Attention NHL Penguins Fans! Penguins Droid App Released!

What an amazing day for Penguins fans/Droid owners!


I checked my Twitter just now and noticed a Tweet from the Penguins telling me that they have recently released an app for the Droid called "Pittsburgh Penguins Mobile". Basically this application gives you news stories, stats, standings, scores, videoslive updates (also has access to Penguins' Tweets within the program)...and best yet (well not for me since I don't live in Pittsburgh anymore due to being active duty Army) it allows you to watch replays when you are in the Arena!!!

Even if you are missing out on that amazing feature, this is still a great app. Talking with your friends and want to let them know some key Penguins stats or NHL standings? No problem. Want to see some video that was played on the Jumbotron recently? No problem.

The only thing I think it's missing is a link to the live radio like they have on their website. But have no fear, you can get that feed from iheartradio for free since 105.9 the X is a Clearchannel station!

Zillow for the Droid

Thanks to the guys at DroidLife.com we a video review which makes my job here at Droid-Does astonishingly easy. Zillow is a website that gives you estimates on how much houses are worth, how much recent houses have sold for, etc...to give you an idea of how much money you have lost since the economy took a crap.

Like a fellow Droider mentioned on Droidforums.net, "I don't like to use this app because it keeps telling me I'm losing money".

But if you're in the market for a new home, this might just be the app for you.

TripIt Travel Organizer and Flight Track Pro

I saw over on AndroidTapp that they were reviewing TripIt, and it made me wonder why the hell I have been using this program for about two months and never said a single word about it.

I travel almost incessantly for work, sometimes for five weeks at a time, but usually 10-14 days. This app is well worth it and almost invaluable to me when I travel, especially combined with Flight Track Pro.

Here is the description from AndroidTapp.com:

Features:

TripIt Android App is an extension of the popular travel organization website TripIt.com. If you’re not familiar with TripIt, it’s a great website for travelers that conveniently organizes travel itineraries why adding a social aspect to it sharing recent travels with friends. They offer a premium service that allows you to receive alerts if your flight may be canceled or departure gate changed at the last minute.

The app however is fairly limited yet very useful for how it organizes travel itineraries in an easy to read fashion with icons versus a huge block of ugly text you typically get from your itinerary confirmation emails. Each line item can be drilled down into further detailed to give you a booking details, directions to/from your airport or hotel via Google Maps, estimated hotel check-in/check-out times, and more.

If you have friends using TripIt, you can see their shared travels as well as you can share your travels or not. The shared data consists of sharers’ name, to & from destinations and the miles racked up.

TripIt also offers a subscription service which keeps track of your flight changes, status, gate changes, etc. However, you can get Flight Track Pro for just a few dollars and it automatically will pull your itineraries from TripIt and place them in Flight Track just like the more expensive subscription service. Flight Track also has a widget, and the ability to notify you in the notification message bar when flights change, get delayed, when the gate changes, etc.

Before I was rushing to the sign on my connections that tells you what gate the flight has moved to or not, wasting valuable minutes when you are talking about major airports like O'Hare, DFW, Atlanta, etc. Now I just pull up my Flight Track which pulls from my TripIt and I don't have to sweat it.

The best part about the TripIt/Flight Track combo? It's literally too easy to set up. You sign up for an account with TripIt and sign in. It will ask you to authorize the app in your browser (like when you have to authenticate Flickr or Facebook).

Once you get an account set up, you simply send your travel plans to plans@tripit.com. Within (usually) about 10 seconds, your travel plans are populated into the TripIt and Flight Track programs (provided you have them running).

From there, everything else is automatic. You don't have to change anything...

Now, I work for the government and we use SATO travel. I thought for sure that they wouldn't recognize the PDF document attachment that they send me (auto generated) but sure enough, they do.

Here is a list of travel plans that Trip It supports.

If you travel a lot, there is literally no reason you shouldn't be using these programs. For the cost of a Starbucks coffee or two you could be saving yourself countless minutes at the airport, and having to drag around less paperwork.

gTasks now available for free on the Market

A new ToDo list that syncs with Google, allowing you to easily sync the things your wife makes you do before you can come home from work with your phone/Google account.

From AndroidTapp.com:

Price: Free

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

* Easily sync tasks with Gmail/Google Apps tasks
* No account/credentials sign in… just works!
* Features Android Widget to quick launch the app
* Create tasks offline and sync later

Cons

* Would be cool to have Android notifications with Tasks

Features:

gTasks Android App conveniently allows you to sync your task/to do lists from your Android phone to your Google Tasks from either Gmail or Google Apps email accounts. gTasks offers a solution to an issue surprisingly not solved by Google in their Gmail client. More beautiful, you don’t have to login nor grant permission to the app as it just works with your Gmail/Google Apps account(s). For Android 2+ devices, you can sync tasks with all accounts created. Features an Android Widget to quickly launch the full app. Create tasks locally offline and choose when to sync or set it to do so automatically.

New App: Cache Killer

There's a new app for root users on the Market for about $1.10 (or sixty million yen) called Cache Killer. For those with OCD personalities like me this sounds great...one touch to clear all cache and free up some space and potentially speeding some apps sounds really promising.

