IE only 5.47%, YES!

Follow the geek, and you will taste the future ahead of time.

How did Google get this market share?
Let’s just say that it wasn’t only because they do have a great product, think monopolistic-like powers and a lot of bullying and dictating to partners conditions that favor the adoption of this browser over any other browser, and that’s all I’m allowed to say.

A new FrostWire for Android is out on Google Play.

In this release we improved our search algorithm to include relevant search results that were being hidden in previous versions.

We’ve also made use of Square’s Picasso Image loading/caching library for displaying all the images on the user interface, resulting in less crashes due to out of memory errors we kept receiving. Now when browsing your Audio files you will be able to see the cover art of the track, making music browsing a lot friendlier.

We’ve removed ad display from the player window, no more admob ads, instead we’ll rely on the support of the community and we’ve placed a donation control which you can always turn off on the application settings.

We’ve added a new navigation menu called “Watch TV” which will either launch or take you to the android market so that you try our new app “FrostWire TV   ” to watch live TV channels (and a huge library of video on demand content). This app is still in beta testing period, we’d love for you to give it a try and give us as much feedback as you can. We’ll reveal more details about our Live TV initiatives and new partnerships on an upcoming press release. As an added bonus,

this release is compatible with OUYA, however there’s still a lot of user experience details that need to be fine tuned for better feedback on non-touch screens. Here is the full changelog:

FrostWire 1.0.8 - MAY/31/2013
 - New main menu entry to launch "FrostWire TV" app.
 - Search algorithm improvement brings better quality and missing search results.
 - Local audio files now show album art making local music browsing friendlier.
 - Fixes bug where audio player would stop instead of pausing when removing headphones.
 - Updated Image caching based on Picasso, better frame rate overall, should see
   less Out of memory error reports.
 - Fixes bug where the search cache couldn't purge old entries nor it could be deleted.
 - Fix for parsing torrents with minor mistakes in trackers list.
 - Less intensive HTML detection during torrent parsing
 - Added jdk14 logging library.
 - Fixes bug where .torrent files and magnets would not open with some file/web browsers.
 - Fixes crash reported when there is no access to the image cache folder.
 - Fixes crash initializing donations Billing Service.
 - Better description for mobile network data usage and bittorrent preferences.
 - Removed Google AdMob.
 - Added donations request component instead of ads.
 - Integrates Offercast offers on installation.
 - Experimental OUYA compatibility.

Here.

I’m personally trying to simplify my life as much as possible, getting rid of the things I don’t need/enjoy. Keys are one of them. When you have too many locks in your life, this is particularly uncomfortable, and those few electronic locks in the mix that you find nowadays with fobs/passwords can only help so much, fobs still can be lost (lost my office’s key fob this week for example, it’s been a nightmare and it’ll cost me $50 to replace if I don’t find it)

In an ideal world, whoever solves this problem in a way that it’s cheap, safe, uses as little energy as possible (none would be sick so it can compete with regular keys, or at least human energy) wil have a billion dollar in his/her hands.

The ideal solution should work like magic, and these locks should be installable in doors, gates and vehicles. No passwords should be shared, and the lock magically opens to those who are authorized to use them.

These news by Motorola/Google are very promising, however I don’t buy the “pill” solution, but I’d definitively be willing to apply some sort of invisible electronic NFC tattoo in my hand or my arm, so that when my hand is near the lock it gives off a unique magnetic signature so I can be validated. Think NFC chips for your body.

For those of you who don’t want to have a tattoo, perhaps there could be a version of the NFC tag that we could place on the back of your watch if you wear one, or if you wear rings or some kind of jewelry at all times it could be attached there.

The idea is that you don’t have to carry your authentication mechanism in a wallet or a key ring, so that you can just go out not worrying about carrying keys with you because you are or have the keys on you all the time.

Download the APK or get it at Google Play

A new FrostWire for Android is here, this is a major update that you should not skip, specially if you’ve had issues in the past.

The biggest changes are:

Integration with Archive.org

Archive.org indexes free files from all over the internet, there’s a huge amount of Public Domain files and Creative Commons files, so keep an eye for those archive.org results if you’re looking to remix legally free available content, FrostWire will be a great tool to find it.

Archive.org also indexes torrents of these files, if you download and seed you will help make its contents more decentralized and durable, not to mention you will save archive.org some bandwidth.

The Archive holds over 7.3 million files, it’s a powerful content library that now is easily accesible from anywhere using FrostWire, we hope you find it very useful, for example, law students and attorneys can now use FrostWire to search for public transcript of court cases, among other documents. Almost every known public domain film, book, and audio recording is available and best of all we’ve integrated it with FrostWire after revamping our search architecture which now delivers results as soon as possible to your android device.

Search results coming from archive.org include basic information about the file’s license if available, make sure to check the licenses and to respect your local copyright laws, FrostWire condemns copyright infringement.

