Digging through the trenches so you don’t have to.

T-Mobile G2 Unveiled

It was a big week of leaks as multiple future Android phones were caught on camera.  The gents at Engadget were able to snag a few for our viewing pleasure.  Above is the to-be-announced T-Mobile G2 (Rumored HTC Vision).  It reminds me of a Nexus One with keyboard and optical trackpad.  If this keyboard feels as good as it looks, we should have a real winner on our hands.

Source [Engadget]

Dell Thunder sneak peek

Since when did Dell start making beautiful hardware?  While the Dell Streak wasn’t unattractive, it was hardly one of the prettier Android phones available.  With the Thunder you can really see that Dell is not pulling any punches.  Click through the source link for added video.

Source [Engadget]

Chrome OS tablet speculation leads to Black Friday release

Finally!  A tablet that actually isn’t a giant phone.  Imagine that.  Yes, some will say that a giant phone is better than a tiny browser operating system, but I am willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt.  A Black Friday release could be a huge selling day as we bask in our post turkey glow.  Reported specs: “Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platform, a 1280-by-720 multitouch display, 2GB of RAM, at least a 32GB SSD, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G connectivity, GPS, a webcam, and a multi-card reader that could provide expandable storage.”  Yes please.

Source [Download Squad]

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini wins EISA Phone of the Year

The European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA) announced the winner of their 2010-2011 European mobile phone.  A surprise to some, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini came out on top of the pile.  Lauded for its stylish looks and small form factor, the X10 Mini won the award for also providing a complete experience and comprehensive features.

Source [EISA]

Android devices predicted to surpass 55 million shipped units in 2010

Do you hear that?  That is the sound of Steve Jobs gnashing his teeth.  Digitimes reports that Android devices are on track to ship over 55 Million units world wide in 2010, which comes out to be a whopping 20% of the total smart phones to be sold globally.  I think it’s safe to say we’ve passed the tipping point.  When will we jump the shark?

Source [Digitimes]

I’m working a tiny bit on an application called FaceIT from time to time which uses a shitload of bitmaps in the two activities it consists of. Note that i’m not responsible for the original application but just started fixing some bugs in it a couple of weeks ago. The app suffers from silly out of memory exceptions due to Bitmap data not getting freed as the Bitmap objects in the VM don’t take up enough memory so the GC collects them and frees the native heap memory associated with them (Which the GC knows nothing about). So i poked around a little and found out that there is actually a way to get the native heap memory usage of an app on Android!

android.os.Debug.getNativeHeapSize();
android.os.Debug.getNativeHeapFreeSize();

Both return the respective sizes in bytes. With this it is quiet easy to monitor native heap allocations that happen with say Bitmap instances.

All hail Android! In other news: Collada is a bitch…

Will those numbers in your Mobclix analytics page ever turn into real money? Apparently it’s not so easy. And we are not the only ones, see here and here.

In short: we started generated revenue on March 2010 and now, in August 2010 and close to 5-figure numbers, we didn’t receive a single cent.

Long version: see our discussion with Mobclix support below.

Delayed payment

This is the e-mail that we sent on August 12 to Mobclix support:

During March, our first month with Mobclix, we generated $268.09 with our applications:

FML (803e8557-b71d-4937-b23a-8802ab22b125): $35.97
MLIA (cdf3868e-16b2-4611-ae83-4c6736400c50): $86.85
TFLN (cbc66b89-e88a-4e5e-8eb1-f3dbd36faf84): $145.27

Our questions are:
1) Why did we not receive any payment yet?
2) Why does the Invoice for June 2010 says $69.72? (Instead of $268.09)
3) Why didn’t we receive any payment yet? (We forgot this question in the original message)
These questions equally apply for the following month, April (whose invoice was generated during July)

The answer was just a document with the invoice for June (March’s revenue), splitting the contribution from every ad company. To this, we replied explaining what exactly were the mismatches between the figures in our Mobclix analytics and those in the invoice. In short, it should be 4 times bigger.

