Stock Google Calendar now on the Play Store

While it was previously only officially available on stock devices such as Nexus 7 or Galaxy Nexus. Google Calendar is now available for download with a myriad of features.

• Snooze events directly from a notification if you’re not quite ready and want to be reminded later.
• Use predefined messages to send quick "I'll be late" updates to your event participants directly from the notifications or the event itself (of course, you can always write your own).
• Pinch to zoom in and out of a day.
• Set a home time zone to help you manage your time better when traveling.

Download: Link

Play Store Updates to 3.9.16

The last update to the Play Store happened way back in August. But we have just seen an update to version 3.9.16. This update will bring several highly awaited features to the Play Store. First off everything works better with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. While I know not everyone is on Jelly Bean yet, the expanded notifications have been completely changed. You now have full expandable notifications from the Google Play Store for updates, and upon updating or downloading an app you get the actual icon, not a logo. 

Then the other update here is the ability to remove apps from your list. If you’re like me, that “all apps” list in the Play Store is extremely long. Now you can easily go through and delete apps you know you have no interest in. If you've ever got a new phone and had to search through that entire “all” list forever you’ll know the feeling. This is an extremely welcomed change. Now I just wish there was a way to filter it to show only purchased apps... as it did before. To select multiple apps from this list, you just long press an app until it selected, then simply tap on the others you want to select. To remove them you then tap the button in the top right corner of the screen. 

Link: Download

         

Passbook for Android tutorial

One of the major selling points for the iPhone 5 is the new Passbook integration. Pulled straight from the Apple website is this description:

"Your boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons, loyalty cards, and more are now all in one place.  You can add passes to Passbook through apps, emails, and websites from participating airlines, theaters, stores, and more. Then you can scan your iPhone or iPod touch to check in for a flight, get into a movie, and redeem a coupon. You can also see when your coupons expire, where your concert seats are, and the balance left on that all-important coffee bar card. Wake your iPhone or iPod touch, and passes appear on your Lock screen at the appropriate time and place — like when you reach the airport or walk into the store to redeem your gift card or coupon. And if your gate changes after you've checked in for your flight, Passbook will even alert you to make sure you’re not relaxing in the wrong terminal."

Seems like a great way to make your ticket purchases and coupons paperless. With all the talk about Passbook it is no surprise that Android has something up its sleeve. Therefore, this tutorial will be for you Android people out there who want a Passbook experience on your phone.

Lets start out with membership, reward, and loyalty cards. Keyring lets you scan these cards and then use them at the participating programs. However, some registers can not scan the phones screen, so you need to have the cashier type in the code manually.

The next big thing is boarding passes. There are several different airlines that have apps, the following also may include notifications if your flight changes and more.

1. Fly Delta
2. United Airlines
3. British Airways
4. American Airlines
5. Southwest Airlines

Passbook and Android both lack a little in the mobile ticketing field. But both are getting more support. A major ticketing app on Android is Fandango. It allows you to buy movie tickets on your phone and some theaters will let you skip the ticket booth all together and check right in. Some theaters even allow you to reserve a seat, so you can pick the best spot for your favorite movie. Hopefully we will see more support for mobile only tickets in the near future. 

Coupons on the other hand are on the rise already. Many apps including Wallgreens and Target have coupons built right into the app that can just be scanned at the register. But one of the best all around coupon apps is Coupon Sherpa. There are mixed reviews for this app, but from my experiance it seems to be well built. It offers some places that I have never heard of, but of course this does not need to be a bad thing! 

And last but not least is Google Wallet. This app is only available "officially" for certain phones on certain carriers, but there are hacks that allow you to bypass all of that. This does work on my Nexus 7 though so I have first hand experience using it. When you launch the app you put in your PIN and then you see 4 different actions that you can take.

Payment cards, where you sign up your credit card.

Rewards cards, where you add your rewards cards to be automatically used at the time of purchases.

Offers, where coupons and offers show up to save you money.

Transactions, where you can review your digital receipts and track your purchases.

Hopefully this has helped you to set up a Passbook like experience on your phone, if you have any other recommendations or questions please feel free to leave a comment below. 

App Review: Right Click

Right Click is a tutorial app that is there to teach you about the different settings on your DSLR camera. Right Click helps us to learn visually by showing us the affects that the different settings have on a photo. There are several different modes to help us learn: 

View Mode: To let us see the affect first hand by using a slider at the bottom of the screen

Read Mode: For the textbook lovers out there, helps understand through documentation

Photography Styles: Shows different techniques and styles for all sorts of photographing situations

Here we pick from the different Modes of learning. Lets say you pick "View Mode"

Here we can select the different Shutter Speeds, tune the Aperture, and select the ISO range. By clicking on these they bring up a sample photo with a slider at the bottom, to see how the changes affect your photos.

