Android

No messin’ around — they’re Winamp, Launcher 7, and aCalendar. When you finish reading this post, you will be just dying to check ‘em out. More

I primarily use my Android device for four things. Calling people, texting people, playing music, and taking pictures.

In switching from HTC Sense to CyanogenMod 7, I found myself a little disappointed in crucial system apps – the gallery, phone, music player, and SMS client. Although the calender app was a step up compared to Sense, all others felt like a downgrade. For example, CM lacks the ability to start autocompleting a contact name in the phone app by keying in a part of it, like I could in HTC Sense. After some searching, I turned up some great alternatives. If you too are after better system apps, I recommend grabbing these. More

At one time, I was the proud owner of an iPod Touch. But I’ll face it — that was so 2010. Now, my Android phone defeats the purpose of an iPod Touch. I love every bit of it, minus syncing music. Apple’s tight grip on user experience means that syncing music to Apple devices is a breeze — a pleasant, balmy summer breeze at that. That experience is a little different on the Android side of things. Here’s what works for me. More

With Spring break over, I am now sort of finding myself slammed with the good old pile of schoolwork again. And now my Tuesdays and Thursdays are really jammed, I’m not free until after dinner. I’m already thinking about classes for next year! That went super fast.

So what am I working on right now? Not much of anything at the moment, but towards the end of the week I’ll have more free time and I intend to continue post-launch tweaking for Bitmenu as well as working out more bugs in Crash ‘n Burn.

Just updated to the latest CM. I missed RC2, I was on RC1. Somewhere along the line, they added the option to show percentage battery left in the status bar — great! Just what I was after. I also notice a touched up notification widget bar. Time to crack open the settings menu…

My favorite SMS app just got updated this morning, and everything looks fine right up until “Break the dependence with native SMS app(Refer to “Important Tips” -”Stock SMS uninstalled?”)”. Does this mean it no longer acts as a new interface to the stock SMS system? There’s another app that I really like called SMS Backup & Restore that works great, but it runs off of the SMS database built in to the ROM.

Go SMS does have a Backup/Restore feature, but it does not allow you to schedule backups like SMS Backup & Restore. My plan is to hold off on updating until I can come up with another way of scheduling SMS backups.

If it’s 5 letters, starts with an S and ends with an E, it must be awesome, right? I love Skype too, but Swype is nearly just as awesome.

Yeah, I know, comparing them is a little weird. Skype is a VoIP client, and Swype is a text entry module for Android that is pretty much where I ended my search for keyboards on my Droid Incredible. We all know that entering text on any phone is nothing like a using a fullsize keyboard on a normal computer. No matter how roomy that slide-out keyboard on your phone is, it’s always a thumb-mashing nightmare, if you ask me. The problem here, ladies and gentlemen, is cellphone engineers have decided the best way to bring text entry to such a small device is by taking the conventional keyboard and squeezing it into a minuscule package. More