Pocketables

What's the point of multiple apps for Facebook (and other services)?

2012-05-24T18:19:13-10:00

Today, Facebook revealed the fruit of its Instagram acquisition: an iOS app. Facebook calls its new app Facebook Camera; like the name implies, it's a camera app that ties directly into Facebook. But that's all it does. Its purpose is to make uploading and viewing pictures easier. This makes no sense to me since the Facebook app already performs this task admirably.

This isn't the first time Facebook has released another Facebook-branded app besides the actual Facebook app, either - just look at Facebook Messenger, which allows you to chat with your Facebook friends on your phone, just like the Facebook app that's already on your phone.

Notice how repetitive the word "Facebook" is in the first two paragraphs of this post? It's not written that way because I don't know any other words that are fitting for "Facebook;" it's like that because repetitive is exactly what the social network is being. In two paragraphs, I mentioned three separate Facebook apps; two of them only replicate features that are already found in the first one.

In Facebook's defense, the new Camera app does allow you to add filters à la Instagram, and maybe that's important to you. But to me, it seems like a waste of $1 billion if this is all that Zuckerburg and Co. will be doing with the purchase.

Not only that, but will iPhone users really want to navigate their phones to find another camera app? Why couldn't Facebook have built a better photo viewing and uploading experience into the existing app as an update? Filters surely would've been simple to add, and a minor UI tweak doesn't seem like a herculean task, either.

Personally, I'm trying to find the most efficient way possible to use my phone. To do that, I'm trying to cut down on the number of apps I have installed; the ones I do have installed are multifunctional. In other words, there's no need for extra apps when the ones I already have (Facebook) can do it all.

The Facebook Camera app is available now in the iTunes App Store for free if you want to try it out.

[Facebook | iTunes]

Use Tasker to add some comic relief to your device

2012-05-24T16:36:07-10:00

What was the first thing people did when Siri came out on the iPhone? Ask it lots of funny questions like "will you marry me" and "how much wood would a..." you get the point. If you're the kind of person who finds that kind of thing funny, then Tasker has more uses for you than you may think. The ability to use text to speech, accept voice input, and other useful actions can give you some quite funny results if you combine them in the right way. Read on to see a couple of examples.

Who you gonna call?

This is one that I sort of accidentally stumbled across while exploring ways of recreating the Galaxy S III's proximity sensor based calling, until I realized that said feature is rather pointless. I've refined it a bit since then, and this is what I currently have.

To set it up, start by adding a new task - not a profile. As the first action, select Misc and they Say. In put "Who you gonna call?" in the Text field and select a voice engine - mine is a custom one downloaded from Google Play, so if you're using stock ones, expect them to be more robot-like.

Next, add the action Get Voice under Input. Leave all of the fields untouched, as it will automatically store the text it hears in the variable %VOICE. Next, add another Say action, this time making the text something like what I have: "Sorry, but I do not think that person can help you." Select the voice engine, scroll down, and check If. Input %VOICE in the first field, ghostbusters in the second, and change the symbol in between them to !~, aka "Doesn't Match." This is what will be read aloud when the voice input doesn't match "ghostbusters."

Now we're going to add the two actions that run when you do say "ghostbusters." First, select Music Play under Media. You need to have the Ghostbusters song stored on your device to be able to make it play, I'll leave it up to you how you get it. Select the file in the File field, and modify the Start slider to where you want the file to start playback (mine's at 28 seconds to get it to start where it does in the song). Check If, input %VOICE and "ghostbusters" in their respective fields like you did above, but this time select ~ ("Matches") between them.

Finally, add the action Call under Phone. Input %VOICE in the number field, and once again, set up the IF %VOICE ~ ghostbusters criteria. I would suggest leaving AUto Dial unchecked, or it will actually convert the text to a number and try to dial it rather than just display "ghostbusters" in the phone dialer.

Save the task, go to you homescreen, and add a non-app shortcut to Tasker's Task Cut option. Select the task, find a suitable icon, rename it, and place it where you want it. Not when you click it, the phone should act as mine does in the video.

