova Launcher everything on the phone looks pretty much as it did before. I can go into the settings of the phone and I can see that it has been updated to Android version 4.2.2. It would have been nice to be able to go to version 4.3 and thats maybe possible further down the road. I can at least see that all of the bloatware from Samsung and from the phone company have been removed. I did like the way that I could swipe my hand across the screen of the phone to make it do a screenshot. I don't have that any more, but that is not too much of a problem as I have another way to do screenshots.

I like the way that when I do a slide to unlock the device I have a choice of sliding it to the right to just unlock it or I have four other options. One takes me into the messages app, the other takes me to the music app, another takes me to the phone app and finally there is one which opens up an Internet browser. The Internet browser is not the one that I am going to be using as I prefer to use a chrome, but the other choices could be useful.

Looking good so far

I have been able to set up all of the accounts on the phone with Google, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Dropbox and I have been able to get the passwords in there from 1Password as previously

Upgrading the Galaxy S3 to a Custom ROM

What exactly is a Nandroid backup

Last night until 1 o'clock in the morning I spent fiddling with my phone and getting it ready to put on a custom ROM. I got a lot of information from a Google plus community about how to do it. I needed to download extra stuff, for example I needed to do a Nandroid backup as well as download an extra application to add Google apps to the update. This is due to the fact that Google do not let the custom ROM makers distribute their applications within the actual custom ROMs. I have to admit that the process is quite complicated and confusing and not for your average human. Updating your phone to a custom ROM is more for the geeks of the world. I do consider myself to be a geek, but I have to admit that I'm finding this process a little bit challenging this first time around. I suppose that once you have done this process while two times it seems a little bit more friendly and easy. I bought an application called ROM manager which is supposed to be making things easier. I watched a video showing how to do the process but it didn't show all the things that were shown to be necessary as per the information from the Google plus community. There are certain files that have to be downloaded and the files are specific to the model of the phone that you're working with. There are rather variables also which are dependent upon the custom ROM that you want to put on your phone.

Why would anyone want to do this?

When you get a phone from a carrier it has extra software on the phone that is commonly called bloatware. So one of the reasons to use custom ROM is to get rid of that extra and required software. That software can't be otherwise deleted from the phone. After having the Nexus seven for a couple of weeks and using the latest version of Google Android and liking it, it seems like a good plan to get to something a little bit more pure Android.

Instructions from Geoff Whiteley at Google plus

With CWM this should be your procedure....

1. Boot into recovery (shortcut in ROM manager)
2. Backup (you've already done)
3. Wipe data/factory reset
4. Wipe cache partition
5. Wipe dalvik cache (in advanced)
6. Format /system (only /system nothing else, found in mounts&storage)
7. Install zip, navigate to ROM
8. Install gapps
9. Reboot system
10. Enjoy

How to post to iOS and Mac App DayOne from Android

DayOne journalling from Android

My favourite application for journalling, diary keeping is an application called DayOne, the only problem that I have with it is the fact that I use Android with my phone and my Nexus 7 and there is no Android App. The joys of being a slider between platforms iOS and Android. So what I need is to have some way where I can share from my Android devices, so that it all will go into DayOne with no extra work on my part. I did wonder if it would be possible for me to send an email to myself that would let me grab the contents to put into DayOne. I still think that process would be possible, but I have tried another way first and it works. On the Android devices I have used the application called Draft although I could have used any of the text editing applications that synchronise with Dropbox.

The way that it works

The first part of the job is to create the journal entry in Draft and to do that with a particular file name. The file has to be called DayOne.txt and the application is already set to synchronise with Dropbox in app settings. In the blink of an eye the file is saved into the Dropbox folder called Draft. Then it appears like magic onto the Mac and the iPad and the Galaxy S3, anywhere I have Dropbox.

Keyboard Maestro Magic

Keyboard Maestro is a marvellous application that allows you to do all sorts of automation tricks on Mac OS X. I have found on numerous occasions that Keyboard Maestro is far better than the Apple application Automator. I can use it to simulate keypresses and key combinations and to work off numerous triggers. In this case I decided to have two triggers, one is based upon a time and I have chosen 11:30 PM in the evening and the other trigger works from a keyboard combination. This means that I can activate it manually or I can leave it and at the specified time the macro will run by itself and add my Android journal entries into DayOne.

listen to ‘Sliding in Android DayOne posts ’ on Audioboo

I have the macro open up the specified file and to select all text within it and copy it to the clipboard. Then the Keyboard Maestro macro opens up DayOne in a new journal entry mode and pastes the text from the clipboard. I then have it set so that DayOne changes to the list view and this effectively saves the post.

