Android 7 (Nougat) on a 5-year-old phone

A 5-year-old phone is not going to the kindergarden, it is more likely to be found on the phone graveryard. One important reason for this is that its manufacturer stopped caring for it at least three years ago. Fortunately, there are other caretakers – people that maintain the latest android version also for five-year-old phone grannies – in form of custom ROMs.
So, is it possible to run the latest Android version on a device that’s 5 years old? Hell, yes! This article shows how.

My old HTC One S (aka ville, the older S4 processor not the “C2” with S3 processor), launched April 2012 runs terribly laggy on its latest stock anroid 4 firmware, last update 2013 – four years ago! That’s why it was retired a long time ago. At the beginning of 2017, when the first unofficial builds of lineage OS turned up, I was surprised to see that HTC One S was among them. I was wondering, how can such an old device run the latest android version? I had to see for myself.

TLDR; Android Nougat works surprisingly well, way better than the latest Stock version but HTC makes it a hell of a way to get there. Lets see what has to be done.

Note that all files on your device will be deleted during the process!

Unlock Bootloader

To be able to flash software to our HTC devices, HTC forces us create an account on htcdev.com and register our device there. Then we receive an unlock code as zip file which we can flash on our device.

adb reboot bootloader

fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin

For all Windows 8 (and also Windows 10, apparently) users who have problems getting the fastboot driver to work, whereas ADB works, this little registry edit did the trick for me.

In the bootloader make sure to remember your HBoot version, it will be required during the process.

HBoot 2.16 – we’re good!

Flash TWRP

Download from here to your PC and flash as follows

fastboot flash recovery twrp.img

fastboot reboot

Check HBoot version

I had to find out the hard way by flashing lineage 14.1 that there are requirements regarding the HBoot (HTC Bootloader) version:  HBoot 2.16 is required.

So better check in advance. If you’re on HBoot 2.16 flash lineage and enjoy. If not, let the games beginn.

S-OFF & root

Upgrading HBoot needs S-OFF (Security off, enables writing to /system directory). On top of unlocking our bootloader at htcdev.com we need to risk bricking our phone to enalbe writing in the /system directory of our device.
Those two things are the reasons why I most likely won’t ever buy an HTC device again.
Anyway, with the One S, we’re lucky! S-OFF takes a bit of time but not much effort and comes at almost no risk, thanks to rumrunner (a good overview of other S-OFF Mechanisms is described here). Rumrunner makes it easy to get S-OFF, but it needs root access.

What? Why are we doing this again? We want to Upgrade HBoot, that’s why we need S-OFF, in order to get S-OFF, we need root. That’s the last unpleasant surpise, promise!
Lucky again, root access can be gained easily on HTC One S. I used Superboot: Just Download, execute Script on PC while Phone phone is in bootloader mode. Root done. More detailed description here.

Then just download rumrunner follow the instructions, wait for about 10 minutes (don’t worry, your phone is restarting about one million times) and you’re S-OFF!

Upgrade HBoot

We’re getting closer. Now, with S-OFF we can flash HBoot 2.16. I followed these instructions, and found the firmware here.

Caution: After flashing HBoot 2.16, the internal memory is really small, only 50 MB left. Obviously Android 4 and Hboot 2.16 are not good friends. Don’t worry, this is solved once Android 7 is flashed.

Flash Android 7.1.2

It’s finally gonna happen. We’ll flash Lineage 14.1, Android 7.1.2 (maintained by moozon, thanks so much!). But how, the internal memory is only 50MB, but the image is almost 300MB? I copied the image to an USB thumb drive, connected it to the phone via an USB OTG adapter and flashed via TWRP Recovery. TWRP also offers ADB sideloading, which might be an alternative, it you don’t have an USB OTG Adapter at hand.

Once flashed, you finally can enjoy the latest android version on your “antique” phone. 🥂

Optional finishing and more info

Root is built-in but disabled by default. If you want root access, you can enable it in developer options.

If you need google services, get ARM | 7.1 | pico (my recommendation) from opengapps.org and flash via TWRP.

