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!
   

My little Social Media ‘spy’ application http://spy.appspot.com makes “15 Useful Google App Engine Applications” on LouisGray.com written by Mike Fruchter! I just slid in there at 15… hoping to keep plugging along adding useful features and using ‘spy’ to expose more and more folks to the value of Social Media.

Google App Engine really does make it possible to kick out an idea out into the world delivering scalability, quality and efficiency right out of the gate. I hope developers continue to discover it’s power, Python and Django are nothing to be afraid of in fact I really value learning them.

Thanks again to Mike and Louis!