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.

Well, it seems Haykuro has done it again. Rogers will be the second to release the Rogers software when their Android phone hits the market tomorrow (June 2nd). They were beat by a 17yr old who happened to finish his homework early and have some time to spare. They should change the back of the phone to say “WITH Haykuro” instead of the “Rogers” logo. This early release presents another first also: US G1 owners have a chance to use the Canada only rom before Canada gets to use it. Grab your copy of it here!

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.

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.

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.

It would appear that Android has a thing for tasty sugar coated treats. From what I have heard the newest cupcake is not even a cupcake, but a donut! Word is flying around the underworld (freenode.net) about the latest buzz which is dubbed donut (sans frosting?). Hopefully this means that we will see a new word on the market besides cupcake for once

I had been reading about calibrating your battery for a while. I had been putting it off for a while for no good reason but reading a forum post somewhere made me go for it. It started one day at work when I would turn on everything during each of my breaks and do whatever I could to wear the battery down. By the end of my shift I was about 7% and the phone kept trying to take a nap on me. When I got home I turned everything back on and went into power manager and watched the voltage drop till I was at 1%. After about 15 minutes at 1% the phone brought up a dialog about saving settings and shutting down. I first thought this was an odd way for a phone to “die” and was expecting more of a *poof*. At this point I did what the forum post said and I left the phone off while plugging it into the charger. I left it there all night and unplugged it the next day at around 10am. I did not power the phone back on until it had fully charged (this is the important part from what I have read). Starting that day I was able to use my phone lightly to moderately for 3 days straight.

I ended plugging it back in about 70 hours after its last charge and the phone was still at 58% capacity. During those 3 days I made about 5 phone calls, checked the market (on wifi or 3g) 2+ times a day and downloaded 1-3 apps each time I checked the market. I ran aTrackDog once during this and updated probably about 10 apps. I also used Gtalk about 2-4 times a day, played a few games and did some web surfing. During those 3 days I had wireless, cell location and gps all enabled (not using them all the time of course, but all were on).

Before the calibration I was barely able to get through my full 8 hour shift without charging during my breaks to keep the phone running the full day. This is such a drastic change that I thought I would let those who are experiencing the dreaded G1 battery life woes know that the calibration really does work. It is easy to do and does not take that much time if you kill it before you go to sleep and let it fully charge overnight.