Klok Mobile for Android now on AppBrain

In case you missed it, Klok mobile is now available on the Android Market. It is now available on AppBrain which apparently takes a while get sync'd with the market. Anyway you can download it from the widget below.

Klok Beta for Android on AppBrain

Klok Beta for Android now available on Android Market

Klok Beta, the mobile version of the popular desktop time tracking application, is now available on the Android Market. This version has been tested on various phones and the Galaxy Tablet. If you have problems on your device, let us know at support@getklok.com Please check it out and let us know what you think. Don't forget to give us a rating. Thanks.

Coming up in the final release are the ability to remove the ads using your desktop license key, synchronizing with the desktop version and additional reportiing. Let us know what you would like to see in the mobile version.

Note: You will need Android 2.2 and you must have the Adobe AIR runtime installed first. For more information about system requirements, see the Air mobile system requirements on Adobe's site.

New Version of Klok Mobile for Android available

We posted a new update to the Klok Mobile for Android beta last night. We will be posting it to the Android Market very soon but if you would to try it out now, you can download in manually from our website

Note: You will need Android 2.2 and you must have the Adobe AIR runtime installed first. For more information about system requirements, see the Air mobile system requirements on Adobe's site.

Adobe AIR Application: Klok Mobile for Android Beta now available - update

With the excitement of Thanksgiving last week you may have missed our exciting announcement regarding the Android version of Klok Mobile. If you have an Android phone that meets the requirements for Adobe AIR for Android and would like to try out the mobile version of Klok, feel free to click on over to the Klok Mobile for Android page on our site. Make sure you read the Getting Started section. Also, please send any bugs or feature requests to us at support@mcgraphix.com.

Adobe AIR Application: Klok Mobile for Android Beta now available

I am pleased to announce that the first beta version of Klok Mobile for Android is now available for download from the Klok website at http://www.getklok.com/KlokMobileAndroid.html.

Klok Mobile requires that you have the Adobe AIR for Android application installed. For those developers out there wondering how easy or difficult it was to create, I am happy to say that working with Flex 4 Hero is very simple. While I still have some bugs to work out, some skinning to do and some performance enhancements to add, I was able to go from blank canvas to working beta version is just about 20 hours worth of work. Note too, that this was really the first real application I created using Flex 4 at all, so there was a learning curve to overcome too.

Android - A breath of fresh (Adobe) AIR

In case you have not heard, Adobe has release the Adobe AIR 2.5 runtime for Android devices. We should start seeing some very cool mobile applications built with the Flash Platform in the coming weeks. I know I can't wait.

Froyo is here... and it's Awesome

So Sprint pushed the Froyo update last night which was surprisingly painless. When I think of upgrading the operating system on any device I get a little scared, but in this case I really didn't have to do anything other than watch the progress bar for a few minutes. I wasn't timing it but the whole process took less than 20 minutes.

Now that I can watch all kinds of video and play all kinds of games on my phone, I realize that Flash on the phone drains the battery quicker, but not for the reasons you would expect. The reason was that I couldn't put it down. Having free access to all that stuff I was missing almost brought a tear to my eye. I spent more time using my phone than I ever had with my IPhone. My word of caution to people who are not able to try it first hand and have to listen to the media talk about it is that, when people say the battery drains faster, you really need to make sure that apples aren't being compared to oranges. Make sure that the reports are based on equivalent use of each device.

As I was playing around with it, I watched some videos on Adobe TV, played some of the games that were in the Adobe's Flash Showcase app and spend quite a while playing with it. Of course the battery went down slightly... very slightly. Nothing near the "OH MY GOD... I CAN HEAR THE BATTERY DRAINING BECAUSE IT IS DYING SO FAST" fud that is coming out of Apple. I was surprised at how little it actually affected the battery. Note that I was over WIFI, not 3G/4G so that probably would have an effect on battery life.

Overall I am very pleased with my EVO and Froyo so far. I will be posting about my experiences with it as I find new interesting things.

UPDATE: I said that Sprint "pushed" Froyo, but they actually didn't. They made it available for geeks like me to check for updates manually. If you can't wait, you can go into the Settings > System Updates > HTC Software Update menu.

