I’m not slacking, I’ve just been busy at Betanews trying to adhere to the prime directives.
You know…serving the public trust, protecting the innocent, and upholding the law…
That’s how I do.
But I’m gonna do better and spread my work out among a couple of other blogs soon. For now, here’s a look at the two different builds of AVG’s Android antivirus software: phone and tablet.
AVG did a pretty good smartphone survey in February and they shared the results with me at CTIA when I shot this quick video. It was kind of ridiculous, actually. Like many security surveys, it was sort of geared to show how ignorant most people are.
Of nearly 30,000 smartphone users that participated in the survey, 25% DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT OS THEY WERE USING!
That was more than any other single OS named. iOS had 24%, RIM BBOS had 19%, Windows Mobile had 12% and Android had only 9%.
51% said they had, at some point, accidentally signed up for some product or service without knowing it cost money.
59% said they were unsure if they had ever shared their location via photo metadata.
53% said they were unsure if their “confidential payment information” was being shared through third party apps.
AVG is free/freemium. While I’m not personally convinced of the utility of smartphone security apps against good old fashioned conscientious usage, you can’t really argue with their intentions and their price point.
Stay Tuned, I’ll be posting a review of Mikrosonic’s MPC for Android that goes by the name SPC.
You may find this hard to believe, but almost 60% of the traffic I get on this site goes to one article…my review of Electrum, the drum synth app. I didn’t even give it that great of a review, but apparently Android musicians are STARVING for music apps, so I’m more than willing to give you a look at all of Android’s musicmaking apps.
RD3 Groovebox by Mikrosonic is the other noteworthy sequencer/synth app for Android, and has been available for about six months already. If you were to download it now, you’d be getting version 1.1.1, the second major iteration since it was released.
It’s a dead simple app to pick up and use, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sophisticated. It’s just very efficiently arranged. The interface is made up of three screens: Beats, Bassline, and Mixer. Let’s take a look at each…
Beats
The drum track isn’t a synth but is a beat sequencer with 8 different classic beatbox sample sets. The sample kits include Roland’s 606, 808, 909, and CR-78, the Oberheim DMX, the Korg KR-55, Casio RZ1, and the classic Linn. Each drumkit has six samples which vary slightly between them, but generally include kick, snare, two high hats, rimshot and then some other one which could be anything from a clap, to a conga, to a tom or cowbell. It’s not super versatile in terms of sample variety, but it’s more than enough of a selection of popular drum machines to play with, and you can mix the levels from that screen.
Setting up sequences is ridiculously easy. Along the bottom of the screen is a 4 step/4 bar phrase, and you simply select the sample you want to sequence, and the sequencer along the bottom switches to that sample. If you have played with any step sequencers, it’s a setup you should instantly recognize.
Bassline
The bass track is pretty much a virtual Roland TB-303. It’s got the same square/saw oscillator and some of the filter knobs. An awesome part of RD3 is that it supports multi-touch so you can tweak multiple knobs for the full filtration effect.
Sequencing the bass can be done in two ways: step by step, or by “following.” The first way involves selecting a step, and then assigning a note to it. It’s a little awkward, but once you know what to do, it instantly becomes second nature. You poke the step, you poke the note, and then you can select the octave, and pick if you want it accented or held. “Follow” mode is pretty much like having it on record, and you can play your bass phrase more or less live, and then assign octave and accent in step mode.
Mixer
You can record four different drum patterns and four different bass patterns, and then choose how you’d like them to play in the master screen. For example, you can just pick the patterns as they’re playing, have them played in order, or have them played randomly.
Also from this screen, you can select the volume of the bassline and the beats, and even apply distortion to the bass to make it sound more aggressive (or more like the classic Acid House bass, if you’re so inclined.) Finally, the master “play” button (labeled “run”) and tempo selector are located here.
