Posted: September 15th, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Android, Apps, Google | Tags: 9/11, abortion, Android, app, Bankruptcy, browser, cancer, fast, fast flip, flip, Google, Health Insurance, iphone, jobs, news, pandora, roger federer, Sarah Palin, store, twitter, WAP, web apps, webkit, Yankees | No Comments »
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.
Web Apps still feel like a hollow shell to me.
Posted: September 9th, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Android, Lifestyle | Tags: Android, app, cellular, disorganized, facebook, g1, homescreen, htc, iphone, Mobile, open home, organize, palm, pandora, phone, pre, sense, shazam, store, t-mobile, twitter, ui, weather channel, widget, wxwidget | 1 Comment »
The problem of widget disorganization in Android has been approaching for some time. Now that many of the most popular apps come with widgets, I’m really beginning to feel the clutter on my homescreen. With today’s release of the official Pandora app and yesterday’s release of the official Facebook app, I now have two more medium/large widgets to deal with, and some reorganization to consider.
Pandora Widget, with some 2nd wave ska
I’ve reached the point where things have gotten ugly. With traditional icon-based apps, I can at least do a cohesive theme where everything is the same size and color and it matches the background. With non-themed widgets, though…I’m kind of at the mercy of the app’s designer.
Fortunately, I can add up to 7 more homescreens with Open Home, but anyone who’s dealt with a pack-rat will tell you that giving a hoarder more space doesn’t solve any problems, it just makes them harder to tackle.
I wouldn’t call myself a “widget hoarder,” but let’s see. In my “Add to Home Screen > Widgets” folder, I currently have: Analog Clock, Calendar, Facebook, Music, Open Home Big Analog Clock, Open Home Music, Open Home Setting Widget, Open Home Weather, Pandora, Picture Frame, Search, Tiny Clock Widget 2, Twidget Lite, Voice Text, Voicemail+ Large/Small, Weather Large/Small/Tiny, Weather Channel WxWidget Large/Small.
Do I really need SIX different weather widgets and three clocks? Not really, but you sometimes need to compare to get the best looking widgets that also provide the best results, plus it’s really only three in multiple sizes. The WxWidget actually isn’t my cup of tea, though it’s a super popular and handy app with more in-depth updates and alerts, but the Weather Widget by Lock2 is 100% better looking and gets the job done (I believe it’s designed after HTC Sense’s weather widget). It’s free too, but I highly advise floating a donation their way if you’ve got some change to spare.
Before I can even begin to think about organizing anything, I have to have a deep philosophical “chicken or egg” discussion with myself: Do services gain homescreen position because I use them more, or do I use them more because they’re on my homescreen? My homescreen is usually a bit of both. I use the weather widget a lot mostly because it’s there, not because I always care about the weather. Shazam is an app icon I feel like I always need on my homescreen, but I don’t use it nearly as much as, say, the Google Search bar, which I have relegated to a secondary screen. But really, I’ve started to feel like I don’t need app shortcuts any more with the way things are going. Everything I use pretty much resides in the “side drawer.”
It’s times like this that I wish there was a Widget “snap to” program, or a position randomizer, where I could just hit a button and have the widgets fit to a grid on my screen and I could decide if I liked it or not.
New Facebook widget with Twidget Lite
Because I prefer an uncluttered layout, I’ve switched to a five-screen layout where each screen serves a different purpose. The main screen has weather and calendar, the “music screen” has the Mp3 player and Pandora, the “feed screen” has Twitter and Facebook, the “utility screen” which right now only has the settings widget, and the “Google screen” only has the search widget right now, but anticipates the arrival of new homescreen toys from Google.
It’ll get the job done for now, but more widgets=more processes which ultimately means slowness. It’s running acceptably now, but we’ll see how things get bogged down in the real world. This is something we need to think about as Android users, since the elegant use of widgets is helping to make Android both stand out above icon-based smartphone interfaces, and run more efficiently for the user.
Posted: September 5th, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Apps | Tags: Android, app, art, best buy, blur, brush, circuit city, coloring, drawing, emboss, eric carle, finger, fingerpaint, koalapad, light, move, ms-paint, paid, paint, paintbrush, pen, picasa, picasso, review, store, swirl, tiki, vectrex, vortex, wacom, wallpaper | No Comments »
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.)
Posted: September 2nd, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Android, Lifestyle | Tags: Android, android market, app, bought, buy, caveman, coding, cowpotato, downloads, facts, free, froogloid, guitar, how many, how well, itunes, jtribe, market, my, paid, pedersen, popular, quote of the day, sales, sell, sold, solo, statistics, stats, store, today, tommy, trial, useless, yesterday | 2 Comments »
Sure enough, after all the fuss thrown up over the state of the Android Market, it turns out that we could track sales all along, and Jtribe released a free app in the second week of August simply “Android Market Stats” that attempts to chart the progress of Android’s ecosystem, and in doing so, lends credence to the notion that the Android Market is pathetic.
