An application I recently discovered is Tasker. It’s an amazing application that can be used for automating and customizing many of the features of an Android device. In short, you set up rules (called “contexts”) that, when triggered, cause different actions to occur.

Here are a few of the things I’m doing with Tasker:

• At home, school, work, and church, set the ringer volume appropriately.
• Turn on wi-fi only when I’m at home.
• Announce the time every half-hour (when I’ve got the headphones plugged in).
• When I receive a phone call or email, speak the name of the caller/sender.
• When my geocaching app is running, don’t let the display time out and shut off.
• When I plug in my headphones, launch the podcast app.
• A couple of minutes after I connect to my home network, update and download my RSS feeds and podcasts.
• If I’m someplace where the ringer needs to be off, ignore the volume buttons and keep quiet.
• If I can’t find my phone, I can send a special text message to it to cause it to ring as loudly as possible.
• If I think my phone is stolen, I can send a different text message to it. The phone will then find its location using GPS and reply with a message telling where it’s located, how fast it’s moving and how much battery life is remaining. I can also have it take a picture or record audio.

Initially, I was going to post my scripts here, but I realized there’s not realy any further contribution I can make, other than just casting my vote for this app. The Tasker Wiki has a good set of example profiles that you can use to create your own, and it covers most common topics fairly well.

Tasker is available in the Android Market using the QR code above. It’s only a few bucks, and in my opinion it’s money well spent. Tasker might be a little daunting at first, but once you get past the steep part of the learning curve, there’s a lot of functionality!

One of my favorite podcasts is the Bob and Tom podcast, which has a small subscription fee, and therefore requires authentication. Originally, the need to provide a password limited my choice in podcatchers. One of the most popular (and free) choices is Google Listen, which does not support authentication. Thankfully, I found a workaround.

Yahoo Pipes is a tool for manipulating RSS feeds and other web content. Since a podcast is basically just an RSS feed, Yahoo Pipes can solve this problem. All I did was create a new pipe and have it import the Bob and Tom feed. When I specified the feed URL for the original podcast, I put the username and password into the URL as follows:

http://username:password@rss.premiereradio.net/bobntom/podcast.xml

Then, instead of pointing Google Listen at the original podcast feed URL, I pointed it at the feed for my new pipe. Since my Yahoo pipe isn’t password-protected, Google Listen has no problem with it. Note: don’t “publish” your pipe; keep it private. It has your username and password for the authenticated podcast associated with it.

Using this trick, basically any podcatcher available for Android should be able to handle a password-protected podcast. If this workaround is not your cup of tea, there are a few apps I’ve found that are capable of handling authenticated podcasts natively. Here, in brief, are the results of my tests.

• DoggCatcher – a very attractive app, but it’s having problems with redownloading episodes every day due to the way this podcast is structured. It will get the job done.
• ACast (free) – works just fine, but its interface is a bit confusing.
• BeyondPodpowerful but simple, and is working great so far. In the past I had problems with duplicate episodes being downloaded, but the problem hasn’t reoccurred. This one is currently my favorite.

Any other good choices? Let me know in the comments!

Here’s a article that describes how to do it.

Google Docs Finally Makes It Easy to Download All Your Documents

Here is a list of my favorite free online services. These services can be accessed from anywhere you have access to a web browser, and I use most of them on a daily basis. You might notice some duplication to the applications I listed in my iPod apps post, but that’s mostly because I gravitated to many of the iPod apps because of my love of the online services they worked with.

Gmail

Website

I’m sure you’ve heard of Gmail, so there’s not really any point of me telling you about it. The big selling points for me are the excellent spam filtering and the free IMAP access. Using IMAP, you can view all of your mail folders, not just the inbox, using a mail client application. It works great on my iPod. While we’re on the topic of iPods, the iPod contacts information will also sync with Gmail’s address book, which saves a lot of duplicated effort.