To finish off the macro and to tidy up, I then tell it to delete the text file that was opened up by Textmate on my Mac. This has to be done so that I don't end up with the duplicate entries. During the testing procedure I did use the command to move the original file to another folder rather than to delete. After I have found that the copying and pasting into DayOne had been successful I decided to change it to delete the file as I no longer needed to keep them.

What comes next to automate journalling with DayOne

Any other posts that I make to Google plus, Facebook, Twitter or any other social networks are in effect journalling or diary keeping. It would be handy to be able to take those social network postings and to put them into one place. The application DayOne would be a good place for all of that. There is a guy called Brett Terpstra who has created some scripts that take the posts that he has made on social networks and put them automatically into DayOne. The set of scripts uses the command line interface from DayOne and I have downloaded this and tried to make it work. Unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful in getting it to work on my system. I am just not geeky enough. So I will have to have a look at another way to get this social network journalling to put into DayOne.

Getting to know the Nexus 7 - New 2013 version

A week with the Nexus 7

Of course, after getting the Nexus seven I spent a certain amount of time with setting it up. This was all very easy and straightforward, I installed most of the applications same as I had already purchased and installed on the Samsung Galaxy S3. There were one or two applications that I hadn't really been using, so no point installing them on the Nexus 7, but as far as possible I wanted to have things set up in terms of the set of applications, similar to the Android phone.

Going to have to root the Nexus 7

It is only when I tried to use the application that I need to use for the Android tutorial screencasting called BBQ that I remembered that I rooted the S3 in order to be able to do this. The application sends the screen video by Wi-Fi to an application that I run on my Mac and then I am able to capture the screen using ScreenFlow. I have watched a video that shows me how to do this rooting on the Nexus 7 using my Mac, but I want to leave myself loads of time for doing this, just in case something goes wrong along the way. Sometimes there could be a change to the operating system or some other part of the necessary files that I have downloaded and the whole process could get messed up. I told my neighbour that I will be rooting the Nexus 7 and he reckoned that would probably void the warranty. I would imagine that it is also possible to put the Nexus back to the way it was if needed. I have already done backups of the device, just in case. So I am not too worried about warranty difficulties. So I will be doing more tutorials like the one for the best test editing app for Android soon.

Reading books with the Kindle app

Android vs iOS. I just set up the Kindle app on the Nexus 7 and I am quite pleased with the results compared to the way that the books look on the Kindle app on iOS. The text looked okay on the iPad, but then when I looked at the same text in Kindle on the Android device, there was formatting that made the book very much easier to read.

Necessary extras for the Nexus 7

The Nexus 7 I bought has only 16 GB of storage space and I'm sure that I will use that up fairly quickly. I found out that there is a possibility of extending the storage space by buying an On the Go - OTG Cable and with this I will be able to plug-in USB storage. This could be very handy although at the moment I don't have any USB memory sticks available. So I will have to send in an order to buy a USB 32GB stick that I can OTG plug into the Nexus 7. I will be able to use this if I want to have some movies or music stored outside of the Android device. I want to be sure that I can leave plenty of space for movie clips and audio recordings that I will be creating myself by using the camera and also using applications like Audio Evolution Mobile.

Going paperless with an Android device

One of the applications that I have installed on the Android is an application called CamScanner. It is an application and it is also a service. Documents that I create using this application go to a web server as well as being saved on the device. Not only that, but the documents are also synchronised out to other devices using the same application. I have been using another application on my iOS devices called Scanner Pro which I really like because it functions so well, but I can see that the synchronisation facilities between platforms will be very useful.

There's Writing, Blogging And Note Taking - Part Two

Back to Part One

Other sorts of text entry

When I am out and about with my mobile device, the Android-based Samsung Galaxy S3, I am more likely to want to make quick notes. It is also possible that you might want to make quick notes while sitting in front of the desktop computer. For these types of quick notes then you're going to need an app that is quick and easy to open so that rules out the large page layout applications like Word or Pages. Seeing as I am already using Mou for some of my editing that is the application that I tend to use for making those quick notes. I could also make notes in some of the other text editing applications I have such as Textastic (Mac and iOS) or TextMate (Mac), but I prefer to leave those for the times when I need to do some coding or maybe just some cleaning up of some text.

Create text and send it anywhere

On iOS my preference for these quick notes is the application called Drafts and this is because of its marvellous sharing ability, for keeping those notes all in one place as well as synchronisation through Dropbox so that I still have access whichever platform I am using. Drafts is excellent because of the fact that I can share out from it to numerous networks such as Twitter, Facebook, ADN and various other places including blogging platforms. Of course, Drafts does Markdown extremely well.

