I don’t like wireless connections; they’re always second-best, be it in terms of security, speed, or reliability. Here’s how my apartment looks (very approximately):

Hello everyone, TransportDroidIL 1.0 will be released this month. It has quite a few new features:

1. Separate “Source”, “Destination” and “Time” fields. This is much better for auto-completion as well.
2. Automatic location-based detection of “Source”. Hopefully you’ll find the interface for this unobtrusive.
3. Quick reversal of “Source” and “Destination”, for your return trip.
4. A new settings screen, with:
   • Provider selection (currently Egged or MOT)
   • A small attempt at right-to-left fixes for non-supporting devices.
   • A “clear history” button

Everyone loves screenshots:

Don’t get me wrong. I love being able to communicate textually with friends, coworkers and family. It’s ideal for a noisy pub; a somewhat-private conversation on a crowded bus; telling something to someone who may be asleep, so they see it first thing when they wake up; making quick responses while in a meeting without being rude (well, at least at my workplace it’s considered perfectly acceptable). It’s also very handy when you want to tell someone something they ought to write down, such as a phone number or something they should remember to buy. My problem isn’t with the concept of mobile textual messaging - it’s with SMS, the “Short Message Service”, as provided by Israeli carriers (and possibly worldwide).

Since I’ve last posted, I’ve moved to a new apartment. First order of business - get a working internet connection. This is extra-challenging when your primary machine doesn’t even have a wireless network card.

My first hack used my trusty laptop - it has a properly working wireless card, and could connect to my roommate’s router quite easily. It runs Ubuntu, and as it turns out, that means sharing the connection was dead-simple: Right-click on the network manager icon, add a new wired connection called “Shared”, and under IPv4 settings, choose “Shared to other computers”. That’s it. Once I connected my desktop to my laptop, it automatically got all of its settings, and I was good to go.

After a couple of days’ messing with it, I’m releasing it: Transport Droid IL! It’s a handy little app for querying Egged’s site, as well as the new Ministry of Transportation site, on transportation information. This is pretty beta, but seems to work well enough.

More info, source code: http://lutzky.github.com/TransportDroidIL

APK File: TransportDroidIL.APK

There are several good guides for installing Gilad Ben-Yossef’s excellent Hebdroid fonts on physical Android devices, but those don’t really work with the Android SDK’s emulator - changes to the system directory aren’t persistent. Here’s how to get around that:

First, a few downloads. You’ll need:

1. The android emulator (presumably you already have this, if not, you can get it at developer.android.com)
2. The hebdroid fonts
3. unyaffs, which will extract the system.img file
4. A snapshot of yaffs2, which will create our new system.img file. This is actually today’s snapshot from the git repository, which worked for me. For later versions, take a look at the git repository.

Building unyaffs is simple enough, or you can use the prebuilt version from the site. Building mkyaffs2image is also quite easy - just untar the snapshot, and run make in the utils directory. Put both of these utilities somewhere in your $PATH for convenience.