Upgrading the G1 Dev android phone to Cupcake (Android 1.5)

After reading about the new features about 1.5, I was quite excited, since some of the issues I had were solved, and some more extra features were added like the camcorder.

Moreover, the SDK / language offered some new features regarding multi-threading and layout. I found this nice video on youtube where someone showed the new features.

Installing it on the original dev phone (not the T-mobile !!) is quite easy: go to HTC website and download the radio image zip file and the recovery image zip file.

Firstly I downloaded the radio image ota-radio-2_22_19_26I.zip, renamed it to update.zip and put it on the root of the SD card. Then shut down the phone and reboot it with home+poweroff pressed. Then ALT-L and ALT-S (lowercase L and S) and the radio firmware was upgraded

Secondly I downloaded the recovery image signed-dream_devphone-ota-147201.zip, renamed it to update.zip and put it again on the root of the sd card. Same procedure: shut down the phone, reboot it with home/poweroff, ALT-L and ALT-S. Then it takes a while, but it gets installed.

So all the things mentioned on the htc website are not really needed (adb or fastboot). I upgraded my android in 15 minutes… without the need of the SDK which I had installed anyway.

One of the nice things is that all my data was preserved: contacts, calendar, pictures, my saved tracks in ‘mytracks’….

Previously I had issues with my SD card mounted in read only mode, so the camera could not save pictures, etc… I had to launch in a terminal emulator on the G1 the command: mount -o rw,remount,dirsync -t vfat /dev/block/mmcblk0p1 /sdcard . Now this is solved.

Another thing which is great is that the shutter time of the camera is much smaller and that there is a softbutton to take the picture. The hard-button is really annoying.

One small issue: I had to download the new GPS Status application since the old crashes on 1.5.

See also this website for upgrading…

Tip: try out the barcode application, this is quite cool too..

Upgrading the phone was a breeze…

 

Testing new Netbeans 6.7 Beta

I hope they fixed my Maven plugin bug in netbeans 6.7 beta, download it from the netbeans.org website. (see also my netbeans page.)

I’ve installed the zip file on linux, a 250MB download tarball ! The full installed version is 550MB. For some reason it did not correctly install openesb, glassfish21 and tomcat6, Maybe a conflict with my already netbeans 6.5 installation ?

Nevertheless the basic ide installed ok. Starting up is ok. It looks really slick.

When started, I was looking to install the maven plugin (as  you had to do in netbeans 6.5). Surprisingly, it is installed by default, cool !

The next thing I did, is I downloaded my maven multi module project (zip file) from my netbeans issue. The goal is to have the classic maven approach:

1. root pom which encapsulates everything (aka build all)
2. a parent pom for project inheritance
3. a foo service interface: this has an interface class which will be used in the other module (WelService)
4. a foo rating service, which extends the foo service interface (RateService)

The whole idea is that if I change the api definition of my WelService interface in the foo service interface module, the impact (build failure) must be visible in the foo rating service module (RateServiceImpl).

1. First things first, into the netbeans options / maven , i defined my maven repository folder.
2. Next i added my own build configuration with the goals “clean install”. Apparently this is not longer needed in 6.7, it is by default, so you can skip this.
3. After extracting the maventest zipfile you can open it natively, “Open Project”. Netbeans will detect the root pom and submodules. The IDE shows it nicely (better than in 6.5)
4. Next, build first the “parent”  project
5. Next, build the service-interface module
6. Next build the rating service module, you will see the compilation failure in the maven console.
7. Fix the build error in RateServiceImpl, now everything builds fine.
8. If you change the WelService interface again (add method) and save it, you even don’t have to “rebuild” it manually, when you go to RateServiceImpl, the error will show immediately without the maven rebuild. The only little bug is that the icon of the RateServiceImpl file/package does not color red. if you add a empty line and save it then it will do so.

As an extra feature, the right-click-menu on a maven project has some nice extras like the dependency graph

In short, it is really cool and promising, I do hope they will fix the icon bug

Now I’ve imported a 34 module project with root/parent structure, all seems to be fine, as long as you’ve built them once with Maven (clean install) and installed them in your local repo.

However, one module is a xmlbeans project wich does not have sourcefiles in src/main/java, they are generated from XSD’s. Even if the other modules have a maven jar dependency (and it is  shown in the libraries folder), netbeans marks the classes in the modules using those xml-type beans as error. The workaround is to exclude it from your root pom, so there is only a library dependency and not a netbeans/maven project.