Here are my top 5 android applications and widgets (two separate lists).  In an effort to spread the word about some lesser-known power-user apps, I will try to exclude everyone’s favorites, such as RememberTheMilk and WeatherBug.

Applications

1 Handcent

Handcent is a replacement for the stock “Messaging” application on Android.  It literally has too many feature to list, but some of my favorites:

• Can customize notification options on a per contact basis, and even set custom vibrate settings
• Can skin to your hearts content
• Can reply inline to incoming text messages
• Can quick-compose a text message from within ANY android application

2 SayMyName

SayMyName is a nice little random utility that will speak the name of the incoming caller when receiving a new phone call.  It is overlaid with the ringtone that is being played, but in my experience that is not much of a problem.  You can have it just say the persons name, or configure what it says, such as “Incoming Call from %first% %last%”.

3 Gentle Alarm

GentleAlarm is a sort-of a replacement for the Clock application.  In my opinion the stock Clock application is severely lacking in the alarm feature, coming from using an iPhone as a dedicated alarm clock for almost two years.

Once you get past GentleAlarm’s rather HORRIBLE user experience, it is easily the best alarm application I have ever used.

• dock support
• sleep-cycle optimized to you wake up during light sleep (optional)
• music, playlists, ringtones
• silent alarm for school/work
• very smooth onset of alarm
• night display
• flip to snooze
• optional flightmode at night

4 KeePassDroid

I use KeePassX on my Macbook Pro to track all of my important account information.  KeePassDroid allows me to carry that information with me everywhere on my phone.  Definably a must for me and my smart phone.

5 twicca

I really don’t spend much time using Twitter anymore, but twicca seems to be the best currently available twitter app for Android.  It looks great, and covers all of the basic features perfectly.

Widgets

1 Agenda Widget

The stock “Calendar” widget that comes with Android sucks.  What I needed was an agenda style widget that doesn’t look like crap.  “Agenda Widget” fits the bill rather perfectly.

2 Power Control Widget (root required)

A widget that gives you quick access to toggling bluetooth/wifi/3g, comes with a rooted ROM.

3 Battery Time Lite Widget

This widget gives you a little battery icon showing remaining juice, but it also places the battery percentage into your notification bar.

I have been using an iPhone 3G for a little over two years, and a year before that I was using a first generation iPod Touch. For those 3 years the iPhone (and its operating system) has been my handy companion, helping to keep me entertained, and on track with every aspect of my life. It _was_ the ultimate smart phone.

I have spent many years using various Palm PDAs and they always left me felt wanting – I didn’t know what I wanted, but the iPhone filled that spot perfectly.

I have been completely satisfied until recently, and this week signed up for a new 2 year verizon wireless contract, and bought a Motorola Droid.

What led me to do this?
- iPhone 3G was becoming increasingly slow. (Jailbroken or not). In an effort to speed it up, I restored it to stock firmware and lost 90% of the functionality that is important to me in a smart phone. iPhone 3G stock is useless to me.
- AT&T reception. Where I work, and spend most of my weekends, AT&T reception is poor at best. In most cases it would be faster to go to an Apple Store, buy an iMac, then hand carry that iMac to a starbucks to check my email then wait for the iPhone to find service and launch the email application.
- Boring, and nothing new in sight. 2 years is a long time to have a phone. Last year’s update to the iPhone (iPhone 3GS) wasn’t enough for me to extend my AT&T contract another 2 years, or plop down $500 for an unsubsidized phone. This last apple event apple announced the iPad. There was no discussion of the iPhone, or even the operating system they share in common. This disturbed me. Concentrate on the product everyone loves, dont split your focus to another product that doesn’t solve a problem for me…

What do I want in a smart phone?

The Droid so far does _almost_ everything my jailbroken iPhone could do (and with speed and service). There of course are some gaps.

First, what do I do with my iPhone exactly? What is important to me in a smart phone that I keep with me 24/7?

- Calendar Notifications. I NEED my phone to sync with whatever calendaring system I am using (Google Calendar currently), and even more important I NEED it to notify me of events that are on that calendar. (iPhone: Stock calendar application)
- Calendar Agenda. Again, I am all about calendar support. I NEED to see what the days ahead have in store for me. (iPhone: Jailbroken LockCalendar)
- To Do List. I try to be a very organized person. I like lists. I keep extensive to do lists to organize my life. My phone needs to be able to sync with whatever solution I am using for To Do lists, even if I have to hand write it myself.(iPhone: Things)
- Note Syncing. I write notes about a lot of things that I need to remember. Same as above. (iPhone: simpleNote)
- Easy access to all of my email accounts. I get a lot of email (who doesnt) (iPhone: stock email)
- Real web browsing. I can stand stupid phone web browsers. The iPhone MobileSafari has spoiled me. I need that in a phone.(iPhone: stock browser)
- Reliable phone service. I work on an air force facility. I frequently need to make important phone calls. I need reliable phone service.(iPhone: I wish)
- Music playing. My phone is my iPod. I do not wish to carry multiple devices around.(iPhone: stock mp3 application)
- Terminal/SSH ability. I like to be able to access remote servers that I own at free will.(iPhone: Jailbroken MobileTerminal)
- Customization. I hate it when my phone looks exactly like everyone else’s. My phone is mine, it needs to feel like home. (iPhone: jailbroken WinterBoard)

So why didn’t I just get an iPhone 3GS and jailbreak it? It’s faster than the iPhone 3G, and it meshes with my current environment, BUT the current model of the iPhone 3GS can’t be jailbroken reliably. It currently requires to be tethered to a computer EVERYTIME you reboot it. Phones suck, they aren’t stable, their batteries die, they get rebooted occasionally. This is a deal breaker for me.

