Slingbox for Android speculation

I don’t own a Slingbox, but I probably would if they had an Android-based app for viewing content like the one they have for the iPhone or the Blackberry. Watching my own TV content on my Android phone screen sounds great to me, and it apparently sounds good to the new hordes of Android users coming online as well. Run a search for “android” on the Sling Community site, and you’ll see the following results (among others like them):

SlingPlayer on Android? Vote here! “How’s it going? I have the HTC Droid Eris. How about getting the SlingPlayer client on our Android phones? Please go to the link below and vote on getting the SlingPlayer mobile software for our…”

HTC hero . Android “Have sling develloped a player for android ? had it on an N95 for three years worked great.would be nice if sling could devellop something . The android operating system has been out for some…”

SlingPlayer Mobile for Android Still a Possibility “Since the G1 launched last year, the Android faithful have been clamoring for a SlingPlayer app to run on their Google-iscious handets. Now that a slew of new Android players are hitting the market, like…”

The rants come angry and often in discussions like “SlingPlayer Mobile on Android?” In fact, four of the threads on the front page of Sling Community’s “New, Rumors, and Gossip” forum are questions about Android. How can something that seems so obvious to everyone else escape the notice of Sling Media?

Speculation time. I don’t think that Sling Media is unaware of Android’s current market share. It turns out that Sling Media plans to be at CES in January, and one of the most reasonable things they could do there is announce support for what is now the world’s fastest growing cell phone OS (and 2nd overall in the global Smartphone market). Again, this is just a guess on my part, and I have no evidence supporting this notion whatsoever. I made a few calls to the Sling folks, but they wouldn’t answer me. The only other thing that I can think of that would prevent a company from choosing to earn more money is a pre-existing agreement with someone else. Perhaps a certain fruity company?

In any case, this may be a situation that resolves itself when another competitor shows up first. Orb has a competing solution, but they lack a simple set-top box to make it work (you have to permanently attach a PC to do the streaming). Maybe they have something in the works. I sure hope so, because like lots of others, I want to be able to watch my TV content on my Android phone.

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Update Crazy on the Android Market

Assuming that you pay attention to the notification bar on your Android phone, you’ve seen it. Apps on the Market are being updated constantly, and often the same app will be updated several times in a week. For folks like me with a rooted phone and lots of apps, this is becoming quite a burden. Since I have almost 150 applications on my G1, I regularly see notices like today’s “22 updates available.”

Why don’t I just uninstall a bunch of applications? Well first of all, I paid for them. I admit I have a problem with uninstalling things that I’ve paid for, no matter how rotten they are. Plus, I don’t think that the frustration is limited to folks with rooted phones and huge SD cards. I have a perfect test case in my wife, who has an unrooted phone and only a few things she has downloaded from the Market. The update process has turned her off to the point that she completely ignores update notifications. The only way she gets updates is when I happen to grab her phone and do it for her.

The update process itself is a bit clunky as it connects to the Market, and you can only have two active downloads going at any given time. Then, when the application finally moves from the “downloading” phase to the “installing” phase, the phone becomes unusable for a brief time. Adding to the annoyance is the fact that developer descriptions of what these updates are supposed to accomplish are extremely variable–from very clear to nonexistent.

Two main factors are causing these frequent updates. First and foremost is the release of the Droid, which forced developers to adapt their code that was working in 1.5 and 1.6 versions to incorporate Android 2.0 models. Second is that users are far more demanding than they were in the early days of Android, when a slapped together app with a “home-made” UI was fine. While all of this is a good thing, I am looking forward to a time when updates can be packaged together and downloaded in the background, much like an OS update for Windows or Mac.

It turns out that at least one such a project is in the works: Android-Omnipatcher on the Google code site hopes to be a “universal Android .apk patcher” that can “automatically download and apply patches/fixes for installed apps.” Let’s hope that someone makes it work, and soon. In the meantime I will mentally prepare myself for the next batch of updates.

