Wandering Jew
Here, there and everywhere

It's a long and bureaucratic process

As we left the story last time, I was waiting to hear if I'd been approved-in-principle for a Quality Migrant visa. The results being published approximately quarterly, I was expecting end-of-August results to be followed by end-of-November results, but the end of November came and went without any sign of results on the QMAS website. I will admit that I got a little obsessive, checking the website hourly, and getting more and more frustrated. Finally, while out for dinner in the first week of December, I checked the website on my phone and found that - woohoo! - it had been updated. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, the list is published as a PDF, and - boo! - my phone didn't have a PDF reader on it. I managed, tapping away madly on my phone in a restaurant, largely ignoring two understanding friends, to find a web-based PDF reader which worked, only to find - double boo! - that all they publish is a list of approved application number, and I couldn't actually remember my number. Rushed home, pulled out one of the letters with the application number on it, loaded up the list, and...

My number was on it.

After more than 4 months of waiting, I had an approval-in-principle, meaning that they had accepted my application, and as long as I could prove that all the papers I'd submitted had been genuine, and that I hadn't otherwise falsified anything on my application, I should be in. Sounds simple, isn't. A couple of weeks later, I got a letter confirming the approval-in-principle, and instructions on what paperwork they needed me to bring to my 'interview', which should be booked by calling them within 3 months. They asked me to bring:

• That letter
• My passport
• A completed copy of an attached survey, just for their records
• Proof of no criminal record from UK and HK police
• Originals of a variety of papers which I'd previously submitted copies of

The letter, my passport and the survey weren't exactly a big deal. For the police paperwork, all I had to do was submit the appropriate forms to the Metropolitan police in London, and similar to the Hong Kong police - except that being local, I went in person and got fingerprinted. I will admit that I'm not too fast when it comes to paperwork - I just hate doing it - so by the time the police processing was done, it was time to go for my interview.

Except there was one other little issue. I got my Dad (aka my lawyer/solicitor) to send me the originals of some papers he holds for me, so I had all the other paperwork I needed - all the paperwork I'd submitted, that was. For some odd reason, something had apparently got mixed up at the Immigration office, and they asked for the originals of some references I'd given them to support work visa applications in 2005 and 2007. I don't know where the papers are from back then, so I just decided to ignore them and hope they'd go away...

Paperwork collected or on the way, I called to book my interview mid-February and was given an early-March date. I got my papers together, rechecked them a few times - yes, slightly obsessively - and was all ready when the interview date rolled around.

Or Android 1.5, as it's properly known

About 20 minutes ago, jbq (aka Jean-Baptiste Queru, Android engineer and community friend par excellence) announced on the #android IRC channel that Android 1.5 - the release formerly known as Cupcake - was done, tagged and released. And that being done, he was going on vacation...

There's a somewhat full feature list here, but the things I'm really interested in are:

• A2DP, or stereo Bluetooth support, coupled with AVCRP for remote control. To be honest, I'm not hugely bothered about it being stereo as such, since I mainly listen to podcasts and other spoken content, but without A2DP, only calls can go over Bluetooth, regardless of the number of channels in your audio. I had A2DP on my Treo years ago, thanks to Softick Audio Gateway, a third-party shareware A2DP driver, and it's good to know that Android has caught up a bit.
• On-screen keyboard. The G1 is the first phone I've ever owned which slides, flips, rotates or otherwise isn't a single block with a keyboard on the front, and while the slide keyboard is pretty decent for a phone, it's pretty annoying to have to flip the phone open to enter a URL, a search term, or some other short text - and it's almost unusable one-handed, say when holding onto something in order not to fall over on a moving vehicle. I've had a fiddle with the soft keyboard in the 1.5 preview SDK, and it seems pretty usable, at least for short things. Not sure I'd want to type an email, blog post, IM, etc. on it, but we'll see
• Widgets. One of the most-requested features for the home screen - apart from not taking a few seconds to rebuild itself after being kicked out of RAM to make use for something else - widget support appeared as somewhat of a surprise a couple of months back, and not quite in the expected way. Rather than being HTML/CSS/Javascript widgets, they are implemented as an application interface, so they are richer (and probably faster), but a little harder to write. There are already lots of ideas floating around, and at least one community widget competition which should hopefully produce some interesting things. I wonder how long until the 3-screen home screen becomes limiting?
• Browser performance. Not that the existing browser is particularly slow, but it'll be nice to see it faster.
• General polish and performance. There's been a bunch of screenshots floating around recently, and thing are looking a little more form-over-function. Not that it really really matters, of course, but prettier phones sell more units, and I want Android to sell as many units as possible - both because I think it's a good platform and good for the mobile market, and because, selfishly, I hope to release some Android software soon, and more users (customers?) would be better

The interesting question, of course, is when it'll get shipped or pushed to users. The HTC Magic should be the first device shipping with 1.5 out-of-the-box, and it's expected to be released on May 5th, which really isn't far away. For the G1, T-Mobile Germany have already announced that they expect to push a 1.5 update to users in May, so it's not unfair to expect T-Mobile in other countries to do something similar - I have a US G1, so I should get the push whenever T-Mobile US gets round to it. I suspect Dream (same device, but not T-Mobile branded/released) users might have to wait slightly longer, but hopefully not too long.

Roll on donut!

Just a little thing

I got a T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream) back in November, the first Android device to hit the market. There's a partially-done full writeup somewhere in my draft folder, but for now, I wanted to get down a little tip I discovered today:

I've been trying to sign up with the new PCCW Wifi 'Single Device Plan', which is a very cheap ($28, around US$3.50 per month) unlimited wifi plan which uses the MAC address of the device for authentication. You have to manually login once, entering the activation code you got by SMS, and from then on it'll recognise your device and log you straight in. Their regular wifi service is virtually unusable on a regular basis with Android, since you have to connect to the service, then login before you can get to the internet, but as soon as you connect the device tries to reconnect to gmail, IM, etc. over wifi and fails. Very annoying... One limitation of the single device plan is that the $28 rate is only applicable to mobile phones, not laptops, and they use server-side user-agent sniffing to make sure you're activating a supported device. Android is, of course, no supported.

No problem, says I, since the webkit rendering engine in Android has support for choosing an Android user-agent, a 'desktop' user-agent, or an iPhone user-agent. I knocked together a simple web browser which pretends to be an iPhone, and went to register. Problem, says I - there's something a little funky about the SSL setup used on the activation form, and I can't get it to work with my toy browser. The built-in browser uses undocumented APIs to handle SSL errors, and while I probably could hack something up to work, I really can't be bothered.

I originally discovered that webkit had optional user-agent strings from the famous Mr. Romain Guy - author of the Android Home application - who mentioned something about a debug mode in the browser. Unfortunately, this debug mode is, while not exactly secret, also not well-known, and I went off on a wild goose chase to make my own browser. Today, while randomly browsing the bug list for the best-known Cupcake-on-G1 build, I see a mention of the debug mode, complete with instructions on how to enable it. In short, what you need to do is load the URL "about:debug" - this won't load a page, but will enable debug mode, which adds a bunch of options to the bottom of the 'Settings' panel, including a User-Agent picker.

As soon as I found it, and tested it on this site, I popped down to the PCCW shop in my building, loaded up the activation page, and bang! working fine. I haven't tested it, but according to original instructions, the setting doesn't persist (across a restart of the Browser, or a reboot, I don't know), but it's very useful to know if you just need to access a page behind a stupid iPhone-only user-agent check.

For the record, the other toggleable options which show up are:

• Single column rendering
• Use wide viewport
• Normal rendering
• Enable tracing
• Enable light touch
• Enable nav cache dump

Don't really know what any of them do, but I'm sure there are one or two people out there who might want to play around with it...