Cisco Cius Unofficial Skin for Google Android Emulator

Filed under cisco, mobile, development, cius, android,

Technoberto - Roberto Andrade Techn0bert0.me@RobertoAndrade.com

For those that are anticipating the release of Cisco Cius (more info at Cisco.com) for some cool Android-based app deployment it might be a bit frustrating to wait until end of September 2010 to get access to Cisco's emulator image alongside the Cius skin (according to their CDN page on Cius: http://developer.cisco.com/web/ciusdev/start).

Well, that was the case for me at least, so after hours searching the web and checking out different developers' blogs and noticing everybody keeps pointing at Cisco's release notes, which just builds upon the expectations, I decided to go ahead and create the bare minimum you will need to get your app tested in the standard Google Android emulator (using Froyo as image - Android 2.2): the Cisco Cius Skin.

This not just mimics the appearance of the device but also some of the hardware features presented by Cisco on their product literature about this specific product.

So here you can find the result of my little endeavor, of course, the official release, as soon as it's out, will probably make this obsolete as it will also include the actual modified Android 2.2 based OS image that runs on the device alongside the additional APIs you'll be able to use to take advantage of the extra features built-in to the hardware and software of this neat little piece of engineering.

The steps to follow to have your emulator look like the sample pics in the time being as usual are:
  1. Download the skin file;
  2. Considering you have already downloaded and installed the SDK (Google's plain version of Froyo - Android 2.2 - should do it), just unzip the contents of the zip file downloaded in the previous step to the skins folder of the installed SDK directory. 
In my case, having the emulator running on both Mac and Windows based computers, I have it installed at the following respective locations:
  • /Developer/SDKs/android-sdk-mac_86/platforms/android-8/skins 
  • C:\android-sdk\platforms\android-8\skins
  1. Once that part is taken care of you will need a virtual device (AVD) configured in your SDK so you can emulate the Cisco Cius looks and hardware spec. You can do that by following the documentation available at the Android Dev Guide about doing so. 
The only especial parameters you need to pick are basically name (use something like ciscocius), target image (of course, use the one where you installed the skin:  Android 2.2 - API Level 8) and skin (cius-skin).
That should be it!

Depending on your screen resolution you might want to adjust the scale of the device's resolution against your monitor in case it does not fit well. That's done once you start the AVD, by checking "Scale display to real size" and defining parameters that are compatible with your screen dimensions and settings.


Enjoy it.

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Aug29

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