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When I was in high school, we used to play a simple but addictive shareware game called Scorched Earth, a turn-based artillery game. It involved tanks shooting at each other with crazy weapons, fun upgrades, very basic controls, and a little dumb humor. I was delighted to find out that there is a version of it on the Android platform, called Barrage. I think it captures the essence of the original game perfectly, and is easy to pick up and play on your phone. It’s a lot of fun, especially if you’re a nostalgic gamer.

Barrage Lite

Barrage Lite is free and includes the entire game. You can purchase the paid version to add more weapons, remove the unobtrusive ads from certain non-gameplay screens, and save your high scores and publish them for all players to see. Sadly, there is no online play, though that would be awesome. Still, it’s very good, and I heartily recommend it if you played the original in the DOS days!

I hate getting up in the morning, and have long had trouble falling asleep at night. These two apps by Mobitobi work together to make it a bit easier.

Gentle Alarm

Thanks to the Motorola Droid’s dock and clock (ahem, “Multimedia Station”) mode, my phone became my alarm clock the day I brought it home. (Of course, due to the insanely bright LED lights on the Droid, I have to shut off the display before turning in for bed! The LEDs Hack doesn’t work for me very well.) Android’s default alarm clock is fine, but I really wanted an alarm that didn’t blast me out of bed in the morning, but started out quietly instead, and gradually increased in volume until it woke me up. Luckily, the Gentle Alarm app exists for just this purpose.

Gentle Alarm's Main Screen

Gentle Alarm provides alarms that fade in over a user-definable period, and customizable snooze times, too. It can ring any alarm, audio file, or ringtone on your phone. (The app, and your Android ROM, come with a number of alarm sounds by default.) Gentle Alarm’s defining feature is its “pre-alarm” feature, which tries to take advantage of your sleep cycles to wake you up when you are refreshed. The idea is to ring a very quiet alarm, prior to your normal wake-up time, to rouse you if you are already almost awake. If you are still in a deep sleep, you won’t be able to hear it. (It’s true!) The app helps you calibrate the volume, so the pre-alarm will only wake you up when you are not sleeping deeply, and the main alarm will always ring loud enough (eventually) to rouse you out bed. I’ve found that the pre-alarm helps me wake up earlier, or at least hit snooze less often, and still refreshed.

Gentle Alarm's Profiles Screen

If you’re worried about replacing Android’s tried and true alarm system with a third-party, and potentially unstable, application, don’t be. Gentle Alarm hooks into Android’s normal alarm routines, so, short of your battery dying, you can be assured that the alarm will ring.

Gentle Alarm's Alarms Screen

It took only one night’s trial for me to fall in love with and purchase the Gentle Alarm app. (The free version only works 6 days per week.)

Sleep Now

Sleep Now is a great app for the power napper or anyone who has trouble getting to sleep at night. It’s a fancy white-noise generator and alarm clock wrapped up into one package. I really like it, because I think it helps me fall asleep faster, and sleep more soundly, than I did without it.

Sleep Now's Main Screen

You set up programs to fall asleep to music or white noise.

1. Relax to music (whatever is on your phone), white noise, or other sounds included with the app.
2. Sleep to white noise, other sounds, or silence.
3. Wake up to a gentle alarm.

Programs can be configured to a fixed sleep timeframe, such as a 20-minute power nap, or to prompt you for a sleep duration when you run them. The alarms are similar to the Gentle Alarm app, but cannot be scheduled to exact times of day, and do not include the pre-alarm function. Like Gentle Alarm, Sleep Now allows you to calibrate your volume.

Sleep Now's Sleep Programs Screen

Two Apps?!

I bought both apps and use them every day. I think that Gentle Alarm could be folded into Sleep Now, because only two features of Gentle Alarm (alarm scheduling and the pre-alarm) are missing from Sleep Now as it is. The developer may do that in the future. Because the apps are not that expensive, I use them every day, and I like to support small developers, I didn’t hesitate to buy both.

