This is the thread for the discussion of interesting apps.

[MaxBurn]

He fixed apex within a couple hours so I suppose its OK. I don't like the stock launcher at all and when I researched apex seemed one of the more popular ones. I have nothing to compare it to, it gave me everything I was looking for and more.

I'll look into the navigon thing on my note, I assume you have to go through some weird back orifice at samsung to get it? Doesn't come on the phone and of course play store wants money.
Edit: saw your post will check into it.

 

[MaxBurn]

Ah I remember this thing. Launching samsung apps takes you to the play store where you can chose uninstall or open, selecting open reopens the play store where you can select uninstall or open...

It never worked for me.

 

[ddrueding]

Here is the product page, but it seems that Verizon replaced the Samsung app store with there even crappier one and replaced Navigon with their own VZ Navigator which really sucks.

I think I'll just roll with CoPilot.

 

[MaxBurn]

I uninstalled and reinstalled the Samsung app thing to get it working, the uninstall wasn't blocked by the way which is nice. Anyway the navigon is in there, for &49.95. I'll wait for TomTom.

 

[time]

Sorry guys, looks like it's only free for Australia and Orange users in the UK. I guess Verizon et al didn't want to pay for it. Weird.

Given it's essentially improved Garmin, I'm happy enough.

You might grow old waiting for Tom Tom though, given that they've signed an exclusive deal with Apple. BTW, the word so far is that Apple's IOS6 version sucks. Probably country-dependent.

 

[MaxBurn]

Anyone using Doubletwist player?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.doubleTwist.androidPlayer

Specifically it has an interesting sync feature that I am interested in.

http://www.doubletwist.com/airsync/

 

[Mercutio]

One of my iphone people just started using it since he moved to a Galaxy S3 instead of an iphone 5. I'm sure I'll hear about it if it does anything other than "just work."

 

[MaxBurn]

Well I gave it a try and it has the ability to use SD card for music storage and the sync even recognized the music I already had on the card and avoided doing a 100% sync, that was a nice touch. Not sure yet where the playlists go because I can't find them on the phones storage anywhere but they appear in the doubletwist app and other apps. Not sure if it is a two direction sync on playlists yet. Whole thing worked really well actually, far better than the winamp/foldersync solution I was doing. Of course it imported from itunes really well but it appears to work with just directories with music in them if thats what you have. Appears to handle collisions too, my music folder had some amazon music that I had imported into iTunes so it was in both places. It put them on the phone with no complaint and no duplicates. Already liking doubletwist much more than I do winamp.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm just using the Amazon Cloud Player app at this point. Most of the music I'm listening to these days is stuff I've aquired recently, which means I got it on Amazon as an MP3 anyway. It is very useful and copies purchases down from the cloud automatically.

 

[MaxBurn]

No doubt their player handles their store better. You can tell it to only use wifi right? Straight Talk takes issue with streaming media in their contract so I make the effort to fly way under the radar.

 

[ddrueding]

You can tell it to only use WiFi, but I'm on an "unlimited" corp data plan, so I dare them to complain

 

[Will Rickards]

I use doubletwist when it isn't being screwy and not seeing my music. I actually had to use it as it was one of the only ones that supported the ogg format my music is in. I don't use the airsync. I buy music only like once or twice a year. So there is no syncing. Just ripping it and copying it to my phone.

regarding not seeing my music: The ltevo has the internal storage partitioned into 2GB for system and 10 GB for "SD". Then when you put in an SD card it becomes ext_sd. So sometimes it doesn't see that ext_sd card. I think they fixed it though as I can use it in my car now. Not sure if it was an htc bug or doubletwist. But I haven't run into it lately. But it is still dumb regarding my album art in some of the latest releases. I have the album art saved in the folder with the files.

There also was a bug where a .. in the name caused problems. I had to remove it to get it to see the album.

 

[Mercutio]

I've noticed that MTP-based sync fails A LOT when there are non-US-but-still-Western-Alphabet special characters. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I had the issue syncing playlists with every application I tried. It might be a limitation of MTP on the device, since all the syncs failed in the same place.

It's easier for me to just copy a folder of music from an SMB share in the first place, but it's an annoyance.

