Just another nerd.
Hash It! is an Android app that replicates — and is compatible with — the Password Hasher extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox. Create a master password key, and Hash It! generates a password for each site you visit based on the master password and the URL of the site.
An interesting approach to password management, though I’m sticking with Diceware plus KeePass.
So Firefox on Android is going to go native with its user interface:
The problem, however, is that interpreting and painting at the application level adds an unwanted overhead, which usually goes unnoticed on most modern desktop and laptop computers, but becomes a bottleneck in resource constrained devices like cell phones and tablets. Native widgets are handled by Android directly so it doesn’t require additional translation or memory to map how to draw them.
Faster startup, less memory consumption, and improved responsiveness are some of the expected benefits of such a move,which is not free of important new challenges, most notably: localization and add-ons support, both of which are completely XUL-oriented.
I like the Firefox browser on Android, but it crashes and randomly restarts so often, it is essentially unusable for me. Hopefully this planned change will actually make the browser useful.
BytNotes is an Android app that lets the user type in notes and then easily link those notes to a specific contact. Then when you call that contact or the contact calls you, the note will pop up as a reminder of what you needed to talk to the contact about.
I like tower defense games a lot, but find that most of the popular ones available for Android or iOS are largely unplayable (I love Plants vs. Zombies on my PC and Xbox…on my Android, not so much). GRave Defense HD is the first mobile tower defense game I’ve played that actually does a decent job of using the available screen space so the game doesn’t feel claustrophobic. Placing and upgrading defenses is incredibly intuitive, and the game gets very challenging as the levels progress without feeling like it’s trying to cram too much onto a 4″ screen.
Like a lot of people, I use my phone to share links over Twitter, email, SMS, etc. I have my own YOURLs-based link shortener running on this server, but typically I just use whatever built in shortener the app I’m running uses. This finally annoyed me to the point where I decided to see if there was an easy way to route around the bit.lys of the world.
Enter free Android app URLy. URLy bills itself as a “multi-purpose URL sharer” and is a very slick way to share links, photos, etc. to literally dozens of social networking sites, email, etc. But for my purposes its main advantage is that among the 40 or so URL shorteners it lets users choose from, it throws in support for custom YOURLs installations.
All I had to do was go into the settings, enter the URL for my YOURLs API script and the signature token and it just worked. URLy will let you assign a custom short link to any URL, and has more configuration options than you can shake a stick at. (If every app on Android were this high quality …)
I used to carry a GPS logger to keep track of where I’d been, but that tended to be expensive when I’d lose or run over the loggers, and the data wasn’t necessarily in a format where I could easily use it. There are GPS loggers for Android, but none of them worked very well for my purposes, so I stopped tracking my location for awhile.
A few weeks ago, however, I discovered backTrack Personal Travel Log for Android. backTrack uses GPS and WiFi access points to figure out where your phone is, and then gives you the option to log that information to Google Calendar. What is nice — and occasionally frustrating — is that backTrack only logs places you’ve visited for at least 5 minutes (this is a variable that the user can set, but 5 minutes is the fewest minutes it offers).
So, backTrack does not give me a record of my 10 minute drive to work. What it does do, however, is once I’ve been in my office for more than 5 minutes, it notes that. Once it detects I’ve left my office, it then creates an entry in my Google calendar showing an appointment spanning the time from when I arrived to when I left. It allows me to configure templates for place, so I can tell it if it detects my home WiFi, that place should be called “Home” in the information it writes to my Google Calendar.
The app is free an overall works very well. Some reviews complain about issues with accuracy, but so far I haven’t notice any issues with that. Of course a bigger issue is the potential misuse of such location data, especially once it is logged in Google Calendar. For me, the potential drawbacks are more than offset by the benefits, but your mileage may vary.