Dropbox is a service that allows users to store their files online in a virtual directory. The service is free for 2Gb of storage, more storage costs money. One of the reasons Dropbox became popular on Android, because both Samsung and HTC, gave a 2 year subscription free for 25Gb with their android phones. So it maybe worthwhile spending some development budget to include dropbox support.

Adding Dropbox support is not that difficult as it might seem, as Dropbox have a SDK available for Android development. To add Dropbox capability to your application, you will need to register with Dropbox and create an account. This is because, Dropbox does not grant your application the right to access Dropbox immediately without going through a review process that involves you testing out your application against a single account, i.e. your account.

Widgets are a great feature of the Android OS, and WhenDidI implements it’s own widgets. You can add a widget to the home screen, allowing you to enter events quickly.

You can add widgets to the home screen as per usual for widget for your particular version of Android. Before the widget is placed on the home screen the widget configuration screen appears. Here you select the topic (event type) that the widget is to be used for.

There has been a lot of news lately about how slow the androids phone are compared to the latest iPhone 5. The main benchmarking suite I have seen quoted is Geekbench. The articles quoted the iPhone 5 at 1601, and the fasted android, the Samsung Galaxy S3, at 1560. Making all the apple owners jump up in joy.

To be honest I never heard of Geekbench until I saw articles of how much faster iOS is compared to android. This is hardly surprising, because if you do a search for benchmarking on Google Play, Geekbench 2 (the current version) does not appear until the third page of results. (This was search result at the time of writing).

Also this is a paid application. This is important because of the way Geekbench works. It posts your results to a central server, and the results are accumulated and can be seen at http://browser.primatelabs.com. Paid applications on Android are not that popular, especially when there are lots of equivalent free ones. So the average android user who wants to run some benchmarks will inevitably instal one of the free applications. The point being, is that the results are not for all android users, only the ones who have downloaded Geekbench, which is a small percentage.

Events can be added, modified or deleted through the event management screen. This tutorial we will run through each of these operations.
First we need to navigate to the events management screen. The screen is accessed by clicking on the icon labelled Events on the main application screen.

Topics is the terminology used for event types, or categories. You can add, modify and delete topics. A topic may have any number of events associated to it.

For example, if you want to track how many litres of fuel you have been filling your car with, then you would create a topic called Petrol, and then you would be able to add events of type Petrol.

In this tutorial we will create a topic called ‘Drinking Water’, which measures how many litres of water you have been drinking.

WhenDidI has facilities to backup your data. Data includes all your events, topics and measurements. It is worthwhile backing up your data for a number of reasons.

1. Upgrading from trial version to paid version.

2. Re-installing the application after a factory reset.

3. Transferring data to another phone

WhenDidI can keep a backup in two independent places, local storage and Dropbox. The backup screen can be accessed from the main screen using the menu button.

Events are just not simple counters, where only the date and time of the event is collected, but a value representing a measured quantity and/or cost can also be stored  along with the event date and time. For example, it you were interested in how often you filled up your car, and also wanted to know how much litres of fuel you added at the time, then you could setup WhenDidI to also store the number of litres of fuel you added.

When the Google Market (now known as Google Play), was first available to Android owners, the refund policy stated that there was a full refund available within 24 hours of purchasing the application. However, a lot of developers, especially games developers complained about this period.

Their main concern was that people were using the application for a day, practically non-stop, would then ask for refund. Now, this obviously is more applicable for games. A user can complete  major, if not all, of a game, if they played it for 10-12 hours. For this reason, Google, drastically reduced the refund time to 15 minutes.

There are many people that complain about fragmentation on Android, but one of the benefits of choosing an Android is the they come in many shapes and sizes. Which is a good thing, as people come in many shapes and sizes.

There are many factors when choosing a phone. OS,  RAM, storage and looks.  However, another important factor is the screen size,  which more or less dictates the size of the phone, and is probably the most deciding factor. Which is why physically holding the phone is recommended.

Well by now the news is out about the iPhone 5. Obviously as we are not apple fan boys, so we do not automatically accept that the new phone is the best in its class. However, if you owned Apple hardware in the past, and are sold on their eco-system then there are many reasons to upgrade to the new iphone5. The main ones being

• Bigger screen
• Improved screen colours
• Faster CPU
• Better battery
• LTE
• 5th icon row

Now from an Android users perspective this is all yesterdays hardware. Lets put it in another perspective. When I owned a Galaxy S, and I was looking for a phone to upgrade to, the hardware of the iPhone 5, if it was running Android OS, would not be considered. That is, I would have considered the equivalent Android version of iPhone 5 to be mid-range, and not a worthwhile upgrade for the Galaxy S. High-end for Android is the Galaxy S3 or HTC One X, or that new LG with the Snapdragon S4 Pro.

But, lets break down the iphone5 improvements further.