 

[MaxBurn]

Right on Merc, I ran into a infinite folder loop situation in syncing a Motörhead folder. Valid directory name on HFS, not so much on whatever android uses. Would not copy at all, I had to rename the folder. I corrected that before trying doubletwist so I don't know how it would handle that.

 

[Chewy509]

Re: MTP - It depends on the device. I've had no problems sycning any files names on Solaris/Linux (with gMTP which uses libmtp.so as the backend library), but gMTP and libmtp are fully Unicode aware. The problem may be that the underlying filesystem that your device is using may not be UTF-8 aware (there's a lot of Android 3.x devices that actually use FAT32 as the native FS instead of ext3, not to mentioned that MTP on Android does have issues - but never heard about string encodings). And I know Windows MTP stack sometimes will choke on anything that's not part of the codepage set by the user.

(MTP itself uses UTF-16 encoding for strings - MTP Specification v1.0 - Section 3.2.2).

 

[MaxBurn]

Tomtom is out but it has some limited compatibility in the 1.0 release, play store won't let me try it.

 

[Santilli]

Anyone used Waze? Trying to figure out how to combine it with a radar detector.
New car is a bit faster then the Toyota.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze
http://www.waze.com/

So far not really sold on the free GPS. Last night it wanted to turn a 45 minute drive to another route, 1 hour 15 minutes.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm looking for an app that will post my phone's location and path every minute or so on a Google maps page, primarily so my wife will know where I am when I go out for solo rides alone.

I'm playing with life360, but it is too wholesome for me...all about children and sexual offenders and can't be turned off.

 

[Mercutio]

Isn't that what Google Local does?

 

[Will Rickards]

lookout has a find my phone feature. So you install lookout on your phone and you can find it via logging in to the web page.
It shows your location on a google maps page.

 

[MaxBurn]

Andy Ihnatko talked about waze on one of his podcasts and probably has a column or three on it somewhere, forget what paper he writes for. He rather liked it. I loaded it but haven't used it for driving.

Have used the google navigation beta! thing quite a bit and for an app that must download maps if you didn't preload them it works pretty well. No idea why they still call it beta, it seems better than most dedicated hardware GPS units I have used.

I got tomtom for android via nefarious means and for a rev 1 app it worked really well. The map that you normally drive with either in 2D or 3D is perfectly fine and looks just like it does on other devices, actually the app looks and works the same as it did on other platforms so I was right at home. US and Canada map download are about a 2.3GB download. The text is small in places and the touch targets are sometimes small too. The view map function for browsing around (not driving) is completely off in marking your location on the map, which seems to be a fault of the app not being written for the note screen size, It operates like the map is centered on screen with a anchor location of top left while the navigation arrow where you are is anchored bottom right, and then you mix in a screen size it was expecting and the two don't match. Completely understandable and I guess these two things are why it is marked as incompatible in the play store for me.

 

[Striker]

I'm looking for an app that will post my phone's location and path every minute or so on a Google maps page, primarily so my wife will know where I am when I go out for solo rides alone.

I'm playing with life360, but it is too wholesome for me...all about children and sexual offenders and can't be turned off.

You can try Glympse, it doesn't post on a google map, and you can set the Glympse to last for a particular time so you don't run your battery down if you forget to turn it off.
It sends a link to the Glympse website that shows a map with your location (or last known position), speed, and your past travel for the last 15 minutes or so.

My wife and I use it, mostly to avoid her asking where I am, how long until I get home etc., and to avoid her feeling the need to tell me when she is leaving somewhere.

 

[ddrueding]

Glympse looks awesome. I'll be playing with that over the next couple days. Thanks!

 

[Santilli]

Waze, or how to eat up a lot of 200MB of band width, fast.

I've used Waze for a bit, and I'll being pay for it this month. Here is my take:

Fun toy. Gives you a chance to interact with other drivers, sort of a social driving/data network in the Bay Area. As I said earlier, it consumes bandwidth.
On an unlimited plan I think I'd use it quite a bit.

It does have problems. It's hard to tell which way the traffic is really bad on the map. Monday it showed very slow speeds, a red line on 680, yet after a bit of a crunch, it was 65-70. It was the other side of the road that was
crawling along, and it was hard to see the difference. My side did have one bad stretch, but then opened up.

