On Switching To Android

Christmas went by quickly. Looking back on the year, I often remark that I wish I'd taken more pictures, and captured more of the moments that made for a great 2012. I don't particularly make "new year resolutions" but I will resolve now and going forwards to take more pictures. In fact, I resolve to take one picture a day, every day. And to accomplish this task, I am armed with the Samsung Galaxy S3.

The first in the series is a panorama of our front room on Boxing Day

Friends in the know will recognize the significance of my move to Android. So far I have been a walking talking iAd, and in many ways still am. I love Apple. I love their design, futuristic outlook, attention to detail and super-friendly UIs. But the time has come to go Google.

Why? Working there likely has a big part to play, but moreover, I'm finding recently that I want a little more from my phone. The camera was a big part of the decision (don't take my example above as proof of it's superiority, I'm still learning and practicing!) However, the customization, Google Now, and the general speed with which Google seems to be moving, compared to Apple, pretty much made me feel it was the right time to jump ship. It may not be there right now, but I've high hopes for Android in 2013.

The experience so far has been lackluster. I am struggling to adopt to the new world, but its a challenge I'm being rewarded for. Let me boil down a couple of my highlights so far. 1. The option to choose and buy my own battery cover (I'm in leather now, with Galaxy S3 etched in). 2. The option to custom fit my own launcher, minimizing animations and effects, and gearing my device for function. 3. Significantly better keyboard, also chosen by myself from the Play store. 4. Significantly better voice control, in the form of Google Now. It's still mostly a gimmick, but some functions have become part of my daily life, including checking stocks morning and night, checking what time's Stacey is at work (her rota changes, but I can see calendar entries as they come up), setting alarms and timers on the fly quickly and easily (I turn the boiler on and tell my phone "set alarm, 40 minutes, shower is ready", or I remember I have to make a phone call later, so I tell my phone "set alarm 715 tomorrow call home".

On the other hand, I should really tell you the many things that are pissing me off. There are tiny little details that Apple have paid attention to that I never even noticed until they disappeared on this device. Let's start with the one that is probably least relevant, but the most pertinent and frustrating - the lock screen. The lock screen is slow. I've never noticed how the iPhone lock screen is impressively present, but the Galaxy screen is slow. What I mean is, if I lock the phone and try and get back in, I'm not necessarily seeing the lock screen. I will probably see the screen I was just on, and have to wait a second or two to have the lock screen come up. In the long scheme of things, this is nothing, but it is bloody annoying. The time isn't on the button either. It's always worth giving the phone a couple of seconds in case it is showing you the time from the last time the display was on - this has happened many times. Forget the days of quick checking the time on the iPhone, and pocketing it back in a flash. This one takes time.

Next, the screen is too big! I can't believe I agree with this Apple ad now. I laughed at it when it went up on YouTube. I thought to myself "They are really desperate now, trying to sell on their thumb geometry." But it's a real issue. It's things like propping your phone up with your pinky to get to the home button, or having to conduct a carefully delicate maneuver to reach the top left corner, putting your phone is a dangerous palm balance.

I'll have to round up because this was a long post, and now I want to get dressed and head outside. I've got a picture to take and the weather in Dun Laoghaire is lovely (I didn't ask Google Now, I just looked out the window #oldschool). The roundup is pretty much a 'Watch This Space'. I'm not sure yet if I'm entirely comfortable on Android. While there are definitely gems keeping me interested, such as the prospect of rooting, developing apps for it, customizing, playing Ingress, etc., I'm still missing the simplicity and genius of the iPhone 5. I keep wondering, "Would it have been worth that extra 100 bucks?" The truth is, these are very different devices, believe it or not. The Apple vs. Samsung case while fighting over the hardware design, and some elements of the software, has made it seem like these two are homogenous, but they are not. One thing I have learnt from my time on Android, however, is that there are very few I would recommend it to. At least for the time being, it's definitely a place for the savvy, and the curious. If you want easy-to-use and "magical", just stick with Apple. Since Google Maps came out with an iOS app anyway, what's the problem?

Back to Black

After a year's hiatus, I've finally reinstated by black MacBook. I got this dear old thing back in Berkeley, when my Dell imploded just before a week of tests and coursework deadlines. It's nice to be back on my own computer (i.e. not a work computer), but it is weird having a poorer experience than I do at work. There is still some oddity with the backlight, which just decides to off itself every now and then, about once an hour, so there will be no movies had. Personally, I don't see myself lasting more than a few months before this old pal sees Ebay, but let's see if I can't make something of him yet.

Day 5: Shit work

Day 5 has been a tough one. I started out the morning crafting a new site template. Something a big different i.e. not simple and clean, but loud and outrageous. I decided to build a site for a fictional band, named aptly after my high-school attempt at a music career, Tru Story.

