Droid Explorer 0.9.0.2 Released

I just published a minor update to Droid Explorer. This fixes a couple bugs with the Shell console where some lines that should be on a new line are not. There are some new shortcuts now added to the start menu for quick access to launch the shell console, device backup, apk installation, taking a screenshot, and to launch the screencast plugin.

Also addressed is an issue where some older devices do not show up in the device selection. This was because Droid Explorer now uses ‘adb devices –l’ to get more detailed information about the device, but it appears that some older devices do not display this information. To resolve this, it will try to look for the additional information, if it isn’t found, it will fall back to use the information without the details. A downside to this, which I may address later, is the device icon will not be the true device icon because the web service will not know what device it is.

See the full change log for this release here.

Download this release here.

 

Update 3/10/2015 : updated to 0.9.0.2 to fix a bug that prevented the device icon from loading.

Hangouts App In Chrome Super Tiny, Then It Vanishes.

My Hangouts app in Chrome has been vanishing on me on my home computer and I could not figure out why. I tried to uninstall it and reinstall it. Nothing fixed it. When I would close it and restart the app, it would show the “loading spinner” as normal size, but then it would shrink to an extremely tiny icon. If I then tried to click on the Hangouts app, it would vanish, never to be seen again until I reloaded the app again.

After some searching, turns out that this is a bug, that is being tracked here.

Here is how I worked around the issue, not sure how permanent this work around is though.

• Go to: chrome://settings/search#page%20zoom
• Make sure the Page Zoom is 100%
• Even if it is 100%, change it to something else.
• Now change it back to 100%. (You could probably change it to some other default, but YMMV).

Now my Hangouts app is back to normal… For now.

Amazon Echo Api

As I posted in my previous post, I recently bought an Amazon Echo. I saw some videos of people using their Echo to do home automation with a Raspberry Pi or Adriano. They did this by using something like Node, or python to monitor the tasks that are added to the Echo. To do the monitoring, they used the undocumented, unsupported, Api of the Echo.

I wanted to play around too. While I really don’t do anything related to home automation, I still wanted to explore the Echo Api and see if I could implement some type of wrapper for it in C#.

Here is what I found with the undocumented Api:

• The desktop app connects to a WebSocket on the Echo device. I have not yet successfully connected to the socket, nor have I tried yet.
• There is a url to get the latest “cards” - /api/cards?limit=N
• Get the tasks - /api/todos?type=TASK
• Get the shopping list - /api/todos?type=SHOPPING_ITEM
• Get registered devices - /api/device
• Get the media state for a device - /api/media/state?deviceSerialNumber={0}&deviceType={1}
• Get the connected bluetooth devices - /api/bluetooth
• Get music accounts - /api/music-account-details
• logout - /logout
• Get the capabilities of each provider - /api/media/provider-contenttype-capabilities

I also found that I should be able to send commands to Play, Stop, Next Track, Previous Track, Shuffle, Repeat, and set the Volume. The web app does this by first doing an HTTP/OPTIONS request, followed by an HTTP/POST. The post contains a JSON payload that contains the meta data of the device and what the volume is (if setting the volume). I have been unable to successfully POST these commands as there should be a CSRF token sent along with the POST. This token should be available in the cookies, but for some reason that I have not figured out yet, the token does not exist in the CookieContainer.

Currently, I have a working wrapper Api to Login, Logout, Get Tasks (TODO or SHOPPING), and update a task. I have posted my code on GitHub and I will push changes when I make them. This is just a little toy project that I decided to play with when bored. I will continue to work on it in free time, while I am interested in it. Feel free to fork it.

Amazon Echo Api

Happy Hacking of your Echo

Amazon Echo Material Design Stylish Theme

I bought an Amazon Echo last week. I was looking for a Bluetooth speaker and for $100 (for Prime Members), it is a decent Bluetooth speaker, plus it integrates with Prime music, and other Amazon services. It allows you to purchase items from Amazon directly from the Echo. It also has other features like TuneIn radio, iHeartRadio, a timer, an alarm (seems like it should support more than one timer and alarm, hopefully they will add this functionality in the future), todo list, and a shopping list.

The Echo has a companion app for iOS and Android devices, and it has a web app for your desktop. I was playing around with the CSS the other day while I was off work and decided to re-theme all (or most) of the desktop app using Stylish (Chrome|Firefox).

 

Download Amazon Echo Material Theme

 

 

 

 

Here are screenshots of just about every page within the Echo desktop app. Some are pretty boring, but they do show some of the elements that have been changed on the page.