Google Calendar

Website

You’ll probably notice a theme with the first four items on this list, but Google Calendar is, in my opinion, a nice straightforward calendar application. My favorite feature is its ability to act like an Exchange Server, so if you have a calendar application (again, like the one on the iPod Touch) that can sync with an Exchange server, it’ll work fine with a Google calendar. Also, I recently discovered that if I invite my work email account (which uses Lotus Notes…) to a Google Calendar meeting, it will add it to my work calendar.

Google Reader

Website

Google Reader is an RSS reader and aggregator. If there are news sites, blogs, webcomics, etc. that you like to read, chances are they expose a “RSS feeds.” If you subscribe to these feeds using Google Reader (or any RSS reader for that matter), you can keep track of what entries you’ve read and which you haven’t. Likewise you only need to go to one place to read all your content. Why Google Reader specifically? Well, it’s convenient, since I use so many other Google services, and also because it works with Byline on my iPod.

Google Docs

Website

If you’ve never used an online document editor, you might be surprised how full-featured they’ve become. Using Google Docs, I store and edit a number of “Word”-type documents and spreadsheets in the web browser. I haven’t put all of my documents online, nor do I intend to. What I do put there are documents like the spreadsheet I use to track my vehicles’ gas mileage and our shopping list. The gas mileage spreadsheet I like to be able to update from anywhere, so that I can record my fill-up before I misplace the receipt. The shopping list is a document I keep on my account, and I’ve got it set up to share with my wife. We can both add and remove items (using our own accounts), and there’s no manual merging of lists.

Dropbox

Website

Among other things, Dropbox is an online service that lets you place some files online and retrieve them from a web browser. Even though there are applications for your computer and iPod to sync your files, I mostly use the online features. One of the main things I use Dropbox for is keeping my collection of batch files, scripts and other tools that I never know where I’m going to need them.

Toodledo

Website

Toodledo is a web-based task list with several integration points with other systems and services. Its a fairly new alternative to Remember The Milk (which I used for quite a while), but it has some great features. It can show your tasks on your Google Calendar on the day that they are due, notify you using SMS/email/etc., and sync with an iPod Touch app (which isn’t free, but is very cheap). One of the main reasons I like Toodledo is their concept of “contexts” for each task. For instance, if you’re sitting at your desk at work, there’s no point in seeing tasks that you need to do at home, and if you’re out running errands, it’s nice to know what tasks you need to be out of the house to perform. Context divide your tasks into group like these.

LogMeIn

Website

Last on the list, but only because I just recently discovered it, is LogMeIn. LogMeIn is a remote access tool, and it’s free for personal use. Using their service, I can access and control (for instance) my home PC from my desk at work or I can troubleshoot my family’s computers without the need to travel. You have to install a small application on the PC that you intend to control, but nothing needs to be installed on the PC that you’re controlling from. It even works, albeit not quite as smoothly, if you have ActiveX and Java disabled on the client PC. I was surprised how easy it was to set up; you don’t even have to manually open ports on your firewall or set up port forwarding on your router.

As with all online resources, there’s always a chance that these services will cease to exist, so if you use them, please be careful to keep local backups of anything that’s important to you. Each of these services does have a mechanism for making backups, but I haven’t streamlined all of them yet. That will be a topic for another day.

Now keep in mind, I have an iPod Touch, not an iPhone. Whereas an iPhone can be connected to the internet at any time, an iPod Touch is only internet-enabled when you’re in range of a wi-fi connection. What this means is that I’m largely interested in offline apps that can make the most of an occasional internet connection. Since I’ve been fooling with it for months now, I figured I’d share which of these apps I find the most useful. Here are my top 5, in no particular order.

Dropbox

Website
App Store
Free

Dropbox is an online service that allows you to store files and sync them to multiple computers. I use it and it works great, but the iPod app provides a notable feature that is missing from the iPod Touch: the ability to store and view PDFs and other file types offline. When you set up a Dropbox account and sync the iPod app to it, you can mark some of the files as “favorites.” These favorites are stored locally and available offline.

