Android Apps You Need

I am still buzzing with joy over my recent Android phone purchase. The Android Marketplace has proven very useful, I have found many useful apps and wanted to share a few worth trying out.

1. Listen – This Google app is a must have if you listen to podcasts. Forget the old days of downloading them and syncing them to your mobile/DAP. With Listen, you subscribe, download, and stream right from your phone.

2. Seesmic – This great little app is for those Twitter users on the go. After installing and logging into my account, I was able to perform all of the tasks that I expect from a Twitter client. Simple and intuitive.

3. NewsRob – If you are a Google Reader user you probably are familiar with using GR from your mobile browser. It isn’t any fun. NewsRob is simple, fast, and free. With numerous options for reading and syncing, this app is great.

4. Advanced Task Killer Free – The name is pretty self explanitory, it kills running processes. This is especially useful on the Android operating system which seems to leave everything running in the background even though you think that you exited.

5. TorrentFu – This app is excellent for controlling Transmission and other torrent clients. Uploading, starting, pausing, and all the other basic controls are available. A neat feature is the ability to search for torrents right from the phone and submit them to any of your configured profiles for downloading. There is also a built-in barcode scanner which converts barcodes into torrent searches. Perfect for those times in the movie/music aisle.

6. Katawa – Web comics! If you are a fan of XKCD, Indexed, Dinosaur Comics, and the like, this app is for you. It pulls the latest strip on demand.

There are many others… far to many to list actually. Anyways, I hope that this short list helps out new Android users.

–himuraken

HowTo: Install Adobe Air and TweetDeck in Linux

So I finally created a Twitter account and started checking it out. I quickly noticed that below everyone’s tweets, was the application or place that they were tweeting from. I noticed that a lot of people with using TweetDeck. So I headed over to their download page and clicked on the big yellow “Download now, it’s free” button and nothing happened.

Apparently their install is delivered via the Adobe Air application which I have never seen or used. Well it is pretty easy to get TweetDeck going once Air is loaded. So follow these short steps and you will be up and running.

Head over to Adobe’s Air download page which is here and download the .bin file. For simplicity sake, lets just say that you saved the file to your desktop. Open up a terminal window and

cd Desktop

Next we need to set the execute bit/permission so enter in

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Now start install by entering

./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Just follow the wizard and complete the install. Head back to the TweetDeck download page and click on the download button. This should start TweetDeck download/install via the Adobe Air application. Follow the onscreen steps and you are good to go.

Update! 64 Bit Ubuntu users follow this link and use the step by step directions there. Cheers to Tony at OSSRamblings for this one.

Note* The Adobe Air install described here works for all browsers tested: Opera & Firefox.

–Himuraken