Android Diaries, Part 2: Tools

The nice thing about smartphones, and more so, getting knee deep into the smartphone world is that your experience is exactly how you want it. You can use it plain vanilla out of the box, you can tear it down and rebuild every little detail (depending on the limitations of the device etc.) or you can settle in somewhere in the middle.
This post (which I will update as I discover more wonderful tools etc.) is an attempt to share my experiences with some of Android’s system tool type of applets, widgets and such. For reference sake, I run a Motorola Milestone on Canada’s Telus network. As such, I don’t have access to customized ROMs and such due to the restriction on the Milestone’s boot loader where all ROMs must be signed by Motorola.
Here are some of the applets, utilities and such on my phone that I’ve found to be handy.

Shortcuts & Widgets

• Various widgets from the “OnOff” series by CurveFish. These are wonderful. Which ones you need/want will vary by user as a lot of this will be handled by the built in Power Control widget that comes with the phone (which includes WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, AutoSync, Brightness). I like the independent brightness widget as it’s sometimes more convenient to simply set the brightness I want rather than to cycle through presets.
• Sync Settings. For when setting up contacts manually or doing some trickery with the calendar, this home screen shortcut makes it easy to quickly get to the central account sync settings. Sure we can get this functionality half a dozen ways, but this is prepackaged for us, so I found it very convenient.
• Data Counter Widget. I have a substantial enough data plan that I don’t constantly need the data usage information in front of me, but for those with lesser data plans may find this widget handy.

Applications

• Adobe Reader. The official Adobe Acrobat reader applet.
• Adobe Flash Player 10.2. Full flash player – keep in mind that this applet does not, by default, move to the SD card, you’ll need to perform a minor system tweak to move it.
• Adobe Photoshop Express. A very limited version of Photoshop, allows for basic image tweaking

System

• BTMono and BTMono Premium. I wear a standard (one-ear) Bluetooth earpiece and when I listen to audio, I want to have the audio stream to my ear – not play from the speakerphone. This applet reroutes all the audio to the Bluetooth device.
• BusyBox and BusyBox Donate. A collection of GNU Core utilities and Unix tools needed by many lower-level applets.
• Root Checker. An applet to quickly check if your phone is rooted and has a correctly setup BusyBox.
• Milestone Overclock. A software overclocking applet that works with OMAP3 phones.
• CPU Benchmark, Linpack, Linpack Pro. A simple and easy to use CPU benchmark applet, useful if you’re going to overclock.
• EasyRoot. The v2.2.1 update wiped out a lot of the one-click roots for the Milestone, this one was simple and worked.
• Home Switcher for Froyo. Simple applet to switch between different home screen handlers.
• LauncherPro. A different home screen handler, provides lots of functionality
• LockMenu. A different home screen handler, this one focuses more on extending the lock screen functionality.
• myLock Utilities and NoLock. Utility to skip the lockscreen when turning the screen on.

Camera/Media

• MobileTag. Scans every kind of QR and bar tag. The latest version also adds NFC scanning.
• PicMe and ShootMe. Two applets for capturing images from your phone’s, PicMe provides capture directly to the PC via remote server while ShootMe dumps the image to the phone.
• Floating Images. A neat interpretation of the image gallery.
• MPC Remote. Applet to turn the phone into a remote that connects to the web-access for Media Player Classic

Entertainment

• Movies. Awesome applet for looking up movies that are playing near you
• IMDB. An applet for the IMDB movie site.
• xkcdViewer. A custom viewer for the xkcd comic.
• OpenTable. A custom applet for managing reservations etc for OpenTable restaurants.

Social Networking/Blogging/Messaging/Sharing

• Blogger. The official blogger applet!
• Twitter. The official twitter applet!
• Facebook. The official Facebook applet!
• Skype. The official Skype applet!
• Voice. The official Google Voice applet!
• Google Buzz. The official Buzz applet!
• LinkedIn. The official LinkedIn applet! This is actually quite a pain in the butt to get to as you need to navigate here on your Android browser.
• Trillian. I use Trillian as my desktop/cloud chat client so this is perfect, my conversations follow me no matter which client/system I connect to.
• Share More. This system tool adds more options to the built in ‘Share’ functionality.
• Share Apps. A quick and easy way to send an Android Market applet link to a friend.