Once you’re done laying out all your sequences, you can save the song and export it as a .wav file. When you export it, you’re presented with sharing options such as bluetooth, email, SMS and whatever other methods of sharing you may have installed. On my Galaxy S phone, for example this includes things like AllShare and Yahoo! email. There’s also an option to share via SoundCloud, but every time I’ve tried this so far it doesn’t work.
This video is me playing around with RD3, but I can’t actually hear what I’m doing because it’s running directly into the camera, so it’s no masterpiece, but you at least get a good idea of how easy it is to use.
Bottom line: Solid Music-creation Android apps are few, ones this good are even fewer. It’s a must-have.
I talked to Mint.com about their Android App before it was released a couple of weeks ago. Even though they developed for the iPhone first, they had a lot of positive things to say about Android: Development is easier, less restrictive, and more community-supported.
After actually launching their app, they have already issued version 1.2 thanks to all the user feedback they got. In case you missed my review on Betanews, Mint is a personal budgeting app that accesses all your online banking records, investments, and lines of credit and gives you a live snapshot of your finances and where you stand in your budget. It doesn’t allow transactions to be made, so it’s a bit safer than some of your regular banking apps.
Version 1.2 has 1.2 in response to user feedback. The new version of Mint for Android allows users to view their financial data in landscape mode, it now works with hardware keyboards (including Shape Writer,) it
enables widget viewing in a 4×1 area, and offers improved categorization and cleaner refreshing.
Once you get over the initial skepticism of putting all your financial records into Mint, you find that it’s a really handy app. I find myself using the live folder of my recent transactions very often. It’s the first time I’ve really put live folders to good use.
I’ll be at CES for Betanews again this year, and in addition to BN reporting and lending a hand on the Plan8 Podcast, I’ll be singling out Android goodies in my usual fashion. To simultaneously whet your appetitie for next week, and help me remember the booths to visit, here are some of the Android drops I’ll be looking for in the miles of floorspace at CES:
When we first saw Android 1.6 (donut) long long ago, we heard about the accessibility features afforded by the text-to-speech engine made by SVOX. By default, your donut device doesn’t have the speech libraries loaded, and you have to add them yourself. Eclair-based devices such as the Motorola Droid, however, come with the speech function fully loaded and ready to rock.
To turn it on, go to Menu> settings > accessibility, click on the “accessibility” checkbox, and then click on the “TalkBack” checkbox. A warning box pops up telling you that it will read things such as credit card numbers aloud and that it “may be able to collect the data you type, ” so be careful..
When you have TalkBack turned on, all it really does is verbally tell you where you are, such as the home screen, sub-menus or URLs. It also reads pop-up messages and warnings, but that’s the limit of it.
But I started thinking the other day that maybe TalkBack could come in handy if I could highlight text and have it read aloud, sort of like what you can do on many Kindle books, and what you can do with Speech in OS X. Since I have to edit other people’s documents for work, I’m always using speech. I even have a macro set up to highlight all text in this one field and automatically launch the voice reader. So yeah, I thought it would be cool to have TalkBack read my Google News or Techmeme headlines to me as I’m driving or walking the dog or something.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a solution that doesn’t require the installation of another application. I try to highlight and copy text with menu-e on the Droid, which then copies my selection to the clipboard. But then I have no access to the clipboard to read my selection.
So what the hell…I downloaded Talking RSS Reader by Google Engineer Stephanie Doyon, which integrates with Google Reader. It doesn’t use the nice built-in Android reader voice, but the Linux text-to-speech voice which I now equate with the dumb smiley face on the OLPC “Speak” program. I got my niece an XO-1 for Christmas last year, and she spent quite a lot of time playing with the Speak app, making it just go “fhfhahfhfhehehehehnfmsisisisioep” and such…over and over and over.
This is the guy I picture reading my RSS feeds in Talking RSS Reader. Or more accurately, I picture him reading every single bit of text in every article in my feed in order. When you use this app, half of the time it’s going to be saying things like “image link, image link, image link, image link, image link” and other such useless info that I don’t want to hear. It’s the worst in blogs because it reads all the usernames, link names, comments, and stuff. Talking RSS reader is free and alright, but it’s better for reading the full text of articles in sequential order rather than just reading headlines. I want something that will just speak all the headlines to me in a clear voice, and have speech recognition so I can say something like “read that one!” and it will stop its listing and drill down into the article I chose. That kind of app would be awesome for commuters, and I guess I have to continue my search.
