Leaving

For my last meal in San Antonio, I returned to the one special restaurant at which I ate far and away the most times during my stay in the Alamo City - Florio's Pizza. This was the first time I ate the pie without having it sit in its own juices for twenty minutes as I drove it home, so it was even better than usual. It was also during the lunch rush, and while sitting at the counter I was able to listen to the rapport the customers had established with the New Jersey family making the product. It was a reminder as to why I ate there so many times and a suiting final stop before leaving for Kansas.

Part of me hates leaving - I've already established relationships with people, I've gotten comfortable in my lifestyle, and moving sucks. Every time I do have to leave, however, I'm reminded of a scene in the finale of Six Feet Under - perhaps one of the finest endings to a television show ever. Clair is saying goodbye to the family before she moves to New York, I think - it's been a while since I watched the entire thing. Teary-eyed, she gets everyone together to take a picture, and Nate appears behind her, and says "You can't take a picture of this. It's already gone." It's true - by the time we start lamenting about losing what was, everything's already begun to move on to what is. By the time I left, all but three people had already left the city.


And while I loved living in San Antonio, I was beginning to feel that in the year I spent living there I had uncovered most of the secrets the city had to offer. Having moved roughly once a year over the past three years, I realize that there is a benefit to leaving that I crave - it's the chance to get a fresh start, to take who I was and tweak it to make it someone I want to be. It's an iterative process, and while I've made some progress since I graduated college, there's still work to be done. In the meantime, I can look forward to what my new home has to offer and look for the benefits, rather than focus on the uncomfortable change.

There's an old Italian proverb that says that everything has an end, except salami, which has two. I think that has relevance, but I'm not sure.

Android App Spotlight #5-#9: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, SCVNGR, Brightkite, and Google Latitude (With a Little Yelp and Facebook Action Thrown In) (Part 2)

Loopt
Price: Free
AppBrain Link
Website

Originally more of a always-on service like Google Latitude, Loopt has integrated check-ins to the Android app. The process is no different than any other service, though it seems like checking in is a bit pointless given that you can already see where everyone is located using the map. The app allows you to either update your location automatically throughout the day - completely draining my battery before midday - or just to update when you first run the app. There is a journal feature, which I think can provide an interesting feature, but blogs like Blogger offering the ability to add a location, this isn't a killer feature. Sadly, this service is the one on which most of my real-life friends use (a whopping two people!), but with the check-ins feeling like a tacked-on feature, it can't really compete with some of the other services. Loopt does offer several variations on their apps, including a Foursquare competitor Looptstar, but they're all for iPhone/iPad, so Android users are out of luck.



SCVNGR

Price: Free
AppBrain Link
Website


SCVNGR started as a tool to help give tours for museums and the like, but thanks to a small backing from Google, they're changing their business model to a more mainstream approach through check-ins. You earn points for doing routine tasks like checking in, taking a picture, and writing a blurb, but the unique aspect of the program is the ability to earn points for unique tasks such as posing with a department store mannequin or making an origami swan from the tin foil of your burrito. Businesses can add their own challenges, and users can add "treks," a series of places to visit. The service is still new, with most businesses offering only the standard check-ins, but if adoption spreads, the possibilities could be interesting.

Google Latitude

Good old Latitude. Since they bought Dodgeball from the makers of Foursquare back in 2005, the service has been integrated into Maps and left dormant for five years without much development. It does the always-on GPS feature like Loopt, though it doesn't offer much else. Hopefully that will change soon - they've recently released an API for the service, and their "Where Have I Been?" feature is neat, though a bit inaccurate. If you're interested in the simplest way of sharing your location with friends, the integration with Maps and the ease of use can't be beat, though it really isn't a check-in app.

Yelp


Though they have an Android app, iPhone users are currently the only ones able to participate in their ability to check in. The service is fairly basic in its current iteration, though upcoming developments are looking to get into earning badges similarly to Foursquare.

Facebook


Facebook has been rumored to get into the check-in business since the beginning of the year. When they finally decide to flip the switch, it's pretty much over for any other service. The sheer install base of Facebook ensures that they will immediately dominate the competition.

Final Thoughts


This overview of apps was essentially pointless - no matter what features one app has over another, the most important thing for these programs is that your friends are using them. I can amass a million points on Foursquare and every item in Gowalla, but it's not really fun if I can't throw it in my friends' faces. Perhaps the future of the check-in apps will come down to Facebook's sheer numbers and Latitude's open API and Maps integration. Personally, I'm waiting for Yelp's check-ins to come to Android, but that's just so I can add more crap to my profile at that site. There's still no one winner in this space, and it's only going to get more difficult to keep first place as more companies look to get into the mix.