Automotive/Navigation

• GasBuddy. The applet to go with the site, this applet is pretty handy for getting a quick feel for how much gas is at a particular location. Your experience with how accurate it is will vary although I’ve had pretty good luck. You can also submit gas prices through this app.
• Car Care. This app might be hard to get now, but it’s a pretty handy Google-maps car oriented applet that lets you search for almost any car related service (brakes, oil-change, wrecking, towing, etc.)
• aCar. A really comprehensive car management applet that lets you track maintenance, mileage etc.
• Car Home. My phone came with a custom car docking mode but for those without such thing, this is the generic mode that it is based on.
• Google Maps and Navigation and StreetView. Wonderfully integrated into the operating system, this GPS/mapping combo is top-notch. When you have StreetView installed as well, the navigation automatically kicks into StreeView mode when you get close to your destination.
• Open Spot. Google’s search-for-parking applet.

Alarms

• Countdown Alarm. It’s simple and gets the job done, great as a naptime alarm.

Applet Management

• App2Sd Free and App2Sd Pro. This applet is mostly just a timesaver: it identifies and categorizes all the apps on your phone based on whether or not they can be moved to your SD card or not (it also triggers whenever you install something new, so you get an alert right away). For info on how to move stubborn applets, have a look here.

Network Management

• Ping & DNS and Ping Simple network connectivity applet to test connections: handy if you’re running servers off the phone and you can’t connect and you’re trying to isolate whether or not the automatic background task manager is terminating the service or if you have a legitimate network connectivity problem.
• WhatIsMyIp?. Exactly what it says, this applet tells you your WiFi IP as well as your cellular IP
• Speedtest.net Speed Test. An Android applet of the famous bandwidth test, this will test both your wireless connection as well as your cellular connection.
• NetCounter. A totally awesome applet for tracking how much data you’ve used. The applet breaks it down into days, weeks, months etc. as well as distinguishing between WiFi and mobile data. It also has the ability to generate alerts when crossing the certain thresholds. Great for those without unlimited data plans.

Battery

• Battery Left and Battery Left Pro. Both of these widgets provide at a straightforward “how much battery time do I have left”.
• Battery Indicator and Battery Indicator Pro. This applet adds an entry in the application tray which gives you the remaining battery life as a numeric percentage. Unfortunately for my phone, the resolution is only in 10% gradients, but it’s handy to be able to see how much life left at a glance. By firing up the applet, it provides a breakdown of how much runtime is estimated to be remaining.

SMS/Call Management

• Call Filter and Call Filter Pro. I’m pretty sure there are better applets out there, but these are decent at getting the job done. I don’t block that many people so the quirks I can live with (mostly that while it prevents the call from going through, it does so by essentially picking up and handing up – which still results in the initial phone ring)
• Not Call Log Classic, Not Call Log 2 Free, Not Call Log 2 Paid. A necessity on the stock Milestone – after every call, it would dump you out to the call history (which, by itself, is ok) … but due to the input lag of the device, if you accidentally touched the screen, it would (after finally loading the call history), register that touch on a call history entry – resulting in you dialing that number. So aggravating. With an overclocked phone, it’s not so much of an issue, but it’s nice to have regardless.
• Dial 0. This is sort of a specialty applet but it’s handy to have sometimes. This applet is a dictionary of ways to skip through automated call systems. If you find yourself having to step through dozens of automated messages on a regular basis, this may be what you need.
• Say My Name Dessert. Applet to announce the name of the caller
• SMS Popup. An applet to display messages the same was iPhones do.

File Management

• ES File Explorer. A wonderful applet that makes it ridiculously easy to work with files on the phone. It’s free, it’s straightforward and it delivers what it suggests it will.
• DropBox.  The one and same DropBox as we all know, DropBox, in conjunction with ES File Explorer, makes it really simple to copy files between the desktop and the mobile without having to dig for cables or much setup. Just copy the files to the DropBox directory and presto, you’re done!