Apps

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Sokoban

January 6, 2011 in Apps, Games, Reviews by F-Droid | No comments

No prizes for guessing that Sokoban is an implementation of the classic game Sokoban. Unless you’ve never heard of it of course. I’ll assume that’s the case, otherwise this would be a very short review.

Sokoban is 30 years old, and is a puzzle game that involves moving your character around and pushing multiple things onto targets. Originally the things were boxes (Sokoban is Japanese for warehouse man) but in this version they’re some kind of shiny red gem. Sounds simple? The tricky part is that these things get in each others way, and your way. In practice, it’s hard, and in the process of completing the first 67 levels I’ve declared many of them impossible and closed the application in disgust before going back and trying again later. Clearly it’s addictive too.

This version has a total of 354 levels to play through – the only question is whether you can complete that many without either frying your brain or smashing up your phone.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, and the menu screens are particularly sparse (standard Android buttons and nothing else) but this doesn’t matter at all. The game plays perfectly, with nice touches such as zooming in and out with the volume buttons, and undoing a move with the back button. You can move with the direction buttons/pad/whatever-new-fangled-thing-your-phone-has but it seems much easier to use the other option of just dragging your finger around the screen.

Definitely give this one a try if you like puzzle games.

Vital Statistics

You can install it from the FDroid repository client, or download the APK directly if you prefer.

ConnectBot

November 4, 2010 in Apps, Reviews, Utilities by F-Droid | 2 comments

ConnectBot is an essential tool for the sysadmin on the move, or the stationary sysadmin on the beach. It’s a fully functional SSH client packed with useful features, including:

  • Multiple concurrent connections that stay open in the background
  • Port forwarding
  • Key management, for password-less logins

A clever feature is ‘URL Scan’ which grabs anything that looks like a URL from the terminal and presents a list where you can click to open it in the browser.

Ideally you’d use this with a physical keyboard, both for speed and screen space reasons. Even so, it’s perfectly usable with a virtual keyboard and there are plenty of customisable features to make life easier in that scenario.

ConnectBot is extremely useful to have around, especially in an emergency, and is actively developed. Highly recommended.

Vital Statistics

market://search?q=pname:org.connectbot

Available in the Android Market (scan/click the QR code opposite) or, of course, via the FDroid repository.

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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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

Settings Screen

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.

Vital Statistics

market://search?q=pname:com.beem.project.beem

MythMote

October 4, 2010 in Apps, Reviews by F-Droid | No comments

If you use MythTV (and if not, why not?) then you need MythMote. It’s a remote control that communicates with all your MythTV front ends over the network. Why is this better than a normal remote? Just some of the many reasons:

  • The interface is better
  • No infra-red – the dog can’t sit in the way
  • The same device works in every room
  • No infra-red – you don’t have to point it
  • You always have it with you
  • No infra-red – you don’t even have to be in the same room
  • Everyone can have their own remote

To use MythMote, you need to tick the ‘Enable Network Remote Control Interface’ in the MythTV frontend setup, for each frontend you intend to use it with. You also need network access to these machines, which normally means using WiFi on the Android end. In theory, you could use cell data by exposing a port for each frontend at the edge of your LAN, and routing them to the appropriate machines, but I don’t know if I’d consider it safe to do that.

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