If you need more info, you might get started here: [LINEAGE OS] HTC One S Lineage OS 14.1, Android Nougat 7.1 ROM

Final thoughts

The One S with Android 7.1.2 almost works better than my HTC One M8 with Android 6! Why must HTC make it so hard to get there? And why are manufacturers not able to support their devices longer than 2 years, while the community or even single indivudals are able to do so for more than 5 years??

[EDIT 2017/06/13: Google just published the guaranteed updates for its devices: two years of upgrades and another year of security updates. While this is at least some formal guarantee (other manufacturer just don’t guarantee anything) it still is far from the five years provided by the community for my HTC One S… ]

I’m still waiting for a manufacturer that guarantees support for its devices for many years. That would really be a unique selling point! I can’t believe no manufacturer uses this USP on the highly competitive market for mobile devices. In addition, this would be so much more sustainable, and contribute to a green(er) IT. While the whole world complaints about planned obsolescence, why is there no manufacturer that uses this fact for positive marketing?

[EDIT 2017/07/01: HMD Global (owner of the Nokia brand) just announced that they intend to provide plain vanilla android phones with support “even after two years“. I looking forward to their next anouncements. My calls might just have been heard 👂]

[EDIT 2017/10/05: Google talks about four android version upgrades being possible from Android O and releases Pixel 2 with three years of support. See More sutainable Android Software with Project Treble and 6-y LTS Kernels with Android O?]

What is Google doing, by the way? They introduce Safety Net, providing the oportunity for developers to hide their apps on Google Play from specific devices, such as the ones running custom ROMs. So now, no more Netflix, etc. for custom ROMs. Effectively, this is another punch for the custom ROM scene after the death of CyanogenMod.

Lets just hope custom ROM developers will not be discouraged by these facts and continue their imporant work, making success stories such as the one of my HTC One granny possible.

Thank you android community, XDA forums, custom ROM developers, etc. for sharing your work and never giving up! 👍

Automatic checks for vulnerabilities in Java project dependencies

 Java aktuell published an article I wrote on a topic at work for TRIOLOGY GmbH.

You can find an English version on the TRIOLOGY Blog: Automatic checks for vulnerabilities in Java project dependencies. The article shows an approach to keeping your Java project dependencies free of known vulnarabilities (e.g. CVEs) using the OWASP Dependency check with Jenkins and Maven. There also is an example project on GitHub.

The original article PDF (in German) is available for download here: Automatisierte Überprüfung von Sicherheitslücken in Abhängigkeiten  von Java-Projekten.

TRIOLOGY also published a short Q&A on the article, which can be found here.

Maven: Create a more sophisticated build number

Earlier this year, while working on a project for TRIOLOGY GmbH, I once again used maven to write a version name into an application, using the mechanism described in my post Maven: Create a simple build number. As a more sophisticated version name was required for this project, we expanded it by a time stamp, SCM information (branch and commit), build number and a also created a special name for releases. You can find a how-to here – Version names with Maven: Creating the version name – which is the first part of a small series of blog posts on this topic.

The second part shows how the version name can be read from within the application. While writing the examples for the post, I wondered how many times I must have implemeted reading a version name from a file in Java. Way too often! So I decided that this would be the very last time I had to do it, and extracted the logic into a small library: versionName, availble on GitHub. What it does and how to use it is described in the second part of the post: Version names with Maven: Reading the version name.

Hopefully, this will be useful for someone else. Funny enough, in the new project I’m on, I’m about to reuse it once again. I’m glad I don’t have to write it again. Here’s to reusability 🍺

Building GitHub projects with Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube 5.2 on OpenShift

Time for an update of the post Building GitHub projects with Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube 4.1.1 on OpenShift, because SonarQube 5.2 is out: It’s the first version since 4.1.1 that can be run on OpenShift. That is, it’s the first version of SonarQube 5 and the first one that contains Elasticsearch and many other features that are now available on OpenShift!
Interested? Then let’s see how to set up SonarQube on OpenShift.