The answer was:

Mobclix will make payouts when we receive payments from ad networks. So while you may not be paid for a certain network in a month, we are working on collecting the payment and will remit it in your next invoice.

Irregularity in Revenue reporting

This is a different issue, and pretty worrying too. This was our ticket to Mobclix, on August 12:

In the Revenue tab for our applications, we noticed that, for 21-27 July, the generated revenue figures dropped a posteriori, after those days had passed. We can’’t find any reason or official explanation.

More specifically, here you have a table with the comparison of the figures that we observed before and after July 31:

Date	Before	After
27 July	62.40$	39.53$
26 July	66.10$	34.70$
25 July	73.32$	34.28$
24 July	78.62$	37.70$
23 July	73.18$	36.93$
24 July	78.05$	27.53$
23 July	61.12$	32.44$

We never got an answer.

What’s funny is that, if we hadn’t seen this, we would never have noticed. Maybe you think you made 100 dollars per day last month, but it has now magically to 40. No kidding.

Next steps

We still have hope that Mobclix will react, and understand how serious these issues are. We’ll keep you posted.

Related posts

• Admob vs Mobclix: 3rd round
• Admob vs Mobclix: 2nd round
• Admob vs Mobclix: 1st round
• What does it take to develop some android applications, our experience

In our previous posts (first round, second round) we didn’t cover a critical topic: how to cash out the revenue (ie, money) that you generate.

Admob

Every month you get paid the revenue you generated two months before. For instance, on July you get a transfer of the revenue you generated during May. As simple as that.

Mobclix

We started generated revenue on March 2010 and by now, end of August 2010, we have not seen a single dollar. Ouch. That’s not a good business, is it?

This deserves a post on its own: Can’t get our money out of Mobclix.

Related posts

• Can’t get our money out of Mobclix
• Admob vs Mobclix: 2nd round
• Admob vs Mobclix: 1st round
• What does it take to develop some android applications, our experience

This is slightly old news to those of you on the BLEEDING EDGE of Android, but if you’re in possession of a phone upgraded to Android 2.2 and loaded with the final version of the Flash Player, you’ll be automatically redirected to the BBC’s hot new mobile version of the iPlayer site.

So we thought we’d take a look at how iPlayer operates on Android. The novelty of taking screenshots of stuff on our phone still hasn’t worn off.

So there it is. Android iPlayer operates entirely within the web browser, as you’d expect, along with an impressively comprehensive collection of options – adding shows to your Favourites lists, sorting and searching by channel and day, and much more. It offers all the functionality of the desktop version.

You’re able to watch shows in this miniaturised picture format, with a bit more information around the edges. Handy if you’re the modern sort who finds it impossible to concentrate on one particular thing for more than three seconds at a time. And if you’re watching TV on your phone, that’s likely to be the case.

The Favourites tag works, as in it remembers your favourites between web sessions (we turned our Desire off and on again to check this…). It’s a shame there are no super-hardcore options to tweak picture quality manually dependent on connection speed and phone processor power, though, as that’d keep Android users well happy.

Rotate the phone and the view scales up a little more. At this resolution, picture quality is still great – plus the player skips quickly through shows with pretty much nothing in the way of buffering. Of course we’re reviewing this when connected via wi-fi – that’s a compulsory requirement.

This is what you see when accessing iPlayer via the mobile network. It won’t work for most of you, unless you’re on Three or Vodafone and sitting on a picnic blanket right beneath a 3G mobile mast on a sunny day.

When zoomed to full screen, picture quality is not so hot. It’s pixelated. Not as bad as watching standard definition broadcast TV scaled up on an HDTV, but not super-sharp either. The BBC is pushing out a special 400kbps stream for us mobile users.

The only issue we have is the size of that pause button – it’s minuscule. And shoved away at the unresponsive corner of the screen. You’ll be in trouble if you have to perform an ‘Emergency Pause’.

Although it all takes place within the Android browser, BBC’s Android iPlayer is a surprisingly app-like experience. Everything’s simple, uniform, and quick.

