You Work for Me Now

In the last few weeks I have discovered a few services that take boring and menial tasks and turn them into automatic automated awesomeness. The general rule is: “If it is too difficult to do or remember, most people won’t do it.” Basically, any amount of complexity or repetition added to a task makes it easy to put off and not ever do, especially things we need to do, like letting your wife know when you’ll be home from work. Here’s where IFTTT and on{X} come into play. They allow normal people (non-programmers) to easily setup simple tasks that can automate some of our life both online and off.

IFTTT

If This Then That (IFTTT), is the simplest form of logic: if this event happens, then execute that action. If I Tweet, then post to Facebook. IFTTT is the biggest mashup of web services and APIs that I have ever seen, seriously check out their list of “Channels” as of this writing there are 50 different services you can connect to.

At its heart IFTTT is about making your digital life simpler by automating tasks. Some common examples include cross-posting a status update, backing up photos, will it rain tomorrow?, and letting people know when you finally posted to your blog. Among options you can have a notification sent via email, sms or push message when a trigger occurs, or have things happen passively and not need to do or see anything. This is especially useful for backing up my photos, pretty much anything I post online can be transferred to my Dropbox account and saved on my home computer. I don’t have to worry about it.

I setup a special recipe to email my dad, who refuses to use Facebook and doesn't have an Android or iPhone, so he can see the awesome pictures of my son, whenever I post them.

Recently IFTTT has integrated with the physical world, through the use of Belkin’s recently released set of WeMo sensor/switches. These sensors can be setup as triggers or actions, you can have your lights automatically turn on at 6AM, or off at 10PM. You can receive a notification when a switch has been triggered, or turn on/off a light with a text message. The possibilities are pretty amazing when you think about being able to trigger certain actions based on the whether outside. One recipe: If it gets cold, turn on my bedroom heater, lets you have a nice warm bed when you need it.

on{X}

on{X} was developed by Microsoft as an experiment in automating your life through your Android phone. This has the same concept as above, on X, or when X happens, do this. The key difference here is that it is using your phone and its many sensors to receive triggers, and perform actions: on{leave my house} turn off my wifi. 

Recipes are written online and then pushed to your phone through the on{X} app which hooks into all of the hardware sensors, so you can detect your location and perform an action. For example, send my wife a text message when I leave work, this is great because I don’t have to remember to let her know that I left, it happens automatically and it comes from my phone.

They’ve recently updated their system to support NFC, proximity sensor, and a few other great enhancements. I’ve setup my phone to disable wifi when I leave home, launch Foursquare once I’ve been in a place for longer than 20 minutes, and to message my wife when I leave work. These have saved me time by having my phone do things automatically, things that I might forget or otherwise not have time to do. on{X} hasn’t been around as long as IFTTT so their list of pre-built recipes isn’t very long, but one of the great things, is that on{X} allows you to write your own recipes and share them with the community. I modified the “launch Foursquare” recipe to only trigger when I am outside the range of my home, since I don’t checkin at my house.

As with my previous post about push notifications, these put our phones to work for us, so we can keep up with our responsibilities, obligations, etc. and also make our lives a little more comfortable. Being able to setup these events and then receiving notice about actionable items helps to use my phone as a tool instead of just a huge distraction. Happy experimenting!

Push Away

Push notifications have almost completely replaced text messaging and email notifications for me. I used to love text message reminders, but now I get annoyed that I cannot take action on those items. For example, I get a message from twitter, the most I can do is click a link. When I get a push notification from twitter I can read it, then dismiss, or I can touch it, get the full twitter app experience and find out more about that particular tweet, user, hashtags or people mentioned. This gives me a lot of power that a simple text message cannot.

Bank of America recently released an update to their Android app that allows replacing the standard email and text message notifications with push notifications. This is great news since I can change the frequency and/or conditions of the notification without having to load up their site in a full desktop browser. They’ve even introduced their new BankAmeriDeals (or whatever it is called) so that I can receive push notifications with opportunities to save money. This last feature may get obnoxious after a few days, so we’ll see how long I keep it on.

Alarm.com is another example of a company using the full-features of a smartphone to benefit their customers. I have an alarm system that allows me to arm/disarm and change the thermostat in my house while I am away from it. They recently introduced a feature that allows me to set a notification at a certain time at night to remind me to arm my house, this is great as I  often forget to arm the house (which completely defeats the purpose of the system). Another great feature is geofencing, I have the app setup to notify me when I get outside a certain radius from my house, to remind me to arm the house. This even works with 2 phones, you can set the trigger to only notify you if BOTH phones are a certain distance from the house, it won’t bother either if one of us is still home. This is one of the coolest features to me, using my phone’s built-in hardware to help make my life better, easier, safer, etc.

