We've been hearing about Cupcake for a while and so the feature set is probably no mystery. I got tired of waiting for T-mobile to push the update down and so after a few false starts I decided to update myself (instructions here. After playing around, I found a few things which I thought I'd share in case you hadn't gotten the update yet. Here are a few of the minor things you've got to look forward to when it does finally come over the air.



1. You can now mute threads in Gmail. This feature is even more handy when you're on the road than when in front of your desktop. Nothing worse than sitting in the middle of a thread you care nothing about when travelling. I wonder how Google Wave will handle this..

2. Most applications will auto-rotate now. Auto-rotating had been disabled initially (rumored at Apple's request) but it's now been enabled. Almost all the apps, from games to the browser take advantage of this. If you're an app developer be sure to see what your app looks like when in landscape mode...

3. There's a software keyboard with autocomplete options and you get the ability to enable haptic vibrate response. T-9 on Android is still not possible due to patent issues, but luckily they've found another way to get the job done. As you type a small toolbar appears with a number of guesses on what you're typing. It's pretty effective. In fact my typing speed on the software keyboard quickly matched how fast I peck using the HTC G1 hardware keyboard.

4. If you hard press the power button it will let you both silence and enable airplane mode on the phone. Not much more needs to be said about this. It's nice to have and allowed me to uninstall the ToggleAir application.

5. When you press the any button other than menu and your phone is locked, it will show the wallpaper background. This helps identify your phone even when locked. Especially useful if you work in an office with multiple Android phone owners..

6. When you are on the phone, instead of having the screen black out and the dialpad disappear, it now stays on but makes you double tap to access the dialpad. Since the G1 doesn't have a hardware proximity sensor like the iPhone, it has no way of knowing when you hold it up to your ear and when you take it down to push a button (Apple really thought of everything didn't they!). This new behavior tries to do as best as possible given the lack of sensor.

7. The Email IMAP client now really deletes email from the IMAP server. If you spent a lot of time on the G1 without using the Google account as your mail email provider, you probably noticed right away that you couldn't really delete emails. Thankfully, this is now fixed.

8. Camera improvements: Speed to launch the camera has improved as well as the speed of taking a picture. It's almost usable now.. just missing a flash. Hopefully future Android phones figure this out. Plus, you can now just hold down the camera button to launch it. No more going through the app menu and clicking the camera icon.. As covered elsewhere, there is also a camcorder now.

9. Live folders and widgets: We've got calendar widgets and a live folder that will launch various things like 'contacts with phone numbers'. It's a small thing but it does add to the usefulness of the phone.

10. There are now animations when moving between screens and lots of minor polishing has been done. You can unlock even more here if you install the "Spare Parts" application from the market.

Overall Cupcake is an excellent update. I'm really looking forward to Donut though. I especially want the ability to have the phone turn itself on if you have the alarm set. Google: think of how much energy you would save the world if you enabled this!

I'm (somewhat) patiently awaiting the cupcake build for my Android phone. While browsing around the market, I came across a few apps to take for a spin and thought I'd write a short post about them. Without further delay, here are four apps I kind of liked.


1. Contact Owner: This is a simple application but incredibly useful. When you launch it you select some preliminary text, a contact's information, and finally some concluding text. It will then display that message on your phone when it's locked. Why is that useful? It's intended for the scenario where you lose your phone and a some kind soul recovers it. In my case it might say:

If found, please return to:
Vince Wadhwani: 202-555-1212
Reward if returned.

Pretty handy, eh? Sure beats the paper and tape I usually use.

2. Slicehost: This is an application from the guys at Slicehost to help manage your slices. I have a few slices there so I thought I'd download it and give it a whirl. The only downside so far is that you have to enable API access on your slice and then manually type the API key into the application.

Slicehost rarely does anything badly, so I imagine there's a good reason to require the key and not just do it by one-time email/password retrieval. I think the other limitation is that you'll only be able to manage one account at a time which may or may not be a big deal for you depending on how many client slices you manage.

3. Connect Four: Yeah, this last one is a softball. I feel it's like tic tac toe and there's no reason to ever lose a round against the computer. But for whatever reason (concentration is the easiest culprit to blame) it is challenging. Fun too.

4. Spare Parts: If you've got cupcake, this is a nice addition. It allows you to add some features missing from the default options including keyboard animations and haptic responses. Worth playing with!

All the above apps are free so unless you're hurting for space I'd say give them a try.

If you've got a Rails Stack built on top of Intrepid Ibex and you want to update it to Jaunty, I've got some good news in that it's pretty easy. Depending on what you have installed though you may need to do a little extra repairing. Here's a quick step by step detailing my experience.


The first thing you must do is make sure your system is up to date:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Install any packages that are out of date. After that, time to get the update manager:

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Since we're upgrading from Intrepid Ibex to Jaunty Jackalope there shouldn't be a reason to modify any other files like you might when upgraded from the LTS. So get straight to the matter by running this command:

sudo do-release-upgrade

Follow the on-screen instructions. If you're not an advanced user, I'll recommend just taking whatever defaults you are prompted with. Once you're done, reboot!

A couple of things went wrong with my upgrade. First, my Passenger Phusion install went awry. This was 100% my fault though for not upgrading the right way. Just in case you missed it, follow the instructions on the official blog.

The second thing I needed to fix was my rmagick install. A key library got removed and so it was back to the drawing board. Luckily, I found some easy instructions courtesy of Rob Britton.

sudo apt-get install libmagickwand-dev
sudo gem uninstall rmagick
sudo gem install rmagick --no-ri --no-rdoc

And with that you should be done, and hopefully enjoying your upgraded stack. It also couldn't hurt to do a sudo gem update just in case you have some old crud hanging around.