Here we go,
What are yours?
This is post 79 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This makes it so typing on a phone is not so bad of an experience, but the other factor is GBoard.
As a FOSS enthusiast, I tend to favor using FOSS apps on my phone. The reality is that quite a bunch of the alternative keyboards simply aren’t good enough, it wasn’t always that way though…
I’ll skip the T9 keyboards and the non-android phones, I already wrote about the phones I’ve had. All I remember is that at some point I tried predictive T9 and it was so fast it was amazing, but those times are long gone now.
In the beginning, the weird Chinese phone I had was the worst thing ever, it wasn’t a modern touch screen, I could push too hard and it would leave a mark, it also had no multi-touch functionality at all. I just used the default keyboard because the thing only had like 512 MB of storage.
The HTC Status had a pretty decent physical keyboard, it was not bad, but the keys were kinda mushy and it was getting worse over time. Regardless, it was pretty nifty and I was able to program all the keys on a GBA emulator and play games like that. It kinda sucked but I did it anyways, and for a turn based rpg like Pokemon, it didn’t matter how responsive those things were.
From there I got a Galaxy S3 mini, handed down by my dad. This phone was where I explored a bunch of different keyboard options all the time. The thing was rooted and modded to oblivion, it actually died because of that. Back then, my favorite keyboard was Fleksy, the ability to hide the space bar and use just gestures to move around was fantastic because of the small screen factor and the responsiveness of it all.
Sadly, later updates have made some random changes that I am not a fan of, they started trying to implement swipe typing (like most keyboards) instead of improving their existing gesture method, and it kinda broke it all.
After Fleksy, I became a huge fan of Openboard, it had some of the nice gestures of Gboard without all the fuss, it worked wonderfully and I didn’t have a need for much else for quite a while. However, something started to change…
I started to write in English more. After I started to interact on more diverse places like Discord and eventually Mastodon, I had the need to switch between keyboard languages, and Openboard or Fleksy just didn’t cut it anymore, nothing did.
That’s when GBoard won. Swiftkey was a contender and I’ve tried it multiple times, for months, but I just love the features and the smoothness GBoard brings. The Material You theming, the predictions and suggestions, and of course the fact that I don’t need to set my keyboard in a language or another, it will just work as I expect it to do so.
I would love to tell you I have it all locked down and without internet access, but honestly I just install it and don’t think much about that. It respects the privacy mode while filling password fields or using certain apps and the word suggestions just get better and better. The clipboard feature is also pretty good, as well as the built-in translator. So far it’s been a few years old things working just fine…
I still keep an eye on the FOSS alternatives, but it is how it is. 🤷♂️
This is post 70 of #100DaysToOffload. Have a good rest of your day, fellow reader. 😊
]]>These are only a few of the tons of apps I used to try back then, most of this list was inspired by watching a lot of videos by the Spanish YouTube channel Pro Android that showcased some of the best app recommendations I’ve ever seen, even compared to similar channels today. I still go back to his old catalog and find a few great apps still working from time to time.
Quick Tip: YouTube removed sorting by oldest months ago in the web UI, you can however, use the search feature inside a Youtube channel and search for “before:20XX” as well as whatever term you want, and it will show videos from before that year. It is how it is, at least it works!
Before Simple Gallery, QuickPic was the top of the game, the simplest, lightest, fastest gallery app there was. To this day it remains one of the saddest downfalls when it comes to how good it used to be, before being acquired by Cheetah Mobile.
As soon as the acquisition took place, some mods made out of the last non-CM version have been released and the original APK still floats around in the Web. It still kind of rocks, its animations look great, and it is lighter than Simple Gallery, so maybe it’s still worth a shot for some, I decided to try the mod for a while.
