Productive Organizer

I still have a love hate relationship with Evernote, mainly because I still have not really make sense of it yet.

But while I complain about it, what you like is to subscribe to a cloud app that is continuously value adding. And this update is rather small but provide something that many would appreciate.

I compose some of my notes on the go and before I actually save and upload the notes, I may stop halfway and get on the bus and my accidentally close the Evernote Android app.

This version of Android Evernote provide a feature to manually save when you are composing really lengthy note.

Small but really helpful.

Now if you were me, you will have this small problem of not liking to create playlists. Rather, the way I play music is to organize them into folders. I can always drag an updated folder in because most of my song folders are theme as

1. 01 Rock
2. 02 Chill
3. 03 Popular
4. 04 Podcasts

But somehow, perhaps influenced by iTunes not many Android music players are like that.

Enter MortPlayer [Android Market >>]. Here is a music player, that not ranked the highest but serve its needs.

Plays music by folders

Instead or artists, playlists, it enables you to scan available music folders. You can let MortPlayer to scan for you or choose a designated root folder.

Equalizer and Bass Boost

If you think this is just a lousy app that only plays via folders, think again. It comes with a range of audio enhancements. I love having an equalizer and bass boost settings.

Lock Screen Controls

Now this is something a lot of third party players do not have. My Samsung Galaxy S2 default player allows me to change track on lock screen, not many can.

MortPlayer allows you to do that! The image above shows a sliding door you can slide up when you are at your lockscreen. You can access most of what you need to do, change tracks, change folder, stop and play there.

When you click the notification bar it will launch a control pop up like this for fast control.

Conclusion

I am very happy using MortPlayer and have not found any faults yet. I hope you can give it a try.

I have subscribe to the Google network a fair bit. This means that I use

1. Gmail as my main email client
2. Google Reader as my main RSS feeds reader
3. Google Calendar as my consolidated calendar
4. Google Contacts as my main contact manager

The advantage of subscribing to Google’s cloud services or network, or whatever you want to call it is that

1. It is extensible. You can link data to your data easier than other platform. You can export data away from Google should you feel dis-satisfied with it
2. Because it is extensible and API is open to developers, many desktop,smartphone and other native device developers can build applications to increase productivity and performance
3. Google continues to innovate in their products to accommodate to a large number of users with different ways of calendaring, contacts management, reading and managing email

But the downside for using Google’s product

1. The look is always very ugly compare to Microsoft and Yahoo’s offering
2. Because applications are always in Beta, some people will feel turn off about experimental things and why it doesn’t have certain features

Google have taken a lot of efforts to address the UGLY portion. In the last year, their web applications and Android and iPhone applications have undergone a drastic beautifying.

Now there is a consistent minimalist white theme for almost all their applications. They have cut out a lot of the clutter and have given enough whitespace to enable the user to focus on the right subject.

Good user interface attracts users to come back and want to use it, and the more a person use it, it enhances them better.

The new Gmail resizes better when you change it to a smaller window. The email conversations look better with the picture of the person you are talking to next to it and overall feels more like a chat conversation.

The problem with Google Reader had been that it always look strange and its really not great at focusing on what matters – the content! This redesign removes a lot of the boundaries and ensures the user sees clearly between controls and content.

There is also a tighter integration with Google Plus which is good to grow the Google Plus social network. The more ways you make it easier for info sharing the more it becomes important.

What do you guys think? Do you like the new changes?

If you are a fan of streaming English subtitled Animes, you would enjoy the use case of

1. Watching Anime in between commuting
2. Not having to bother about downloads
3. Watch for Free

Now we know that sites like

1. Anime Shippuuden
2. Anilinkz

Aggregates Anime episodes so that you can stream and watch English version of them. But can you stream and watch them from  your smartphone over 3G?

I believe you cannot do it for iPhone or iPad because Flash does not work on iOS platform. However, that’s where Android comes in because you can stream from a mobile browser window to watch these Anime.