Talking RSS reader crashed on me quite a few times when I was playing with it, but it didn’t ever throw up an error message. The app just silently closed, which I guess is kind of less annoying, but still bad. I won’t uninstall this yet, as I intend to use it in the car, but it’s really not quite what I had in mind.
In the main screen of the Android Market for Droid and Droid Eris users, there are three sections: Apps, Games, and Verizon. It is a different layout from the one peculiar to T-Mobile Android devices, where the three sections are Apps, Games, and Downloads. Right now it’s not much, but it provides a look into what carrier-specific Android portals may look like. When you click the Verizon tab, it opens a section titled “V Cast,” which includes a small handful of apps chosen specifically for Verizon users.
Right now there are only 15 apps up there, including free things like the Bank of America app, Myspace Mobile, and Flyscreen, and for-pay games like The Sims, Pac Man, and Call of Duty mobile. Currently, only two apps are unique to Verizon, the free “My Verizon” app for account information, and the free Visual Voicemail app which requires a $2.99 monthly fee to use. The latter of these comes pre-installed on the Droid and reportedly can’t be uninstalled….actually hang on, let me check and see if people aren’t just total morons….
Okay, they may be right. When I looked through “manage applications,” the only apps I can uninstall are the ones I installed myself. This is, of course just a cursory judgement, and I’m sure some further probing will uncover a way to fix that, and I’ll post it when I do. If not, that’s kind of stupid.
There really isn’t much else to say about the Verizon section of the Android Market, but there is one huge question: If this is a V Cast-related market, are the for-pay apps billed to my account?
NOPE.
They’re Google Checkout just like everything else in the market.
Complete and total bust.
But that’s hopefully only for the time being. Once the section provides apps unique to the Verizon network, or apps that are billable to your Verizon account, then it will be useful. For now though, it’s like a bar at 3:30 in the afternoon: ghost town with potential.
We still have a long way to go until Android has a significant number of music creation apps for creative types to choose from. It’s only a matter of time, sure…but things right now are a bit scant, so when a new music app comes along, I don’t hesitate to pick it up and give it a run through.
SequencePad (Skyarts), a 4-track general MIDI sequencer is available for ¥250 in the Android Market right now. If you work with MIDI, it makes a decent song sketchpad and supposedly exports sequences as .mid files which, as you know, can be edited in any number of desktop music suite, I personally use Logic Studio and FruityLoops.
However, I cannot guarantee that this app actually does export .mid files, because the simple fact is:
IT’S THE CRASHIEST APP I’VE EVER USED, and I never got far enough to find out if I could save as .mid.
Now I don’t think I’m unjustified in calling this app “crashy as fuck”, but SequencePad doesn’t just force close a lot (I can understand it to a point, it happens…that is something I’m used to), but this app would just turn my screen black and go completely unresponsive for 3-5 minutes. I had to fully reboot my phone three times in the course of reviewing it, and the worst part about it is that this fatal crash occurs when you want to exit the app. You’re not provided with a quit or close button, so you can either try to hit “back” or “home” and the result is the same: total unresponsiveness.
That’s not to say the app isn’t worth picking up, though. I mean, you really don’t have much of a choice if you’re an Android-using musician. You get every app at this point, support the developers, submit useful bug reports, and hope for updates.
On to what SequencePad can actually do.
The main sequence screen
There are a couple of very dumb things about the sequencing screen. Each vertical line is a note in the scale and each horizontal line is one beat. The red dots are notes that I’ve placed. Down the right hand side, you see the numbers 1-4, and in the lower right hand corner, an arrow pointing down? That’s SequencePad’s way of fitting in 8 beats. On the first screen, you’ve got your first half, and then you click the down arrow to switch to the second half of the phrase on the second screen.
