Interesting apps for Samsung Galaxy S2

aCalendar: Works ok, no force close (fc), shows my contact's brithday's without any need to configure that (may it synchronized with my google's calender, do not know). Interesting app to have installed.
Advanced Task Killer: Quick way to close apps, helps preventing apps from wasting battery.
AirDroid: Control your Android from any browser. That is usefull to use a laptop's keyboard to type SMS or exchange files to/from the phone for instance.
AndChat (Free): For those who still use irc this is really good irc client.
Andro12C financial (free): If you need to calcule amortizations this is very handy calculator.
BusyBox: Command line for Android, very useful when used together with 'adb shell' command from a laptop.
CamScanner -Phone PDF Creator: Scanner app. I was not very faithful about this app before I tried it. It really did a good job in my tests, the app crops and tries to undo image distortions (because of shaking hand) so the final image is a perfect rectangle, I was not expecting it to do that. The final result is really good as long as you can make the camera to correctly focus the paper. In my case I enabled macro focus, anti-shake and configured the camera to focus on the part of the paper that has letters in it (if you try to focus a empty part of the paper the camera does not correctly focus).
Coffice: Calligra Office from KDE :-) I am a KDE developer so this is a bias review  hehe. However I am not a Calligra developer so do not ask me any details about its source code because I do not know. This apps reads OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents, I have not tried to open Word or Excel documents but I guess it is capable of it too. The installation takes more than usual space because it needs to download Qt libraries (Coffice is written in C++, so it is not a native Android app, which are usually written in Java).
ColorNote Notepad Notes: I had to find a new one after I installed Chameleon in my Samsung Galaxy S2 since Chameleon does not come with a note app.
CPU Spy Plus: Usefull for detecting if the CPU is not in deep sleep, which usually means some app is taking CPU and consequently battery power.
English Dictionary - Offline: English dictionary, handy.
GetRIL: Test if the modem driver (the one used for 2G/3G audio and data connections) matches (is suitable for) the library (called ril) Android uses to handle it. If they do not mach it can mean the modem may not be using some features to save power or even the modem is not working properly. My current ril does not match my modem's firmware and I have not seen any real issue yet, so do not take the words above as a garantee of problems if the modem and ril do not match.
File Manager: Advanced file manager for advanced users :-) Allows mounting /system as read-write if the firmware is rooted. Just do not mess with files in /system or you will have to re-install Android. In case you mess with /efs even re-installing Android will not be enough to make the phone works again with your operator's network. Be carefull.
Globo News: This one is for Brazilians or anyone that can listen to Brazilian Portuguese. This is an app that receives video streams from the biggest Brazilian news tv channel (kind of a CNN for Brazil).
GSam Battery Monitor: Shows how much battery each app or system component used, also estimates how long the battery is going to last until needs to be recharged. Very handy for battery hungry apps users or just to identify why the battery does not last long.
MoboPlayer: Video player. Plays mp4 and rmvb, which are the most interesting ones for me, probably plays other formats too.
Network Monitor Mini: Show download/upload speeds on the screen all the time (it is always visible). I like to see in real time how my operator network's speed varies, just for curiosity :-)
Network Signal Info: Another app just for curiosity hehe. Show signal strengh for wifi and cell radios with graph.
Nova Launcher: App launcher, I like this one better than the default aokp (Android Open Kang Project) one that comes with Chameleon.
Offline dictionaries: Offline translation dictionaries (includes English <-> Brazilian Portuguese).
Palmary Weather: Weather app with detailed weather information, such as hourly weather forecast. Very cool.
Pianist HD - Finger Tap Piano: Very cool piano app, try it.
Screen Filter: Creates a shadow to make the screen darker. Theoretically that helps saving battery for oled screens (does not work with TFT screens used in Sony's phones for instance).
Speedtest.net: Another diagnostic tool, this one measures network speed and is probably well known by many people.
Titanium Backup ★ root: Very handy app to backup other apps and their configurations. Android already saves Android's apps list on your google account, but as far as I can tell it does not stores apps configurations, so this one does all the job you need to fully restore your apps after a firmware re-install for instance.
TrackID™: Play a small sample of any song with this app opened it will (if there is Internet available) detect which song is being played. Very cool.
Trainer PRO Run, walk & bike: I like riding a bike and as a curious person I wanted to know how much time, how far and how many calories I spent when doing my usual bike circuit.
TuneIn Radio: When I get bored with my in the air fm radio app I like to use this one to listen to other radios :-)
WiFi TXpower: Decrease (or increase) wifi card's tx power. Decreasing tx power helps saving power and if the access point is very close (a few meters without any wall in between) that also helps decreasing radio interference. Increasing tx power helps signal strength if there are obstacles between the phone and the access point.
Z - Device Test: Diagnostic tool, shows a lot of details about the device, very interesting.
ZEDGE™: Allows downloading wallpapers, ring tones and other stuff to customize your device. Very cool.