This is the precursor to today’s navigation gestures, this was the ultimate way to go back in an app, even more functional than today. Back in the day there were a couple other apps like this. I also remember Navigation Layer, which I never got to use. SwipeBack would display an awesome animation that showed what was “behind” the current screen. It ended up dying for a while during the 4.0 days, but got resurrected with support up to Lollipop. It has been dead for a while, and it took until Android 13 for stuff like Predictive Bar Gestures to show up, even if they are still work in progress. I absolutely loved using this Magisk Module.
I was so happy when I finally got to try this module back in the day. The amount of tweaks this Xposed module provided was unmatched, probably the second-best one was XuiMod, which provided many awesome scrolling animations when opening apps, pop-ups or scrolling through lists. These things were super fancy and cool. Later one some Custom ROMs would begin adding these tweaks to the built-in settings, and eventually it stopped receiving support, at least for now, since the last Android version that it worked with was 11.
Back then pretty much all browsers sucked, except for this one. Later on, CM Browser was also pretty good (until Cheetah Mobile showed its true colors, of course). This app was light, fast and pretty customizable for its time. Reviews of it convinced me to try it out back then, and honestly, I wish browsers today were as good. Today we have DuckDuckGo, SmartCookieWeb or Via Browser, and while the quickness is there, they are just not as fun. There were gestures shortcuts, tabs and all sorts of cool little things that still didn’t slow down the device at all. I don’t understand how apps today are so heavy when stuff like this existed back then, but maybe it used the built-in WebView engine like many light browsers today. The app is still around, but it’s nowhere near as good as before. If I were to guess, its probably a security and privacy nightmare.
The list goes on. I guess this could be a bit of a semiregular series, there are still quite a bunch of apps from back then that aren’t needed or no longer work nowadays.
I have to admit, I feel like there are a lot missing, seriously I almost don’t want to post this one as is. But I already spent a while writing here,so it will have to do.
Anyway, I just wanted to share what used to be some of my favorite tools I used back in the day, such fun times. What are the apps you used that were awesome but ended up dying or retired from the Play Store? Please share your own list!
This is day 39 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>PolyCal is a calendar widget that does exactly what I want, its just a compact list of events, with the important information laid out in a really minimal way. It does not have a lot of settings, but you can adjust the date format and some other things.
It integrates well with Simple Calendar and most others, since it requires Calendar access and all that. You can even select only certain calendars to show up, which adds a nice bit of privacy.
Just look at that title! if that wasn’t enough to try it out, I don’t know what will. This is a great collection of retro games that can be played solo and even online with your friends. It’s also made with Godot, an open source game engine that I’ve used in the past. it has a great aesthetic and the controls are great, so if you find yourself bored you should give it a go.
This is quite a recent discovery for me. The app just does what it says, you can add a URL from some web radio and play it no problem, what I like about it is that you don’t even have to know the URL of anything, it comes with quite a big list of stations you can just add and forget. I personally found some nice Lo-fi and Videogame music stations that I didn’t even know I needed in my life.
There are no subscriptions and no need to get a local music collection, just choose a station that fits your mood and be free.
This is a really nice Gemini client (remember when that was all the rage?). It works great for the few sites I follow with it. I really enjoy using it, even if its not so common when it happens. I started a Gemini capsule along this website back then, but it has been a second class citizen and it barely functions properly, but you can visit it if you feel like it
If you are a reader like me you are probably aware of Goodreads, a website that lets you keep track of books you read. If you are a Fediverse advocate like me, you probably know about Bookwyrm, the alternative to it.
Openreads is, sadly, not a Bookwyrm client, but it allows you to keep track of the books you’ve read locally on your device. It also has a great UI and smoothness. It would be great if it could sync with Bookwyrm, skipping on the social aspect, like how Tachiyomi syncs progress with MAL or Anilist.
So yeah I just wanted to share some apps that I thought deserved a bit more recognition, they are not in any particular order but this is the end of the post so it doesn’t really matter what I say now.
Anyways, let me know if you would like me to do this again with some other apps or maybe some Linux programs too. Until later.
]]>I am quite a FOSS advocate, but I am also a bit pragmatic. I still use Google services often, a lot more than I would like to admit. So if I was already using them, why wouldnt I give away more of my freedom for the sake of convenience, right?
