Srcasm

So you’ve got your Android Phone (your G1 for now) and you are showing it off to all of your friends and all of a sudden someone with an iPhone walks up and starts showing off their on-screen keyboard.  Does that make you depressed?  I hope not because your phone rocks anyway!  But seriously, below are a few applications that give you an on-screen keyboard for your G1 pre-Google releasing the ability for OSKs to be integrated system-wide.

• For SMS
  • ChompSMS - This application is one of the best designed apps I’ve used on the G1.  It offers a clean SMS interface (almost identical to the iPhone app), takes over for the integrated app and offers large-font support for ease of reading.  One downside is it does not currently flip to landscape mode.  But still, definitely worth a look.
  • SoftKey/A7 SMS - While I love Chomp, A7 was first and so it needs a place on the list.  Many people have complained about A7 not working properly although when it was first released it worked fine for me.  The keyboard is awkward to type on and when I used it, it was landscape only.  This kind of defeated the purpose of the OSK for me.
• For the Web
  • QSearch - This app can be hard to find on the web, a search in the Android market can bring you to it.  It’s a cleanly designed app that enables an OSK that can launch Maps, YouTube, Google, Amazon, a dictionary search and allows a URL to be entered.  These are all helpful while trying to use the G1 with the keyboard closed.  The problem is, these have to be launched from within QSearch, not the normal browser or applications.  For frequent searching, it should be in the G1 owners must-have toolkit.
  • Steel for Android - I’ve wrote about Steel on my blog before.  It’s a replacement to the built-in web browser and it’s fantastic.  It’s fast, supports landscape and portrait mode and now supports tabbed browsing.  In addition, searching from the address bar and adding bookmarks right from there makes Steel look more like a mobile version of Chrome.  Very nice.
• For the Phone
  • SpellDial - SpellDial can be a replacement to the current dialer/contact application.  It allows dialing and locating of names through a T9 input method.  Simply tap the key that corresponds to the name once and you’re off to the races.  If you have a large number of contacts on your G1, SpellDial can be a lifesaver.

In this day and age of mobile phone, PDAs, Flip Video cams and EyeFi cards, everyone and their mother is connected to the world wide web (even my mother texts now…  guilt in multiple forms.)  This also means that location-based services are even easier to work with today than they were only a year ago.

Tools like Brightkite and Loopt allow a user to both tell everyone where they’re at and pinpoint people and places close by.  Now I’m happy to see sites moving to a more granular location system.

When I searched for a car two years ago, I went onto Cars.com and searched for cars in my area.  This meant “within 10, 20 and 30 miles” were my options.  This is fine when searching for something in the area, but what about if I want to know the closest restaurant to eat at while downtown at New Work City?  This is where granularity comes in.

GoMobo.com allows restaurants to setup online ordering for their customers directly from their mobile phones or the web.  While I believe this is a fantastic idea (especially for my late-night Wawa trips), something they’ve taken one step further is how they show restaurants near you.  It’s no longer large areas around a point, I can go as close as .25 miles away from my location.

While up at NWC, I could see restaurants that are actually within walking distance, not those that I’d spend an arm and a leg taking a cab to.  I could see places to grab some grub that would deliver, not those that I had to go schlep over and pick stuff up at.  This is superb on a number of fronts but in my mind it’s the way of the future. 

Now that you’ve found me to the square meter (GPS), tell me what’s near me to the square block.  Now, who wants to order from Cafe Español?

Great news!  Magda and I will be moving back into the city.  To many of you who read this, it means nothing to you but to us, it means having a new place to live, a new place to call home and a new place to throw some fun events.