Slice can be setup to scan your email and pick out purchases. This allows the app to notify you when your packages are being shipped, in transit or when they have been delivered. I have been surprised by this app many times when I didn’t hear a delivery truck or see anything in my mailbox. The first time this happened, I had forgotten about ordering anything, I got a push notification that there was a package on my doorstep, I looked at the message with a puzzled look, walked to my door and there WAS a package waiting for me. Awesome!

Another great advantage to push over text messaging is that I am not limited to a single device. I carry 2 phones around one for work (iPhone 4), one personal (T-Mobile G2). As a result I have a lot of application overlap, this is on purpose, since if one phone is dead, or out of service, I can pick up the other and continue my conversation (Facebook/Google+ Messaging). I normally have notifications for personal things (Facebook/Twitter/etc) turned off on my work phone, so that I don’t get a crazy amount of buzzing in my pocket when both phones go off simultaneously, though it is incredibly cool to get notifications in realtime on both devices.

I wish the Mint.com app would implement push notifications, I despise getting their email notifications now that I have tasted the goodness that is push. One disadvantage to push messages/notifications, I can’t go back and search through them, such as with email notifications, granted, I usually delete most notifications anyway, this is a minor issue.

I am glad that application developers and the services world as a whole has noticed the advantage to push notifications. I do wish there was a backup method such as text, for those rare times when I am in an area of poor coverage and limited or no internet. At the same time, it’s okay to be off the grid for a while.

Controllers (ASP.NET MVC)

I had the opportunity to write up a presentation about the Controller part of ASP.NET MVC. With Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 as my guide I whipped up this presentation and some sample code.Feel free to download/read/learn/look at it as you please. 

One of my favorite things about controllers is the ability to return pretty much any type of content that you desire, files, xml, json, whatever. This makes controllers incredibly versatile and allows the developers to give the users power over what they get back (when they want to allow it).


Enjoy.

Mobilificationizing

If you are reading this on a desktop computer, the screen shots are for you. If you have a smartphone or other smaller screened device let me know in the comments how it looks and what does/doesn't work.

I was feeling under the weather recently, and as a result I stayed home from work to sleep longer, take some medicine and get better. After waking up around 10am I realized that there were a few things I was putting off because I didn't have time during the day at work, and most of my free night-time is taken up by a side-project that I've been working on for the last few months (http://studybuddycampus.com) and normal life things.

I took the opportunity to make some changes to my wife's blog about our family. It now has 3 columns and she loves it! Go take a look: http://tommyandalisha.blogspot.com

I finally got around to fixing the obnoxious problem I have when I visit this very site on my phone, the fixed-width sidebar. I know that I haven't been the best at updating and that is partly due to me wanting to play Halo/Call of Duty/etc or just not feeling like I have anything interesting to say. I feel that, as a heavy mobile internet user, I should have a site that looks good on a phone.

My site was slapped together a few years ago using asp.net/c# with master pages. Their was no concern in my mind for a mobile site, luckily master pages are wonderful and all I needed to do was create a duplicate of my existing template and start chopping. First thing I did was move the sidebar on top so that it sits on top of the content it normally flanks. Then I gave each main wrapper a width of 100% so that it would stretch to whatever screen size it was given. I checked it out on my phone and realized that the phone thought the web page was much wider than the phone's screen. I added the following meta tag to prevent this and tell the page to fit the width of the device and not assume a desktop size.

After a few more tweaks to the general layout and adjusting the padding/margins I got the site to look somewhat presentable. I used some fancy jQuery magic to get the sidebar er...menu to show/hide when the arrow in the upper right-hand is touched.

Now all I needed to do was redirect users to the correct master page when visiting my site on a mobile phone. I found the following code online and added it to all pages in need of the mobile layout.



After that was in place I realized that images from my posts were a little bit too wide for the average phone screen. Instead of manually resizing all of my images, I once again turned to jQuery for some help. Using an example I found, I check each image's width, if it is wider than the current width of the body tag, it reduces its size to fit nicely within the confines of the given screen.



All in all the process was fairly painless to convert an existing site, most of the work was getting the formatting correct. In the future I'd like to build a site from the ground up with current mobile browsers in mind, but that's for another sick day...

HTML 5

Just got some cool new HTML5 stickers to show off. Now it's time to add some new features to my site.

This also serves as a test post with the official Blogger for Android app.

My Top Android Apps for 2010

As Android has grown in popularity and the range of devices has widened, many of my friends and family have been getting Android phones. This list is supposed be a starting point for those getting a new Android phone or really wanting to get the most out of the phone they already have.

