I got my Google Android App Inventor invite early this week and had some trouble connecting the Blocks Editor to my Samsung Galaxy S. So I thought I would post some tips for anyone else experiencing similar issues using App Inventor on Ubuntu. Firstly I must say the Galaxy S is a brilliant phone/mobile computer and I have no trouble connecting to it from ubuntu as a mass storage device. I can plug it in and share files between them easily.

These steps are for Ubuntu and the Samsung Galaxy S although they should work with other Linux distros and phones and at least point you in the right general direction on other Operating Systems such as Windows. I found most of these points at App Inventor Troubleshooting page and from the App Inventor Group mailing list.

• Ubuntu ships with open-jdk unfortunately this doesn't work well with App inventor, so you will need to uninstall openjdk, openjre and any other openjava related packages and install the equivalent Sun versions.
• Check what versions you have installed:
  dpkg -l | grep jre
  You need sun-java6-jre
• Once you have the correct Java installed enable debugging in the Java Control Panel
  javaws -viewer
  Click on the Advanced tab and under Setting > Debugging select the checkboxes.
• Create or edit the /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules file.
  
  cd /etc/udev/rules.d/  
sudo nano 51-android.rules
  
  Paste in:
  SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="04e8", ATTRS{idProduct}=="681d", MODE="0666"
  Make sure you look up the correct vendor id and product id.
• Check your firewall and make sure port 9997 is enabled.
• If you have also downloaded the Android SDK, make sure Eclipse is closed.
• Make sure you browser is set to open the .jnlp file.

The momentum behind Android is amazing. I have been keeping an eye on Androids progress and it is simply staggering. Many of the biggest phone manufacturers such as Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson have released Android phones and have many more in the works. Not all the best phones are making it to Australia and some are getting here too slow. Australian carriers are starting to get behind Android and competition to release the best handsets and plans seems to be heating up.

The Android market has somewhere in the region of 70,000 apps and is growing rapidly. One of the great things about Android phones as you can get apps from anywhere. You are not tied to a specific site or application. AppBrain is a site that enables you to browse the apps in your desktop browser and install to your phone with one simple click.

Google have just released App Inventor a simple to use, with No programming required app builder. This should make building quality apps easy and hopefully it wont flood the market with copy cat apps all doing the same thing.

At CSS Creator I have added a list of CSS Properties, selectors and the browsers that support them. This is actually a rework of the original CSS properties list in a more useful format. Now you can see the earliest version of each popular web browser that supports the CSS property or Selector. It should be easier to use and maintain as in general once a browser supports a particular property then it will continue to do so.
In the future I plan to continue adding more CSS3 properties and the browsers that support them.

Hope you find it useful.

I used to provide yearly stats on this site that showed Browsers, Operating System and Screen Resolution. Somewhere along the way, about 2006, I lost interest or got too busy to publish them. Over the last year or so I have noticed a big increase in Mac usage, every man and his dog has one, or so it seems. So I had a quick look at the stats for last month and compared it with the old stats. In 2006 mac users accounted for just 2.1% of visitors. Currently November 2009 they account for 12.49% that's over 10% increase, a significant amount of market share going to Mac.

Tonight I am giving a presentation to the Brisbane Drupal user group on jQuery. I plan to cover some of the early tools I developed well before jQuery was around, such as the CSS Generator, which is about 7 years old now. Then look at adding AJAX functionality via jQuery to the Best Reply module. This has become a little more complex then I first envisaged due to some of the new features I am adding. You will have to come along to find out more.
If I have any time left I will have a quick run through of Bear SQL