If you have a consumer-grade camcorder, such as the Flip MinoHD (2nd Generation), like I do, you probably should use a tripod of some sort to stabilize your shots. Obviously, if your camcorder is smaller than a deck of cards, you probably aren’t going to lug around a full sized tripod. Luckily, mini-tripods exist, which are (almost) pocketable, and make steady shooting easy. The GorillaPod is a prime example.

The GorillaPod.

The GorillaPod is a mini-tripod for cameras and camcorders with an interesting feature: bendable legs that conform to almost any surface. As you might imagine, it is very effective when placing your camera on uneven surfaces, such as rocks, blankets, and nearly anything found in nature. The extreme flexibility of the legs also allows you to clamp it onto vertical, horizontal, and diagonal handrails, chair-rails, guide-wires, and what have you. Indoors, chair backs make a great, impromptu stand.

GorillaPod, attached to a vertical chair-rail.

Flat surfaces, however, are more challenging to deal with. Every “node” of these legs, including where the legs and mount attach, is posable, and there is no easy way to perfectly straighten them. This means that you have to manually adjust the mount to ensure the camera is level. That’s a minor inconvenience for such a cool and flexible tripod. I’ve even found that I can use its legs to steady the camera even while I’m holding it.

I bought my Motorola Droid the morning it was released to the public. The first app I installed on it was Locale, which promised to automatically set the phone’s volume, wifi settings, and so on, based on its current location. I thought this was a great idea: I could automatically silence my phone at the office, and turn the ringer on while at home. Unfortunately, after a couple days, I realized that Locale basically never updated my location, so it never worked right. I still stuck with Locale for a while, because it also allows you to set you phone’s volume (etc.) based on the time of day. After Locale became a $9.99 app, I uninstalled it in favor of a free alternative: Timeriffic.

Timeriffic allows you to change your phone’s volume (ringer and notifications), wifi, Bluetooth, screen brightness, and airplane mode, based on whatever day and time schedules you create. It is easy to set up (though the UI colors are kind of garish), stable (no force closes), and has almost no effect on battery life.

Timeriffic

I use Timeriffic to silence my phone while I am asleep. Typically, I don’t receive phone calls in the middle of the night, but I receive a lot of notifications, which I don’t want to wake me up. Silencing the ringer or notifications with Timeriffic is an all-or-nothing setting. The downside to Timeriffic, as opposed to Locale, is that you can’t “whitelist” phone numbers to ensure that certain people can reach you, even when you’re phone is set to silent. That isn’t a problem for me, but then again, I don’t have a job that requires me to be on call.

Locale has more features and a better user interface, but it is way too expensive, for what it is, to recommend. For my needs, the free Timeriffic is more than adequate.

The record industry is dying, and that’s fine with me. It’s most important function, aside from distribution, is content selection. Record label A&R (artists and repertoire) acts as a giant content filter, which has its good points (you don’t personally have to listen to 1,000 lousy songs before hearing a good one) and its bad points (commercial radio stations play the same 50 songs on repeat forever).

The Internet enables artists to distribute their music at minimal cost, which leaves it to us, not the record companies, to filter down all the music to just the music we like. Aggregators, such as Last.FM and Pandora, allow us to harness the wisdom of crowds (i.e., people with more time us) to do a lot of this filtering for us. This review represents me doing my part in all this. I was given an album that’s a little outside my ordinary musical tastes, asked to listen to it, and ended up really enjoying it. The album in question is Jonah Knight’s “Ghosts Don’t Disappear”.

Ghosts Don't Disappear

Jonah Sea Knight, a singer/songwriter (ahem, “songfighter”) and erstwhile professional playwright from Frederick, Maryland, is an artist I encountered when searching for a playwriting podcast early last year. His podcast, “Theatrically Speaking”, which ran back in 2007, was wonderfully informative. He moved away from playwriting recently and went back to work as a musician. He writes songs about being haunted, and peppers them with lyrics covering well-trodden but still fertile thematic ground: love and loss, time and distance, and the physical and metaphysical distance between us.

