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What software types do I particularly want on my tablet, and which specific apps will be best?
The ideal is to use my own Teddy on the tablet. This, however, will require a lot of development and installation, so at least at first I will get an app written by someone else. The ideal is at least 2 windows visible at the same time. What I'll probably get is multiple mutually exclusive tabs.
DroidEdit: See this Review by Jack Wallen dated 2013-05-07. Key features are:
But it's ad supported. For USD $1.99 you get:
Quirks to remember: The file menu may disappear on some tablets; you may
need to suppress the condensed action bar
. This problem is not seen on the
TF700T in CyanogenMod-10.1.
On the Samsung Galaxy SIII my normal editor is Jota+ by Jiro of Aquamarine Networks. This works well also on the TF700T. ES File Explorer also includes a viewer and lightweight editor for text files, as does the File Manager that comes with CyanogenMod-10.1.
How can I run real
Linux on the Android device? It turns out that
there's an app for that:
Complete Linux Installer by ZPWebsites (free, donate for $3.12).
Linux Installer Standard by Galoula (free).
Linux AutoLoader by Zenful Apps ($0.99).
DebianKit by Sven-Ola Tuecke (free). This is the one I used.
See My Home Directory
for the
issues that motivated me to move on this, and
Debian on Android
for my
(successful) experiences with DebianKit.
This is a synthesis of quite a lot of best apps
articles. The
majority of the recommended apps are totally useless for me, but a few are
worth investigating.
Adobe Photoshop Touch ($10): Mainly for photo editing.
Autodesk SketchBook Pro ($5): Draw/paint program.
Dropbox: Just about every list includes this. But security and custody issues turned me off to Dropbox.
Google Currents (free): RSS reader. Includes offline reading. An alternative is Pluse. (Could they have misspelled Pulse?)
Several lists recommend Pulse News. It may be a RSS reader. You select news sources that you're interested in.
Prey (free): Locate your device, deactivate via SMS. Mainly intended for theft protection. More features if you pay.
PocketCloud Remote RDP (ad supported, upgradeable): can also do VNC. Paid version can connect to multiple computers.
Android-VNC-Viewer by a team on Google Code
. No ads.
No encryption (use SSH tunneling).
Overlook Fing (free): Shows your net parameters. Can do a TCP port scan to another host, like nmap.
Several "best apps" lists recommend ES File Explorer.
Moon+ Reader: E-book reader for formats other than Kindle.
This is a list of key apps from my smartphone that I will also want on the tablet.
Amazon Kindle: e-book reader for their proprietary format. Confirmed: it works.
AndFTP: FTP client.
Android Lost: Help to find your device if it's lost or stolen.
Astro File Manager: should be compared with ES File Explorer. I've decided that I like ES File Explorer better.
Barcode Scanner. Confirmed: it works.
BookmarkSB: For ordering and managing your bookmarks, including backing up. The file can be copied over and restored on a different device. Confirmed: all of this works.
CalDAV-Sync. Confirmed: it works.
CardDAV-Sync. Confirmed: it works.
ClockSync: NTP client. Confirmed: it works.
VX ConnectBot by Martin Matuska based on ConnectBot by Kenny Root and Jeffrey Sharkey: SSH client with SCP capability. With multiple tabs (connections). Can also act as a local terminal. The SSH key agent works. See below for usage hints.
DeaDBeeF: Audio player that admits to handling Ogg. Ad supported. I've found that CyanogenMod's Apollo gets the job done, and no ads.
DropBear SSH Server by Sk.Schneider. Confirmed: it works.
However, the situation with DropBear is getting strange. Both this
version and DropBear SSH Server II are available in the Market but are
marked discontinued
. I tried several competitor apps but
none were satisfactory; they do not use SU privilege (and DropBear II
doesn't either), so they have to use a nonprivileged port (not 22),
and you end up executing as the DropBear user, which is not much help
for doing backups.
I think it likely that I will use the OpenSSH server in Debian, once I get it set up.
Google Sky Map. Confirmed: it works.
GPS Status: Good for debugging the GPS. Radar mode gives you the
direction and distance to a specified location, and if you pay, you can get
a table of saved locations. If you're cheap, copy your location to the
clipboard, paste it into a file, and edit it to the form latitude (space) longitude
where each component is a signed decimal number of degrees (negative is west or south).
