If you are lucky enough to have one of the new smoking fast, beautiful Android phones from HTC the Incredible or the EVO 4G you have little to complain about… but… well… some of us just aren’t in love with that HTC Sense UI…

Is a more standard Android experience is what you want? Well it’s only a few settings away.

Below is the stock Sense UI home screen on my HTC EVO 4G (with a custom background only.) Let’s get rid of it!

Just a few quick steps…

	Press the Menu button.
	Press Settings.
	Choose Applications.
	Expand Manage Applications.
	Wait for the application names to load, scroll down and select HTC Sense.
	Press the Clear defaults button.
	Now press the Home button on your phone. Check “Use by default…” …and then choose Launcher.
	There you go, your new smoking fast phone in a more native Android flavor. Enjoy! -Ben

The adoption of HTML5 and its surrounding cast of powerful new features is going to be a huge boon to web users and points towards a very positive direction for the future of the web. From the smoother interfaces of canvas, local storage enabling offline modes for online email programs and the like seamlessly, online video free of dependencies like Flash, web sockets making the real time web a breeze without all the current AJAX workarounds, and so much more but I’ll save all of those for future posts….

Today I wanted to finish up and release an experiment using the HTML5 Geolocation feature (sticklers, click here), a feature allowing your web browser (with your permission of course) to share your location, enabling any current website to tailor itself right to where you are… a powerful feature for todays increasingly mobile web user.

Why is This Important?

Today this level of convenience, all the applications you use every day seamlessly knowing where you are, is unheard of for the user as well as the web developer outside of proprietary built “apps” on iPhone or Android you need to seek out and download. But little do most people know those web browsers in their pockets on those same devices can do this today, opening the playing field of a personal local experience up to the entire web… no downloads, no waiting, no device lock-in.

The Experiment

My experiment started with a simple need, in the summer I drive a Jeep to work with a soft top and I prefer to have it down as much as possible, I mean sun in Minnesota only happens for a short stint i need to suck it up. What I needed was a simple view of the current temperature, maybe a radar map to look for any rain on the map coming my direction, not a huge list. In the early summer I quickly built a one page HTML and JavaScript mashup using jQuery, HTML5 (or Google Gears as a fallback) and the Weather Underground API to build a web page that did just that, polished it up a bit (let’s call it a working prototype as of today) and hosted it on Google App Engine purely for worry free scalability to show it to you all.

Initially on load my experiment “Weather GEO” asks if I want to share my location, of course I select yes, this allows my browser to pull a location from my GPS, Wifi or internet address depending on what the device sees fit.

It passes that longitude and latitude back to my page’s JavaScript I in turn query Weather Underground for the next two forecast elements and a radar map for that longitude and latitude and display them as soon as they come back…

Pretty slick… solves a problem in a simple way, just one click from a browser bookmark, no custom proprietary “app” code to build and it will work in every browser when HTML5 is fully adopted, but currently works in the major mobile browsers, Android and iPhone, in FireFox 3.5+ and any browser that has Google Gears on the PC, Mac and Linux… thats more than enough for me.

A great example of where the web is going and how progress on open standards like this benefit everyone, give my little experiment a try here http://bctx.info/wx. Let me know how it works for you, if your device is passing your proper location and what you think in the comments. Currently I am seeing the Droid have a problem with the code and have posted to the Android Developers Google Group.

* Ok, technically Geolocation is part of the W3C Geolocation Working Group, not HTML5 but it will largely be implemented with HTML5 so it really has become part and parcel of the browser based future.

In order to get my feet wet with Google’s Chrome OS (in it’s current developer build state, Chromium OS properly) and test a real world workflow with this “web only” device I figured I’d put together a blog post with some photos courtesy my new DSLR never leaving the Chrome “browser” now grown up to an OS… let’s go.

Getting Ready

It wasn’t much of a chore to get Chromium OS up and running on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook, I decided to go with @hexxeh‘s build and run it directly from an SD card rather than build Chromium OS from source on my Ubuntu box for simplicity’s sake. I only had one small hiccup moving Hexxeh’s image file to the SD card in Ubuntu which was cleared up by visiting his wiki, he has instructions for loading the USB/SD card from Mac and Windows too.

Start Up

I booted from the SD card and in less than 10 seconds had a login box, wow… much quicker than my daily stand by Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Currently with most Chromium OS builds the first thing you need to do is log in as an admin user and fire up your wifi before restarting and logging in as yourself with any Google account, no problems here. Once you are logged in the Chromium logo in the top left shows you the menu screen with a nice launcher, it also loads up your GMail and other Google tools for you right off the bat.

