Enable USB Debugging on Samsung Galaxy S5

Anthony Muzonzini 2014-04-19T15:00:01Z19 hours ago

Anthony Muzonzini

Currently living out in the East Coast. When not on the AndroidPIT grind you can usually find me turning up or play footie.

USB debugging is something that is very useful for your phone as it allows you to connect and transfer files between your PC and your phone using your USB cable. The feature is turned on in the developer options portal so you need to access this in order to take advantage of the USB debugging feature. Another reason why you may want to enable the debugging feature is that in order to use Odin with your phone and flash it, you have to have USB debugging enabled. Without being able to use Odin you won’t be able to install new ROM updates if the over-the-air update is not available.

Developer Options / © AndroidPIT

Anyway let’s get to the point. Here is how you access the developer options and enable USB debugging on the Galaxy S5:

1. Go to the menu
2. Launch Settings
3. Access the “About Device” menu
4. Go down to “Build Number”
5. Then tap on the build number 7 times
6. After the 7th tap you will be told that you are now a developer
7. Now when you go back to the settings menu, the developer options will now be enabled and you can do whatever you want in there.
8. Now to enable USB debugging you will need to open Developer options and tick the box that says USB debugging.

If you continue to have problems connecting your PC to your phone, most likely you need to ensure that the correct Samsung drivers are installed on your PC.

Have you done this on your Samsung Galaxy S5? What do you think? Please leave us a comment below and we will get back to you.

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Enable OTA updates on Rooted Samsung Galaxy S3

Sterling Keys 2014-04-04T07:00:00Z7 hours ago

Sterling Keys

After finishing his Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Alberta, Sterling made the move to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Within a stone's throw of mountains, ocean, and complete wilderness, he mountain bikes and skis during the day and is hopelessly connected to his phone and computer at all other times. His writing "career" started as he penned about his escapades while skiing and has slowly progressed to freelance marketing and promotion throughout British Columbia. Interested in anything tech and gadget related, he has thoroughly enjoyed his transition of writing for AndroidPIT.

If you’ve had your Samsung Galaxy S3 for awhile, it's likely that you may have gone the route of rooting the device and installing either a custom ROM on it or pure Android. However, if you’ve gone ahead and done this, you’ll notice soon enough that you’ll no longer be able to receive official OTA updates, despite being given the constant reminder that they're available. We’ll show you how you can get back to having OTA updates so that you can get the latest firmware changes as they’re rolled out.

 © AndroidPIT

Note: This will work as long as you’re running stock Android on your rooted Samsung Galaxy S3. If you’re running anything else, such as CyanogenMod, you’ll need to get stock Android first. As well, there is always a risk when you’re playing around with a rooted phone and this could cause you to brick your device, so follow this guide at your own risk.

First, you’ll need to confirm that your device is rooted (hey, don’t laugh, it’s important to check). Turn off the phone and then hold the Volume down, home, and power button while it boots up. Then you’ll use the Volume up when you see the warning and it’ll boot into Download Mode. You’ll see some text in the corner or your device and if you see that Current Binary is set to Custom and Current Binary Download is set to Yes, you’re good to go. Take note of the information on this screen as you’ll need to verify it later.

Checking the Download Mode information on your Galaxy S3. / © DroidLessons

Secondly, download TriangleAway from the XDA Developers Forum (thanks again to Chainfire for this!) and make sure your device is on the supported device list. If you downloaded the apk file to your PC, transfer it over to your Galaxy S3 once it reboots. If you’ve downloaded it straight to your device, just launch it from there using a File Manager. As well, you can support Chainfire by buying the app from Google Play and helping support him in his coding endeavors:

Once installed, let it have Super User permission and then check out the Current Status portion of the app. If the information matches what you had on the Download Mode screen, you’re good to go.  Hit Reset Flash Counter and let it do its thing: once the flash counter has been reset, your Galaxy S3 will reboot automatically.

Compare your information from Download Moade to your Current Status and then hit Reset Flash Counter. / © Google Play

If you boot back into Download Mode after using TriangleAway, you should see Current Binary set to Samsung Official and Custom Binary Download set to No. If so, that means that TriangleAway has done its job and you should be able to receive OTA updates on your device again!

If TriangleAway worked, you should see the following on your Download Mode screen. / © DroidLessons

Has anyone tried it out? If so, how did it go for you? 

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How to Enable Box Sizing in Internet Explorer 7 [Quicktip]

We have covered CSS3 Box Sizing in a previous article. Box Sizing, with the value of border-box, allows us to retain the element width and height, regardless of the additional padding and border it has.

This makes measuring and defining element size easier. However, CSS3 Box Sizing would not function in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and earlier versions, as you can see below.

Both of the columns that you see in the above screenshot have width, height, padding, and box-sizing specified. But as IE8 does not recognize the box-sizing property, the second column is pushed down when their total width exceed their parent container’s width.

You will have to adjust the size for each column accordingly to make them fit in it, which could be a very tedious task depending on the number of elements that you need to handle. If your website has to support IE7 (for whatever reason) while also preserving CSS3 Box Sizing, you can use the following trick.