The component can also be degrees:min.utes. When later returning to the
spot, paste this into the set location
box.
Jota+: This editor is intended for phones, and should be compared with DroidEdit. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Confirmed: it works.
Kitchen Timer: The tablet won't be used in the kitchen but you never know when you will need a timer. Confirmed: it works. The only alarm tone that you can hear is the raucous CyanogenAlarm; the others are too quiet. What happened to the rooster?
OpenVPN Installer and Settings: Can we get real IPSec also? (Yes.) Confirmed: OpenVPN works.
Phone Tester: Just for initial checkout. Confirmed: it works.
RealCalc: RPN calculator. Confirmed: it works.
rsync backup for Android: Provides the rsync binary, for my backup scheme.
Skype
Terminal Emulator. I've actually been using VX ConnectBot for a local terminal.
Wifi Analyzer. Confirmed: it works.
Xabber: XMPP client. Confirmed: it works with my server. But it requires a saved password.
This is a list of apps on the stock image, and their disposition. Almost all will be either abandoned or reinstalled from scratch.
These are the apps included with CyanogenMod-10.1 and Google Apps (2013-03-01). It's hard to identify authoritatively which are Google's, though some of them are pretty obvious semantically. The TF700T is Wi-Fi only and does not have a cellular modem, so it has no phone app.
Here is a list of the apps that I want to install, from the Android Market (Play Store).
Add Public Keybutton. An RSA key generated by OpenSSH keygen is acceptable.
open stream in media playerlink (M3U) performed it successfully.
servermeans the realm or domain.
Connect serveris the actual server, if SRV records point to the wrong place (e.g. IPv6 which this server can't do).
Some unplanned additions:
MythTV Frontend (Beta) by Daniel Frey -- Works, with one minor detail: no sound. Both the Gallery video player and the ES media player can play the video but not the sound. (The media player can play a MPEG-4 demo with sound.)
StrongSwan VPN Client (IPSec) -- This is set up (client and server) on the tablet and it works excellently including IPv6 payloads. But on CM10 (Galaxy SIII) it cannot find the private key (and neither can either browser for X.509 web auth).
These apps have competitors and I should look carefully at what's available and maybe switch.
Andoku (Sudoku game) -- This game is very good, but there's an ad support issue that I need to resolve.
Either Astro File Manager (with Bluetooth add-on) or ES File Manager. The latter includes FTP, SCP, OBEX clients. So far, ES File Manager is working well, including Bluetooth FTP and SFTP.
Periodic Table -- There are a lot of these and I need to see if others are better than the one I have.
Periodic Droid by Jorge Cevallos -- no ads! 55 properties for each element. Copy property to clipboard. Includes isotopes with abundance, halflife, spin, decoay mode. Reviewer says: have to scroll in main table, awww. Looks like a good one.
Simple Spreadsheet by Tomahawk -- There are now competitors and I need to pick.
Kingsoft Office 5.5.5 (free) -- Complete office suite. Does not have a paid version and there is no sign of ads. What is their business model? Need to try it on the test spreadsheet. It can create/edit/perform text documents, Microsoft Word, Power Point, and Excel spreadsheets.
I was able to make my power of two spreadsheet successfully. I also successfully made an expense and dutiable items log. An advantage of this program is that it can import and export documents in Microsoftish formats.
How do you
close a document? On the start page it shows a set of thumbnails
which you can click to open a recently used document.
These are just graphics; the documents are not open. Hit Erase
Record
and the center thumbnail will be removed; the document
will remain.
Solitaire Collection -- I'm annoyed by this program's ads during game play, so I'm going to look at competitors.
Solitaire Classic by CandyMobile (semi ad supported) -- Klondike 1 or 3 card, Spider, Freecell. Good reviews. There is an ad on the start screen but not during game play. Start screen is portrait only but the game screen can rotate.
Firefox by Mozilla -- On Gingerbread I tried Firefox Mobile and it
was awful. However, the Microsoft find my phone
service kills
webkit-based browsers, so I gave Firefox another try, and now it's
pretty decent. I'm thinking of switching to it as my regular browser.
However, it is still not capable of presenting a user's X.509
certificate to authenticate to a website. Update: Sometime, probably
CyanogenMod-10.2.x, this started working.