 

Android Markdown Editor

I have been looking for a markdown application to use on Android and I wrote an article about my initial searching when I first got the Galaxy S3. I was delighted to find that there was an application called Draft which it seems is trying to emulate the brilliant application Drafts from iOS. It is a work in progress and isn't quite as good as the iOS application, but it is going in the right direction. I have a widget on one of the android screens which allows me to go directly to making a note in Draft, which can be either a text type note with a.txt extension or it can be a specifically Markdown note with a .MD extension. On my home page on the Galaxy I can also get directly into Draft and I can do some of the things that it is possible to do with the application that it is trying to copy, Drafts.

Easily confused

When you get used to the way that one application works and then you're trying to do similar things in a similar application it can be a little bit confusing. With Draft some other things work pretty much the same as they did in the iOS application I was using and then sometimes not quite so. There are a huge number of places that I can share out to which I can get to by using the share icon in the top right-hand corner. Initially it only gives me three different places and none of which I am likely to use S Memo, Messaging and Hang Outs, but if I click on See All there are a huge number of possibilities. So I can share out to just about any of the other applications I have available including email, the Twitter application Carbon, Facebook, Dash, blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress. I could even send it out as a QR code or through the SMS application called What's App.

A work in Progress

The only problem with this within the application Draft is that sometimes it will automatically take the text and put it ready to be used in the other application and sometimes it doesn't. I found that the workaround for this is to always select all of the text before I do the share so that at the very least I will be able to paste it back in again when I get to the share application. This is not too much of a bother so long as I remember to do it.

Sharing with Plain Text or html

When you're not in the editing mode and you tap on the share button you are given two options to start with, share plaintext or share HTML. I just used that button to share some plaintext to Facebook and it takes me to an empty post. That was not quite what I had expected and I would need to do a paste if I had remembered to copy it beforehand. It is also the same if I ask it to share the text as HTML. On the other hand when I want to share out to the Gmail application to send as an email, both ways works out fine and I get the text as expected in the Gmail application and ready to send. So as you see it is a bit hit and miss.

Part Three

Installing applications on my Samsung Galaxy S3

Rooting Tooting success

This morning I have been installing quite a few applications on my phone and I started with Framaroot which allowed me to root the phone. This was from a suggestion by my friend Stefan Svartling. I had followed a couple of his previous suggestions to root the phone which had been unsuccessful and I was delighted that this one actually worked. It must have been the fact that there was something done that was a little bit weird by the telephone company, that messed it up before. Now that I have the phone rooted I will have to decide what I am going to do next. Stefan has been flashing a custom ROM onto his Android phone in order to get rid of some of the bloatware that comes with Samsung Touchwiz. I have noticed that when I use applications such as Helium, the backup application, that I do get some extra functionality because of the phone being rooted.

Off-line maps

While we were visiting Estonia it would have been very useful to have some off-line maps. This was so that I could have used a map to show where we were. This is considering that the maps from Google were not available as I didn't want to download any data while roaming. I did get to see some of the Google maps, but only when I was within range of some Wi-Fi. One of the great things about Estonia is that there are very many places that give you free Wi-Fi and I even had Wi-Fi when I was sitting on a tram travelling into the city of Tallinn. There are some open source maps available and I have found a couple of applications which give access to these maps on Android. The one that I downloaded is called OsmAnd when you get the application started up you get some options about which maps you will want to download and also where you want to put them. I put them onto the external SD card and as they are vector maps they shouldn't take too much space. I downloaded a few based upon the possibilities of me actually going to those places. I won't really be able to get the benefit from these until I go travelling again and that could be who knows when.

Global positioning for photos

I also downloaded an application for getting the GPS coordinates for photos that have been taken with my DLSR camera which will save the expense of buying one of these new fangled cameras with GPS included. The way that it works is that when you go out to do some photos with your DSLR camera, you also start the tracking application on your iPhone or Android device. Then you use another piece of software on your Mac to marry the two sets of data together and hey presto you have all of the tracking information within your exif data. You do have two synchronise the clocks on the two devices, I don't think it has to be exact, but I will be doing some testing to find out how close it has to be. It is possible to do GPS tagging for free, but you do have to remember to take a photo with your mobile device every time you take pictures in a new spot with your big fancy digital camera. As soon as I have tested this way of working with the photos and GPS I will post a new article all about it.

