ANDROID OPERATING SYSTEM

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e-Book Echo: Two Readers Delayed – Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. E-book readers get announced all … 13 hours ago …

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Andy's Blog: Natural Herbs that Help.

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e-Book Echo: Two Readers Delayed – Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. E-book readers get announced all … 13 hours ago …

Go here to see the original:

Andy's Blog: Natural Herbs that Help.

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As many of you already know, there are tons of music applications for Android.  For me though, Pandora is the stole my heart early on. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Pandora, it’s a streaming music service that learns what its users preferences are.  Like a song?  Give it a thumbs up and you’ll hear it again soon.  Don’t care for that last track?  Thumbs down ensures you never have to hear it again.  In the middle, the skip button, simply lets you bypass the song this time.

I have always had a love for all genres of music.  There was a time when I would make “Angel’s Music Mix 98″ on a CD.  You know did too.  Before the birth of CD’s it was tape recorded songs on blank cassette tapes.  How awesome was it to make your own mix of artists and genres in one place?  There were downsides to doing these yourself though – it’s very time consuming and CD’s get scratched and lost.  Skip ahead a few years and along comes Pandora!

My first true moment of using Pandora was a few months back when I painted my kitchen “Bicycle Yellow”.  With my husband in bed, I was up until about 6:30 in the morning.  Pandora helped me pass the time by playing all my favorite artists and tracks.  When my mood changed from fun to tired or frustrated, I could change the “station” to a different genre or artist.  As I neared the end, I began to feel accomplished and successful so I switched back to my Colbie Caillat station to “rock out”.

Today, I use Pandora in my car with an auxiliary adapter, when I run at the gym, and even when I’m just lying in bed trying to slow my mind down.  It’s safe to say that Pandora is a short list of favorite apps on my Motorola  Cliq. The more I use it, the better my stations get.  It molds itself to my favorites and opens my ears up to new music and artists every time I run it.

I’m pretty new to Android myself so I’d like to hear what music apps you guys are using.  Are there other steaming music applications I should check out?  Leave a comment below and I will be happy to look into it!

The AndroidGals series of posts are written by, but not necessarily for, female Android users.  We’ll be bringing you reviews, perspective, and opinion from the girlie point of view.

Might We Suggest…

• Juicy Development Bring ‘Talk Radio’ to Android
  Juicy Development LLC has released an Android version of their Talk Radio application. Using GPS and a proprietary algorithm, the app identifies where and when a user’s favorite shows are available….

The rest is here:

AndroidGals: Pandora is Music to More Than Just My Ears

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Take the beast that is the Droid and add some HTC Sense UI. Not a bad combination, but it’s not something you can expect from HTC or Motorola. Fear not, the industrious individuals at are cooking up some Sense UI on the Motorola Droid. They won’t be known for their extraordinary video taking skills, but you get the point. A slow moving Flash demo is included for good measure. No word on when mere mortals will be able to add this to their Droid, but we’ll keep you posted.

Read more here:

HTC Desire’s Sense UI Ported to Droid

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My wife and I recently bought a Honda Civic Hybrid. Among other features, it has the ability to play music files off a USB mass storage device. Yay! Easy way to play the music on my Android phone through the car speakers, right?

Wrong. You see, about a year ago I upgraded the disk server to 1.5TB and re-ripped our 800+ CD music collection to FLAC. At the same time I also transcoded to AAC, because AAC turned out slightly better to my ears than MP3 in some comparative testing I did.

Now, the Civic's owner manual claims that the stereo can play AAC files, and even lists the bitrates, sampling rates, etc. that are supported. However when I actually tried to play these files, it gives the error “UNPLAYABLE FORMAT”.

If you look more closely, you notice the disclaimer that says only iTunes AAC files are supported. As best I can tell, what's going on specifically is that iTunes doesn't support encoding AAC files with VBR, despite the fact that VBR is required by the AAC spec (according to WikiPedia, at least.)

Rather than support VBR, Honda's stereo vendor chose to simply implement AAC without VBR. I have to wonder why. There are plenty of spec-compliant AAC implementations out there, including some that are open source. Did Apple actually give them this code? The thing supports deeper integration with iPods so it's possible they got some code for that from Apple that included playback of Apple-forked AAC files, and are just reusing that same AAC-playback for USB mass storage playback too. This is just speculation of course — I have no way of knowing, except that the manual says straight up that only Apple's non-standard fork is supported.

Regardless of what the technical reality is, the retail leader in digital audio forked a standard, and then used their market power (whether intentionally, or accidentally) to cause another vendor to propagate their fork. Shame on Apple for not supporting AAC properly, and shame on Honda for propagating the breakage.

Now please excuse me while I go transcode my FLACs to MP3, just so I can try to play them in my car. God help a regular person who tried to do this, without the know-how to write a Python script to do it…

Update: It was pointed out to me that iTunes does support VBR, and has an option for it in the UI. However, according to WikiPedia, it's not true VBR. Here's the quote from WikiPedia, to make things clear as mud:

iTunes supports a “Variable bit rate” (VBR) encoding option which encodes AAC tracks in an “Average bit rate” (ABR) scheme. As of September 2009, Apple has added support for HE-AAC (which is fully part of the MP4 standard) but iTunes still lacks support for true VBR encoding. The underlying QuickTime API does offer a true VBR encoding profile however.

So it could be that, or it could be one of the other changes Apple made to the AAC file format that I've read about. But as I said, I'm just speculating; all I know for sure is that my car only supports whatever hacked format Apple's introduced, and it makes me sad.

Follow this link:

This makes me sad

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Todo Q v1.1.0 is released to the android market with the new Send to Friend feature. This feature enables tasks to be sent from one Todo Q user to another. My wife loves this new feature.

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Todo Q for Android has Send To Friend