Music player -- DeaDBeeF is OK, but I decided to switch to Apollo
for playing back Icecast streams. But what about local music? Of
course Apollo can play it -- but it shuffles the M3U playlist and I
can't figure out how to make it desist. Update: if you hit the
shuffle
icon on the player controls it will stop shuffling
and will persist in that state. Yay!
Apollo can perform local tracks (ogg or mp3) and M3U playlists,
and also Shoutcast. It cannot do a remote M3U (when last tested).
The best way to do Shoutcast is, in Firefox find a URL to the stream.
Long press on it; you get a menu including Open with an App
.
Choose that one. You may need to pick between Apollo and Google's
Play Music (always). Give Apollo a little time to start up and buffer
the stream. Once Apollo is playing, you can hit the home
button, i.e. iconify Apollo.
The following is kept for historical interest. My requirements for the player are that it can play Ogg Vorbis media, since all my music is encoded in this way, and that it can handle my M3U playlists.
I found this guide to Android music players by Nick Fury (2012-10-16). Among the reviewed players that meet my requirements Astro Player seemed initially to have the nicest UI, but when I added albums to the music folder I couldn't figure out how to get it to recognize the new material.
The other useful player was MortPlayer Music by Mirko Schenk.
I really don't like the UI, but ugly and working wins over pretty and
useless. It has a small advertisement at the bottom of some of the
pages (not the now playing
page). Here is the procedure to
use this player:
Specific issues for which I hope to find an app:
Mounting the 32Gb ext3/ext4 SD card. CyanogenMod wouldn't automount it. Here's the issue; I'm not sure if this is specific to CyanogenMod-10.1 or is a general feature of Android 4.2.x. It never automounts the second partition of a card, only the first one, which therefore must cover the entire card. A preformatted card will have a VFAT filesystem and a partition type of 0x0b (VFAT) or 0x0c (VFAT LBA), and it will be automounted. If you put a Linux filesystem on it such as ext4, it will not be automounted. But if you change the partition type to 0x83 (Linux), at last it will be automounted.
Stock Recovery only knows how to read from a VFAT filesystem. Modded Recovery such as ClockworkMod Recovery are believed to be able to read any filesystem supported by the kernel, but I have never tempted fate and tested this.
Linux incubus. I'm using DebianKit, see links above.
In the New, Improved Play Store app, to find the list of your apps, specifically those having a pending update, in the top bar click on the download icon, an inverted T, next to the search icon (magnifying glass).
A reviewer's comment on DropBear SSH Server II: he had to copy the binaries to /system/xbin. Also to make sftp work, he had to create /usr/libexec and then symlink sftp-server (where?) to /system/xbin/sftp_server. DropBear worked fine for me out of the box.
Is there an app for IPSec? Actually there are several. Showing only the free ones.
Samsung AnyConnect by Cisco Systems. Several variants. Intended for use with a Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance which requires a Mobile License. Doesn't say if it will work with a generic IPSec server. Forget this one.
Express VPN by ExpressVPN. This is a trial version, and is intended for use with a non-free collection of partner sites; it sounds like it's intended for the Chinese market. Forget this one.
StrongSwan VPN Client. Uses IKEv2 key exchange. Does password auth as well as RSA certificates. Algos: AES-CBC, AES-GCM, SHA1, SHA2. No elliptic curves (yet). Can do IPv6-in-IPv4. This one is installed and working.
Air Control Lite -- A new game, haven't tried it yet.
AndroidVNC -- It works but is not my favorite way to interact with my servers.
CIFSManager -- See CIFS on Android for experiences (not wonderful) with this software.
DSP Manager (from CyanogenMod) -- You can boost audio bass and stuff like that.
Photo Editor -- iPad has such an app intrinsically, and in fact the photo editor was what attracted my wife to buy an iPad. This one looks useful, but I haven't actually tried it yet.
Random Mahjongg -- A game, pretty fun.
Science -- The dedicated app for downloading and reading issues. The app is dumb: you need to keep the machine awake while downloading, and something (I'm assuming it's the server) is awfully slow, and the issues are stuffed with a lot of garbage or are poorly compressed.
Skype -- It works. I don't like Skype for political reasons but other people in this family do.
Spider -- Live wallpaper of an animated arachnid. Alice refused to use the tablet unless I got rid of the spider.
Here is a list of software which has my personal password configured in an easily stealable form, that needs to follow password changes on my UNIX account.
profile.
These apps are often used with a stored personal password, but I avoided the need to do so.
These apps store a password that differs from my UNIX password.
