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No Search in Android's default Email app
Thursday, May 19, 2011
So this is the situation. I have a GMail account that I use for 90% of my email, then I also have an exchange account for work. Rather than use two separate email apps I set up both accounts in the default email app as exchange accounts. This worked well as I got push, a combined inbox, and it nicely color coded each message to show which account it was sent to. That's until last night when I tried to search my email only to discover that you can't search in the default app. Wow, what a shocker!
Of course the native GMail app has great search capabilities. Fortunately GMail's "Send as" functionality works on Android too. So the solution was to set up sending from my work exchange account in the GMail web interface and then have all of my exchange email forwarded to my GMail account. Now I happily have all of my email in the GMail app where I can search it and when replying to work emails it replies from the correct account.
So there is a solution but it came as a huge surprise that I couldn't do this in the default app.
Dusting off the Blog
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
I do this every few months. I decide to try this blogging thing again and it usually lasts a couple of weeks until I forget about it. We'll see how it goes this time round. I've uploaded a blogging engine (or backend) that I was working on last year so that's what this site is running on. Some of the posts are from last year when I started this and a couple are from about a month ago. The archiving is buggy as I had only just started on that when this fell into disrepair last year. I'll spend some more time on it if I stick at it.
While it still needs a lot of work there's a couple of things that I like about this back end. It's all flat files so it's easy to move and get setup. Also each post is it's own file with some meta data and I can assign a type to each post ie. POST, PHOTO, LINK. This allows me to treat each type of post slightly differently and will also let me do some interesting things like only show links or only show photos etc.
It's kind of crazy that I write web applications for a living and pretty much hate doing it but then in my spare time I'll spend it on something like this. I think I have issues. Oh and I'll replace the horrible logo/header at some point too.
Android Music Player and Podcasts
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Coming from the iPhone I was expecting a similar music player experience on Android. The iPhone quite nicely allocates podcasts their own section within the music player and also provides great control over scrubbing.
Unfortunately Androids default music player doesn't even recognise podcasts. In the Android universe you have no choice but to use third party podcast players. Initially I was hoping to be able to get just a podcatcher that would download my podcasts so I could still play them in the default music player but that wasn't going to happen either.
It's all or nothing. You HAVE to use a third party podcatcher/player to handle podcasts and they all come with their own players built in. It's a very separate and "one program for one task" approach.
Fortunately there's a few really good podcast apps available. Google have their own Google Listen app that's a Google Labs project. I tried that for a while but found that it didn't queue downloads very well and if a download failed you were in trouble. I tried a hand full of others and eventually found that BeyondPod and DoggCatcher were the big two. BeyondPod is good but for me the interface is unnecessarily complicated and I've settled on DoggCatcher as my player of choice.
The huge upside to having a completely separate app to handle podcasts is that you're not tied to a computer that you have to sync with to get new episodes onto your phone. DoggCatcher updates all my feeds every hour and if/when I'm on wifi it'll download them. This all happens in the background without any interaction from me. So when I want to listen to something I just scroll through and see which new episodes have been downloaded.
I'm still hoping that Google's upcoming music service brings updates to the default media player, and if I could request one thing from DoggCatcher it'd be more control over scrubbing, but I'm happy enough for now.
Android Custom ROM's
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Being relatively new to Android one of the immediately attractive things was the ability to install custom ROM's. After doing this ALOT I've learnt a couple of things.
It's pretty much impossible to brick an android phone if you understand some basic principles and processes. Once you get your head around what flashing a ROM means and what's involved you're pretty safe (read, not ENTIRELY safe). Whether or not you intend to install Cyanogen(mod) I'd recommend the Cyanogen(mod) Wiki as a good place to start. It's got all the info that you'll need to root your device and get you ready for flashing and it also lays out the steps and what they do. They list Engineering HBoot as "optional" but it saved my ass when all was nearly lost so I'd recommend it.
