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Android |OT2| - Patent pending

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Angst

Member
I'll believe it when I see it. Apart from the screen I wasn't really impressed by the S3 compared to my S2, and the concensus seems to be that the S4 isn't significantly better than that, especially regarding the smoothness of interaction.

I enjoyed reading your thoughts though, so thanks.

I have an S2 now and like you, wasn't impressed by the S3 when I first tried it out. That totally changed when the S3 was updated and my gf's S3 can now reach heights my S2 can only dream about.
 

Husker86

Member
Is there an easy way to sync an itunes library to an android device? I tried copying and pasting but the files had no tags or album art so it was pretty much useless.
Before I switched to Google Music I used iSyncr. Worked really well. Haven't used it in a while but I'm sire it has been kept up.
 

Doopliss

Member
I have an S2 now and like you, wasn't impressed by the S3 when I first tried it out. That totally changed when the S3 was updated and my gf's S3 can now reach heights my S2 can only dream about.
You're right about the S3's Jelly Bean update making a huge difference. ICS on the S3 was janky, unresponsive garbage (relative to CM10 which I was running on my S2 when my brother-in-law got his S3). His phone certainly performs above mine now, but not by a huge margin. I would say they're just at different degrees of 'slightly stuttery at times'.
 
Very weird hearing about the stuttering problem on the S4 in the last page. When I used the S4 last week it was smooth as hell, no stuttering at all. That was with a messed up version of 4.2.2 as well according to my rep.
 

gcubed

Member

buhdeh

Member
that doesn't fix the tags though. I've pretty much abandoned Google Music and just use Spotify now. Don't really feel like re-tagging my music for the 2nd time.

Are you using iTunes to tag your music? If so, that's why you don't use iTunes
to tag your music.
 

SimleuqiR

Member
Sweeet chat heads without Facebook home

So am I wrong to assume that this feature of "floating" chat/messages windows/widgets is something that's actually built into the Android OS. It seems like any app should be able to achieve this on the OS level. Am I wrong developer-GAF?

If Facebook would have had allowed registration with just a telephone # on their messaging app, I would have installed it a long time ago. Until they stop requiring you to have an FB account I won't even entertain the thought of installing. I'll stick to Whatsapp and eventually move to Babel.
 

panda21

Member
So am I wrong to assume that this feature of "floating" chat/messages windows/widgets is something that's actually built into the Android OS. It seems like any app should be able to achieve this on the OS level. Am I wrong developer-GAF?

yeah i'm kind of surprised an app is allowed to have permanent floating stuff that draws over other apps. i guess maybe it was added to android in ICS/jelly bean or something?
 

SimleuqiR

Member
yeah i'm kind of surprised an app is allowed to have permanent floating stuff that draws over other apps. i guess maybe it was added to android in ICS/jelly bean or something?

It has to be at the OS level, and no one else thought of using such code but Facebook. There is another text messaging app on the market that just updated to do the same thing. Forgot the name, but FB Messenger is not the only one.
 

Blackhead

Redarse
So am I wrong to assume that this feature of "floating" chat/messages windows/widgets is something that's actually built into the Android OS. It seems like any app should be able to achieve this on the OS level. Am I wrong developer-GAF?

If Facebook would have had allowed registration with just a telephone # on their messaging app, I would have installed it a long time ago. Until they stop requiring you to have an FB account I won't even entertain the thought of installing. I'll stick to Whatsapp and eventually move to Babel.
A couple apps in the Play store that already do the floating window thing:
StickIt (Video player), LilyPad (IRC), Hovernote (notepad), Floating Browser Flux! (webbrowser)
 

panda21

Member
It has to be at the OS level, and no one else thought of using such code but Facebook. There is another text messaging app on the market that just updated to do the same thing. Forgot the name, but FB Messenger is not the only one.

thats cool. hopefully this will inspire other apps to do the same, i'd love it if whatsapp had it. i'm mostly excited about FABOHO because i'm hoping the general concept (minimal launcher/lockscreen combo with pretty news items) will be copied but without the stupid facebook features like having a status update button in your app drawer. FABOHO X Blinkfeed would be pretty sweet.
 
there are apps do use floating... floating browsers, floating sms reply notification apps, floating video players, floating calcculators, etc... and stuff like LMT launcher and AntTek Quick Settings do it too, just with an invisible section.
 

Zeppu

Member
It's a special permission which allows you to pop up urgent notification to the user, which will be overlayed over what is currently running. Like the Low Battery warning.

Now they're exploiting that to have a completely floating app.
 

DrFunk

not licensed in your state
Verizon brings the pain: NE2 credits expire 4/15; device upgrades change to 24 months:

verizon-ne2-done.jpeg


verizon-new-upgrades1.jpeg


http://www.droid-life.com/2013/04/1...pgrade-cycles-changing-to-24-months-and-more/

http://www.droid-life.com/2013/04/1...-month-cycle-ne2-credits-gone-as-of-april-15/
 

jobber

Would let Tony Parker sleep with his wife
My GS3 dies the same day the premium suite rom leaks and the new store is up

Looking at the store on my EVO 3D...looks neat...and clean. Hope it's the same for tablets.
 