We’ll be living near 5th and Bainbridge Street in Philadelphia, PA and it’s quite the space.  Once we’re moved in, I’ll share some photos but to describe it, here are a few of the awesome, key points to the place:

• Two floors of livable space - This means no more walking on top of each other when I’m working from home and she’s on a break.
• One and a half bathrooms - For those of you who live with a significant other, this is very important.  We currently have one bathroom and we fight over it daily.
• A nifty spiral staircase - Okay, this might make for more of a pain to move stuff but it looks great and it takes up less space.
• A giant bathroom - The bathroom upstairs is at least 20′x20′.  I’m not sure why it was done this way but I believe I’m putting either a couch and a desk or a jacuzzi in there.  Not sure which yet.
• A beautiful roof deck - The deck off the fourth floor looks west into the city.  From it we can see the city skyline (to the north) and West Philly (which CAN be nice).  We can also grill up here and lounge out in the spring time.  Not too shabby.

As you can tell, I’m very excited!  More news and information to come.  But for now, it’s time to find a mover.  I am NOT doing it again, myself.

I have recently been playing with Google Sites quite a bit more than I previously had.  This is due to both curiosity (as to its uses) and the need from a few clients.  As I said before, at first glance it looks pretty lame but under the hood it could become your next Sharepoint system.

From customizing the look and feel to importing videos and photos, Google Sites allows users to quickly bring media to their personal sites and potentially to their internal company sites if used like a wiki.

Google allows its users to setup sharing preferences — Who can view, edit and control sharing are all available to all Google Sites users.  Some of the tips and tricks I’ve found that could be helpful follow:

• Changing colors - Google allows the customization of almost all of the colors within a site.  From background to text and borders and columns, you can choose almost any color of the rainbow with their easy-to-use color chooser.
• Importing Google Calendars - So you’ve got your site setup and now you want to share your internal company events?  No problem with Google Sites.  Setup a Google Calendar, list the events you want and then pop it right into your site.  No coding, just a simple link copy-and-paste.
• Mapping subdomains - Subdomains are the ability to put something before the top level domain.  ”www” in www.srcasm.com is a subdomain and that could be anything I want.  So if you have a few internal company sites that you’d like setup, just choose a different subdomain to keep the links short and people coming back.
• Mapping domains - Now that you’ve setup a simple test site, why not map a full domain to it?  If I wanted, I could move srcasm.com over to Google and allow people to view my site there instead of http://sites.google.com/a/srcasm.com/test.  Seems simpler, right?
• Granular sharing - As I stated before, Google allows you to choose who can view and edit your pages.  If it’s an internal site, let your whole team modify the page but if it’s client facing, maybe external text is better left for the PR people.
• Contact forms using Google Docs - Lastly, which I just found, is that Google Forms (a separate area in Google Docs) can allow you to setup a survey or a contact form in under 5 minutes.  These can then be placed onto your Google Site with a few clicks of the mouse or almost anywhere else on the web with a simple copy-and-paste.

These are just a few of the neat things that Google Sites allows users to do.  I keep finding new things to add to sites and new ways of making people and groups more efficient while using Google as both a wiki or an external company site.

Two words — It’s Fast!

I decided to go ahead and grab a copy of Windows 7 and so far, I love it.  The install was painless and less steps than setting up XP or Vista and the speed that it runs (even in my Sun VirtualBox) blows me away.  As far as design of the OS goes, it’s very similar in many ways to Vista which is not ALL bad.

The taskbar is much better for browsing on a lower resolution screen.  It can be scaled up and down and one press of the Windows key lands you in an easy to navigate “Start Menu”.

The control panels are a little weird to me because I’m so used to XP but I’m sure I’d get used to them.  They are very wizard driven which will make it very easy, for a newcomer, to learn the ropes of Windows 7.

As far as the rest of the OS goes, much of it comes with some neat little addons.  Gadgets that can display RSS feeds, Windows media files and the weather along with “Peek” which lets you quickly shoot to the desktop (just like OSX) to check on your latest news and weather for the area make Windows 7 a great upgrade for the normal, home user. 

Time will tell on how well 7 will do against XP in the office environment.  XP and Server 2003 made a great pairing when it came to security, control and all-around update management.  We’ll see if Microsoft can make 7 just as good.