My Favorite Android Apps

So I’ve owned the Motorola Droid for just over a month now, and I’m just loving it. Yes, the phone isn’t without its shortcomings, but many of them are getting fixed via software updates. I don’t really want to post another review since there are a bunch of good ones already, but rather list my very favorite apps.

• ConnectBot is an truly excellent ssh client with plenty of features — including easy ssh tunnel managing!
• Dolphin is a good replacement web browser with lots of fancy features.
• NewsRob is the best way I’ve found to read RSS. It syncs with Google Reader (like NetNewsWire on my Mac!) and offers a very comfortable way to navigate and read the news.
• Google Voice, if you can get an invite, is amazing: free phone calls / texts in and out, visual voicemail, vm transcriptions, call recording…
• Google Listen is a really great podcast downloader/player.
• HandyCalc is a very powerful calculator with graphing, algebra, and unit conversion features.
• Google Sky Map turns your phone into a guide to the sky. By reading from the accelerometer and compass sensors in the phone, this app shows what should be seen in the sky when looking in the phone’s oriented direction.
• Pandora, Last.fm, StreamFurious, and Jamendo are all great apps for streaming music down to your phone. Amdroid lets me connect to my Ampache instance on the server back home and stream anything from my collection.
• Qik lets me stream (and archive) live video from my phone.
• SwiFTP starts up a simple ftp daemon that I can connect to from my PC to manage files on the SD card. This is more convenient than plugging it in.
• Mythmote lets me remote control my MythTV DVR software on the TV.
• SqueezeDroid lets me remote control my SqueezeBox.
• TransDroid lets me remote control my torrents running on the server.
• Seesmic is a nicer Twitter client than Twidroid, I think. Maybe not as many features, but it’s clean, totally free, and includes bit.ly API support.
• Meebo IM is my favorite IM application of the bunch. It supports all the major networks.
• MixZing is a great improvement over the native media player, though I haven’t been playing local media much on my Droid. I wouldn’t really want to use my Droid as my primary media player. While the built-in speaker is quite good, the headphone output is not the best from a portable.

The Android user base is currently growing by leaps and bounds with the release of the Droid and other exciting new phones. It seems like every day there’s a great new app and several updates to existing apps. I’m very much enjoying being a part of it!

Miro: Internet TV Made Easy

When Miro 1.2 came out, I decided to give it another try after some previously failed attempts due to annoying bugs. Well, I’ve been using this free and open source, next generation video platform on my Mac for a while now, and I must say it’s quite nice if you fancy yourself watching some of the great, free video content available on the internet.

Miro is RSS + Bittorrent. Find sites with cool videos that interest you, subscribe to their feeds, and when new content is published, you can have it downloaded and waiting for you by the time you realize it’s there. It’s just so smooth the way I can play the first video, and all the new content plays like my personal TV station. Cmd+F throws me into full-screen mode. It didn’t used to work nearly this well, and I’m just all so very pleased with today’s offering. (It will even search and play YouTube videos.)

Ok, so you want to try this. Click the “Miro” link above and grab the player. It comes with some default channels, but I’ve deleted all but the Onion News Network. The Miro Guide appears to be a nice index of most/all of the content available for the platform, but please allow me to recommend a few of my favorites.

• Revision3 is The TV Network of Kevin Rose (of TechTV and Digg fame) with great shows like Tekzilla, Systm, and of course Diggnation. I also have come to watch the goofy Internet Superstar… I haven’t even tasted many of the Rev3 shows yet!
• Mahalo Daily is a great 5-day/wk short form (3-5 mins) show with Veronica Belmont. (Although she’s about to leave…) They visit someone and show of something… usually very interesting stuff. I like the one about the dude who makes music with Gameboys.
• WebbAlert is another daily, short form show with Megan Webb. Just a quick overview of the tech news.
• GeekBrief.TV is yet another daily, short form show with the bouncy character that of Cali Lewis. Again, it’s an overview of the tech news. Maybe a product review or interview here and there.
• commandN is a longer form (15-20 mins), weekly show with Amber MacArthur, Will Pate, and others. They talk about the news and share cool website picks. Amber’s brother, Jeff, usually has a longer segment where he usually reviews a product.
• Hak5 Is a great, long standing show with a great crew. They hack stuff and talk about it on the show.
• Cranky Geeks is a talk show with John C. Dvorak.
• DL.TV is a tech show with some of the folks from TechTV.

