F-Droid · News and Reviews

Missile Intercept

October 22, 2010 in Games, Reviews by F-Droid | 2 comments

Missile Intercept is a game modelled on the classic Missile Command, complete with retro-style graphics. You’re defending three cities at the bottom of the screen from destruction by incoming enemy missiles.

The gameplay changes somewhat due to the touch screen interface, because you aim your counter-missiles by simply touching the appropriate point on the screen – no need to manoeuvre a crosshair around. In addition to this though, are two non-standard things – your counter-missiles explode immediately where you target them, which means you don’t need to account for the time they take to get there, and also you seem to have a virtually unlimited supply.

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F-Droid Repository Alpha

October 20, 2010 in Repository by F-Droid | 11 comments

Following on from the earlier post (read first if you don’t know what this is about), you can now try an alpha release of the software. There’s a lot of planned functionality still missing, but it’s fully functional and useful.

Source code for the application is on Gitorious and you can install the current binary release, via the Repository page.

A quick overview – open the FDroid application, press the menu key, and choose update. The lists should then be populated with the FOSS apps already in the repository. Stuff you already have will be automatically detected, and put in the ‘Installed’ tab, and the rest will go in the ‘Available’ tab.

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MathDoku

October 16, 2010 in Apps, Games, Reviews by F-Droid | No comments

I’ll start by saying that I hate Sudoku, it always struck me as very tedious, and I’ve never heard of KenKen, the variation on which this game is apparently based. In case you’re clueless too, it’s like Sudoku but bits of the grid are boxed off and have to ‘solve’ the simple arithmetical puzzle for that box. If that doesn’t make sense, look at the screenshot – the three squares at the bottom right are boxed off and have to add up to twelve.

On a 4×4 grid, the smallest you can have, it’s pretty easy. You can choose any size from there up to 8×8, which is, let’s just say slightly tricky.

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F-Droid Repository Vapourware

October 15, 2010 in Repository by F-Droid | 6 comments

The observant amongst you will have noticed the “and more” in this site’s tagline. I thought I’d write a little bit of an introduction to that side of things, since I’ve briefly mentioned it to various people already anyway.

The plan is to implement something that’s sorely missing from the Android world – a repository of FOSS software. Development of this is well underway, and soon there should be code to be seen and alpha versions to be played with. As of right now there’s nothing to see though, hence the ‘vapourware’ in the title of the post.

Even so, I think it’s worth outlining the basic plans for the sake of soliciting feedback. There are several components to this, as follows:

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StatusNet Mobile

October 14, 2010 in Apps, Communication, Reviews by F-Droid | 2 comments

This is the official client for StatusNet microblogs, including the popular Identi.ca.

On one hand I expected great things from this, because it comes direct from StatusNet’s excellent development team. On the other, I had grave reservations when I heard it was being developed using Appcelerator Titanium. When it came to it, I decided I was right on both counts.

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gvSIG Mini

October 13, 2010 in Apps, Geo, Reviews by F-Droid | 4 comments

There are plenty of options for mapping on Android, including the virtually ubiquitous Google Maps. However, none of them are even in the same league as gvSIG Mini.

One of the main things that sets this app apart from the competition is that it’s a generic viewer, rather than being tied to a specific map provider, or a particular company’s commercial interests. Any tile map source can be used, either in online or offline modes.

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NetCounter

October 13, 2010 in Apps, Reviews, Utilities by F-Droid | 2 comments

NetCounter is a simple but effective application to keep track of your data usage. It counts cell and wi-fi data separately and displays a summary of both in an easy to read format. You can see the total used ever, and the amount used in the current calendar month, as well as figures for today and the last 7 days.

If you want to get fancy, you can long click on the interfaces and items in the display to get pretty graphs, add new counters – maybe you want the last 14 days, for example. You can also set up alerts on any of these counters, so if you’ve got a monthly cell data allowance, you can get a notification when you’re getting close to it.

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FBReader

October 7, 2010 in Apps, Books, Reviews by F-Droid | 2 comments

Yesterday we looked at real books so today it’s the turn of e-books. FBReader is an e-book reader based on the desktop application of the same name.

Although it’s currently at what sounds like a lowly version 0.7, the reading interface is slick and flawless. You have full control of the fonts and colours used – double control, in fact, because there is a day mode and a night mode, each of which retain their individual settings. Navigation between pages can be done by swiping the screen, but the more sensible option is using the volume buttons. For broader navigation, you can access the table of contents or set and jump between bookmarks.

When you come back to FBReader it immediately resumes exactly where you left off, and also remembers your place in any other books you’ve had open.

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Book Catalogue

October 6, 2010 in Apps, Books, Reviews by F-Droid | 2 comments

It’s hard to know how to start a review of an application with a name so descriptive you know exactly what it is from the title. The standard cliche doesn’t work – Book Catalogue is a book catalogue application. Can’t write that. Somehow we seem to have got started though, so let’s move on.

More specifically, this is an application for building and maintaining an database of all your books – the old kind, made out of paper, rather than those new-fangled e-book things. There are three ways of adding a book, as follows:

If you have the excellent ZXing Barcode Scanner (review coming soon) installed, Book Catalogue will use that to let you scan the barcode directly. It then looks up all the details of the book, grabs a thumbnail of the cover if it can, leaving you to just fill in details like notes and location.

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Beem

October 5, 2010 in Apps, Communication, Reviews by F-Droid | 5 comments

Beem is an XMPP client which, as yet, offers a fairly basic range of options but is under active development. There are a few quirks that mean it’s probably not quite ready for prime time yet, most notably the fact that it doesn’t always handle disconnections very well.

One of the biggest limitations currently is that you can only configure a single XMPP account. Ideally I’d like to be able to have several, which I could enable and disable individually.

Another problem, for those with small screens and no physical keyboard, is that due to the way the chat output is formatted, you’re not left with much room for reading once the virtual keyboard has taken its share of the display.

Despite these problems, it’s a good enough client for my purposes. There may be better options (what do you use?), but as far as I’m aware not that I can get the source code for – a feature I rate very highly.

Depending on whether you use XMPP heavily from your Android device, Beem may or may not be the client for you, but even if it’s not it’s worth keeping an eye on because it’s improving all the time.