“Ghosts Don’t Disappear” is his second EP, and exemplifies, according to Knight, the creative direction he is going in. “Ghosts” offers introspective coffeehouse music with an added layer of word-craft, imagery, and narrative. The warm production highlights the delicately finger-picked guitar lines, theremin-like keyboards, and accordion. Knight’s sometimes whispered, sometimes sung lyrics

Three of these songs—“Someday We’ll All Be Ghosts,” “Far,” and “Rhythm”—are duets. Not to take anything away from Knight, but his female backgrounds singer, Jennie Williams and (especially) Kristin Lagana, are outstanding. The interplay of the male and female vocals make these the strongest tracks on the EP. “Rhythm” shines especially brightly, and is my favorite track of the bunch.

I recommend that you check out Jonah Knight’s music. You can It took me a couple listens to get my ears around it, but now I really enjoy it, and eagerly await his next release.

Jonah Knight has a website and a mailing list. If you sign up, you get 6 free songs. His next EP will be out this fall.

I just received and wrote an Amazon.com review for the Flip MinoHD 2nd generation camcorder. Here is my review.

Flip MinoHD 2nd Generation

This camcorder is meant to be used on the go, to capture fun or spontaneous moments, and share the videos with friends and family. I wouldn’t bother using it to record a school play or a religious ceremony, but it sure would be fun to have at a party, wedding reception, or on vacation. A full-sized, and more expensive, handheld video camera is likely to have a better lens, more features (like image stabilization), and should produce generally higher-quality videos. That said, who wants to lug around a full-size camcorder? The Flip offers a pocketable alternative, and promises easy shooting (there are few controls or features to worry about) and easy sharing (the included software makes it easy to upload videos to YouTube). It’s closest competition, in my opinion, is the iPod nano. The main advantage of the Flip MinoHD over the iPod nano is that the Flip records at an HD resolution (720p), while the iPod nano records at VGA resolution (640×480). I have found that this device takes better quality videos than my Droid phone.

Benefits

• Very easy to use. (This is a huge selling point. This camera helps you point and shoot videos without much of a learning curve.)
• Small, pocketable size.
• 2 hours of recording time.
• HDTV quality superior to that of the iPod nano, iPhone 3GS video cameras.
• Records H.264 video with AAC audio, which is a very capable and widely supported codec combination.
• Included FlipShare software offers Windows and Mac OS X compatibility.
• FlipShare makes simple edits, such as trimming, and uploading to YouTube very easy.
• HDMI output, to view videos immediately on an HDTV.

Drawbacks

• Does not perform well in low-light conditions.
• No image stabilization. Definitely use a tripod, even a mini-tripod!
• Not the best image quality, but totally acceptable for the size and price range.
• Simple recording features–you can’t pause and resume a recording.
• No memory card slot (you’re stuck with the original capacity).
• Does not come with an HDMI cable. If you wish to connect this device to your TV, you have to purchase a cable to do it.
• Does not double as a still camera. (Though you can grab stills using the FlipShare software, you probably wouldn’t want to use this camera to produce still images.)

The Bottom Line

This is a great camera for simple shooting. Image quality is acceptable in many conditions, except low light. I highly recommend buying a mini-tripod to stabilze the camera whenever possible. The included software is excellent. This is my favorite video recorder now, mainly due to its ease of use and its pocketability. Recording, editing, and sharing are so easy, I no longer have an excuse to not take videos.

NewsRob is a paid app* that I use every day to access Google Reader. You might think that it is a mindless luxury, because Google Reader actually has a decent mobile site. That said, the Android Browser is pretty slow, and loading the content often took more time than was worthwhile.

NewsRob solves the loading time problem for me by fetching updates from Reader on a regular (configurable) basis. It will download the feed, the entire article, and, if you want, the entire web page (mobile or regular). You can choose to be notified of feed updates via the Android notification system, or via a home screen widget (I prefer the latter). NewsRob will sync your read/unread, starred, and shared items back to Google Reader.

NewsRob

I like using NewsRob because it saves me time. It was definitely worth the cost to buy the Pro version, because the notifications, widget, and improved loading time of articles allows me to consume my RSS feeds far quicker than Google Reader’s mobile version does alone. If you are a heavy Google Reader user, I recommend NewsRob for your Android phone.

