My employer encourages their employees to participate in some sort of activity outside of normal office hours to keep learning new skills. For me, cracking code is both my job and a spare time hobby, but after eight hours at work it’s often hard to find the motivation to sit down to fix even more bugs or open a dry book on patterns. But this year – just like last year – I plan to make a simple Android app in my spare time. As it turns out there’s an internal contest at work starting these days that involves mobile application development. Convenient for me, since it means that I can, at least in theory, use some of my working hours to work on the Android application.
Tag "Android"
Another thing I like about the Android platform, in addition to it being incredibly customizable, is that it supports some amazingly powerful applications. Tasker (website) is a very good example of an app so powerful you can do almost everything you can imagine with your phone. Yes, it’s not exactly intuitive and has a learning curve, but if you have a little programming experience or just some patience, you can set up some really useful tasks.
Here are a few of the profiles I’ve created so far:
- If I’m at work (location based), turn on Wi-Fi, and set the phone to vibrate. When I leave work, the Wi-Fi turns off again.
- If I’m at home (location based), also turn on Wi-Fi, but turn up the volume on the phone. If I leave the apartment, the Wi-Fi turns off again. Both of these profiles help me save a lot of battery.
- If I send a text message with a code word, the phone will will get the current coordinates from GPS or the cellular network, depending on what’s currently turned on. It’s not possible to turn on the GPS without human confirmation, which is a bummer, but mobile data is turned on if it’s not already turned on. The coordinates, together with accuracy and information about the latest lock and the current phone time is sent back to the phone number that initially sent the text message with the code word. This profile comes in handy if I misplace my phone.
- Flight mode is automatically turned on at night and turned off again in the morning. The actually time it’s turn on and off depends on if it’s a weekday or not. Saves a lot of battery.
- If I plug in my headset, and I’m not at work (my work profile is active), I’m not about to answer an incoming call or I’m not already talking on the phone, Spotify is launched and the media volume is turn half-way up. Very, very convenient.
- If Spotify is launched manually, the media volume is also turned half-way up. Just because I’m lazy.
One of the thing I enjoy the most about the Android platform is how incredibly versatile and customizable it is. With a few clicks and a little imagination you can change the look of your phone from whatever the manufacturer thought was great to something you personally think is even better. Here’s my first serious attempt on doing just that.
To set this up I used a cropped version of this wallpaper and four different Android apps created by some very smart people. More information and plenty more inspiration are available on myColorscreen.
Google is celebrating that the Android Market has exceeded 10 billion app downloads. And they are celebrating with some insane offers: Selected high quality paid apps for 10 cent a pop. If you have an Android phone, you should really have a look at what Google is pulling out of the hat.
Yesterday you could get apps like Asphalt 6 HD, Color & Draw for Kids, Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro, Fieldrunners HD, Great Little War Game, Minecraft, Paper Camera, Sketchbook Mobile, Soundhound Infinity and SwiftKey X. If you didn’t get any of them, that’s a shame.
But you’re not too late yet. Today’s selection is Fruit Ninja, BB – Bedtime Battle, AirSync by doubleTwist, Flick Golf!, Star Chart, Reckless Racing, Reckless Racing PLAY, Christmas HD, NFL Rivals, Beautiful Widgets and Read It Later Pro.
And this will go on for another 8 days. Not bad.
Either open the Android Market app on your phone, or browse the market on your computer by going to market.android.com. If you log in on the website, you can buy the apps right there and have them automatically downloaded to your phone. A really great feature that’s probably also a gigantic security hole that will some day be exploited to send malicious software to every single Android phone.
You heard it here first.
There are a lot of mobile platforms out there: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, webOS, BlackBerry and Symbian, just to mention a few. In my honest opinion, there are way too many and a good thing at least two of these, webOS and Symbian, will disappear off the face of the Earth in the not-so-distant future. Looking into the crystal ball, I’d say that the future for Windows Phone also looks bleak: Windows Phone 7 sales numbers are, to put it mildly, disappointing and if it wasn’t for the fact that Microsoft can bleed pile upon pile of cash before they have to throw in the towel, the Windows Phone platform would have been taken behind the barn a long time ago. It was a great leap from the unbelievably crappy Windows Mobile platform, but as long as you don’t sell any handsets you’re not making any money, no matter how huge the potential is. What might turn the tide for Windows Phone, though, is Microsoft’s partnership with Nokia, which is also getting pretty desperate not to get completely squeezed out of the smart phone market, or that Windows Phone 7.5 Mango is some sort of magic money making wand, or that Steve Jobs turned out to mean more to Apple’s success than he should or that the Android platform continues to dig itself into a segmentation hole. Didn’t we learn anything at all from J2ME?
But I digress already.
Continue reading "Building a Twitter Reader With Titanium Mobile." →
You are visiting the blog and personal web site of 
