Posts Tagged ‘tutorial’

Remove Mintnav from Android phone

Wednesday, September 6th, 2023
Remove Mintnav from Android phone

Mintnav.com is a suspicious website that has been reported by numerous Android mobile users as the unexpected homepage in their Google Chrome browser. This sudden appearance has raised concerns among users, leading them to seek methods to remove or replace it. If you’re facing a similar issue, this article will guide you through the steps to remove Mintnav.com from your Android phone, specifically Xiaomi devices, and provide insights into the potential malware threat associated with it.

Mintnav’s sudden emergence as the default homepage on Android devices has been a topic of discussion on various forums. Users are often puzzled by its unexpected appearance and are eager to replace it with a more familiar or preferred URL. According to reports from users on Reddit, Xiaomi mobile phones might be compromised by malware present in the Chrome browser. While this information has not been officially confirmed by Xiaomi or cybersecurity experts, it has generated significant concern within the tech community.

The malware, referred to as ‘Mintnav’, is believed to hijack the Chrome browser on Xiaomi devices. Specific details regarding its operation or the exact components of the browser it affects remain unclear. However, users have observed alterations to their Chrome homepage, which now redirects to the Mintnav.com website. The legitimacy of this site is questionable, as no official documentation exists, and similar incidents have been reported on Xiaomi devices previously.

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Android Architecture: Message-based MVC

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

How do you separate application state, user interaction logic and data presentation in your Android apps?

Platform designers did not enforce any high-level application architecture framework upon us but left us enough options to implement our own solutions based on application requirements and scale. Most simple applications will get away with just storing data in their widgets (such as in text fields, spinners etc.) and their state manipulation right in event handlers such as OnClickListener‘s. However, if you are going to write a complex application or plan to sophisticate your simple app further, you should really think how to layer it well so that the architecture supports adding new features and satisfies the expected performance, flexibility, responsiveness and other requirements, and your code does not become a mess.

In this article, I will show you one practical approach to dividing application code into three layers according the MVC paradigm and connecting the view to the controller using the Android messaging framework. I used it in my own code and although it might not be 100% academically correct or applicable for every possible app, I love the benefits it gives to me as my app grows more and more complex.

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Android Audio: Play an MP3 file on an AudioTrack

Friday, September 17th, 2010

In my previous article I outlined the stages you need to go through if you want to manually decode WAVs to PCM to play them on an AudioTrack. I promised to show how to do the same for MP3s and this is what this post is going to be about.

Again, the use case is more common than you might think. The only way you can play an MP3 file via direct Android API is MediaPlayer which is heavyweight, slow and presents only high-level API. If you need to mix or modify audio streams or manage them with low latency, you are on your own. But I will try to help you right now.

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Android Audio: Play a WAV file on an AudioTrack

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

If you’ve managed to hack around the various issues that AudioTrack has, then you are probably enjoying its benefits, such as low latency (in the STATIC mode), ability to generate audio on the fly (in the STREAM mode) and the wonderful ability to access and modify raw sound data before you play it.

However, the problem now is getting that data from a source. Many applications that need to use AudioTrack do not generate PCM audio from scratch (an example of an app that does that would be Ethereal Dialpad and other similar apps). You will probably encounter the need to load and use existing audio samples from file sources such as WAV or MP3 files.

Don’t expect to be able to use MediaPlayer facilities to decode raw audio from WAVs and MP3s. Although MediaPlayer can play those files pretty well, its logic is almost entirely contained in the native layer and there is no option for us to plug in and use the decoders for our own purposes. Thus, we have to decode PCM from audio files manually.

In this article I will cover WAV files and in the next one we will get advanced and read audio from MP3s.

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Android Tricks: Multitouch AND 1.5 Support, Same App

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

I don’t know about you but I have an emotional attachment to old platforms and APIs. They are often sweet and nice in their primordial simplicity, even with their well-understood limitations. Even when they become obsolete, we developers still remember and miss them.

In case of Android, version 1.5 / API level 3 is technically obsolete but is far from being extinct from the device market. In fact, as of the day I write this article, it is one of the most widely installed Android versions on the market. (And if you add the not-so-different 1.6, they take almost half of the market together.) While subsequent versions brought us a lot of goodies in various areas of the platform API, 80% or more of all functionality our apps need today is present in 1.5.

Sure, there are cases when your app just isn’t meant to run on 1.x. For example, its core functionality is based on the APIs that are absent from API level 3 (e.g. you’re making a live wallpaper), or when you don’t want to support old devices for performance reasons, or due to a marketing decision. However, in many cases what makes developers raise the minSdkVersion bar is the need to use some of the 1.6+ APIs, such as the new contact management facilities, signal strength detection or better animation support.

The good news I’m trying to bring in this article – to those who aren’t yet familiar with this trick – is that you can actually use the new API yet keep minSdkVersion at 3. This trick might not work in all cases, and might look like a hack, but it will work for many situations like this – and who knows, might allow your app to reach out to its grateful, ready-to-pay customers who still use 1.5.