* A free, ad-supported version is coming/available.

Verizon charges a monthly fee for Exchange access, which is exorbitant and ridiculous. For the first couple months I owned my Android phone, I didn’t have access to my company email or calendar, because I wasn’t willing to pay an additional monthly fee.

Later, a coworker recommended I try out Touchdown, a $20 app that integrates Exchange with my Android phone. Instead of a monthly fee to Verizon, you pay the developers one time for registration. It’s definitely an acceptable trade-off. I’ve used Touchdown daily for months now, and think that it is worth every penny.

Touchdown's home screen

Touchdown works very well. Its interface won’t blow you away, but it is certainly easy enough to use, and the push notifications and home screen widgets work perfectly. The initial setup wizard used to connect with the Exchange server is easy to use. The other settings are voluminous and a little intimidating, but it is nice that the app allows you to tweak it so thoroughly.

Having work email on your smartphone is a mixed blessing, I’ve found, but it is hard to argue against having appointment reminders (i.e., your work calendar) on your phone. If you’re on Verizon, and would like Exchange support without adding more costs to your contract, Touchdown is the app of choice.

As a consultant, sometimes I have to take a plane or train to work and back each week. Last year I stayed in hotels almost 50 nights—and that was a pretty light year for travel. Traveling is stressful. Trains are late. Flights get cancelled—sometimes when I’m sitting on the plane. Gates get switched three or four times for no apparent reason. Printed itineraries get lost. Confirmation numbers get forgotten. It’s incredibly tough sometimes to keep everything straight. Fortunately, just before my last business trip to California, I discovered two Android (and web) apps that have helped me pull everything together, fairly neatly, and allow me to relax a bit about all the particulars.

TripIt

TripIt is a well-known web service that allows you to easily build itineraries, share them with people, and take them with you on your Android phone, iPhone, or iPod Touch. It’s a powerful service, and easy to use, because most of the work is done for you. You just email your itineraries and confirmation emails to TripIt, and it structures the entire trip for you. You don’t even need to set up an account: you can log in using Google or Facebook credentials (I love this feature!). TripIt is free and very useful, but it doesn’t do absolutely everything for you. The phone app does not let you edit your itinerary; you have to use the web app for that. More importantly, the TripIt app does not notify you if your flight status changes. For that, you can sign up for TripIt Pro for $69/year, which will text you whenever there’s a change.

FlightTrack Pro

If you want to save a bit of money, though, you can purchase a $10 Android app that will notify you of all the flights you sent to TripIt: FlightTrack Pro. FlightTrack Pro does one thing very well: it tells you whether your flight is on time, delayed, or canceled, and which gate it is at. The non-pro version is $5, and requires you to enter your flight information manually. The pro version, an additional $5, reads your flights from TripIt. It’s worth the $10, I think, to save the annual fee for TripIt Pro. Plus, it loads your flights much quicker than TripIt, and has a handsome widget for your home screen.

I’ve tried all the Twitter clients in the Android Market, and always return to Twidroid Pro. Twidroid is one of the earliest and most popular Twitter apps on the Android platform. I prefer the way it works to competing apps, mostly because of its interface. is superior for quick information consumption and action.

Twidroid Pro

I think Twidroid offers the highest number of features of any Android client, and its interface is very good for quickly collecting and acting on information in your streams. Unlike single-service apps like Seesmic or Mustard, Twidroid supports Twitter as well as Identica and StatusNet installs. The Pro version can combine all your accounts, across all services, into one stream, or display each one individually. When you select a tweet, a menu pops up that provides you with every option you may want to perform (reply, follow a link, view conversation, etc.). Critically, selecting a tweet does not slide you over to a view of the single tweet, which is time-consuming and idiotic, just so you can follow a link. One feature I frequently use is”view conversation,” which puts messages in context. This feature is all the more impressive because it is not in the native Twitter or StatusNet API.

Twidroid provides notifications and widgets just as you’d expect on the Android platform. Twidroid is free, but you must purchase Twidroid Pro to access multiple accounts. It’s worth every penny, in my opinion.