That’s not the dumb part.
The dumb part is that you can’t put a note on the ONE beat at the very top!!! you have to start either on the upbeat or on the TWO. See how the screen actually has space for five beats? yeah…it doesn’t make any fucking sense. You actually have to start playing the track to figure out where the downbeat is. And there’s no metronome function to simply and clearly show you where to start.
If you like general MIDI and its familiar palette of 128 sounds and sixteen assignable drumkit slots, you’re fully covered.
Ah, Bird Tweet. The most useless MIDI sound ever.
There are four tracks of general MIDI instruments which can be either “tones” or “rhythm.” The red number one in the picture above means i’m on track 1, and the purple button with the tools to the right of it lets me switch between sounds. To switch tracks, you just push the number button in the middle and choose your track.
The compositional aspect of this app is intuitive and should feel familiar to experienced musicians. You can listen to a track individually, or with the rest of them at the same time, and you can alter the tempo with the metronome button. The only thing I haven’t figured out (besides how to export .mid files) is how to sustain a note. As far as I can tell, this app only allows one note at a time per four tracks. That is, you can’t plonk down four tracks worth of sustained piano notes complete with overlaps. If you can, I still haven’t figured out how.
This might be because the instructions are in pure Zero Wing Engrish.
“Edit Phrase Screen: When it touches the measure eye part, the demiquaver can be added. When it touches an existing note, it is possible to erase it. However, harmony cannot be used.”
Okay, I sort of get what it’s saying, and let me respond by posing this question:
How perpetual notes? User cannot creation tone which have timbre and echoing over formerly stricken sound, and resulting phrase have redolence of Sierra On-Line vintage King’s Quest MIDI beeps. Please to instruct.
Note: I originally wrote this here, but I got assigned the same topic at Betanews, so in my haste, I submitted this same blog post (although edited and re-tooled to omit four letter words and tone down a bit of the personal spin) to Betanews this morning. I hope you don’t feel cheated. I’ll do another one tonight.
Call me crazy, but aren’t Web apps just a kind of reversion back to the “Mobile Web” that was so furiously chastised when the full Web browsing experience came to smartphones?
I understand that our modern Web Apps are being rendered by a “desktop browser” engine, and not some junky WAP browser circa 2002, but I can’t help but feel that an application designed specifically for a mobile phone’s browser is the same goddamn thing as a Web site stripped down to Mobile Web size.
Google debuted the Fast Flip lab last night and it has thus far been received with moderate acclaim. The improved ad coverage and revenue sharing with publishers has been widely cited as a step forward. But what is Fast Flip and why would I give a single shit about it?
Well, it’s another news aggregator. It takes the top 30 headlining stories and arranges them as if you were reading a magazine with one story per page. You should care because a major aspect of this lab is the mobile component that allows Android and iPhone users to leaf through articles with a swipe of the finger. But really, that’s just about all there is to it.
Fast Flip Web App front page
The main page frankly looks like ass, and the text is too small by default; so when I go to look at “Sci/Tech” headlines, I keep accidentally hitting “Entertainment” and having to look at TMZ or something equally inane for a second.
There’s also a search field which lets you look for subjects of interest to you by keyword. One cool thing is that the search field has a built-in X button, so you can erase former searches or typos with a single button smash. That will come in pretty handy when trying to type in someone’s name and it autocompletes it as something else. My buddy from high school yesterday was trying to type in Swiss tennis player “Roger Federer” and it kept auto-correcting it to “Roger Desertes.”
I don’t know when “desertes” became something people really need to type either…but I blame them for Federer’s loss at the U.S. Open.
Once you’re in your chosen category, it’s pretty cool. You swipe your finger from right to left to flip to the next page overview. If the article looks interesting to you, you tap on it and an abstract pops up which asks if you want to view the full article, zoom in, or close the abstract.
abstract popup
You’re also given the option to “like” a story, adds a smiley face to the upper right hand corner and logs it into a profile for stories it will suggest later, sort of like when you give certain songs the thumbs up in Pandora and then you hear them 900 times a day. If you’re logged into your Gmail/Google account, you can also hit “email” and it’ll send a screenshot of the article to whatever email address you input.
