HTC just announced via good ‘ole Twitter that a new upgrade for the Hero aimed at Orange users has been released. Read more and download the update here.

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.

JesusFreke releases a Cupcake update for all Dream devices. This includes the G1 (US and
UK) and the ADP1. The previous release only covered the ADP1 (which most users just flashed anyways). If you have not flashed the cupcake RADIO update, you will want to do that soon after flashing this update.

Information and links to the updates can be found here: http://android-dls.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=526

As always, these updates can be downloaded and applied using JFupdater, which can itself be found on the market.

Now that the update has been found we can make way for JF to perform his usual magic. Once he creates a JFized version, it will be posted here. For those who want to tweak it themselves or just want to try it without root the information including download links can be found in >the wiki.

Jeff Sharkey just released a cool little script he wrote to color code the adb logcat output based on the type of message. As soon as he pasted it into #android on freenode.net I had to try it. I downloaded it to my ~/bin folder and saved it as “logcat”, then chmodded it to make it executable. Now I can run it by just typing logcat in a terminal. For anyone who uses logcat on a regular basis (and is a linux user), this script will be a life saver. Check out his blog to download the script and read more about it.

I am about 85% sure that I have successfully removed the bridge and from what I can tell I have a working forum. If anyone is unable to login or has any other major forum issues please email me at admin AT android-dls DOT com or find me on irc.freenode.net in #android-downloads so I can look into it.

The forums *might* be going up and down today as I will be performing some maintenance. I have grown tired of the repeated errors caused by a stupid choice I made while this site was still new. While I was creating a download section (which was later made useless by the market) I wanted users to be able to login to it and the forums at once so I installed a Joomla <--> phpBB3 bridge. This bridge was supposed to make logins and other user information seamless across both platforms. While it did make them accessible, it was NOT seamless. There are numerous errors that get reported and with my very limited php knowledge I am only able to temporarily fix them. I will be attempting to remove the bridge by installing a fresh phpBB3 today and hopefully hooking it up to the old database. I started this project last night and was about 90% successful but I made a mistake which caused me to have to revert and start over. If you experience problems logging in today, please be patient and try again later. I will let you guys know when (I think) I am finished. Thanks in advance for the understanding.

If you are like me, you probably check the market for new apps at least once a day. I was excited when I first saw cyrket.com had setup an RSS feed for the latest items and immediately went and purchased the first Android RSS reader that supported notifications. This was then set to check cyrket every 5 minutes for new releases. While that was good while I was away, I did not want to have to pull out my phone to see the latest releases. I recently added the feeds to a bot I run on irc.freenode.net in #android-downloads so that I could see the latest submissions when I am on irc. If you frequent freenodes #android channel feel free to add my channel to your auto join and come idle. If you are looking for a good irc client for the G1, try out Android IRC by nyt. It is not free, but in my opinion it is the best, most full featured client that has been released and it was definately worth the $5 I spent on it.

Also note that I have placed the last 10 apps feed on the right side of the home page.

A user at >XDA-Developers (haykuro) has been playing around with a rom from an HTC Sapphice/Magic and has made it run fairly well on the G1. I flashed it last night and have been messing with it (not much, its pretty incomplete because he is still working on adding back some stuff he had to remove to make it work). Overall impression is that it looks better, runs better and has a lot more features. Lots of stuff we were expecting our G1 to have when we bought it will be added. They have added video recording, soft keyboard and a few features you know about, plus a lot that you do not. If you are not a stranger to flashing roms I would suggest you head on over there, download the latest version (he updates it as soon as he can get things fixed) and try it out. Make a nandroid backup first so you can restore if you need to go back to a JF build because it is not 100% functional.

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.