Microbes - Fast Paced Casual Game

This is a guest post by Michaela presenting her first game Microbes available now on Google Play.

The original post in German can be found here ...

Microbes Promo Video

---

Yeah, it is finished :)

moreGainE1976's first Android Game is released to play!

Now you can visit the small and cute Microbes on their garbage dump!

Link to Google Play Store: http://goo.gl/Hr1PSX

The Main Characters

This small and green scaredy cat is the smallest Microbe, that is allowed to play on the garbage dump. Its only job is to be afraid and to be eaten.

The next bigger one is the yellow Microbe with the funny snouts as ears. It eats smaller green Microbes and prefers many at once. Nevertheless, it must have to worry if the larger Microbe is near:

These lovely purple lady is the third Microbe. As harmless as she may strum with her eyes, so greedy she is! No yellow Microbe is safe from her!

 

The red Microbe is the hungriest of the four. It hits its teeth in the purple ladies, as it was just starving! There is no escape! And when it ate too much, then it bursts!

To clean up the garbage dump, there is from time to time – as a reward – a small poison bottle. Sometimes – but not always! - the shattered poison bottle lets explode some Microbes, too, and so generates extra points.

And yes, the skull is a cross over to the PirateBox :)

Wear Shell - Exploring Android Wear

Having a LG G Watch for a while I thought that it would be interesting to run code directly on the watch without having to create an APK. Sometimes I just wanted to run some code snippets on the watch and view the result instantly.
Creating a complete project, compiling and deploying the APK on the Wear device is quite time consuming and somewhat annoying.

I tried to write an app to execute BeanShell code directly on the Wear device. This is all experimental and the possibilities are quite limited compared to an regular app, but for an execution of some code snippets that seemed to be a good idea.

The result is Wear Shell, an app that consists of a mobile and a Wear part. The mobile part moves the code for execution to the smart watch, collects the result and passes it to the calling application.

So I hope owners of an Android Wear smart watch have fun with the app and find it as interesting as I did to explore things from the perspective of a watch.

WearShell App

Web Interface

To make tests easier, the app contains a small (PAW based) web server with a web interface. Inside this interface you can type the code inside a text area, press the Execute button and wait for the result to be displayed.

Web Interface with Wear System Information

The web interface also contains a page containing code snippets for you to try out. These snippets include code for database, Bluetooth and system info access and should provide a good starting point for further explorations.

Developers

Developers have the possibility to use the functionality of the app within their own applications by using a Result Intent.

Action: de.fun2code.android.wear.shell.EXEC
Request String Extra: bsh
Response String Extra: result

Just pass the BeanShell code to execute to the bsh parameter and read the result from the resulting Intent.

Links 

Download: WearShell APK
Discussion: XDA Developers

PirateBox for Android - Android Wear

Starting with version 0.53 PirateBox for Android supports Android Wear notifications for uploads and shout messages.

Android Wear support is disabled by default but can be enabled inside the PirateBox preferences. There is a new Android Wear section which currently only has one Wear Notification check-box preference.
As soon as this option is ticked upload and shout notifications will be sent to a connect Wear device.

Android Wear Preference

Whenever a new upload or shout has been processed and sent to the Wear device a notification is displayed on the Android device (the phone) to indicate that new notifications have been transferred to the Wear device. If that notification gets dismissed, all notifications on the smart-watch will also be deleted.

Wear Notification on Phone

On the smart-watch notifications are summarized and presented in chronological order (newer first). The following image describes the flow on the Wear device.

Flow on Wear Device

After the messages have been expanded options are available to open the PirateBox app on the phone and in the case of a file upload to open that file on your phone for display.

PirateBox for Android - I18N

The latest PirateBox for Android version 0.5.2 adds i18n support to the web interface. It is now possible to change the language of the web interface independent of the phone's langue settings.
This post will show how to add your own translations in a few easy steps ...

The language files are stored inside the piratebox/html/i18n* folder. The file names have the following format: i18n_ISO.properties
The ISO part specified the ISO 639-1 code which defines the language. Here is a list of available ISO language codes: Language Codes according to ISO 639-1

To add your own translation copy the English translation i18n_en.properties file and rename it to your desired language. To take French as an example, the file would be named i18n_fr.properties.