More Than Meets the Eye

The web app I use for photos on this blog is Flickr so I fired it up and popped my memory card into the card reader not knowing exactly how a “web browser” would handle that… not to my surprise but certainly to my delight a slick little content browser popped up auto mounting my card and allowing me to view the files in what else but Chrome. Using Flickr’s uploaders on Linux in general is not the prettiest endeavor but it all worked I quickly discovered the ESC key is the key to closing full screen windows and all was well.

Conclusion

I easily fired up WordPress and threw together this post of no more than a little geek and eye candy just to see how it all held together and I would say for Chrome OS’ current young vintage that things are very well. Hardware support was awesome, no tweaking for me (some of that likely is credit to Hexxeh, thanks!), the software and its all web based workflow work well for the cloud residents like me and I think the simplicity will appeal to the current desktop bound user who’s lost files, gotten burned by viruses and simply doesn’t have time to understand all the bells and whistles those boxes are now full of…

…I didn’t miss semi-transparent flying minimizing windows or things “snapping” to my screen once during the writing of this post.

Browser testing is critical to any web developer, designer… really any web professional. You need to know how your users or customers are seeing your work through the multitude of browsers and devices available to them, new ones become available every day.

About a year ago I wrote a post walking you through installing the Google Android SDK on your machine to use as a mobile web browser. This time I am doing it on Mac OS X but I might just make a Windows version too if I get a little time… let me know if you’d like to see that happen.

Let’s get started…

Get the SDK…

1. Go to the Android SDK page.
2. Download Android SDK for Mac OS X (intel)
3. Unzip it and move it to the root of your home directory.

Set it up…

1. Open Terminal, enter the following commands…

   cd ~
   nano .bash_profile
   

2. Paste this into the new file, or add it if there are existing contents.

   export PATH=${PATH}:~/android-sdk-mac/tools
   

   

3. Press “Control X” and save the file.
4. Close Terminal.

Load up an Android OS…

1. Open Terminal, enter the following command…

   android

   The Android SDK and AVD Manager will open.
   

2. Choose “Available Packages”
3. Click the arrow beside “dl-ssl.google.com…”
4. Check one or more Android Platforms, I chose Android 1.6 and 2.0 for good measure you can choose whatever versions you are targeting.
5. Click “Install Selected” and then “Install Accepted”
6. Your SDK is now complete and ready to run… Stick in your Android SDK and AVD Manager let’s make a device!

Getting your virtual Android device ready…

1. Chose “Virtual Devices”
2. Click “New…”
   
3. Give your AVD a name for this tutorial I chose “default2.0″
4. Choose one of the Android platforms you downloaded in the “Target” pulldown, I chose Android 2.0.
5. Give the SD card some value, let’s say 25mb.
6. Click “Create AVD”
7. You should return back to the home screen, click your new Android AVD’s name and press “Start”
8. Success!
   

Create an icon of sorts to launch your new emulator…

1. Open Terminal, enter the following commands…

   cd ~/Desktop/
   nano Android.command
   

2. Add this command to the new file…

   emulator -scale .7 -avd default2.0
   

   

3. Press “Control X” and save the file
4. Run this final command….

   chmod 755 Android.command
   

5. Close Terminal
6. Double click on Android.command on your desktop… Success!
   

This is a test!

Below I embedded my first Wave “Hello World… I mean Wave!”… The first of many likely… let’s see what it looks like out in public… I know many of you probably can’t see it… This is a test!

UPDATE: I believe and claimed this as the first Google Wave embed in a blog outside of the Googleplex! My claim on Twitter.

For those not in Wave yet here was a screenshot from 4pm 6/3/09.

Here we go…

(click into post to see it)

Update: Post on how to install Android 2.0 on Mac OSX is here.

This post is for Android SDK versions 1.1 and under.

Browser testing is critical to any web developer, designer… really any web professional. You need to know how your users or customers are seeing your work through the multitude of browsers and devices available to them, new ones become available every day. I wasn’t able to find a quick answer to browser testing on the new Google Android mobile platform so I blazed a trail, captured and boiled down the steps so anyone can follow and get Android up and running on their Windows PC quickly and painl.