TweetDeck [Free] - By far the quickest and easiest way to view and reply to Twitter/Facebook/Buzz updates on Android.  The columns can be customized to display all updates or only the updates from certain services or people.  They also have a Desktop and Chrome App version.

LauncherPro [Free] - While I appreciate the default homescreen, I can't be limited to just three icons that I can't change. LauncherPro does many things, I can switch the number of homescreens from an unwieldy 7 down to a manageable 3-5. It also gives me secondary actions for all 5 icons on the bottom of the screen, for example if I swipe up on my messaging icon it takes me to the Compose Message screen, saving me time and a few steps.  There are many other reasons, but these are the most prominent.

Angry Birds & Angy Birds Seasons [Free] - Best time waster ever.  Both are free, though they include some semi-obtrusive ads. I would pay good money to go ad free.

Dropbox [Free] - If you are familiar with Dropbox.com you will no doubt love the Android companion app.  Dropbox is a file syncing service that is accessible from pretty much anywhere you have an internet connection.  You add files on the web, phone or computer and within seconds they are accessible on all devices.  This is very useful for backing up files from your phone.  I use it to save pictures taken with my phone in case it gets lost or stolen.

AppBrain [Free] - While the Android Market client recently received a facelift, it still lacks a real web-based component for browsing market content.  Google showed off the web-based market earlier this year, so expect it some time next year.  In the meantime use AppBrain, which lets you browse apps on the web, then queue them up for install on your device. All links to apps on this page go to appbrain.com

Google Maps [Free] - I could not live without Google Maps in my pocket, I would have been lost many times over. The latest update added offline support, new vector-based maps (which take up less memory) and 3D maps for most Android 2.2 devices. Overview of features at Google Mobile Blog.

Movies (by Flixster) [Free] - Great for seeing what is playing at your local cinema, what is being released on DVD/Blu-Ray/Digital Download, and managing your Netflix queue.  You can even log in with your Facebook account and upload reviews of movies to shared with your friends.  Access to showtimes, release dates, trailers and Netflix make this a must-have for entertainment junkies.  Check out the IMDB app if you need info on TV shows.

Gmail [Free] - Yet another app that is being used all day long. I almost like it as much as the full desktop web version.  I use this to triage my mail when not at my computer, and as a scratch-pad note system since Gmail syncs drafts.  The latest update added a refreshed compose screen with support for multiple sender addresses and easier reply options.

CalWidget [Free] - Like Gmail, I have Google Calendar setup in a meticulous manner to help me remember things and make sure I'm not late paying my bills or wishing someone a happy birthday. The default Android calendar widget shows one event for the day, it looks pretty but isn't very useful. CalWidget lets me pick a size so I don't have to take up an entire homescreen, unless I want to. If you have an HTC, Samsung, or Motorola phone, you may already have a decent calendar widget, if not this one is well worth the download.

I probably missed a lot of great apps, this is just a small list that I use very often. Let me know in the comments of your top Android apps.

How to Create a Custom Shortcut in Android

I'd been wanting a quick and easy way to compose a new email.  I tried my hand at whipping up a simple program that just installed a homescreen shortcut, but ran into namespace issues and didn't feel like putting more than an hour into it.  A few days later while messing around with my homescreen shortcuts/widgets and discovered how to use the Custom Shortcuts option available in some aftermarket launcher programs such as ADW Launcher and LauncherPro.  I've been running CyanogenMod 6 (based on Android 2.2/Froyo) for about a month now, which includes ADW, so my screenshots and examples will reflect that.

Any Android hacks you'd like to share in the comments?

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How to Create a "New Email" Shortcut (Google Doc)

On the homescreen and either long-press on empty space or hit Menu, Add:

Select "Custom shortcut" from the list:

Select "Pick your activity":

Select "Activities" (this displays a list of all activities for every installed program):

Tap "Gmail" in the list:

Sift through the various activities available within the messaging app to find "Compose(.ComposeActivityGmail)":

Once you have selected the activity, it will return you to the Custom shortcut dialog.  

Enter a name, if you don't like the default, that will display on the homescreen (you can also change the icon by touching the default icon.)  Hit "Ok" when you are done:

Huzzah! You've added a Custom Shortcut

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These instructions relate to semi-stock Android 2.2 your mileage may vary.  You can also do the same for pretty much any other application that has a "Compose..." or "Edit..." activity.  I was able to create a New Gmail, New Event, and New Tweet shortcut, just had to hunt the right activity down in the list (though this didn't work for the default messaging application).  Enjoy!