Android ROM's are really poorly distributed and hard to find. A couple of the larger ROM's have dedicated websites (Cyanogen(mod), LeeDroid, Revolution, MIUI) but the vast majority are distributed via the XDA Developers Forums which is annoying and time consuming. The up side is that it's a great source of information for just about everything.
After months of trial and error I've come to the conclusion that Cyanogen(mod) is the biggest and most popular custom Android ROM for a reason, it's the best. A lot of ROM's are just unpacked and repackaged versions of original manufacturer sources. Cyanogen actually reverse engineer the devices and have updates available before the manufacturers, pretty impressive stuff.
I'm loving my new Android phone and plan on documenting more of the journey here soon.
A scary thing
Monday, July 5, 2010
As I was editing and saving the last post (via FTP) I ended up with a blank master template. I'm not really worried about the few posts that I've written, or even the template file, but the engine that's powering this site is coming along pretty well and it would be pretty devastating to lose all that work at this point. It's amazing how often I don't back up my work. It's all backed up now ;)
Toy Story 3D
Monday, July 5, 2010
I went to see Toy Story 3 today and have got to say that as a movie I enjoyed it a lot, it's pretty cool. Having said that though, it's the first movie that I've seen in "Digital 3D" and I was pretty sceptical about the spate of 3D'ification that has been taking place. Although I enjoyed the movie I'm still underwhelmed by the whole 3D thing. At times the picture looked unclear and blurry to me. Maybe I was paying too much attention, or maybe I'm just getting old...
It's not you, it's me
Monday, July 5, 2010
I used to rail against "society" and it's constructs. "They're stopping me from being who I want to be man..." But as you get older you, hopefully, get wiser. I'm realising that "society" has very little to do with who or what I am, and really doesn't care that much. Society is mostly people like me who have no idea what they're doing and are just trying to do their best. Whether others choose to go about that in the same way as me isn't important.
We have some pretty simple rules in our "society", which can be boiled down to one rule really, don't do anything to anybody else that they don't want you to do. That's pretty much it. Other than that there's plenty of room for you to do or be whatever you want.
There are of course injustices, but these days I'm saving my outrage for the big ones. Namely when corporations or governments don't follow the one simple that the rest of us are expected to follow. When governments act unfairly or unjustly, when banks prey on the weak, when companies lie and steal for profit, these are all worthy of my outrage. But as far as "society" is concerned... Society is just people like me.
To Comment or not to Comment
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Another decision to be made is whether or not to have comments. On the one hand the idea of conversation and feedback is nice, on the other, well sometimes they just don't work.
Again the main reason for my decision is mostly asthetic. I don't like the ugly "X Comment's" under each post. So I've decided to include comments on the dedicated page for each post but not display the number of comments under each post on the main page. If you follow the Permalink to the dedicated page you'll see the Disqus comments under the post. Not a traditional way to handle comments but I like it.
Different data types
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Currently I have content broken into three different data types; Posts, Photos, and Links. The thing that I'm wrestling with is how each of those data types gets displayed. Should they all be displayed the same, with a title, date, and permalink? Or should they be treated differently?
Should Photos have a title and a date? Certainly I want them to have a Permalink so I can link to them but I'm really not sure about the title and a date, it definitely looks nicer without them.
If I posted multiple links together then I'd probably want that to have a title, date, and permalink but if I just posted a one off link I wouldn't.
I'm thinking of treating each type differently, I guess the way to decide is to pick one way and stick with it for a while and see how it goes, I can always change it. I think I'll treat them differently and then it gives me the flexability of using a "Post" if I want the extra info as Posts can obviously include photos and/or links..
This is a place holder
Thursday, July 1, 2010
This is here to fill up space, no more, no less. It's here for me to see what I can see and nothing more. What do you see? Are you sure that what you see is really there, I'm over here...
When you've seen everything that there is to see why do you still look? Is it me, is it you, is it us? They say that I'm neurotic but I don't believe them, you shouldn't believe them either, WE shouldn't believe them, what do they know anyway? Right? Am I right, or am I incorrect... I'll be alright, don't be left behind.