This is what you will be presented with if you choose Read Mode. From here we can select any of the topics and read a short page about them. With a nice UI and very fluid movement this app is built well, and it shows here.

Here is the Photography Style page. It teaches you about what settings to use in what situations. This has come in hand quite a few times and is a great resource for anyone who is just getting started taking manual photos. 

Overall this app is great. I read through it and understood what it was saying. I am not normally a big advocate of tutorial apps, but this one works well. There are no ads and it is a free download so I appreciate that a lot. The app is built well and is quick and easy to use. Although there are transition sounds so make sure you don't accidentally open it in a quite room without your sound being off! What do you think of the app? Did it teach you something that you didn't know about your camera's settings? Leave a comment below or respond on Reddit or Twitter.

Link: Download

App Review: The New York Times

After reading some of the reviews of this app through the Play Store I was a little worried about downloading it. There are several reviews that only give the app 1 or 2 stars. They are saying things like: 

"The updated app looks nicer, but the functionality is much worse."

"...everytime I touch the screen to scroll the background turns blue. You let go, back to white. The result? Constant flashing! Terrible."

 I have been using this app for awhile now and have not seen the flashing that these people are reporting. The pages take a bit long to load but nothing like the 10+ seconds that other users are reporting. I understand that not all Android phones are created equal so I cannot speak for everyone on topics of performance. 

When you first open the app (free version) we see a list of the top news. We can also change font sizes, save those articles, or refresh the page from here as well.

After clicking on an article we can view it, share it, download it, or even have the article read to us. The reading voice is not to bad, it has a fairly female american accent and is clear and loud.

Overall this app seems to be a good newsreader but I can tell that they are pushing you to get a subscription. The ads are hard to ignore and as they take a short while longer to load than the article itself, and I found accidental clicks did happen a few times when I wasn't paying attention. The other benefits for the paid subscription are: "unlocks all the sections in the app of The Times, plus blogs, videos and slide shows."

For someone who already gets The Times this may be a good way to take that subscription and turn it into a more portable and accessible newspaper. 

Link: Download

Android 4.1.2 not just on Nexus 7 anymore, now rolling out on CM10

For everyone out there running CyanogenMod 10 a new update is coming your way. Android 4.1.2 has a variety of very vague updates, and only mentions a few specifics.

“improves performance and stability and fixes bugs”

There are mentions of browser, audio, camera and a kernel updates. There is also now an icon next to the version of CM10 that you are using. You can get this update through a recent release of CM10 in the CM Updater. (Settings>About Phone>CyanogenMod Updates) If you are not yet running this build then you can get it from CyanogenMod's official site get.cm. Stay tuned as I use this update and see if there are any new features worth noting. 

App Review: Field Trip

Field Trip was recently released by Google and is your guide to the hidden, cool, and unique places around you. Field Trip is a non-invasive app that will run in the background and when you near a location or point of interest, it will pop up a card that can show you more details about it. You can fine tune field trip to only show you the information that you want to see, and when you walk, drive, or travel near the places that may interest you Field Trip lets you know. You can then further personalize your results by giving each recommendation either a "Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down" to tell Field Trip what you like. 

Lets get started setting it up!

We are greeted with a nice canvas looking background and tap on the arrow to proceed.

Field Trip starts by asking us how often we want notifications. This can be very hard on your battery as it will awake itself quite often to check where you are in order to show the cards, so choose carefully. Of course you can always change your preference in the settings later.

Now we are greeted with a map that should show where you are (assuming your location settings are on)
If there are any points of interest around you they will also pop up. I will be taking us to Chicago because my home town only has 1 point of interest and is very boring.

Here we are zoomed in by The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and you can see quite a few cards are here. I am going to be traveling to Chicago later this month so I will be able to see some more of these features as I am there. But for now lets focus on a virtual tour.

Lets select this card here, up near the top of the screen. It is a card for "Shoreland Hotel, Main Lobby"

By clicking on the screen we are then taken to the information page of this hotel and we can either thumbs up or down the hotel, we can share it through a variety of different apps or we can change our notification settings.

Lets back out of that screen and clock on a blue card. The one just south of the Museum will do fine. It is a Movie Location for "The Blues Brothers, 1980" It tells us that this is the bridge that some "ineffectual Stormtroopers are dumped" here how exciting...

Anyway for my final thoughts, this app has a great bit of potential! It can really bring up some interesting things that not many other people may know about. But there is also a lot of junk wade through. You need to make sure to tailor your settings to exactly what you want, otherwise you will be barraged by cards that have nothing to do with your interests.

Link: Download

App Review: Pocket Planes

This game by Mobage follows the same pixel goodness that we saw with Tiny Tower.

Lets start playing.

We are at first greeted with a tutorial to get us used to the controls. They are a bit hard to pick up on at first but after playing the game for a little bit you learn fast. The tutorial is quick and does not go very in depth at the start of the game but it does wet your toes to the style of game play  You start out by loading a plane with either people, cargo, or both. Certain planes can hold more than others so you want to choose who you take wisely.  

