Nook Color for Android Fun

While I was in the USA I picked up a gadget. Such a surprise. I went into Barnes & Noble, a US bookshop chain, and bought a Nook Color. This kind of a colour screened answer to Amazon’s Kindle, a portable e-reader for looking at books and magazines downloaded via WiFi. It has a nice screen and I figured it would work as a portable reading device, and maybe even iPad replacement.

Unfortunately you can’t buy the Nook in the UK, and if you do bring one this side of the pond you will be unable to use it as intended because all the content is region locked and you need a US credit card to make purchases. But I didn’t want to use it as a Nook. I’d read that if you put a micro-SD card into the device and turned it on, it would automatically boot from that card, allowing the use of other operating systems. I’d also learnt that there were a number of versions of Android out there which would turn this device into quite a handy tablet. So, that was the plan.

Armed with an SD card and a USB reader I set to work. The install process is quite straightforward. If you don’t mind the performance hit of running everything from the SD card it is as simple as just plugging in the card and turning the machine on. However, I went for the option of replacing the entire Nook operating system with the Cyanogen version of Android. After a few false starts and a bit of head scratching I managed to get a stable device built on the 7.1 Release Candidate. The device works with Android Marketplace so I quickly had quite a few applications running, including a free copy of Angry Birds and even the Amazon Kindle reader, which is actually rather ironic.

The device whizzes along quite happily, the only problem I’ve found is that it chugs quite a bit when watching TV from BBC iPLayer (although lower quality versions viewed via the BBC web site look OK).  Battery life is very good and the whole thing is properly useful. I’m not completely convinced about Android itself, some of the operations are a bit fiddly and not intuitive to me, and I have a whole bunch of camera and phone functionality that is irrelevant on this device. However, I don’t regret the purchase.

If you are in the market for a well made tablet with good battery life and a nice screen, and you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, then the Nook will fit the bill nicely.  I don’t feel to bad about “de-Barnes and Nobelising” it, I reckon they probably make a bit of profit on the hardware anyway.

Back in the Rain

Flowers for sale in Pike Place Market. From slightly warmer times.

Got back today. Actually managed to sleep on the plane. When we got back the cloud reached almost all the way to the ground. By gum it was raining. Splashed home just in time for fish and chips. And sleep.

Climbing Needles

I’d convinced myself that there was no point in going to Seattle. I’ve been before, it is a half hour bus ride and I had work to do. Then I saw the weather outside, and I went anyway. Monorail – Space Needle – Pike Place Market – wonderful.

This is the tower reflected in the building nearby. Amazing stuff.

Another view from the top of the needle.

I took a bunch of pictures that will no doubt appear on these pages over the years. Then it was time to board the return bus and head back to pick up my luggage and catch the flight home. I’ve been using this rather cunning (I think) trick of getting up around 3:00 am while I’m out here to try and trick the body into not adjusting to the Seattle time zone. In a couple of days I’ll find out if it works…

It’s been a great trip. Very intense, but very rewarding. Great questions and interaction with the audience. Thanks folks.

Windows Phone Jumpstart Ends

What the Outside World™ looks like round here. Pity Borders is closing.

We did the last sessions today. Great fun. Andy did most of the morning, and I did the afternoon. Lots of great questions and congratulations to Frank Mondorf and Kelvin Challcot who won Windows Phones and Alexander Shevchenko who won the “Private Jet”.

If you are looking for the content (all the slides and the sample code that we showed off) you can find it on the BornToLearn site for the course.

There were some questions that we couldn’t answer in detail during the sessions, I’ll try to remember what they were and put up answers on this blog. One I recall was about the Windows Phone Desktop Passthrough program (WPDTPT), which you need to debug applications on the phone that use media. You can find this on your machine in the tools folder for your SDK installation. This is where they are on my machine.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect

You run this in place of the Zune client if you want to debug programs that use media content on the phone. Normally such programs won’t work because the phone locks media when it is syncing to Zune. This is how you use it:

1. Plug your phone into the PC.
2. Zune software will start.
3. Stop the Zune software.
4. Open a Command Prompt
5. Navigate to the appropriate folder (paste the above path into the command prompt if you like). Make sure you use the right version (there are 64bit and 32bit versions).
6. Give the command WPConnect. This should connect to the phone and display a message indicating that the connection is active.
7. This will take the place of Zune, you should now be able to debug programs on the phone that use media.

You can run the WPConnect program by double clicking from the desktop, but that makes it harder to see whether it worked or not.

More answers as I remember the questions….

Jumpstart Day Winners

Jeff takes aim

Did the first day of Jumpstart today. We had a bunch of winners, and we need some of them to get in touch so that if they win the phone (or the “private jet”) we can send it through. Here are the names of the folks that I copied down during the session. If you are on the list and there is a * next to your name, send me a mail at iwon@robmiles.com and we’ll sort you out.

• TEESofteare*
• Alexander Sherchenko*
• Christopher Cosgrove*
• Gabriella*
• Michael Wells*
• Jaron
• Rajiv Dasari
• JenP
• Kevin Challcott
• Nico*
• Kevin Robinson*
• Milan Mihajlovic
• Margot Myller*
• Kyle Hiebert*
• Bojan Misic
• Ray Montungi
• Lindsay Lindstrom
• Mohamed Yamana
• William
• Sammy
• Jim Baines*
• Julienne Harrington

We had a great time, some wonderful interaction and super questions. More tomorrow, including the XNA stuff. You can still sign up for the next day at http://bit.ly/Mango-Jump