• If you’re starting from scratch, just skip to this section.
• If you got a running instance of SonarQube
  • make sure to back up you instance before you continue:
    rhc snapshot save -a --filepath
    or
    ssh @-.rhcloud.com 'snapshot' > sonar.tar.gz
  • Then pull the git repository just like in step 2,
  • wait until the app has started and visit

    https://sonar-.rhcloud.com/setup

    SonarQube will update it’s database during the process.

  • If you followed this post to set up your SonarQube instance and therefore use an SSH tunnel to access the SonarQube database, note that you can now get rid of this workaround. From SonarQube 5.2 the analyses can be run without direct contact to the database.
    That is, you can also remove the database connection from your the configuration of the SonarQube plugin in jenkins.

Install new SonarQube instance

To install SonarQube 5.2, execute the following steps on your machine:

1. rhc app create sonar diy-0.1 postgresql-9.2

   Make sure to remember the login and passwords!

2. git rm -r diy .openshift misc README.md
   git remote add upstream -m master https://github.com/schnatterer/openshift-sonarqube.git
   git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master
   git push
   

3. Login to your SonarQube instance at

   http://sonar-.rhcloud.com/

   Note that the initial setup may take some minutes. So be patient.
   The default login and passwords are admin / admin.
   You might want to change the password right away!

Basic installation Jenkins

Basically, the following is an updated (and a lot simpler) version of my post about SonarQube 4.1.1.

1. Create Jenkins app

   rhc app create jenkins jenkins-1

2. Install Plugins
   Browse to Update Center

   https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/pluginManager/advanced

   and hit Check Now (as described here).
   Then go to the Available tab and install

   1. Sonar Plugin,
   2. GitHub plugin,
   3. embeddable-build-status (if you’d like to include those nifty build badges in you README.md).

   Then hit Install without restart or Download and install after restart. If necessary, you can restart your app anytime like so

   rhc app restart -a jenkins

3. Set up maven settings.xml to a writable location.
   • SSH to Jenkins

     mkdir $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2
     echo -e "<settings><localRepository>$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2</localRepository></settings>" > $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2/settings.xml
     

   • Browse to Configure System

     https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure

     Default settings provider: Settings file in file system
File path=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2/settings.xml

4. Either see my post on how to introduce a dedicated slave node to this setup or
   set up the Jenkins master to run its own builds as follows (not recommended on small gears, as you might run out of memory pretty fast during builds):
   Go to Configure System

   https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure

   and set
   # of executors: 1

5. Setup sonar plugin (the following bases on SonarQube Plugin 2.3 for Jenkins)
   On the Jenkins frontend, go to Configure System

   https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure

   • Global properties,
     tick Environment variables
     Click Add
name=SONAR_USER_HOME
value=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR
     See here for more information.
   • Setup the Runner:
     Navigate to SonarQube Runner
     Click Add SonarQube Runner
Name=
   • Then set up the plugin itself
     Navigate to SonarQube
     tick Enable injection of SonarQube server configuration as build environment variables
     and set the following
     Name=
Server URL:

     http://sonar-.rhcloud.com/

     Sonar account login: admin
Sonar account password: (default: admin)

   • Hit Save

Configure build for a repository

Now lets set up our first build.

1. Go to

   https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/view/All/newJob

   Item name:
   (Unfortunately, Maven projects do not work due to OpenShift’s restrictions.)
   Hit OK

2. On the next Screen
   GitHub project:

   https://github.com///

   Source Code Management:

   https://github.com//.git

   Branch Specifier (blank for 'any'): origin/master
Build Triggers: Tick Build when a change is pushed to GitHub
Build Environment: Tick Prepare SonarQube Scanner environment
Build | Execute Shell

   cd $WORKSPACE
   # Start the actual build
   mvn clean package  $SONAR_MAVEN_GOAL --settings $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2/settings.xml -Dsonar.host.url=$SONAR_HOST_URL
   

3. I’d also recommend the following actions
   Post-build Actions| Add post-build action| Publish JUnit test result report
Test report XMLs=target/surefire-reports/TEST-.xml*
Post-build Actions| Add post-build action| E-mail Notification
Recipients=
4. Hit Apply.
5. Finally, press Save and start you first build. Check Jenkins console output for errors. If everything succeeds you should see the result of the project’s analysis on SonarQube’s dashboard.