                         
When you have chosen who is going on your plane you press the take off button in the bottom of the screen and you are shown a map. Airports that you have available to you are solid white, while ones you are yet to own are slightly transparent.

When you pick what town to send your Bitizen to, the plane begins to fly. You can then switch to another plane by clicking the arrow keys on either side of the screen or see a list by clicking the picture of the plane in the bottom right hand corner. There is also an option to "Tweet" where your plane is going, but this seems very annoying and gimmicky to me. 

As you watch your plane fly coins and Bitizen Buxs will fly by the fly, if you tap them then you get the bonus associated with the item. Buxs can be used to purchase in game extras, or speed up a process or several other actions to make your game play easier. You can always purchase more though an in-app purchase, but they are not required to play the game.

When all of the planes are in flight to one place or another you can exit the game and wait until the time next to the flight runs out. This app does have the option for notifications when this does happen. I have noticed that it totally restarts the game so I assume that it will not use up much battery life at all. 

This is the Menu screen and as you can see, there is alot of information here. We can do everything from sell on the Market to check out Logs or buy new parts for our planes. This is also where the Bank is in order to convert Bux into Coins. We can use "MobaCoins" to actually purchase the Bux. The current rate is 100 MobaCoins for $0.99 which can then be turned into about 20 Bux. (With 1 MobaCoin left over for some reason)

Link: Download

App Review: Schemer

Schemer is a little known app published by Google with just over 100,000 downloads. It is a bucket list kind of app with a nice UI and good support. But this app does lack a large user base. In my city of about 80,000 people there is only 1 other person who is posting things that they want to do, but I will get back to that in a second.

Schemer allows you to post a "Scheme" and then publish it for other people to look at and decide if they want to do it or not. It allows you to add other peoples Schemes onto your own list and accomplish them whenever you want.

The app gives you a couple of choices on how to search for Schemes. You can do a nearby search, which is great for large cities, or filter out by categories. If you choose  a category you only see what activities have to do with that category.

Say you love being outside. Then you should select the category "outdoors" or maybe "natural wonders". If you select outdoors then you can further filter that down by keywords, locations, and even things that you can do at home. I went ahead and did "Anywhere" with no other filters on. I have a few things here that I would like to do, such as "Bicycle the Stevens Creek Bikeway" so I will click the green + sign next to it. But I also want to do something that isn't on the list. So I am going to add my own Scheme to this category. "Hide a new geocache" seems about right. Now if someone else wants to do that they can just click the plus sign next to mine and I will have "inspired" them to do that!

With just a little bit of time spent playing around with this app I already have several things that I want to do, I have also posted several that I think others will also like (although I haven't inspired anyone yet) This seems like a great app and I wish that it could get the popularity that it deserves.

Link: Schemer

Motorola Backflip

   

Lets take a trip through time and remember the Backflip with some specs. This phone was the first Android powered smartphone released on AT&T. It had dimensions of 4in x 2in x .6in. It had a capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320x480 (about 186ppi). The screen was also something new called "Gorilla Glass". It had 256mb of RAM, with a 528MHz ARM11 processor  It ran Android version 1.5 (cupcake) and was upgraded all the way through 2.1 (Froyo). The standby time was up to 315 hours and talk time was 6 hours, with a 1400mAh battery.

What made this phone unique was how it was opened. The keyboard was exposed on the back while closed and then "flipped" around to the front to open it:

With this phone you either hated it or loved it. It was hard to get used to the new operating system and the keyboard all at once and you found yourself fumbling with it at first. However when you got the hang of it, it became just as easy to open as a traditional flip phone. On the back of the screen was a small trackpad. It was used for navigating around the screen and could even select applications or slide through your homescreens. The only real use that I found in it was selecting text from a large document because the touch screen didn't have multi-touch. The camera placement on the phone meant that when the keyboard was open, or flipped to the front, you could see yourself on the screen. This made self shots possible without a front facing camera and I loved that about this phone. 

The software it where this phone shines. Before the Backflip if you wanted to get an Android phone you needed to be on T-Mobile and get the G1 made by HTC. You could only buy this straight from Google for about $500. Then after this phone was released and the Droid was released by Verizon we started to see Android take off. I bought this phone the first day that it came out and I can remember the Android Marketplace well. It had a grey/black background and a side scrolling list of apps at the top. 

I remember that I could scroll through all of the applications in a very short amount of time. I also remember them all being free. I got a flashlight app and was amazed at how I could use my PHONE to light up a room!  There were a few good games for this phone but they were very simple.
I had this phone until I upgraded to the Samsung Captivate, and I loved almost every minute of it, in fact I still have the phone in my drawer of phones and tablets.

Next up I think I will do the Samsung Captivate.