Chameleon v3.0.2 for Samsung Galaxy S2

Last month I decided to install a new firmware in my Samsung Galaxy S2. There is some time that I am watching the comments about Chameleon. What interested most about it is the fact that it preserve the fm radio receiver app from Samsung. In despite of what most people think I really like to read fm radio  when I am travelling and and online radio is very costly when I outside my country (Brazil) and 3G connection takes much more battery juice than in the air fm radio.

Reasons apart I installed Chameleon and I kind of miss or dislike some things compared the original Samsung firmware:

• the ring and alarm tones that comes with Chameleon are not for my test. That is not nothing that Zedge could not fix.
• the alarm app requires more taps to configure.
• the message app uses white background. I like dark themes for oled screen devices (helps to save power).
• I also does not like the Google seach/voice incorporated into the homescreens so I installed Nova launcher instead since there is not way to disable that.
• Thanks for jazzk to add a option in Chameleon 3.0.2 to disable the crtoff effect. I really does not like it.
• I rather prefer the swype keyboard than the default Google's one. The Google one is not as accurate as swype and show less keys.
• it does not come with a note app by default. ColorNote Notepad Notes is a good one that I installed.
• for some reason I think my secreen's minimum brightness is now greater than Samsung's original firmware, that means the battery lasts less then it used to be. I have not measured that to confirm.

Now the things I like in the firmware:

• Fm radio support :-D .
• it is smooth and fast.
• I like the darker theme and icons compared to the original Samsung firmware.
• I like romcontrol feature to change and reorder launchers in notification area (it could have more options like powertoggles has though).
• the Samsung camera app is present in this rom. I am used to it so it is good that I do not need to learn how to use a different one.

Overall I think this is a great firmware and worth trying, specially if you want to get rid of the bloatware that comes with Samsung's firmware.

Solid Forge 2

Some of you may have noticed that there are some KDE sprints happening right now. One of them is Forge 2, the Solid sprint. If you do not know what Solid is you should be ashamed. Everytime you configure a network connection, change screen brightness, use a bluetooth device, insert a usb stick and Device Notifier pops up it is because Solid is working to make that happen for you. Solid abstracts the computer hardware and makes it simpler to create programs that helps the user to control their computer's hardware.

As the maintainer of network management in KDE I am really interested in making things work better and better in Solid, not only for network management. The sprint started last Thursday and I finally met the guys from RedHat, which by the way are hosting Forge this year. I was particularly interested in meeting them because they have been doing a good work in improving NetworkManagerQt library (yes, former libnm-qt changed its name again) and creating a new applet for NetworkManager. Both the current applet (in networkmanagement repository's master branch) and the new one (in plasma-nm repository) share NetworkManagerQt library. One of my wishes for NetworkManagerQt was to move the dbus parsing code from networkmanagement to it. Now that is a reality thanks to Jan Grulich (one of our RedHat hosts). I also need to thank Lukáš Tinkl and Daniel Nicoletti for their work on improving NetworkManagerQt.

The list of things to improve in the new applet and in network management in general includes several items. We are going to discuss those items and tackle them in the next months. It also good to know that there are some GSoC candidates interested in working in KDE's network management :-) This year looks promising for KDE's network managment.

PS: Today we finally removed Solid::Control from kde-workspace (yeah!!) One step ahead to simplify libsolid.

Migrating to kmail2

Ok, I know, migrating to kmail2 is old news now. But only today I decided to try migrating to kmail2. Gentoo is going to remove kmail1 from their repository in a few months so I did not have much of a choice.

My kmail1 configuration included one pop3 account, one gmail account and some local folders. The migration process finished and then nepomuk started indexing my e-mails (my laptop's fan screamed for several hours hehe). During the indexing process kmail2 exited with the message "Failed to fetch the resource collection". After some search on google I found this blog that explained how to fix that (it is simple, really). Then I had a problem with e-mails not being sent. The error message talked about mailfilteragent, which is installed by kmail2 itself but is started by akonadi. Restarting akonadi made it recognise the new agent and the problem was fixed.

