I’ve become a bit of a phone geek. We’ll, that’s really an understatement. I’m a huge phone geek – I know more about my G1 than I do my laptop.

Thanks to the peoples at AndroidAndMe, who are having a contest for everyone to show off their android desktop, I’m showing off mine. Hell, I show everyone in person anyway because my G1 with Android rocks! Sure it may be a bit chunky compared to an iPhone but you can’t beat the fact that it’s open source and the OS is amazing.

Now, there isn’t a whole lot special about these screenshots, other than the lock screen (yes, the linux penguin) that I put together. The icons and the wallpaper are all from the hero build, same with the widgets. I only use three screens and I need very few apps. I don’t play games on it – I check email, I write blog posts and I keep a todo list.

Screenshots

My lock screen and my lock screen in airplane mode (as required by the contest rules):

All 3 of my desktops together:

Message screen (zoomed in):

Initial home screen (zoomed in):

Publishing screen – twitter, this blog, analytics (zoomed in):

Specs

So what’s under the hood?
It’s a G1 on T-Mobile with an 8gb sd card running swap and apps2sd. The OS is jacHero 2.3.3 which is the most flawless Hero OS so far. It runs HTC’s Touchflow (“Rosie”) interface without overclocking and the build gets better everyday.

Any questions?

Feel free to ask, I’ll be glad to point you in the right direction as always.

Appcelerator has just released a new beta of Titanium that has put this small (somewhat unknown) application into a new league that will make it easy to create applications that can be distributed to both the iPhone and Android mobile devices.

The beta is currently limited and you must request to be a tester – they prefer that you have already developed apps for either the iPhone or an Android platform.

I became a huge fan of Titanium when it was first released into its original beta (maybe two years ago) because it was really the open-source equivalent of Adobe’s Air, allowing for desktop application development using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Now that they’ve branched out to expand this to mobile devices, they’re going to give Air a run for its money. If you haven’t taken a look at it, you really should.

If I had some time or a great idea to develop an app – this is how I’d do it.

This is a small site for a new Gym in Jacksonville North Carolina. The logo and color scheme had been previously developed. I concentrated on the use of typography to take this simplistic design online.

Go check it out. My site is on there too so go give me 5 stars dammit.

I’m a crazy driver, like most New Jerseyans.

All I had to do was plug in a little wireless adapter into my car computer and it uploads information about the way I drive directly to them. Jersey is one of only a handful of states that are doing this so far.

What I’m afraid of is that they’ll realize that I’m a pretty bad driver. Every day I drive almost 100 miles and at times I top 80mph. And most of my commute is a lot of quickly driving and quickly stopping. (You’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever driven the Schuylkill Expressway in Philly)

Most drivers in New Jersey drive crazy – so hopefully my data will be pretty typical – or it may even be less than typical. I hope for the best.

They say they won’t cancel me…

I combed through their policy and they state that they won’t increase the payment or cancel your insurance based on that data. We’ll see. They say they’ll only use it to give discounts and I doubt I’ll be reaping any of those benefits.

Why just monitor speed?

Having been in an accident a few years back (dude ran a red light and I hit him) in which they weren’t able to determine who’s fault it was, wouldn’t it make more sense to put a dashboard video camera in the car?

I’d think I’d go for that.

If I get canceled…

I’m sure I’ll vent about it. Loudly.

GrandCentral (now Google Voice) is a great service with some really impressive features

I’ve always really liked GrandCentral and have found it pretty useful – the ability to screen messages as they’re being recorded and the fact that I can have different voicemail messages for different ‘groups’ of contacts comes in really handy. For those of you that aren’t aware of what it has to offer you should look over the features.

What’s new in Voice?

Now that it is officially Google Voice, there are a number of new features that I’m going to like.

The first is SMS Messaging. Text Messaging through the browser has been pretty lacking – there were some good tools to send them, but none that I found to receive replies back. I spend part of my day attached to a computer and the rest of the day attached to my phone. I don’t want to have to pick up the phone to do a text message when I’m already on a computer… this solves that.

The second is the transcription of voicemails. I’m a big fan of speech-to-text technology (I’m hoping that one day most of my blog posts could be started in this manner) but my first couple tests of it haven’t been that promising. There is a lot of potential here but right now it barely comes close.

The Speech-to-Text feature has some real potential but seems pretty useless so far

To test out the system, I left myself a message that said:

“So over the weekend, I finally got my upgrade to GrandCentral, which is now Google Voice. It’s become part of my Google account and what most interests me is the Speech to Text transcripts – as I’m very interested to see how that will go in the future.”

Voice translated it back as:

“so that weekend i finally got an upgrade to grand central which is now google a voice it’s become part of my will come out and what most interesting the in these speech that tax the transcripts so i’m very interested to see how that’s going to go and future”

It does show which words it had trouble translating by showing them in grey text. Each transcribed message also has a “Was this transcript useful?” button to give feedback.

I typically mumble like crazy but I was REALLY damn clear in this message. I’d say that, so far, this feature is pretty much useless.

We’ll see how smart the system becomes as it learns, and I’m optimistic that this could actually becoming useful.

Didn’t get an invite three years ago?

For those of you that weren’t lucky enough to get a beta invite years ago when they were giving them away, I’m sure the service will be open for everyone in no time. Maybe by the time they let you in, they’ll have hammered out some of these issues.