It is important to note that the file encoding has to be ISO-8859-1, otherwise you might have issues displaying the characters correctly inside the web interface.

Now you can start editing the file. The file contains key value pairs separated by an equals (=) sign. All you have to do is to translate the right hand side of the euqation.
Here is an example, the original in English on the left and the French translation on the right:
button.thanks=Thanks                                button.thanks=Merci

If all lines have been translated, copy the  new file to the piratebox/html/i18n folder and you are almost done.

To select the new language simply go to the preferences of the PirateBox app and select Web Interface Language. If everything worked well the language should be available for selection.

After a restart of the server the web interface should show the new translation.
Besides English the web interface is already translation into German. If you have made your own translation, you can send it to me** and I'll include it in the next release***.

Have fun and I hope everything is working as it should ...


* Base directory: /data/data/de.fun2code.android.piratebox/files/
** Mail: jochen[at]fun2code.de
*** If there are multiple for the same language, I'll pick one...

PirateBox for Android - Modding

Here are the workshop slides I prepared for the PirateBox Camp #2 in Lille. Because they were not used at the camp I'll post them here, so they are not lost.
The slides show the range of possible modifications to the PirateBox for Android, ranging form simple preference changes to the more advanced use of the Android API.

Here are the slides, more details and download links are available below the presentation.
 
The first slide shows the Basic Settings that can be changed inside the preferences of the PirateBox app.
These basic settings allow to change things like the SSID name, storage directory etc. without deeper knowledge of the PirateBox.

The next slide Content Modifications shows the settings needed to make basic changes to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. After ticking the Content to SD option, the app has to be restarted for the change to take effect. After the restart you should find a folder named piratebox on your SD card (or wherever your external storage file system is located).

Inside the piratebox folder you'll find a directory named html which contains all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. If you are making changes to files located inside the html directory, make sure that the option Enable Updates is not ticked to prevent the next update of the app to overwrite your changes.
You will also notice that the html directory contains files with the extension xhtml. These files are html files that, in addition to standard HTML, include dynamic content. Dynamic content is covered in the slides that follow.

The next five slide (Dynamic Pages, Using BeanShell, XHTML Example, XHTML Errors and BeanShell DIY) cover the use of dynamic pages by using BeanShell. The slide named BeanShell DIY contains a download link (available below) that offers you the possibility to execute BeanShell code directly on your device.

The last two slides (Using the Android API and Android API DIY) are targeted at developers that already know the Android API. The Adroid API DIY links to a ZIP file (download below) that contains an example that shows the use of the Android API to access the music stored on the Android device. After unzipping the files to the html directory you should have an additional menu entry named Media inside the menu of your PirateBox start page.

If you are interested in how that works you can inspect the xhtml files included inside the ZIP file. But event if you are not into development the sample might be a nice addition to your PirateBox.

Downloads

The files referred to inside the presentation are available on Google Drive:
camp#2/beanshell.zip
camp#2/android_media.zip

PirateShare

PirateShare is an app that tries to simplify file upload to a PirateBox by using Android's share functionality.
On the PirateBox Camp #2 we tried the app and it seems to work quite well.

Android Share Dialog (image by #BiblioBox)

PirateShare was inspired by the PirateFox a PirateBox file sharing app for FireFox OS:

http://ruk.ca/content/piratebox-firefox-os-piratefox
https://github.com/reinvented/piratefox

The  PirateShare app is available for download on Google Drive:
http://t.co/j7oiLJdZuT


The app works like this:

1. Select one or multiple photos from the Gallery or select file(s) inside a file management app
2. Select PirateShare from share menu
3. PirateShare checks if connected to a PirateBox by requesting the ncsi.txt file
4. If connected PirateShare will upload the file(s)

Upload Dialog

PirateBox at Google Play

After quite some testing PirateBox for Android is now available at Google Play.
Thanks a lot to all of you for testing. Special thanks goes to Skyworth S8 for testing and sending in lots of screen shots (see gallery below).

The APKs will also be published to Google Drive, so installation will be possible for devices without Goggle Apps.

In case of errors or if you would like to provide feedback, please send a mail to piratebox[at]fun2code.de or leave a comment below.

Links

PirateBox at Google Play
APKs on Google Drive