Using Custom Maven / JDK version when building with Jenkins on OpenShift

[EDIT (2016-06-02): OpenShift now provides different JDK “alternatives”, e.g.

/etc/alternatives/java_sdk_1.8.0

So you might want to skip the steps bellow, regarding a custom JDK. The steps described for using a custom maven still apply, however.

]

In previous posts I pointed out how to build GitHub projects with Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube and how to run these builds on dedicated Jenkins slaves. The following shows how to replace the “stock” versions of maven and JDK that are provided by OpenShift.

At the time of writing OpenShift features Maven 3.0.4 and OpenJDK Server 1.7.0_85. Why would you want to change those? Best example is a Java8 project to be build on Jenkins. Can we just advise Jenkins to download the newest Oracle JDK and we’re good to go? Nope, it’s not that simple on OpenShift! Jenkins does download the new JDK, sets the JAVA_HOME variable and the correct PATH, but maven is always going to use the stock JDK. Why? Running this command provides the answer

$ cat `which mvn`
#!/bin/sh
prog=$(basename $0)
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java
export JAVACMD=$JAVA_HOME/bin/java
export M2_HOME=/usr/share/java/apache-maven-3.0.4
exec $M2_HOME/bin/$prog "$@"

The stock maven is setting its own environment variables that cannot be overridden by Jenkins!

So, in order to exchange the JDK, we need to exchange maven first.

• SSH to the machines where your builds are executed (e.g. your slave node). The following example show what to do for maven 3.3.3:

  cd $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR
  mkdir maven
  cd maven
  wget http://apache.lauf-forum.at/maven/maven-3/3.3.3/binaries/apache-maven-3.3.3-bin.tar.gz
  tar -xvf apache-maven-3.3.3-bin.tar.gz
  rm apache-maven-3.3.3-bin.tar.gz
  

• Edit maven config

  vi $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/maven/apache-maven-3.3.3/conf/settings.xml
  

  Add the following to the tag (replace by your OpenShift UID first)

  /var/lib/openshift//app-root/data/.m2

  (press i button for edit mode, insert, then press esc button, enter :wq, finally press return button)

• Browse to

  https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure

  Set Environment variables
  PATH=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/maven/apache-maven-3.3.3/bin:$PATH
M2_HOME=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/maven/apache-maven-3.3.3

• And that’s it, your builds are now running on the custom maven!
  This allows for using a specific JDK in Jenkins. You could just choose a specific JDK via Jenkins console. This is comfortable, but has one disadvantage: It takes a lot of memory (approx. 600MB per JDK), because the JDK is stored twice – compressed in cache to be sent to slave and again uncompressed to be used on the master. If you got enough memory, you’re done here.

  However, In case you’re running a small gear with only 1GB of memory, you might want to save a bit of your precious memory. The following example shows how to do so for JDK 8 update 51 build 16.
  On SSH:

  cd $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR
  mkdir jdk
  cd jdk
  wget --no-check-certificate --no-cookies --header "Cookie: oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u51-b16/jdk-8u51-linux-x64.tar.gz
  tar -xvf jdk-8u51-linux-x64.tar.gz
  rm jdk-8u51-linux-x64.tar.gz
  

• Then go to Jenkins

  https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure

  JDK installations | JDK
  Name=SlaveOnly-Custom-JDK8u51
JAVA_HOME=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/jdk/jdk-8u51-linux-x64

Building GitHub projects on Jenkins slaves on OpenShift

This post showed how to build GitHub projects with Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube 4 on OpenShift. For starters, it used the Jenkins master node for running build jobs. However, when running on a small gear, the master node might run out of memory pretty fast, resulting in a reboot of the node during builds.