Only one problem though: it doesn't work. Or at least it didn't for me. Even though I'm rooted, have a custom ROM, overclocked, BusyBox installed, etc...it told me I didn't have root access.

It was worth a try and you get a refund pretty quickly so perhaps you'll have better luck?

Change the way you type

Personally, I am a huge fan of the physical keyboard. Even though I have big, fat thumbs, I can type close to. 50wpm with the Droid keyboard.

That being said, there are two really awesome alternatives to the soft keyboard. Developed by the same people that developed T9 years ago, these apps allow you to never lift your finger from the keyboard to type. The first, one that I prefer, is Shapewriter. I like it for two reasons: first, it is available on the market for free to end users and the developer is easy to contact. The second is it auto capitalizes your first words.

The second option is a little smarter with recognition but is only available with a leaked beta apk file that needs to be manually installed (see my next post to see how to install apk files). It's called Swype, and it's being developed only to sell to OEM companies like HTC to include on future phones, so that means no updates.

Here is a link to a review and download location of Swype:.

In either case you need to go into your menu > keyboard and language settings and enable the new keyboard.

Stay tuned with instructions on how to install apk files.

Gesture Search Comes to the Android 2.0 and Above

Google has just released Gesture Search on the Market. No, this isn't an app that gives Steve Jobs the finger, this allows you to make a gesture, such as an "m" which will bring up contacts, music, apps, bookmarks, etc that start with the letter "m". Then you can continue to gesture to spell something out (one letter at a time though) to narrow your search. I see this being a great "contacts" replacement. Instead of scrolling through your contacts you use the gesture. Very intuitive. I downloaded and tried it, and even with my sloppy and careless writing it didn't make a single mistake. Another quality app from Google.

I ordered my wife some new slutty lingerie...

...and I used Mobile Package Tracker to track the package via UPS. This nifty little app allows you to input the tracking number and package carrier (FedEX, UPS, DHL, USPS, TNT - whatever T.F. that is). It's like 2 bucks on the Market and worth every penny. For awhile I was trying to re-input tracking numbers every time I anxiously awaited my next batch of adult material in the mail, and it got tedious. Now I get notifications every time the package status changes.

PS - I didn't really order her slutty clothes. Sorry to disappoint, it just sounded like a good title.

App review: Quick Profiles

If you're like me, you are frustrated with the default options for changing your volume etc on this phone. I mean, you have so many things that this phone does...and that's great. But no one wants all those great things disturbing their sleep in the middle of the night and making you have a case of the Mondays.



Yet at the same time you might want to be able to get that ever-important phone call at 3am reminding you to fill out your TPS reports. So in that case, where does it leave you? You can go the hard route and disable every notification every night and re-enable them in the morning, or you can download Quick Profiles from the market, for free.

Quick Profiles allows you to set up and manage different profiles of all types. For example, my two most commonly used profiles are "vibrate" and "night". While that seems like a combination of words most women would use in a single sentence, they are in fact just two sound profiles for my phone. Without them I wouldn't even have kept my phone. Essentially I have two main ways I like to keep my phone: vibrate during the day for everything and at night everything but the ringer silenced. This app works great with Handcent or ChompSMS messaging app (see below) as they both have a notification option of "Vibrate only when ringer is set to vibrate".

So you take a few minutes to edit some profiles, place a link on your desktop, then it literally takes two clicks to change profiles...one to open the app and one to choose a profile. Then the app auto-closes so you don't have to mess with it after.

Here are some screenshots...go download this app right away!

App review: ChompSMS

I have bounced around left and right between the stock messaging application, Handcent, and ChompSMS. Ultimately my personal preference, despite all the fun features of third party messaging apps, is minimilistic applications running in the background, using memory, etc. Call me anal, that's just the way I am.

However, today I was texting my wife some dirty, adult-only stuff and vice versa and noticed a terrible (yet consistent) problem with the stock messaging application: sometimes it shows the wrong contact in the correct thread. So I almost texted my aunt some very inappropriate things that I am nearly ashamed to even say out loud.

So off to switch to either Handcent or ChompSMS, the two leading third party messaging apps. Now the first and most important thing to remember when installing a third party messaging application is to DISABLE the notifications under Menu > Settings in the stock messaging application, otherwise you will get two notifications. This is by far the most common problem I see with the Droid as a whole!

Anyhow, so the benefits to using Handcent over Chomp are somewhat numerous, including multiple different chat setups (with Chomp you can customize colors but mostly it looks like the iPhone SMS setup), etc. However, one issue I ran into with Handcent on a fairly regular basis I was getting double text messages. Not notifications, but rather the same message would come through twice, despite having "auto retrieve" messages disabled in the stock messaging settings. This drives me up a wall.

So I decided to go with ChompSMS. It's free on the Market (as is Handcent).

Here are some of the positives about ChompSMS:

* iPhone look-alike. Yeah yeah, iPhone sucks, but honestly I always liked their SMS app look.
* Popup. Should you so desire, a quick reply popup can be enabled for you instead of having to go into the actual program every time. I keep this option disabled, but it's a nice feature.
* Change the color of the notification LED light
* Change the vibrate pattern (makes it easier to feel when in your pocket)

Feel free to comment on your thoughts between Handcent, Chomp, the stock messaging app, etc.