I'm not ready to upload this to the actual Internet yet, so you'll have to satisfy yourself with this drab screenshot. Even though its my work, I find it tasteless and clunky. I'm ashamed, but I'm not disheartened. Had I understood positioning in a more complete way, I'd have banged this out in an hour or so. But going back and correctly myself meant most of my day was spent trial-and-erroring multiple different combinations of absolutes, relatives and fixed. I didn't even spend 10 minutes honing the color scheme, so I've forgiven myself for that. I'm going to call this what it is and move on - a practice session. Perhaps not ready to be portfolio-ed, but something to work with. 

HTML & CSS, Sorted!

It took the best part of the week, but I feel like I've finally got fundamental HTML and CSS cracked. I've just finished up on my first site (all about me, of course) and you can find it at mynameisel.com.

I'm going to go through the steps for you here, because really there isn't any reason we should all know a little bit about putting together a simple website. For me it was an obvious skill I needed - I work daily with online advertisers so having some web design knowledge should help there. It also means I can use my own creativity when it comes to promoting anything I'll need to in the future. So I decided to take 2 weeks off work to focus on me and learning something I wanted to learn. I did not expect to be done by now!

Day 1: On the first day I learnt all the basic HTML stuff. Pretty simple since I was a bit of a MySpaceaholic back in the day. I understand the core concepts, but needed some refreshing on how a website is really meant to be put together, as opposed to how a self-obsessed teenager might do on a broken social network. It led neatly into...

Day 2: Good, solid CSS. I loved this bit. I'm a bit of a minimalist (have you seen my site yet?!) and a perfectionist with stuff like this, so seeing the range of style to use was great fun. I've spent longer than I care to admit getting all the details right, but I've come to see how flexible CSS is, and how important it is to keep it in a separate file. This was a brand new concept to me (tell me about it... and I work at Google... I should know these things right?)

Day 3: Getting in hosted. This was way harder than I expected. A simple, practical and affordable web hosting solution is a big fat gap in the market if I've ever seen one. It took me two hours, a long walk, and a headache to figure out and decide what service provider to go with. All said and done, I put the site online using HostGator, for $8.95/month, plus $15 to register my domain. Their 24/7 chat customer service is pretty stellar, but their UI is total crap. I need to see if this can be done cheaper.

Day 4: Making it better. I spent time today nailing the "hover over" effect that's going on. Codecademy taught me how to change what happens to a certain div when you hover over it, but it took me a darn good while to figure out how to affect another div, and how to do it with correct positioning so that everything didn't shuffle around the page. Today is Day 4.

Next: Well now I need a new project. I've got some tidying up to do on the dashboards I have made for work, but since I am still on vacation, that can probably wait. In the meantime, I think I'll look for another site to start working on.

EDIT: Lot's of credit to Codecademy and the contributors on Stack Overflow btw. Couldn't have done it without them!

My First Dashboard in Google Spreadsheets

SQL update

The progress so far on understanding SQL is unfortunately very early days. Last week however, I caught up with an experienced Business Analyst, who has opened my eyes, as it were, to the world of spreadsheet dashboards. I spent a fair few hours this week scrawling through Internet lessons on how to present data from spreadsheets in a dynamic way, and hopefully I've now arrived somewhere quite interesting. This takes advantage of the QUERY function, practically the same as learning pure SQL, so this is my present diversion.

Google Spreadsheets

The advantage of using Google is two fold. 1) It is far easier to build something I can share with people at work (Google Ireland). After spending time learning this stuff, I want it easily accessible and familiar for everyone, and believe it or not, some people in our office simply don't run Excel on their laptops. Moreover, it just seems un-Googley to not use Spreadsheets! 2) I can keep it updated and current. I did start building in Excel, but the kind of data I want to show need to be updated on a daily basis. Sending out an Excel file every day is impractical, so I'm building my dashboard in Google.

A case for Excel

Just before we leave the point, I have to point out that Excel does seem to be significantly more powerful, so once I start working with much bigger sets of data in more complex ways, I wouldn't be surprised if I swapped, particularly with Office 365 looking much more Internet friendly.

The Dashboard - the good bit!

The way I see it, a dashboard needs to turn a whole shed load of dump data into a report - some kind of presentation that makes it useful. For starters, you need a database:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap52YEdfS7NLdEFyUlR4MzI2S21KaXFyTFZCNUtyWmc#gid=0

I made the mock above about how a fictitious Alice and Bob played a game to win Coins and Stars. It's really simple data. The idea on the dashboard is that you can choose either Alice or Bob, and choose how many Coins they won. The result is how many Stars they got for each time they won this many Coins. While this seems completely useless, you will appreciate that being able to query tables of data like this in a Google Spreadsheet could be kind of handy.