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Android Beginners: NDK Setup Step by Step

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Most Android developers start their learning from pure Java, Android SDK based apps. While everyone is aware that there is the NDK (the Native Development Kit), they don’t face the need to use it. Since NDK is distributed separately from the SDK, including documentations and samples, you are not likely to get familiar with NDK before you actually try it as a solution to one of your development challenges.

Because of that, many people think of NDK as of “black magic” of Android development. Many developers who are not familiar with NDK think it is 1) complex to understand and use, and at the same time a lot of developers will think it is a sort of a 2) silver bullet that can solve any problem that can’t be solved with SDK.

Well, both opinions are rather wrong, as I hope to show further in this post. Although it does have a maintenance cost and does add technical complexity to your project, NDK is not difficult to install or use in your project. And, while there are cases where NDK will be really helpful for your app, NDK has a rather limited API that’s mostly focused on several performance-critical areas, such as:

  • OpenGL, including support for some newer versions that the (Java) SDK supports
  • Math (some, but not all, calculation-intensive algorithms might benefit from being done on the native layer)
  • 2D graphics – pixelbuffer support (only starting with 2.2)
  • libc – it’s there for compatibility and perhaps to allow you to port existing native code

In this tutorial we will take our basic Android development environment that we created in one of the previous articles and add NDK support to it. We will also create a basic skeleton project that uses NDK that you can use as the foundation for your NDK-powered apps.

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Android Beatz: Making a Drum Machine App

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Hello again! I’m back from a wonderful vacation and ready to share some more experience of Android programming. Today I’m presenting a simple drum machine app that I made for fun. If you saw the video above, then you probably got the idea how a drum machine works. The design was inspired by one of the greatest drum machines ever – the AKAI MPC. You can have a look at how the original device looked like for example here. Our app is, of course, greatly simplified compared to AKAI MPC, but you can have some fun with it too.

Here’s a screenshot for a better idea of how the UI looks (clickable):

Some interesting features of this app:

  1. The UI is done using bitmaps and custom controls to imitate the original device
  2. The latency is low enough not to be annoying (at least on my Droid)
  3. You can press multiple buttons at once which is very good for long samples such as the bass drum
  4. The LCD screen control uses a 9-patch bitmap background, and switches between flashing, static and ticker text
  5. The LCD screen uses a custom TrueType font that is included within the app

Now let’s see how the most interesting features of this app were implemented (as usual, the source is available at the bottom of the article).

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Android UI: Making a Live Wallpaper (Fire Simulation)

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

In the previous article we used 2D graphics via the Android Canvas to draw a custom UI widget. The Canvas approach is very useful when you need to draw relatively static graphics or when there is not too much complex animation. That is the typical case for UI widgets.

In this article we will develop a live wallpaper that displays a fire simulation that you might remember from the good old days of demo scene and DOS. Since we need very fast graphics, we will use OpenGL as the rendering engine. Although OpenGL is typically used for 3D graphics, it can also be used for hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, such as in this case.

Here’s our plan:

  1. Understand and implement the fire effect
  2. Enable OpenGL to render the fire on the screen
  3. Convert our simulation into a live wallpaper

The source code is available at the bottom of the article (but read on to learn some of its limitations).

Note: The part related to live wallpapers will only work on Android 2.1 or higher.

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Android Custom UI: Making a Vintage Thermometer

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Hi everyone. Today I would like to show how to design a simple yet cool-looking custom UI element for Android. Since an analog clock is already part of the standard UI, I came up with an vintage thermometer as an example.

The final result looks like this:

Here’s the list of nice features this custom view has:

  • A gradient metallic rim and a textured face
  • The logo changes its color depending on the temperature (as you can see in the screenshots)
  • A circle-bent title below the logo
  • A 3D hand with a shadow
  • The hand moves in a physically realistic fashion
  • And, of course, it shows the real temperature – based on the phone temperature sensor (if your phone has one)

Also, the thermometer view tries to be a good Android UI citizen:

  • Scales well to any size
  • Supports screen orientation changes and layout changes
  • Optimizes its drawing procedures, doesn’t eat CPU when the hand is not moving
  • Saves and restores its state gracefully when the activity is paused, re-created etc.
  • Reusable – not bound to any external code

If you’d like to know how to develop views of this kind, read on. It’s so easy and fun to do that you will be surprised.

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Android Beginners: From Bare Windows to Your First App

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Want to develop Android apps but don’t know where to start?

Follow these steps and we will build a complete Android development environment from scratch, starting on a fresh Windows installation. The whole process should not take more than 20-30 minutes, provided that you have a good internet connection.

I need to mention that we will not develop a full-blown app here. The focus is on setting up the environment so we will develop the simplest app possible.

Here’s what we start with: a nice fresh XP installation. I intentionally left everything intact, including the ugly wallpaper and Internet Explorer. (Note: all screenshots are clickable.)

Here’s the basic stack of requirements for Android app development:

  1. Java (JDK)
  2. Eclipse IDE
  3. Android SDK
  4. ADT (Android plug-in for Eclipse)

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