Week 1

Android does everything Google under the box (makes sense). To even activate your phone you have to give it a gmail address.

It automatically sucked down my Google Voice contacts, and it was a chinch to setup Google Voice on it. The market place isn’t as plentiful as the AppStore, but it does seem to have a lot of the quality applications covered.

So far I use the following to replace features of my iPhone:

- Handcent. Text messaging application at its finest. This is almost equivalent to biteSMS on a jailbroken iPhone.
- Astrid. Pretty solid to do list software supporting tags and due dates. Doesn’t quite replace Things for me, as I rely fairly heavily on the syncing capability. Astrid does seem to sync with RememberTheMilk, so I will give that a whirl.
- KeePassDroid. There’s too many passwords for me to remember. On my desktop I use KeePassX (http://keepass.info/ is free and open source for all platforms). iKeePass on the iPhone kind of sucked. KeePassDroid is pretty sweet.
- Haven’t found a note syncing solution yet.
- BetterTerminal. Pretty great terminal.

Android lets me configure every notification sound to my content. Everything can have its own noise, no hacking required.

Best part of the new phone so far? The speaker is incredibly louder than my iPhone 3G so I can actually here phone calls and text messages.

I think I will keep it for now….

UPDATE: Three weeks later, I have decided to keep the droid, and even ported my AT&T number to VZW!  Goodbye iPhone!

I have to admit, I am becoming a fan of Nissan.  Solid cars so far.  This is my best rental yet, this sporty little guy is quite a bit fun to drive around!

Chrome and Safari has this nifty feature enabled by default… as you start typing in the Location bar entries from your history and bookmarks are autocompleted into the field.

Apparently you can also do this in Firefox 3.5, but it is disabled and hidden away in about:config.

To enable this, pop over to “about:config” in Firefox, and toggle the key “browser.urlbar.autoFill” to true.

Work now pays for a rental for me to use while I am on Domestic Assignment in the “desert”.  My first rental?  A dark blue Toyota Prius.  I don’t care if you think the car is lame, but you have to admit that its quite the geek ride..

Despite all of its buttons and gadgets in the cockpit, driving the Prius is basically like driving a fridge.  There’s no roar of an engine.  There’s not much feedback when driving.

The gas mileage is of course fantastic which makes it great for all the driving I have to do, but I think my next rental car will be something else.

This is something that always bothered me while designing an iPhone UI in Interface Builder: When making a “Tab Bar Application”, my child/tab views were always messed up, and not rendered the same as what I would make in Interface Builder.

Of course the whole thing was a big neophyte mistake on my part, but I figured I would share my findings for others that have such a problem.

For the sake of this post, I am building an application called “DemoApp”, from the “Tab Bar Application” template in XCode.  My UI design in Interface Builder looks like this:

For the sake of this demo, I have also thrown away the default “SecondView” that comes with the template, in favor of using my own custom one as an example.

So how does this render on the iPhone?  Not at all how it looks in Interface Builder…

It took me FOREVER to figure out why my Views were getting clipped, and generally rendered incorrectly whenever I made a custom view to go inside of a TabBarController.  The secret?  On your custom view, enable the bottom bar!

So now your interface should look like this in InterfaceBuilder:

Which makes it MUCH easier to arrange your UI to render correctly inside of a TabBarController.  This little checkbox and my own carelessness caused me much stress and anger towards Interface Builder – hopefully this post will help someone resolve the problem more quickly than it took me!

Did a little work on my Jeep this weekend. Nothing complicated, but improved (IMO) the look of the jeep front, and cabling in the cab area.

• Painted the chrome headlight bezels to be satin black
• Fixed the USB support in my car stereo, and ran an iPod cable to the back of it for my iphone
• Ran the power cable (cigarette lighter -> mini USB cable) through the bottom of my dashboard, and up out of the defroster vent.

Before:

After:

Here’s a shot from above of my GPS (mounted to the windshield), and the power cable snaking into the defroster vent:

.. and then a shot of the stereo playing from the iPhone and displaying the current track:

Rattle canning the bezels was a blast:

I’ve been here in Southern California for two weeks now.  Two weeks! I don’t know if I will ever believe that I live here..

I spent the first week getting familiar with the area, and waiting for my personal belongings to finish their cross country journey.

My apartment is roughly two blocks from the beach.  The beach is incredible!

A few blocks down the street from me is the Santa Monica Promenade.  Something I have never experience before, but is basically a massive out door mall.  Complete with food, an apple store, and street performers. (belly dancers? yes!)

I started my new job this week, working for Northrop Grumman in the Aerospace Systems division.  I spent Monday and Tuesday at the HQ in El Segundo doing orientation/indoc stuff, then was promptly shipped off to the desert town of Palmdale to meet my actual team.

It’s pretty crazy so far.  I get to work on two airforce bases, including Edwards Airforce Base (massive).  I have seen some incredible, incredible things.  The urge to take pictures while on base is incredible… but as you may understand, is not allowed.

Edwards AB does have an old airplane meuseam that allows photograph though, so here’s a picture of an A1 Warthog:

Tonight I return back to the desert to check in to my (paid by NGC) hotel, and start a very long week of work.  Last week was 6 days, for a total of 59 hours.  This week will be considerably higher (60+?) – but thats great, because its overtime pay! (straight pay, not time and a half.. but still, thats a lot of money to pay off my student and jeep loans ;-)  )

I am going to hold off on saying if I like California, my new job, or my new life.  I’ll let everything simmer for a little longer before sayin if I truely like it or not… but it’s really looking good ;-)

I have accepted a position with Northrop Grumman Corporation as an Aerospace System Test Engineer and will be moving to LA next week.

Goodbye Rochester.  We’ve had some good times, and a lot of bad times (that I am looking forward to forgetting)  I won’t miss you.