UPDATE: Richard, the developer of Android-Omnipatcher, says that his application actually has a much narrower focus: “It is a tool for creating and applying user fixes to 3rd party closed source apps. I’ve started working on it cause of my “Google Maps Navigation outside USA fix” – I don’t want to distribute proprietary Google’s code, only fixes and it is what this tool is for.” My apologies to anyone that was misled or had their hopes up. Let me know if you hear of any other new or tools that promise to help fix the Market update madness!!

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Looking for new widgets, check out the Beautiful Widgets app from the Market

Anyone looking for some new, and stylish widgets may want to check out the latest offering from Beautiful Widgets. And living up to the name, they seem to offer a nice set of — you guessed it widgets.

These widgets should run on most Android phones, and have been designed with the HTC Sense UI in mind. In short, they look very nice.

In terms of features, the Beautiful Widgets app offers

• Two nice looking flip clocks with 12/24 hours support
• Weather with realistic icons
• Celcius and fahrenheit temperature
• Automatic language detection
• Geolocation for the weather city, or the ability to enter the city name
• Automatic sunset/sunrise calculation
• High res graphics for WVGA Devices (such as the Motorola Droid)
• 1×1 beautiful Wifi/Bluetooth/Plane mode/Silent/Vibrate widgets to easily enable or disable them
• 1×1 GPS widget that act as shortcut to enable or disable location in the settings.

Finally, the Beautiful Widgets app can be downloaded from the Android Market, or by scanning the code below.

[Beautiful Widgets via Android Community]

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Google Goggles: visual search and augmented reality app for Android

Google has made two announcements today that will add on to it’s already extensive presence in mobile search. Android users can now “Search by Sight” with Google Goggles, a visual search option for Android. Simply snap a photo of a book, landmark, business card, barcode, or artwork, and the app will return Google search results for that item. Google Goggles even includes an augmented reality element for local businesses. When the app is launched facing a business front, GPS and compass technology helps reveal a store name. Tap the name to see more.

UPDATE: THIS APP WORKS ONLY ON ANDROID 1.6 OR HIGHER, SO HERO AND OTHER CUPCAKE PHONES CANNOT USE IT.

Google Goggles is an app that performs Google queries based on images rather than entered text. It will not always perform well on cars, animals, plants, or appeal, but it’s a strong entrance. I’m surprised that this is available because just yesterday I was responding to someone wondering if there was an Android app that could provide a tour guide to an area or contextual information about items in an art gallery. Less than 24 hours later, here’s Google adding yet another layer to its search portfolio.

Google also announced “What’s Nearby” for Google Maps on Android 1.6 or higher. Update the Maps app in the Android Market and you will be able to take advantage of the new feature.

To use the feature just long press anywhere on the map, and we’ll return a list of the 10 closest places, including restaurants, shops and other points of interest. It’s a simple answer to a simple question, finally. (And if you visit google.com from your iPhone or Android device in a few weeks, clicking “Near me now” will deliver the same experience [video].)

Of course our future plans include more than just nearby places. In the new year we’ll begin showing local product inventory in search results [video]; and Google Suggest will even include location-specific search terms [video]. All thanks to powerful, Internet-enabled mobile devices.

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How does it feel to be an ADC2 $50,000 winner?

Florian Heft knows. Florian is the developer of Graviturn, a game that just won 2nd place and $50,000 in the Games: Arcade/Action category of Google’s ADC2 awards. Florian is also a 21 year old college student from Mühlacker, Germany, a small city of 26,000 people in the southwest portion of the country. He currently majors in computer science, and is in his fifth semester at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. I found out about his story by reading this post on Google’s “Android Discuss” forum:

“Oh my god … I can’t believe it. This must be some kinda fake mail or anything … AM I REALLY ON THE SECOND PLACE AND WON 50.000$ ?!?!

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO VOTED!!! =)

I’m totally freaked out .. i’m just a poor student who never had more than like 2.000$ … thank you google!!”

As you can tell, Florian is pretty excited about his windfall, and his friends and family are as well. (Apparently winning $50,000 from Google has that effect.) He never expected to see his game make it past the second round, and the notification letter from Google was in his GMail Spam folder: “Results from ADC 2 are in: Congratulations!”

