Announcing Droidora - - - HELP WANTED

[WizardStan]

There's never been any requirement against putting Android on devices. The issue has been getting access to the official market place. We'd just have had to do what other devices have done and setup their own market place where blessed apps would go.

 

[moz]

Oh I see,


carry on then!

 

[coreyjohnson711]

pressed the wrong button on my pandora and now am starting this post over, so i will make it short. first great job on everything so far, i love this community, nd feel bad i know nothing of coding.


for the project


could you use one nub for mouse and the other for left click and back?


could you use start for hhome, select for menu, and pandra button for power?


could you use the d-pad to pretend to be the g-sensor to make apps ans games usable?


keep up the wonderful work!

 

[dgame]

I believe the Pandora didn't fulfil (right word?) the requirements of Android, therefor Craig couldn't legally put Android on the Pandora.

OS Idea: Pandora should move to Android (craigix - thread linked below)


General Response: Pandora nerds want UMPC not phone-less cell phone. Most support alternate-boot option like Droidora (thread linked below)


See: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/55412-pandora-should-move-to-android/

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Consider:


The Pandora should move to Android to get real commercial software and games - plus it's only a matter of time before someone else releases an Android games console (which works well), Pandora should be first.


Discuss...

Response Highlights:

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I for myself would never switch to Android.


Tried it on my SmartQ and hated it.


I want to keep my shell with SSH, proper programs like Claws-Mail (just needed to copy my .claws-mail-dir from my Main PC to set up all my accounts ), VNC, etc.


Dualboot would be okay... or optionally, either run it from SD or Android from NAND and Angström from SD.

More selected responses:

Spoiler

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Couldn't this community give the big FUCK YOU to android if we don't like it and just keep and dev for what we have now though?


It is not like Craig will come to our houses and make sure the dumbed down android is installed. When we get the android installed Pandora could't we just wipe it and put angstrom and minimenu etc on it like we have now? Devs here have been making the OS themselves anyway like DJWillis Notaz etc. After all PSP and DS homebrewers hack their native OSs to run homebrew so we could too right? Even a community OS was made for the GP2X (Open2X) We wouldn't have to succumb to mainstream OS any more than PSP users do, if we want the OPEN Pandora to remain open we still could I would think.

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Why is losing the ability to use the device as the miniature computer that it is, in favour of using something that seems to primarily be aimed at mobile telephones, a great thing, though? Am I missing something?

Link to Post

Link to Post


Consider:


The Pandora should move to Android to get real commercial software and games - plus it's only a matter of time before someone else releases an Android games console (which works well), Pandora should be first.


Discuss...

You do realize it will not work out of the box on pandora, do you?


Good luck finding people to do the port for you.

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Craig just threw this otu there for a discussion; it is not a twinkle in anyones eye.


(cpasjuste I think did a basic Android port ages ago, it worked; it needs tonnes of work.. Andorid is not just magicly free to use


For my part, this discvussion is about wht you want for a primary OS; you coudl run android right now if you wanted on NAND, or boot it from SD; you can run any linux you like.


The question here is what you want as pushed as primary.


I will _not_ be running it on my Pandora (except that I support the community, so if everyone went that way, I might dual boot into it on occasion for testing something?); I like our current firmware.. nice good old regular Linux, easy to tweak without a load of heavy gunk on top. I see no problem in having a variety of systems and the user can pick which they put on NAND, and which they boot from SD.


IF folks want to push Android as the prime OS, for publicity sake or something; I'll stay out of the vote


For my part .. I just have little interest in rewriting all the UIS in the world to make them run on Android, not to mention a lot of other things. (Sure, you get some (not all) Android apps, but you lose every regular linux app, too, until they get ported into Android apps.) (And when peopel say stuff like, but it uses 'standard APIs', remember to read that as "it uses standard APIs, as long as your standard is Android" As a mobile dev whose been in the game longer than most, Android is still on the edge; they're exactly where Palm and others have been years ago -- Palm let their OS out of the bag to other companies (at a cost mind you), and those companies did exactly trhr same as with Android -- same core, but deciding to enable/disable features, mess with or replace the UI, support/ignore later OS versions, etc, and it fragmented the market and caused _huge_ developer headaches; code ended up full of "if palmos, but if sony's version, do this; if palm os, but handsprings version, do that..."; Android has quite a bit of risk of this sort of thing right now, and its already been happening to some small extent with carriers introeducing UI changes and more to point.. not upgrading firmwares, etc. However, Google and others are fully aware of history before them and are trying to stop this from happening, but haven't the clout to enforce much so we'll see..


Anyway, Android has its ups and downs, and nothing much wrong with it, and a lot lot of awesome; but at the same time, from my single person view .. I want the pandora because its a typical linux hack box, and I don't want to jump through NDK hoops to do it; I've done that before on a dozen mobile OSes and on Android, and it makes my teeth itch.


Assuming folks do the kernel patching and all that so Android works well on Pandora, consider what you gain exactly and what you lose.


But it might be worth it for the markeing fluff, who knows?


But not on _my_ pandora


jeff

Back ON topic. My main concern with what Craig was suggesting was losing the effort and momentum of the current OS.


I support unofficial projects like Droidora that don't take resources away from the main OS.


I'll probably give this a try when I find my spare SD cards.


EDIT: Added working links to quoted gp32x posts.

 

[Prometheus]

I notice that one of my old posts was quoted, above. :lol:


I have a more up-to-date view on it than that, as I now use Android on a daily basis on an Asus Eee Pad Transformer, which is Tegra2-based, and has a stock clock speed of 1.1GHz.


It's certainly a nice OS, but it's highly counterintuitive in places - cryptic icons that make no sense (and many of which really should have text labels, because nobody associates a frowning alien's face with an e-mail spam folder), and needing to move your fingers in the opposite direction you want to scroll in order to scroll, unless a trackpad is connected or unless you're touching a certain area of the window (which it took an update or two to add a visual cue for - it seemed to be completely random before that), are particular problems, I feel. I wonder if the telephone version equally cryptic? The Transformer runs 3.x (Honeycomb, currently updated to 3.1 or so). It's also very, very slow in some aspects, which I didn't expect from "current" hardware.


It's near-impossible to post things on forums due to the extreme lag in the (very crash-happy) browser (which can't recover its previously-open tabs when it crashes, and sometimes gets itself into such a state that you have to reboot the entire machine to get it working 100% properly again and to make it stop crashing as much), and the fact that standard keyboard shortcuts are either randomly ignored or randomly accepted, which just makes it outright hard to type. In fairness, typing is a bit better in tablet-mode, but the thing is sold as a tablet/laptop hybrid, and I personally use it in the latter way more often, as that's one of the Transformer's big draws.


It's also a lot less stable than the Pandora's OS, to the point that I'd rather have Ångström (or at least Xubuntu) on it, as it's clearly a lot more optimised - I think I'd get more out of the hardware that way. :lol: (I really need to see if dual-booting is possible, in the same fashion as on the Pandora.)


Now all of that said, it's certainly a good OS (and whilst it may appear contrary to the above, I do like it a great deal), but it seems to me that it's got a hell of a way to go before it's mature enough to be stable. Again, perhaps the telephone version fares better here, though. That said, as I've always said, I'd love to have it as an option (much more so now I'm more used to it) - just not the default, as I personally don't think it's ready for that at this time.

 

[Linopoly]

Yeah, I'm not really adding anything new, but it seems to me that Android would require OCing the CPU just to have a smooth UI, remove the ability to develop native Linux apps without jumping through NDK hoops, cause fragmentation in community, and still not be able to access the official marketplace. For all this trouble, it would be better for someone to focus on porting only the Android userspace stuff required to launch Android apps (as with Myriad Alien Dalvik), and then integrate that into Angstrom so that people can run Android apps as an additional choice instead of as the only choice. Of course, this is almost certainly way too much effort for what you get out of it, but nothing is stopping anyone from trying to do it.

 

[Morn]

and needing to move your fingers in the opposite direction you want to scroll in order to scroll, unless a trackpad is connected

It's not counter intuitive, it's just different way than on most of other apps and systems.


I remember once I been typing out some document for my mother, who never used a computer on her own. At some point she said "move it up" so I scrolled up "No! the other way!".


When working on something that doesn't fit the screen it's intuitively like looking through a rectangular hole. Most of us think of scrolling as of moving the hole we are looking through. My mother however imagined a fixed hole that cannot be moved so he asked me to move the underlying document up so the bottom part appeared in the hole.


Both approaches has some logic behind. And it isn't something that came along with google. You could use this type of scrolling in Acrobat Reader years before Google even thought about making mobile operating system.

 

[Fworg64]

I would be happy to see a mainstream-ish OS as an OPTIAN for the OPEN pandora, thats the whole spirit of the device isnt it? choices. But i think the defining factor will be whether or not we can get the app store to work properly, if it doesnt then i would see no real purpose in installing it.

 

[Prometheus]

@Morn - My apologies, but I honestly thought that moving one's fingers upwards in order to make a drop-down menu (the very first thing Android Honeycomb greets you with) or a page move down was the height of counterintuitiveness. I'm not disputing that it's different, it certainly is, but moving up in order to move down seemed utterly bizarre to me at first. :lol: There's a reason that Adobe also provides regular scrollbars, after all (or did they eventually stop doing that? I haven't used Microsoft Windows, or Adobe's readers, in longer than I can remember!).


Anyway, I'm getting off-topic and I absolutely don't want to do that, so I'll ask something I've been wondering as this thread's been going along: How easy is it to get Droidora up and running in its current form? As easy as making a bootable Ångström card using this? (I must admit to being a bit bewildered by the discussion on it earlier in the thread. :blink: )

 

[SNESFAN]

amazon app store is comparable to the google market, and is better than slide.me it even has stuff the google market doesn't have, plus it doesn't need "approval" from google


http://www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/b?ie=UTF8&node=2350149011


don't be turned off by the interface, the corresponding android app is much nicer than dedicated market (mind the newest version)


and I'm still here with money in my hand for the bounty, keep up the good work

 

[Prometheus]

^ I really wish Amazon's app-store was available outside of the US. To my knowledge, it still isn't, unless I missed something.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Hey guys, I think that Pandroida is a much better name.

 

[TylerAW]

Can games on the droid store run on the Pandora? I noticed that not many new smartphone are using the SGX 530 GPU and I was wondering does that matter or not?

 

[Fueler]

Pandroid is a great project. It doesn't need to be installed, I like running off the SD. I agree with the sentiment of improving the current OS is the right choice. There are only so many man hours of work that can be done at one time.

 

[Cyberworm]

Hey guys, I think that Pandroida is a much better name.

It's still too closed to "Pandroid".

 

[Blue Protoman]

So?

 

[Bosbeetle]

Stop bickering about the name for flyingspagettimonsters sake

 

[Blue Protoman]

I am agnostic.

 

[Linopoly]

So?

Pandroid is the name of an existing project to port Android to the PandaBoard.

 

[Bosbeetle]

I am agnostic.

So you dont beleive in a flyingspagettimonster but you do acknowledge there could be one.