The whole Ghostbusters thing is of course just one of countless possible amusing uses for the Say and Get Voice features in Tasker. These are actually extremely powerful features, and you can make your own voice assistant this way if you way if you just use the "If %VOICE (matches) CODEWORD"-system to trigger various things. Doesn't have to be joke tasks either, this has applications far beyond joking around.

What's the best smartphone?

Someone at Apple made an oopsie a couple of weeks back and somehow made Siri stop overriding question regarding what the best smartphone is and instead cause it to look online for the answer. Using some weird system of customer satisfaction the reply was Nokia's Lumia 900, which is naturally not what Apple wants its voice assistant to tell people is the best smartphone. Apple quickly corrected it, but not until the damage was done. It now replies one of a few different phrases, one being "the one you're holding." We don't support such blatant disregard for personal preference and rigged marketing here on Pocketables however, so how about we make one that's more honest, and add some laughs to it in the process? Certainly a neat tool to have around the next time you encounter someone with an iPhone 4S....

As for how you set it up, the voice input and output is basically the same, with "*nothing*" and "*best smartphone*" as the triggers that you would input using "If %VOICE ~ CODEWORD" for each of the two Say actions. For added bonus I made it change the response based on charging status. To do this, go to profiles, and add a new profile. As the context, select State, Power, Power, and set it to Any. Add a task, then as the only action select Variables, Set Variable. Name the variable whatever you want, but keep a capital letter in there - and start it with a % to make it a variable, e.g. %Chargeresponse. In the text area, put in what you want it to say when charging. Save the profile, find it in the profile list, and expand it so you see the connection between context and task. Hold down on the task, and select Add Exit Task. Use another Set Variable action, name the variable the same as above (e.g. %Chargeresponse), and input the non-charging reply. When when you make your Say action in the main voice assistant task, use your variable (e.g. %Chargeresponse) instead of any text. This will then change based on charge status.

Finally, I made it open our website using the Net - Browse Url action. I added it to the home screen, named it something that has meaning only to people who read books by Mike Shepherd, and then you're done .

Face unlock

The final example I'm going to show you is much simpler, yet still amusing. With the face unlock feature in Ice Cream Sandwich being what it is, this might be the safer way to go, hurt feelings or not. The way it works is quite simple: make a task that has a Say action with the response you want, and add a shortcut to that task on your lockscreen - assuming you use a lockscreen capable of that, like WidgetLocker. It would actually be possible to make it more like the stock one, activate when the screen turns on, show something that looks like a camera interface etc - but for the sake of this being the simplest joke in the article, I'll stick to the easy version.

These are just three examples that I came up with. There are endless possibilities to be explored here. You could for instance use the charge trigger I showed you above to instead activate a spoken message that says something like "You're charging me AGAIN? No wonder the planet is going under" every time the phone is plugged in. Imagine the look on the face of someone less tech savvy than you who didn't notice Tasker suddenly being on the device and running, when the phone suddenly starts commenting on their power use. Do that enough time, and you'll have done more good than Earth Hour.

With the Linux 3.0 kernel, the Kindle Fire can finally be an Ice Cream Sandwich tablet

2012-05-24T16:29:08-10:00

As most of you probably already know, the Amazon Kindle Fire has been an incredibly well selling Android-based reader. It is good at what it does, but when I reviewed the device a few months ago I found out one important thing: in stock form, the Fire is not a standard Android tablet, but a gateway to Amazon's content.

Of course, as is typical within the Android community, developers soon set to work fixing that problem. They had an alpha build of Android 4.0 running late last year, but it wasn't yet in a useful or usable state for most users. I've been using builds of Ice Cream Sandwich on my Kindle Fire for a few months now, and I think that time has finally come.

The software was mostly there with the release of the Android 3.0 kernel for the device, but I decided to wait until everything including HD games and Netflix was working to endorse the build as being ready for general use. You can see a quick tour of how well everything works in the video above, or if you have a Kindle and want to get some Ice Cream Sandwich for yourself, head over to this xda-developers thread which will get you started with CyanogenMod 9 and the 3.0 kernel. If you aren't sure how to do all this, just keep an eye out for the Kindle Fire to Android 4.0 tutorial that will be published in the coming weeks.

