CROWD FUNDING

This is the P&L; for Diaspora, a project which raised two hundred thousand dollars on Kickstarter (http://goo.gl/Yf3Pi) and has now decided to turn it over “to the community” (http://goo.gl/yH9W9) (read; all the money has gone, they’ve not managed to create any revenue streams, and they’re not putting any money in to keep it going). Looking over the figures a couple of things jump out at me; The only income is the Kickstarter money.

ICS SMS RATE LIMIT

One of the changes in #IceCreamSandwich was the introduction of a lower SMS usage monitor rate which restricts how many SMSes can be sent by any application in a given time. My guess would be that the aim is to prevent malicious apps sending huge amounts of SMSes to premium rate numbers, but unfortunately some users seem to be hitting the limit with the default SMS messaging app (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-discuss/bsDO0jQVdTI/Ns7oaTCcIa8J), and it’s possible developers may see users complaining about this if their apps rely on SMS usage and are heavily used, so I thought it’s worth letting people what the limits are in case people ask them.

THE GALAXY S3 HAS MULTI-WINDOW MANAGEMENT CODE ON IT

TL;DR: Implementing it in your apps is more hassle than it’s worth. To answer the most common question; Yes, the two apps on one screen functionality of the Galaxy Note 10.1 is limited to a few apps. All of them ship with the device. The code to support multi-window mode is baked into the core Android framework on the device (so much so that the classes are in the framework library odex), which means that it could be submitted to the #AOSP to become part of Androids core functionality.

ADOBE FLASH

After a comment on a previous post from George Medve on Flash I though it best to share my take on it. I’m doing this as a post because it’s probably of interest to some people who wouldn’t read the comments on the other post; In terms of Flashes security, I think this article says it all. 2 days ago Adobe were patching a bug which could crash machines and/or allow remote users to take control.

OUYA DOESN'T NEED TO BE PURE ANDROID

The #Ouya Kickstarter has nearly crossed the US$5million mark. I’ve read all the negative press, a lot of which was written before this weekends Android XBMC posts by Kieran Gutteridge and Jason Parker. If you bear in mind that Apple apparently sold more than 2.7 million Apple TVs' in the first half of this year (http://goo.gl/K9ldI), a US$99 XBMC capable device which has the ability to run apps and games as well seems to me to have a good chance of being a success.

BUILDING ANDROID JELLYBEAN ON OS X

Building AOSP JB on OS X 10.7 with XCode 4 takes just a little tweak to your build. Instead of running just make you need to run; make CC=“gcc” CXX=“g++” Which will allow the build to complete.

EXPERIMENTING WITH THE NEXUS Q

It’s always fun when you can pull the birds on a new device :) Hopefully my posts messing around with the NexusQ have shown you that it is just an #Android device and that most apps would work on it with little to no effort as long as they don’t require things like a camera or multi-touch input. If the Q were combined with a simple control system (e.g. an app on the phone which worked as a touchpad for the Q) you’d have yourself, in my opinion, one of the best Android living room experiences currently available.

ACCESSING THE SETTINGS ON A NEXUS Q

If you enable USB debug mode on the Q, then use adb shell you can start the settings app using the command; am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings Once you have done this you can “configure” it using; input keyevent xxxx where xxxx is one of the key events from http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/KeyEvent.html (e.g. input keyevent 20 is the same as pressing down on the dpad). It’s a bit time consuming, but it should be enough to get the Q working with a mouse ;)

NEXUS Q IDEAS

After chatting with Billy Rutledge yesterday I’ve got a few ideas spinning for how people could use the #NexusQ so I thought I’d put them out there as they seem to revolve around one theme; The Q as a hub device. Multiplayer gaming could use it as the server/co-ordinator for multiple devices running on the same WiFi network so that no-ones individual device needs to be nominated as the primary device (and take the processing hit), and any peer-to-peer co-ordination alogrithms could be offloaded onto the Q creating a star topology instead of a mesh, which tends to be more efficient.

ANDROID ON GOOGLE GLASS

Did I mentioned I was told yesterday that Googlers already have some Android apps running on Project Glass? I had an OMG moment when I was told that, then I remembered Sergey Brin’s “US-only” statement, and once again I felt like a mug spending over US$2500 in flights, hotel costs, and the ticket, and, over the course of IO, spending over 21 hours on a plane for a round trip and spending a week away from my office.