In order to resolve this issue, there are two options:

• limitting the memory of the build or
• running the build on a slave node.

As spawning additional nodes is easy in a PaaS context such as OpenShift and provides a better performance than running builds with small memory, the slave solution seems to be the better approach.

This post shows how.

1. Create new DYI app as a slave node (a how-to can be found here), name the node e.g. slave
2. Create node in Jenkins
   1. Go to Jenkins web UI and create new node:

      https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/computer/new

   2. Set the following values:
      Remote FS root:/app-root/data folder on slave. Typically this is /var/lib/openshift//app-root/data/jenkins, you can find out by SSHing to the slave node and calling

      echo $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/app-root/data/jenkins

      Labels: Some label to use within builds to refer the node, e.g. OS Slave #1
Host: the slave’s hostname, e.g. slave-.rhcloud.com

   3. Add Credentials
      username:
      Private Key File:Path to a private key file that is authorized for your OpenShift account. In the <a href="https://itaffinity.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/building-github-projects-with-jenkins-maven-and-sonarqube-4-1-1-on-openshift/”>first post this path was used: /var/lib/openshift//app-root/data/git-ssh/id_rsa. Note: $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR seems not to work here.
      BTW: You can change the credentials any time later via this URL

      https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/credentials/

3. Prepare slave node: Create same environment as on master in the <a href="https://itaffinity.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/building-github-projects-with-jenkins-maven-and-sonarqube-4-1-1-on-openshift/”>first post
   1. Create folder structure

      mkdir $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/jenkins
      mkdir $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2
      echo -e "<settings><localRepository>$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2</localRepository></settings>" > $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2/settings.xml
      

   2. Copy SSH directory from master to same directory on slave, e.g.

      scp -rp -i $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.ssh $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.ssh <slave's UID>@slave-<your account>.rhcloud.com:app-root/data/.ssh

   3. As the different cartridges (jenkins and DIY) have different environment variables for their local IP addresses ($OPENSHIFT_JENKINS_IP vs $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP) we’ll have to improvise at this point. There are two options: Either
      1. Replace all occurrences of $OPENSHIFT_JENKINS_IP
         In all builds and in

         https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure

         Sonar | Sonar installations
Database URL: jdbc:postgresql://$OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP:15555/sonarqube
         or

      2. Create an $OPENSHIFT_JENKINS_IP environment variable on your slave machine

         rhc env set OPENSHIFT_JENKINS_IP=<value of  $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP> -a slave

         You can find out the value of $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP by SSHing to the slave and execute

         echo $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP 

      3. I’d love to hear suggesstions that do better 😉
4. Adapt Build
   Easiest way is to not use the master at all.
   To do so, go to

   https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure

   and set # of executors to 0.
   Hit Apply

5. Limit memory usage.
   Make sure the slave does not run out of memory (which leads to a restart of the node):
   Global properties | Environment variables
name: MAVEN_OPTS
value: -Xmx512m
   Hit Save.
6. Now run a build. It should run on the slave and hopefully succeed 🙂

See also Libor Krzyzanek’s Blog: Jenkins on Openshift wi… | JBoss Developer

Modernizing android UIs part 2: design support library, switches, action buttons

After finishing the migration from Actionbarsherlock to appcompat described in the first Post on modernizing android UIs, it turns out there are even more things to modernize in terms of android UIs.

Tabs and design support library

If you used Tabs within the ActionBar, after migrating to appcompat-v7 API 22 you might recognize a warning, that tells you that they are now deprecated.

In order to modernize those, you should use the design support library that was added to the Android SDK with API level 22. Similar to the appcompat -v7, the design support library provides backports of material design components of Android lollipop (5.x) for older versions of Android.

Here’s the steps that rid you of the deprecation warning

• Add the design library to your eclipse workspace and link it with your project in pretty much the same way as appcompat described in the first Post. The library can be found on the following path: <sdkdir>/extras/android/support/design.
  Import it into eclipse as Existing Android Code Into Workspace, change the build target to level 22, and link the appcompat project with it.

