Hijinks Inc.

Category: Google

  • Android Users – Ditch Your Stock Launcher!

    Hi! I’m Ryan – the new guy here! First, I want to say thanks to Aaron for bringing me on board here to write about Android. I’m looking forward to sharing tips, tricks, and great apps to a great new reader base!

    For my first article, I’d like to start by talking about the most used application on just about every Android phone – the home screen (or launcher). Everything starts from here, so why not make it the best app on your phone? Those of you with the Sense UI on your phones (most HTC phones) have it pretty good. You get seven pages, and switching between them is very smooth. For the rest of us, especially Motorola Droid users, the home screen experience isn’t nearly as good. The stock Droid launcher only has 3 pages, and scrolling can be choppy, especially if you have several widgets active.

    The good news is that there are options. Android allows other applications to become the default launcher. There are currently two great options for launcher replacements, and both are FREE on the Android Market – LauncherPro and ADW.Launcher by AnderWeb.
    (more…)

  • 30 Days Without Voice Service

    AT&TYesterday marked day number thirty since I posted my walk-through on how to use your iPad 3G ‘s Micro SIM in an iPhone for data only service, and more importantly its been thirty days since I last used AT&T’s voice service to make a call. While I’ve been using only VoIP to make calls and send texts, I did leave my service active until June 1st just incase things didn’t work very well. But as of the first, I am no longer paying for AT&T voice service.

    As you might have concluded from the canceling of my service I’m happy to report, that at least in my neck of the woods, using data only with Google Voice, GV Mobile, IPKall, Backgrounder, and Acrobits Softphone has been a smashing success. While I admit that it’s not as straight forward to place calls, it’s still easy to receive them. Which fits quite nicely with my phone usage.

    Overall call quality was surprisingly good, naturally it worked better over WiFI, but it was more than passible over 3G. Over the course of those 30 days I only used 291 minutes of talk time, but I sent over 1,000 texts and used over 16GBs of data streaming content. I also installed MyWi to use my iPhone as a hotspot so my iPad could still browse the net from anywhere I had 3G coverage.

    How my setup works is simple(ish). IPKall provides a SIP number for my Google Voice account to call, which rings to Acrobits Softphone, so if I use GV Mobile to dial a number it then rings my iPhone via that IPKall SIP number. Along those same lines, anytime someone calls my Google Voice number the call rings through to my iPhone using Acrobits Softphone.  You can find instructions on how to setup SIP calling in this post.

    Texting is handle through Mail.app as I have Google Voice forward my texts to my email. For a more real time texting experience I used Boxcar configured with my Gmail account to push notifications of text messages and new voicemails. I can also use GV Mobile or Google Voice’s own website to send texts from my phone.

    I did try all of this without jailbreaking my iPhone, and while it works, I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a bit more complicated to do things like make calls or even answer them (opening Softphone is rather slow). Plus, jailbreaking was necessary in my case since I wanted to run Softphone in the background and completely remove Apple’s Phone.app from the phone so it wouldn’t continue running and using memory (be advised, this removes your ability to call E911 in an emergency).

    I will admit this option isn’t quite as appealing since AT&T decided to change their iPad data plans, but for those lucky enough to still have unlimited data it might be worth a try. I’ll likely post another update in 30 days or so, as I refine the process.

  • How To Easily Install Android on Your iPhone

    AndroidLess than a month ago, some crazy guy released instructions on how to install Android on your iPhone, now while I followed those instructions and got Android installed it was more than a little complicated, so I didn’t write it up. But now comes iPhodroid.

    iPhodroid will automatically copy the required files to your iPhone, and the best part? No more needing a Linux virtual machine to pull this off. This solution is only available for Mac users currently.

    First off, you’ll need:

    • An iPhone 2G or 3G running 3.1.2 (doesn’t support 3.1.3 yet)
    • Your iPhone should be jailbroken with Blackra1n, PwnageTool, or RedSn0w. Devices jailbroken with Spirit won’t work.
    • OpenSSH installed with default password (alpine)
    • Macfuse installed on your Mac
    • iPhodroid

    Step 1: Disable auto-lock on your iPhone. To do this, go to Settings-> General-> Auto-lock and set it to Never.

    Step 2: If you haven’t already done so, download Macfuse and iPhodroid.

    Step 3: Install Macfuse.

    Step 4: Extract iPhodroid to your applications folder.

    Step 5: Connect your iPhone to your Mac. Open iPhodroid and hit run. Expect the process to take a few minutes.

    There you have it! Just keep in mind that Android on an iPhone is still buggy and will drain your battery an in hour, but it’s pretty cool to play around with.

  • 14 Google Wave Invites [out]

    I have 14 more Google Wave invites to hand out.

    And I’m out… hit up Fred in the comments if you still need one.

    It should be noted that invites are not instant, giving me your email address technically only gets you nominated for an invitation.

    Hit me up in the comments or on Twitter if you’re interested.

  • Google Voice Invites

    I’m sure they won’t go as fast as the Google Wave invites, but I have 3 Google Voice invites left.

    Leave your email in the comments, or hit me up on Twitter.