Groof

Junior Member
The whole chat heads thing seems so interesting, too bad I rarely ever use Facebook messenger. I'd rather they'd just fix the main app already.
 

buhdeh

Member
The whole chat heads thing seems so interesting, too bad I rarely ever use Facebook messenger. I'd rather they'd just fix the main app already.

I don't have any faith in them fixing the main app when they can't even get a sliding menu right.
 
Sideloaded Facebook Home on to the girlfriend's One X to see what she made of it. Seven minutes before a shout of TURN IT OFF.

Also, it has the black menu bar of doom. On a launcher. Currently only on a few specific devices. This being one of them. What amazing testing.
 

buhdeh

Member
Sideloaded Facebook Home on to the girlfriend's One X to see what she made of it. Seven minutes before a shout of TURN IT OFF.

Also, it has the black menu bar of doom. On a launcher. Currently only on a few specific devices. This being one of them. What amazing testing.

LOL Good old legacy menu button.

It's like the entire app is designed with Gingerbread in mind.
 

3phemeral

Member
Is there an easy way to sync an itunes library to an android device? I tried copying and pasting but the files had no tags or album art so it was pretty much useless.

I used TagScanner to retag my horribly disorganized collection (like two weeks ago, in fact). Was able to get through my library of about 13000 songs in a week. You can embed album artwork into the tag itself, so no messy album artwork stored in every folder. It might have taken even less time if some video game OSTs weren't mislabeled from a previous autotagging program I was using (never again).

Protip #1: If you decide to use it, MusicBrainz will be your best option for finding video-game music. Otherwise, using Amazon was perfect for almost everything except obscure tracks. And for those tracks you absolutely cannot find using those two services, default to Discogs. Nintendo music, especially really old Nintendo music, I had to tag individually, though.

Protip #2: Make sure you save your settings. There are options to add custom genres and folder-structure formats (you can restructure your directory based off of whichever custom tags you want to), but you'll need to close the program and then reopen it to save (I don't know why). The program crashes occasionally when it's handling a large amount of files, but that's if you rush through to fix other tags while it's still saving the tags for previous songs you've changed. If it crashes, just reopen and your settings remain, unless you change them again. So whenever I decide I didn't like the former method of organization I was using, I would change the tagging-directory order, just close and reopen. I had to do this a few times because I wasn't sure how the songs should be organized from within the directory themselves, while still finding an easy solution to find possible duplicates.

What's great is that as soon as I uploaded everything to Google Music, all my tags and album artwork showed up perfectly (unless you decide to have custom album artwork for every song in an album; Google music will default to only one artwork, but you can fix it with the web interface afterward). Just make sure you check out Google's tagging hierarchy so you understand how it interprets that information.

One last thing: Say you screw up somehow and you notice your tags are messing up during upload (and you're like me and would rather not use Google's interface to fix, so I deleted what was uploaded and decide to retag them using TagScanner). Don't follow Google's advice because it no longer works. You just have to restart the Google Music client by selecting the "Advanced" tab and then selecting "Change" and then reselect the folder. This forced Google Music to rescan for songs you previously deleted via web interface and readds them.

I only faced this problem when I didn't know how I wanted to organize my video game music, because it was dividing individual OST tracks up like their own albums, so I decided to tag the Album Artist as the publishing company, but left the track artist intact. So instead of countless Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire folders, they're all nicely grouped together by company.

One last thing with Google Music, even though it matched most all my collection, they still kept my original tags and album artwork for everything (except for albums where I had each song use its own artwork). So I was happy that nothing was lost in the matching process concerning that.



Are you using iTunes to tag your music? If so, that's why you don't use iTunes
to tag your music.
I was thinking about using iTunes after tagging my music but I wasn't sure what would happen, so I decide to upload everything to Google Music first. I spent so much time tagging and finding high-quality artwork that I was afraid as heck to lose all that work in it. Good thing to know to avoid iTunes tagging. I'm still uploading my artwork artist by artist to make sure I tagged everything correctly. If I upload everything at once, I'm likely to get overwhelmed and forget it all together.

Next up is using Calibre to convert/clean up my ebook collection.
 

buhdeh

Member
I was thinking about using iTunes after tagging my music but I wasn't sure what would happen, so I decide to upload everything to Google Music first. I spent so much time tagging and finding high-quality artwork that I was afraid as heck to lose all that work in it. Good thing to know to avoid iTunes tagging. I'm still uploading my artwork artist by artist to make sure I tagged everything correctly. If I upload everything at once, I'm likely to get overwhelmed and forget it all together.

Should be fine to import into iTunes. Haven't used it in a long time so I don't know if the behaviour is still the same but tagging in iTunes used to (or still does) put the tags into a separate database file so it never actually modifies the MP3 itself.
 

3phemeral

Member
Should be fine to import into iTunes. Haven't used it in a long time so I don't know if the behaviour is still the same but tagging in iTunes used to (or still does) put the tags into a separate database file so it never actually modifies the MP3 itself.

I'll keep that in mind, I didn't know you could save a separate tagging database (fantastic!). Last I used iTunes, I don't remember if I had problems with tagging, but I know that when I replaced some of my lower-quality songs with the HQ matches, none of that tagging information transferred to Google Music, so I was irritated that I had these songs with no album artwork popping up. It was mainly album artwork that I recall having an issue with, though.
 
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