Faster Search, Reduction of CPU/Battery consumption

We’ve made search considerably faster, now results are shown as soon as they come in, in the past our algorithm would wait for a certain amount of results to come in and show them to you, the search experience should feel snappier now. Also we optimized and fixed our code and some third party libraries that weren’t meant to be used on Android so now the app consumes up to 84% less CPU which will result in your battery lasting a lot longer if you’re running FrostWire.

We’ve made a few improvements in the bittorrent core, namely the hashing algorithms are about 15% faster than before which also reduces battery consumption while downloading and checking torrent chunks.

More stable and compatible

Since our last release in november we received thousands of crash logs from users worldwide and we went through all of them fixing bug by bug, in the process we did a few updates on the user interface you will notice a nicer looking navigation menu, and more intuitive icons to share/unshare files on the Wi-Fi network.

Many fixes related to the audio player, specially an annoying double-playback bug lots of you reported, thank you.

Full Changelog

For those of you following the codebase and who know geek-speak

FrostWire 1.0.6 - APR/08/2013
 - Faster search results. Search architecture revised and improved.
 - Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions
   of public domain and creative commons works from all over the
   internet.
 - Reduces CPU and battery consumption up to 84%.
 - FrostWire won't disable screen locking during audio playback.
   It's now up to the user to set longer auto-locking timeouts if
   they want to use FrostWire as an audio player in their vehicles.
 - UI fix, media player screen is correctly updated if a song starts
   while the screen was locked.
 - Updated icons and graphics.
 - Improved mime type detection.
 - Supports WebM video search results.
 - Updated UPnP cling libraries for better Wi-Fi sharing discovery.
 - Multiple crashes and freezes fixed.
 - Opens .torrent files from urls and from any file browser.
 - Faster hashing and checking of ongoing and finished torrent downloads.
 - Fixes a crash when sharing files from third party apps like FileKicker
   which pass filepath uris instead of android provider uris.
 - Fixes double audio playback issue with third party media playing apps.
 - Fixes bug where the app would force close and restart on phones without SD cards.
 - Fixes bug on Android 4.x where finished document downloads wouldn't appear under
   documents.
 - Avoids crash caused by AdMobSDK and WebView's cache being null.
 - Fixes bug where sharing files from a third party app would open FrostWire
   in a way that hitting the back button would take the user to the desktop and
   not back into the third party app.
 - Replaced navigation menu for a better one that presents itself with a smooth
   brief zoom-in animation.
 - Navigation menu and transfer screen looks properly on Motorola Razor
 - More efficient use of Bitmaps should cut down on the number of Out of Memory errors on most devices.

I’ve been doing what I now consider truly coding for the last 4 years, but I’ve been doing much simpler programming for 10 years.

Something happened more over the last 2 years, as I used other’s peoples libraries and found bugs or thought of ways of improving them, I stopped being afraid or intimidated by other’s people’s open source code and I started reading it, and understanding, and I started critizing, and then fixing, and in most cases now, this is so familiar that I open several projects of other teams and I can now read them as If I had wrote them.

The code, which is meant to tell the computer of an algorithm, all of a sudden becomes a language of intellectual expression on which programmers can talk to each other in these concepts that we somehow try to describe with words, but they’re so much more that language cannot hold. Programmers can try to describe to each other ideas on how to build these systems, but there comes a point where they read each other’s minds and nod, and they start speaking through their code.

Coding has this awesome instant gratification that occurs when you run the code and it works like expected, it’s a really awesome validation of the correctness of your mental model to be able to see the thing working and to experience that along with other people who are thinking about these systems just like you feels great, it’s like speaking another higher level language.

I think the same thing occurs with anybody that is good at whatever they do, they must first get to a certain level of sofistication to be good at it. Comedians eventually master the timing of the joke delivery, and they can perform combos to make you laugh exactly when they want you to laugh. Great comedians disassemble other comedians shows probably even to a mathematical level, just to learn or read what is it that whoever wrote this was trying to do with the public’s

The same with musicians, they speak with more than words when they speak to each other through the music. To be able to communicate with other people like this I think that’s some sort of mind reading

If you’re a geek traveler with a backpack full of gadgets, perhaps you’ve also obsesivelly thought of how to make this tedious part of travelling as fast and issue free as possible.

Here’s my ritual for the damn TSA Security Line.

I usually travel with:
- A jacket since most places I travel to are cold, or the plane cabin could be cold.
- Backpack
- My laptop.
- iPad, Kindle, SLR Camera.
- Belt for my pants, I used to not bring belts so I wouldn’t have to take them off before the line (that’s how obsessive I am about this)

BEFORE YOU GET INTO THE X-RAY CONVEYOR BELT LINE:

If you are wearing a jacket, place EVERYTHING that you have in your pant pockets (that means wallet, cellphone, keys, coins, etc) except your ID/Boarding pass on your jacket pockets, zip em up if you jacket has zippers. If you don’t have a jacket, or your jacket doesn’t have zippers in the pockets, it’s preferable that you put all these things inside one of the outer pockets of your backpack.