Taking a hearty cue from Twitter, Fast Flip also has a trending topics category based on most commonly searched terms. Last night, there were some kinda fucked up ones in there, so I’m pulling it up right now and seeing what the trends are in Googleland.
Just as I expected…people are searching for Health Insurance, Bankruptcy, jobs, 9/11, cancer, abortion, Yankees, and Sarah Palin.
It’s all the depressing stuff the news is good for.
But the point here, albeit a rather blunt one, is that Web apps like Fast Flip, no matter how good, lack the hard key action of dedicated applications. All your controls are situated within the browser window, and if I hit “menu,” which is typically the master control switch for Android apps, I just get the browser’s controls, nothing specifically tailored to Google Fast Flip, or any Web App, for that matter.
Before I go into anything, I would like to warn anyone who’s attempting to seriously blog from their Android phone with wptogo as I have...you will lose your work at some point.
This is my fourth attempt at making a post entirely in the wptogo WordPress blogging app on my G1…let’s see if I can save a draft before I go on.
I think that worked. Unfortunately, though, I’ve lost a lot of pretty decent writing due to force closes when attempting saving drafts or other features. I wrote half of one post using only the soft keyboard and talking about the interesting benefits of auto-completion while blogging on the move. I tried to post some instantly captured pics…and I explained the app’s layout and its pros and cons.
But it’s all gone, and I’m a little upset about it.
However, it’s not anger or annoyance… It’s disappointment that this app has not been the magical solution it promised to be. I thought of all the professional bloggers who use WordPress that could seriously benefit from this app, and I was saddened by its frequent crashing and the thought of all the brilliant work that could get lost.
I was also particularly fond of the idea of writing a blog about an Andoid blogging app while using that very app.
Anyway, let’s talk about the app and hope that it sticks. The touch interface makes this app great, I can highlight text and hit bold or italics, insert links, blockquotes and in-phone images. It’s a bit wonky if you don’t already have photos snapped because you can’t leave wptogo open, go to the camera and take a quick picture for the entry. It requires saving and moving around.
I hit “pictures>add” but nothing has shown up in this field to indicate that a picture has been inserted. It’ll be a surprise for me to discover later. They should be random pics I just took here in line at the grocery store of caffeinated Butterfinger candybars and a sensationalist Newsweek headline.
Okay, I’m back on my computer at home to finish out this review, and apologize for the serious lack of cohesion. Re-reading this entry now, I realize that my composition process is totally uncoordinated, and when I can’t constantly revise a piece of writing, it seriously lacks flow. I shouldn’t say WpToGo RUINED this review, the lack of flow is my fault, but the crashing made me progressively more careless until I eventually just wanted to get something posted.
And as you can see, the one picture was automatically inserted in the top of the post….so I have a nice, ridiculous teaser shot that is sure to get people shaking their heads.
By the way, a woman in front of me in line saw me take the picture of that magazine cover and asked why I had. I said “well, because babies pretty much love everything by default.”
And I kid you not…she said “yeah, and if they don’t, you slap the shit out of them.”
People are hilarious. This is why public blogging is great.
Paint programs. They’re as old as graphical computers themselves, and one of my all-time loves. As a formerly aspiring artist (ages 1-18,) I spent much of my youth perfecting my paint program techniques through various interfaces: joysticks, mice, trackballs, tablets, whatever I could get my hands on, really. Yet as I write this, I only now realize that I’ve never used a light pen. Damn, you know, I’d really like to.
Anyway, I’ve drawn on computers for a long long time in an amateur/enthusiast’s capacity, and I’ve left tracks all over this silly Internet thing. Some really vile tracks, quite intentionally vile, might I add.
