A Couple Android Magic Tricks

Strolled through XDA just now, found a few gems worth sharing not because I think a ton of you will use them but to characterize the nerd factor Android offers. What, you’re not a nerd? Then what the hell are you doing reading a nerd blog?

In addition to many Samba clients, something that lets you get onto your Windows file network, you can also run a Samba server, letting you access your external storage in your phone from your computer over wifi as if it were a shared folder on another Windows computer. It’s called Samba Filesharing by Jimmy Chingala, it’s free on the market, and here’s the XDA post including development versions. Note that Macs can also climb onto an SMB share.

Here’s something really impressive. Viulian over at XDA has managed to get Lighttpd, PHP5 and Sqlite3 (with support for MySQL and PostgreSQL. While we already have been able to run those things using Ubuntu Linux on our Android phones without even having to flash anything, this is compiled for ARM processors, effectively turning your phone into a full-fledged LAMP, sort of. I’d love to see one of you Windows Phone badasses produce a screenshot that looks anything like this:

Wonder what would happen if I tried to host this site for an hour or so on my Nexus with this. Hmm.

Then there’s SwiFTP, which I wrote about before, an FTP server that not only is an FTP daemon, you can also access your phone not just on wifi but over the cellular air or behind some other firewall by means of a proxy server you can either run yourself if you’ve got a server or use the developer’s who’s kind enough to share his bandwidth. And here’s a solid VNC server with mouse tweaks and shortcuts, the whole nine.

That’s enough for now on servers, I think you get the point, so how about a client you won’t find elsewhere? Here’s the stock Android email client (the open source version) what has been modified to let you connect to Exchange servers without Exchange Security policy enforcement. Nobody’s recommending that you don’t support or enforce such security policies on your Exchange server, but if you don’t for whatever reason, hey, that’s your business buddy, and this is your email client.

Okay one more trick. You may know you can modify your boot animations with Android, you may know you can check out dmesg / logcat too, but did you know you can get a boot animation that scrolls through it live like a regular BIOS boot? You do now.

Doug Simmons