The default font is ant size. In Settings look for Default Font Size. I find that 20 is a good size on the tablet.
In Settings turn on the option to ask for a destination filename when doing scp. The default is to put it in /sdcard using the original filename.
While you're on a connection, long-press the screen and you will get a menu where you can toggle full screen mode, or set the font size. This is per connection.
To do a file transfer, double click on the screen and a title bar will appear for a moment. Hit the Menu icon (3 dots, upper right corner, this is on the ASUS stock Jelly Bean image). There are choices for uploading or downloading files. You have to type in the path names; you don't get a GUI file browser.
Sometimes it would connect using IPv6 and sometimes it wouldn't. In that case I wrote out the IPv4 address explicitly.
Edit your account (see below for how to get to this page) and
de-select Store Password
.
When you intend to communicate, start the app. It will bloink and notify you, password required. (Notification style is configurable.)
In the top row there are three icon-oids: the Xabber logo, a droid
representing your identity, and your status (as text). Long-press on
the droid. Choose Edit Account
. Or you can hit the menu icon
(3 dots in lower right corner), Settings, XMPP Accounts, click on the
row for your account.
Click on Password. It shows a box filled with dots which are not just decoration, but appear to represent random garbage.
Double click on the dots, selecting all of them. Type your password, replacing them. Hit the OK button (Return just shifts focus to the OK button and you would need to press Return again.)
It will take a moment to connect and authenticate, then will bloink to announce that it's online.
To terminate the connection, hit the menu icon and then Exit. Your password will be forgotten. But likely if you don't exit but lose the connection, Xabber will try to reconnect using the password you gave.
This is intrinsic to CyanogenMod,
starting possibly in version 7. Go to Settings, the first section (Wireless
and Network), hit More
and it's the third item. Click it to get
to a page where you can configure it and then turn it on.
The tether is kind of useless on the tablet, which has no uplink possibilities, but I've used it extensively on my Samsung Galaxy SIII, letting the tablet connect to it, to test authentication and VPN tunnels coming in from the wild side. It doesn't eat battery too badly.
At last I have software that can do OBEX Push. To pair two devices. as you would need to do with a friend's pocket computer, do this (some of it is from memory):
Turn on Bluetooth on both machines. Flick down the notification bar, the right group for tablets, and hit the Bluetooth icon.
Then long-press the Bluetooth icon to get to the settings page.
If you need to rename your device use the menu (3 dots) in the upper right corner.
Decide who will be the initiator and who will be the responder.
Responder clicks on the row for his machine; it should then say
visible to all nearby devices
with a 2 minute timeout. Click
again to turn this off early.
Initiator clicks on Search for Devices
. The responder's
device should appear.
Initiator clicks on the row for the responder's device. The procedure here varies with the device type, but for a device with a keyboard it will ask for a 4-digit code which you make up on the spot, just to make sure that you have the correct partner.
Responder's machine should ask for the code. Type it in.
The machines will negotiate a 128-bit shared secret for AES (Rijndael) encryption, and will announce that they are paired.
Once the devices are paired (and Bluetooth is running and they are in range of each other), use this procedure to transfer an object using OBEX Push. The recipient's Bluetooth should be running before the object is sent.
This description is for sharing a generic file using ES File Explorer. Apps that handle objects that often are shared, such as Gallery, People or Calendar, will similarly have a menu choice for sharing and will follow generally the same procedure.
Find the file. Long press on its icon to select it.
In the bottom toolbar hit more
and pick share
.
It gives you a list of transport methods such as e-mail. Pick Bluetooth.
It shows a list of devices that have announced that they will accept OBEX. Pick the partner to which you want to send the file.
The recipient's machine will bloink. He should open the notification list and click on the OBEX notice. Tell it to accept the sending. You have about 60 seconds before the sender gives up.
On CyanogenMod-10 (and probably any recent Android version) the file lands in /sdcard/bluetooth/$filename, using the name on the sending host.
Now there appears a notification about Bluetooth downloads. Open it. Click on the row for the newly downloaded file. Assuming a mime-type is known for its extension, a list of apps will be shown that should be able to open it. Click on the appropriate one. It will open the file, and you can save it using the app's facilities.
If you cancel from the download list, the file will still be removed from the list (but not from storage), hiss, boo. I'm not sure when (if ever) the file is removed from /sdcard/bluetooth.
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