Monitoring your websites on your Android

Anyone who manages mission-critical (or even vaguely important) websites knows the need to be on top of downtime awareness. On your PC you have lots of choices: Pingdom.com springs to mind, especially with their Personal account letting you monitor up to 10 sites for free.

But the best I've found for the Android is the free Overlook Wiz. It's widget (or several, if you monitor many sites) that sits on your home screen, and alerts you when the site is unreachable.

You can set the interval at which it checks the server, and you specify a specific URL to check. Note that a HTTP check looks for a specific word on a page, so be careful what word you specify.

60 great wallpapers for your Android

Once in a while I like to change my phone's wallpaper. Just came across this site, which has some stunning photos that would grace any phone!

http://android.appstorm.net/roundups/60-beautiful-wallpapers-for-your-android-phone/

Sharing Links

I've been looking for the Holy Grail for a while, and I think I've found it. My requirement is to be able to send a link from my smartphone browsing to my desktop - for example I may, while browsing at home on my phone, find a page that I want to explore further on my desktop at the office. I'd tried a few Bookmark sharing apps but wasn't happy with them. Nor did I want a 'read it later' kind of app.

But my wishes were granted when I found Phone2Chrome. The app, with a companion Chrome extension, does the job perfectly. It works by tapping into your DropBox account, storing the things to be shared there. Use it to send a link a link from your phone, and when you open your browser you'll get a notification.

It's a great little app/extension, and having used it for a while now it's good to see how it's evolving nicely - for example, you can view a history of links you've shared both in your desktop browser and on your phone. And best of all, it's free!

Android Market problems

I had a strange problem crop-up when using the Market - updates or downloads would begin but never finish, just show a 'Starting download...' message. Furthermore, when I tried to uninstall, a similar thing would happen: the 'Uninstalling...' message would show but never complete. Googling gives many possible solutions, but the one I found to work was to upgrade to the latest Play app.

10 Solutions for Creating Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SixRevisions/~3/8d0cufqjB-Q/

Organising your music collection

Cataloguing you CD collection may be old fashioned, but there's something so easy about doing it using your Android phone that it makes you want to. Perhaps its the bar code scanner that can pull in a wealth of detail about your music.

But it took me a while to find the best for my needs. Here's a summary of apps to consider (or to reject outright).

PackRat: Really wanted to like this app - it looked good, but it totally failed to find several items, and force closed when I tried to go into preferences.

Memento: found it to be useless: scanned a code but then didn't pull the details in.

ScanPet: Oh so pretty, and oh so confusing. Scanning creates an Excel file, and seemingly nothing more.

Shelves: Now this one I could get to like, with a clean interface and accurate scanning. Only the detail view of an item is simply a review - and while there is more to see if I edit an item, it still doesn't include a track listing.

Collectionista: I liked this app because it does pull-in the track listing. I did think it left a little to be desired - mainly because it went straight into a full edit if you click on the image. But it looks good.

And the Winner: Inventory. Almost too simple, but I loved the scan accuracy (it even offers suggestions if there a close matches when scanning). You can view an item, then choose to edit. And of course having the track listings in the details is great. On the other hand, there are details in the listing that can't be edited. It does have a focus on ownership (allowing you to specify who you've lent an item to), but is quite customisable.

QR codes and Apps

You've created your first app, so how can you drive traffic to it? Using a QR code is one way.

Your App 'ID' in Play (formerly known as The Market) is actually the package name, so it would be something like this: com.delphis.DestiDom.

So the URL to the website would be:

http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=<com.delphis.DestiDom>

and a link directly to the Market would be:

market://details?id=<com.delphis.DestiDom>

Using a QR code creating service like http://delivr.com/QR-Code-Generator
we'd then come up with our QR code!