Kirsty Wark must’ve doubled her salary since the launch of BBC4. She’s on everything.

Oh, and it also does radio. We’re running out of things to talk about, so best stop. It’s a great, great app. If you’re not yet running Android 2.2 it’s certainly something to look forward to.

Related posts:

1. BBC iPlayer coming to Android – but only for 2.2 devices with Flash 10.1
2. Official BBC Android apps coming “later in the year”
3. GUEST REVIEW: HTC Wildfire user interface

Hey,

As part of the “Community Restoration and Rejuvenation Act” I’ve changed the price of Galcon Labs for the iPhone to FREE for the weekend! This is a great opportunity for you to get all your friends in on the Galcon multi-player frenzy! So Go GO GO! Twitter about it! Facebook about it! Email about it! Get the word out!

Thanks!
-Phil

The HTC EVO 4G USB Sync and Charge Cable is the most important cell phone accessory to buy if you want to get the most out of your smart phone or portable media player. You can use this sync cable to connect your HTC EVO 4G with your desktop or notebook computer and charge the battery at the same time. Buy the HTC EVO 4G Sync and Charge Cable if you need a replacement for your original sync cable or just want to have a backup handy. Combine the USB Sync and Charge Cable with various adapters for use in the car or at home. —–

(more…)

I was thinking about this the other day, and I realized I can't particularly think of a label to attach to this concept.  Anyone out there got a name for this?  This could be due to my lack of formal computer science training, so I thought I'd ask, at the risk of looking stupid (I'm having an off day, so that's a very real possibility).

If you have a series of functions, say: a(x), which in turn calls b(x), which calls c(x), and so on, and you end up with a faily long call chain, out to say m(x), and you subsequently decide that m(x) needs an additional piece of information that is contained in a local variable in the body of the a(x) function - how do you get it to m(x) ?

• You could simply make it a global variable!  That's easy and generally a pretty bad idea.
• You could modify every function signature between a(x) and m(x) to look like b(x, y), c(x, y).  That's a lot of work though.  And what happens if something *else* needs to get passed around?
• In an object oriented language, you could make x an object, and attach y to it, so that you mostly pass it around just as before.
• Along the same lines, you could make x a hash table, so that you can look arguments up by their name, to have some idea what they are.
• You could just make x a list, and remember what position everything is in.  That's not so nice though if you have to revisit the code and you didn't document where everything is, and why it's there.
• Other things?  You could make a(x)'s scope visible to m(x), I suppose, although that sounds like it's a fairly involved, and potentially hairy answer.

It seems the answers are basically either 1) add the parameter to all the functions and everything that calls them, or 2) use some kind of composite type to stash the one or more values in.

It seems that this is a reasonable common thing to have to do, so it must have a name.  How well does your language handle that kind of refactoring?

StumbleUpon, which is a super-popular social web rating tool that millions of people use but no one ever seems to talk about, has released an app for Android. It’s rather simple – you login or create an account, then get pinged with an endless list of web sites from your chosen categories.

You then give them a thumbs up or down, and move on – pausing only to share or read any pages you like. As a way to waste time while connected via wi-fi, it’s great.

The only problem with StumbleUpon on Android is with the entire format of the system itself. Vast numbers of spam sites are submitted, meaning it’s rather rare to actually “stumble” “upon” anything of great interest. It’s basically a Chatroulette of web browsing. Great fun, if you have hours to waste, though.

Read all the official words & stuff about the new mobile apps over on the StumbleUpon blog.

Related posts:

1. NEW APP: SongDNA arrives on Android
2. Seemingly rather pointless Norton Security app arrives for Android
3. Unexciting minor OTA HTC Hero Android update arrives

With a slew of Android tablets expected to hit the market over the next several months, I thought I’d take some time to think about what features and qualities I’d like to see them have. If any tablet manufacturers are reading this, I hereby grant you permission to use any or all of these ideas for free in your tablet, as long as you give me one (just kidding on that last part). As an added benefit, many of these qualities will be the same even if your tablet runs some other operating system such as iOS, Blackberry, Windows, and Chrome OS.