Recommended Reading: A Look Into: HTML5 Shiv And Polyfills

Box Sizing Polyfill

To make IE8 (and below) acknowledge Box Sizing, we can use a polyfill. This polyfill comes in the form of an HTC file and is developed by Christian Schaefer. Download the file from the Github repository and put it in, for example, your CSS folder.

Create a CSS stylesheet, dedicated for Internet Explorer. Add the link in the HTML document this way so it will only be served in IE7.

<!--[if lte IE7]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie.css"><![endif]-->

Then put the following code in the ie.css. This CSS rule below will apply box-sizing for all elements.

* { behavior: url(css/boxsizing.htc);}

A few things to note when applying this trick:

The url path of boxsizing.htc must be relative to the HTML files location, otherwise it will fail to work.

Paul Irish also has a tip to apply box-sizing in pseudo-element with *:before, *:after. But, since IE7 as well as IE6 does not support pseudo-element, there is no reason to use pseudo-element selectors in this case. And as you can see above, we don’t include them in the code as well.

The Result

Here, we have two columns with the parent container’s width set to 500px. The column width are set to 50%, so each column should have 250px width, even though we also set padding for it. Let’s open Internet Explorer 7, and launch the Developer Tool (F12).

Go to the Layout tab of the Developer Tool to see the column size in detail. You should see that in IE7 the column now includes padding as well as borders as part of the total size. In our case, the box width remains at 250px.

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How to Enable CSS3 Border Radius in Internet Explorer 8 and below

CSS3 gives us the ability to create rounded corners with the border-radius property. But as you might already know, this new feature is not recognized in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and its earlier versions. So when you apply CSS3 Border Radius to an element, it still appears as a box with pointed tips.

You may find a lot of different advice on the Internet suggesting you ignore IE8. You wish you could do so. But if you’re working on a website for a government institution or a bank, you may not have a choice. You still have to make the website look as nice as it does in modern browsers, which includes the ability to apply CSS3 Border Radius.

If you really have to make your website IE8-ready, while being able to use the CSS3 feature, we have just the tip for you.

Recommended Reading: Beginner’s Guide to CSS3

CSS3Pie

CSS3Pie is a kind of polyfill for CSS3 decorative features. Aside from CSS3 Border Radius that we’re going to discuss in this article, CSS3Pie also supports Box Shadow and Gradients, though it’s limited to the Linear Gradient type.

Download CSS3Pie (here). Put it inside your project directory – I placed it in the css folder. As you can also see from the screenshot below, I’ve created one stylesheet as well as one HTML file.

Open the stylesheet in code editor and set one of the elements in the HTML file with rounded corners, like so:

.border-radius { height: 100px; width: 100px; background-color: #2ecc71; -webkit-border-radius: 50px; -moz-border-radius: 50px; border-radius: 50px;}

As the element’s width and height are both 100px, and the border-radius is set to 50px, the element will become a circle:

In IE8, as we expect, it would still be a square (sigh), but don’t worry.

To enable the rounded corner effect, insert this line: behavior: url(css/pie.htc);, like so.

.border-radius { height: 100px; width: 100px; background-color: #2ecc71; -webkit-border-radius: 50px; -moz-border-radius: 50px; border-radius: 50px; behavior: url(css/pie.htc);}

Note that the file path in url()has to be either an absolute path or relative to the HTML file. You can also add this line in a separate file.

You may have a stylesheet that is designated for Internet Explorer. You can put behavior: url(css/pie.htc); within that file, but ensure that it’s declared within the same CSS selector, like so.

/* declared in ie.css */.border-radius { behavior: url(css/pie.htc);}

Refresh the page in IE8. The rounded corner should now come into effect (ta-da!). It should work in IE7 as well.

Troubleshooting

Internet Explorer may behave unexpectedly. If this does not work (maybe the rounded corner does not take effect, or the selected element has disappeared), adding the position and zoom property should solve the problem:

<style>.border-radius { behavior: url(<?php echo get_template_directory_uri() ;?>/css/pie.htc); position: relative; zoom: 1;}</style>

Using CSS3 Pie in WordPress

You have finished putting your website in HTML form. You also utilize pie.htc in the website to enable CSS3 in IE8. At this stage, you are ready to transform the website into a functioning WordPress theme. In this case, as WordPress is dynamic, where pages may serve in different level URLs, we have to specify an absolute path.

You can either change the path in CSS like this:

.border-radius { behavior: url(http://localhost/{website}/wp-content/themes/{the_theme}/css/pie.htc); position: relative; zoom: 1;}

Or add internal styles in the header.php, this way:

<style>.border-radius { behavior: url(<?php echo get_template_directory_uri() ;?>/css/pie.htc); position: relative; zoom: 1;}</style>

Final Thought

Having cool things such as CSS3 Border Radius work in IE8 is fascinating, and CSS3Pie makes that happen, while giving us one less reason to hate IE8.

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