Little Droid Lost

Not sure if you are aware of this yet but the recent update to the Google Play store app on Android now allows you to locate, ring, lock and even delete the data on your droid remotely (as long as it is connected to either the phone or a wifi network of course).

Simply go to https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager, set up your devices (you may need to change settings on your actual devices too, follow the prompts for this) and you are on your way!

Makes all those 3rd party apps a little redundant now I guess?

Citation Nirvana for Research Students on Android, PC and Mac

I was wrestling with citations for my current masters subject on Evernote the other day. I find the research capabilities of Evernote brilliant, especially as a premium user. The ability to just slam anything into Evernote, organise it and then do my work without having to remember where everything is does wonders for my mental health.

Where Evernote absolutely fails as a manager for research papers is in the area of citations. I have tried all sorts of tricks and no cigar.

So there I was, on the train to work a few days ago, bouncing between Evernote and LibreOffice (when will you build and Android version!?), wrestling with my citations and my train buddy says to me "Why don't you use Zotero?"

Don't you love those serendipitous moments when your life takes a drastic new course? You can imagine my response. "Zote what?" I quickly download the Mac version (Windows, Mac and Linux versions of the clients are all free, costs are associated with the storage of documents). You download the relevant clipper item for your browser toolbar Safari, Firefox and my preference, Chrome) and you are off and running.

What completely placed the delicious icing on the cake for me this morning was discovering the Zotero Scanner for my Android phone. Point the sucker at the book in question (as long as the app which set me back a cool $2.40 AU, and Barcode Scanner app are installed) and I was able to add another 17 books to my bibliography in under 10 minutes.

Scan the books on my phone, sync the desktop client, select all the volumes and request a bibliography in Chicago (Note) format and I am in citation heaven.

Yes, I don't get out very much but with this new development, perhaps I will!?

Scotty, peace out for our random train encounter. You are still a legend in my book!

Zendone: You really need to check this out!

Once again, whilst waiting for the development of the beta client for my web based GTD system, I discovered Zendone. I have to say I am sorely tempted!

Zendone's web based interface has quite a beautiful aesthetic. I downloaded the Android client from the Google Play store and it is still quite crude in terms of functionality. You are unable to sort tasks by context, nor does it neatly replicate the web based views that you may have set up. If they can nail these things down quickly (which I believe they are as I consulted their published roadmap) it will be very difficult for me to justify staying with Nirvana.

The reason being is that Zendone integrates incredibly well with both Evernote and Google Calendars. I will keep an eye on the development of the Android app and keep you posted. Exciting times for Android GTD'ers...

While I'm waiting for my GTD app...

While I'm waiting for NirvanaHQ to get their beta to a relatively stable place, I have been exploring other GTDbaseed solutions. Since I've started down this track, things like being able to tag a task with multiple contexts and sync across multiple devices have become mandatory necessities for me.

With that in mind, I found todo.txt. This text based GTD app is brilliant. It uses Dropbox to sync a simple text file that you can edit directly using a simple syntax on a desktop/laptop computer. It is small, simple and fast. I seriously contemplated covering over to todo.tx. The only thing that held me back was the lack of a decent desktop based rapid entry facility.

I still however highly recommend you check it out if you are looking for a small simple GTD based system for Android.

Goodbye Spotify, hello Google Music!

Google Music have finally made "Access All Area's" available in Australia. "Access All Area's" is the monthly subscription facility. I have been using Spotify for the last year or so as I wanted to be legit in terms of my music. Spotify was less than perfect, simply on the basis that I could not add to it all of the cool live tracks and the many variations of songs that I have downloaded over the years, not to mention my large CD collection. Google music does what Spotify does, with the addition of adding unique tracks and your CD collection.

One thing that I have found is that Google Music's search facility is not as good as Spotify's! (Go figure! They are a search company after all!) On a few occasions, I tried looking for tracks on Google music and thought that for whatever reason Google Music did not have access to the track. I then tried adding further information and it found the track. I have found that you need to spell the track and any additional information (band name, album name etc) perfectly otherwise you will get a "track not found" error.

Twitter photo issues on Android

Tried adding a photo to a Tweet on the official Android app all weekend but to no avail! It was just personal stuff so I wasn't too put out. When I tried to do so for work, well let's just say it got a little frustrating!

Five Google minutes later and I had my answer from the official Twitter help web site. Seems it's a known bug. The work around in the short term is go to Settings, Apps, then scroll down to the Twitter app. Do a Force Stop, Clear Data then Uninstall. Reboot your device then reinstall it. It should be good to go after that.

Thanks Twitter. Sort of.

Google Reader Replacement Solution

After freaking out about what to do post Google Reader, two organistions came to my rescue!

Ever since I can remember, I have been using GReader Pro on my phone and tablet as my Google Reader Interface. GReader Pro is solid, has a small memory footprint, has all the power user features you could ask for (including things like reading out articles to you) and as per my workflow setup, lets me easily flick articles to Pocket for reading later (even though it has its own "Save for later" function).

Problem was GReader Pro is a reader and does not host feeds on a web based aggregator. What to do?

Feedly was the most likely candidate for me in terms of web based aggregation, but the client, whilst looking really cool, was just a little too flaky for my liking. I was trying to use and like Feedly but the flakiness factor was too much for me to feel comfortable with it managing my 60 odd feeds and over 3000 news items each week.

I fired up GReader Pro a few days ago to pleasantly discover that GReader Pro now is able to use both Feedly and Good Old Reader as their back end!

So it is like nothing has changed for me! Feedly as my web based aggregator with GReader Pro as my sorter and sifter and finally, Pocket as my reader. Happy camper!