Tag Archive for android

Fast Web Installer is…well…fast.

If you like AppBrain as much as I do, you’ll love their new Fast Web Installer. With Fast Web Installer, there are just two steps to super-easy, auto-magic Android app installs:

  1. Use the Fast Web Installer app to register your device with AppBrain.
  2. Login to the AppBrain website from any computer with internet access, and go shopping for the app(s) you want to install.

In a few moments, you should see a notification on your phone that your app(s) has been installed!

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XBMC + Android = superawesome

It’s true that there’ve been XBMC/Boxee remotes available in the Android Market for quite awhile, but only recently has there been an “official” one from the XBMC Team…and it blows the others away. I’d share my own screenshots I’ve taken with drocap2, but xbmc.org has plenty, as well as the system requirements and a QR link for the Market.

I’ve used it quite a bit with my HTPC, and frankly prefer it to my Streamzap remote. Another bonus is that now I don’t have to copy my custom Lircmap.xml over every time XMBC is updated.

QR Codes +1

Since the last post about those nifty little QR codes was so awesome, I thought I’d add one more: creating QR codes using the goo.gl URL shortener, automatically. Hang on a sec, before you hyperventilate, it is possible.

If you’re a Google Chrome user, there’s a browser extension called goo.gl URL Shortener that will reach out to Google’s URL shortener API to create a short URL for you on the fly. Sadly, I don’t think the web interface for goo.gl is available otherwise. Once you have a goo.gl short URL, all you have to do to get the corresponding QR code for that URL is add .qr to the end of it, like so:

http://goo.gl/EFj6 becomes http://goo.gl/EFj6.qr

When wrapped in image tags, it looks like this:

QR code for eison.net

And here’s the HTML:

<img src="http://goo.gl/EFj6.qr" alt="QR code for eison.net" />

QR Codes Demystified

If you have a smart phone, hopefully Android, you’ve probably seen a QR code or two. Yep, they’re those crazy, bar code-looking things that you can scan with your phone’s bar code reader, that will link you directly to something, like an app in the Android Market.

Turns out that there are lots of QR code generators out here that’ll help you create a code for quite a few things: Android Market apps, URLs, a block of text, or your contact information. If you take a look at the other posts and pages on this site, you’ll see examples of three of those. It’s great to be able to use someone else’s code to generate things for you, but what if you found out that you can do the same thing with just a little HTML of you own?

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