I have always struggled with redesigning my site over and over again just to feed the urge for something new. It was past time that I stopped redesigning my site and starting styling individual posts instead (That should keep me going for a while). For those of you not familiar with the CSS Zen Garden, you should be ashamed.

There are a number of things to consider and a number of things to avoid if you decide you can handle a new design for each post that you do.

Other then satisfying your own urges to constantly design (like myself), it will show that you put that extra bit of thought into your work and can how powerful the use of web standards can be.

So what do you want to style with each post?

It’s completely up to you, but you’ll want to keep it simple enough to quickly put together. I chose to pull out my headers, background images and most element colors. I left everything else for a couple reasons:

1. You don’t want to spend several hours tweaking the overall layout
2. You’ll want to keep your navigational elements and secondary info consistent amongst all the designs.

Consistent elements to aid usability

Anything that’s used as navigational elements in your site (tags, recent posts, categories, etc.) should be kept consistent among the varying designs in order for users to move quickly between posts without having to re-learn the interface.

Keep number of style sheets to a minimum

You should always keep the number of stylesheets attached to a page to a minimum. I always recommend only having one if you can but in this case we’ll settle for two. The first stylesheet should hold everything that is set in stone and the second should hold everything that will potentially be customized for each post.

There is no need to separate different style sheets for resets, layout or typography. With a little organization all of them can and should be kept together, keeping multiple requests back to the server at a minimum and allowing for quicker downloads.

Avoid !important

The last thing you want to do is have to use !important in your CSS to override the cascade. You also don’t want to serve up all the extra unnecessary data, so anything that you decide will be customized in each post should be pulled out of the main stylesheet and put into the secondary dynamic one. This will also save you from wondering why a style you just applied in your custom css isn’t showing up (that’s always no fun).

The plan

To get this to work in a CMS, you’ll need to setup a custom field. All CMS’s should have this ability and once that’s setup you’ll:

1. Link to the Main stylesheet (as usual)
2. Create an If Statement in the code to pull the custom field (if it exists)
3. If it doesn’t exist, pull in a default secondary stylesheet

Super simple.

TextPattern Implementation

I’ve been using TextPattern for sometime now (see Sorry WordPress, You Just Lost Your Battle to TextPattern) and have really grown to appreciate it’s simplicity.

Setting up the custom field

In the TextPattern Interface:

1. Go to Admin > Preferences > Advanced
2. Find the list of Custom Fields and give any empty one the value of “Custom-Style”

Create the custom styles

In Presentation > Style

1. Create a new style called “secondary” to use as your customizable template (so you’ll save some time on future posts) – again this should contain all of the potentially custom items with default values assigned to it. In the event that your post doesn’t have a custom style, it will pull this one in instead.
2. Copy the new style and give it a name that describes it (I’d call this post “Zen”)
3. Do your magic on it – changing the default styles

Customize your posts

When actually writing your article:

1. Open up the Advanced Options and find the newly created “Custom-Style” input box
2. Enter in the name of the stylesheet you just created (there’s no need for a CSS extension)

Pulling in the custom field as a stylesheet

In the form that you reference your header data, setup an if/else statement. Call your primary CSS file first, if there is a custom CSS, call that. In the event that there isn’t a custom one, call the secondary CSS file. We’ll always end up with two stylesheets like so:

<txp:css n="default" />
<txp:if_custom_field name= "custom-style">
     <txp:css n="<txp:custom_field name="custom-stylesheet-name" />" />
<txp:else />
     <txp:css n="secondary" />
</txp:if_custom_field >

I think this is self explanatory – if there isn’t a custom style attached to a post, it won’t end up referencing an empty stylesheet.

Yep, couldn’t be more simple.

WordPress Implementation

Since WordPress is THEE blogging platform of choice these days, I’ll go ahead and show you how to do it there too (Thanks for making me setup a local install to see how to do this).

Setting up the custom field

You can setup your custom field directly from your blog post in WP(WordPress). Below the post, expand the “Custom Fields” – enter “custom-style” into the “name” input box. The value input box should hold the name of your custom stylesheet (this should have a .CSS extension).

When you go to create a new post, the “custom-style” custom filed will be available to enter in a value.

Create the custom styles

Using an editor, create the template that will hold all your potentially customizable items – set these up with default values and call it something like “secondary.css” and upload it to your theme/css directory. This will be the style that’s pulled in if a post does not have a custom style.

Customize your posts

For each post:

1. Go to the custom field “custom-style”
2. Enter in a value with the name of your custom stylesheet (with a .CSS extension)
3. Upload the custom CSS file to the theme/css directory.

Pulling in the custom field as a stylesheet

I’m not going to go into much detail about how to read out the custom fields in WordPress. Here’s how the code should look. It pulls in the default stylesheet, checks to see if it has a custom stylesheet, and determines if it needs to pull in the secondary (template) stylesheet or the new custom one.

This should go into your templates where you typically pull your CSS (more than likely it should go into the “Header” template in Appearance > Editor).

Because the code is a little long, I’ll mark unnatural line breaks with a “»”.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>"  »
type="text/css" media="screen" />
<?php
$customCSS = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'custom-style', $single = true);
if($customCSS !== '') { ?>
     <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/ »
     <?php echo $customCSS ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<?php }
else{ ?>
     <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/ »
     secondary.css>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<?php }?>

That’s really all there is to it.

Please share if you know other CMS’s

I don’t have all the time in the world to be trying this out in other CMSs, so if you know how to do this in Moveable Type or other platforms, please let us all know in the comments.