Yeah, that’s the train of thought I have sometimes. But other times, like today, I am feeling a more privacy conscious, and I decided to look for an alternative email client. I had already tried Fairemail a fairly decent app that works wonderfully. However, it contains unobtrusive, privacy friendly ads, which are not bad at all and are completely understandable, but I didn’t want to deal with them, besides, I had already tried it, and I wanted something new.
And here is where K-9 Mail comes to the rescue. The app was a bit dead, but last year, the app got a visual redesign that caught my attention and convinced me to give it a chance. I knew about the app for years, but just by looking at its icon and the screenshots showcased on F-Droid, I never installed it.
I was pleasantly surprised, setting up my Gmail account was as simple as Google lets you, using the so called “App Passwords” needed for anything that doesn’t wanna use their login authentication methods.
Adding the rest of my accounts was a piece of cake, I had to add my school account with IMAP because the domain was weird and unable to be automatically setup like my personal one, however, it was no big deal.
A Microsoft account I got had no trouble at all, although I should add 2FA to it, since it’s not active.
K-9 Mail pretty much looks like the Gmail app before they changed to Material Design 2.0 a couple years ago. And that’s a good thing for me. It has a bit of similarity to Fairemail, but I liked K-9 a bit more since its more simplistic and a bit less cluttered. Besides, the starting screen of Fairemail its their settings, and its really overwhelming, which was a reason I wanted to avoid K-9, since I thought it would be even worse. But I am quite happy with how it is.
There is a really good Dark Theme, a nice amount of settings and customization and it even applies a dark mode to the email contents, which is good for those nasty non-plain text emails that have their own styling.
It is a pretty great experience! so nice and comfy I did a whole blog about it. Like, I can’t believe I spent so many years not using this (being fair, it looked terrible 2 years ago, but still).
The only thing I disliked for a bit was the non-instant arrival of emails, which is normal for most email clients that once again don’t depend on Google immediately. I wonder if there is some way to trigger the update, but at the same time, I don’t really need email to be instant.
With this setup, I am very happy again with my FOSS mindset. It has reinspired me to check out even more alternative, free software applications. This is day 36 of #100DaystoOffload
]]>So, I was watching Distrotube’s latest video, where he talks about Nitrux, a pretty new distro, that has some really interesting concepts, one of which caught my attention inmediately.
Nitrux uses some really unique programs as default, Index, their file manager, Nota (notes), Station (terminal), Vvave (music player) and others,which are built with a framework named MauiKit. This tool is similar to GTK or Qt, but it seems to be quite faster to work with, but I am not expert. But I found out that they have android versions for some of their applications, and I decided to give them a try just for fun.
I was really weirded out by these apps, they look so different from the apps following the Material Design used by Android. They are not available on F-Droid nor Google Play. I was only able to find them in some KDE’s random repo.
The apps are still quite broken sometimes, the music app was unable to detect most of the album art on my songs, and for some reason was unable to display “Daft Punk” correctly (only showed “Da”).
There were some nice transitions and animations. But simple stuff, like hitting play and pause, invoking the weird bottom hamburger menu, or switching directories looked pretty plain. However, I am not going to complain, I have never heard of these apps before, so I think that they are still quite new, and I hope they improve and get noticed a lot more in the future. Its nice to see more alternatives to the default applications, I have always enjoyed to test them out.
Today I got an exam to complete. I was getting ready for it for days. And I was quite confident on being able to figure it out. However, right after I opened the file containing the questions, I realized it wouldnt be as easy as I thought.
The first 5 questions where problems that required using Inverse Laplace transforms and using the partial fractions method to solve differential equations. This might sound complicated to some, but it really isn’t that hard. However, it takes a lot of time to solve the problems. And while I understood the concepts and studied them, I didn’t actually solved any proper problems myself, and I got stuck for a while solving some basic things. I ended up taking an hour to solve the first 2 problems.
