I had to re-read that sentence. The first time through I mentally finished it with "a spot and having the signal die."

Agreed on both counts. I'm going to try out another keyboard soon called "Swift Key" or something. It's on the market.


Oh wow, I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah, that's 90% of what I use the trackball for. Sorry, I'm not sure what to do if you don't have that. Perhaps this is something Gingerbread will address...


Wow, yeah, it sounds like you're suffering from some of the crap that Motorola put on there. It amazes me that Motorola still has even an inkling of a thought that they can write software. Do they not remember how awful their phones' UIs were? Android isn't the smoothest OS in the bunch, but it sounds like the stock build is better than what Moto or even HTC's UIs are.

It's too bad you can't put the stock build on there. Caleb is apparently slightly inaccurate in saying that the phone bricks if you try to put stock Froyo (or anything else) on. Apparently it comes back if you put the approved software back on. Depending on how well the Droid X sells, I can't imagine it will be long before someone figures out a way around that stupid eFuse thing that "protects Motorola's users." What BS.

Yeah, my post was based on an early report.

If they figure out how to get CyanogenMod on that phone, I recommend jumping on it. It's a really great ROM and would free you from a lot of the issues Motorola seems to be causing you to run into.

Apps Organizer (The Android Launcher's built-in folders can be a little limiting.)
Shortyz (I now suggest this over my previous crossword puzzle suggestion. It has autodownloads of a huge number of puzzles. There are a few bugs, but it's open source, so if he doesn't fix them, I can.)
Dropbox
IMDB (They finally came out with an official app. All the other ones sucked because they were just renderings of the web page, since they keep a tight rein on their community-provided data. Which would tend to imply that the official app will suck, too, but it's actually pretty good. My only complaint is that there's not a search box right on the opening screen.)

There are a large number of "remember things for me" apps, like Evernote (which is one of them), which seems like a great fit for a smartphone, but, so far, I've not been happy with any of them. They all seem to suck in one way or another. Ones I've played with at least a little so far include: Evernote, 3banana, Springpad, XeekuNote.

I hated 3banana. And frankly, I hated all the other "note taking" apps too. I'm still not certain why Evernote is so popular, especially since you have to pay for it if you want to use it to it's fullest.

I definitely recommend checking out Email to Self. That app is my note taking and reminder app

Does self really appreciate getting all your notes? Seems kind of rude.

Laser scanners can't, but they are for 1D barcodes only. The 2D "scanners" are actually an LED floodlight and a 2D CCD imager plus software that looks for and interprets the 2D barcode. This should work on almost anything, even if the screen is non-reflective like an OLED.

Bitt, thanks for your recommendation of App Organizer. I really do prefer it to the standard folders (they look better, for one thing).

There's just one thing I'm going to request from the developer:

So, once you've applied labels to your apps, you can create widgets on the desktop that are essentially folders that open and display all the apps with that label. Additionally, you can star apps so they will show if you press the star on the widget when it opens.

What it currently does is remember your star selection state across all widgets you've created. So, if I open one of the widgets, press the star so it's on, it shows my starred apps. When I close and reopen that widget, the star is still selected. When I go into another widget, the star is still selected there too. If I unselect the star in any of the widgets, it's now unselected across all of them.

What I'd prefer is that these states would be stored individually. In fact, I sort of wish there were an option to default to the star state for each or all of the home screen widgets.

Otherwise, I really like the app.

Are there any other good task/reminder apps besides gTask and Email To Self? I'm using AKNotepad, which is quick and easy, but doesn't have reminders.

I need something to remind me to do stuff, bugging me every day until I do it, or just bugging me every day to remind me. I used to abuse my calendar with recurring reminders, but that's just not the right use. Is there any apps which can do this? Sorry my request is vague... it's tough to define what I'm after.

Thanks.

I thought that Google Tasks interacted with Google Calendar. Doesn't that do what you want?

I've actually abandoned the gTask app for the mobile Google Tasks web site, but I don't need what you need, so I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what to recommend...

*edit*
Although, now that I think about it, Email to Self is how I do exactly what you're talking about. If you practice inbox zero, you're constantly annoyed by an email sitting in the inbox, and it reminds you every time you check your email to take care of that task. That's how I handle it, at least...

Astrid?

I was being irritated by only having five Home screens last night, so I went searching for a solution. The only ones I seemed to find were Home/Launcher replacements, which I'd tried before and hated. Their UIs were uniformly lousy. But I thought I'd give it another shot.

I don't know if I just didn't try the right ones before, or if the ones available now weren't when I first gave it a shot, but I'm upset that I didn't try these sooner.

After a few hours of playing, I feel like I can heartily recommend either LauncherPro or ADW.Launcher. If they're not both based largely on the default launcher, I would be mightily surprised. They both feel almost exactly like the default with some nice additions.

They share a lot of new features, while seemingly not losing any features of the stock launcher. The new features include support for up to seven screens, change of icon density, customizable home screen "dock" (where the button to get to the full app list is), rotatable home screen, ability to set an icon for virtually any "Intent", uninstallation of applications directly via drag to trashcan, support for scrolling home screen widgets, some UI changes to the all-apps list, etc.

(Why the limit at seven screens, though? Why not allow an arbitrary number?)

There are some differences between them. LauncherPro allows you to have the home screen "dock" be swipeable for multiple sets of launchers there. ADW allows you to pack icons onto the home screen to ridiculous levels. LauncherPro has the ability to create an icon for any Intent, even ones that don't exist, while ADW only provides the ability to launch Intents that are "published" in the API. There are some UI differences in the settings for some of the features. I tend to think that ADW has the upper hand there. ADW is open source, while LauncherPro is not. LauncherPro has an up-pay version with some widgets (which seem nice, but that I largely don't care about).

