Last updated on January 22, 2009
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Today at lunch I made a quick trip home and plugged in the batteries for my bike lights so that I’d be able to see tonight when Bob and I met up for a bike ride through Dodge Park and the Clinton River Park. (For reference, the two are connected by the bridge above, which crosses the Clinton River.) I rode the Bianchi D.I.S.S., which was really great everywhere except for the 3″ thick glare ice in one of the flooded parts of the trail. (Bob had no problem riding over it with his Nokian Extreme 294 studded tires, though.)
That photo above was taken with the new-to-me Android / T-Mobile G1 and is at the heart of my biggest problem with it: getting content (namely pictures) off of it. The device works great, but it does not support Bluetooth OBEX, has no IR, and the SD card does not mount as USB Mass Storage when the handset is connected via USB. I’ve also had no luck with the now four FTP, SFTP, and/or direct-to-Gallery apps which I’ve tried.
The only current solution seems to be emailing the photos or copying them over USB using adb (Android Debug Bridge). Emails difficulties are obvious, and adb is just tedious, requiring full paths to the images (eg: c0nsumer@reason:~/Desktop> adb pull /sdcard/dcim/Camera/20090121185850.jpg 20090121185850.jpg).
I’d love a direct-to-Gallery uploader, but judging by the current state of the other apps in Android Market it looks like I’ll have to write one myself.
There is something called Bucket Upload which seemed promising as it could do custom HTTP multipart uploads, but as the Gallery Remote Protocol requires two requests for authenticated uploads (login then add-item) it wouldn’t work. It’s only designed to do single-request uploads.
UPDATE: It’s been shown to me that selecting the USB connectivity notification in Android after plugging the phone in allows one to dismount the microSD card from the phone and present it to the OS. This will be a good stopgap.