Thankfully, the last three were easier now that I found myself in the flow state. The problems were more complex, but it took me less time to solve them. The problem was. By the end I still had 5 more problems to solve. These problems were about Block Diagram reduction. Which is a technique used for the design of Controllers, System Dynamics and stuff like that.
Once again, I found myself in trouble, I had to show every step of the reduction process, and I would lose more time drawing the diagrams rather than actually solving them.
With 15 minutes left, I managed to solve the easiest of the bunch, after drawing and solving the couple steps to get the Transfer function. The time left was spent taking the pictures with a Doc Scanner app (I am looking for some FOSS alternative, but I use Notebloc because its the lightest of the bunch, and doesn’t seem to have any controversial things, like Cam Scanner and such).
So, I have already done a similar blog talking about this topic, so check it out if you want to read a bit more about the topic. I said it before, and here I am again. I love android’s customization. ArrowOS, my previous rom, was alright, it was simple and minimal, pretty customizable, but it still lacked a few things I wanted.
I am now on crDroid. And just by checking its Recents screen, I noticed it comes already with a pretty distinct style to stock android. It reminds me of Resurrection Remix, which I had used before, but has not been updated in a while. So that’s great for me, since I got the CRT effect back for my screen off animation!
After restoring my Migrate backup, reinstalling Magisk Manager and rebooting, I was ready to go. The default look and feel, as well as the wallpaper were beautiful, some apps were glitchy so I had to reinstall them. But that’s not the rom’s fault.
Syncthing, the backup program I use, doesn’t play nice when the folders that used to exist no longer do, but after resharing my folders from my computer, everything worked great, I was once again surprised at how quick the syncing process is, and wondered once again why this tool is not used by absolutely everyone.
So yeah, I have everything back on track. No real problems for me, since I am quite used to dealing with everything I had. School was a bit tiresome, but nothing too difficult really, I believe the teacher is going to be understanding of the situation, since most classmates also lacked enough time to finish.
There was one person, who actually did it all and got a 10/10. I would have been surprised if it wasn’t for the fact that some friends realized that ~3 of the problems were already solved from previous classes. In the end I got 5.5 out of the 6 questions I solved, its not ideal, but I also got some encouragement from my teacher, assuring me that I could have had a better score if I had more time, so I felt better, and I hope justice is made.
In the end, Android lives on, school moves on and I forgot to backup the MauiKit apps, I hope they improve and get published in a F-Droid or something!
This is day 35 of #100DaystoOffload
]]>Honestly, after a few days I just forgot about it and uninstalled the app, but thats how I got interested in them (Thanks Google).
Months later, I tried AntennaPod, a free and open source app that allowed me to do the same thing, and I liked it a lot, it just had quite an ugly interface, but I was willing to give it a try.
They recently got a very nice redesign that gets rid of the Holo interface for something based on current Material design guidelines (still a bit rough around the edges, as most FOSS projects). And I have been listening to more podcasts lately, so I wanted to share this app because it is quite fantastic.
I keep a backup of the full database thanks to Syncthing, similarly of how I manage my RSS feeds. but it allows to export to simple OPML files too, but I like the stats it gives me, so saving them for everytime I reboot my phone is quite nice.
I have a lot of subbed podcasts that I listen from time to time, but these are a few that I consistently listen to, or that are finished shows that I enjoyed.
There is another FOSS podcasts app that I quite like, named Tsacdop, this one is not developed by a whole community like Antennapod, so it is still quite in its early stages, but you can still try it out, since it has a very unique feel to it, I really love its layout.
Anways, Antennapod is a very good app, they also have their own forums where you can leave suggestions and bug reports, and contribute in any way you want. It is still quite active in development, and is one of those FOSS apps that can have a fair fight against their non-free (as in freedom) competitors, such as Podcast Addict and others (Google Podcasts is not even close by the way).
If you have any other podcasts that I should listen to, please let me know, this has been day 13 of #100DaystoOffload
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