I’ve had my Motorola Droid long enough now to feel like I’ve always owned one. Those dark pre-smartphone days of last October seem hazy as they retreat into the past. I listed my favorite Android apps in my early days of ownership, but that list has changed a bit over time. And while I have a lot of apps installed, not all of them get used every day. Here’s the dozen or so android apps I currently use most often:

Setting Profiles
This is magic. Based on criteria like my location, presence of a wifi access point or time of day, Setting Profiles changes settings on my phone. For example: When my phone sees the wifi signal at work it turns the ringer off automatically. When I plug it into the car dock Bluetooth turns on. It’s a bit complicated to set up, but works perfectly. $3.95

CardioTrainer
Tracks my exercise via GPS. I use it to chart my times when I ride my bike home from work. I even used it to track a bike tour we took in Paris, and had a great time examining the route on a map afterward. Google’s My Tracks app performs a similar function, but focuses on just collecting raw data. CardioTrainer is tweaked specifically toward fitness tasks and provides some low-level analysis. Free.

Drop7
I don’t play nearly as many games on the Droid as I did on my iPod Touch. Why that might be is a topic for another time. But when Drop7, my favorite iPod Touch game, launched an Android version I bought it sight unseen. $2.99

Foursquare & Gowalla
I like Gowalla better than Foursquare, but find myself checking in places with both for different reasons. Gowalla is more fun, but Foursquare has those tantalizing freebie specials. Gowalla’s Android app is also much prettier than the Foursquare counterpart. Free

Listen
Google’s excellent podcast client hasn’t changed much lately, but still works very well. Integration with Google Reader is handy. Free

Mototorch LED
This home screen widget turns the phone’s camera flash on for use as a flashlight. Comes in handy more often than you’d expect. Free

picplz
Foursquare + twitter + camera = picplz. This app takes a picture, then checks you in at a foursquare venue. I have an archive of pictures associated with the actual places I took them – both in GPS and foursquare venue form. The picture can also be posted to twitter. It’s like twitpic, but with better geodata. Free

PRO Paint Camera
The stock Android 2.1 camera app is awful. Focus and flash options are hidden away and hard to get to. Thankfully there’s Pro Paint Camera with a much better UI. I replaced the stock camera app and never looked back. Free

Quick Settings
Does what it says. Hold down the Droid’s search button and a menu of various options pops up. Volume, brightness, wifi, bluetooth, etc. Quick Settings puts all the toggles in one place. Free

RockPlayer
If you’ve ever wanted to play a video file that’s in a format the Droid doesn’t natively support, RockPlayer does the job. Still in Beta, not yet available in the Android Market. Free (beta)

Touchdown
Android 2.1′s built in Exchange support is pretty useless – I couldn’t get it to see any folders other than my Inbox, Sent, and Trash. 3rd party to the rescue! (sensing a theme yet?) Touchdown does a much better job, though at a fairly steep price. The UI could use some work, but functionality is rock solid. Now that we’re an Exchange shop at work this is completely indispensable for me. $30

Twidroyd / Twitter (official)
I go back and forth on which of these two Twitter clients I like better. Twitter’s official client has an amazing UI and integrates twitter messaging into the phone’s contacts list, but Twidroyd has some extra functionality like the LED alert for new replies that I’ve come to rely on. I keep both installed and use whichever matches my needs at the moment. Free

Google Voice
Verizon wants to charge me $3 per month for visual voicemail access. Google Voice gives it to me for free. That’s a no-brainer. I don’t use the SMS or calling features, but might switch to them someday. Free

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A couple notes on where I’ll be at ALA 2010 this week:

First, I’m presenting on ALCTS’ Mobile Catalog Interfaces panel:
Saturday 6/26/10 10:30 am-12:00 noon
HILTON WASHINGTON, Columbia 5

I’ll be going over our mobile catalog interface, a bit about the design process, pointing out some new features, and hoping for great questions.

Second, I’m co-chair of LITA’s Distance Learning Interest Group. We’re co-sponsoring a program with ACRL’s Distance Learning Section:
Open Access: A Conversation
Saturday, 6/26/10 1:30 to 3:30 pm
Washington Convention Center
Room WCC-144A-C

Third, for the DLIG annual meeting we’re trying something a little different. Instead of having a giant room reserved for a standard roundtable discussion for a block of time, we’ve reserved some space in the Networking Uncommons: http://annual.ala.org/2010/index.php?title=Networking_Uncommons
Networking Uncommons space
Sunday, 6/27 9:30-10AM

The Uncommons is a space on level 1, concourse A, near the exhibits. There’s tables, a projector, and plenty of power strips. We have no specific agenda. Just show up, hang out, and mingle! It’ll be morning, so feel free to view it as a warmup for the day – bring coffee and ideas. We have the 9:30-10AM Uncommons slot on Sunday the 27th.

Hope to see you there! If anyone wants to meet up during the conference, the best way to get ahold of me is a message on twitter. I’ll be around from Friday – Sunday, leaving Monday morning and trying not to melt.

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I still think a lot (some might say too much) about what libraries’ mobile presence should be like. I’m still mostly happy with the decision to make a webapp instead of an app, but every once in a while I want to do something a webapp can’t. Barcode search has always been at the top of that list. We’ve got all that ISBN data in the catalog, and every book in a bookstore has an ISBN barcode. Matching those two things up would be pretty convenient. Why spend money on a book if it sits in the stacks above my head every day already, right? It’s also a feature that’s definitively mobile – it doesn’t really make any sense to search via barcode scan on a desktop browser. The best use case for catalog search via barcode scan is when I’m out and about in a bookstore, not sitting at my desk.

But webapps can’t access a phone’s camera. And no camera means no barcode scanning.

