Nielsen: Android Takes Top OS Spot, Apple Tops Manufacturers

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Intel Looks To Bring Mesa SNB libEGL To Android

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Study: Android Takes 48 Percent Market Share in Q2

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Zinio Adds Full Froyo and Gingerbread Support, Now Available for All Android Devices

Earlier this summer, Zinio released its reader app for a small handful of Android tablets, bringing more than 20,000 full-format magazine titles to the Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and a half dozen other slates. Now, the app is available for all current Android 2.2 Froyo and 2.3 Gingerbread devices, including tablets and smartphones. At launch, you'll have access to a dozen free current issues, including ESPN The Magazine, Maxim, and Robb Report.

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Not So Crazy Rumor: Amazon To Release An Android Tablet And Two New Kindles This Fall

The fabled Amazon tablet: Oh how you tease us so. You come from the maker of the world’s most beloved ereader and are said to run the versatile Android OS. (hopefully skinned, though) But there’s just so much we don’t know about you. When are you coming? How much are you going to cost. What’s your name? Are you even real?

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Sequoia Leads $10 Million Investment In Dolphin, The Customizable Android Browser

The desktop browser wars are fiercer than ever, with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and *cough* Internet Explorer all in a heated race for users (and new features). But there’s a relatively new market that’s still ripe for a surge in browser innovation: mobile.

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Internet Radio and DECT Phone Run Android, Include Videocams

Archos announced two Android-based & Home Connect& devices with 3.5-inch touchscreens and front-facing webcams. The Archos 35 Home Connect is a $149 portable Internet radio that runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz TI OMAP3630 processor, and the Archos 35 Smart Home Phone is an Android-based DECT landline phone....

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Open Source Project Brings Android Apps to iOS with 'Hello World' Panache

Ever think you'd see Android applications executing natively within iOS? A project called "in-the-box" is working toward this goal, and it's hoping to provide developers an easy path for submitting their software to the App Store. This means Apple users could get a crack at exotic titles from Google's turf, all without jailbreaking their devices. The magic is performed by porting the Dalvik virtual machine and Gingerbread API's to iOS, which developers must bundle inside their applications -- something that's already resulted in a Java-based "Hello world" app (see it in action after the break).

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Task Management from the CLI to Android with Todo.txt

In the never-ending quest for task-management software, most Linux users gravitate towards fancy GUIs, multi-faceted import/export, and endless customization. Sadly, all that achieves is a cornucopia of incompatible GUI to-do managers, and when one goes dormant, the others are no help. But if you take the "less is more" approach instead, you'll find todo.txt a worthy alternative. Todo.txt stores its data in a flat text file that any application can read, but it gives you full access from the command line as well as from Android and other mobile devices.

Technically speaking, the command line interface is properly called either todo.txt-cli (which is the name of its public Github project) or todo.sh (which is the name of the actual script you use to add, update, prioritize, and assign tasks). But for most people, todo.txt is the preferred moniker, because it highlights the key feature — the plain-text, human-readable, and "future-proof" todo file. The CLI script is the canonical way to access and change the file, but its simple format had led to a healthy ecosystem of other front-ends, including web-based and Android interfaces.

The principle of todo.txt evolves directly from a simple text file listing one task per line, with a minimum of syntax added on. In fact, according to the wiki documentation, there are just three features that todo.txt views as essential: prioritization, projects, and contexts. Prioritization simply allows you to sort tasks by importance, and is denoted with parentheses: (A) is a "most important" task, (B) is second-most important, and so on. Each "project" is a grouping of related tasks, and a project name is indicated with a plus sign, such as +RoofRepair, +Thesis, or +WorldDomination. Contexts are directly borrowed from the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach popularized by David Allen, and are denoted with an at sign, such as @home, @phone, or @undergroundlair.

The kicker is that none of these syntactic features are required. A perfectly valid entry in todo.txt is as simple as:

Buy root beer

... but you can layer on the other features as desired, and with the exception of priorities, in whatever order feel natural. All of the following are valid entries as well:

(A) Buy root beerSolve Rubik's Cube +SelfImprovement @work(D) +Music +Backyard Install Outdoor Speakers @homeFind lost wallet @home @office @car @park +Life +Finances +RememberingThings

Priorities have to come first, for parseablity's sake — that way if you need to add the task "Turn my side business into a registered 501(C)(3)," it's unambiguous. Some of the front-ends also add creation dates, and if you use them, they either have to come first or directly after a priority indicator, using the YYYY-MM-DD format. This also prevents ambiguity.

Your task list can also include completed items — for various reasons, you may need to retain them in the file even after you are finished with them. The official syntax for a completed item is that it starts with an X (or a lowercase x) followed by a space. Which means if "X-ray" or "X-Men" happen to start one of your to-do items, be sure not to forget the hyphen. If a completed item has a date immediately following the initial X-and-space, this is officially interpreted as the completion date. That could result in some ambiguity in tasks that already started with a date, depending on the front-end you use, so several of the add-ons use their own metadata format such as due:YYYY-MM-DD. But you don't need to worry about that to get started.