After importing my local folders manually (the migration process did not do that) I configured my mail filters and waited until nepomuk finished indexing my e-mails.

So far so good using kmail2, no crashes and everything works almost like the old kmail1. One exception was the "go to the next unread message when opening a folder" option that is disabled by default. Alex Fistas helped me with that and now I can do with kmail2 everything I used to do with kmail1.

Update: well, the "so far so good" did not last a day :-/ I have found this really annoying bug and submitted a patch to reviewborad to fix it. With luck this will enter 4.10.3.

Migrating to KDE Telepathy

Last Friday I decided to migrate from Kopete to Telepathy. Believe it or not it was Microsoft that convinced me to migrate. I explain, I used to use Kopete for gtalk, jabber, Windows Live Messenger (wlm), skype and icq. I have just a few contacts in the alternative (to gtalk) jabber server and icq and most of them I can contact using other protocols. Now that wlm contacts are migrating to skype and Kopete's skype support is kind of broken* I used to use Kopete only for gtalk, so there was no need to wait for the metacontact bug to be fixed anymore.

* I have migrated my wlm contacts to skype. It works ok in Skype 4.1 but Kopete is not able to see them. Besides Kopete is not able to change skype's status (online/offline/away, etc) anymore.

All KDE Telepathy (ktp) installation process went smooth in Gentoo, but then the contact list did not appear. After some time researching I saw in a log that telepathy-logger was complaining about some uninstalled schemas. Issuing the command "glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas" fixed this problem and the contact list works now. Well, I still would like it to disappear when I click on the systray icon but it seems  we I will have to wait for a solution for this problem. Update: we did not have to wait that much :-). Another bug that I would like to see fixed is the problem of showing groups with zero contacts in contact list.

All in all, I like ktp and it is working well here, except for one crash when I try to search a contact in the contact list :-/ I added a facebook account, which I never used in Kopete, and now I use ktp for gtalk/g+ and facebook.

One thing that I really miss in all communication programs in KDE is the ability to set a glogal available/away. Today I use ktp, skype and konversation and I would like to set my status in only one of them and the others follow it. Last year I tried to implement something like that but never finished my work. Today I tried again and implemented something simple that works for me. I know my patch is not ready for reviewboard yet, just wanted to know if somebody else is working on something like that. By the way, the patch applies against ktp-kded-module. Now when I set my status to available/away in ktp it will contact skype and konversation to do the same, pretty cool :-)

I know kpt supports to skype but Gentoo does not have an ebuild for telepathy's skype module, so when I have some spare time I will create one.

Plasma NM 0.9.0.8

Plasma NM 0.9.0.8

SHA256Sum: c3b4458faf3bea75c5952ffe20b55724246c9cc3cd751a484b3e1832240d3ad6

The problem with missing password field in wpa2 password dialog if finally fixed. Everybody is advised to upgrade to this new version. Wireless ap-mode is also available for wifi firmwares that supports it.

Changelog:

. Show icon in systray when mobile's access technology and signal quality are unknown.
. Don't erase the input for the WEP key when it's not correct.
311705: Add support to wireless ap-mode.
316672: Handle new states of active connection due to some changes in the new version of NetworkManager (>= 0.9.7).
299868: Fix missing password field in wpa2 password dialog.
. Use correct interface name in InterfaceDetails.
314811: Fix crash when parsing IPv6 configuration from dbus and accept upper case hexadecimal digits in SimpleIpV6AddressValidator.
312964: Relay NetworkManager's secret request even when using plain text storage.

The following languages have more than 80% of strings translated:

bs ca cs da de el es et fi fr gl hu ia it kk km lt nb nds nl pl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sl sr sr@ijekavian sr@ijekavianlatin sr@latin sv tr uk zh_CN zh_TW

Also read some very usefull information about how to use and avoid problems when using Plasma NM in my past posts page.

What is happening in QtNetworkManager (former libnm-qt)

Last year I wrote about some changes I would like to see happening in QtNetworkManager. One of the most important ones (Move the DBus parsing code to QtNetworkManager) is happening right now (just grab the code from settings branch from libnm-qt repository). Thanks Jan Grulich from RedHat for working on this issue.

Well, there are still other things to work on QtNetworkManager, just take a pick :-) If you are a student you can also take a look at my Google Summer of Code idea for improving the interface details panel in Plasma NM. Just write a proposal based on the idea and I will take a look it.

Update: I have just added a second idea for GSoC. It is about implementing SMS send/receive feature in Plasma NM.