OpenPlug Elips - update but still no joy

Well I was able to get past my original problems but after 5 minutes of playing with it I seem to have broken it again. With a very simple app with just text in it it compiles and tests ok from within FlashBuilder and when I package and install to my Android emulator set up with Froyo. However, when I add what I think is bare bones application funcionality, it starts to go haywire again. Basically I have a List that I want to populate with XML from a webservice. My initial thought was to use an mx:WebService (which is what I am doing in the browser version). No luck though... WebService doesn't seem to exist in the ElipsFlexSDK. I could always get the data another way via URLLoader so I forged ahead and figured I would just compile in the XML using an mx:XML tag and come back to the remote data access later.

"Sorry folks, park's closed"... This error: "Could not resolve mx:XML to a component implementation" is particularly frustrating because when prototyping, I use this all the time. (If there was a 6 foot moose to punch in the nose I would have). I am not giving up yet though. So I create local variable of type XML and initialize it to a chunk of XML. Voila... it builds again and I can run it in the emulator in FlashBuilder. So at this point all I have to do is package into an APK file.

....Um....no. I get a whole bunch of errors starting with one like this:

C:\OpenPlug\My Systems\Flex_XD\ElipsProject\elips_bin\ElipsProject.cpp:582: error: invalid conversion from 'avmplus::Atom' to 'avmplus::ScriptObject*'

This is where I am giving up for now. It just doesn't seem friendly enough for me to start going down this path. The upside of it is that it supports iOS but I am personally starting to care less about the iPlatform altogether anyway. Especially now that I scrapped my iPhone in favor of the HTC Evo... which totally rocks by the way... I missed Flash on my phone way more than I even realized but I really am enjoying it. Plus I now can start on the Klok for Android app... I've said too much already. Stay tuned.

Note: I keep putting "emulator" in quotes because it doesn't appear to really emulate the real Android. It doesn't look anything like what it looked like when I packaged and installed the apk file to the actual Android emulator. This may be because Elips seems to only have profiles for Android 1.6. More importantly, if something works in the emulator in FlashBuilder I would expect it to work similarly in the Android SDK emulator.

OpenPlug Elips - Sounds great but...

Don't you hate when you get all excited about how easy something is and then try it out and it just doesn't work the way you expect it to?

Well, OpenPlug Elips Studio sounds pretty great (except for the price) so I decided to give it a quick try while I await Flex Hero. So I created a very simple app with some text on it and tested in FlashBuilder and saw the Android emulator (I think... it kind of looks like an emulator comes up and then the air app comes up and is positioned over top of the emulator) come up and show me my application. So far so good. Then I decided I wanted to try creating the APK file and install it on the emulator myself and eventually on my Evo (Froyo is coming tomorrow so I hear).

This is where things started to go wrong. First off, I had an Actionscript error where I had a creationComplete handler specified on the application but didn't have a matching method in my code. The error message shown in the console was pretty big considering the error. So it took me a few to find my problem.

Then I compiled again and got a different error regarding the keystore being in the wrong format. I thought the issue was that in the configuration I hadn't correctly specified the necessary parameters to generate a key. So I specified all the values that were required and tried again. No joy though. The new error... "Incorrect AVA format". I don't really know what that means. A search of the support forum, returns exactly 1 result that mentions "rebuilding the keystore". Not exactly sure what that means either so I am dead in the water at this point.

Hey Adobe... help me out here. A beta of Hero would really help right about now.

Flex Hero now available for download?

If you are like me then you are anxiously awaiting the ability to create apps for mobile devices with Flex. With the announcement of Flex Hero a couple of weeks ago I have been a kid waiting for Christmas. Several people have asked about Klok for Android and I have been playing around with Flash CS5 but I would love to build it with Flex if possible.

So today I decided to see what additional information was available online. A quick Google search returned this result:

Clicking the link brought me to the general login page for Adobe's site. Upon logging in I was brought to the Adobe Groups home page. Unfortunately, that is where the trail went cold. Hitting the link directly, even after logging in, gave me an generic permission denied error.

It seems that on July 20, it was possible to download the Flex SDK with Hero atop it, but it is no longer publicly available(?). Perhaps there is a private beta that I don't know about. If there is I would love to be included... Did you hear that Adobe? Just in case you didn't, I will say it lounder: ADOBE, PLEASE INCLUDE ME IN THE FLEX HERO BETA.