Before I get started, I realize not all of you are going to agree with my list, or order them in the same way. So feel free to use the Talkback area below to share your ideas about your *own* perfect tablet.

#1: Long-lasting, hot-swappable batteries

Whether it’s a tablet, laptop, netbook, or cell phone, it’s not going to do me any good when it runs out of power. So the most important feature of the perfect tablet has to be a power source that lasts a long time. One of the things I like about the Apple iPad is that I can use it as much as I want, all day long, without worrying about the battery running down (assuming I can pry it away from the wife, of course). That’s because it has two oversized batteries behind the display with a total rated life of about 10 hours. Therefore, the iPad has set the bar that I challenge the perfect Android tablet to meet or beat.

You what would be nice? Two batteries, with the ability to replace one of them without having to turn off the tablet. For example, I could get an extra battery and keep it in a charger. Whenever one of my onboard batteries starts to run out of juice, I could swap it with the one from the charger and keep going.

A little indicator light above each battery compartment could tell me how much power was left and which battery to replace. Smart power management software would run one battery down completely before tapping the other one, as opposed to using them both and having them both run out at the same time.

This would even work if I just have two batteries: one in the device and one in the charger. When the live one starts to run out, I’d pop in the full one (my hot spare), then take out the empty one and slip it into the charger without skipping a beat. After all, the tablet should be able to run fine for quite a while on only one battery. If it can go for 10 hours on two batteries, it should be able to manage 5 with one.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a conference or other event with my laptop and the battery has run out right in the middle of an important presentation. I frantically look around for a power strip, but there is not one in reach. There’s usually a spare battery in my bag but I’d have to turn the laptop off  in order to replace it. I’ll bet this has happened to many of you too. Having two smaller battery compartments, with a total of 10 hours or more battery life and the possibility of more through hot-swapping, would eliminate this problem.

If two batteries is impractical, I could live with one big one, especially if there were some kind of built-in power source that would keep the tablet alive long enough for me to swap the old battery out and the new battery in. However, I’d really prefer the extra flexibility that two battery slots would bring.

What would you build into *your* perfect Android tablet? Share your thoughts in the comment area below. And check back next week to find out what’s second on my list.

A couple of weeks ago, we arranged that registered developers could buy an unlocked Nexus One via their publisher page in Android Market. We think it’s a good development platform and a nice phone. Apparently, you agree. Somewhat too many of you, in fact; we blew through the (substantial) initial inventory in almost no time, and they’re back-ordered from HTC, who are doing a pretty good job of managing runaway success amid a worldwide AMOLED shortage. Everyone appreciates that it’s important to the platform to get phones in the hands of developers, so we’re working hard on re-stocking the shelves; stand by.

Well folks, it was fun while it lasted.  The Dead Zebra has officially announced that Series 1 is no longer available.  Re-orders are most likely not in the cards so if you missed out, Ebay might be your only chance.  The announcement came in the form of a FAQ covering all the major questions.  Here’s a wrap-up of the important bits:

• Yes, it is really sold out.  Sorry, there are no more left.
• Although more were produced this time than the first run, in order to keep the items “Limited” and “Collectibles”, large unlimited batches were not made.
• Standard Green Androids will continue to be on sale periodically as new shipments are ordered.  While apart of the Series 1, they will continue to be produced as a single line.
• If you missed out on Series 1, you haven’t missed out completely.  Series 2 is in the works and will be out in early 2011.

Source [Dead Zebra]

I get a fair few emails asking for help on making soundboards because I have a few out on the market currently, so this is one of a few mini-tutorials I am creating to explain some of the difficulties to overcome.

So there are two methods for playing sounds in android SoundPool and MediaPlayer.

SoundPool

SoundPool is designed for short clips which can be kept in memory decompressed for quick access, this is best suited for sound effects in apps or games. Using this method with soundboards is a bad idea as you will be loading lots of “medium” sized sounds into the memory and you may exceed your limit (16Mb) and get an OutOfMemoryException.