How to replace the screen on your HTC One S

2012-05-24T15:00:00-10:00

So you bought a shiny new HTC One S, and then you dropped it down two flights of stairs. Or your best friend accidentally ran it over in his car. (Both of these have happened to me with previous phones.)

What are you going to do now that the screen has shattered into several thousand tiny pieces? Luckily, you don't actually have to go out and buy a new phone; just replace the screen!

The video above offers us the first glimpse (that I know of, anyway) into the inner-workings of the One S. I am by no means a do-it-yourself kind of guy, but it's still really interesting to me to see what's inside one of HTC's flagship devices, especially one that packs so much into such a tiny space, like the One S does.

Still, even with this helpful video, I doubt I'd see myself attempting this on my own. I'd be the sucker who just ponies up the cash for a replacement, or spends too much getting someone else to repair it for me. Oh, well; at least I wouldn't have to worry about putting it back together again once it's been taken apart!

Living life as a Google user, part two: History repeats itself

2012-05-24T12:58:19-10:00

On Tuesday, I started my "Living life as a Google user" series. The first post was about my replacement apps and services for Apple's Reminders; I solved that problem with Google Tasks and a handy note app.

Today's installment has to do with a task that I perform much more often than setting reminders for myself: browsing the web. I'm the kind of nerd who likes to keep everything as in-sync as possible so I can easily switch between the devices that I use on a daily basis, and since I do a lot of work in the browser, it just makes sense that I'd like all of my bookmarks, history, and settings to be the same across all of them.

Apple's iOS features the Safari browser. There's also a desktop version, which means that users of iOS Safari and desktop Safari can sync some information across their devices. Luckily for me, Google has a similar situation with Chrome - provided you're using an Ice Cream Sandwich phone. Again, I'm a lucky guy, as my Galaxy Nexus does indeed run ICS. Read on past the break to find out how well it's working for a guy who's used to the way it worked on iOS.

I use exclusively Macs for my desktop computing needs. You're probably thinking that isn't important, but it is: I've yet to connect my Android device to either of my Macs. Because of this, I needed a way to wirelessly sync my browser's history, bookmarks, and settings. With Google Chrome, I can do just that.

This is a screenshot of Chrome on my MacBook Pro. As you can see, all of those settings are checked, meaning that they will continuously sync with my other devices as they change.

These are two screenshots from my Galaxy Nexus. All of my bookmarks are synced from my Macs to the phone. The right screenshot shows the bookmarks that are synced, while the right shows at what time the sync took place. Mannuel is my Mac mini. I use it while I'm in my home office, so that's why it hasn't synced for 17 hours.

Meanwhile, my MacBook Pro is the computer I used to type most of this post up. As such, every time something changed in Chrome on my laptop, the changes would transfer over to my phone.

The syncs are completely transparent to the user, so I can just type away and be safe in assuming that all of what I've done will be on my phone before I leave my house. It's incredibly simple to set up: just make sure all of the settings you see in my desktop Chrome screenshot are checked, download Chrome to your ICS device, and - voilà - you'll have synced information!

My Galaxy Nexus has been with me for about two weeks already. In that time, I've learned that Google services are some of the many things that make Android devices fantastic. Chrome syncing is no exception; the way it syncs everything wirelessly without any input from me is such a nice way to sync. Remember, I'm a forgetful person. All in all, I'm missing absolutely nothing from iOS in the browser department.

There are still some more services I need to replace - namely Photo Stream - but I'm fairly confident that Google has what I'm looking for. Tune in next time to see what I'm using in lieu of Apple's photo service!

AT&T HTC One X RUU leaked, ready to download

2012-05-24T12:16:59-10:00

If you've got an AT&T version of the HTC One X, and you're just dying for a software update, you should be happy to hear that an official HTC RUU has been leaked and is ready to download. This brings the software version of the One X up to 1.85.502, although it's important to keep in mind that this update is currently unreleased; this simply means that AT&T and/or HTC may have slightly different software available by the time they're ready to send this out as an OTA update.

