In followup to my last post, I thought I'd post a link to the ROM I am using on my HTC Desire.
Here is the link.
Sure hope BD comes back someday!
I have an Android phone - an HTC Desire on the US Cellular network. I really like my phone. Shortly after getting it I decided to root my device and give some custom ROMs a shot. It wasn't long before I found my favorite, the UltimateDroid (UD).
There are two big reasons I run UltimateDroid: Performance and Battery Life. After running on UD for a few months, US Cellular finally released the FroYo version of their stock Desire ROM. At this point I was running Gingerbread with UD on my phone, but I thought I'd give the new USCC FroYo update a shot to see if it was comparable (and see if Sense was still worth it). AS soon as I booted the new stock I quickly remembered why I like UD so much. The stock was far less performant. Visual effects were slow and laggy; apps launched much slower; there were more than 40 processes running; and the battery life was a lot less. I quickly returned to UD.
Some of the other smaller things that I liked about UD was the features, and the quick release schedule (I was a nightly build subscriber) that often offered the newest features and performance tweaks.
As the version numbers climbed from 2.4 to eventually 3.3.0, I began to really like UD and its community. I'd visit often, trying out new nightly builds. This is really the reason I like Android so much better than iOS -- the customization that open source offers is unmatched.
But then something sad began to happen. There were no updates for a week; 2 weeks; 3 weeks -- the blackdroid had taken breaks in the past but then -- 1 month; 2 months -- nothing. Not a word from anyone on the site! And then: the site went down. www.udrom.com no longer made a successful connection. And soon after, it no longer showed up in the Google Search results for UltimateDroid.
What happened? I've read rumors on various sites saying that he may have been a victim of extreme weather (maybe a tornado?) and lost his house or something. But nothing was certain.
Is this the end of UltimateDroid ROMs? Is the blackdroid done developing ROMs?
I certainly hope not. If you have any information regarding the state of the UltimateDroid project or blackdroid's plans for the future, please leave a comment. I'd like to help if there is anything that I can do. I am an aspiring developer after all (although I've never done any Android dev).
It's been about half a year since I last made a blog post, so I figured it's time for an update on things.
I began my college career this past fall at Iowa State University studying Computer Engineering. First semester was great! I absolutely love college. I am living in the Friley Hall dormitory with my high school friends and it's a lot of fun. I've met some cool people too. In terms of Comp E classes, I learned so C last semester with Dr. Daniels. We used it to manipulate data input from wiimotes. C is really annoying compared to other languages I have worked with, so I'm glad I won't be doing a whole lot with it in the future (I think/hope). This semester I am taking a Java class. So far it is identical to C#, which I already know. Hopefully it will expand my java and C# knowledge towards the end of the semester.
One of the more exciting technology related things that has happened to me so far in college is the 2010 ISU Cyber Defense Competition. I created a team with Zach, and 4 freshmen we had never met before. Zach and I were the only ones with past CDC experience, and amazingly we won first place! This was really quite amazing, as we were competing against much older teams who have been through more college than us. I guess operating our own home servers has really helped a lot. Because we won, our team was invited to compete in the 2011 National Cyber Defense Competition on February 19th. We are currently preparing for that competition. This year they have moved completely to visualization. Instead of each team having multiple old-ish boxes to host OSs on, each team has one new(er) server with VMWare ESXi installed. This is quite excited, as Zach and I run ESXi on our home servers. We are looking forward to the competition!
Besides college classes and cyber defense things, I have been continuing to work for the Ames Community School District's Technology Department. In addition to that, I have been growing Zach and I's DJ hobby/business, P&H DJ and Sound Services. We were asked to be the DJ for Ames High's Homecoming week, which went very well. Since then we have gotten Ames' Winter Formal, Prom, and 8th Grade Formal, as well as Boone's Winter Dance. I really enjoy doing high school dances and am looking forward to DJing more in the future.
Something I have never mentioned on this blog is Zach and I's DMX Software we are writing. We want to have full featured lighting control without spending hundreds or thousands on a good lighting console. So we have begun writing a program that sends DMX signal via a USB-DMX dongle. We have gotten it up to the point of being able to use it in gigs, but we still have a ways to go in order to get all the functionality we are looking for. It has been a great experience in terms of learning object oriented programming for me. Speaking of software, my friend David Naylor who writes the iTunes Jukebox software that we use for song requests is about ready to release version 3.0, as well as a completely revamped website complete with a Paypal cart and product key generator! I will be making a blog post when it is ready. It is truly great software and I hope it is successful in the market.
Last thing for this update. I am excited to say that I am now an Andorid user! I was able to take advantage of U.S. Cellular's Thanksgiving sale and get myself an HTC Desire. I absolutely love this phone. Experimenting with custom ROMs has been a lot of fun! Currently I am using UltimateDroid 3.0 RC which runs on Android 2.3.2 (Gingerbread). I love the customizablity that open-source Android offers and I can't wait for the future updates and market apps that will be coming out. In my opinion the iPhone dies not even compare because of the endless possibilities Android offers.
I think that's all for now. Hopefully you can look forward to posts here more often. Heck maybe I'll even finish the post about my new computer that I've been promising for 6 months. Feel free to comment as always!
Take care,
Max