Android phone battery lifetimes suck, but you knew that already.  A few weeks ago, I was visiting the heart of downtown Tampa, FL.  I stayed in a beautiful hotel across from the Convention Center, and had no Sprint coverage.  ”But Greg,” you say, “one of Sprint’s first WiMAX 4G towers is there!  Their coverage map shows ‘in-building 4G’ coverage!”  Yes, my Internet friend, I do see that, but alas, I also saw the prohibitory icon on my phone, the Samsung Galaxy S Epic 4G, for an entire week.

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A lot of people have been sending me e-mail about the solution to a problem that was not very well documented to DAS Calc.  Sending the same stock reply to these people helps them out, but that’s only for the people who have spent the time to send a support request.  The rest are probably frustrated that they can’t solve the problem and either don’t purchase or regret their purchase of the full version of the app.  If I could somehow notify the users of the solution as an alert in the app, everyone’s happy and I stop getting e-mails.  This isn’t a unique solution, but I’ve wrapped it up for you to use.  I call it Remote Alert, and you can find the code on GitHub.

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At first, I thought to myself that this must be some isolated display glitch, but I didn’t have time to restart the phone.  Today I did.  Several times.  No difference.  Then I thought, let’s ask the Internet if anyone else has seen this.  Looks like people have.  Again, Samsung, it’s the little things…

Despite changing language settings, the spelling has been wrong for “Favorites” in every single update for my Samsung Epic 4G from Sprint in the Phone app.  It’s the little things, guys!

Since Twitter doesn’t seem to appreciate third-party developers anymore, I’ve decided to switch from the official Twitter app to The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific.  I really like it, but I absolutely can’t stand how the menubar icon turns from black to blue with every new tweet.  I constantly see it change out of the corner of my eye and subconsciously move the mouse to click the icon.  I’m not a fan of this incessant interruption.  Here’s a hack to disable it.

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Well…it looks like the Mac is finally getting hit with malware!  I’ve had to remove the “Elf Toolbar” or “Translation Toolbar” aka “Conduit” from a number of Macs in the past few weeks.  Judging by the increasing number of recent forum posts on Apple’s Discussion Boards, it’s spreading fast.  Here’s what it is and more importantly how to remove it.

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During his last rant on the last day of my graduate Software Engineering class, the professor gave each of the students a pack of train-shaped sponges.  What the… I thought.  I laughed like crazy, trying to write down everything he said so I could tell everyone about this hilarious last day. | Read more »

Update: There were several serious shortcomings in the code below that have been resolved (Twitter #failwhale, control characters in Tweets, greedy regex).

I’ve been working on a backend for a website and needed a way to show the latest Twitter update. There is plenty of code floating around that does this, but I couldn’t find anything simple that preserved formatting, like hyperlinks to @replies, e-mail addresses, URLs, etc. Anything that did was either very bulky (lots of source files) or required a Twitter API key…so I wrote my own, self-contained in a single function call.
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I haven’t been messing around with the Android SDK for too long but I’ve already found some things that I think are worth sharing. Android has a concept of Services, or a process that can sit in the background and run a task without needing to interact with the user. There’s plenty of reasons why a Service might not need to be running all the time (say an alarm clock app with no alarms scheduled), but for the most part, Services need to be started at boot. Here’s how, tested from Android 1.5 to 2.2, since no other example I could find on the Internet was complete for this ever-changing SDK.
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iAds are going to be all over apps in the AppStore in just a few short weeks as developers try to make some money from the average iPhone user. The only problem is that you won’t make any money unless the user is running iOS 4.0. Versions of the iOS prior to this don’t have the iAd framework and therefore can’t display ads. So what’s a developer who wants a few clams to do?
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