MediaPlayer

MediaPlayer is designed for longer sound files or streams, this is best suited for music files or larger files. The files will be loaded from disk each time create is called, this will save on memory space but introduce a small delay (not really noticeable).

So lets have a look how to use Media Player instead of SoundPool

MediaPlayer Usage

MediaPlayer mp = MediaPlayer.create(AppName.this, R.raw.sound);
mp.start();

You can pause the sound playing and then use start to start the sound playing again.

mp.pause(); // Stop
mp.start();   // Start from place paused

To stop the sound playing use stop, using start now will start playing the sound again from the beginning

mp.stop();    // Stop sound
mp.start();   // Start from beginning

To reset the media player so it can be reinitialised with a another sound

mp.reset();
mp = MediaPlayer.create(AppName.this, R.raw.sound2);

To release the resources once you are finished media player (free memory)

mp.release();

My Soundboards

Below is a few screenshots of my current soundboards on the market

So .. License Server came out about a week ago. When I heard about that I was all, “eh, more DRM, why bother, the users won’t see any benefit, so it’s not worth my time.” Turns out I got that wrong! There are actually several concrete benefits to the user by using the License Server (which I found within a day of releasing Galcon due to the quantity of emails from users explaining my failure to care about them!) If you use the “Copy Protection” feature of the Android Marketplace publisher, you do two things to the user:

- The app will take up twice as much room.
- The app cannot be stored on the user’s SD card.

I covered some of this in a previous blog, but the users memory is very limited, so over utilizing it is a “bad thing”!

The documentation for the Licensing Server is really really long looking, but there isn’t that much you have to do, actually. You’ll probably want to read it, but if you want the synopsis of what you actually end up having to do, here it is:

Step 1: Install the LVL SDK.

You just power up the SDK installer software and find the “Market Licensing package” and install that.

Step 2: Copying the LVL SDK into your project.

Just copy path/to/android/market_licensing/library/src/* into your local src/ folder. The SDK isn’t part of the Android platform, so you have to include it in your own codebase.

Step 3: Get your app to check the license using a Policy.

You can do some complicated things, but the documentation says, “… don’t do that. Just use the included ServerManagedPolicy or StrictPolicy.” I’m going to use the ServerManagedPolicy because that doesn’t require the user to ALWAYS be on-line to use your App. The StrictPolicy only works when the user is on-line and checks the license every time.

At this point, you’ll want to just go find path/to/android/market_licensing/sample and check out the source there. It includes an example that will pop up a dialog to send the users off to buy your app if they don’t have it licensed properly. This seems to be pretty much what I want, so I’ll just copy-n-paste from that.

Tips:

- To grab your public key go to http://market.android.com/publish/ and click on “Edit Profile” and your key is at the bottom of the page.

- You’ll (maybe) want to grab the example res/values/strings.xml and paste the Licensing related strings into your own strings.xml

- applicationError(ApplicationErrorCode errorCode) should call dontAllow()

- add finish() after the app goes to the market Intent. This way, they can’t go back to the app and get pestered about buying it again. They will have to restart the app and the license will check out fine.

Step 4: Testing it out

You can test out your app by again going to http://market.android.com/publish/ and clicking on “Edit Profile” .. at the bottom you can add market user emails that are being tested and you can change what license response you want to force out to the user.

Tip: be careful not to hit the licensing server too often, or you’ll start getting 503 errors which indicate overuse of resources. These take a while to reset.

Step 5: Adding a demo mode

You may want to add a demo mode to your game if licensing fails. Or somehow stop the game entirely, because the AlertDialog seems to be full of “holes”. That dialog will disappear and reveal your game under a number of scenarios. So don’t count on it blocking the user.

I just recall showDialog(0); in onTouchEvent if the game is in demo mode to keep bringing up the dialog again. I suppose a less annoying way to do it would be to respawn the dialog every minute or something. But maybe I’ll do that later!

Step 6: Applying ProGuard code obfuscation

This step is highly recommended by the Android developer guide. It would be nice if this were built into the Android toolchain, but it isn’t. Here’s a blog post that tells you how to do this.