However, if you're brave and you don't mind breaking any root that you have on your phone, you can download the RUU to your computer and install it right now. Speaking from experience, RUU updates are really easy to apply: all you have to do is plug your phone into your computer, run the .exe file that you downloaded, and wait about ten minutes for everything to finish flashing to your phone.

There's no official changelog quite yet, but do let us know if you discover anything different after applying this update.

[xda-developers]

Make your Android device look like a Galaxy S III

2012-05-24T11:17:02-10:00

One constant never changes in the Android universe: if a device comes with something that can't be removed, someone will find a way to remove it. If a device comes with something you can't get anywhere else, someone will find a way to port it over.

That is just as true for the Galaxy S III, which is why the XDA Developers forum has been full of related topics lately, both with custom ROMs for a device that hasn't been released, and ways of getting S III features onto other devices. S Voice may have gotten the most attention, but there's an ocean of goodies out there.

Galaxy Nexus + root "conversion kit"

If you have a Galaxy Nexus, there's a Galaxy S III add-on available that you flash through CWM Recovery in order to get the complete package in one go. From the water drop sound when you unlock the device to the look of the settings menu, the launcher, and apps like S Voice, this is a all in one solution.

It's rather ironic seeing this on the Nexus, since one of its big selling points is that it comes with stock ICS, not any sort of manufacturer customization. To slap Samsung's TouchWiz on it seems a bit weird, but then again that's what Android is about: choice. With the Nexus size, resolution, and screen type being almost exactly that of the S III, and with a lot of people not caring about the S III's faster chip, better camera, SDXC slot etc, this is after all a way to get a pseudo-S III for much less.

Other devices

If you don't have a Nexus, or if flashing files via CWG Recovery tells you nothing, a lot of the S II Content has been pulled in a more traditional fashion as well. There are tons of these threads on XDA, but the ones that stood out are the one that has the applications and the one that has the media files.

I tried a few of these myself, specifically I played with the water ripples/dandelion live wallpaper and had a listen to the ringtones and the notification sounds. I pulled the new version of the Over the Horizon melody and put it on my S II, complementing the S II's version. I quite like that tone and use the S II version as my ringtone (first of the two in the video above), while the much softer, slower S III version now serves as a soft alarm sound.

[XDA via Droid-life]

Why I finally gave up on Gmail for Android

2012-05-24T09:38:25-10:00

Google's own apps for Android are part of what makes the OS great for some people, and without things like Gmail and Google Maps a device simply doesn't feel like Android - and those devices exist. This is also why I've been hesitant about replacing any of the stock Google apps - it just feels unnatural in a way.

After months of being annoyed at the stock Gmail app however, I finally made the move to the free, open source K-9 Mail app.

The reason for that basically comes down to the advantages outweighing the disadvantages. I've had a few issues with K-9 while testing it out in the past, basically things related to syncing read status back to the server. The advantages have been evident for a while though, and simply gotten more important lately.

First off, there's the widget thing. I've expressed my feelings about Google's lack of a Gmail widget on anything below Honeycomb before, and using K-9 simply means using an email client that is open for widgets to interact with it.

K-9 can also interact with other apps in other ways, most importantly (for me): Tasker. Once installed, Tasker will have a new trigger action available that reacts to incoming emails. Using this makes it possible to create an email counter variable that you can then use for various things.

In my case, when I wake up and deactivate sleep mode, one of a few variables that Amy tells me as part of my good morning message is how many emails I've gotten while asleep. Using K-9 also enables some built in variables in Tasker, namely %EFROM / %ECC / %ESUBJ / %EDATE / %ETIME. These variables contain info about the last email received, like subject or who it's from. I don't use them (right now), but it's possible (quite easy actually) to use these to create, for example, a car mode profile that reads new email info aloud, or parse the info to a widget that shows you the email info you want. The email widget on Asus' Transformer tablets is for instance very popular and has been making the rounds to other devices, and with this Tasker interaction you could duplicate it - and improve it - from scratch.