Installing the SDK and Browser

1. First things first visit the Android SDK download page and download the Windows version of the SDK.
2. Create a folder under C:\Program Files called “android-sdk”
3. Un-zip the contents of the Android SDK you downloaded into this folder.
   
4. Now that you have the all files you need to edit your “path” so Windows can find the emulator when it is run.
   
   • Right click on “My Computer”
   • Select “Properties”
   • Click the “Advanced” tab
   • Click on the “Environment Variables” in “System Variables” scroll down to “Path”
   • Double click on “Path” move to the end of the “Variable value” and paste in this path (don’t forget the semicolon to close the previous path)
     ;C:\Program Files\android-sdk\tools
   • Click “Ok” on all open windows.
5. Ok now the SDK is set up to run, lets quickly create some shortcuts icons to launch our emulator.
   
   • Right click on your Desktop, mouse over “New” then click “Shortcut”
   • Paste this command into the entry field then click next
     emulator.exe -datadir "C:\Program Files\android-sdk" -skin HVGA-P
   • If you like give your shortcut a name I chose “Android – Standard” (I chose “Standard” for a reason if you want to try the other versions see “Extra Credit“)

Success!

Double click your shortcut and you should see the Android emulator starting up, it does take a little time the first run.

Doing Some Quick Testing

• 

  Once the emulator phone boots, click “Menu” on the phone and proceed to the browser.

  Click on the Browser icon

• 

  Click “Menu” again then click “Go to URL”

• Type in the URL of the site you are interested in and see what your users see!
• 

  That should be enough to get you going, there is a lot more to find in the Android emulator poke around and understand the experience on these new devices and keep looking out for new ways your users are seeing your site.

  -Ben

Extra Credit

If you are interested there are three more iterations on the Google Android screen that will be in users’s hands. Create shortcuts for these commands if you’d like to try them.

emulator.exe -datadir "C:\Program Files\android-sdk" -skin HVGA-L

emulator.exe -datadir "C:\Program Files\android-sdk" -skin QVGA-P

emulator.exe -datadir "C:\Program Files\android-sdk" -skin QVGA-L

My back story: I recently got into a friendly argument with some Mobile experts on a RWW Live: Mobile App Development call, I threw on my rosy colored glasses and spoke of a time where the Mobile web browser has access to device features like GPS, Contacts, etc we could leverage what we learned on the web and build even cooler more contextual and helpful Mobile Web apps that worked everywhere… and was told maybe… someday… but for the foreseeable future we’ll be building our apps 20+ times and asking carriers permission to do so (listen to the MP3, really!)… well the news today strikes me well, the glasses are rosy again!

Mozilla has the Vision

Today Mozilla fires the first shots across the bow of the future Mobile web, or as Mitchell Baker and many others put it “One Web.” Today Mozilla launched the first alpha release of Fennec it’s mobile browser that has goals to re-envision how we will use our Mobile device’s simple web browsers. [Quotes from FennecVision]

Fennec will bring a true Web experience to mobile phones and other non-PC devices, yet take advantage of the specific opportunities for new and useful user experiences enabled by mobility and telephony.

Even in it’s first release it will break huge ground delivering the first of breed access to the device’s GPS and they have goal to do the same across many other device features.

It will integrate smoothly with device features, including easy initiation of phone calls from Web pages, access to local search, maps and directions.

Curing Fragmentation? (ok at least a start)

Fennec will be the mobile Web browser that content and application developers can target to create great software for mobile phones, rather than the plethora of native platforms and programming languages required to reach people in a mobile environment today. Any developer with skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript will be able to develop for mobile.

Hard to argue with any of this, in my mind aside from the carriers this is the biggest limitation seen today with Mobile development.

Don’t overlook this Mobile Web milestone

This seemingly small browser release will in the future be noted as a milestone in the evolution of Mobile and the Mobile Web. The path this release sets into motion, I believe, will make possible to reuse the years of learning we’ve compiled as the web grew up moving our experiences Mobile with the same rich capabilities of the browser we have on the desktop. On top of that web learning we throw in access to key Mobile features like GPS and likely soon address book and calling… the ability to really build for a users context is now real, making the Mobile web browser the true platform of the future… and delivering, as closely as possible, One Web. A web that sits in the palm of your hand and works seamlessly with your life regardless of your current location or device.

