2010/05/29

Little Firefox extension for people with Android 2.2

One of the new features that it's coming in Android 2.2 or FroYo is the ability to use the Google "Cloud to Device" servers. Basically it is the possibility of an Android App to get a notification from an external server, but without the need to open a connection by yourself and drain the battery and data plan of the user. It's nicely explained in the Android Developers blog: Android Cloud to Device Messaging

Besides the API they have published also a little project "Chrome to Phone" that adds a little button in your chrome browser to send whatever page you are currently viewing to your phone. But despite all the nice features of Chrome I still prefer to use Firefox, the Chrome interface still looks too weird to me and in general I know that I Firefox works mostly the way that I want.

So the next step was quite obvious: it was a Sunday with some free time so I created the Send to Phone extension. It was funny but quickly after publishing it I realized that another guy had the same idea and he beat me by 3 minutes, fortunately it seems that none of us have a big ego so we have agreed to merge both extensions, I picked some of his code, added a few extra things and we got now a nicer version for you to enjoy.

If you did install the leaked 2.2 preview you can test the extension right now, I hope that you enjoy it and find it useful at least for some situations: for example this morning I started watching a YouTube video on the PC, but had to go to the kitchen, so I just clicked the button and then I had the same video on the phone without the need to search anything.

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