Disable bloatware on Xperia Z5 compact

I recently bought a new phone, the Xperia Z5 compact. It has its strengths and weaknesses. In particular, why do vendors insist on crippling their devices with irritating bloatware?

The Xperia comes with Movie Creator, an app that runs in the background to create meaningless movies from photos. It is about as irritating as Microsoft’s old Clippy. Fortunately it is possible to get rid of the app, even though it can’t be uninstalled. Go to Settings, Apps, All and select Movie Creator. Delete any data it has amassed and then click on disable. That prevents the app from starting. It also removes the icon.

The same procedure should work for other unwanted bundled apps.

First Google Glass application released

Last week I released my first real GlassWare! It is a really cool application, but unfortunately under non-disclosure. Anyway, my first impressions of Google Glass as a target platform are fairly positive.
The API is still changing and that can make life a bit difficult. Some samples target the wrong version and either won’t compile or crash. Furthermore my computer wouldn’t recognize Google Glass correctly at first, so adb couldn’t find it as a device. I solved that as explained in this post. Finally the voice recognition for my Swedish accent is – well, let’s settle for not perfect.
All in all, though, it is fun to develop for Google Glass! The bleading edge is where I want to be.

Unexpected value from nativeGetEnabledTags

There is a bug in the Android SDK API 17 that floods LogCat with warning messages like:

Unexpected value from nativeGetEnabledTags: 0

This makes it hard to see real messages. The message does not appear with older API versions. Until the bug has been fixed the messages can be suppressed using this filter:

^(?!.*(nativeGetEnabledTags)).*$