I don't really drive many days where it helps much.

I do like the ability to post the location of police, and the gps is ok, but helpful mainly for places you know how to get to a lot. It works for home if you are somewhere you are unsure of on how to get back to the freeway.

 

[Striker]

Glympse looks awesome. I'll be playing with that over the next couple days. Thanks!

I'm happy I could be of help for once.

 

[MaxBurn]

Replace your share menu. Can change list order, hide things you don't use and automate some things.

I just stumbled on this and really like the concept, if you know of a better one let me know.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andmadesoft.share

 

[MaxBurn]

Tomtom just became available for many android devices and is on sale. Covers my note 2 now and S3 is mentioned.

In the meantime google navigation I have discovered is really quite good with some nice free features. Long as you have a good data connection.

 

[Howell]

Ive been playing around with waze. Turn by turn directions with integrated automatic traffic feedback based off the speed of other users.

The only thing I wish it had was a louder voice to hear over my radio. Not really a software problem though.

 

[MaxBurn]

I tried wave and it seemed to work but had more cutesy crap that put me off. Google traffic comes from people using their maps too as I understand it.

If you are using music from the phone waze doesn't pause the music to do announcements?

 

[Howell]

It is a little cutesy but that's easy to ignore. If it gets more people to use it that benefits me traffic wise. I also like that it will not let the phone sleep while it is open.

And yes, I had forgotten about the voice overs. It will even continue to talk to me if I am on the phone; although the other person can't hear it. That could use improvement as well.

 

[MaxBurn]

Heard about CPU Spy mentioned on a podcast as a way to diagnose an android phone with battery life problems or a buggy OS. It basically tells you about the length of time your CPU stays in a given state.

Found out why my battery life on the Note 2 is so good, for a CPU that scales up to 1.6Ghz it spent 0% of the time above 1Ghz, 10% of the time between 400-1000Mhz, 27% of the time at 200Mhz and 58% of the time in deep sleep over the past 35 hours. Rest must be split out to states under 1%.

 

[ddrueding]

Interesting App. Of the last 236+ hours, 70% was deep-sleep and 22% was 384MHz. 2% at 1512MHz and rounding error in the rest of the states.

 

[mubs]

So you guys are saying there's no need to spend more for a phone with a faster processor?

 

[LunarMist]

So you guys are saying there's no need to spend more for a phone with a faster processor?

What choice is there? Are there any phones where there are different CPU options like configuring a computer online?

 

[MaxBurn]

Random thoughts on it; The faster the processor and the more advanced the process the lower they can lower the clock to get a significant amount of work done and at that clock a much lower voltage than a lower performance cpu need to do the same work, so power savings. The processor on my phone is reporting fifteen power states but only using seven or so? Power management and gating is much improved on the newer processors too, big save in consumption. There is also the other theory we are seeing in LTE right now, because it is so much faster we can get something done while using more power but because it finishes so fast it ends up being a net power savings. What I would be interested to see is how that splits out across the four cores on the CPU, maybe it didn't have to be a quad? That would have lowered it on benchmarks though, lots of bad press to be avoided.

 

[Mercutio]

So you guys are saying there's no need to spend more for a phone with a faster processor?

It's difficult to justify and frankly other than games it's doubtful that there's any need. The expectation in the market is that tier-1 OEM devices may have anything from a single core 1GHz ARM to a 1.7GHz quad core, but any normal app needs to work just fine with the low end of that range. I've done file conversions on my tablets a couple times (.flac to .mp3, .png to .jpg) and my dual core Xoom is definitely faster for doing that than my single core Evo, but they both open and run regular apps at the same speed.

 

[ddrueding]

One of my clients regularly crops video on her S3 before emailing it. The stock app supports it including a timeline with previews. I was amazed how well it works.

 

[MaxBurn]

The camera app or something else? Sounds interesting.

 

[ddrueding]

Just the regular camera app. She mainly does it to get them under the 25MB attachment limit.

 

[MaxBurn]

Hmm, I don't have that on my Note 2. I do have a limit for MMS feature though.