My top Android apps

It’s been a month since I bougtht my lovely HTC Desire and I’m still loving it! During this time I’ve mostly been on vacation and have consiquenly had a lot of time til play around with it; installing and testing loads of applications from Android Market, reading comics and ebooks, listening to audiobooks and watching videos.

I’ve found myself using the same applications over and over again and I find it kinda strange that my top Android application list does not resemble the lists you find by googling after top Android apps.

Before I go into the details I’d like to mention that I’m writing this post using my phone and the WordPress app.

First and foremost is Android Advanced Task Killer (free). This application is essential since Android is a multitasking platform which allows apps to run in the background, even start automatically. Having many apps running reduces battery life considerably and Android does not provide an easy soloution to this yet. You can use this app to kill all running apps at configurable intervals excluding those you specify, the ones you really need to run for longer periods of time. When I started using my phone I had approx. 40 apps running, now they are somewhere around 5.

To manage the data on my phone I use File Manager (free). This app gives you full control over your files and folders, copy, delete, rename, you name it.

The Facebook application integrates nicely with the built in contacts app, allowing you to link contacts with their fb profile, giving you access to phone numbers, profile pics, birthdays etc. Google and twitter accounts integrate similarly.

I use the SwiFTP app extensively, its basically a very simple FTP server and comes very handy when exchanging files with friends pc’s via wireless.

MortPlayer is by far the best audiobook player I’ve come across so far. Note you have to install the widgets separately.

I find Springpad very handy when taking notes or writing todos, however I can’t seem to switch entirely to Springpad from Evernote so I just use them both.

I’m using a few more which will have to wait, my phone is running out of juice!

Encode video for HTC Desire with Handbrake in 4 simple steps

I got my hands on a HTC Desire phone a few days back and since then I’ve been very busy playing around with it. So far I’m pretty impressed with this phone and Android, it’s operating system, as well and frankly how could I not be impressed since my last phone was Nokia 2330! Last night I started looking at converting video for this phone and tried quite a few tutorials and applications I found online but I couldn’t get the format right so the phone would play the actual video instead of a black screen.

After some trial and error I settled on using Handbrake for Mac to encode my videos because it is fast, free and simple to use. Furthermore, I came up with the following settings for Handbrake which work for my HTC Desire and are in good-enough-quality. Good-enough-quality is important because lower quality video playback is less power consuming than high quality and for obvious reasons, battery consumption is important. So here is a tradeoff between quality and battery life and depending on your preference you change the quality levels by changing the following video parameters;

1. resolution
2. frame rate
3. average bitrate

Configure Handbrake like this to start encoding your first videos:

Handbrake configuration steps

1. Click Picture Settings and select Size tab. Make sure that Anamorphic is set to None and Width and Height do not exceed 800 and 480
2. Select the Format as MP4 file
3. Select the Video Codec as MPEG-4 (FFmpeg), choose the Framerate to be same as source (or as low as 15 for large movies such as DVD rips or Blu-Ray) and uncheck the 2-pass encoding box
4. Set the Average bitrate (kbps) to 384

By default my Audio tab settings in Handbrake are:

• Audio Codec: AAC (faac) , this is in fact the required format !
• Mixdown: Stereo
• Samplerate: Auto
• Bitrate: 128

Now you know how to convert your videos the easy way, try my values first and then tweak them to your taste. Enjoy.

New and prettier www.ari.is

I’m very good at doing stuff which isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing, one of these things was redesigning my ari.is website! Let’s face it, it needed changing and frankly I was getting a bit jealous of everyone else having fancy pansy personal pages with mine looking like crap. So this week I swallowed my burning hatred for CSS, and powered by love for Django and Python, I created a new and prettier ari.is – Horray!!

Now I look cool online – no ?

Just ask!