The third and final feature that has been pulling me towards K-9 is something that is such a no-brainer feature that the lack of it in the stock Gmail app is just beyond stupid: the ability to share emails.

The Share/Send feature in Android is present in just about every app that deals with information and is the Android version of iOS' "open in..." There are lots of things you can do by opening an email in another app, but I just need one of them: the ability to add an email to my to-do list. This is a feature that Google even has hard coded into Gmail in a desktop browser, then linked to Google Tasks. Yet not only is this feature missing on Android, it doesn't even have the ability to open an email into to-do apps that support it.

With K-9, if I get an email that I need to make a task of, all I need to do is open it in Astrid Tasks and it will then create a task with the subject as the header and the body as the task notes. This replaces a system where I have to forward an email to a special email address on astrid.com and then wait for auto sync to kick in (or sync manually) to see it. You really shouldn't have to use email to get info from one app to another on the same device.

I know that there are also other advantages to K-9, and I'm looking forward to exploring those and seeing what's useful. These three things I've mentioned however are specific features that I've manually looked for in the past and been lead to K-9 Mail every time, and when that happens a third time, it's time to stop being prejudicial and just kick Gmail out on its butt. For a company that makes such a great (in my opinion) browser based email client for PCs, Google really needs to learn a thing or two about doing the same on its own mobile OS.

Make Your Clock lets you create your own clock/weather widget

2012-05-23T18:56:29-10:00

Have you ever browsed the Google Play selection of widgets for ages without finding anything that really screams "use me"? Perhaps I just have weird tastes, but I have. Even with having used the same clock widget now for several months, it never fit me 100%.

With my recent obsession with Tasker and my phone now frankly doing more on its own than I do with it, I decided to finally get off my butt with the widget issue and make one from scratch. Minimalistic Text is well known for allowing you to create your own widget as well as being able to use information provided by Tasker. After playing around with it though I found it to be horribly flawed for my use, so I went to see if there were other apps that combined Tasker compatibility and widget creation. There is, and Make Your Clock is exactly what I needed.

Make Your Clock are available for both tablets and phones, as free (phones/tablets) or paid (phones/tablets) versions. You'll want to get the paid version to use the custom widget feature though, as the free version is too limited.

When you first start creating your own design it's important to understand how the widget sizes work. The largest widget size available in the phone version is 4x2 icons, which might seem little for a lot of larger phones with custom launchers, but those launchers can also scale widgets beyond that. When you do that, the elements will scale too. As such, 4x2 icons is enough as long as you think in relative terms rather than absolute terms. A clock displayed on half the 4x2 widget stretched to 8x4 will essentially make it a 4x4 clock.

Most of the controls are rather self explanatory, but some are not. The Anchor tab available for items you add is very important, because it decides how elements you add to the widget grows when they change based on difference in word length for days of the week, number and size of digits in a clock, and so on. If you want a clock to always be centered, you should anchor it in the center. If you want Two dynamic pieces of text to stay side-by-side but never overlap as one grows, you should anchor the left one to the right and the right one to the left, so that they're anchored at the gap between the two and grow from there as the size changes.

There is also no safety system in place to stop you from exiting the edit mode without saving, so make sure you save often, and use the backup feature in the top right corner of the edit screen when you're satisfied with your design, just in case the app data resets at once point. Finally, it's a good idea to learn to switch between drag-and-drop positioning and using the arrows for doing it a pixel at a time to get full control over positioning. You can also lock finger movement to make sure you don't accidentally mess anything up, and there's something that looks like a GPS fix icon that lets you switch between which element is selected without having to try to hit it with your finger.

With those things in mind, you can go nuts and design. You use the plus sign to add new elements, where you can choose between various elements that have to do with time, date, battery, phone status, or just visual elements. The weather feature in this system is actually very very powerful if you ask me, as it allowed me to not only choose between several different skins for the weather icons, but also allowed me to use a Norwegian weather service as the weather provider. You can add icons for the current and next two days, or various dynamic text bits that deal in the same things. Many of the elements you can insert also have further customization options once inserted, like e.g. a clock always being 4 digits, or days displaying all uppercase rather than all lowercase, and so on.

