I just wanted to do a little shout out to any developers, to say that the early bird ticket deadline is fast approaching for this years PHPNW conference.
Tickets have been on sale for a while now at £58 (ex VAT) but this will go up on the 12th August to £75 so if your thinking of going, now’s the time to get your ticket.
For more information or to book your ticket goto http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw10/.
A few people now have been tweeting and facebook messaging me asking how I installed Android 2.2 on my Orange branded HTC Hero, so thought I’d pop this quick guide together for you all.
Please note: This Guide is for people with an Orange Branded Hero (the Graphite version, with the Orange sticker on the back) but should work for everyone else too (but don’t flash the orange rom!)
All Credit and thanks go to the wonderful developers at XDA and VillainRom.
Disclaimer
While this process worked perfectly fine for me, and I have done if 4 times now, I take no responsibility if you turn your phone into a paperweight while trying to do this. If your not comfortable with the risks, please ask a friend or wait for HTC and Orange to release *snigger* an official *lol* update instead.
Setting up your Hero
To get around the various software locks you need to be running the 2.73.61.5 version of the rom. If your using a higher version you wont be able to flash the recovery image.
I had a few problems downgrading my firmware as my Laptop was running Windows 7 so I kept getting Error [170]: USB CONNECTION ERROR and also when it did occasionally reboot into the Bootloader it just timed out trying to re-establish a connection.
After a lot of frustration, I managed to find and resolve the issue, here’s how. If you have an XP machine you can skip this part…
1) Download the Sync drivers from here
2) Open Device Manager on you pc and expand the Android device driver tab. Then run the Rom updater
When the phone reboots into the Bootloader, check the Device Manager to see if a Yellow ! appears over the Bootloader Driver
If it does you have the same problem I had, otherwise this may not work but is worth a try (you can always uninstall it it doesn’t).
3) While the phone is still in the bootloader, right-click on the device and choose update driver.
click on install from disk or known location, and browse to the drivers you downloaded.
You should then see a list of available driver, (I saw 3) one was called Bootloader but don’t pick that as it didn’t work for me, the other two had the same name but different version numbers, I picked the highest version.
(sorry for the vagueness of this step, am at work and cant quite remember, will update the post when I get home)
4) Click Next to install the driver and we’re done.
If you manage to do this within the Bootloader’s 60 second time-out, the updater will kick in and start flashing the rom. If you have hit the time-out just, restart your phone and re-run the updater.
You should now be successfully downgraded.
Flashing the recovery image
I’m not going to write the process for this step as there is a wonderful guide over at www.roothtchero.co.uk which is what I followed.
If the site ever comes down I will update this post, but by then I don’t think anyone will be using a HTC Hero. Just follow the guide, step by step until you can successfully load the recovery screen by holding the HOME and POWER buttons to turn your phone on.
Installing Android 2.2
I tried a few different 2.1 roms after I had installed recovery and none of them felt right, a couple were sluggish, the stock was ok but didnt have root so I settled for VillainROM12 which is based on the official 2.1 Hero update.
This is however a 2.1 based rom and when last week I saw this announcement on Twitter, I thought Yes please so I popped over to the VillainRom forum to download and install it. (the current version at time of writing is 1.1.1)
To install is easy, download the rom and rename update.zip.
copy the file to the root of your SD card and reboot your phone into recovery.
Perform a full wipe of both data and dalvik cache (ext is you are using it) and then flash the rom
All that’s left is to download your favourite apps and enjoy the FroYo goodness….
Note: I will update this post with some pictures when I get home tonight…
Posted from Manchester, England, United Kingdom.
I mentioned last week on Twitter that I had been using the Fx4.0 alpha at home in preparation for the Fx4.0 Test Day (last Friday) and how impressed I was with it. Apart from the extra space saved from removing the title/menu bar the browser felt obviously faster and more stable than previous alpha and even beta releases.
Yesterday Mozilla announced the build has reached BETA and is ready for the more cautious developer to start playing with it. Firefox 4.0 comes with lots of new bells and whistles, you can find a full feature list here, most notable the new UI design and enhancements in <hmtl5> and CSS3. There are also lots of new developer api’s for us to play with including websockets and local indexeddb’s.
If your already surfing the beta channel wave, you should be able to just “upgrade now” although my work machine didn’t find it so had to install it manually. Those of you running a stable realease or want to install manually can do so via the usual beta release channel.
For more information on please read the Mozilla Announcement on their blog.
Google last night announced they have completed their migration to their new web indexing system known as ‘Caffeine’.
This new system basically allows them to push anything Googlebot finds into the main index in seconds rather than weeks.
Previously Googlebot would crawl the web, find a site, then submit its content to another system for processing. This other system would then sort and process the content and work out what its all about. It would then pass it to another system for inclusion in the index. This was a time consuming process and was also done in batches, which means your site would have to wait for all the other sites in the same batch to be processed before being submitted to the index.
The new system is different, rather than doing things in large batches, it will work on smaller portions, more portions at the same time and submit them all to the index straight away, allowing users of the search engine to see information much much quicker, and this is just the start!
Image copyright of Google
There are several rumours floating around about what lies in store next for Google users and their shot of caffeine. But for now we will have to wait and just enjoy our new “real-time” search results.
You can real the full article on the Google Webmaster Blog
Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner, yesterday announced that Mozilla is to” jump” Fx3.7 and head straight for 4.0.
The main reason for this is because, Fx3.7 consisted primarily of “Out of Process Plugins” which as most of you know has been implemented in Fx3.6.4. This has pushed developers to bypass the 3.7 release and focus on pushing out Firefox 4.0, hopefully by November.
A couple of things that jump out to me are that there will be no more modal dialogs and software updates will switch to background tasks. This is to help improve the user experience as they are two of the main pause points in a using Firefox.
The background process updates I can understand, Chrome has shown that this is by far the best way to push out updates and bug fixes to users and ensure that everybody is running the same version across the board. The removal of modal dialog however Im not too sure about.
There are also the expected updates, the new chrome (browser layout, not Google browser) redesign, which has removed many of the less used parts of the interface as found during a Test Pilot back in March and from developer feedback.
Firefox 4.0 UI concept - May 2010
Something Im really excited about are the developer tools. In particular the console. Beltzner described it as a Quake style console, pulled from the top of the browser, as an advanced view source. With the ability to edit css/dom elements, and make other tweaks on the fly. They will continue to support Firebug and will also add a couple of other api’s to allow us to access rendering times and memory usage from within our apps with should help a lot with development and optimisation.
If you using Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch Mike Beltzner presentation.
It is almost an hour long but I do recommend watching or at least listening, to what Mozilla believe is the future of Firefox and the direction they are going.
For more on this story, head over to Mike Beltzner blog post, view the slides and watch the presentation.