What I tried was to watch an episode of Gundam Age on my Samsung Galaxy S2. The superior performance of the phone, plus the Dolphin browser makes the whole process rather enjoyable.

How do you guys find this use case?

What do you guys think of Roboto, Android 4.0 new font which will overtake Droid Sans’ role?

On first impression I find that it is a very refreshing font compare to Droid. Droid comes across as very edgy, very strong.

Fonts really determine the overall user experience. Steve Jobs told everyone how much his course on Typography helped create this overall successful user experience for the iPhone.

Without Helvetica on Mac and IPhone and Segoe UI for Windows 7 and Vista, users would not like using these electronic devices so much.  For me, Droid always make the original Android Cupcake and Donut look funny.

Where Roboto works best is that it looks much like Helvetica or Gill Sans. These are the set of highly readable font that you cannot go wrong, along with Frutiger and Segoe UI.

Roboto is meant more for 720p screen not on Desktop

One thing I did was to see how well Roboto look on Windows desktop. It turns out that it looks rather bad! There were much mentioned that Roboto released is much optimized for high definition display so that’s why there are glyph that makes it look very bad on desktop. (Top part is Roboto bottom is Helvetica)

Roboto a rip off of iOS’s Helvetica?

There are many that says Roboto is a copy cat of Helvetica, but I think it just prove that the kind of font used in Apple and iPhone is a very readable, presentable and at the same time make a good headline.

Why are we talking about it being a rip-off?

John Gruber have a point:

No one — no one — is criticizing Roboto because it isn’t Helvetica. If anything, the complaint is that it’s too similar to Helvetica. Nor is anyone suggesting that Android should use Helvetica as its system font. In fact, if they did use Helvetica as their system font, the criticism would be louder, insofar as they’d be seen as copying from Apple. (Of course, they couldn’t use Helvetica, because Helvetica can’t be included in an open source OS, but that’s beside the point.)

On Segoe, we agree. But note that everyone agrees. No one from Holwerda’s imaginary Apple-defending Helvetica-loving cabal has anything but praise for Segoe, as Metro’s system font. It’s attractive, readable, friendly, and distinctive.

Honestly, I’m just selfish. I want Android to have an attractive system font, if for no other reason than that the system font is going to be used to render Daring Fireball for anyone reading it on an Android device. This idea that designers who favor iOS criticize Android for being poorly designed just because it’s from an Apple competitor is nonsense — a bogeyman construct dreamed up by open source zealots who refuse to believe over a decade of evidence that open source UIs tend to be ugly, and that ugly UIs tend to be unpopular. We criticize Android for being poorly designed because it’s poorly designed. We favor iOS because it’s better designed. That’s it.

How to change your rooted smartphone

1. Download and install the app Font Changer from the market (requires your device to be rooted)
2. Download the zip file containing the Roboto font and unzip it (XDA Forum link, Mediafire, Or here)
3. Open System > Fonts and copy all the three .ttf files from the unzipped folder and paste them into your phone’s SDcard (inside the folder “.fontchanger“)
4. Open the app in your device and select the font
5. Reboot

Google and Samsung will be holding an event on 19th October 2011, where they are likely to release the Nexus Prime and Ice Cream Sandwich, the next iteration of Android.

In yesterday’s conference call after announcing their Q3 results, Larry Page said the follow on ICS:

“You won’t believe what we have managed to do in this release. We see Android going gangbusters, and we don’t see anything that will stop that.”

When you promise something like this, you better make sure that you jolly deliver it. Recent iteration of Android have not truly WOW the fans.

And lets face it: Google+ looks to be going downhill. They are not making money off it and probably majority of the people there are just testing it and not truly using Google+

The Apple iPhone 4S presentation was largely a disappointment for a lot of folks, but for me the highlight was SIRI, the personal digital voice assistant.

Voice recognition is not something new. Google’s Android have this in their Android to replace text input or carry out search.

But Apple’s presentation looks really neat. Apparently I found out that SIRI exist as a startup before Apple decided to integrate this into their OS after buying over. 

But can Android do something similar as well?

1. It integrates narration of incoming text messages when put into a narration mode. Android has that too but its not integrated this way.
2. Replies to text message through voice. Android is not integrated this way yet.
3. Switches application context from text messaging to music playlist through voice command.
4. Understands that you are currently in an application context and continues to be in that application context.

Till today Android have VLingo which does the same thing. It is free over at Android Market and well rated.[Get it here]

SIRI actually marries 2 concepts

1. Instead of text commands to invoke switching between apps, it users voice. For text command apps on the desktop do take a look at Google Calendar’s Quick Add Feature [illustration here]
2. SIRI maintains a set of voice commands. These voice commands could be 5 different voice sets to bring you to a single application context such as Reminders or Calendar, as we bring it up differently.
3. SIRI then marries this with your own variable data input.
4. The second powerful concept is the AI to recognize voice and translate to data or commands better than the competitors

Why SIRI is better than Android’s current offering is the AI portion is really well worked out.

1. SIRI started off in 2003 as CALO, a DARPA funded project with 300 researchers. It has 8 years of development and a lot of money invested. Basically Apple is now bring a really advance voice to text and text to voice AI system to the mainstream consumers.
2. The system will clarify after voice input to make sure you send or input something according to what you want.
3. The conversion from units or time zones is going to be a very big feature.
4. Integration with Wolfram Alpha as well.

The question now is that as Asians, not all of us have English names. In past voice recognition systems this have been a problem.

Will SIRI be a racist application? We will only find out when we get hold of one and try it.

The next question is: How is Microsoft and Google’s technology in this voice recognition area? Will they be able to compete?

I am getting in the mood to be wary of security on the internet. I think it is a big issue because sooner or later we are going to want to access a lot of our documents, spreadsheets and presentations on our smart device.

The best integration currently belongs to iOS with QuickOffice and Google Doc or Dropbox.

However the integration is minimal. There are some glitches that makes you NOT TRUST the system.

But what many professionals are looking for is checking their work documents and security and privacy is an issue here.

In this recent report by Symantec, it compares iOS vs Android and seem to think that iOS is less prone to hack but when jailbroken is pretty weak. Android is more secure than your windows operating system but very prone to malware.

It looks like your typical windows operating system debate and what I can say is that this will only be another money haven for the security firms.

Symantec says that mobile devices definitely do offer improved security over their PC counterparts. But unsurprisingly, given that Symantec sells mobile security solutions for enterprise, the firm also found that “major gaps remain” in the overall mobile security picture, especially when it comes to securing enterprise assets. Still, even given the company’s bias in this matter, the results of its comparison between iOS and Android reveal two very different approaches to safeguarding mobile users.

In the 23-page report, Symantec outlines how iOS specifically offers “strong protection against traditional malware,” due mostly to Apple’s app approval process and the way the company vets iOS app developers to identify and eliminate attackers. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t employ this kind of screening procedure, which Symantec agues has “led to today’s increasing volume of Android-specific malware.”

Jailbroken iOS devices, however, represent a system just as vulnerable to attack as home PCs, Symantec cautions. Of course, that just means that if you use a jailbroken iPhone, you should be extra careful about your browsing habits and about what software you download and install on your device. In mobile, as in traditional home computing, the most effective barrier against malicious attacks is always the user.

Technology have come to a stage where it is able to assist us massively in our goals. Sometimes we use it for the sake of digitizing it to little effect, sometimes it does help massively.

The smartphone with GPS really expanded what we can do with technology to such an extend that you are able to find things and record things on a geographical scale easily.

Here is a good article written on Android and Me detailing how some android apps help the writer lose 100 pounds before his wedding day.

I am pretty excited everytime Google IO comes around the corner and this year it doesn’t disappoint.

Build new apps that are richer in functionality and smartphone apps that have tablet functionality

Build hardware devices using an ADK to create hardware to talk to Android software

Assess music and video that is sync automatically online