Bubble Foundry

Recently I’ve been working with Arjan on a Cordova (PhoneGap) app for AT5, the local TV station in Amsterdam. While HTML5 video tags work just fine in the app, playing a video kicks you out of the app and into Mobile Safari. Since that’s not the nicest user experience, we wanted to add a native video player plugin to play the videos within the app.

phonegap-videoplayer-plugin is commonly used to do just this, but it doesn’t work in recent versions of Cordova nor is installation totally obvious. So, I took only the most essential files from it and created my own native plugin, CDVVideo. You can find CDVVideo on GitHub.

Recently I developed with Alexander Zeh an interface for an Android tablet app for the agents in an African mobile payment network. It was a pitch for the company, and while we weren’t selected we’re quite happy with our work and decided to share it with you. You can find our designs and analysis at http://bubblefoundry.com/tabletinterface/.

I had some trouble installing an Android app I was testing today over the internet so I used the SDK. I’m working with a tester with a Windows machine who didn’t have the SDK, so I wrote up the steps so they could do the same. It’s essentially the same on OS X or Linux. Here is how to install the Android SDK so that you can install APKs over USB:

1. Go to http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html and download the Windows version.
2. Unzip the android-sdk_r07-windows.zip and move the android-sdk-windows folder to somewhere easy to find.
3. Double click on SDK Manager to launch the application.
3a. If you get a message like “Warning: Java not found in your PATH,” go to http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html.
3b. Click on the left-most big Java button (the plain one). Select your platform (either Windows or Windows x64… probably the former). Click continue.
3c. The download should start. Once the installer is downloaded run it, choose all the default options.
3d. Now try SDK Manager again.
4. Now that you know you can open the SDK Manager, you don’t need to use it. ;-p Copy the APK file into the tools directory.
5. Click on Start, then Search for “Command Prompt” and open it.
6. type “cd Desktop” to move to the Desktop folder, assuming you unziped the Android SDK there.
7. Do the same for android-sdk-windows: “cd android-sdk-windows”
8. And now tools: “cd tools”
9. Finally, with the Android device connected via USB, install the APK with the adb tool: ‘adb -d install “My App.apk”‘ Here’s how I did it:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\Peter Robinett>cd Desktop

C:\Users\Peter Robinett\Desktop>cd android-sdk-windows

C:\Users\Peter Robinett\Desktop\android-sdk-windows>cd tools

C:\Users\Peter Robinett\Desktop\android-sdk-windows\tools>adb -d install "My App.apk"
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
753 KB/s (3701434 bytes in 4.797s)
        pkg: /data/local/tmp/My App.apk
Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_ALREADY_EXISTS]

Ignore the INSTALL_FAILED message, I already have the app on my phone. ;-) If you ever want to reinstall an app, add the -r option: apk -d install -r "My App.apk".