Sunday, July 01, 2012

Nook Color Ice Cream Sandwich errata

I tried to keep my Nook Color Ice Cream Sandwich post concise but I actually have a lot more to talk about so here goes. Remember that I'm running CyanogenMod 9.

Where to start?

I guess the first thing is that by default the Nook Color runs Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) in Tablet UI mode. What's that mean? Here's the best I can find:


I also found an article in Computerworld about the Tablet UI.

If you need to get some sleep you can go read the Android 4.0 SDK documentation. Start with the Action Bar.

Anyway here's what my homescreen looks like in portrait and then landscape:



I'm using the stock ICS launcher, Trebuchet.

The top left is obviously the "Search Bar." At the far right, the grid opens the App drawer. There's not an App dock at the bottom in the Tablet UI.

I can only get the grid to be 6 icons wide and 5 icons deep.

The "Notification Bar" is at the bottom. The icons from the left are Return, Home, and Recent Apps. The notification area is at the right. You didn't see a Menu icon did you?

Here's what "Recent Apps" looks like:


If you tap one of these thumbnails you are taken to that app. If you swipe it right or left the thumbnail disappears. I'm not positive whether the app is actually closed at that point or not. Notice that the Return icon changed to what I'll call a Dismiss icon. Tap it and the "Recent Apps" menu disappears.

Swiping up in the Notification Area gives you a "Quick Settings" menu:


Swiping one of the notifications, in this case "Snapshot captured." dismisses that notification. Tapping the icon that looks like 3 sliders opens a subset of the Settings menu.



Check the date and time to see how long it took me to get that screenshot. Tap the "Settings" choice and you get the full "Settings" menu (finally).


In the "Wi-Fi" settings you begin to see the tablet presentation. The action choices are in a column on the left and the details are in a column on the right.

The "Battery" display shows which resources have consumed the battery.


In the "Apps" display you see how much memory each application is using.


If you tap on an app you get more details.


But notice that you can "Disable" an app from here. That is similar to "freezing" an app with Titanium Backup in prior versions of Android.

The "Performance" setting gives a strong warning when you tap it.


This is why.


You can tweak many parameters affecting performance and battery consumption. You can see that I'm overclocked to 1100 MHz. Also that I don't have "Set on boot" checked. This means that if the Nook reboots it defaults to stock clockings.

Here's the "About tablet" display showing the details of the ROM:


Here's the details on the "Homescreen" settings:


The "Storage" display shows internal and external SD storage.


The "Data usage" display shows 3G or Wi-Fi usage by app.


Tapping the "App drawer" icon at the top right of the homescreen brings up the App drawer.


If you scroll the App drawer to the right you are shown the Wizards drawer.


Here's a good example of how ICS apps adjust to the Tablet UI:


Notice the two column layout.

While we're looking at this notice the three dots icon at the top right. This is an ICS compatible app's Menu icon.

As a contrast here's a non-ICS compatible app, Car Cast:


Since the Car Cast doesn't present the ICS Menu icon ICS provides to the left of the Notification area.

I'm running Flipboard as well. It complained of the screen size when I installed it but it has run fine. I show it here to illustrate that it is not tablet aware.

This is Flipboard flipping pages:


You can tell it's flipping top to bottom like a phone rather than side to side like on the iPad.

I'm running the Swype Beta that was released 06/20/12. Prior to that it wouldn't even install,


There's the Dismiss icon in the lower left to dismiss the keyboard.

I worked for hours over days to get the wallpaper correct. I tried every size and every crop method I could find. Finally I came across a forum post referencing Wallpaper Wizardrii. Fixed it first time. Awesome.


I have an issue with the battery icon still showing charging status after I had unplugged the charger. leapinlar suggested that I try resetting the battery stats. Let me net it out.

CWM is the same thing as ClockworkMod is the same thing as ROM Manager.

ROM Manager comes pre-installed on CM9. I accidentally tapped the top menu item and flashed ClockworkMod Recovery onto the eMMC recovery. leapinlar has instructions on how to use a modified CWM recovery from a uSD in his tips thread.

By the way that didn't help my battery indicator. I think it's a physical problem with the microUSB jack on the Nook.

Since ICS isn't an "official" CyanogenMod release yet you'll probably want to flash a new "nightly" from time to time.

Here's how I do it:


Whew!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

This made my life SO much easier.
Thanks for all the instructions and hints for this. I would also like to try Swype- are you still using it?

Ben Moore said...

Yes, I'm still using Swype. I had to sign up for the Swype Beta. I did that a long time ago so I don't remember the details. I used an "unauthorized" version on Gingerbread. That was unstable on ICS but the recenty Swype Beta update made ICS work fine.

Before the Swype Beta was updated I used TouchPal Keyboard on ICS and it worked fine.

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for this and your blog page on installing CM9 to a micro sd card. I am running CM7 from the sd card on my Nook Color. I barely understand most of this stuff, and find it a great help that you have taken the time to consolidate the instructions and to elaborate by providing this distillation of your hands on experiences. I will soon take the leap to CM9. I feel emboldened by your excellent instructions.

Anonymous said...

First, thanks for your straight forward instructions on how to install ICS on Nook Color with an SD card. You made it very easy, and I was up and running with no issues relatively quickly. Also, thanks for the instructions on how to update to the new nightly builds. Again, very straight forward and no issues were had.

I do have a question, though. I like to d/l the latest nightly every night, but taking out the SD card and all that is somewhat of a pain. I'm trying to figure out how to d/l and install the nightly from GooManager or something else, so I don't have to keep popping the SD card in and out. I've had limited success in finding other tutorials for how to use these other programs, but they all seem focused on installs that were done to the internal flash drive.

Do you have instructions for how to use GooManager (or another ROM program) to d/l and update to the latest nightly on an SD card install?

Thanks again.

Ben Moore said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ben Moore said...

I don't use GooManager but I've seen a discussion of how to use GooManager for SD installs here.

Anonymous said...

Awesome. Thank you for this link. I've been searching far and wide for something that would essentially let me drop files into the boot partition on my SD card. I couldn't see the partition using any file managers, but the link you provided led me to this exact post:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=22858059&postcount=1652

This link gives instructions for how to make the boot partition a folder that you can save the nightlies directly into, using GooManager or otherwise.

In short...

1) Download the file "update-sdbootmount-rev2.zip" from the link above.
2) Copy ZIP file to the SD boot partition by plugging it into your computer.
3) Insert card back into Nook, reboot to SD Card Recovery following your instructions.
4) Let it install, then load back into ICS.
5) You can now access the boot partition as "/sdboot/"
6) Download your nightlies into this folder either using the link from your tutorial or from GooManager (change download directory in settings to "/sdboot/" so to avoid copy/paste from the default directory).
7) Reboot to SD Card Recovery, again following your instructions.

Now I don't have to keep ejecting and loading that tiny little SD card. It may not have been such a big deal if it was a little easier to get in and out of that slot. Oh well.

Thanks again for your help. I owe you a beer or three :)

Ben Moore said...

Great! And thanks for recapping the process for other readers.

I don't flash nightlies very often. "If it ain't broke don't fix it."