Rosy indeed… -Ben

I wanted to capture my thoughts intermixed with quotes from Mitchell Baker, Chairman, Mozilla Foundation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo keynote entitled Opening the Mobile Web, it was truly a great concept and conversation and eye opening for me to see there is real commitment to making the browser (which Mitchell would say is a poor metaphor, but that’s another story) the true platform of the web regardless of the device. Video: Mitchel Baker: Opening the Mobile Web

Your Mobile experience just may be your web experience of tomorrow…

Seems counter intuitive huh? it did to me at first… we all know where we are as far as Mobile capabilities… browsers are clunky and don’t support the same things, the connection is slow and the screen is small so everyone you talk to says, “dumb down your design for mobile,” “find a few most important things and put them on the first page,” “think about your user only having a few seconds, in a rush, to get your key data,” after we hear all that we simplify our application, for mine it was just search and find a store for http://m.bestbuy.com my first run at a quick Mobile Web prototype… but is this really the direction we are heading because of technical inadequacy?

Mitchell Baker says no, and I very much agree… we are doing this because our customers want it to just work, to have unfettered access to our information from any context and any device… to simply and efficiently get to what they need wherever they are.

You should not be thinking about what data can I get to or I’ve got this device so I can get to this data… …or this device has a phone on it so I can’t really get to the Internet I can only get to some part of it… that’s a lousy setting… doesn’t work well for people doesn’t work well for developers — there is no reason we need to build a world that looks like that…

The key of the Internet should be the same and what is that key that core it’s information… What can I get to and what can I do with it… and that should not be dependent on the device I am holding.

Right, I agree give people access to what we know wherever they are, but the trap you quickly fall into is creating the Mobile version of everything, firing up new web servers, cutting features, rewriting copy, creating hundreds of Java apps… doubling (probably more) your work and removing at least some user value all in the name of making it Mobile… we need to find ways to put the critical information and functions back and make them work in the Mobile context without all this rework.

Because Mobile is different right?

Mitchell sees this trend too, we are all designing for the “new Mobile use cases” and that is all good and fine but asks are they really new? Web users want easier access to more and more relevant information, using less keystrokes and have it available from wherever they are… is that new? No… it’s not… she said and I believe, these paradigms will become more and more the accepted web (notice I didn’t say “Mobile”) practice, but it will involve a little rewiring.

I bet in a few years all of those use cases web are finding today for people using Mobile will be equally important wherever we are and that being at home doesn’t mean we will live with outdated or clunky techniques… so I’m on a Mobile device I want things quickly I want the information I want, I want to get at them with fewer keystrokes… why won’t I want that if I happen to be sitting at home?

These use cases are convenience cases that are driven by the constraints of the Mobile device that we will find very useful on machines that have bigger screens and memory and permanent connections… there are constraints when developing for the desktop we don’t have with mobile devices…  mental and human constraints, experience constrains us… we have had 35 years of desktop and laptop machines and coming up on 15 years of the graphical world wide web… those form knowledge, experience and baggage about how we approach things… as we explore the use cases of Mobile devices we will find new ways to use our computers that will be equally important if we are sitting in an office or at home on a differently formatted machine because mental constraints are often the hardest to get past.

Putting it out there, pushing the envelope towards “one web”.

There is one web for most people the Mobile Web is irrelevant, it should be something we don’t think about and basically is something we are not aware of… there is one web.

Mitchell is a “one web” purist, as you would and should expect from someone driving forward these concepts and taking them to reality and we should all appreciate it, it will simplify both our and our users lives.

I tend to take a different but very related tact, from everything I am gathering the browser can and will be the center of the Mobile Web as many of us had predicted and hoped. The work we are now doing to understand, optimize and simplify the web as part of Mobile use cases will be rewarded by our users and I can sleep better knowing that within the near future creating hundreds of versions of a Java clients will quickly go from a “feature” to a funny memory of the past like the classic “Under Construction” animated GIF.

Working within the current Mobile web browser set is possible — it’s not always fun — but it is possible and relatively reusable across many devices… As the iPhone metaphors and quality browsers emerge (WebKit, Mozilla) it will be even clearer that this is the path…Why not jump in now?

Jumping in…

That’s the way we will see the constraints and the creativity and this odd openness of expectations that has to be fulfilled on Mobile devices move back into our entire web experience… how do we get there? it’s a better world for users… there is one web… you don’t have to choose… your device doesn’t limit you to the data of experience you can have…. well to get there we need and open development platform, an open web based development platform and of course coming from Mozilla we view FireFox as that platform….

Hear, hear Mitchell looking forward to developing for Mozilla Fennec and the open Mobile Web.