However, I found that the binary that got build crashed. I’m not sure what is going on, but I’m guessing the NDK and ProGuard just aren’t getting along somehow. I’m going to leave out ProGuard for the time being. (I gave this a few hours effort. Again, this is where having support as part of the Android developer’s kit would be great!)

Step 7: Enabling Install on SD Card!!

This step is basically the whole point of this entire blog post. This gets the app out of the main memory on the device and onto the SD card for the user’s improved happiness.

To do this, add android:installLocation=”preferExternal” to the manifest tag in AndroidManifest.xml

Also change target=android-8 in default.properties.

–

And that’s that!
-Phil

A group of avid Android’ers got together in Vienna and realized that a common theme among the gripes of Android fans was the difficulty of navigating the Android market scene and keeping up with new things.

We thought about this for a while, and today we launched Weekly Android, a newsletter for Android users interested in a weeks worth of news from the Android scene. We will provide a summary every Wednesday, and hope to keep up with the weekly pace! Sign up and enjoy :)

With lots of new things in development, including up-coming new games and updates of old favourites (iconic memory), we’re going to be pretty busy with Android development projects too, so if you hear of anything, or have something to say about Android, let us know!

First issue (August 18, 2010):

It wasn’t too long ago that Android was just a project, a glimmer of hope for the future of the smartphone industry. But then, in September 2008, we were rewarded with the world’s first Android handset, the T-Mobile G1. In the 23 months since then we’ve seen a deluge of Android phones hit the market, and lately it seems like manufacturers have stepped up their games. Motorola just released a pair of high-end devices on Verizon, while HTC has the EVO and the Incredible, while Samsung has gotten into the game with the Galaxy. That left no room for older devices like the G1. Fret not, though. T-Mobile is coming back with an encore.

This is the teaser to end all teasers, since it contains no actual information. It doesn’t even say “coming soon.” The only thing we do know is that it will be T-Mobile’s first phone to run on its HSPA+ network, which has theoretical download speeds of up to 21Mbps. That in itself is an excellent feature, but will that make the G2 a worthy purchase?

(I’d say yes for the network alone, but that’s just me.)

At jkOnTheRun, Kevin Tofel talks about three features he expects from the G2. First is a 1 GHz Snapdragon CPU, but that could change if the device is actually slated for a later-year release and gets one of those newfangled, faster Qualcomm processors. Wouldn’t that be an enticing combination? New, faster processors and a 21Mbps network? Yes, please.

If Tofel is right on his other two guesses, then this could become a must-have Android device. First is a four-inch screen. This takes advantage of the HSPA+ network because it makes the video viewing experience that much richer. Watching video on a smaller screen isn’t bad, per se, but if you’re going to have unprecedented speeds you might as well have the video technology to go with it. The final guess, 720p video recording, would seem like a slam dunk, considering how many other devices now feature the capability.

Take all three of these and you’ll have one of the premier wireless devices, Android or not. Even if he’s right on two of three, this will still be a device worth having. Some, I’m sure, will want it just for tethering. I’ve had a great experience tethering my Nexus One, but it will only get better with a faster network. You might even experience speeds faster than your at-home connection. That would make the train ride infinitely more tolerable.

Still, everything is up in the air. We don’t have features, we don’t have specs, and we don’t have an approximate release date. What we do have is hype and anticipation. Those will go a long way in selling the G2.

Android will be the first to show off HSPA+ speeds

Post from: Google And Blog

So its official guys, HTC Vanguard is TMobile G2.

A few weeks back, TMobile USA has setup a the teaser page that showcase a new class of Android phone – the one with HSDPA+ speed that (hopefully) can rival Sprint 4G Network.

This morning, they update their teaser page and change the URL to http://g2.t-mobile.com

Exciting stuff

The details are still scarce, but here’s what we know so far:

• HSPA+ speed
• 4 row QWERTY Keyboard (rumor)
• Stock Android 2.2 Froyo with no HTC Sense (rumor)
• End of September launch date (rumor)

TMobile’s official announcement:

The T-Mobile® G1® was the world’s first Android™ -powered phone. Launched nearly two years ago, it created an entirely new class of mobile phones and apps. Its successor, the T-Mobile G2™ with Google™, will continue the revolution.