• Add the following to maven

  <dependency>
  <groupId>com.android.support</groupId>
  <artifactId>design</artifactId>
  <version>${android.compatibility.version}</version>
  <type>aar</type>
  </dependency>
  

• Change your code to use the new TabLayout as described here. A complete example is the cheesesquare app: activity_main.xml, include_list_viewpager.xml, MainActivity.java
• Once you’re done with this and have the design support library up an running, you could modernize your app by using more of the library’s features like navigation drawers, floating labels and buttons, snackbars, collapsing toolsbars, etc. See this blog post for more features.

The screenshots bellow show a before-after comparison – deprecated tabs vs material design tabs.

Tabs: design support library, API-22

Tabs: AppCompat-v7, API-22, deprecated

 

Checkboxes to switches

Android API level 14 introduces the switch component, that according to google should be used when only one option is available. For API levels < 14  there’s no such thing as switches. So we’ll have to rely on checkboxes there. Here’s how to replace checkbox preferences by switches for devices running API level 14 and above

• In a preference XML, replace CheckBoxPreference by SwitchPreference (see commit ab16eb1997dfba743abcd488b6b20de71b5c3ff0 for an example).
• However, If you want to keep compatibility with API levels < 14, you’re only choice is to keep redundant copies of the same preferences.xml in
  
  • res/xml/ that contains the preferences with CheckBoxPreferences and
  • res/xml-v14/ that contains the same file with SwitchPreferences.

Another before-after comparison is shown bellow – checkboxes vs switches.

Preferences: AppCompat-v7, with checkboxes

AppCompat-v7, API-22 with switches

Using Action Buttons

Action Buttons are icons that realize the most important actions on the actionBar if there is enough room to display them. These could have been used in Actionbarsherlock already, but if you still didn’t modernized them then it’s about time 🙂

One reason for not using action buttons might be that you don’t have suitable icons. Here’s the solution: Google provides a huge amount of material design icons under open source (CC-BY) license. They can be found on this site, or you can just clone their git repository.

So it’s as easy as that

• Choose proper icons for your actions and copy them to your res/drawable-xyz folders
• Add icon tags to your menu.xml like so

      <item
          android:id="@+id/action_refresh"
          android:icon="@drawable/ic_refresh_white_24dp"
          android:title="@string/action_refresh"
          app:showAsAction="ifRoom"/>

And that’s it. See bellow for an example. For an example see the commit that realized this change.

AppCompat-v7, API-22, ActionBar with menu

AppCompat-v7, API-22, ActionBar with action buttons

Modernizing android UIs part 1: Migrating from Actionbarsherlock to Material Design

This post shows by example the steps that are necessary for migrating an android application from Actionbarsherlock to Material Design (introduced in android KitKat/Version 5.x/API level 21/22), while keeping compatibility with at least android Gingerbread/Version 2.3 /API level 9). It uses the appcompat-v7 library on API level 22. The app that was migrated (nusic) in this example is developed using Eclipse, Maven and RoboGuice.

Before-after comparison

Let’s begin with some before-after screenshots:

ActionBarSherlock	AppCompat-v7, API-22
Preferences: ActionBarSherlock	Preferences: AppCompat-v7, API-22

Basic migration (appcompat-v7)

The following lists the steps that were implemented in order to change the app as depicted in the screenshots above.

