After my gripe last night about Khalid a friend Justin from nexsoftware.net informed me of a cool app that I must have missed. My Market is described as an overlay for the market that allows for much more refined searching. You have the ability to filter out results by author name or by keywords.

My Market filter list

My Market add new filter

Adding in “Sapphire” immediately removed the offending Top Pretty Ladies that were flooding in at a rate that seemed to be about 2 per hour. I then added some other authors to the list and watched the market clean itself up. While that alone is enough to make this app a great one, it does not stop there! There is a built in bookmarking feature, the ability to email a link to a friend and even an internal rating/recommendation system.

My Market app list

My Market app list

About the only downside I could see to this app is that it does not install the selected program itself and instead sends you to the real Android Market to finish the download/install. While this is not a huge disappointment, it does leave you wishing for a better implementation. Overall I would have no problem rating this application 5 stars. If you have not already, go check this app out on cyrket.com.

Apple banned him so he went underground. He used to go by Khalid Shaikh on the Android Market, but lately his apps have been showing up under the alias Sapphire Apps. His company name Perfect Acumen can still be seen in his package names and the annoying flood of his “Top Sexy Ladies <insert female celeb name here>” apps (which most users seem to view as spam) keep him from being hard to find. He packages a few pictures he finds on various websites into a slideshow and attempts to sell them for $5 each. The vast majority of his apps have a 1 star rating, and mostly because that is the least you can rate an app.

Khalid Shaikh Spamming the market with low rated apps

He currently has 178 apps listed on cyrket.com and was up to over 900 when Apple banned him from the AppStore. Google, it is time to stop Market spam and give us a filter option!

*Edit* While I was writing this (and after counting) Sapphire Apps posted 2 more apps to the Android Market. This puts his count up to 180.

*Edit2* 3 more apps were posted within an hour of this post. Grand total 183 and counting. At this rate, he might hit 300 before noon tomorrow.

After getting the chance to join in on the TorrentDroid alpha test and being able to see first hand how it works I decided to try out its competition. BarTor, which was formerly known as ScanTorrent takes a slightly different approach while accomplishing the same goal. Where TorrentDroid aims to give users the most choice in where they search for their torrents by letting you do the search in a browser and sending the resulting downloaded torrent to your home computer, BarTor aims more at ease of use by parsing the results of a torrent search for you and displaying them in a scrollable list. BarTor also supports Vuse as a torrent client but unfortunately uTorrent runs better for me in wine than Vuse does by itself. Each app starts by finding what you are looking for, whether it be by scanning the barcode of a DVD/CD/game or by typing in your query by hand and ends with your Android device causing your home computer to download the resulting media. Below are screenshots of my brief use of BarTor. I would have posted screenshots of TorrentDroid but since it is still in alpha I did not know if the author would want that.

Earlier today I was invited to be an alpha tester for TorrentDroid which you probably have heard of from the AndroidAndMe bounty contest. This was a contest that accepted donations towards the “bounty” which was paid to the contest winner. The winning app had to be the first to meet all criteria of the contest, which basically consisted of scanning an upc code, finding the title of the movie/cd/game and searching for it on a torrent site. Once found, a torrent file needed to be downloaded to the phone and sent to the webui of uTorrent to start downloading. The idea is that you are walking around WalMart, find a movie you want to see, scan it and by the time you get home the movie is waiting for you.

Having been searching for a torrent client for Android (which I probably will never find) for months now, I was instantly interested and applied for the alpha tests. My first impressions are that this is really going to work out and will be a popular application if the price is kept reasonable. I first setup uTorrent (in wine since I am on linux (hint hint, ktorrent support please?)) and got the webui working. I tested the app by scanning an DVD that I own (hey, I’m too lazy to go to the store) and told it to use isohunt.com to search. I picked a decent match and downloaded the torrent and told it to open with TorrentDroid. Within 3 seconds uTorrent on my desktop was downloading the movie for me. There are user customizable torrent search engine options so you can tell it to search wherever you want and you can load new engines via a text file for greater customization. This application is very usable, but also rough around the edges (hence the alpha still). With a little bit of work on the UI and making things a little easier on the non techy users I can see this app easily being one of the most used on the market in a few weeks/months.

[RiS] has released the first non beta version of JFupdater, the application that makes the update process for JF rom users a lot easier. This app checks for new updates, downloads and will flash them with your permission. It only works for the official (technically unofficial) JF roms. Anyone using a JF rom should download this from the market (and make sure to give it 5 stars to offset all the idiots who download it and say “it dunt werk what iz dah root?”) and try it out. You can search for it by typing “jfupdater” in the search section of the market.

Some guys at XDA-Developers are working on an app that does what my old .sh script did. This app will keep track of the latest JF rom and auto download it for you to make updating almost as easy as OTA updates. While this app is still in very early beta, I think [RiS] will have it working very soon. Keep an eye on the thread at XDA-Developers.com for more details.

Android locale has a feature request (digg like page where you vote for requests kinda like our brainstorm site) page that you can submit your request to and pray the implement it. Locale is that program that everyone was drooling over before the G1 was released and was almost forgotten after the first week when it did not work. We all know most apps did not work at that time so now is the time to revisit. I redownloaded it tonight and it seems much improved. When I found this feature request site I was glad that I could finally request the one feature I had been waiting for (besides location situations to actually work). Please feel free (do it now!) to vote for my request (3 votes please) and check out the rest of the requests here. Help them make locale what it was hyped up to be!

P.S. If you care, they have been making regular updates and a very well hidden changelog has been placed on their site: http://www.androidlocale.com/notes.txt

A new site recently appeared called >Cyrket (pronounced circuit??) and gives you a web based view of the market. Great for anyone who wants to view the public embarrassment that some market commenters put themselves through. I will say this site has limited usefulness, but it still has a high cool factor. If we could ban users who have an IQ that does not contain at least 2 digits, the market might be a little more accurate. Check out this tool when you get bored and maybe find a new app that you cant live without.

Jsharkey has just released a few apps he says are very much beta. He had to rush them out before he starts his new job at Google working on Android with the big boys. Seems he already realized he will not have as much time and wanted to make sure they were put out there for others to work on. It will be great to see people finish the OilCan app, as a short 10 minute test got me hooked. His categorized app drawer dubbed GroupHome will be great for nerds like me who install everything from the market they see (yes, I have moved browser and market cache to SD to give more room for my packraticism). Good luck Jsharkey with your new job and thanks for the going away present!

11 more android game and application downloads added today. It is getting harder and harder to find anything downloadable for Android so each update I do is a big feat. Registering is NOT required to download, but please register to help this site grow. The larger it gets, the more files there will be to download.

• AndNav
• FBReader
• Tea.ch Cards Flashcards Light
• WordMate
• HandyCalc
• OmniSoft Chopper Fight
• Memo Game For Android
• OmniSoft Mini-Dogfight
• OmniSoft Mini-Jetfight
• Snake
• OmniSoft TenPin Bowling

Enjoy these latest Android downloads