Ayn Droid

I finally took the plunge and picked up a real smartphone. Rather than give in to the soulless Apple empire, I went with an Android phone, the HTC Evo 4G. Although its design is a year old, it was a groundbreaking phone back then, and I’m very pleased with it so far.

It’s nice to finally have a device that not only offers diverse services—a mobile computer connected to the internet, a mobile WiFi router, a phone, a pocket camera, a GPS, a music player, and so forth—but one that delivers on the promise of integrating all those services, and does so in a very user-friendly fashion. It’s like what Palm Pilots aspired to be fifteen years ago, but so much more.

There’s so much to like about the phone, it’s hard to narrow it down, but my favorite new features would have to include the awesome Swype keyboard, voice transcription to outgoing text messages, great Google Calendar integration, Google Goggles’ funky visual search engine, and Qik’s potential for webcasting live video from anywhere.

On the other hand, the device’s sheer breadth of potential also made for a seriously intense setup process! All told, I probably spent over a dozen hours customizing the phone’s settings, then downloading and configuring various third party apps, plus merging and cleaning up my contact lists (which is an ongoing process).

Other than setup, I think my main issue with the device also derives from its breadth of capabilities. Basically, I’m not used to a phone that can do so many things, so I often overlook instances when it could be really helpful by solving an immediate problem. But over time I’ll get more accustomed to relying on it when those opportunities present themselves.

Finally, I’m going to list out the apps I’ve installed, both to record a baseline configuration as well as to provide pointers for other Android users who might be looking for similar information. So here’s what I’ve added. No, I’m not going to provide links to all these; if you can’t find them in the Android Market, go find them yourself!

Amazon	Amazon online store
Astro File Mgr	Local file manager
Bank of America	Online banking
Barcode Scanner	Barcode search and product info
CatchTheBus	MBTA bus and subway telemetry data ($.99)
Citizens Connect	Boston city services reporting
Dropbox	Cross-platform file transfer
Elixir	Widgets that display phone's internal status
Evernote	Cross-platform notetaking and docs
Facebook	Facebook client
FlightView	Live flight tracking
Google Calendar	Calendar client
Google Earth	Earth view
Google Finance	Financial info
Google Goggles	Visual search engine
Google Mail	Gmail
Google Maps	Local maps
Google Reader	RSS reader
Google Translate	Instant language translation
JuiceDefender	Optimizes power settings to preserve battery life
K-9 Mail	POP/IMAP email client
Kayak	Travel tickets search
KeePassDroid	Password safe
Lapse It	Takes time-lapse photos
Meebo	Multi-system instant messenger client
NBA Gametime	Basketball info
Photoshop Express	Basic photo editing
Qik	Live/social video broadcasting
RingDroid	Ringtone editor
ShopSavvy	Barcode search and product info
Skype	Free international calling
Socializer Lite	Meetup.com frontend
TDAmeritrade	Online stock trading
TipNSplit	Tip calculator
Tripit	Travel planner
Tweetdeck	Twitter client
Wapedia	Wikipedia search
Yelp	Local business search and reviews
Youtube	YouTube videos
Zen Timer	Meditation timer ($1.99)

Dot Eee Dee Yoo

O-taaay… first week back in the working world. Impressions?

After taking two years off, Monday I started working for www.edvisors.com, a small company that provides information and tools to help students navigate the admissions, financial aid, and loans tangle surrounding higher ed. So far it seems like a good group of people, and the company is growing after surviving some challenges resulting from 2008’s big credit crisis.

As a marketing/product company, it’s quite a change from the consulting lifestyle, but I think it’ll be a positive. Since much of their business moves in step with the academic calendar, hours and stress levels should be more predictable. And there’s essentially no travel, which is both good and bad, as you might imagine.

Although they have some properties that are oriented toward grad students, the majority of their user base are high schoolers and undergrads, so their user demographic has huge implications for site design. Although there’s not much happening in the mobile space yet, it’s definitely being talked about, which is really exciting to me both as a designer and developer.

My title is UI Team Lead, which means I have some degree of strategic input, which fits with my level of experience, but I’m still expected to do plenty of the hands-on coding work that I love. There’s some people management, but it’s really a team environment, and it’s too small to get all crazy about hierarchy.

At around two dozen people, the company sometimes feels similar to my previous tenure at Business Innovation. But unlike BI there’s a frontend practice whose design methodology and process I can help build.

As a minor sideline, the company funds a separate charitable education foundation that was founded by the owner and his father, who was a prominent educator and administrator. It funds local and national educational opportunities, especially for disadvantaged youth.

Technically, they’re a PHP shop and are mostly using the Kohana framework. It’s also a Mac shop, which is going to be a change for me, tho not a huge one. The transition is made easier by the fact that they gave me a MacBook Pro i7, which has two 2.66 GHz cores and 8GB of memory; in other words, the machine screams! It’s delivering 3 times the work as the Dell Latitude that Optaros gave me, and nearly 10x what I can get from my personal Lenovo Z60m. And that’s after I throttled it back to run at only 80 percent capacity!

The office is right in the middle of Quincy Center, so it’s a bearable 40-minute T ride (Green to Red) and reasonably bikeable. It’s 12 miles each way, which is pretty equivalent to my old commute to BI in Woburn. When I ride, I’ll mostly follow the Outriders route, which includes a short section of the Neponset River Trail, which is cool. On the other hand, it also includes Morrissey Boulevard and Granite Ave, which are both nightmarish major arteries, which may drive me to take a more inland route thru JP. It should provide some good base miles this spring, but there are no hills, and the urban streetscape won’t permit real interval training.

So how do I like it after Week One? So far, so good. I think it has a lot of promise, and I’ve yet to uncover any obvious sources of trouble. Of course, I’m sure my attitude will be more effusively positive at the end of the month, when that first infusion of cash hits my balance sheet!