The feature that lead me to the app aside from the scratch building option was however the Tasker integration. Once installed, Make Your Clock Variable will be an option under "plugins" when you select Tasker actions. Tasker can then be used to push static text to the widget based on various profiles, or even Tasker's own variables. Variables are essentially special words that are placeholders for other information that is updated regularly.

For instance, part of my Sleep Mode tasker profile involves writing information to the variable %Lastsleep. When I activate the sleep mode profile - which happens when I go to bed - that variable is set to "SM is on." That means that wherever the word %Lastsleep appears in Tasker, it will be replaced with "SM is on." Using the plugin to Make Your Clock, that variable is transferred over to Make Your Clock, where I can add it as part of the widget. When %Lastsleep is set to "SM is on" in Tasker, part of my self made widget updates to display that phrase as well. Then, when I deactivate sleep mode, %Lastsleep is set to "LS %TIME," which contains another variable which is part of Tasker and always means "whatever time it is now."

In practice, if I deactivate sleep mode at 09:23, the widget updates to display "LS 09:23."The more skilled you are at using Tasker, the more complex information you can transfer to the widget. Using the method of transferring info between Tasker equipped devices that I covered yesterday, there is for instance nothing stopping a wife from having a widget that displays what the husband is cooking for dinner, controlled from the husband's phone. Only your imagination decides what you can display here, as long as you know how to or know someone who can help you set up Tasker to send the information to Make Your Clock.

All in all, this app is a very powerful tool, and well worth the $2.50. It's an app that takes some work to get the most out of though, at least if you want to start all the way from scratch with your widgets and not just modify the ones that come with it or you can download online, which is also possible. If you do take the time to create the perfect widget though you're likely to get a lot out of it in the long run, especially if you start parsing information from other places using Tasker, which is something that you most definitely won't get with any off-the-shelf widget.

gTar turns your iPhone into a guitar learning tool

2012-05-23T17:29:46-10:00

At what size does an accessory become the main thing and the mobile device the accessory? I don't know, but the gTar iPhone "companion" on Kickstarter certainly begs that question. It's the size of a guitar, because it is a guitar...kind of. The strings don't play music, but instead transmit data to the iPhone that's docked in the gTar itself, which then produces the sound. The whole thing is made to be a tool to learn to play the guitar, so the idea is that you play by using the tabs on the screen and the LEDs that light up on the guitar itself to get the grips right, and then you can advance through different modes where the iPhone will help you less and less with blocking out wrong notes, until you're eventually playing on your own.

I have no musical talents whatsoever, but I still had a synthesizer for several years where I basically only ever used the learning mode to teach me how to play songs in a very similar fashion to this. I eventually started using it with my iPad, which can handle MIDI input like that through USB. Point being, those kind of learning modes are truly useful for learning an instrument, and seeing something that both brings that to guitars and uses a mobile device as its brains at the same time is really something.

This is no simple plastic slap-on product though, so the prices start at $399 (limit amount, then $450). That gets you the gTar, bag, strap, charger for the 5000mAh internal battery, USB cable, replacement strings, SmartPicks, and a headphone adapter. Pledging $599 gets you a very neat reward that includes a "song selection", which is essentially where you get to pick a song to be included in the app - assuming that the licensing is possible. $999 is the top of the line pledge level, where you get a custom painted gTar as well as the song selection.

With no knowledge of whether the next iPhone will work however, this might be a shortlived accessory. This is a Kickstarter project though, and one that has already raised twice its $100,000 goal in just a couple of days, so it's not inconceivable that there will be changes made to the design before it gets manufactured that will incorporate a snap-in system to make it work with more devices. Perhaps the most obvious solution would be to connect the device wirelessly and use just a plastic adapter for the physical connection, which would open it up for more platforms than just iOS as well. Time will tell.

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who will have comments about this way of learning an instrument, but personally I just think it's a cool way to bridge old technology with new.

[Kickstarter]