The T-Mobile G2 will deliver tight integration with Google services and break new ground as the first smartphone designed to run at 4G speeds on our new HSPA+ network. In the coming weeks, we’ll share more details about the G2 and offer exclusive first access to current T-Mobile customers.

Related posts:

1. TMobile HSPA+ Phone Teaser
2. Nexus One is now ADP 3
3. Logitech Revue Teaser

Being an Android newb means coming across issues that others might find common. But since this site is for newbs and vets alike, we try to cover these issues when they pop up. One notable instance cropped up over the weekend. On Friday I started getting a messaging warning me that disk space on my Nexus One was low. This seemed odd, because I don’t have a ton of apps on the device itself. I’ve installed a ton, but have either uninstalled or moved most of them to the memory card. So what was taking up so much memory?

When you click on the warning, it takes you to a manage apps screen. You can access this manually by going to Setting, Applications, Manage applications. Then click the menu button and sort by size. Atop my list, at nearly 10 times the size of the next largest application, was Pandora. At 116MB I had no idea what was going on. I checked the Market, and the original download is less than 1MB. So what gives?

The first notion I had was to restart, but that did nothing. Pandora was still huge. I found that there were audio issues with Pandora and Froyo, but nothing on a fast-growing app. Of course, if I’d searched for general memory issues rather than ones specifically related to Pandora I might have found an easy answer.

The fix is rather simple. Just click on Pandora from the Manage applications menu and select Clear Data. You’ll getting a prompt suggesting you not do this, but ignore it and go ahead. You’ll see the app knocked down to the base storage, which is about 1.75MB. The downside is that you’ll have to log in again. The upside is that you have that much more free memory.

Newb Post: Apps with growing memory usage

Post from: Google And Blog

It’s a well known fact that most individual software developers detest software patents. Maybe detest isn’t a strong enough word; how about loathe, dread, hate, despise, resent, and abhor? You get the picture. We dislike them almost as much as weekly status reports, deadlines, and conference calls.

So left on our own, most programmers won’t write patents. This was the situation in Sun’s early history, according to one of its most famous former employees, James “Father of Soul Java” Gosling. In an unusually candid blog post about the Oracle/Google patent lawsuit Sunday, he writes:

Sun didn’t file many patents initially. But then we got sued by IBM for violating the “RISC patent” - a patent that essentially said “if you make something simpler, it’ll go faster”. Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn’t have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost. The penalty was huge. Nearly put us out of business.

In response, Sun engineers were asked to write as many patents as they could:

We survived, but to help protect us from future suits we went on a patenting binge. Even though we had a basic distaste for patents, the game is what it is, and patents are essential in modern corporations, if only as a defensive measure.

What happens when you make a bunch of smart, talented people to do something they’d really rather not do? The natural reaction is to poke fun at the task, and turn it into a game. A joke:

There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system. My entry wasn’t nearly the goofiest.

In my last article, I mentioned that a patent from Gosling was one of seven cited in Oracle’s lawsuit. These patents are among those that Oracle acquired when they bought Sun earlier this year. James isn’t saying where these entries rated on the “goofy patent” scale, if at all. But another former Sun employee, Charles Nutter, has written a more detailed analysis. When considering whether or not the suit has merit, he states:

The collection of patents specified by the suit seems pretty laughable to me.

Perhaps now we know why.

Unfortunately, the joke is on all of us. It’s on our economy, as we let patents choke down innovation and increase fear, uncertainty, and doubt in an already uncertain time. It’s on our bottom lines, as we make busy-work for our expensive lawyers with their sparkling eyes instead of investing for the future. And it’s on our collective consciousness, as we force good and decent people to act against the better angels of their nature.

As always, my opinions are my own and don’t necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer or this publication (see the disclosure notice below).