The file format, therefore, is simple. Using it is also simple, thanks to the todo.sh shell script. The downloads page hosts bundles in .tar.gz and .zip archive formats, which hints that the package is usable on a variety of operating systems. The latest release is version 2.7, from August 2010. Inside the archive you'll find two files: todo.sh (the script) and todo.cfg (its configuration file).

The todo.sh script is written for Bash, the default shell on most Linux distros. But when it says Bash, it means Bash: not csh, sh, ksh, or that shell your lab partner wrote. Quite a few users have posted questions on the mailing list about mysterious errors that trace back to not having Bash installed, and the system falling back on a slightly-incompatible shell.

You can install todo.sh anywhere, just make sure you make it executable with chmod +x todo.sh. Open the todo.cfg configuration file in a text editor, and edit the "Your todo.txt directory" line to reflect where you want to keep your main todo.txt file, archives, and various ancillary files. If you're not sure, try /home/yourusername/.todo — but also make sure to create the directory you specify. You can dig into the config file some more and play with color settings and list-sorting preferences, but that is optional.

The wiki suggests a few other tips, such as adding a Bash alias to save on typing. Adding alias t='todo.sh -d /home/yourusername/todo.cfg' to your .bashrc lets you access todo.sh just by typing t. The -d switch is recommended because todo.sh supports multi-user use in a system-wide installation, and each user needs a separate config file.

Speaking of usage, to add a task to your to-do list, type t add "Write the Great American Novel" — optionally including any +Projects or @contexts as needed. The only rule is that you must place quotes around your task text. To see your list of outstanding tasks, type t list or t ls. Todo.sh will write a numbered list of your tasks (along with a summary) to the screen. The number denotes the order the tasks were added. For example, you might see

01 Write the Great American Novel02 Quit job03 Move to @TropicalIsland--TODO: 3 tasks in /home/nate/.todo/todo.txt

If you add a project, context, or priority as an optional filter to the end of a list command, you can see just those tasks that match. So t ls @home shows you your "home" context, t ls +ServerUpgrade your "ServerUpgrade" project, and so on. But you can also pass any chunk of arbitrary text to an todo.sh ls command, and the script will return those to-do items that match it, so t ls cupcakes is perfectly valid, too.

You assign priority flags to tasks with the pri command, followed by the task number (as ls lists it) and the letter of the priority you want to attach (A through Z), such as t pri 16 A. Subsequently, when you do an ls listing, tasks that have priorities assigned will be color-coded and placed at the top of the list, sorted in order. The depri command removes the priority flag from an item.

When you complete a task, mark it with do followed by the task number. In other words, t do 8. Task 8 will be flagged with an "x " in the todo.txt file, and no longer listed for you when you type an ls command.

On top of the basics described here, the todo.txt community has written several add-ons that supply additional functionality, such as grouping ls output by project, assigning "threshold dates" in the future (so that items do not appear in the list until they are slated to start), and pretty PostScript output for printing. These add-ons are scripts that live in their own directory, which is specified in todo.cfg.

If you never leave home, a GTD-capable task manager that you can use entirely from the terminal is reason enough to look at todo.txt. In fact, because you can use todo.sh over SSH, maybe you never do need to leave home. For that matter, todo.sh runs perfectly well on Maemo handhelds (if you remember to install Bash) and should work on MeeGo and Android devices, too. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend there are times when the command-line orientation of todo.sh isn't what you want. There are several alternatives to keep your tasks in sync while you're on the move.

The first is Todo.txt Touch, a full-featured Android client written by the todo.sh maintainers. You can download it from Github, or look for it in the Android Market (although it is not free in the market, the code is exactly the same as the freely-downloadable version). It sports on-screen buttons for the basic functions (adding, filtering, and flagging tasks, assigning priorities, contexts, and projects, etc.) and uses Android's built-in text-input mechanisms to enter task details. There is a simple one-click interface to access your list of projects and contexts, which really is nice (even if it is flashier than the shell script's text output....).

More importantly, Todo.txt Touch is designed to sync with a remote storage location. As of right now, the only supported service is Dropbox, but the team indicates that more "cloud" storage services are to come. If you want to keep your Todo.txt Touch and your CLI task lists synchronized, all you need to do is open up your todo.cfg file and point the todo.txt directory variable to the proper location in your Dropbox folder.

But wait, there is more. Those users with iPhones will appreciate todo.txt-web, which is a PHP-and-jQuery based front-end to todo.sh that you can use as a web app. This requires making the todo.txt files writable by your web server, but is otherwise based on the same code. The default CSS styling of the front-end is designed to look like an iPhone web-app, but the code should render equally well in any modern mobile browser.

Finally, for those users that use the Remember The Milk web service, there is a separate Bash script called getmilk.sh that fetches a remote list of RTM tasks and re-formats them into todo.txt-compatible syntax.

