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I planned to write an introductory paragrah about how everyone and their grandma now uses mobile apps, but everyone (and their grandma) already knows that. So let me jump straight to the point — here’s a list of the apps that I found essential since I got myself an Android phone about one and a half year back.

1. K-9 Mail

A powerful e-mail client. Actually, it’s the e-mail client for your Android phone. Comes with a rich feature set that could put many desktop e-mail clients to shame. Has good support for multiple e-mail accounts, IMAP, signatures, PGP, searching — you name it. Highly recommended for everyone who wants to do some serious business with e-mail on their phone.

2. BeyondPod

A podcatcher/player. I’ve tried quite a few, and this one is by far the best. It’s loaded with useful features, but is still maintaining a clean user interface. This app is the top reason why I’ve become a regular listener of a number of podcasts, listening every day while driving, excercising, or doing mundane house chores.

3. OurGroceries

Dead simple app that aids you in putting together shopping lists. I was originally using the traditional paper and pen approach and thought that was all I’d ever need, but then I tried this app and it proved to be more effective. And, it adds that flavor of geekiness to the boring act of shopping.

4. Twitter

The official Twitter client for Android. People used to criticize it and say that the unofficial apps are way better, but I’ve tried all of the popular ones and none of them offered anything particularly interesting to me. The official app is simple, has a clean interface, and does its job quite well.

5. c:geo

A great geocaching app with lots of useful features and a nice user interface. If you want to try geocaching with your Android phone and are looking for an app, look no further and get c:geo.

6. APNdroid

A tiny app with a very specific purpose. All it does is it lets you add a button to your home screen to toggle mobile data connection on and off, making a commonly used feature accessible immediately, instead of forcing you to find it buried somewhere in the settings menu.

Honorable mention: Shuffle

A simple but effective Getting Things Done app. I started implementing GTD a while ago when a guy I worked with told me about it, and he also recommended this app. I didn’t place it on the list, because the current version has a significant flaw — it fails to properly synchronize with Tracks, a GTD web application that I use on the desktop machine, and I can’t really use it until that bug gets fixed (hopefully, soon).

Things have been slow with my projects in the past few weeks, and that’s because most of my time is now consumed by dayjob. I’m currently working on two part-time contracts, one being a telecommute Perl job for a client in London, the other one an enterprisey Java web project here in Warsaw. This translates to roughly 11-12 hours of work a day, and while I’m used to working this many hours, there’s obviously not much time left for other things.

I hope things will settle down a bit in the next couple of days (especially with the Java project, which should go out of the hot initiation phase it’s currently in), and I’ll have more time for my stuff — especially that I have a lot of updates planned for my jQuery plugins and CPAN modules. For now, I’m trying to squeeze out a few hours every week to at least do some minor updates. So yesterday, I managed to push out a new release of Dancer::Plugin::DirectoryView.

Apologies to everyone who contacted me by e-mail (or other means) and didn’t get a reply, I promise in the next few days I’ll go through my mailbox and respond to any unanswered messages. As a general rule: if you don’t get a response from me in a day or two, feel free to write me again — it usually works.

On occasion (like when I’m traveling), I’m forced to do some actual work on a 10″ screen netbook. This is how I feel when I then return to my regular workstation with two 26″ monitors:

I spent the past week snowboarding on the Stubai glacier, in the beautiful Tirol region of the fine country of Austria. I have been there several times over the last couple of years, always having a lot of fun riding the slopes and enjoying the spectacular views. If you’re looking for quality skiing/snowboarding time in the Alps, try the Stubai glacier, you won’t be disappointed.

A photo from one of the previous trips

I have one private problem with these trips, however — I seem to have a bad tendency towards getting sick during the stay. I often have to take one or two (or three) days off riding and stay inside until I feel good enough to get on the board again. This time was one of those unfortunate ones, and out of the planned five days of snowboarding, I had to spend two getting back to health.

Surprisingly, staying inside the whole day works as a productivity booster for me. I think it’s my inner urge to still get something out of the seemingly ruined day. Alright, I’m here in the Alps and should be snowboarding like there’s no tomorrow, but if I can’t do that, so be it — at least I’ll do something useful.

So, over the two days of sickness last week, I accomplished quite a few things that sat in my backlog for some time — for example, I finally set up a JavaScript development environment on my netbook, and then used it to build a Greasemonkey script, based on an idea that I had a while back (I’ll probably release it in the next few days). I also had a chance to at last start reading the book that I got as a Christmas present — “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall.

Sadly, these sickness-induced productivity bursts only happen on those snowboarding trips. When I’m sick at home I’m as unproductive as one would normally expect.

Vroom vroom vroom vroom!

That’s the sound of my website running on a new engine.

For the past three years, the awesome alien technology behind my website was a bunch of PHP classes that I quickly put together, in a lousy attempt to build a lightweight MVC-like framework. That did the job, but it was kind of a duct tape solution which I didn’t particularly appreciate, and I finally took the time to replace it with something more decent.

I decided to go with Symfony as the basis for the new engine. Rebuilding went pretty quick, and the only thing that took some time was WordPress integration (for the curious, I used a slightly modified version of this method).

You might also notice that the design has changed a bit. It’s not very different from the previous one, but that’s just the visual part — the HTML has undergone significant changes. My primary goals were:

• Keep the HTML structure as simple as possible, with no meaningless elements
• Use a minimum number of images for the basic layout (gradients and rounded corners are now made with CSS)
• Degrade nicely for older browsers, including IE6 with JavaScript disabled

Now, one might question whether it makes any sense to acknowledge IE6 anymore, considering that many websites have already turned their backs on it, and that the content of my website makes it targeted at web-savvy visitors using modern browsers. Ok, so I did it mostly for the lulz. And I’m happy with the overall result.

