Official Android AIM App

By toddj   Feb 12, 2010 11:41 am
Tagged as #android #aol

This is the instant messaging app that I’ve been waiting for.  Just search the android market for “aim” and it appears as one of the first choices from “aol mobile.”  It lets you see your buddy list, IMs, Lifestream, and profile all in a tabbed layout.  The lifestream is an interesting concept, as you can connect facebook, twitter, digg, and other sites to it and keep up with friends.  See link below for full story on lifehacker.  In order to set up lifestream you have to go to http://lifestream.aim.com and login using your AOL account.  Otherwise, it just shows you the lifestream of buddy list status changes.

(via Lifehacker)

Now everyone can enjoy my wonderful site

By toddj   Jan 18, 2010 4:57 pm
Tagged as #woopsy

Thanks to www.daniweb.com I have been able to make my site look the same in all browsers I have tried.

And thanks to @mallorydenison for pointing out that there was a slight problem with the site when viewed on Internet Explorer.  (And by “slight” I mean none of my content was displayed).

I ran it through w3 validation service and fixed as many of the errors that I possibly could, as some are generated by tumblr itself and there isn’t anything I can do about those.  I had done this before, but saw the number of errors it was generating and decided to put it off to a later date :) Procrastination gets me every time.

In the process I decided to do away with my twitter stream and my tag cloud.  They were neat, but caused more trouble than they were worth.

Songbird goes purple

By toddj   Jan 12, 2010 12:37 am
Tagged as #software #songbird

Songbird is still my primary media player for listening to music while I’m at my computer, and they recently pushed out a new version — 1.4.3.  They have changed and added quite a few things.  But my main concern, the iPod support, still hasn’t been updated for the new version.  It does, however, work perfectly with my Droid.  Podcast subscription still seems to be on the fritz, so no Diggnation for me on Songbird.  Not automatically anyway.

I’m not crazy about the new purple theme, so thankfully they have many community driven add-ons and themes where I can pick and choose exactly what I want.  (Gonzo was the old default theme.)

They have added CD ripping support though, so it seems to be moving forward in the development phases.

See more changes at the Songbird Wiki

Motorola has returned to awesome

By toddj   Jan 11, 2010 4:28 pm
Tagged as #technology #motorola #droid

I’ve now moved into the “one week to one month” ownership of the Droid  on Verizon and I’m loving it more and more.  I can’t really compare it to the iPhone since I have never used it, but I can give a pretty fair assessment of the phone. Even with my complaints, the phone is still a solid phone and the Android operating system compensates for most of the bad things.

Pretty Quick
First, the operating system is fairly fast.  While on its own, it leaves a bit to be desired.  If you don’t have friends that constantly give you tips like mine do (thanks Cy), then you may be a little lost trying to figure out some things.  Like how sms notifications doesn’t give you any popup notification or anyway to set up reminders.  This is solved by the SMS Popup app.  Another gripe about the messaging from me: when in the notification area, it sometimes tells me a message is from someone completely different from who actually sent it.  Annoying, but doesn’t really hurt anything, because once you go into it you see who it actually belongs to.

Multiple Apps are <3
Multiple apps are a must for me.  I like to be able to run Meebo mobile and listen to Pandora radio at the same time.  But with this comes an entirely different thing that bugs me. I have my headphones plugged in to listen to some music while I’m bored, when I suddenly get a message (from either Meebo or just a text message), and the music pauses for a moment, plays my notification sound through my headphones, then continues playing.  Now this wouldn’t be that much of a problem if my friends could say what they what they wanted to say in one message instead of 5 one-word messages(thanks again Cy ;).  Another problem with multiple apps being able to run in the background is the battery being drained quickly.  If you’re like me and want to listen to music and browse the web and send text messages all day long, then you’ll be out of luck, as you might get 5 hours of battery life doing all of that.  Sticking with mostly texting and doing one thing at a time you should be good to last the day.  On the subject of multiple apps, you’re going to want to install Advanced Task Killer and occasionally go and killl things running in the background slowly killing a little bit more battery life.

Battery life is “meh”
Transitioning to battery life, there are a couple of things you can do to help keep track of your usage and maybe extend the life a bit.  Cy suggests using [insert app name], because it inserts your battery percentage into the top notification bar.  However, I prefer “Battery Widget” for a couple of reasons: 1. I don’t like having things in my notification area. 2. The battery widget provides shortcuts to kill things that might be killing your battery, like wifi, gps, or bluetooth.