We’ve been collecting data on the Android Market for the past 8 months and publishing it on androidstats.com. We have been able to watch the Android Market grow to it’s current size of just over 7000 apps and almost 3000 publishers, recording every movement made within the market…Considering all this, along with app price and days on sale within the market, we have been able to determine the monthly revenue from the (US only) Android Market to be closer to $1M USD.
Well…that’s even less than was predicted a couple of weeks ago.
But let’s not feel sad. The good news is that we don’t have to guess any more, we can use Jtribe’s statistics, which are gathered completely independently of Google. We may not be as prosperous as the iTunes app store yet, but at least we can revel in our open data.
Jtribe’s app lets you check the week’s biggest movers, check price changes that took place the previous day, or browse the market as you normally would.
It lets you filter the apps according to which ones are for pay and which ones are free, or you can check out all of them at once. You get a clear picture of who’s hot, and how much they’re making if they’re charging. In today’s top overall rankings, there’s actually only one paid app, a game called Brain Twister by The Game Boss, which was bought 150 times today.
UPDATE: I misunderstood what the numbers next to each app stood for. As Chris from Froogloid informed me (see below) these numbers do not correspond to number of times downloaded (which I thought seemed really really low) but instead, are numerical rankings. I have altered my post accordingly. Thanks Chris, keep up the great work!
As someone remarked on the Techcrunch article I linked to the other day, Android is not a gaming platform*…and the Android Market Stats app shows it clearly. Today’s most popular game, CowPotato 3D by Froogloid (the guys who made the Keyring rewards card app) was downloaded 304 times, then SuperYatzy-free edition by Tommy Pedersen was the second most downloaded with 162.
Android Market Stats app by jtribe
All the data in the app is also available on Androidstats.com, where you can do the same comparison of free and paid apps.
Hopefully, the guys at Jtribe will get my pingback and let us know a little bit more about their methodology.
It’s a rather dull app, unless you’re a stats fan (which I am), so having the ability to track the Android Market’s progress is very exciting to me.
*see comments
Posted: August 31st, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Android, android market, app, checkout, criticism, games, gaming, Google, iphone, itunes, labs, larva, larva labs, market, paypal, PC, store, techcrunch | 4 Comments »
Read this article and then hit “Back.” I’ll wait.
….
Welcome back. I know that is just the stupidest way to start a blog entry, but you’ll have to forgive me, I was a bit irked at that article. It is supposed to be a suggestion to Google, I guess, because it does end on a favorable note. But seriously, there was one thing that upset me about it:
Larva’s Matt Hall attributes this poor performance in part to Android’s shoddy App purchase flow. Unlike the iPhone’s integrated App Store, Android Market doesn’t have screenshots of apps, forces you into the browser at times, makes you use Google Checkout, has some unintuitive navigation issues, and a handful of other problems. These issues are widely known — you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the purchase process is as smooth as it is on the iPhone — but they’ve been around for quite a while.
What’s wrong with Google Checkout? It has improved a ton in the three years it’s existed, and comparing a fully functional multi-way transaction system with a simple dedicated merchant site is just silly. You can tie in Google Checkout with your Adsense/Adwords account, you can use it to sell shit online. iTunes is just a money hole..real tough to get right in six years.
Furthermore, the Android Market does not really exist anywhere that’s visible on a non-phone platform. Yeah, there’s the site, but that’s not at all what the market really looks like. The iPhone app store has iTunes, which extends the App Store’s sphere of influence into the desktop OS realm.
Also…I don’t know if you’ve ever spent a great deal of time shopping for apps directly on an iPhone, but if you pick up your iPhone or iPod right now and look at an app’s dedicated site…just pick one at random, it doesn’t matter.
Okay, what’s missing from the first page that is FRONT AND CENTER in the Android Market?
User reviews.
And you wonder why this developer sold more in the iTunes App Store? People are sold by the description and the screenshots. They have to click over to another page to read user reviews. The Android Market, meanwhile has user reviews right up front…however nescient they may be. Developers have to deal with the idiot masses right out of the gate, people who wouldn’t know open source from a third degree burn.
Actual front page review of Larva Labs’ Retro Defence: “Good, but not worth $5.00″
Look around elsewhere. Notice that customer reviews are almost always put at the bottom or on other pages? No wonder you’re not selling as much as you could.
And as for “unintuitive navigation features” that this guy is talking about, I have no idea. I’ve never found myself wildly floundering for direction in the Android Market. Games and Productivity apps are separate. You can see them by popularity or by date uploaded…click on the one you want to look at and then click “buy” then hit “ok.” It’s not fucking celtic runes, get over it.
I absolutely agree that the Android Market is not perfect. The first thing I’d change is the white on black color scheme*. No sites designed for consumption on a phone should do that, it makes the screen reflective and harder to read (see: Mirror app.) I also agree that screenshots are needed to entice buyers.