• Update Android SDK Tools
• Eclipse
  • Setup Eclipse project for appcompat described here.
  • Link your project with it. Right click on your project | Properties | Android | Library | Add
    
  • Remove action bar sherlock. Same menu as above.
• Set Up Maven Build

  • <repositories>
    <repository>
    <id>android</id>
    <url>file://${env.ANDROID_HOME}/extras/android/m2repository</url>
    </repository>
    </repositories>
    

  • <dependency>
    <groupId>com.android.support</groupId>
    <artifactId>appcompat-v7</artifactId>
    <version>${android.compatibility-v7.version}</version>
    <type>aar</type>
    </dependency>
    

• Migrate from Actionbarsherlock to appcompat
  • styles.xml


    <!-- <style name="AppBaseTheme" parent="@style/Theme.Sherlock"> -->
     <style name="AppBaseTheme" parent="@style/Theme.AppCompat">
    

  • Replacing classes
    • RoboSherlockFragment -> RoboFragment
    • RoboSherlockFragmentActivity -> RoboActionBarActivity
    • RoboSherlockPreferenceActivity -> Write your own RoboAppCompatPreferenceActivity that looks like this (or as described here) but is derived from RoboPreferenceActivity (see here for the class that was used in the example).
      Then derive your class from it as before with RoboSherlockPreferenceActivity.
  • Replacing methods
    • getSherlockActivity() -> getActivity()
    • getSupportMenuInflater() -> getMenuInflater()
  • Fixing imports
    • android.view.Menu
    • android.support.v7.app.ActionBar
  • Updating proguard.cfg
    • Remove actionbarsherlock
    • Add

      # support4, appcompat-v7, design support
      -dontwarn android.support.**
      -keep class android.support.** { *; }
      -keep interface android.support.** { *; }
      

For further info please see

• The second post of this series about android UI modernization that contains the desing support library, switches and recommendations for action buttons.
• The commits that applied these steps to nusic (457a50bfcd63d084dac0faf3f35efe3f8077fb7e and b1ea9f80cb2bb4cdc57de0bdcf29e7e4a47b7289)
• Migrating from ActionBarSherlock to ActionBarCompat | Grokking Android
• AppCompat v21 — Material Design for Pre-Lollipop Devices! | Android Developers Blog

iTunes: Exporting playlists with relative paths

TL;DR; A way of exporting iTunes playlists with relative paths is described here.

iTunes Export

Once upon a time I wrote a little tool for exporting playlists from Songbird/Nightinale. After migrating to iTunes, I was looking for a tool that provides the same functionality for iTunes. Fortunately, there already is one: iTunes Export. It’s twofold – you can either use a UI or a console version. I’m more the console type of guy, so my choice is clear. The latest release, version 2.2.2, was released in 2010, almost 5 years ago… and it still works with iTunes 12.1.2 – it’s a miracle! And it’s fast – my approximately 100 playlists are exported in less than 2 minutes.

Relative Playlist workaround

Among all those parameters of iTunes export, there is none for creating relative playlists, though. However, we can use a workaround for achieving this, by combining the musicPath and musicPathOld parameters. Here’s what the doc says:

• musicPath
  iTunes Export will use the absolute location of your music files in the playlist. iTunes Export accepts a command line parameter that will override this default. Example:

  java -jar itunesexport.jar -musicPath="c:\My Music Directory"

• musicPathOld
  Tunes Export will only apply the prefix to tracks stored in the directory configured in iTunes as the iTunes Music Folder location. Files stored in a different directory will not have the prefix applied.If you only wish to override a portion of the music path you can specifi the musicPathOld parameter. iTunes Export will replace this path with the musicPath parameter instead of replacing the default music path.

  java -jar itunesexport.jar -musicPathOld="c:\My Old Path"

A bit complicated, eh?!

Exporting playlists with relative paths by example

I’ll point out how we can use those parameters by a small example. Imagine the following folder structure

D:\Music\
  Playlists\
  Artist1\ 
    Song1.ext
  Artist2\
    Album\
      Song2.ext
  iTunes
    iTunes Library.xml

If we had a playlist call playlistX that contained Song1 and Song2 (anyone remember a band called Blur? 🙂 ) and we would export it without further parameters to the Playlists folder, it would look like this:

