Essential Android Apps

mrk · 11 Apr 2010 at 21:00

Streamfurious is now uninstalled

Shame BBC use .asx streams for the Radio URLLs which only works in WMP/iTunes etc and not streamfurious/droidlive.

muon · 11 Apr 2010 at 21:06

BBC are coming out with an iplayer app soon anyway.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8519783.stm

Camalot · 11 Apr 2010 at 21:29

Azza said:
That is indeed win.

What a quality app :cool:

Azza · 11 Apr 2010 at 21:54

You can use Beebplayer for BBC radio (Apart from 5Live) so it's not all bad.

ghost101 said:
BBC are coming out with an iplayer app soon anyway.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8519783.stm

I use the SkyNews app and that's brilliant I think. The videos are crisp clear and load seriously fast even over 3G.

SiD the Turtle · 11 Apr 2010 at 22:12

ghost101 said:
BBC are coming out with an iplayer app soon anyway.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8519783.stm

Potentially, though it looks to be mired in red-tape at the moment:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/mar/29/bbc-digital-media

borich_planner · 11 Apr 2010 at 22:27

Is there a national rail android app?

Borich

muon · 11 Apr 2010 at 22:50

Azza said:
You can use Beebplayer for BBC radio (Apart from 5Live) so it's not all bad.

But thats the only one I need

.

SiD the Turtle said:
BBC told to delay iPhone apps

Trust to review corporation's plans for news and sport smartphone apps after protests from newspaper publishers. By Mark Sweney

www.guardian.co.uk

That is really quite annoying. Hopefully all complaints will be ignored since they are ridiculous.

Sharpz · 11 Apr 2010 at 23:05

wow. droidlive lite is awesome, thanks for the heads up.

stoke1863 · 11 Apr 2010 at 23:09

Yea thanks for droidlive that is an awsome app.

Full credit to the developer he did a nice job on the GUI

Begbie · 11 Apr 2010 at 23:09

borich_planner said:
Is there a national rail android app?

Borich

This would be nice!

muon · 11 Apr 2010 at 23:26

There's a london underground app (including DLR) with live timings from each station, for those interested.

Then again, it was simply making an app which accessed this data

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/livetravelnews/departureboards/

Don't think a similar thing exists for national rail.

chronic86 · 12 Apr 2010 at 03:02

TASK PANLE - allows you to kill all apps by a click of a button, also allows you to add any app to AUTO KILL which will kill the app on start up! great tool!

413x · 12 Apr 2010 at 07:47

chronic86 said:
TASK PANLE - allows you to kill all apps by a click of a button, also allows you to add any app to AUTO KILL which will kill the app on start up! great tool!

sounds like a replacement for task killer, will check it out

DiG · 12 Apr 2010 at 08:03

I don't know if its been mentioned yet, but AutoKillers good

It modifys the internal task killer so you can make it more/less aggressive. Better than using a separate task killer imo

mrk · 12 Apr 2010 at 09:01

I prefer advanced task managers, it's probably one of the first task managers and probably the best too.

fowler002 · 12 Apr 2010 at 09:16

I don't know how the radio topic came about but no one answered when I asked if there was an app for listening to 5 live and 5 liveextra

Guess will just have to wait till wunder radio is released for Android, it's ment to be in the works tho not dates as to when its out.

Chiz · 12 Apr 2010 at 09:43

I've had 'AppBrain' installed for a while now.

It's basically an addition to the App Market, and allows you to sync your apps online, uninstall them with ease, notifies you of new updates, and also allows you to view the app market online, where you can then install apps from scanning the barcode on the screen. Very handy and useful little app.

osc89er · 12 Apr 2010 at 09:53

Khaaan! said:
I prefer advanced task managers, it's probably one of the first task managers and probably the best too.

It is (GUIi-wise) identical to taskiller except it is missing one (for me) critical feature of letting you see all the apps, not always hiding ignored apps. This lets you do stuff like make your browser ignored so it isn't automatically killed but you still see it on the list so you can manually kill it when you aren't using it anymore.

Deleted User 234324 · 12 Apr 2010 at 09:56

There was an article written by one of the android devs where it went into detail why "task killers" are bad and not necessary.

Will try dig it out and edit this post to include the link.

http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/

DiG · 12 Apr 2010 at 10:03

Yep, task managers are bad, which is why AutoKiller is good, because its just changing Androids internal killer. Developers don't (shouldn't) have background tasks running if they are not doing anything useful!

Interesting bit from the article linked above:

Linux however isn’t generally affected by this. While I admit that I don’t know the architecture and reason for this… linux will run the same regardless of if you have 20mb free memory or 200mb. And as I outlined above, Android will automatically start to kill applications if you do get low on memory! Stealing a quote from Chris Johnston, “Buffers and cache in RAM being cleared is silly. Imagine a professor, who rather than writing all the way across the chalkboard, finishes a sentence and immediately erases and starts writing in the upper left corner AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN