Yang Yongliang: cigarette ash landscape

 

Yang Yongliang: cigarette ash landscape.

We be droppin’ some hands

Via Süffi

Now wait here

…for further instructions. Just in case a few days or weeks go by without updating this thing, listen to this other piece of streetart.

Sleep is commercial

it is -

because Streetart says it is.

I second that. Because they were obviously thinking of Lightspeed Briefs.

_

On the shoulders of giants

Lightspeed briefs brought to you by the Futurama wiki.

Android crowd, green and gold…five apps to start with

Of course, once the golden dust around my new shiny Desire HD had settled a bit, I immediately proceeded to pull off some essential apps from the market, and so a little review might be in order here. Things I do all the time on the phone while out in the wild are reading feeds, ebooks and listening to podcasts. So tell us all about those apps there, and break them down in sweet little categories while you’re at it.

First off, feed readers.

This is my primary news source, my newspaper, and the primary way I access web content. So this better be solid.

One remarkable app in this category is alphonsolabs’ pulse reader. It is by far the best looking and wets your mouth to read more just by looking at it. It’s free, but it does have some drawbacks, at least on android: It is limited both horizontally and vertically, meaning you can add only up to 25 news sources (oi! I got 81 at the moment, and I need them all!), and once you read the first dozen entries, that’s it. You need to go to the website to access more content. Finally, this thing keeps crashing on me on seemingly random entries. Those are the reasons I can’t use this one as my primary reader, and only keep it around as a sort of gadget.

Next up it’s time for Feedsquares. We talked about this cute way to read your feeds a while ago, and it got an android version around that time as well. It’s usage is seemless, it let’s you use the day/night themes, and organize your stuff into folders, for all the Monikas out there. Get it here:

And of course, for anybody who wants the whole real deal, without compromising, you’d need the native Google Reader app. It’s on the market, and while not being among the prettiest looking apps out there, it does offer nearly everything the web application has.

Second base: eBooks.

This one, even more than the other categories, is an ongoing quest for me. I do read the occasional ebook, and I liked the quasi-paper look they gave the screen on the kindle. So I have been looking for an app that offers some comfort and looks, but most importantly, let me display my imported, free ebooks. On that account, I failed, and haven’t been able to find an ebook app that just does that. Meanwhile, I went with aldiko, which features a nice interface, good choice of different reading methodes, and an overall good handling. I was able to get the free ebooks I wanted to read from the built-in shop, but was lucky, I guess. Still looking for that simplest of things, a state of the art ebook reader that is able to display my own ebooks And now that version 2-oh is out there, I can do just that. Case solved. That’s right. Buhaa.

Aaand count three – podcasts.

I tried three promising podcast clients this far.

PodCat (lol witty appnames galore): Looks like a simple, clean catcher and player, but it isn’t: I just keeps crashing. So, not suitable for use in this version.

Hapi Podcast/xuluan android: This one features a pretty awful design and interface. The first thing in order would be to import your existing podcast list, which in my case is quite long, similar to the RSS feeds up there in category #1. This only worked after a stubborn few dozen tries, and only after realizing you had to rename your *.OPML in a certain way and put in a certain place, whereas this podcast client wouldn’t tell you this by itself. Also, at a random point, your podcast list would be erased, and look at your face when you skipped the *.OPML importing step and punched in the RSS feeds of your wished for podcasts by hand. Lord, what a terrible app. Finally, after deleting this thing, it leaves its own sort of permanent footprint on your system, as a sort of reminder of what you dealt with here: An unerasable folder in your system’s garbage bin.

This sometimes happens on my work Mac OS too. I sincerely hate that.

Enough of this, let’s get to the good stuff: BeyondPod. This one finally is the stuff. It lets you import your ‘casts seemlessly and without a fuzz. You can than sort them into folders, download the latest shows, schedule for automatic updates anytime, keep certain entries from updating or getting deleted, and so on and so forth. It just works perfectly. And I mentioned that before, but you do not need iTunes anymore. Thank you very much, some more bloatware finally gone! I even just updated to the paid “PRO” version for $5, without really getting where the difference was, but anyway in order to support the perfect standalone podcast app on android.

Join the green and gold android crowd.

Lord knows, it’s been a while since I’ve been hungering that much for a single device. Maybe it’s getting worse.

Following my own personal smartphone holocaust however, and after venturing through some rather strange places on the ecommercing web, I walked into Saturn am Alexanderplatz and ordered the HTC Desire HD. That got me waiting for many weeks of course, since this badboy has been sold out completely and utterly since day one if one is to judge by some tweets we saw out there.

Anyway. First impressions in this case last.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way.

I thought I just just briefly mentioned the things I don’t like on this fella, to then pass on to indulging you with the good things. First for android itself, I am missing two very very little things. You can’t name the device as of version 2.2 Froyo, so in a WLAN you will have to look for a thing that calls himself a12341717#a12 etc. No prob if you got only one android in your home, but with two or more, well…good luck guessing. Also, you can’t do screenshots. There are several applications in the marketplace, but you’d need to root first.

HTC’s overlay, called HTC Sense, is a very good one for that, but some of the promised features can’t be used, eg. it should be possible to log on to the website and locate your cell phone in your apartment or elsewhere, but the site just won’t let you do that. So, until further notice, no hatemail to your phone’s thief.

The handset itself has got the one flaw that is really worth mentioning, as in “this shouldn’t be this way”. The parts of the device apart from the giant screen itself are of a rather lesser quality build. This means that you can push the bottom and side covers in when holding the Desire HD, and you can even hear little crunching noises. It may even break off when trying to insert a new micro SD or SIM card.

We will just have to wait and see what lifetime we can expect, but right now I’ll have to state that I really loved the build and finishing of my first iPhone 2G compared to this. Well, at least the exterior.
With a monster like this, you’d think that you would keep it in your hand all the time and play around with it. And this sorta thing drains your battery. So the first step in order was to buy another two chargers and place them anywhere I would happen to dwell. But a bigger battery would have been very cute there.

Kingdom come

With those issues out of the way, I could write 300 posts just about how smart, cool, and beautiful the system and the whole device is. All things I didn’t like or that were kinda dealbreakers with the iPhone are gone now with #android. Sorry, twitter and all. Anyway, your don’t need iTunes or any other dumbed down bloatware. You mount your phone with a finger tip and put on your media, docs and other files, also without decoding it. To sum it up, it is smartphonewise just as ubuntu is an experience OS-wise: I start it up the first time with a certain idea of how it should look like, the look and feel etc., and either it delivers right from the start or you can tune it with a few tips/mouseclicks. This I like, this I wantwant. Even though the locked up, dumbed down, making you pay for everything experience on an iPhone is said to have the advantage that each piece relates beautifully to every other part of the system, that is exactly what Froyo with HTC Sense does. There may be some apps on the marketplace that try to add some usabilily you already have, but my overal impression is just that everything just falls into place and feels right. To sum the whole experience up, I would say “android is about being nice to you.”

(o_O)

_

On the shoulders of giants

Look up the specs of this badboy on HTCs official site, here (although, beware – the test praises the build and the battery life, the two major shortcomings of the Desire HD, and we don’t know what exactly they be smoking when doing a test at their “lab”), and here.

Browse a few apps on the official site, or on the imperative appbrain. Check the market stats here.