Posted by Matthew Serre on October 6, 2012 at 12:08 pm
Twitter is one of the most popular social networks in the world. Users from across the globe use the service to broadcast brief messages to their followers, whether they sit in the same room next to them or in a room on the other side of the planet. Because of the speed and ubiquity of the service, Twitter, in comparison to other social networks like Facebook and Google+, benefits particularly well from a mobile version of its website as well as native applications for the most popular mobile operating systems, including Android. The widespread availability of a service like Twitter, to which users have constant access at the tips of their fingers, speaks to the importance of social networking and the impact it has had on human beings over the last decade.
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Posted by Syed H on October 6, 2012 at 11:54 am
Have you ever found yourself at your wireless carrier’s store, looking to buy a phone, but you simply can’t make up your mind? Choosing between smartphones can be confusing and even difficult. But if you answer these questions before you take a trip to your local Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/etc. store, your decision will be clearer.
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Posted by Syed H on October 3, 2012 at 8:47 pm
Android is notorious for their oft-delayed updates to all tiers of phones, regardless of who makes them. Sometimes manufacturers will promise an update ‘very soon’ only for it to be released 3-6 months later. Motorola recently told Atrix, Photon, and Electrify users they won’t be getting ICS even though they were PROMISED it. The bottom line is that absolutely nothing is guaranteed in the Android world. If you don’t own a Nexus or high-end device, good luck in getting a timely update, if you even get one. But fear not, there is a way to enjoy some Jellybean goodness if you’re stuck on Ice Cream Sandwich.
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Posted by Matthew Serre on October 2, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Pay or Pass is a feature in which we determine from time to time which apps are worth purchasing, and which apps you can just pass on.
While I did not purchase every app from the Google Play Store “Celebrating 25 Billion Downloads” sale over the past 5 days, I did buy quite a few; and for 25 cents a piece, my wallet thanks me. But not all apps are worth paying for, some of them not even a quarter. And for those of you who missed the sale, I would rather not see you waste the money paying full price for some of the previously discounted apps, especially the ones that I regret paying for at the low, low price of two bits. The following is a list of the apps that I purchased during the sale and my determinations about which ones you should actually buy, even once they return to their normal prices.
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Posted by Carlos S. on October 2, 2012 at 8:04 am
If you’ve been in the Android community for any length of time, or have searched about Android in your free time, chances are you have seen these terms mentioned before. That’s because these two terms are essential to unlocking a full Android experience and taking control of your device. If you’d like to do that, this article may help you do just that and clear things up if you don’t quite fully understand it yet. If not, it will still be a good way to finally understand what everyone is talking about when they use them. So, first of all, it’s important to know what we are talking about when we use these terms, and that they refer to two very different things.
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Posted by Syed H on September 29, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Whether you know it or not, its been almost a week and four years since Android’s first software release. Although it has recently garnered a lot of attention from the market and media, Android was relatively unknown to most consumers throughout its early years. It has since then taken the market by storm, flooding shelves with smartphones running on all kinds of ‘desserts’. From Cupcake to Jelly Bean, we take a look at the Android operating system in depth, analyzing its rise from anonymity to the world’s most popular smartphone operating system.
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Posted by Matthew Serre on September 27, 2012 at 7:53 am
Welcome to Into the Holo, a regular column in which we delve into reviewing a quality application that follows the Android app design guidelines by using a variation of the Holo theme.
For the first edition of the column, instead of reviewing such an app, let us examine themes in the context of Android app design as a whole and provide you with an introduction to the Holo theme.
The style of Android app design encompasses a very large number of different elements, and the theme of an app represents just one of those elements. What are themes? From the Themes section on the Android Design page:
“Themes are Android’s mechanism for applying a consistent style to an app or activity. The style specifies the visual properties of the elements that make up your user interface, such as color, height, padding and font size.”
And more specifically, what is the Holo theme? Have a look at the images below:
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