WHILE ON THE X-RAY CONVEYOR BELT LINE:

After you’ve given the go by the security officer and you’re about to grab the plastic trays, take your shoes, belt and jacket off and place them on a container.

Immediatly, open your backpack, take your laptop out, put it on a second container, STACK this container on top of the one holding your jacket/belt/shoes.

Then for the iPad,Kindle,SLR camera grab a third plastic container, and again, STACK IT on top of the other two, now you are carryng everything on a smaller area and more people can walk in behind you towards the x-ray machine conveyor belt.

Put your backpack ahead of the containers, and then start unstacking things in the order you prefer, I like having my jacket and shoes first, then my laptop, and then the rest, so I can put my shoes on, restack everything on the other end, and walk to the area where you can sit and re-arrange.

This way you won’t block the line after your things have been scanned and there’s less of a chance you will forget anything.

Oh, and make sure you wear white socks, you don’t want to be profiled as a crazy eastern terrorist by wearing thin black socks.

Obsessive-compulsive Cheers

We’re currently polishing our next release of FrostWire for Android 1.0.6.

Our last release was back in November 2012, since then we’ve received crash reports and lots of complaints that have helped us make the next FrostWire for Android much more robust and compatible for the +2,600 different supported Android devices that run FrostWire on hundreds of thousands of mobile devices every day.

We’ve taken this time to make the search experience considerably faster and we’ve finally been able to integrate our search with another great source of legally free available content, Archive.org.

Archive.org is a non profit organization that crawls and indexes the web’s free content and as of the moment of this writing by having FrostWire connect to its search api you will be able to search through an astonishing number of free and legal works, here’s how they break them down on their home page today:

1,181,452 movies
114,118 live concerts
1,567,041 audio recordings
4,386,872 texts

that’s over 7,246,483 works most of which are tagged with Public Domain and Creative Commons licenses that you’ll be able to download and share with FrostWire.

Most of this content is under the Public Domain and also under Creative Commons licenses.
If FrostWire can detect the license on the content it yields on search results you will see it on screen.

And every year that passes, more works automatically fall into the public domain so you will be able to access more and more information for free absolutely legally, literally from the palm of your hand via FrostWire. We think this goes in line with our mission, and once this update is released the world will be a little better place to be in since all of you will be empowered with free digital works and culture.

Other than that we’ve fixed many crashes, freezes, lowered cpu and memory consumption (which will make your battery last more), we’ve done upgrades on almost all of the application icons, fixed issues for older phones that didn’t have SD cards the way new phones do now, bugs on the audio player and so much more.

Archive.org as a search engine, and a revamp of the search experience is also being added to FrostWire for Desktop so stay tuned for our next desktop release as well (5.5.6)

changelog

FrostWire 1.0.6 - 03/28/2013
 - Faster search results. Search architecture revised and improved.
 - Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions
   of public domain and creative commons works from all over the
   internet.
 - FrostWire won't disable screen locking during audio playback.
   It's now up to the user to set longer auto-locking timeouts if
   they want to use FrostWire as an audio player in their vehicles.
 - UI fix, media player screen is correctly updated if a song starts
   while the screen was locked.
 - Updated icons and graphics.
 - Improved mime type detection.
 - Updated UPnP cling libraries for better Wi-Fi sharing discovery.
 - Multiple crashes and freezes fixed.
 - Opens .torrent files from urls and from any file browser.
 - Fixes a crash when sharing files from third party apps like FileKicker
   which pass filepath uris instead of android provider uris.
 - Fixes double audio playback issue with third party media playing apps.
 - Fixes bug where the app would force close and restart on phones without SD cards.

So you got a new Nexus or another Android running Android +4.2 and there’s no “Applications” menu entry in the settings menu.

No worries.

Go to the “About phone” entry at the bottom of settings, then scroll all the way down to the “Build number” menu entry.

Tap on it SEVEN times. (You’ll see funny “toast” messages come along)

When you go back to the main “Settings” menu, you will see a “{ } Developer options” entry.

Cheers

Sometimes you may need to make a TextView (label) look a little transparent to make emphasis on other parts of your UI. The .setAlpha() function on TextView is not supported after later in the SDK. Here’s a static workaround you can place on some sort of UIUtils class you may have in your project.

    /**
     * Android devices with SDK below target=11 do not support textView.setAlpha().
     * This is a work around. 
     * @param v - the text view
     * @param alpha - a value from 0 to 255. (0=transparent, 255=fully visible)
     */
    public static void setTextViewAlpha(TextView v, int alpha) {
        v.setTextColor(v.getTextColors().withAlpha(alpha));
        v.setHintTextColor(v.getHintTextColors().withAlpha(alpha));
        v.setLinkTextColor(v.getLinkTextColors().withAlpha(alpha));
        
        Drawable[] compoundDrawables = v.getCompoundDrawables();
        for (int i=0 ; i < compoundDrawables.length; i++) {
            Drawable d = compoundDrawables[i];
            if (d != null) {
                d.setAlpha(alpha);
            }
        }
        
    }

Enjoy, and above all
CODE!