Previewing Android L on Nexus 7 2012 through MultiROM!

Disclaimer: Before you start anything, you must know that I take no liability for anything that would happen to your device as a result of you following this guide and/or any of the instructions from the links that will follow.

The new Android L (5.0) has been recently announced by Google, and if you own a Nexus 7 2012 tablet, than this is your chance to try the newest version of Android on your device. Please note that this is nothing official, it is just an port from the Android L emulator with the proper Android 4.4 binaries included. Therefore, you should expect frequent force closes, poor performance overall and lots of other problems.


Here are the general steps you need to follow:

1) First of all, the tablet must have an unlocked bootloader, with a custom recovery installed on it. This is a great guide that'll help you achieve that: link.

2) Then, you must install MultiROM, it will allow you to boot multiple ROMs on your tablet so that if you feel Android L is too unstable, you can easily boot the other ROM: link.

3) Finally, download the Android L files and gapps, and flash everything in MultiROM by following these instructions: link.


If you see a .zip file named repacked-something (repacked4.zip at the time of writing this article), then it needs to be flashed in MultiROM, unless the last link states otherwise. Do not follow what other websites or articles say (they are not even giving direct links to the original authors, which is unfair), some of them advise to flash repacked4.zip directly through recovery, that will not work and you risk bricking your device that way.

So that was all I had to say. I am currently running Android L myself, it is unexpectedly stable, I've seen relatively few force closes, but performs poor in terms of speed. There is probably barely any acceleration whatsoever (YouTube videos won't start at all). The animations are probably accelerated at less than even 30 frames per second and with more than several programs in the multitasking menu, you are going to see huge performance issues.

For the apps that are not available (Chrome, Facebook etc): go on Google, and search, for example, "Chrome apk". It will give you the apk for that app, which can be easily installed. Yes, it can be altered/have malicious code injected but.. this is the only way you can get these apps.

Good luck!

Facebook's policy becomes more and more abusive, tries to stop you from connecting to anybody.

Facebook takes more and more aggressive (and of course, abusive) security measures, turing some users against it. The first time I realized that Facebook exaggerates was when I was on a holiday and I tried to login from my phone. It simply told me that my password wasn't correct, even though I tried logging in for about 10 times (that was on the "Touch" version of Facebook).

OK, so I tried then logging in from the desktop version (again, from my phone), and surprise, it logged me in but I had to confirm that I was... me. That was, in fact, the reason for why I wasn't allowed to login from the "Touch" version of Facebook (how difficult can it be for the guys from Facebook to make it possible for that verification to be done from the "Touch" version?).

Recently, when I was again on a holiday, it happened the same thing, but this time I was requested to do a stupidity. It showed me 8 randomly pictures (if I remember correctly), from all of my friends albums, and I was asked to choose who that photos belonged to from a list of six friends (six different friends for every photo). I have a lot of friends with hundreds of photos, how do I recognize somebody if I only see a photo from a party where that person was, photo is which there are 20 persons dancing?!

This evening when I wanted to add somebody as a friend, Facebook told me that invitations from strangers (yes, they were referring at me) are temporary blocked, and that the person that I invited was going to receive that invitation later (OK, it didn't sound exactly like this, I'm not getting that anymore, but it was something like that). But how the hell do Facebook know that I'm a stranger to that person?!

For the same person (yes, I didn't give up), now it says this:

This Request Can't Be Sent

Do you know this user personally? To prevent misuse of Facebook, this request can't be sent. To learn more, please visit the Help Center. If you believe you're seeing this message in error, you can report the problem.

And this is not the first time I'm getting this. Somebody told me that I get this because the person I'm trying to add as a friend blocked me before, but if I keep trying, it will work, in the end.

I don't know where they are planning to get with these policies, but, unfortunately, the only thing they are doing is to turn the people against Facebook.

Is Facebook down at this moment? Some users report so.

There are some users currently (1:50 PM GMT time) reporting that Facebook is down, via Twitter. It is not clear, however, what's happening, because there are other users reporting that Facebook works just fine for them. I have to mention that Facebook works for me quite well. Downrightnow.com, which is the website that monitors lots of services and reports if a service or another is working or not, is currently displaying Facebook as "Likely Service Disruption".

This state comes from users that reporting both on Twitter and on downrightnow that Facebook is down, while the Facebook officials didn't confirm (yet) that their service has any kind of problems.

If you want to see the progress of Facebook, just follow downrightnow.com. If you are an user of Facebook, please leave a comment telling us either if you have problems in accessing Facebook, or if works fine for you.

TweetDeck announces new Beta version for Android, includes few new features.

TweetDeck announced today their new Beta version for Android, v0.9.5. This new version brings some updates and features, such as:

• Full compatibility with all Android 1.6 devices and above.
• Added option to remove Facebook, Buzz and ForeSquare accounts, but also to delete tweets sent by you.
• Added multi-Twitter account compose.
• New More button for Twitter profiles and updates, allowing users to: Reply All, Sharing, Translation, Copy update text, Copy update URL.
• Tapping on top of a column automatically updates that column. 

I really used to be a fan of TweetDeck when I was a user of iOS, but now my favorite Twitter client is HootSuite (both on my Android device and on my computers). TweetDeck seems so unfinished on Android (it's normal, however, as it is still a Beta version), and I think that just the possibility of using other social networks from the same client (such as Facebook or Buzz), isn't a good enough reason just to choose TweetDeck.

The complete changelog of this new Beta version of TweetDeck is available here.

TweetDeck v0.9.5 is available for download from here.

Using social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn? Then, try HootSuite.

HootSuite is a professional social client, featuring various platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Page, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace and  Foursquare. I presented you some time ago Seesmic's web service (here), and the main difference between them is that HootSuite is much more complex and supports other platforms, not just Twitter.

There are many things you can do with HootSuite: track results of your websites (only for WordPress), add contributors to your account (who can post from your account), schedule posting at certain time/date, monitor mentions or assign tasks to your contributors. All those in a well organized screen, with a theme of your choice (you have 3 themes to choose from).

Posting is done easily with a large number of options, and with the option of selecting the network on which to post. If you are confused about changing settings, viewing your stats or managing plugins, just hit that owl on the upper left corner of the window.

Go now on http://hootsuite.com/, create an account, and start using all of your social networks from one single place.