But criticizing it for Google Checkout is completely dumb. iTunes is not a bank, PayPal is not a bank, so they’re all about equally vulnerable. I won’t even get started about basing an assessment of the Android Market’s prosperity on the FIFTH PLACE company. You can’t base ANYTHING on that. At least if we contacted the top seller, you could set a ceiling. Come on.
You can’t tell me how long a race lasted by the fifth and twelfth place contestants. You can’t even tell me if it was good.
Black-on-White Android Market
*According to CNet today,
this is already in the works.
Posted: August 25th, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Apps | Tags: 808, 909, Android, app, beatmaker, bebot, bend, casio, circuit, drum, ds-10, electrum, iphone, ipod, jam, james, junk, korg, kraftwerk, m-audio, market, music, niko, nintendo, poor, psp, richard, sessions, store, stylophone, synth, theremin, touch, toys, traxxpad, twenty, ubisoft, zoom | 3 Comments »
Because I spent many years as a poor musician, my area of gear expertise isn’t with high quality instruments, it’s with bargain equipment (think Zoom, M-Audio, Casio, et al.), pawn shop finds, and things best classified as “musical toys.”
I keep up with the latest toy musical instruments, and delight in their exploitation. Circuit bending brightens my day, and I’m always looking out for the next Stylophone. I got the Korg DS-10 on the day it came out, I have two copies of Traxxpad for PSP, and I consider the iPhone/iPod Touch to be a full-fledged music platform.
I guess i’m a pretty discerning customer in the “Don’t Expect Much” category.
Electrum was made by Niko Twenty and is available for $3.99 in the Android Market. What you get is a 16-step sequencer somewhat like the ol’ TR-808 in design, and each sequence is built with six samples. You can put together up to 32 different sequences and create full songs. The cool part is that you can export your creations as single sequence loops or as a full song. The dumps are 16 bit wav files (mono).
A blurry, late night shot of Electrum's interface
I had originally intended to put in a couple of quick sequences that I whipped up on the “rock kit,” but I’m having some trouble doing that, so I’ll just say that there’s also 808, 909, Orchestral, Hip Hop, and Human Beatbox kits and 6 free downloadable packs. While it’s pretty light on features, the only thing it’s really lacking is the ability to import your own sample set. (See Comments) I always find myself wishing for a sound recording sampler app so I can make my own Richard James kit of nutty noise captured on the phone’s mic. But I guess I have to wait.
If you’ve ever used BeatMaker on iPhone, don’t expect that level of quality. However, BeatMaker costs 20 fricking dollars and Electrum costs only 4. At one fifth the price of BeatMaker, you get much more than one fifth of the functionality with Electrum. Complaints are few. It does get crashy at times, it has dumped some broken .wavs for some reason, and the UI in Sequence mode looks like it’s unfinished. But it’s a work in progress and junk musicians should applaud Niko Twenty.
This is definitely one of the best music apps we have on the Android Platform, and I’m currently working on a little jam built with beats from BeatMaker, a guitar track from Ubisoft’s Jam Sessions for Nintendo DS, and some Theremin wangling from Bebot on iPhone.
Posted: August 24th, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Android, app, ben, cab, cutie, death, for, gibbard, napster, postal, radio, rhapsody, service, spotify, store, streamfurious | 1 Comment »
Rhapsody for iPhone is going to remain a big deal until it gets approved or rejected. That’s like half the damn fun with the iTunes App store lately. But nestled in Real’s press release this morning was the mention of a Rhapsody app for Android. I’m sure I won’t be the first person on the Internet to say thank Christ.
The music industry loves subscription services like children love things that scare the shit out of them, and if we can have streaming subscription services to our mobile devices, that’s practically a reinvention of radio, and that’s how the Fuckedcompany that is the music industry will come back.
You can also think of these services as “music utility companies,” which may be upsetting to some of you…but probably not to musicians and record labels. Some people think it’s going to happen to news, too. Shit, News Corp. already said they’re going to start charging for all of their news sites…but I have digressed enough.
I don’t love Rhapsody. In fact, I fucking hate Rhapsody. I went to their download shop launch event in NYC with Ben Gibbard (guy from Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service) and their people were literally nowhere to be found…presumably they were already drinking and watching the show. I had exactly ONE drink before they ended open bar and I had to listen to shitty acoustic versions of shitty Postal Service songs that I hated eight years ago. Then after the show ended, everyone milled around and socialized and I had no idea who I was supposed to meet with because it was so dark and loud and half the crowd was leaving.
I realize that has nothing to do with the service whatsoever, so I’m going to shift things and say when they release their Android App, I’ll give them a fair shake.
But I subscribe to Napster. I joined up for a Betanews review, figuring it was $5 and not a big deal, and I’ve stayed with it since then. It’s probably been almost five months. It’s not great, but it’s proven useful…and if they released an Android app, I’d be pretty happy.
I talked to them today, and they said that they are “looking into making the service available in as many places as possible, including the iPhone,” but they didn’t mention Android. They said they’d keep me posted. Until then, i’ll just have to completely obliterate my battery listening to StreamFurious and consuming “traditional” radio.