Archive for category Tools

Project Real Device Screen onto Your PC

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Tools on March 24th, 2010

If, like me, you need to give presentations of working software on your PC (usually then projected onto a screen) then you might like to take a look at Droid@Screen. It’s a free (open source) Java utility that projects the current hardware screen image onto your PC. This is similar to the DDMS screen capture except that it automatically shows new screens without you having to press a refresh button.

The utility uses the standard adb connection. If you are developing for Android then you probably already have the adb connection working. If not, there are instructions for setting it up on Android Developers.

Fixing Speaker Buzz and Emulator Crash

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Coding, Eclipse, Getting Started, How to, My Freeware, Tools on February 22nd, 2010

Unfortunately, the Android emulator doesn’t always work well with desktop sound. This can cause the desktop speakers to start buzzing just after boot. The emulator also crashes and it’s not possible to close it.

The solution is to turn off sound support in the emulator. You can do this by adding -noaudio to the emulator command line. Open Run Configurations and select the Target tab. Add -noaudio to the ‘Additional Emulator Command Line Options’…

targetnoaudioObviously, you won’t be able to hear or test sound if you use this option.

Klockwork Static Code Analysis

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, Coding, Tools on April 10th, 2009

klocworkIf you are developing on Android professionally rather than experimenting for fun, you might like to look at a new product from Klocwork that performs static code analysis.

Klocwork Solo identifies critical bugs and security vulnerabilities in Android Java source code. It’s fully integrated into Eclipse IDE.  The static code analysis detects more than 200 different security vulnerabilities and quality defects without the need to run or generate test cases. It also identifies issues specific to Android mobile device development, including a range of issues that can cause runtime failures, such as null object references, resource leaks and usage of already freed resources.

Klocwork Solo costs $299US per user, per year, with a limited time offer of $99 per user, per year until June 30, 2009.