Vroomity vroom vroom!

I haven’t been posting for a while — in the past couple of weeks I’ve been extremely busy with running my company, which translates to little time for personal projects and other stuff I might want to share with the world. Now, as things have cooled down a bit, I’m getting back to it.

Some issues have been reported with my jQuery plugins, and I’ll be looking into them in the next few days (always thankful for your feedback, keep it coming). It seems the recent new releases of jQuery (1.4.3 released mid-October and 1.4.4 shortly thereafter) broke some of the plugins’ functionality, so I’m going to first bring the code up to date with the latest version.

I’m also resuming work on a related project, which is a JavaScript testing application, codenamed “JSweet”. It’s already operational (I use it to automate the testing process of jQuery plugins), but definitely needs some polishing before it can be released to the public.

So that’s it for a quick catch-up. Going back to my JS debugging session…

I started using Twitter a couple months ago. As my numbers of tweets and followers/followees indicate, I’m not using it heavily — I mostly just post announcements on new project releases, blog posts, and my miserable attempts at improving my running performance. Still, I’ve had enough experiences with Twitter to come across a couple irritating problems. Here’s my rant.

First, one day about half of my tweets went missing — they simply disappeared from my timeline. I looked around for an explanation of this problem and found a page at Twitter’s Help Center which convinced me that it was some general issue and a fix was on the way. In the next couple of days the lost tweets came back and everything looked fine.

This mysterious vanishing of tweets happened again a few weeks ago. Additionally, sometimes my timeline displayed the same tweets repeated two or three times (maybe Twitter did this to compensate for the lost ones, I don’t know). This time the situation didn’t get back to normal in the following days, and I decided to report this to Twitter support. On the aforementioned page, the support asked that those suffering from the missing tweets problem leave their details in the comments. So I tried posting a comment — I explained my case, and clicked “Post”. Bzzzt –

Apparently, comments weren’t working anymore. So I sent a direct message to @Support, describing my problem (briefly enough to fit in the 140 characters limit). Two weeks passed, no response. I sent another one, still no reply. At this moment, all my tweets from before July are still missing.

Another story. I like reading the technical articles at IBM’s developerWorks, and I found it convenient to follow their Twitter stream and receive brief announcements of new topics. While on my vacation last week, I read a few interesting articles on Android development, and I wanted to read them again now, on my home computer. But, @developerworks posts as many as 20 tweets every day, so last week’s updates were buried deep in the timeline, requiring me to repeatedly click the “More” button and skim through all the tweets to get to the interesting ones.

I hoped the Twitter search feature might allow searching in just my home timeline (the tweets of people that I follow, plus my own), but no, it can only search the whole world. Then I came across search.twitter.com, and I thought that was it — the advanced search options allowed me to limit the search to one Twitter account. I entered “developerworks” and “android” as the search term, and clicked “Search”. Bzzzt — “No results for android from:developerworks”. Weird. I tried another term – “java”, and some results did come up, so the search engine was working. I thought that maybe it only searched the most recent tweets by default, so I went back to the form and set the time range. Clicked “Search”. Bzzzt –

After making sure that it was the time range setting that broke the search, I gave up. I went to developerWorks website, entered “android” in their search, and immediately got the articles I was looking for. I guess I should have done that in the first place instead of expecting Twitter to assist me in getting to week-old tweets easily.

I know these issues are just the tip of the iceberg, and many Twitter users have numerous more serious problems. Twitter, you could at least put a big “Beta” (or, even better, “Alpha”) tag on all your pages, so that people know not to expect that the features you offer actually work. Then maybe start fixing things.

By the way, to be sure I’m using the term “timeline” correctly in this post, I checked the Twitter Glossary and clicked the “Find out more about your timeline” link. The result?

Bzzzt.

I’m on a vacation trip to the United States. I finally get to see and experience this exotic country of “America” that everyone’s been talking about so much.

I have a netbook and a smartphone with me and I get online occassionally (like this very moment), so I should be able to check my e-mail every now and then, but don’t get mad if you don’t receive a reply in a timely manner.

By the way, when I boarded the plane I was surprised to be greeted by the Linux penguin and the familiar booting process — apparently the Continental Airlines in-flight entertainment system is running on Linux. Neato.

I’m doing some spring cleaning of my files, and while browsing a forgotten partition on an old hard drive, I came across an ancient archive directory containing a few megabytes of miscellaneous source code. It’s dating back to my late teens, when I got a kick out of programming simple DOS games in Turbo Pascal. Of course, I couldn’t resist trying to run some of the old programs in DOSBox. Here’s a screenshot of my unfinished Space Invaders game:

This brings so many memories. I remember my ambition back then was to code the game completely from scratch, not using any libraries — I wrote the graphics code, keyboard handling, sprites and such all by myself in Turbo Pascal and some X86 assembly. This taught me a lot about programming, the X86 architecture, and DOS — most of this stuff is now obsolete and pretty much useless (especially when you make a living as a web developer), but it was really fun back then.

Hmm… I wonder if it would take long to port the game to Linux…

My website just got a new look. I got bored with the old one, so I played a few hours with GIMP, and this is the result. It’s still simple like the previous one, and it’s probably pretty obvious that my design skills are rather limited, but I like it better, and I hope it won’t burn anyone’s eyes.