See, for some reason I went through a phase where I’d draw grotesque and bizarre scenes in MS Paint on my friends’ computers, and make those pictures their wallpaper. Giant green phalluses…exploding toilets….people being run over by steamrollers…basically stupid shit to get a laugh.
Well, I turned into a junkie for those laughs. At one point, I was making daily ventures to nearby Best Buy and Circuit City shops specifically to draw fucked up pictures on display computers and make them the background for all the shoppers to see and laugh at. I’m weird, I know…but I loved breaking up the staid chain store setups with phantasmagoric and ridiculous imagery. I kept those at a Saturday morning cartoon level of sex and violence, never including anything morally offensive. Ridiculous and inappropriate? Yes…Child-scarring? No.
Like most things, it got boring. So I decided I just wanted to do serious art stuff and lost interest in getting anonymous laughter from shoppers and retail store employees.
That was a long time ago…and now that I’ve clung pretty tightly to my Wacom tablet or good old fashioned physical media like paint/ink/canvas/cardboard/paper, I have completely let the opportunity to draw on a touchscreen phone fall by the wayside. So today, I got Picasso by French developers Tiki Move, a €1.99 “fingerpainting” app in the Android Market and gave it a good, thorough testing while waiting in the airport this evening.
First impression: Fun, but not magical. The app launches directly to a blank canvas and for some reason your default brush color is magenta. I have no idea why…this is probably one of those things the devs didn’t even notice, but most paint programs (and I’m speaking from vast experience here) default to a black. Shit, even the paint program I had on my IBM 286 with only CGA depth didn’t default to magenta, and its colors were only CMYK.
As far as paint programs go, it’s pretty bare bones, You’ve got a few brush options (Pencil/Line, size, fill/blur/hardline, emboss,) a few shape options (circle, rectangle, filled/unfilled,) Flood fill, and one effect called “vortex” which swirls the image with Coriolisness.
You can save your pictures to the SD card as .png files or export them as .jpgs via email/gmail/messaging/picasa/pixelpipe (or other similar exporter) or you can take a screen snapshot.
While playing with the app, pretty much everything bad happened straight out of the gate. I spent a long time drawing and went for a screenshot first. It crashed the app and I lost my drawing. Then I did another one and sent it out via POP3 mail. It never arrived…the same happened with Gmail. I didn’t try Picasa or Pixelpipe because I was sick of redrawing pictures, so I just saved my next file to the SD card. That was the only one that worked.
I mounted my SD card on my computer and found the images that never sent, so they were saved, but the first one that crashed can never be recovered. Too bad, because it was quite a little stunner if I do say so myself.
a test of vortex effect, saved as a PNG
This image is pretty boring, but I was frustrated at this point from the lost images, so I just splattered it up and tapped all over it with “vortex.” It actually kind of reminds me of Eric Carle tissue paper painting, an artist who will forever remind me of my little brother Hubert. Hubert was one of those rare children who at a very young age decided he had a favorite artist before he’d decided he had a favorite television celebrity…his choice was, of course, Eric Carle.
But I’m rambling. This is an app review, after all.
Exploiting the default magenta brush.
The black in this picture is pencil with “blur” turned on. The hard lines are just the standard non-blurry pencil. The rule? Keep it simple, keep it big, and layer the shit out of it. You really get the feel for your limited space and limited gestural accuracy with this app. There is quite a bit of latency in drawing, and I find myself pushing a bit too hard on the screen.
whee. I love macrame and yogurt!
The petals were shaped with pencil with “fill” turned on. This creates free-form op art style shapes when you move your finger around. It’s kind of a nifty feature, especially when you add the “emboss” feature, which makes the shapes look vaguely three dimensional. That feature is used all over this picture.
What do I think in the end? It’s not all that bad. Totally fun to play with and would absolutely be worth the €1.99 if the file export issues get fixed promptly. After all, you don’t want to lose your precious creations just because you had the hauteur to want to show them to people.
Oh…also, you can set your drawings as your home screen wallpaper, so my picture of a vomiting mailbox can proudly be shown off (to be added later.)
