Use adb to update APK on device even with emulator running

For my Android development I use the fast HAX based emulator on both my PC and Mac. I do the bulk of my testing on the emulator and push the APK to a real device maybe once a day to to make sure everything still looks good and runs as expected.

If you try adb install {yourapp}.apk it gets mad if it finds multiple devices such as a physical device and the emulator. Plus install gets annoyed if the program is already installed on the device.

You should use the following command

adb -d install -r {yourapp}.apk

The -d option tells it to find a device attached via USB. The -r tells it to upgrade which keeps all the existing app data in place which is handy if you are using SQLite databases or have settings saved such as username and login server. This command can save a lot of time and headaches as you don't have to shut down the emulator to push to a device and you don't have to lose any saved data.

If you have a lock screen enabled you will have to unlock the phone before you can push the update to it.

You can also use adb -devices to make sure it is finding the USB connected device. There are times you have to unplug and replug the USB cable to get things working.

Win 7 Professional always freezes at 15% during patch installs

Various machines around the office - all Win7 64bit Professional - freeze during patch install shut down at 15% complete. We hit the reset button, tell it to boot normally when prompted and the patches install just fine. This has happened every time over the past year that we have installed patches. I don't have this issue at home where I am running Win7 64bit Ultimate and Home. Annoying but does not seem to be a show stopper.

I have completed my work on the JIDE update. There are some outstanding issues but others are fixing them while I get back hot and heavy on the MigCalendar scheduler replacement. I have some open Mac issues with Jidesoft. They don't appear to do much testing on the Mac which is a shame. You can basically use the main OS look and feel on the Mac but the other ones are useless. Colors that are not readable, tabs that are not clipped so they paint on other tabs etc.

I was doing various bits of editing of the code under IntelliJ 11 on the Mac and PC and ended up getting SVN all confused. I finally just extracted a fresh copy of the code and renamed the directory to get the Mac to play nice again. I was doing weird stuff like double editing files on my home PC and the Mac laptop then trying to revert on one and check in on the other. Classes were moved to new packages etc. which I am sure caused a great deal of grief. All fixed now, just some of the fun of being a multi-platform developer.

The MigCalendar conversion is going nicely. The new JIDE based grid is so much faster at everything you can hardly believe it is functional, it feels like something should be missing otherwise how can it be this fast? MigCalendar has a lot of wonky ways of doing things and used a lot of static collections to do it. Glad to be rid of it. I did a build yesterday with no MigCalendar references in it at all. I deleted a ton of code and old dialog boxes in the process. Plus the new scheduler is so much more flexible and configurable. The clients are going to be elated when we ship.

I plan on writing an email to the MigCalendar folks letting them know why we are discontinuing the use of their product. I figure developers rarely are notified as to why they have lost a sale so it seems only fair. We just found it to be to bulky, not flexible and the documentation to be poor to non-existent. I was never able to find any useful references on the web either an they only allow you to see their forums if you are paid up on your license. Not a way to run a successful business in our book.