Byline

Website
App store
$3.99

Byline is an RSS reader for the iPod/iPhone that syncs with your Google Reader account. What this means is that you can add your favorite blogs, news sites, web comics, etc. to Google Reader and view them aggregated in Byline. My favorite feature is the offline support. When you have a network connection, hit the sync button in Byline and it will download all new entries, including embedded images and snapshots of the linked web pages. Then, when you’re away from a network connection, you’re still able to read the full articles (especially useful since some feeds like CNN put very little content in the feed and instead expect you to click over to their site). Next time you sync, the entries you read will also be marked as read in Google Reader.

Toodledo

Website
App store
$2.99

If you’re looking for a way to keep your to-do list organized and to help manage your time, I’d recommend taking a look at Toodledo. It’s a web-based task list with lots of useful integration with other services. The iPod app works with the free Toodledo service and syncs tasks between web and mobile using push notification. I used Remember The Milk for a long time, but when I discovered Toodledo I quickly switched over.

Dictionary.com

Website
App Store
Free

One of the great things about having a mobile web device is being able to look something up wherever you are. If you don’t have a wi-fi connection, you’re a bit more limited but you can at least look up definitions using Dictionary.com. It’s based on the Random House dictionary, and takes a fair amount of storage space, but doesn’t require a connection.

WordPress

Website
App Store
Free

Not everyone will find this useful, but if you have a blog based on WordPress, the WordPress app lets you do some limited work on your blog even offline. Right now, I’m editing this post on my iPod using the “local draft” feature. When I get back to an Internet connection, I can publish it to my website or save it as a draft for further editing.

Honorable Mentions

• The Creeps: an excellent tower defense game, and the only game in years that has hooked me
• Instapaper: saves web pages for offline reading
• Remember The Milk: a good to-do list manager, even though I prefer Toodledo
• Fast Food Calorie Counter: nutrition information for choices at fast food places

That’s about it for my must-have offline apps, but if you have a good one I didn’t mention, please comment! I don’t want to miss out!

8×8 will be discontinuing the Freedom Choice plan, and effective June 1, 2009, your plan will be changed to:
8×8 Freedom Unlimited Plan – $24.99/month

June 1st is monday… and they’re increasing my bill $10 for the privilege. To top it off, the Freedom Choice 500 plan still shows up on their website right now.

Since I just got the email 3 hours ago, there’s not much information on the net just yet. I’m hoping the straight story comes out pretty soon.

It runs Windows XP and has a 160GB hard drive and 1GB of memory. The keyboard is smaller than a regular laptop, but it didn’t take long to adapt. I’ve run some benchmarks, and it’s definitely “slower” than my full-size laptop, but in practice, I haven’t noticed any difference for general web browsing, etc. Even though portability wasn’t a major goal, I’m quite happy with my choice due to one particular feature: the 8-9 hour battery life.

There are tons of reviews out there, so there’s not a lot of point in repeating what they all say. One thing I can add is my electricity usage measurements. Using my trusty kill-a-watt, I took the following readings:

• idle, power save mode: 10 watts
• idle, super performance mode: 11 watts
• idle, screen off: 9 watts
• playing DVD video: 14 watts
• standby: 1 watt

For comparison, my full-size laptop, a Dell Inspiron 6000, uses 22 watts when idle. My netbook uses less than half of that. I imagine that might just contribute to the excellent battery life!

For all more power measurements, see my Electricity Usage Measurements page.

I’m using the free version of GooSync, and in my testing it’s been very reliable. The free version is limited in three ways that matter to me. First, it only synchronizes seven days into the past and thirty days into the future. Secondly, it doesn’t automatically synchronize – you have to manually run the process. Third, the free version is only supposed to synchronize two-way (from server to phone and phone to server).

For me, these limitations haven’t proven too painful. My calendar doesn’t change often, so when I plug it in at home I just hit the sync button. No big deal. Also, I really don’t find myself checking my distant calendar when away from the computer. It’s usually more a question of “what’s going on this weekend?” Finally, I’m mitigating the risks of the two-way sync wrecking my Google Calendar with a bunch of testing and backups.

Before starting the calendar syncing process, I added a scheduled task on my PC to back up my Google Calendar to a file each day. In case you’re interested, I’m using wget to grab the .ics file for my calendar each day and saving it to a unique file name with the date. If you want to know more just ask and I’ll post about it.

Additionally, I ran several tests with test appointments to make sure that the sliding synchronization window worked as it should. What I tested is listed below.

• Create a new appointment on phone in the current date range
• Create a new appointment on phone before the current date range
• Create a new appointment on phone after the current date range
• Create a new appointment on Google Calendar in the current date range
• Create a new appointment on Google Calendar before the current date range
• Create a new appointment on Google Calendar after the current date range
• Rename an appointment on phone when the appointment originated on phone
• Rename an appointment on phone when the appointment originated in Google Calendar
• Rename an appointment in Google Calendar when the appointment originated on phone
• Rename an appointment in Google Calendar when the appointment originated in Google Calendar
• Delete an appointment on phone when the appointment originated on phone
• Delete an appointment on phone when the appointment originated in Google Calendar
• Delete an appointment in Google Calendar when the appointment originated on phone
• Delete an appointment in Google Calendar when the appointment originated in Google Calendar
• Create an all-day event on phone
• Create an all-day event in Google Calendar
• Create a repeating appointment on phone – yearly
• Create a repeating appointment on phone – 15th of the month
• Create a repeating appointment on phone – 2nd friday of the month
• Create an all-day appointment on phone
• Create a multiday event on phone
• Create a repeating appointment in Google Calendar – yearly
• Create a repeating appointment in Google Calendar – 15th of the month
• Create a repeating appointment in Google Calendar – 2nd friday of the month
• Create an all-day appointment in Google Calendar
• Create a multiday event in Google Calendar
• See if events created on phone are deleted as window moves
• See if appointments created on phone are added as window moves
• See if appointments created in Google Calendar are deleted as window moves
• See if appointments created in Google Calendar are added as window moves

Everything propagates from phone to server and vice versa in a predictable way, so I’m happy with the results. In short, any change within the 7 day past to 30 day future window gets synchronized. The only items that get “deleted” are old appointments that you create in Google Calendar or on the phone – they are no longer synced to the opposite calendar when they are 8 days or more in the past. Likewise, if you create an appointment on the phone more that thirty days into the future, it will get synced to Google Calendar when the window slides forward to that date. Also, if a repeating appointment is synced to the phone, ALL instances of the appointment are synced on the phone. All-in-all, it seems like a good implementation, given the understandable limitations they’ve put on the free version.

Since I kind of use my main calendar (Google Calendar) as a historical record, it’s important to me that nothing ever gets removed from it. If I create an appointment on my phone, it won’t stay on Google Calendar after the sliding window of synchronization passes it. There are two choices for me to work around this: never create an appointment on the phone, or upgrade to the paid version of GooSync. Since I don’t create that many appointments, especially from the phone, I’m going with the first option for now. If I’m away from the computer and need to schedule an appointment, I just send myself an email. For now that’s working out OK. If GooSync would lower their rates, though, I’d revisit that decision.

I keep my contacts in Gmail, and they don’t change very often. As a result, I’m really not that concerned with synchronizing exactly, but I just want to be able to take the contacts from Gmail and copy them to my phone.