I decided that I really liked the swipeable dock, so I decided to go with LauncherPro. I think that if ADW adds this feature, I'll switch over, mostly to support the open-source nature. I may, in fact, look into implementing the feature myself. Point being, either ones seems a very good option.

For now, I'm really happy with an additional two screens and a 25% increase in screen app density, from sixteen icons per screen to twenty, which solves the problem I went looking for a solution for. The additional features are (very tasty) icing on the cake.

Shazam has a competitor now in SoundHound. SoundHound seems to simply do a better job matching music.

In my first test, it matched a classical recording from an FM broadcast playing on an alarm clock. And it wasn't exactly something super well-known, either: Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 2 in D. (Verified on the station's web site.) It made this match surprisingly quickly; about half the time that Shazam usually takes. Shazam failed to identify the recording.

In my second test, I sang "Amazing Grace" at it. It identified it right away. Shazam not only doesn't claim to do this, but actively says it can't.

In my third test, I sang "Back in the USSR" at it. I only halfway remembered how it went, though I did look up the lyrics. The first time it failed, the second time it got it.

The only drawbacks to Soundhound I can see are: the app size is much larger, something like 4.3MB vs. 1.8MB; Soundhound only does five free matches per month, which is actually true of Shazam, too, unless you'd already used it more than a few months ago when they changed their policy; and Shazam has an Intent to launch directly into the match (which means I can set an icon to do that on LauncherPro), whereas SoundHound doesn't seem to.

Anyway, I'm very impressed with Soundhound. Given that I still have unlimited searches with Shazam, I seldom, if ever, need to match classical music or songs that I want to hum, Shazam allows me to launch the matching much faster, and I kinda need the space back, I'm going to stick with Shazam. But Soundhound is a very strong competitor.

Re LauncherPro:

I've been using it for a few weeks now and I'm also very happy with it. I also like having a greater icon density, though it makes the homescreen look like crap in landscape (which the app even says its self when you enable it), but I've disabled landscape in the settings. The reason the density is important to me is because I actually don't want more home screens. I spend about 90% of my time outside of apps on my initial home screen, and rarely go to another one. This is because I use App Organizer to make those great folder replacements, and I feel like a single tap to open one of these is much faster than swiping even to the adjacent screen, let alone the last one. I like how in LauncherPro hitting the home button brings up thumbnails of all the homescreens to it's quicker to navigate to them, but that's still more movement than a single tap.

So yeah, pretty much the only reason I use LauncherPro is to fit more on the screen. I like having more rows and more icons on the bottom. Frankly, I wish I could make the home screen icons smaller so I could fit even more in one screen, but I'll live with this.


Re SoundHound:

Thanks for the info! I'll try that one out. I actually frequently need to know what a song is when all I know is how to hum or sing it, and Midomi... Ha! I just went to look up Midomi, which has been on the iPhone since forever, and always made me jealous because you could sing into it, and it turns out that it's the same app, they just renamed it.

I'll give it a shot. I don't like the larger file size, but I don't think I have unlimited Shazam searches anymore, even though I did have it before (I think I've wiped my phone since then, so that's probably why). Anyway, thanks again.


Oh, and I'm sure all Android owners are fully aware, but Angry Birds is finally out (in beta, at least) for Android. It works perfectly fine for me, and it's so refreshing to actually see a first-class game on Android. Maybe Popcap will get off their lazy asses and FINALLY release a decent game/port for the platform.

Check out ADW.Launcher, then. It allows you to set the screens to (up to) 8x8, and does some funky folding of icons to make them fit. It's not super-attractive, but it's functional. Worth checking out, anyway.

Ahh, another hit and run random link from Caleb with no discussion :-P

I left a mischievous emoticon as I stirred the pot!

A picture speaks a thousand words.

I only counted 206.

http://wordfeud.com/

Pretty neat Scrabble-like.

I was just getting ready to post that I thought I'd finally settled on Springpad.

3banana and its online presence, Snaptic, were recently renamed Catch. The Android app is very fast, but there is no markup possible in text.

Xeeku and most of the others with online components just feel like they will disappear before long. Some of the others aren't cross-platform at all.

Springpad's Android app is pretty good, as is the web site. Its problems lie in an inability to edit "rich text" on the Android app and lack of a native client for desktop OSes. You're just supposed to use the web interface, which makes web clipping virtually impossible.

Evernote's Android app in the market is just awful. Slow and awkwardly designed so as to make it even slower, and generally virtually useless. Nothing is cached locally, and network access is slow, so looking at anything takes forever. Sync is so miserable that changes you make on the Android don't even show up on the same device until many minutes later.

However, in composing this post, I found that there's a public beta of the Evernote Android app, and is very good. Speed has been improved dramatically. Caching has been implemented. The UI is far better. There's nothing about it that hasn't been improved tremendously. (It's worth pointing out that neither Evernote app will allow you to edit "rich text" notes. It does allow appending plain text to them, though, which is more than Springpad will do, and then you can go back later and reformat on the web or a desktop client, if needed.)

Also, there's a Java desktop client that works under Linux, Nevernote. It has some issues, but, by and large, it works pretty well.

So I think I'm back to Evernote for now. I don't really see anything at this point that would cause me to change, other than someone offering Evernote's premium features for free.

I like QuickDesk. Provides a means to switch between recently run/currently running apps and start new apps that you added to its display.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2010/10/22/...version-coming/