Friday 16 August 2013

There's Writing, Blogging And Note Taking - Part Two

Back to Part One

Other sorts of text entry

When I am out and about with my mobile device, the Android-based Samsung Galaxy S3, I am more likely to want to make quick notes. It is also possible that you might want to make quick notes while sitting in front of the desktop computer. For these types of quick notes then you're going to need an app that is quick and easy to open so that rules out the large page layout applications like Word or Pages. Seeing as I am already using Mou for some of my editing that is the application that I tend to use for making those quick notes. I could also make notes in some of the other text editing applications I have such as Textastic (Mac and iOS) or TextMate (Mac), but I prefer to leave those for the times when I need to do some coding or maybe just some cleaning up of some text.

Create text and send it anywhere

On iOS my preference for these quick notes is the application called Drafts and this is because of its marvellous sharing ability, for keeping those notes all in one place as well as synchronisation through Dropbox so that I still have access whichever platform I am using. Drafts is excellent because of the fact that I can share out from it to numerous networks such as Twitter, Facebook, ADN and various other places including blogging platforms. Of course, Drafts does Markdown extremely well.

 

Android Markdown Editor

I have been looking for a markdown application to use on Android and I wrote an article about my initial searching when I first got the Galaxy S3. I was delighted to find that there was an application called Draft which it seems is trying to emulate the brilliant application Drafts from iOS. It is a work in progress and isn't quite as good as the iOS application, but it is going in the right direction. I have a widget on one of the android screens which allows me to go directly to making a note in Draft, which can be either a text type note with a.txt extension or it can be a specifically Markdown note with a .MD extension. On my home page on the Galaxy I can also get directly into Draft and I can do some of the things that it is possible to do with the application that it is trying to copy, Drafts.

Easily confused

When you get used to the way that one application works and then you're trying to do similar things in a similar application it can be a little bit confusing. With Draft some other things work pretty much the same as they did in the iOS application I was using and then sometimes not quite so. There are a huge number of places that I can share out to which I can get to by using the share icon in the top right-hand corner. Initially it only gives me three different places and none of which I am likely to use S Memo, Messaging and Hang Outs, but if I click on See All there are a huge number of possibilities. So I can share out to just about any of the other applications I have available including email, the Twitter application Carbon, Facebook, Dash, blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress. I could even send it out as a QR code or through the SMS application called What's App.

A work in Progress

The only problem with this within the application Draft is that sometimes it will automatically take the text and put it ready to be used in the other application and sometimes it doesn't. I found that the workaround for this is to always select all of the text before I do the share so that at the very least I will be able to paste it back in again when I get to the share application. This is not too much of a bother so long as I remember to do it.

Sharing with Plain Text or html

When you're not in the editing mode and you tap on the share button you are given two options to start with, share plaintext or share HTML. I just used that button to share some plaintext to Facebook and it takes me to an empty post. That was not quite what I had expected and I would need to do a paste if I had remembered to copy it beforehand. It is also the same if I ask it to share the text as HTML. On the other hand when I want to share out to the Gmail application to send as an email, both ways works out fine and I get the text as expected in the Gmail application and ready to send. So as you see it is a bit hit and miss.

Part Three

Thursday 1 August 2013

Installing applications on my Samsung Galaxy S3

Rooting Tooting success

Root android
This morning I have been installing quite a few applications on my phone and I started with Framaroot which allowed me to root the phone. This was from a suggestion by my friend Stefan Svartling. I had followed a couple of his previous suggestions to root the phone which had been unsuccessful and I was delighted that this one actually worked. It must have been the fact that there was something done that was a little bit weird by the telephone company, that messed it up before. Now that I have the phone rooted I will have to decide what I am going to do next. Stefan has been flashing a custom ROM onto his Android phone in order to get rid of some of the bloatware that comes with Samsung Touchwiz. I have noticed that when I use applications such as Helium, the backup application, that I do get some extra functionality because of the phone being rooted.

Off-line maps

While we were visiting Estonia it would have been very useful to have some off-line maps. This was so that I could have used a map to show where we were. This is considering that the maps from Google were not available as I didn't want to download any data while roaming. I did get to see some of the Google maps, but only when I was within range of some Wi-Fi. One of the great things about Estonia is that there are very many places that give you free Wi-Fi and I even had Wi-Fi when I was sitting on a tram travelling into the city of Tallinn. There are some open source maps available and I have found a couple of applications which give access to these maps on Android. The one that I downloaded is called OsmAnd when you get the application started up you get some options about which maps you will want to download and also where you want to put them. I put them onto the external SD card and as they are vector maps they shouldn't take too much space. I downloaded a few based upon the possibilities of me actually going to those places. I won't really be able to get the benefit from these until I go travelling again and that could be who knows when.

Global positioning for photos

Gps4cam
I also downloaded an application for getting the GPS coordinates for photos that have been taken with my DLSR camera which will save the expense of buying one of these new fangled cameras with GPS included. The way that it works is that when you go out to do some photos with your DSLR camera, you also start the tracking application on your iPhone or Android device. Then you use another piece of software on your Mac to marry the two sets of data together and hey presto you have all of the tracking information within your exif data. You do have two synchronise the clocks on the two devices, I don't think it has to be exact, but I will be doing some testing to find out how close it has to be. It is possible to do GPS tagging for free, but you do have to remember to take a photo with your mobile device every time you take pictures in a new spot with your big fancy digital camera. As soon as I have tested this way of working with the photos and GPS I will post a new article all about it.