My Galaxy S3 Rooting Journey

Another attempt to root the Samsung Galaxy S3

I was invited to a community in Google Plus called Android Root by +GeoffWhitely and it gave me a link to a site which would give me the necessary items and information to read my Galaxy S3. I put off following the recipe for sometime because I didn't want to do it while I was busy and end up with a bricked phone that I didn't have time to fix. Eventually, I got down to doing the job and the instructions were pretty easy to follow. A very simple step-by-step process starting with downloading the zip file from the website. At the very least with this process I learned about how to put the phone into a recovery mode. From this recovery mode it is also possible for me to reset the phone to factory settings. This could be very useful to do if I mess things up completely and want to get things back the way they were. Of course I have already made a backup of the applications, which includes the data for those applications. This backup is available on my SD card which is a 32 GB size and has plenty of room available for everything I need to backup. I might at some stage see if I can find an even larger SD card for the phone. I am pretty sure it is possible to put a 64 GB SD card into the Samsung Galaxy S3.

Rooting Failure again

Everything was going really well until I got to the final stages of the process. I found it easy to get into the various modes required to do what I needed to do with the phone. It was simple to install the software called Heimdall on my Mac which is just a front end for things going on in the background, probably via terminal. As you can imagine after seeing the failure message regarding the e-signature verification I breathed a sigh of relief to be able to get back into the phone as per normal. So when it booted up into the usual Nova Launcher view I was able then to test whether the phone had been rooted with the tester application. I was quite disappointed to see that this process had failed once again. I did try once before to root the Samsung Galaxy S3 using an application which was meant for another job, but also had the side benefits of being able to root the phone.

Not giving up!

So now I am at the point where I have given Geoff the details of where it went wrong over in the Google plus community and are now awaiting further instructions.

At Step 14 - I get a message
Finding update package...
Opening update package...
Verifying update package..
E-signature verification Failed
Then I went to reboot System and checked to see that the phone was still not rooted.
Other than that it went great
What do you think +Geoff Whiteley ??

Finding a workflow for recording an Audioboo on my Galaxy S3

Yesterday when I went out for my late evening walk with the dog, I decided to give the Audioboo application on the Samsung Galaxy S3 another try. Once again I was disappointed with the application because after talking for the ten minutes time allowed with Audioboo, the upload failed once again. That is two times in a row when I have been let down by this application and I will be heartily pleased when the application is properly updated and set right. When I was using the iPhone and the Audioboo application for iOS I was able to make a recording and not lose it every single time. There were occasions when it took more than one day for the recorded boo to be uploaded to the Audioboo server, but I never completely lost any of the work.

Using other applications to boo

I have a number of audio recording applications which will give me a good quality voice recording and the one that I prefer to use is called Audio Evolution Mobile which is a multitrack digital audio workstation for Android. I also have Easy Voice Recorder which is not bad, but doesn't let me do any editing of the recording. Then there is Pocket WavePad which is easy-to-use and gives a fairly good recording. With this one I also get a decent level meter and it seems to work reasonably well. I do prefer to have an audio recorder that will let me see the audio wave of my voice recordings. This makes it so much easier to edit the sound when I can see the sounds on the timeline as well as hear them.

As I was inclined to buy the Audio Evolution Mobile application as with it I didn't want to have any annoying advertising taking up valuable screen space. Sometimes I find that I have to be careful with the distance of the audio source, my mouth, to the microphone on the telephone as it is very sensitive and I can easily find that the audio is clipping. When the tops of the waves are cut with this clipping, it totally destroys the sound and I have to do a new recording of the audio.

Using my microphones with my Samsung Galaxy S3

Not too long ago I bought a Giant Squid lapel microphone (lavelier) which gives excellent audio recordings and is perfect for video blogging or audio blogging. Up until now I have been connecting it to a Zoom H2 Recorder, but I have recently ordered a converter so that I can use the microphone with the Samsung Galaxy S3. So instead of taking the audio from the zoom H2 and moving it to my iMac to do some editing, I will be able to do it all in house on the S3. On account of the fact that I always have my phone with me, then so long as I have the adapter then I will be able to create my audio recordings. Good quality audio is incredibly important with video and I will be very pleased to improve upon the already pretty good audio I'm getting from my video recordings using the Galaxy S3.

Switching from the iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy S3

Is it time to Root the S3?

I have been using the Galaxy S3 for a month now and mostly loving it. Having a great time learning new things and being nerdy. No is the time to take it a step further and Root the phone and then I will think about running something different in terms os alternative ROM. Much of it all seems to be in a completely different language and totally weird but I will dive in there. I mean I didn't  even jailbreak the iPhones I had. reading through the posts on some of these websites it all seems a bit cryptic.

Getting help to Root

I have looked at some Youtube tutorials and I hit a brick wall. I used a downloaded software that was supposed to root the phone easily, but didn't work for me and now I have the help of +Geoff Whitely  and there is the Google Plus Android Root Community which I was guided to by Geoff. I would do the rooting straight away but it is late in the evening and it will have to wait until the morning or maybe the day after when I and devote the proper attention and time to the task. If I rush it I will only cock it up. That will never do.