Maybe it’s time to check my own Spam folder again.

Amazingly, Florian didn’t even plan his game for ADC2, but was just intrigued with writing an application that would use the tilting sensor in some way. When ADC2 rolled around, he submitted it just for fun. He estimates that it took about 100 hours to develop the game, with the last 20 hours of extremely careful bug fixing being the most challenging part of the project. He had an insightful tip on this subject that may help some other aspiring Android developers:

“Many of the apps you can find in the market have a lot of bugs and come off badly from the very first day on. This is very discouraging for the developers, because even if they fix the problems, most users won’t download a 3-star app.”

At this point, Graviturn has been downloaded over 50,000 times, and there are 1,500 active users each day.

Florian’s big reward has inspired him to consider creating new Android applications, but he has nothing specific planned yet. While he is still considering what he will do with the money, he knows that at least part of the prize will be applied to finishing his degree. The rest, he says, will be a healthy “stimulation for further Android development.”

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How to remotely lock, wipe, and locate Android phones with WaveSecure

Those HTC “You” commercials remind me that the first thing I do when leaving the house is look for my phone. Before I even grab the car keys or wallet required for me to go anywhere, I instinctively place more importance on my phone. So you can imagine how me or any other Phone First person would respond if I lost my phone. How would I find the phone, backup my data, or prevent others from misusing my it?

A winner of the Android Developers Challenge 2, WaveSecure answers all of those questions. WaveSecure is an app and web service that allows Android users to maintain a link to their phone in the event that it is lost or stolen. By logging on to the WaveSecure website, users can lock the phone to prevent use, track it’s location within a general area, backup SMS/contacts/call logs/media, wipe phone data, and restore data if the phone is found. Here’s a video showcasing how easy it set-up and use WaveSecure.

If WaveSecure doesn’t meet your needs, consider trying the very similar Mobile Defense. We selected Mobile Defense as one of the Top 50 Android Apps.

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Review: A World of Photo (ADC2 “Entertainment” Co-winner)

In case you didn’t know, A World of Photo recently won one of the top prizes in the ADC2 “Entertainment” category. The concept is simple: You see a big map of the world, you spin your phone, a random user is picked in the direction your phone is pointing, and that user has to send you a photo. In time, someone will spin their phone, and you will be selected to send a picture to that person. Then you get to spin again.

A World of Photo runs in the background, so it alerts you whenever you have been selected. And right now, you get selected a lot. I ended up uninstalling it at work, because it kept asking me to make a photo for a random user every 5 minutes despite the fact that I kept selecting the “I’m busy” option in the app. I reinstalled the app at home the next morning to test it out. I thought it might be cool to share pictures of my neighborhood with people around the world, and I’m sure A World of Photo won its ADC2 award with this potential in mind.

I sent someone in Texas a picture of a lake near my house, and someone in Germany sent me a busy street scene. Each user gets to rate the pictures they receive and send a comment. Pretty neat. I took my phone downstairs to show the kids. When I spun my phone the next time, with my children watching, the phone found a user in Florida named “bisexual man–I love XXXX,” who thankfully declined to send a photo. Maybe he was asleep–it was 7AM, after all. The app then picked some other user named “OK–Ladies show me what you got.” I picked up my phone and closed the app while my kids protested. “I don’t think it’s working right now,” I said.

The app does have a way to report inappropriate photos, but I don’t think that is going to dissuade the folks who consider this the ultimate adult social networking game. If the developer wants this to remain G-rated for most users, there needs to be a way to reject connections based on usernames. There are some other improvements that I would suggest. The selection process should exclude users that have already sent you a photo within the last few hours. And the app needs to respect the “I’m busy” selection until the user decides to reopen the app. Finally, the huge marker on the map that says, “Welcome! This is you.” should disappear after you start the game. It gets in the way, and I assume most people know where they are on a world map.

All in all, this is a pretty neat idea, and it is fun to send and receive photos from random folks around the world. It’s a free app (there is a donation version), and people seem to love it: 4.68/5 stars after 416 ratings. Just keep your kids away until you get a photo you like from a user that you have previously screened. Read More!