Android App Spotlight #5-#9: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, SCVNGR, Brightkite, and Google Latitude (With a Little Yelp and Facebook Action Thrown In) (Part 1)

You may think they're stupid, but check-in apps are the next big thing in social interaction. The premise is simple: You launch the app, your position is determined via GPS or triangulation, a list of nearby places displays, and you "check-in" to the location, letting your friends know your here. The concept is best suited for groups of friends that don't work or live together: you're out on the town, and you check your phone to see that your buddy has checked into a bar right down the street from you, allowing you to join him and have loads of fun that will be encapsulated and live forever live as a Facebook photo album that your parents aren't allowed to see.

The basic concept is so simple that there are already several different apps available for the various phone OS, and the distinguishing factors come down to the presentation and the value added by using a particular piece of software. I like the concept of the check-in, and my belief about its upcoming popularity encourages me to participate. The thing is, I don't have a lot of friends and acquaintances which are very technically inclined, so I have to wait until the popularity is at near saturation before things start catching on. In the meantime, I'm stuck having to choose between several pieces of software, each with their own benefits.

Foursquare
Price: Free
Website
AppBrain Link

The current "mayor" of the check in apps, Foursquare was the creation of the guys who started Dodgeball, a similar sort of check in social media service dating all the way back to 2000. The service was acquired by Google in 2005 and turned into Google Latitude and left to fester for five years (more on that later). When you open the Foursquare app, your GPS-determined location returns a list of nearby businesses. You check in and you earn some points, the amount of which varies depending on checkins per day, whether this is your first time at the business, etc. The points don't yet have a use - you can't even see how many points you have - but they reserve the right to use them at a later point. Badges can also be earned for your profile once you fulfill certain conditions. If you check in at a business more times than anyone else, you get crowned the "mayor." It can be used as bragging rights amongst your friends, but more significantly, businesses are getting in on the fun, offering special deals to mayors. The service also offers an open API, which allows even more interesting takes on location apps (even if many of them are iPhone-only at this point). This is the app to beat at the moment, though that doesn't mean that other services aren't trying to "dethrone" them (pun)...

Gowalla
Price: Free
Website
AppBrain Link

Austin-based Gowalla operates pretty similarly to Foursquare - find your place and check in. The differences come in their item-based system: upon a random checkin, you have the chance of finding an item. These items can either be "vaulted" - added to your profile for the world to see, or you can choose to use it to swap for another, cooler item you find laying around at another location. Badges are offered here, and they work similarly to Foursquare, but Gowalla also has trips - a series of locations that, after checking in at all of them, you get a special badge for your profile. The interface also has an open API, though implementation isn't very widespread yet. A gripe I have with the software is that checking in has to occur within 50 meters of the designated coordinate for the business. It's not a big issue if you're at a small restaurant, but at bigger locations, like an airport or even a big department store, you won't be allowed to check in unless the app finds you within those fifty meters. It's an anti-cheating measure, but annoying nonetheless. On the plus side, adding locations is easier than the rest - rather than manually inputting address data, all you need is the name and type of business, and the location is determined by the GPS. However, this can create inaccuracies, too - people might add locations from the parking lot, or the location might be determined by triangulation rather than GPS. Between this and the fifty meter limitation, checking in can be a frustration.

Brightkite
Price: Free
Website
AppBrain Link

You check in, and you can comment on posts, photos, etc. Most of the value in this app is interpersonal - just commenting on the stuff your friends post. Although the achievement-based symptoms of Foursquare and Gowalla are gimmicky, they can encourage participation. Because Brightkite doesn't really offer much unique functionality compared to the former two (aside from the ability to upload pictures), my interest in this program has waned. The fact that I can't stop it from running in the background means that it was recently uninstalled.


To be Continued...

Android App Spotlight #4: Hypnotoad to Go

Price: Free
AppBrain Link

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD

Android App Spotlight #3: Aldiko

Price: Free
Webstie
AppBrain Link

Despite music downloads being popular for the past ten years and movie downloads for the past five, ebooks are only now starting to become popular, not because of the need for bandwidth, as determined when than old e former two arrived for popular consumption, but for lack of standards and an old industry not willing to change their ways. Though ebook readers are nothing new, it was the Amazon Kindle that really kickstarted the business (of course the iPad has certainly helped), and today almost every new release is available for download.  Android users can't read books from the Amazon market place yet (though they will soon), but honestly, I have plenty of stockpiled books on my computer that I've collected over the years that I would like to read first. Because many of them were PDFs, I first tried PDF readers. While this proved documents to be perfectly readable, I couldn't save my place, making it difficult to put down a book and come back to it later. The presentation was pretty lacking, too - I'm not saying I need something as pretty as what Kindle of iBooks brings to the table, but it certainly adds some legitimacy to the product.

Enter Aldiko, an excellent and free ebook reader specifically made for Android. Not only does it provide all of the basic functionality that you might need to read books - automatic placeholders, multiple bookmarks, text resizing, and a night and day mode - but it also serves as an excellent way to show off your book collection. There's even a store interface that offers free and buyable books from FeedBooks, O'Reilly, Smashwords, and All Romance ebooks, if you're into that sort of thing. If you can't find what you're looking for through the store, there is an import function that, while easy, can become a bit cumbersome to manage if you begin to accumulate a large amount of books. It's not any worse than manually managing any other form of media on an Android device (by far the worst aspect of the OS), so if you can add your music or video, you can deal with the books, too.

