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Developers Notes Challenges along the road for Mac Tiger laptops

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cesine edited this page Oct 18, 2011 · 1 revision

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Beta Testers

Testers Notes: file transfer for testing versions

USB

If you Android 1.5-2.3 you can drag and drop your Experiment files onto the Android, and you can drag and drop your Results back to the computer.

If you have Android 3.0 and a Mac you have to install a .dmg first, then it will automatically open the tablet whenever you connect it via USB... In Honeycomb the Android devices act more like an MP3 player, and less like a USB stick. "This connection uses the MTP protocol, which is not supported by Mac OS X natively" Android switched to MTP probably for 2 reasons

  1. Now the Android and the computer can access the SDCARD at the same time, you don't have to unmount it.
  2. Often the tablet had to rescan the device to find the new files you put on, now it wont have to.
 A main reason for using MTP rather than for example the USB mass-storage device class (MSC) is that the latter operates at the granularity of a mass storage device block (usually in practice, a FAT block), rather than at the logical file level.
 In other words, the USB mass storage class is designed to '''give a host computer undifferentiated access''' to bulk mass storage, such as compact flash, rather than to a file system, which might be safely shared with the target device (except for specific files which the host might be modifying/accessing). In practice, therefore, when a USB host computer has mounted an MSC partition, it '''assumes absolute control of the storage, which then may not be safely modified by the device without risk of data corruption''' until the host computer has severed the connection.
  MTP saves the cost of re-scanning the entire disk every time the content is modified.

Wifi

At the moment Git clients for Android are too immature so we have to find other options to back up files.

(Very complicated but working solution)

Since Wifi file transfer appears to be the only solution for Mac OS Tiger 10.4 users (at the moment), here is a very complicated, but working solution. Other testers can use this too, if they want to sync using wifi (but syncing via USB is probably easier and more likely since you probably have your computer with you when you want to transfer experiment files or experiment results).

Experiment Files: Computer -> DropBox -> Android
  1. On computer, edit file somewhere under Computer/DropBox/ScheduleSync/...
  2. On Android, using Downloader for DropBox long click on ScheduledSync folder to download any changes
Experiment Results: Android -> DropBox -> Computer
  1. On Android, edit file under the /sdcard/dropbox/ScheduleSync/someotherfolder/...
    1. (if the someotherfolder hasn't been added to the list of folders to sync automatically, add it)
  2. On Android, using ScheduledSync click sync now
  3. The file will appear/change in the Computer/DropBox/ScheduleSync/someotherfolder
Setup

This solution uses 3 software:

  • DropBox +
  • Downloader for DropBox +
  • ScheduledSync
  • Steps:
    • On Computer, Download and install the DropBox application, create a DropBox account
    • On Android, install Downloader for DropBox, and ScheduledSync, and DropBox
    • On your computer, Create a folder in DropBox called ScheduledSync, put one folder called Test, and one file "CreatedonComputer.txt" in the Test folder
    • On Android, using DropBox, long click on the text file "CreatedOnComputer" and tell it to download it to your Android. (this creates the directory structure for you).
    • On your comptuer, create a second folder in you ScheduledSync folder, call it Test2
    • On Android, in Downloader navigate to the ScheduledSync folder, long click and Say yes, download this.
    • On Android, using OI File Manager or ES Explorer navigate to your /sdcard/dropbox/ScheduledSync folder, can you see the Test2 folder? If yes, then your Downloader for DropBox is working.
    • On Android, using ScheduledSync, add your DropBox login, change your settings to sync when you want it to (probably at night). Add folder Test to the list of folders to sync.
    • On Android, using ES Explorer create a new text file "CreatedOnAndroid.txt" in your Test folder.
    • On Android, using ScheduledSync, click sync now.
    • On your computer, look at your DropBox folder, did it add a new file "CreatedOnAndroid.txt" in your Test folder? If yes, then your ScheduledSync is working.

References

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