Category Archives: Software

Software

Google’s Nexus Keyboard is Now Available as a Standalone App

Leave a comment

If you’ve listened to this week’s COLLECTOR’S EDITION 50th EPISODE OF POP TECH JAM (shame on you if you haven’t) you know all about my travails attempting to root a Samsung Galaxy S4 phone. I don’t want to spoil things for anyone so let’s just say it did not go well.

One of the main reasons for my attempted rooting was to allow installation of awesome new applications from small, nimble developers that are passionate about what they do. I looked forward to loading bar-raising apps that would extend the functionality of Samsung’s well regarded new flagship phone far beyond what its bloatware ladened factory image would allow. Ironically, the app that has most dramatically improved the phone’s functionality and usability is as far from revolutionary as you can get and was developed by a huge corporate behemoth. Oh, and it doesn’t need superuser permissions.

Screenshot_2013-06-07-16-43-13

Google Keyboard, free from Google’s app market Play, is the same stock Android keyboard found on the Nexus series of tablets and phones and on plain vanilla installs of Android made available as a standalone application. While the Galaxy S4 is an exceptional smartphone, its most glaring weakness, beyond the many useless apps it crams onto the phone, is the keyboard. The Samsung keyboard is inaccurate, offers up terrible predictions and is pretty much useless for anyone who has large fingers.

In contrast, the free Google keyboard app is accurate, has a voice dictation option and a gesture typing feature that lets you slide your finger across the keyboard without lifting it from the screen to enter a word.  The Swype app from Nuance does a much better job at this sort of modified “keying” but Google’s version is very effective. I would rate it above Swiftkey’s Flow for accuracy but below Swype.

If you find the Samsung Touchwiz or the HTC Sense keyboards difficult to use or just too inaccurate to trust try Google Keyboard before shelling out cash for a replacement app. While the other apps may offer more fancy features the Google app does yeoman’s work. And did I mention it’s free? We LOVE free around here…

Episode Links, Software

Apple for the Teacher

Leave a comment

Summer is winding down and a lot of students are headed back to school. Even if you’re not stuffing your life and laundry in the back of a Honda and rolling toward campus, you can keep learning on your own. Free classes from places like MIT OpenCourseWare and Coursera are among the options for higher learning online. If you have an iOS device, Apple’s Podcasts and iTunes U apps offer plenty of brain-burning educational material that make it easy to absorb it all at your own pace—even if that pace is a steady jog down a quiet road.

The standalone Podcasts app pulls all the episode management and playback controls out of the Music app on iOS devices and gives them their own place to play. The Podcasts app is not universally loved, but it does round up all your shows nicely. It could be the only place to get them if those rumors about Apple cutting the Podcasts section of the iTunes Store loose this fall are true. Recent user reviews of the app seemed to have improved with an update earlier this month, and Apple has a Podcasts support guide for those still wrestling with it.

Podcast content ranges all over the place, but if you’re looking for something specifically educational, the iTunes U app points you to what Apple calls “the world’s largest online catalog of free education content from leading institutions.” There are about 500,000 audio and video lectures in there, plus presentations, documents—and some classes even use interactive iBooks textbooks (which are a lot lighter than those heavy old tree-based tomes that pile up, hog shelf space and fall over all too easily).

The iTunes U course topics range all over the place from science and math to literature and cultural studies. Stanford’s got a 10-week course on iPad and iPhone App Development and Harvard has a 12-week Intro to Computer Science class. Oxford University has a series of short lectures on why great writers are inspirational. The University of Arkansas has 5-minute Spanish lessons. If you like a little sociology mixed in with your Hollywood blockbusters, check out the lecture series from Emory University for video lessons with titles like The Mathematics of Spider-Man and Planet of the Apes: Species Misunderstood.

Since it arrived last January, the iTunes U app itself has been downloaded 14 million times already. Yay, rah, Fightin’ Downloaders!

 

Episode Links, Software

Gimme Some Space!

Leave a comment

If NASA’s latest mission to Mars has you all hepped up on the space program again, you don’t have to go farther than your smartphone or tablet to touch the sky. The agency itself has several software goodies, including the official NASA app for iOS and Android so you can keep tabs on the Mars Curiosity rover and other projects in the works. (Speaking of Curiosity, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a nifty new iOS app last month called Spacecraft 3D that lets you virtually check out the rover up close.) Remember, if you don’t have a smartphone or tablet, you can also find most of this stuff on the official NASA Web site.

For real space heads, it’s not just about NASA, though. Just search for astronomy in your local app store, and odds are you’ll get plenty of hits (even the BlackBerry PlayBook has the $2 Stellarium app in the BlackBerry App World). For example, there’s the $3 Star Chart and the free, open-source Sky Map for Android, which had a lot of input from Google and Carnegie Mellon University. Deneb Software has a similarly named app called SkyMap for Windows Phone for less than two bucks.

On the iOS side, there are plenty of astronomical options, including a pair of slick apps from Vito Technology called Star Walk (for stargazing, $3 to $5) and Solar Walk (for a 3D solar system experience and on sale right now for a buck). Many advanced astronomers favor the $7 Luminos app for iOS for views of 3D textured planet and moons in detail. Space Junk Pro is a similar app — for $5 you can track satellites, planets, stars and other stuff floating high above your head and it’s available for both iOS and Android.

Need more astronomy apps? Check out these roundups and collections for Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone.

And while it’s not quite mapping the sky, the free Planetary app for iPad maps your music collection to a series of animated intergalactic visualizations.  While the deep-space picture show may seem a little weird when listening to, say, banjo music (unless you have the right song), it really rocks the screen if you tap up a bit of Gustav Holst.

Episode Links, Software

The Stream Team

2 Comments

Countless stories have been written about cutting the cord, ditching the cable company and watching all your video through online streaming. But if you’re not quite ready to make the snip, you can at least watch your shows in more places than ever before.

Take for example, the Euro Cup 2012…’cause I need my international football, y’all.

I have a cable TV subscription, but I was out of town in a place with Internet – but no cable TV. But, thanks to the Watch ESPN app, I could watch matches live on the iPad. The app is also available for Android devices and the ESPN3 online channel often streams live sports video on the ESPN Web site if you’re on a regular laptop or desktop computer.

All I needed was a free user name and password from my cable company. In most cases, you can sign up for free to get credentials on your provider’s Web site, but you may need to dig up a recent cable bill with your account number on it to sign up.

Of you do keep the cable account and have premium channels on it, you have other entertainment options as well:

The one that’s been in the news lately: HBO Go.  It works on Android phones, Xbox, Samsung Smart TVs, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, Roku box and the Amazon Kindle Fire. The service is free with an HBO subscription – you can watch past episodes of Game of Thrones, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire and other HBO fare.

If you get the Showtime channel, there’s also Showtime Anytime. You get unlimited access to Showtime original series like Homeland and Dexter, movies and other specials for iPad, iPhone and the computer. You also need a Showtime subscription and a participating provider, like AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS. (And hey, for the Dexter fan in your life, the gift opportunities await.)

That same cable company name and password can also be used for the DVR apps many providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable now have for scheduling recordings or watching live TV. You can also program the DVR through a mobile Web site. (TiVo has its own apps and mobile site, too.)

If you still want to ditch cable, you won’t be without stuff to watch, and this is not even counting YouTube. For example, for $8 a month, you can subscribe to either Netflix or Hulu Plus, which both have apps available for Android, Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, Windows Phone, Wii, PS3, Xbox, Roku and the computer.

If you’re a fan of public television, there’s the PBS app for iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch – it’s free and you can catch up old recent episodes of Masterpiece, NOVA, Austin City Limits and more.

Many broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) have their own apps, especially for their nightly news shows. NBC Nightly News is available for Android and iOS if you need your Brian Williams fix.

And let’s not forget the Olympics. NBC, which is broadcasting the London 2012 games next month, will have some apps. These apps themselves aren’t quite ready just yet, but you can get a preview of what to expect here.

Got some time and need some brain food? Try the TED Talks app for iOS and Android. TED Talks are 18-minute “great idea” lectures from scientists, writers, entertainers, business folks and more. There are hundreds of them online on a wide variety of topics. (I must admit, Joshua Klein’s speech on the intelligence of crows and Steven Johnson’s thoughts on where good ideas come from are two of my all-time favorite TED Talks.)

And one of these days, maybe we’ll even get the BBC iPlayer here in the US — legally. Sigh.

Software

UPDATE: The Kaiser Chooses a New Default Desktop Web Browser…and Continues Referring to Himself in the 3rd Person

Leave a comment

Long time listeners know I don’t do the “change thing” so well. Actually, that’s not 100% accurate. What I don’t do is hop on bandwagons. I am NOT an early adopter. Every time I go against my better judgement and get the newest breathlessly over-hyped doohickey or doodad I am invariably burned. Exhibit A: the Blackberry Playbook. I rest my case.

I’ve been a Firefox user for ages, but only after waiting an appropriate time while it worked out its kinks in beta, and learned to accept the pokiness of running the 32-Bit app on my 64-Bit Windows machines. When the super-speedy Google Chrome came along I tried to love it but I’m still not comfortable with it. The Chrome icon sits on my Windows 7 desktop like a sports car that spends most of its existence under wraps in the garage, only making rare appearances to impress friends.

Enter the Mozilla-based Waterfox 64-Bit browser. The makers of Waterfox 13 claim it is the fastest 64-Bit variant of Firefox. While I can’t claim to have speed tested every 64-Bit variant of Firefox out there I can say with certainty that it is an incredibly fast desktop browser for Windows — but still not as fast as Chrome. Doesn’t matter to me at all though since what sold me on Waterfox is that it looks identical to Firefox PLUS all my add-ons worked without a hitch. The speed difference between Waterfox and Firefox is significant on my desktop with an 8 core CPU but still quite noticeable on my laptops. While Waterfox 13 won’t be capturing all that many checkered flags it won’t be eating much dust either.