Consumer Confusion or Funny Feature?

In testing one of our apps on the Archos 5 Internet Tablet, I ran across something I found to be funny. See that screen shot? The one that looks like the emulator when the camera application is launched?

Yeah, that's on the Archos device.

I find it funny because I know exactly where that came from. But consumers? They might get confused by this. Ideally, the camera Intent would do something useful to inform the user:

• Provide a warning message that the device doesn't have a camera
• Go directly to the gallery picker instead

Or is this the right behavior so developers can just be lazy and not worry about there being a camera on all devices? And that is the final problem: the device behaves as if it has a camera when it doesn't. It might be convenient for running apps that don't know about the device features, but it actually makes it harder for well written apps.

(P.S. I'm not trying to pick on the Archos device, specifically. It's just the only Android device I have that doesn't have a camera.)

Quick Tip: Eclipse, Source Control, and default.properties

Here's a quick tip for you:

When using Eclipse project properties to change the Project Build Target, make sure the default.properties file is writeable. This may mean checking it out from source control before editing the properties. In our configuration, the Perforce file is not writable and changing the Project Build Target settings with Eclipse does not check out the default.properties file from source control. So, I have to first check it out, then modify the Eclipse settings.

Although default.properties is automatically generated by the Android Tools, the catch is it must also be checked in source control. Usually, this does not trigger an error, either. Instead, the default.properties file will just be out of sync with the settings and possible create strange behavior.