The Query

Just getting the hang of putting this query together took a while. The one I've settled for (for now) is:

"=Query(Database!A1:D200, "select A, B, C, D where C = "&F3&" and B contains """&C3&""" ",1)"

Entered into Dashboard!C9, this returns a table based on the entries above. Now to break it down:

a) =Query(data, query, headers): This is the function. Pretty simple stuff. Enter a 1 for headers when starting out.

b) Database!A1:D200: This is my source, which references the first sheet. You can reference other spreadsheets too using importRange("SPREADSHEET KEY","RANGE"

c) "select A, B, C, D: I started by selecting all the columns. In the same file you use A, B, C etc. but if referring to another file, use Col1, Col2, Col3 etc.

d) where C = "&F3&": Notation for referring to numbers should be in quotes and &s.

e) and B contains """&C3&""": Notation for strings has two more quotes. Not sure why but it took me a lot of faffing to clock this. Also, note the and as opposed to adding another where.

You can find a complete list of syntax on the Query Language Reference page here.

The Chart

So easy, but oh so cool. Just make a chart as you normally would, and as you change the value the chart will move. This will impress your boss, I promise you. For good formatting, you might move your entry fields and charts around so that you have a nice clean page where the user doesn't have to see data at all, but just charts.

Next Step

The plan is to go and apply some of this strategy to relevant data we collect at work, to show some useful things. I've also got some learning to do on how to use dates, hence why in my spreadsheet the dates don't work.

Links/References

A really good video by CrestWebServices that broke it all down for me

Google's Query Language Reference

Using Data Validation for the drop down menu

This is day one of my mission to self learn SQL. Started here:

My Family and Hangouts

My family is a close one. Even though we live across the globe, we do our best to meet frequently, in Hyderabad, Warrington, Chennai or this year even in Cairo. But this is hard - travel is expensive, but it also takes time and planning. So frequently usually means bi-annually, and often just one or two of us can fly over at a time. I'd like to share our story of how over the past few months we've been using Google+ Hangouts to make the world a little bit easier to fly around. Since mid July, me and family have been meeting weekly, every Sunday afternoon, to have a coffee, a biscuit, and to catch up on the "craic" (read: banter, gossip, lols and chit-chat).

The first time my nan video chatted with her grandkids - 12th August '12

The reason for my blog is really to encourage this sort of thing. As new technologies become available, it sometimes take a while before everyone really understands what's possible. I decided in July that a lot was possible, and that we would lead the way. I'm a G+ advocate anyway (see my blog about the end of facebook), but maybe this will give me some ammunition in my argument.

My Family...

...on my Mum's side are in some ways just perfect for Hangouts. We are: my Auntie, Uncle and Grandma in Hyderabad, my eldest cousin and her husband in Warrington, my Mum and Dad, also in Warrington, my other cousin sister in Manipal University in Karnataka, my sister in Keele University, my other Aunty and youngest cousin in Rainhill, my uncle in Chennai, and finally me and my girlfriend in Dublin, Ireland. In case you weren't counting, that's 14 people across 6 different locations.

Troubleshooting

Google+: The first objective was suggesting everyone get a Google account. This part was easier than I thought. Most of us already had one, used for Gmail or YouTube etc, and the rest set one up at the same time as accessing Google+ for the first time. My extensive customer services experience prepared me well for an email with screenshots and step by step instructions, ensuring even my Grandma got an account and was ready to Hangout.

Sound: was an unexpected issue. Early on we noticed that some users' mic pick up volume differently and some laptop settings needed tweaking. Fortunately, this landed with some of the more savvy locations, and doesn't disrupt much at all now.

My Nan mistook FaceTime for Google+...

Tablets: are not going to be ideal. Although I am able to hangout just fine on my iPad, its not the easiest for those unfamiliar with the device and unfamiliar with Hangouts. Beware troubleshooting this one - it's just not worth it. Maybe this will get better, but for the time being, desktops and laptops are easiest. With so many of us, the extra screen space is needed too. No news yet on how Android copes with this, but I'll try it out soon enough.

Timezones: Also solved easier than I thought - we meet at 5pm UK time / 9:30pm India time, which suits everyone.

The Sell

The above issues aside, this has gone brilliantly. Some of the big events we would not have been able to share include seeing my sister move into University, seeing my cousin showing off her first doctor's coat, celebrating Rakhi, seeing my parent's home extension develop, but most of all, seeing my grandma's happiness from being with her global grandchildren every week. I'd say we all feel closer together, much more up-to-date, and really happy my Grandma can spend this time with us, even when she is so far away. Furthermore, with my sister and cousin being in University, living away from home for the first time, I'm really pleased they both have a time of the week where they know at least some of us will be free to spend some time with them, and give them eyes and ears if they need it.

Kala showing off her badge

I'm hoping that by now you are more encouraged to try Hangouts. Just to make my sales pitch here, note that Facebook and Skype don't offer multiple chat at the same time or the same kind of app support available with Google. Beyond our family hangouts, G+ came into it's own when me and my mum sat down together to work on some documents, and when me and my sister spent idle time watching YouTube videos together, as though we were at home, avoiding chores like we do. This truly is the new MSN Messenger in the age of high speed broadband. Don't miss the opportunity to be with people who seem miles away. If you have any questions about how certain things work or need any help getting set up, leave me a comment, give me a ring, or you could even start a Hangout with me.