Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Running - "Hi Android : My first Android app - 2nd Attempt

The problem related me preventing running the app was due to some missing connection with the device which I intend to run my app on.
There are clear 2 ways of running the App.
  1. On a real device ( a phone or tab or any Android device ) 
  2. Run on Emulator ( virtual device called AVD, Android virtual device , which represent a phone made out of the resources in a computer ).
I try the 2nd option first. 
To do so, I need to create a AVD first in my computer.

This is available in Google android in this link.
http://developer.android.com/training/basics/firstapp/running-app.html

Steps.on Eclips , click on AVD menu or, execute it from file menu Window>AVD Manager 
 
This will open up following dialog.
Then select New , to create a virtual device.

Give the necessary parameters. For example the parameters I ve given here , represent a virtual smartphone of ARM Processor, 512 MB internal memory, WVGA 800 like display.

Now my AVD is ready to run my program.
Click "Start " after selecting the AVD to "Start" the emulator.



There are some additional screen and dpi settings that you can customize here if needed.


Click "Launch"
It takes extremely long time to start and the first time I though it stuck or crashed.

Once it is loaded it looks like this.
Now I m going to run the program I wrote.
This is how it looks when running on Emulator..
In the next post, lets look at how to run the app we wrote in a real phone...












Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Upgrading, rooting and then installing custom ROM on Samsung Galaxy S1 Captivate

First of all, if you ever want to , follow these information and try root, upgrade and install custom ROM on your valuable smartphone AT YOUR OWN RISK. I m by no means  responsible for any damage that could cause to your phone.

I bought this phone from USA  and it is designed to AT&T by Samsung. It was unlocked and was running with Android 2.1 ( Eclair ). Once I bring back to Sri Lanka powered it on and it was working fine until I charged it after which it was dead. Then I bough another phone and get it down here and replaced the motherboard. Then it worked.  It was like this initially.

I wanted to upgrade it to Android 2.3 ( Gingerbread) , then root, then install the latest custom ROM.
First I downladed Samsung Kias Mini and connected to the phone and checked the latest upgrade and it is Gingerbread of course.

  

It is pretty easy and Kies Mini will just push the upgrade and finally restareting the phone will boot in to Ginger bread. Then first I needed to root this phone- for which I needed to download below files.
 
 


 This includes ,
1. Clock work mod recovery ( CWM)
2. Ordin
3. Corn Kernel
First connect install Odin and then connect the phone to USB cable and then press volume +/- signs together with power on/off button. The phone will force on to download mode and the communication port will be identified by Odin.Then Select corn-kernel ...tar file and flash it to the phone and install CWM recovery.



Once it is done, the phone is rooted and CWM is installed. Then I found a custom ROM that suites to the phone. It was based on Jelly Bean 4.1.2 and one smart Engineer has tweaked the code to match to captivate. First this is how the CWM screen looks like.


  

This is ROM I downloaded . 


 Then I put this ROM file in to SD card and then select the option "Install ZIP file from SD card"
   


Once it is done , installing the custom ROM started. This process is critical, and need lot of care.



 Once done the phone running with nice looking efficient and fast Jelly Bean custom version.






Keep in mind that if you ever want to do this to your phone , serch for what are the tools and roms and recovery tools more sucessful to your phone model, read a lot who has done and see if there are problems. If you are sure enough, then experiment. There is always a chance that your phone could become a "brick ". A brick can be recovered also ( in many cases say 80% of times as I knew from reading) , but if you are so unfortunate, there is a probability that it would actually become a brick.
Thanks for Reading..