Friday, May 20, 2011

Optimizing podcast playback on Optimus


I ran CyanogenMod Froyo 2.2.1 on my old G1 but am trying to keep the vanilla 2.2 on the Optimus T.

The only thing I miss is the CM hack that allows you to do a no-look skip to the next track by holding the VOL UP button even when the screen is locked. I have reclaimed 90% of the CM podcast goodness using $3 of android apps.

ButtonRemapper (~$1) will remap your hard buttons to your liking. I remapped my completely-unused Search hard button to be Next Track. Works great.

WidgetLocker (~$2) replaces your lockscreen and lets you put widgets there. This way you can interact with the widgets without having to unlock the phone. I put the Music app widget on there so I can start/stop music from the lockscreen. If I had another hard button I wasn't using I'd map it to Pause so I could do that no-look, too.

The little bluetooth-badged droid up there is the BTmono ($1) widget for routing audio over a regular mono BT earpiece. I started using that after the author of BT Super Mono decided he didn't need to make his menus fit on screens anymore. He says this is because he only has hi-res screen Android devices to test with now. My responses to that are:


  1. emulator in the SDK
  2. stop hardcoding things like that. You introduced the problem for no good reason. Android allows you to let the device handle the display of such things.
Here's what it looks like now:



Thursday, May 19, 2011

paid good money for that

So I was searching for "ugliest car" for some reason, and this paid advertisement was displayed on the top: