Category: Tech

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Categories
Mobile Personal

Essential Android Applications

I have a new post on this. Go here: https://blog.f12.no/wp/2010/08/06/redommended-android-applications/

I have had my HTC Magic for a little over a month eight months now. I’m still satisfied, though I’m contemplating getting a Google Nexus One next year. I’ve updated my apps list below. Not all of them are necessary for handsets like Hero, but I’m still on Magic so I need some extra extensions. 🙂

System

  • PandaHome – Home screen replacement. Gives me as many home screens as I want and a nice dock.
  • Locale – Profiles for your android. Adjusts sound etc. based on location or other parameters.
  • AutoLock – Delays the need to draw your unlock pattern.
  • Useful Switchers – Easy access to switch on and off the things that consume battery.
  • TasKiller – Kill off tasks.

SMS and contacts

  • Handcent SMS – iPhone like SMS handling with bubbles and all.
  • SMS Popup – Popup covering the screen on SMS instead of just the top bar notifications.
  • SMS Templates – Templates for sending SMS.
  • SyncMyPix – Get profile pictures from Facebook as contact photos.

Connectivity

  • Toggle Data – If you don’t have a free data plan, you really don’t want your Android to go checking the net all the time. This lets you turn off and on data usage.
  • Wisync – Automatically turn off data sync when not on WiFi.
  • Wifi Analyzer – Nice to have when messing around with my APs to find the free channels.
  • WeFi Connect – Scan, connect and test open connections in the area until one succeeds.
  • NetSentry – Keep track of downloaded data.
  • Bluetooth File Transfer – Send and receive files over Bluetooth (sadly not standard).

Productivity

  • Share Your Board – Takes a snapshot of your whiteboard, corrects the angles, crops and increases contrast. I mail mine to Evernote for search and storage.
  • Evernote – Capture anything, for ever. It even does OCR on any images so you can search for what you have written.
  • GDocs Notepad – Notepad that Syncs to a folder on Google Docs.
  • Remember The Milk – My essential GTD app. Nice widget for displaying list of current tasks. Only works if you are a paying member of RTM.
  • Thinking Space – Easy mind maps for Android. Syncs to “the cloud”, but no alternative client for editing (yet?).

Media

  • Spotify – Music like I like it.
  • Google Listen – Podcasts
  • Qik – Stream your video live, and store them when you’re done broadcasting.
  • Shazam – Figure out which song is playing on the radio.
  • SnapTell – Snap pictures of videos, books etc. and get online quotes and links to IMDB etc. Also supports bar codes.
  • Backgrounds – Easy way of finding new ones when you get tired of the one you got.

Travel and location

  • Flightstats Lite – Not really a good app (just sends you to the web all the time), but nice shortcuts for getting your flight status.
  • TripIt – Keep track of trips and contacts trips. Nice sync option to have everything on your phone before you leave.
  • Trafikanten – Bus, train, tram and subway info for Oslo.
  • Here I Am – Send your current location via SMS or Mail.
  • My Tracks – Get the tracks and stats from your trip and export GPX file for Geotagging.
  • MyCityBikes – Status for bikes in Oslo and other cities. Lets me find nearest bike, and nearest free slot.
  • Wikitude – Augumented reality and the ultimate show off app. Can also help you find restaurants etc. near by. 😉

Misc

  • Barcode Scanner – Scan barcodes and open in browser or do a search. Eases installation of applications on the links below.
  • Seesmic – Twitter client with twitter lists.
  • Transdroid – Add and manage torrents in a variety of torrent clients on your computer.
  • Brightkite – Location based social microblogging. The best so far. 🙂
  • Bubble – Level anything. 🙂
  • Meebo IM – Connect to just about any IM service, and use the same account as meebo.com.

Anything else I should be using? Let me know. 🙂

Categories
Development

Java migrations tools

Wow, it’s been a while. If you’re interested in good links follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/anderssv . I usually update there these days.

My talk on “Agile deployment” got accepted for JavaZone this year! I’m extremely happy, but a bit scared too. 🙂 I’ll be talking about rolling out changes in a controlled manner, and one of the things that are usually neglected in this scenario is the database side. I’ll cover stuff like packaging and deploy of the application too, but that’s probably the area where I know the least. The database side of things are really sort of my expertise.

I have written some blog posts on this already, and in relation to the talk and things at work I did a quick search for Java migration tools. DBDeploy I have used earlier, but there are now a couple of other contenders. Here’s my list so far of tools that work on sql deltas that can be checked into SCM:

  • DBDeploy – Tried, few features but works well. Ant based.
  • DbMaintain – Probably has the most features. Ant based.
  • c5-db-migration – Interesting alternative, similar to DBDeploy. Maven based.
  • scala-migrations – Based on the Ruby on Rails migrations. Interesting take.
  • migrate4j – Similar to Scala Migrations, but implemented in Java.
  • Bering – Similar to Scala Migrations, and looks a lot like Migrate4J

I’ll definitely be looking into DbMaintain and c5-db-migration soon. DbMaintain looks promising, or I migh just contribute to DBDeploy some features. I’ll let you know how it went. 🙂

(updated with scala-migrations, bering and migrate4j after first post)

Categories
Mobile Personal

Synchronized calendar and contacts

I’m a geek. I’m even a geek that try to stay organized, so I like to know that my data are backed up and available wherever I am. I see I still get some traffic from Google on a post that’s really not relevant any more, so this is sort of an update to that.

Calendar

Google calendar is the hub of my calendar. Even though you don’t really like or use gcal it’s a great hub because there’s support for it in nearly every program that’s available. So from/to Google Calendar you can use:

Contacts

For contacts it has always been sort of separate for phone and mail. With more and more happening on my phone it’s quite relevant to join these two registers. For contacts I guess the phone serves as some sort of hub. I use:

  • Goosync to sync contacts so they’re available in Gmail
  • ZYB to sync and clean up contacts (the merge duplicates feature is pretty nice). ZYB also has the surprising feature of updating your contacts with the latest information from Facebook. This also includes pictures, so suddenly I have avatars for many of my contacts.

I have a Nokia Series 60 phone, but Goosync which is used for both contacts and calendar only requires SyncML so it should work on many phones.