D:\Music\Artist1\Song1.ext
D:\Music\Artist2\Album\Song2.ext

What we’re going to do is replace the absolute part with a relative one (in respect to the destination folder for playlists). In our example: Replace “D:\Music” by “..” because it’s the parent folder of “D:\Music\Playlists“. That’s exactly what the parameters mentioned above are for! musicPathOld is the the part that is going to be replaced by musicPath. Speaking of which, our call to iTunesExport looks like this:

java -jar itunesexport.jar -library="D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Library.xml" -outputDir="D:\Music\Playlists" -musicPath=".." -musicPathOld="D:\Music"

and results in the file D:\Music\Playlists\playlistX.m3u

..\Artist1\Song1.ext
..\Artist2\Album\Song2.ext

Migrating from Songbird/Nightingale to iTunes

TL;DR; If you still use Songbird or Nightingale and want to migrate your music database to iTunes, start reading here.

Bye-bye Songbird, bye-bye Nightingale

Is anyone out there still using Nightingale or even Songbird? I started using Songbird in 2009 (or even earlier) and switched to Nightingale in 2013. All that time I loved the open source approach of both applications and even contrtibuted a bit myself. However, there also were a lot of drawbacks like performance, incompatibilities of addons after each new version, etc. Speaking of addons – the idea of a modular media player that is extensible just like Firefox or Thunderbird is wonderful. However, it seems to me there’s not much of a community left that releases addons for Nightingale. One of my favorites used to be MLyrics, which was last released in 2013 and doesn’t work properly anymore in the current version of Nightingale (at least for me). Still, there seems to be some development going on. Same goes for the core media player software itself: We all know that Songbird was discontinued in 2013 and the last release of Nightingale was published in January, 2014. Even though there also seems to be some development going on, I lost hope that there will be better usability at some point. So I finally decided with a heavy heart to move on. Nevertheless, I’d like to say thank you to all the Nightingale developers for their strong efforts to keep the dream of a real open source alternative for iTunes alive.

Is there a better alternative to Nightingale? That question I cannot answer properly. My reasons for migrating to iTunes are that it has been maintained by a huge company for years and it’s one of the most popular media players around. So hopefully, it might get along better with my rather huge media library in terms of performance. Plus it is the only tool that is capable of feeding my iPod Nano 6

Technical approaches of migrating to iTunes

Leaving sentimentality behind – how to migrate from Songbird/Nightingale to iTunes?

One of the nice things about Songbird/Nightingale is their SQLite database. I already worked with it before when creating a playlist exporter for Songbird using the java programming language. It’s always a good idea not to reinvent the wheel. So after extracting the database wrapper into a separate project – songbirdDbApi4j (right now, I really wonder why I named it like this 😮 ) – we’re halfway done with the Songbird to iTunes migration. Almost.

The other half – importing to iTunes was a bit more challenging. iTunes stores its database in an XML file. So one approach is to access this XML directly, just like tools such as iTunesExport. However, this file is generated by iTunes merely for the purpose of exporting, the actual database is stored in the ITL file. It would be possible to recreate the ITL from the XML, but this approach is not very convenient. So a different approach might be more suitable here: on Windows, iTunes offers a COM Interface. It’s poorly documented but fortunately, the developers of COM4j implemented it as one of their sample projects. In order to ease the use of this API, I create a very basic Java wrapper for iTunes’ COM API (itunes4j).

Almost done! What’s missing is a bit of glue logic that reads all files, some of their attributes and all playlists from songbird using songbirdDbApi4j and adds them to iTunes via iTunes4j.

Migrating to iTunes

After a lot of empirical studies and nightly test migrations, I’m proud to present a tool for migrating from songbird to iTunes: songbird2itunes. In case there happen to be any other Nightingale survivors out there that run on Windows and would like to migrate their music database to iTunes, you might just give it a go!

I did my best to make it a resilient migration tool. Still, there might be errors. So:

1. Double check if you really want to leave Nightingale behind
2. Make sure to read the wiki first. If you’re sure you want to do this, start the migration as described there.
3. When the migration is done, check if the statistics show any warnings.
4. If so, look for WARN in the songbird2itunes.log and see if those are not critical for you.
5. In case of error, please fix it and contribute 🙂
6. Manually check your new iTunes library, making sure everything is as expected