Addendum to OSX apps I use

Adium: Tabbed chatting, custom backgrounds, what's not to love? Oooohhh that's right, ichat still holds the edge in tele/video conferencing, as well as screen sharing. For straight up text chatting however, Adium is the bees knees.

Parallels: It's a toss up between Parellels and VMWare, both are good. I can run my bootcamp partition as a virtual machine from within OSX, which is nifty, and Coherence mode tries to make it appear that the Windows apps are running natively in OSX.

Google Notifier: I use gmail and google calendar to organize my life. I figure iCal and Mail.app have gotta be slick, but I can't think of a reason to force myself to use either. iCal+Mail has a smart text functionality, where it can parse your emails for contact info, dates, etc., and makes those actionable items. However, I can send an sms to my gmail account, and I can sms a new entry to my google calendar, which is extremely nifty. Perhaps with Apple's new mobileme service they might be comparable to Google Apps, but seeing as Google Apps is free..... I dunno. Google Apps still wins with me.

NTFS-3G: I WOULD be using this every day if I could get it to work properly. I'm not a *nix noob, I'm perfectly fine with manually mounting and unmounting volumes, but I think having my NTFS formatted drive mounted while I installed ntfs-3g is causing me to have problems. So it's either reinstall ntfs-3g, or reformat my external drive.

Google Android

I figure it's about time to give some love to our Google Android team, Android Connect! We've kinda kept it under the radar for a long time, but since we've already submitted our project to google for Phase 1 of their Android coding competition, I figure it's ok to talk about it now.

Our idea was to use the GPS functionality built into Android to allow phones to sense and track proximity to each other. The analogy we used in development was an infection spreading through a population. Not the most user friendly analogy, so the one we submitted under was a smile passed from person to person =). We have a webservice which accepts updates from any device running our Android Connect application, which will then track location, and infection. One of the portions that I'm working on at the moment is building an emulator to simulate a bunch of Android Connect devices roaming around downtown Honolulu. That way when a new user joins up and gives their GPS updates, if they're in downtown Honolulu, they can see their infection spread across the simulated devices in real time.

If you want to check out our Android Connect project, you please visit this website: Android Connect