I thought I’d post a few miscellaneous updates now that I’m back from my vacation. Multitasking MM is going well; I’ve implemented Käppler’s task interface that I discussed in my last post. There are still some issues with saving state (and null exceptions) which I need to debug, but things are looking good. With any luck, we should be able to start MM, hit the home key, and go about our business within the week.

I paid a visit to xda-developers today to see what the Android modding underground is up to. There’s a pretty cool (if slow) full Hero OS out for the Ion now. Several, actually, but I picked the one that looked the most fully-functional. Hero has a lot more ‘desktop pages’ than pure Cupcake Android does, but that was about the only really cool thing I saw before I had to uninstall it. Others have posted ‘super fast’ Hero roms, but these seem to be less fully developed as of now. This is definitely worth watching, because I’m sure these roms are only going to get better.

One definitely worthwhile find over at xda is Amon-Ra’s updated recovery image. He’s the same developer who wrote the image I previously linked in my Android rooting guide, but the new recovery is even better! The Hero roms require some very specific SD card formatting, and the recovery automates this. (It also automates returning the sd card to the stock partitioning). Finally, it allows for patching of a chosen rom.zip as opposed to every previous recovery, which forced you to rename your zip to ‘update.zip’. This one is a godsend for me because I found that to be incredibly annoying as well as confusing.

As a bonus to this grab bag of topics… I’ll throw in a cool Slashdot/Scientific American link about some exciting new hardware. Hardware that lets blind people see. With their tongues. No, I’m not kidding, give it a read!