Essential Android Apps

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HumbleCoder said:
Hope it's ok to post my own stuff, sorry if not.

I wrote two widgets that check your site or server to see if it's down or up, both are free. One checks a web page and uses the http response to decide if it's up. The other connects to a port you specify and decides if it's up if it can connect or not.

There is a few other options on both based around display text, colour, poll period and how many times it retries before giving up.

http://www.appbrain.com/search?q=havedroid

(If you do install it and have problems let me know :))
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I think your on to something :)

If you can somehow integrate Nagios into your system i'd have it without a second thought!
 
HumbleCoder said:
Totally free and ad free. :)

As I side note, I did do some research into AdMob and you need some SERIOUS downloads and click throughs to make it worth the effort.
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Can you tell us a little more? I've been interested in the kind of money developers are getting for some of the ad supported apps as I wonder what the annoyance to profit ratio is as I never clicked one of the things making them just an annoyance.

Moot point for me since I rooted and use adfree (mostly as sometimes there's still a blank space where the ad should be). But I can't help but think maybe donate versions and very cheap apps would work out better, I would easily pay 25p for an app to have ad free than have ads all over my screen that I never click earning the dev nothing.

Maybe a suggested donation style to the market where people can choose how much they want to pay for the ad free version, people will pay the minimum most of the time but people will also give larger donations, I just feel that it may be a better way forward for the devs and the users to come to a better working relationship instead of users having to install ad blockers and devs not allowing people to install the app if they have an ad blocker.
 
Had mine a few weeks now and my only real annoyance is when texting i always hit . instead of space,

so.i.end.up.like.this.before.i.notice :p

Is there a solution to this ie a keybord or option to make the space bar longer?

Or will i just have to train myself to get used to it

cheers
 
gizmoy2k said:
Had mine a few weeks now and my only real annoyance is when texting i always hit . instead of space,

so.i.end.up.like.this.before.i.notice :p

Is there a solution to this ie a keybord or option to make the space bar longer?

Or will i just have to train myself to get used to it

cheers
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Wouldnt mind knowing this myself.

Im slowly getting better myself, but its still an annoyance at times.
Would probably be helped by getting rid of the shortcut for keyboard options off the keyboard.

Scottland said:
Just need an unread Gmail counter now! SMS Unread, and GMail unread widgets don't work correctly on Froyo (for mail) :(
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SMS Unread Count doesnt work on Froyo!? They best fix that before Froyos comes to the Desires! lol.
 
Skyfall said:
Can you tell us a little more? I've been interested in the kind of money developers are getting for some of the ad supported apps as I wonder what the annoyance to profit ratio is as I never clicked one of the things making them just an annoyance.

Moot point for me since I rooted and use adfree (mostly as sometimes there's still a blank space where the ad should be). But I can't help but think maybe donate versions and very cheap apps would work out better, I would easily pay 25p for an app to have ad free than have ads all over my screen that I never click earning the dev nothing.

Maybe a suggested donation style to the market where people can choose how much they want to pay for the ad free version, people will pay the minimum most of the time but people will also give larger donations, I just feel that it may be a better way forward for the devs and the users to come to a better working relationship instead of users having to install ad blockers and devs not allowing people to install the app if they have an ad blocker.
Click to expand...

It's very hard to get exact figures on it because people don't want to say and it all depends on how popular your app and what the ads are for. AdMob works like Google adwords where advertisers bid for space then if you get a click through you get a percentage. I have seen anecdotal evidence that 30000 impressions returns ~200 clicks which is probably >$50 depending on how valuable the ads are.

IMHO, unless you get on the featured list or are picked by a big review site you're never going to be able to give up the day job. I just don't think they stand very well on their own and if you look at the games/apps getting the most downloads the majority are part of a
franchise or an extension of an existing online service.

Also, the Android market place is dire, although I don't think it should turn into the Apple app store, it does need some form of duration to remove the sheer noise from crap ware like ringtones etc. They only give you ~300 characters in the app description and the story with wrt to talking payment is a pita, the user needs to have a Google account with a Google checkout account associated, which the minority do have. It needs better search and maybe some kind of advanced tagging to make finding apps easier.

Wrt to donations for ad free apps that already exists, only without the variable pricing, in free v pro versions (A road I'm thinking about going down) but it suffers from the same problem the 'freemium' model of websites, in that a good conversion rate is considered to be around 3% which is tiny.

I have no clue what the answer is but as a developer unless you've got a highly specialised product or get lucky and get some press there is very little money to be had.
 
Can anyone recommend a good music playing app/widget?
The HTC does the job, but its a little buggy and i cant see a way to create my own playlists. lol.
Its gotta be one that support the Last.FM apps scrobbling though. :)

Tried already:
MixZing - Looks to be useless without paying for the full version.
Cubed - Dont like how it displays info.
DoubleTwist - If its anything like the PC app its ment to go with, useless.
 
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Boom, what was your problem with Cubed?
It can be set to several different methods of display rather than just the cube, it also does list, cover flow and wall of art, and also changed from search by album to search by artist etc. Try switching it to search by artist, and cover flow, you might find that preferable?
I much prefered it to Doubletwist, which feels like a slightly tweaked version of the default player.

I've had very few problems with Cubed once I worked my way around how to set it up the way I wanted, although I'll admit I wasn't so keen on the actual cube method myself.
Combined with MP3tagger to fix dodgy ID3s, it does virtually everything I need in terms of mp3 playback, if it played AAC/FLAC/OGG on top, and allowed you to edit ID3 tags and ID3 art it'd be virtually perfect as a standalone player!

Edit: Not a clue if it supports last.fm scrobbling, probably not.
Edit2: Apparently it does support scrobbling according to a review I just noticed.
 
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I've been experimenting with Cubed and the main issue was with album art. It didn't automatically find the album art embedded in my tracks or as folder.jpg in the folders. I had to manually apply them. It also downsizes the embedded art to 320x320 and seems to crappify the quality as it does so.

It does allow last.fm scrobbling.
 
Wierd thing for me was it picked up a load of album art embedded in some of the files I've got, but then it is still in beta so might still be a bit iffy on that count. I usually ended up looking to see what album art it found anyway and replacing some of it with stuff I thought looked better :)

Its a pretty impressive player for a free beta through, given most of the other decent players are paid for, or at least add supported (whereas this just mentions donating if you like now and then).
Certainly better all round than the built in Desire player.
 
Is that 'torch' app that is bundled with the Wildfire available to download?

HTC_Wildfire_Overview_11.jpg
 
Anyone know of an app that will let me take a picture on the phone then upload it directly to somewhere like Imageshack so I can share it on forums and what not ?

Can only seem to upload to google picasa atm and then you don't get direct image links.
 
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