Also, anything from Leo Laporte is fantastic. I’m a very regular listener of Security Now, TWiT, MacBreak Weekly, Net@Nite, and Windows Weekly on his TWiT.TV (audio) podcast network. While there aren’t any regular, internet-available video shows from him yet, he’s been talking recently about a new studio he’s setting up where he’ll start doing some video shows. He’s a great personality… One to watch.

I hope I’ve captured the interest of some new internet TV consumers. Watching this web-based, independent content has really never been this easy.

Celemony to Release Revolutionary Audio Tool

Celemony is set to release Direct Note Access in Autumn of 2008. There is a nice video on the DNA page that explains what it does, but this software is able to identify and isolate different voices within a single audio recording. The user can then change the pitch of and mute individual notes without affecting the overall mix! This is the first piece of software that allows you to reach into a simple, flat audio stream and manipulate its components in this way.

It’ll be really interesting to see how artists use this product to remix familiar tunes.

Korg Makes a Synth From a DS

Holy crap this is totally awesome. Korg will soon release Korg DS-10: a music composition tool that runs on the Nintendo DS. Check out the short video for an idea what it does. It seems like it could be significantly more versatile than the Kaossilator Touchpad Synthesizer.

Link via Wired Blog

Quizzle is Live!

The project that I’ve been a part of for most of my time here at Quicken Loans has finally gone live. Think of it as a flexible financial tool. We want Quizzle to one day be your one-stop shop for learning where you financially stand against the ever-changing climates of the home markets and economy.

The most important feature for most folks seems to be the FREE credit report. You might laugh and say there’s no such thing as a free lunch (as you may have learned in attempting to get other “free” credit reports from other sites) but at Quizzle, we not only give you a completely free and easy to understand credit report, but we manage to do so without your having to provide your SSN! I don’t believe anyone else is doing this right now.

There is a lot to be had inside Quizzle apart from the credit report. A set of your incomes and debts will be You’ll receive an estimate of your home’s value

Mixxx Accepted for Google Summer of Code

Mixxx has just been accepted by Google’s Summer of Code in which students are invited to contribute to various open source projects. Also Hercules was generous enough to donate a couple consoles (the MK2 like I have and another, simpler MP3 console) to the developers, so we should see more solid support for these Hercules consoles in the near future.

This is all great news for anyone interested in this great software. Expect more good news on the Mixxx development front coming up!

Here’s the Mixxx wiki page for brainstorming ideas.

Ubuntu Edgy Eft

Ubuntu Linux released a new version of their Linux distribution yesterday. As per their goofy naming scheme, it is dubbed “Edgy Eft,” and it can be downloaded for free, as always, on their website.

Edgy didn’t even include any sort of 3d capabilities by default (probably for good reasons), but I wasted no time in installing Beryl, the community fork of Novell’s Compiz window manager. It is a seriously nifty 3d environment for your linux desktop that makes OS X graphics look old. There are so many new effects and the gui configuration tools let you tweak nearly any aspect. I must say, I’m quite impressed with what is being done with Beryl, and I look forward to see what Novell themselves are doing with their Compiz version. This YouTube video will give you an idea of the eye candy we’re talking about.

I also wanted to link to this review I just found on osnews, with plenty of screenshots. Give up windows already!

RSS & Some Good Tools

I’ve just posted on our Blogs for Learning blog here at MSU about RSS: Web News Simplified. I list a good number of RSS readers, including some way nifty web ones.

Subversion HOWTO

Subversion is a really nice version control system that many people have migrated to from CVS. I’ve recently needed to set up my rails applications into subversion repositories so I can make use of the quite proper application deployment tool, Capistrano. I wanted to take a moment and post about generally how using Subversion works—for the reference of people stumbling upon my blog, and also my own.

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Blogging in TextMate

I’ve been getting more and more into using Textmate as my choice editor, despite continuing to need Zend for Quicken Loans as I need to work on remote files (over VPN) and the drawer update issue makes it simply unworkable. (One must wait minutes to bring TM to focus.)

Well, I wanted a nice way to blog without going into the Typo control panel. MarsEdit is cool, and so is ecto, but both are commercial software, and I already have a license for my beloved Textmate.

Actually, I would have tried blogging with Textmate much sooner, but there was some weird issue with it when connecting to my blog, despite the other two aforementioned editors working just fine. Someone in the #Textmate IRC channel suggested reloading my bundles (Bundles -> Bundle Editor -> Reload Bundles). And that seems to have solved whatever problem I was experiencing, because now Textmate blogging works just fine.

Wh00t.