Both Android and iPhone have a number of barcode scanning apps available – including Zxing and RedLaser, respectively. Thankfully developers of both included ways to invoke those scanners from a webpage! More info on how to do this is here and here. It’s not too difficult – the only technical skill involved is understanding how to build catalog search URL.

Earlier this month we built barcode scan searches into our mobile catalog. It only works on Android and iPhone devices, and requires that Zxing or RedLaser is installed first. So it’s not a seamless experience and requires some explanation to users. I’m still working out those kinks, but was both comfortable with and excited enough about this feature to push it out with a beta label. It’s live on our mobile site at www.lib.unc.edu/m

Webapps still can’t do everything, but with a little creativity the functionality gaps close up a bit. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I was able to add barcode search to the site with a simple link instead of learning to code in Objective C

Here’s a video of barcode search in action on Android:

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As I’ve mentioned before, summer is often my most productive time of the year at work. Especially when it comes to special projects. Last summer I focused on developing a mobile site, and this summer I’m looking into the potential of geolocation in websites. My ultimate goal is to mash up GIS data with our special collections and a user’s current position. I’m not there yet. But I do have a system up and running that might provide some utility at ALA in DC next week!

Here’s the site, designed for mobile devices: http://www.hiddenpeanuts.com/ala I pulled the 18 program sites out of ALA’s list of programs, and plotted them on a google map. Then it plots the user on the same map via the phone’s GPS signal. I’ve tested it on an iPhone and Android phones, but I think it should work on webkit-based Blackberries and maybe even the Palm Pre too. (Update: Turns out the Pre doesn’t support geolocation via javascript. boo, indeed!) I’d love feedback on how those devices work (or don’t).

Obviously the site won’t show you much unless you happen to be in DC while loading it up So here’s a demo which simulates the user being in DC.

I’m very interested in any feedback on this system. I know that the interface needs (a lot of) work, but this is as good as I’m likely to have time for before ALA. I’m also open to suggestions on what details about each location would be helpful to have on the mobile site. For now it’s just address and phone number.

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After we got married (!) last month Melissa and I spent 10 days in Europe on our honeymoon. London, Paris, and Rome! It was an amazing trip, especially since neither of us had been to Europe at all before. But this post isn’t going to be our amazing trip’s slideshow. On the more technical side of things, I was fascinated at the idea of using our smartphones (we both have a Motorola Droid on Verizon) in Europe.

A little background: not all US cell phones work in Europe. I’ll avoid the nitpicky details and just say that in general AT&T or T-Mobile phones will work in Europe, but Verizon and other carriers won’t. While we could still open and use apps on our phones, anything that required a cell network connection would be dead.

This distressed my inner techie – I’ve become hopelessly addicted to navigating with my phone’s google maps, and google maps pulls the maps over a cell connection. I really wanted to use it to find our way around. The one thing that still worked on the Droid in Europe is the GPS – it can get your position in latitude/longitude. But with no data connection It has no maps to plot that point on! All that Google Maps would show me is a blue dot on a grey background. Not exactly handy for finding my way.

But with a little foresight and pre-planning, I set up my Droid to cache the maps locally before we left for Europe. This process was a bit of a pain, because it’s not well documented anywhere that I could find. Here’s a tutorial: (more…)

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Last night I pushed out the first major update to the Mobile Site Generator. There’s one big new feature: It can now pull in content to a page from an RSS feed! This feature assumes your web server is running php with cURL enabled. If you don’t know whether your server meets these requirements, there’s one easy way to find out: Try it out

I consider this feature to be pretty experimental, so I’d love any feedback on how well it works and whether I’ve explained what it does well.

Note that this isn’t a feature you have to use. If you want, you can keep using the generator and pretend it doesn’t exist. I also recommend not using it more than once in your generated mobile site – pulling in multiple RSS feeds can slow down the page dramatically. I hope to build in some ways around this problem in the future.

I’ve been thrilled to see the response to the generator! I’m glad that people are finding it useful. If you’ve launched a site and used the generator at some point along the way, please let me know about it. I’d love to build a practical showcase of what this thing can do.

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Today I presented briefly on mobile site-related things as part of Educause’s Online Spring Focus Session on mobile learning. Someone asked for my slides, so here they are! My previous slides from Handheld Librarian expand on a lot of what’s here.

Today’s slides, on slideshare:

(A couple of images got scrambled in the process of uploading to SlideShare, but all the content is intact)

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I’m really excited to launch a side project this morning that I’ve been working on for a while:

Mobile Site Generator

After filling out a form with page titles and few other bits of info, the generator spits out a fully functional mobile site (tested on iPhones, iTouches, and Android devices) ready for uploading to your server as an HTML file!

I’ve been asked a lot of questions about how we made the UNC Libraries’ mobile website. When I start to talk about the iUI framework we used, I see a lot of eyes glaze over. But it’s really easy! I’m not an expert coder, honest, and I made it work. Anyone who has basic familiarity with web development and a little time on their hands to puzzle out a few details can use iUI.

But while I’ve seen a lot of talk about mobile sites for libraries, I don’t see nearly as many actually implementing them. I think a lot of librarians are intimidated. But IUI’s code is actually so simple that I was able to automate its creation! The Mobile Site Generator will hopefully help people over the first hurdle: it creates a framework for a mobile site that you can then tweak & customize to you heart’s content.

As you’ll no doubt see immediately after clicking the link above, the MSG (gee, what a great acronym I picked!) has an interface that’s… shall we say less than ideal I plan on making it prettier with time, but I wanted to get it functional and online in time to point it out in some presentations I’m giving in the near future.

There’s more information on what the generator does over on the MSG page. I welcome your comments and suggestions! You can leave comments here, on the MSG page itself, or just e-mail me.

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