At first, I thought I’d be able to find a way to export the contacts from Gmail and import them directly to the contacts application on the phone. That ALMOST worked. Gmail can easily export your contacts, but the phone doesn’t have a way to import them I could find. Google can export in VCard format and two different CSV formats. If you take the VCard format and copy it to the phone, you can launch that file through file explorer. Unfortunately, the mobile contacts application doesn’t like a VCard file with multiple contacts, so you have to split that file up and add each contact separately. I don’t have that kind of time or patience.

The next thing I tried was using SyncML like I did for the calendar. ScheduleWorld is supposed to be able to synchronize with Gmail contacts, but I couldn’t get it working. Also, I really only want to export from Gmail and import into my phone, not synchronize. GooSync supposedly can sync contacts in the same way, but its a pay service so I didn’t try that.

Finally, what I ended up going with for now is something that isn’t supposed to work. I installed Outlook 2000 on my PC and set it up to sync with my phone only for contacts. ActiveSync 4.5 isn’t supposed to work with Outlook 2000, but it seems to be doing fine. To get the data onto the phone, I exported an Outlook CSV from the Gmail contacts page and imported into Outlook. Once the phone syncs, all the contacts are on the phone.

I haven’t closed the book on this technique, since I’d rather not use Outlook, but I was pulling my hair out trying to find another solution. I can’t believe there isn’t another way, so I might have missed something.

In closing, I’m still shocked how hard to was to get all this syncing working. I can’t believe I’m the first person who has wanted to do this. I have high hopes that in the future the techniques and technologies will come to fruition, and I can avoid using four different techniques and applications.

Of course, a lot of these problems could have been solved by just using Outlook. If they would have included a copy with my phone, I might have just used that technique and saved a bunch of time. However, I’ve learned quite a bit in the process of researching, and I’m excited to see what comes of all of this.

As I described earlier, I don’t have the proper version of Outlook for syncing through ActiveSync, but if I did, there wouldn’t have been a big problem here. I will admit that at this step, I started searching online for a good deal on a copy of Outlook 2007. Google has provided a piece of software called Google Calendar Sync which effortlessly synchronizes Google Calendar to Outlook 2003 or 2007. I tried it out with a trial of Outlook 2007, and it worked great. Syncing Outlook 2007 to the mobile device is a no brainer, so with the proper outlay of cash, the calendar sync problem could have been solved.

I found another way, though. I did some reading about SyncML and found it can do some neat things. I can’t say that everything is fully standards-compliant and well-defined, but I found a working solution. There are several SyncML server providers out there that let you sync your phone to their web application. Also, on many you can sync your copy of Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. to the server as well with the proper connecting applications. That’s half of the problem solved, but it doesn’t solve the problem of syncing to Google Calendar.

Thankfully, I found a free service that did. I set up an account on ScheduleWorld. The website itself looks a little unpolished, but the service works pretty well. ScheduleWorld provides you a calendar on their website and can synchronize with your Google Calendar and also works as a SyncML server. Using a plugin from Funambol, which runs on your Windows Mobile phone, you can sync the data from the SyncML server to the phone. It all sounds pretty complicated, but it really wasn’t that bad to set up, since ScheduleWorld tells you everything you need to know. I’d be happier if there was a way to point straight to Google for syncing, but maybe that will come in time.

UPDATE: Be careful with ScheduleWorld. For some reason, the web app preference to sync to/from Google Calendar keeps defaulting back to “2-way”. I wanted to sync just one-way (from Google to ScheduleWorld) to keep my calendar safe, but the preference reset itself and now most of my all-day events have been duplicated in Google. Likewise, the Funambol plugin is doing the same thing – resetting itself to synchronize bidirectionally with ScheduleWorld. If you fool with these tools, back up your Google Calendar first (by downloading the iCal file).

I’m going back to the drawing board for calendar syncing… I’m trying out the free version of GooSync and having some luck. It’s limited in the date range it synchronizes, but so far it’s working OK. I’d initially ruled out GooSync because of that limitation, but I’m revisiting it due to lack of other options. The results of my full testing are available in part 5.

In part 4 I take on syncing my contacts.