Anthony Tietjen

You can use an Android phone without having to be on a two-year contract and without having to pay for an expensive data plan. The Benefits Inexpensive monthly cost for an Android phone. The Drawbacks You have to pay more to buy a phone outright. You don't get as much data. No nights/weekends. The Steps Purchase a Verizon Android phone without a contract. I suggest getting a used one on an auction website or find one on a classified ads website. Register with PagePlusCellular . Sign up for a prepaid plan that fits your needs. (There are many pricing options available, but there is no yearly contract.) As far as I know, PagePlus doesn't officially provide support for people who use Android phones on their service, but I have used successfully used the following with their service: Droid 1, Droid Eris, Droid Incredible, Droid 2 and Samsung Fascinate. I was not able to get the HTC Thunderbolt (which is a 4G phone with a SIM card) to work on PagePlus.

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Yesterday I decided I wanted to get at least something out on the Android Market. So I put together a very very simple app called Shopping Assistant. Currently its only function is to help you figure out cost per ounce while you are out shopping. This is helpful for knowing if something is really a good deal or not. Shopping Assistant is a simple app, but in the first day there were 15 downloads. The app is currently free. Perhaps someday I will add more features. The ADT Plugin for  Eclipse made it very easy to export the app, sign it and get it ready for upload to the Android Market . I used the Dalvic Debug Monitor to take the screenshots. You can find Shopping Assistant in the Android Market.

I listed my Android app "Auto Respond By Text" on  GetJar.com and it went active on October 14th. Two days later when I checked at about 5:05 PM it was showing that there were 18 downloads. Now, 16 days later, there have been 55 downloads. I may have contributed to one (if any) of the downloads. Because "Auto Respond By Text"  was made using App Inventor for Android, it isn't setup correctly to be able to publish via the Android Marketplace. When I tried to upload it to the Android Marketplace I got an error about the icon. So, as an alternative I have listed it on GetJar.com. Download Auto Respond By Text

I noticed that the apps I was making using App Inventor for Android were ending up being about 4MB in file size. So I decided to find out what size an app is when you use the Android SDK instead. It turns out that there is a considerable difference. A simple Hello World app made using the SDK is only 20KB, whereas one made using App Inventor for Android is 3.55 Mb. I also found out that the startup time for the two Hello World apps differed. On my phone, the app made using the SDK opened maybe 1 1/2 seconds faster than the one made using App Inventor for Android. See below for more details. Made with Android SDK File size: 20.00KB Startup: Maybe less than a second Made with App Inventor for Android File size: 3.55MB Startup: About 2 seconds

TinyWebDB is a component in App Inventor for Android that lets your app communicate with a web page in order to set or retrieve values, rather than storing them on the phone itself. I wanted to know what the TinyWebDB component sends to the web page when it tries to set or retrieve values, so I used Kodingen this morning to write a PHP script that takes the form fields and values sent to the page and writes them to a file. Here is what I found: TinyWebDB.StoreValue sends these parameters: tag value TinyWebDB. GetValue sends this parameter: tag So if you write your own PHP page for TinyWebDB to connect to, you can know if TinyWebDB is trying to store a value if the "value" key exists in the $_POST array. If the "value" key doesn't exist in the $_POST array then you know that TinyWebDB is only trying to retrieve the value for the given tag. As an alternative to using the method outlined by Google , you could use TinyWebDB with your own script written in an...

"Auto Respond By Text" is an Android app I made by using App Inventor for Android . This app is a tool that will send an automatic response to whoever who sends you a text while it is enabled. It was inspired by Google's example app called " No Text While Driving ". After seeing that idea, I made mine from scratch and I added much enhancement. Here is what mine offers beyond the example provided by Google: Choose from a list of pre-defined responses. Customize your own list of responses. Enable or disable the auto-response feature. Set a timeout so that it will disable itself automatically after a customizable period of time. Sleek user interface. Thanks goes out to MakeUseOf.com for helping me figure out how to take screenshots of Android apps without having to root the phone. Download Now