culebra: concertina mode

One of the latest additions to culebra is the concertina mode. Named after the concertina movement occurring in snakes and other legless organisms that consists of gripping or anchoring with portions of the body while pulling/pushing other sections in the direction of movement, this mode allows culebra to move across the UI.

You may have used android's monkey before. monkey is a UI/Application exerciser that generates pseudo-random streams of user events such as clicks, touches, or gestures, as well as a number of system-level events. It is commonly used to stress-test application. While it may serve this purpose, it's overly complicated to be used in other scenarios.


Then, it comes culebra concertina mode that instead of sending pseudo-random events, analyzes the content of the screen and randomly selects a suitable event or action for the also randomly selected target, normally a View.

For example, if the randomly selected view is an EditText, culebra enters some random text. However if the EditText turns to be a password, it sends random passwords, that is instead of just entering a normal sentence it selected sample passwords from a list like the infamous "querty".
Furthermore, if it detects the EditText is expecting an email address, by inspecting the id, the hint or anything else that may suggest that, it sends random email addresses like user@example.com. Of course, other Views, receive other treatment, like Buttons being clicked, Scrollables being scrolled, etc.

Additionally, if the content description suggest the application may be awaiting for you to talk, like 'Tap to Speak' or 'Voice Search', culebra will actually speak random text to the app (this feature is only available on Linux and OSX).

You should check this aspect, it's sometimes hilarious.


Taking advantage of the culebra GUI already described in previous posts, while it's running the randomly selected Views are highlighted. At the same time, the python script is being generated. You can save it, modify it and run the same tests again and again. It's worth to mention that commonly the script eliminates the random selection of components and thus it runs deterministically.

Run culebra in concertina mode

$ culebra --gui --concertina --scale=0.5

and you can obtain something like this, where the nickname of a new contact was randomly selected from the available Views and the random text "chaos reigned" was entered.

BTW, this screenshot was taken via dump as described in android: obtaining beautiful screenshots automatically.

Android: android.process.acore has stopped

I've started to receive the infamous message: The process android.process.acore has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again. Is this the android counterpart of the blue screen of death ?


Lately I'm receiving this annoyingly often. Googling for it you can find some links giving some solutions I found unacceptable like hardware resetting the phone.

Notice: There could be many causes for this problem, so follow the steps presented here to determine if you are in this case.

Hence, I decided to take some action and find the reason. After some debugging this is what I've found:

09-23 16:32:13.798: DEBUG/Sync(110): skipping photo edit for unsynced contact
09-23 16:32:13.938: WARN/dalvikvm(110): threadid=37: thread exiting with uncaught exception (group=0x4000fe70)
09-23 16:32:13.938: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(110): Uncaught handler: thread SyncThread exiting due to uncaught exception
09-23 16:32:13.948: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(110): java.lang.NullPointerException
09-23 16:32:13.948: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(110): at com.android.providers.contacts.ContactsSyncAdapter.cursorToContactsElement(ContactsSyncAdapter.java:846)

Unfortunately the problem, a NullPointerException, is in ContactsSyncAdapter.java, a piece of Google maintained code AFAIK and we can only watch it happens and no much more than finding a workaround. Before introducing the workaround let's analyze one of the possible reasons for this problem.

Last message before the exception is

skipping photo edit for unsynced contact

so the problem might be an edition of a contact photo that can't be synced.

On possible workaround is to disable Auto-sync for Google data.
Try to synchronize Gmail, Calendar and Contacts and check if you receive the android.process.acore has stopped unexpectedly message.

Fortunately you can just disable Contacts synchronization. You should remember to synchronize manually your Contacts data until you find another solution, an upgrade is provided by Google, you can delete all of your Contacts and hope for the best or hard reset your phone.


Hope this helps.

Android Eye Contact

I'm working on Android Eye Contact, and application that complements the standard Android Contacts application and provides alternative presentations.
The application, in its Lite version, can be freely downloaded from Android Market.
There will be also a Pro version, someday when people from other countries other than USA and UK be able to charge from their applications. In the meantime there's a very good opportunity to explore the possibilities analyzing what should be included and what shouldn't.
The main idea behind Android Eye Contact is to provide a seamless user experience easing access to contacts ideally using only one hand and with the phone closed, if we think about the available models only.
Some users requested features like Contacts Flow, and I'm now experimenting on this front, though I'm not completely convinced that this is a good way to glimpse through hundreds of contacts which usually don't have a picture associated.
Anyway, this is highly based on great pictureflow, a Qt2/Qt3/Qt4/Qtopia4 widget to display images with animated transition effect.

Comments, suggestions and ideas you may want to share are gladly welcome.