Category: Android
-
New Android App: Silent Mode Bypass
I’ve just published a new tiny, free Android app: Silent Mode Bypass. This app does just one thing: disabling Silent or Vibration mode when you receive a phone call from a selected list of contacts. It’s useful for emergency calls that you must be absolutely sure to receive, typically at night, while still keeping everything…
-
Software: Epic Fail
Note: I’ve had this post in draft for several weeks. I forgot about it and only found it today. I recently bought a Google Nexus 7. I figured I could use it to read stuff for work while commuting. It looked very handy and convenient. But, it’s been probably the worst experience ever with mobile…
-
No More Grey, There’s Only ‘Like’ And… What Else?
Coming up with a grade, be it in tenths or 1-to-5 stars, is not easy. If you lurk around Google Play, you’ll notice that apps rated 4 or better tend to polarize the vast majority of votes on 5, 4, and 1 stars. There’s significantly less people giving 3 or 2 stars. That is easily…
-
FDfD Extremes
There have been a few reports about stuck downloads with Folder Downloader for Dropbox, so I added some logic to better handle network read timeouts. The main problem is with Java’s FilterInputStream.read() method, which is blocking and has no timeout setting. I ended up using Eclipse’s TimeoutInputStream (see update below). That said, such timeouts were…
-
Eating Your Own Dog Food
Eating your own dog food, or dogfooding, is a term coined adopted by Microsoft indicating that a software company should use its own products internally. It’s true, and Microsoft does it. Internally, the company runs on its own products, and each team even uses pre-release versions of their products, such as Office, Exchange, Windows, whatever.…