Thursday, December 20, 2012

Further fun with Android Apps

Hi All,

 More fun with apps, but first let me wish you a joyous holiday season and a happy new year just in case I don't get to it in the following days and weeks.

From howtobeadad.com
After the last post The Convenient Skill (CS from now on), from here (sorry your blog title is too long for me to want to type it), had mentioned two apps in the comments which looked intriguing. Namely Dungeon Sketch and Tales of Mobile Entertainment (ToME).

I duly went to the Amazon app store and no luck. I then tried the Google Play store from my phone and found ToME but not Dungeon Sketch. A web search on the computer found Dungeon sketch but it said it was incompatible with my phone, I was able to download the apk file from the developers site because I really wanted to put it on the Kindle anyway.

I then spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to side load apps onto the Kindle Fire. There are some tutorials out there, I'll show you how I did it.



1. Download the ES File Manager for your Android devices. I have not yet learned all of the features for this app but the most important feature is you can used it to manage and back up your apps, putting them in a folder you can actually find.



2. Once you've backed up the apps in question on your device, copy them to your computer.

Showing your files.


In the App Manager selecting and backing up.

Showing your backed up apps.

3. Go to the Settings>Device menu on your Kindle Fire and allow 3rd party apps

Turn on 3rd party Apps

4. Copy over the the app files to your Kindle, I chose to put them in the /backup/apps folder.

ES File manager on the Kindle.

5. Open the /backup/apps folder on your Kindle. Your apps should now be there. Press on the icons to open them and you will be asked to install.

Showing them in the back up folder.

6. Hit install. Congratulations you have side loaded your app.

Successfully side loaded.

Unfortunately Dungeon Sketch was not supported on any of my devices. I am now set up to do some gaming on my phone or kindle. I also learned how to get screen captures on my phone. Fun stuff.

I also hope to have that Heraldry tutorial up soon, although at present it may be a post mortem of what I did rather than a step by step how to from scratch. We shall see.

2 comments:

  1. Nice one Sean! Although I'm sure a few veins popped in my head just trying to understand it, its not you its me!!

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  2. No problem about the name!

    It's an Adrian Mole quote/joke:

    "I have just realized I have never seen a dead body or a real female nipple. This is what comes of living in a cul-de-sac." (Sunday, 9 May -- Growing Pains)

    Very funny but very, very British!

    I'm not sure if cul-de-sac is normal American terminology, it means dead end street.

    Anyway, that's a pain it doesn't work, after all that as well!

    It's also annoying because the program is Open Source so you could have helped update it, rather than start from scratch.

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