Last week I got tired of waiting for the Android Lollipop OTA update to reach my Nexus 5. I went through manually flashing the Nexus 5 Lollipop factory image. You can read all about my upgrade process in the upgrade mini-project posts (which is practically finished, but some of the planned posts are still pending).

Some initial thoughts on Android Lollipop:

1. It’s pretty.
2. It’s smooth.
3. I experienced some really bad cellular reception on the first day. It seems the issue went away though.
4. Battery drain is somewhat higher on average. This is not based on benchmarking, just on hunch. The difference is not significant enough to be a real issue, at least for me.
5. The new lock screen behavior with notifications is interesting. I haven’t restored my DashClock lock screen configuration, so I can see how I like this one.
6. The most notable change is probably the task switcher. It’s completely different. As long as I keep it clean, I like it. The problem is that it’s hard to keep it clean…
7. Still haven’t figured out the new share menu. Is it sorted? By what? Can I control it?
8. A nasty bug that I ran into 3-4 times so far: some activity gets “stuck” in the foreground. pressing “back”, “home”, or trying to switch away doesn’t work. after several seconds, I can lock, unlock, and then “home” will bring back the home screen. I couldn’t recognize any specific pattern that led to this bug yet.
9. The Tasker task I have for disabling the PIN code lock stopped working. When I run it, the screen lock setting is changed to “Swipe” as expected, but the PIN is still active…
10. SmartLock is nice! I heard an upcoming update adds “trusted locations” to it, which will be very useful for me!
11. Long pressing the power button is a bit confusing now. It offers only “Power off”. No more silent / vibrate mode.
12. The volume control now contains also “Interruptions control”. This can be set to “All”, “Priority” or “None”. “None” is like silent mode, but also for alarms! Seems that “Priority” is equivalent to the “standard silent mode”. Not sure where I can choose between “silent” and “vibrate” though…
13. “Priority” mode can be enabled “indefinitely”, or for “N hours”. It also allows configuring “Downtime”, that automatically sets priority mode on schedule. This is similar to the Silence Premium app that I use for “downtime” and auto-priority-mode during calendar events, but without the calendar-awareness feature.

Some thoughts on the Android upgrade process:

• When preparing for an upgrade, it’s hard to predict what gets automatically restored and what doesn’t.
• The way different apps handle customization, settings, and app-related data is pretty inconsistent. From an end-user point of view, I’d expect Android to offer some kind of “synchronized app configuration and data storage service” API, that I can connect with my Google account. This way, my personalization can follow me across different devices and device-upgrades without all the hassle. Am I missing something here?
• Overall, despite taking the factory image flashing route, the upgrade process was straight forward and smooth.

The Weekly Review is a recurring (so-far-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.

Blog posts from the last week

1. “Released” the first version of nitpick, automating sorting include files in C++ code.
2. ShellFoo: printing the Nth line of a file.
3. Documented my Nexus 5 settings and configuration.
4. The previous weekly review.

With the Lollipop upgrade mini-project taking precedence, my other active projects and series suffered a bit. Once I finish with it, I plan to get back to covering the website side project.

If you’ve been following my SCons series, be assured that I have more episodes coming up. In case you’re interested, I finished implementing and deploying most of the SCons enhancements I planned in DayJob, so I have all that to cover.

I also have stuff planned for my Mac training.

It’s quite a lot to juggle, so if you prefer hearing about something over something else – let me know! It might influence what I choose to prioritize! 🙂

The best way to keep up with new posts is to follow the feed.

Web selections

Not much this week.

This Kali-on-Raspberry-PI-with-TFT project from Offensive Security looks cool.

Interesting article on scaling Agile. It’s nice that at the DayJob we have such a small team, that not only we don’t need to “scale Agile”, even “basic Agile” itself is an overkill for us! 🙂

I find it mind blowing that someone thinks it’s a good idea to copyright APIs. Glad to see the EFF is acting against it.

Side project updates

I’m practically finished with the Lollipop upgrade mini-project, as alluded to in the intro. I expect to finish writing up the accompanying posts during this week, and be completely finished with it by early next week.

No significant progress with the website project. I fixed a couple of new issues with the Evernote-image-extractor (like lost indentation due to image extraction). Every time I try to work with text across different services (Evernote / WordPress in this case), I get reminded how broken the world of text encoding really is…