Aldiko only reads books in the epub format, which was originally a limiting factory considering many of my books were PDFs (even sometimes txt or html files). In solving this problem, I stumbled upon another great piece of software, Calibre, which not only serves as an easy and imaged-based way of managing your desktop ebook collection, but it can convert a book in literally any format (DRM excluded, of course) to any other format. It was a simple thing to convert my HTML copy of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, to epub, adding metadata and coverart to the file in the process.

Perhaps, once Amazon's Kindle app is released, there might be a worthy contender for Android's best ebook reader (though I don't really want to reconvert everything to .mobi anyway, and that's if I can even import my books at all), but for now Aldiko is far and away the best ebook reader app for Android. I'm always looking for new ways to read books, and after spending a plane ride easily paging through The Accidental Billionaires, I think I'm going to be using Aldiko a lot more often. At least until Audible releases their Android app.

End of Season Review: The Ricky Gervais Show

Before Steve Carrell and team brought it to America, The Office was a two-season series in the UK created by and starring Ricky Gervais. Though I would argue that the dark wit, and genuineness, and the ending of the original outshines the American version (though both versions have their strengths), the show, followed by his other successful show “Extras,” propelled Gervais into stardom. Before and after the success of his TV shows and movies, Gervais, along with his writing partner Stephen Merchant, hosted a netcast* that eventually evolved into featuring the oddball opinions of their produce, Karl Pilkington. As the comedy duo moved into films and hosting awards shows, the broadcasts aren’t as regular as they used to be, but with several “seasons” of material in the can, there’s a wealth of information available for the producers of The Ricky Gervais Show, HBO’s other new Friday night show that animates the previously-recorded netcasts.

*Also known as “podcasts,” though I’m with Leo Laporte’s contention that the term “podcast,” applied to all online broadcasts, can be misleading.

The format is one that should be familiar to those who used to watch Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist on Comedy Central. Whereas the squiggly TV show was mostly just a sounding board for comedians to come and perform a few jokes from their act, RGS shows the three guys sitting at a radio station console, talking to the words originally spoke by Gervais, Merchant, and Pilkington, and animating a scene when something interesting is talked about. Dr. Katz wasn’t completely rehashed material, though – there was a storyline and improve conversations that permeated the episode, and while it usually wasn’t as funny as the jokes of the comedians, it kept things interesting, especially if you were already a fan of the comedian of the day. The Ricky Gervais Show is nothing but a straight 25 minutes from the podcast.

Like Funny or Die Presents, HBO’s other new Friday night show, I can’t really understand why this show needs to exist – it serves as a sampler of the podcast, and the animations can be chuckle-worthy at times, but it doesn’t really justify viewing again if you’re already familiar with the material. I can understand why HBO wants to keep it around, though – it’s dirt-cheap to produce, it only needs a small amount of viewers to keep it profitable, and all the writing was accomplished several years ago. It’s been renewed for a second season, and with the three boys still putting out regular podcasts today (at a rate of about one a month), the show has the potential to be around for quite a while.

Android App Spotlight #2 - Last.fm

Price: Free
Website
AppBrain Link

iPhone and Android users love their free streaming music, and of the many options available for both platforms, Pandora Radio's offering remains the top choice. The radio service utilizes the Music Genome Project, an algorithm that takes a user-entered artist and plays music similar to that artist, with refinements in the resulting songs coming from users "liking" or "not liking" a track. Free music that you like before you know you like it? Sounds good to me.

While I'm not going to fault anyone if Pandora's their app of choice, I prefer the companion app for website Last.fm. When you're on your desktop, phone, or any other devices, and you listen to a song, that information gets uploaded to the site in a process called "scrobbling." Using the information, the website provides recommendations to other artists that you may enjoy, and suggests friends who share the same musical tastes as you. They offer free radio stations like Pandora, too, and since you are constantly giving them new music information, regardless of device, I think their algorithm is more accurate than what's provided by Pandora.

The Android app is very similar to Pandora's - you're presented with a list of channels of artists that you've previously entered into the program, plus you get the ability to stream music specifically from your own library. If you're playing a song in the app, you have the ability to look up the artist's Last.fm profile, see similar artists, check out events with the artist, and take a look at other users who were fans of the song. You can also buy the track on Amazon if you really enjoy it.

If you're playing a song in your stock Android music player, the last.fm scrobbler automatically loads in the background and maintains a presence in the notification bar, allowing you to access the same sort of information from the website as if you were still using the app.

After many months of using the service your profile can be pretty indicative of what music you like, and the theory is that the more you use the service the more accurate your results will be. Even if you're happy with the service Pandora provides, Last.fm offers some great and more in-depth features than Pandora, and is definitely worth checking out. It's Android-only, too, so you can flaunt it in your smug iPhone friend's faces.