Any way you slice it, Todo.txt's power comes directly from the simplicity of its file syntax. You can use the shell script, the Android app, a text editor, or any other tools you devise to edit the file (there is even one written in .Net for Windows users). As long as the applications retain the correct syntax, any of the other front-ends can make use of the result, so you can Get Things Done whether you're in front of the keyboard, on a remote machine, or in the middle of nowhere with only your phone by your side.

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The 10 Best Android Apps that Make Rooting Your Phone Worth the Hassle

Android phones are spectacular little devices because they're able to so much that others simply can't, but one big snag in that greatness is that many of those best features require that the phones be rooted. Whether you plan on installing custom ROMs or not, you may want to root your phone just to use the great apps that require root access. Here are the ten most essential apps available for Android that require root.

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The 10 Best Android Apps that Make Rooting Your Phone Worth the Hassle

Android phones are spectacular little devices because they're able to so much that others simply can't, but one big snag in that greatness is that many of those best features require that the phones be rooted. Whether you plan on installing custom ROMs or not, you may want to root your phone just to use the great apps that require root access. Here are the ten most essential apps available for Android that require root.

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The Best Music Player Application for Android

Android has no shortage of great music apps, but if you're looking for something that'll play nearly any local file, has a powerful equalizer, a handy tag editor, and tons of customization options, look no further than PowerAMP.

Read more at Lifehacker

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Quanta Building E Ink-Based Android Tablet for Amazon?

Quanta has received OEM orders from Amazon.com to build its much-rumored Android tablet, expected to sell in quantities of 700,000 to 800,000 units per month, DigiTimes claims. The tablet is said to use Fringe Field Switching display technology from E Ink -- presumably a version of E Ink's Triton color e-reader display....

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Android Officially Cooler than iPhone

Well Android fans – we are no longer the underdogs. It turns out that their is a new cool kid on the block. Android phones, according to a very recent Nielsen survey, are now cooler than the iPhone. Nielsen surveyed people, as their business is market research, and the results of people surveyed from January-March of this year, showed that 31% of future smartphone owners plan to buy one running Android, which has tip toed past the once great, once mighty iPhone. While the difference currently is 31% wanting an Android phone and 30% wanting an iPhone for the first time, this shift is undoubtedly part of a larger trend.

More significantly, they discovered that 50% of recent smartphone buyers purchased an Android phones, while only 25% purchased an iPhone. And, of course, Android is maintaining a healthy 37% market share in the US.

The future certainly looks bright! With 1 million daily activations likely to occur daily by 2013, how how big do you think Android will get in a few short years?

Via:  Nielsen

Header Image of Cool Guy

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SSH Tunnel Is the Easiest Way to Tunnel on Your Android Device [Downloads]

Android: SSH Tunnel is free, open source, and provides one-click SSH tunneling for the entire system or individual apps. The app's official purpose is to allow users in China to bypass what's been called "the Great Firewall," but it can be used by anyone who'd like to ensure private browsing. Comments (0)
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PXA370 Reference Platform Gains Industrial-Focused Android BSP

E-con Systems announced an Android board support package (BSP) for its Marvell PXA300-based eSOM300 module and related Alioth baseboard reference platform. The company says it added to Android's hardware abstraction layers with blocks that support non-mobile, industrial-focused peripherals including RS232/RS485, CAN, GPIO, ADC, and various sensors....

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Tethering Apps 'Blocked' in Android Market

Android users on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile no longer have access to some apps that allow consumers to use their smartphones as broadband modems for free access to the Internet.

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ISPConfig Monitor App For Android

The ISPConfig Monitor App is for all servers, not only for servers running ISPConfig. With the ISPConfig Monitor App, you can check your server status and find out if all services are running as expected. You can check TCP and UDP ports and ping your servers. In addition to that you can use this app to request details from servers that have ISPConfig installed (please note that the minimum installed ISPConfig 3 version with support for the ISPConfig Monitor App is 3.0.3.3!); these details include everything you know from the Monitor module in the ISPConfig Control Panel (e.g. services, mail and system logs, mail queue, CPU and memory info, disk usage, quota, OS details, RKHunter log, etc.), and of course, as ISPConfig is multiserver-capable, you can check all servers that are controlled from your ISPConfig master server.

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Hands-On with Netflix for Android (video)

Netflix for Android is here... finally. It's been a long time coming and we're thrilled to be able to bring our instant queue with us wherever we go. Though technically only approved for a handful of HTC phones and the Samsung Nexus S, we were able to successfully get it up and running on at least one unsanctioned device -- the Droid X (sporting a leaked copy of Gingerbread). So what's Netflix like on Google's mobile OS? Well, it's a heck of a lot like the iPhone app. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart if it weren't for the tabs being moved from the bottom of the screen to the top. Still, we figured it was worth giving a solid once over and, as usual, you can find our impressions after the break.

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Tethering Apps 'Blocked' in Android Market

Android users on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile no longer have access to some apps that allow consumers to use their smartphones as broadband modems for free access to the Internet.

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