I have had my smartphone for about 3 months now. In that time I downloaded a lot of apps and deleted most of them again. Some I even downloaded twice and some of those I deleted a second time. Also everyone has to publish a list of their favorite apps sooner or later. So here’s a short list of apps I won’t be deleting anytime soon:

11 Favorite Apps:

1. Barcode Scanner: scans 2D barcodes also called QR-Codes that encode links to quickly open them on the phone.
2. Birthday: a widget that displays your contacts’ birthdays on the homescreen – very useful. It also creates reminders on the day, so if your phone isn’t just lying in the corner without power you cannot miss any birthdays anymore!
3. Tower Raiders Gold 1+2: my one and only favorite android game (there are free versions for trying it first)
4. DroidWeight (+ RpgTracker) I only write apps that I want to use myself
5. Imdb App: great info on movies, in the UK we even tested checking showtimes. What I am missing with this one is the ability to rate movies.
6. KVV: paying for bus tickets with the phone just rocks
7. Öffi: looking up public transportation timetables and finding out which train to take  is even better
8. Twitter: I use twitter and it was made for phones originally
9. Wallet: storing important information for you … I’ve used it on my last trip to remember the pin for my credit card (I never needed it before)
10. Skype: just tested and it works really well while near WiFi of course Any other voip client should do as well. However sipgate currently has no numbers available.
11. Advanced Task Killer: because sometimes I just want to kill everything with one click

There are a few more that I use regularly, but they either do not work so well or I am still looking for another app that does the same thing better. Here are the runners-up:

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I have talked to quite a few people lately about my plans. While many express a certain kind of doubt about the steps I am currently taking (most often quoting that dilbert comic), many others are curious about android and talk about programming some android “stuff” themselves. If you already know java, getting started is so easy, I thought I’d share the first few steps with you and give you some links to make it even easier!

So don’t just talk about programming android apps, do it! Follow these steps: I promise it takes less than an hour (unless you have a really slow internet connection!) and you’ll have hello world running on your device (or emulator) in no time! Continue reading →

Every app needs an icon, a logo, something that people can recognize it by. Many apps have really nice ones and many don’t. Most importantly the icon should be unique.

My first idea was to do something cheap like create a button in gimp and write something on it. I quickly trashed that one. Cheap looks cheap and that is that.

My second idea was to hope that a google search would turn up something, however thoughts on copyright and licensing got rid of that one even faster. So I picked up something with a creative commons license to have something to work with while I was thinking of a solution.

Next I thought to just try and find stock vector graphics at one of the great stock sites on the net. I also needed icons the tabs and the menus. The stock sites didn’t work either because (1) they are expensive and (2) I just did not find anything that clicked.

I came to the conclusion that there was no way around making the icon myself. Quite a scary prospect when you have never done any graphic design whatsoever. Still I installed some vector graphics tools. After trying several I stayed with inkscape. There are a lot of really great tutorials for inkscape. Trying to learn how to use inkscape, I completed just one of those (two, to tell the truth, I already linked to the other in my previous article!). I read a bit more of the documentation and just started with the ideas I had for the icon.

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