Fortysomething Geek

My last post on iPad apps got a good reception so I will follow up with a review on some Android "tablet" text/code editors. These editors are designed for writing code with syntax highlighting and more advance features than a simple notepad editor.
Some of these apps have code preview, FTP, and even SFTP integration.

The apps I will mention in this post are:
Touchqode , DroidEdit Pro , AndEdit HD , WebMaster's HTML Editor, Android Web Editor PRO , SilverEdit , and kEdit.

Rather than bore you with in-depth review on each and every app, I will highlight what I think in terms of good features and shortcomings.

I chose these apps due to their popularity and the touted "tablet" compatibilities. You don't need to use a tablet specific apps. In fact, there are some good phone apps that work.
However, I am believer in optimized interfaces.If you use a tablet,the experience should be more compelling than a blown-up phone app. Unfortunately, a majority of these apps are just that - blown up phone apps.
Well, you can also use phone apps and they may work for you. Phone Apps include Jota Text Editor , TextWarrior , 920 Text Editor and I will briefly mention them as well.

If I had to choose any apps out of this entire lot, it would be DroidEdit Pro or Touchqode. Both are highly rated and popular. Both have the important requirement of SFTP integration. That is a pre-requisite for me. There is no point in editing a server-side script locally off a SDcard or internal storage.

If I had to end this review, these are the two apps you only should look at.
I would give a slight preference over DroidEdit due to user interface. Touchqode feels too much like a blown up phone app in my opinion.

DroidEdit Pro Screenshots

Touchqode screenshots. As you can see, it still looks like a blown up phone app. Those buttons are extremely small. The app works fine on my phone but looks out of place on a larger screen.




Next, The only app that has a tablet feel is AndEdit. It supports a dual pane interface and you would easily mistaken it as a clone of an iPad app such as Texstastic. Unfortunately, that is all it has. It is rather buggy. Syntax highlighting is poor and there is no FTP/SFTP. Furthermore, it has no option of full screen text editing. The dual pane view is only good for selecting among files. It tries to be a clone of some iOS apps and ends up becoming an also-ran app.

AndEdit screenshots:


Bugs like these are annoying. Frozen panes and the apps tell you there are no open files. This happens after you try re-opening after a crash.


WebMaster's HTML Editor,SilverEdit, kEdit, and Android Web Editor Pro were pretty much lackluster. They felt like text editors with minor features like line numbering and additional buttons for brackets and curly braces.

kEdit. In addition to the lack of SFTP, the poor syntax highlighting made this program irrelevant for me.


SilverEdit made me scratch my heads a few times. The UI doesn't work too well on a tablet.



I didn't feel like Android Editor Pro added any value vis-a-vis the competition. And look at that UI!


In fact, I prefer the free phone apps such as Jota, TextWarrior, 920 Text Editor. Unfortunately, they also lack FTP/SFTP integration which rules out their utility.

Still, I would keep at least one text editor on hand. I figure I could use some other apps to get my files but that is rather clumsy and requires clicking in and out of apps.

920 Text Editor
TextWarrior


Jota


In general, these apps suffer from Android quirks. Yes, I call them quirks. These apps are designed with "responsive layout." Meaning the UIs are designed for multiple resolution and are highly adaptive
( http://developer.android.com/training/multiscreen/adaptui.html ).
Developers need to take lesson from these guys on Design principles and guidelines for Android apps (http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2012/07/26/android-design-tips).

The problem with the stale responsive approach is you get a lot of wasted space. Incredibly small interface elements on high DPI tablets. Buttons tend to be small. List menus require a toothpick or stylus to click. For example in SilverEdit, I had a hard time clicking on files in the file manager. I would mistakenly open up an excel file instead of a javascript file in my Downloads folder. This would trigger a crash every time.



Then you have mismatch elements. Keyboards covering up menus. For example, trying to do a search-n-replace in DroidEdit is a frustrating exercise. I would end up switching orientation from landscape to portrait to reveal the "Find menu." In fact, in numerous instances, I had to switch orientation for various reasons. The ridiculously large virtual keyboards (I've tried many different keyboards) would take up a lot of wasted space that I would often end up going portrait.


To fix the problem above, you need to flip the tablet to portrait mode which is counter intuitive when you use a bluetooh keyboard in a case or dock.

First, none of these apps support version control (I haven't found one on iOS either). But the important thing is none of them support organization by projects. If you are connecting and downloading from various SFTP servers, you can easily get lost on which files belong to which server. In my testing, I was simply downloading various source code and it got confusing to which files belong to what source. Since many of these apps are "blown-up" phone apps, none of them offered a dual-column file manager that would allow you to organize your downloads. A better option is the ability to clone a folder from a remote website locally. Hence, you would probably end up using another FTP/SFTP client to organize your files. In the end, it is a bit counter-intuitive and gives a user a cumbersome experience. However, if you are only editing off one server (say a personal website), then an application like DroidEdit Pro would work.

I would also caution that you should always check to see if you are working locally or remotely. Some of these apps open up remotely and save remotely at the same time. If you lose a data connection or something happens, you can accidently delete a live file. Hence, I prefer some sort of cloning/downloading to a staging area. You can always "save-as" to a local folder but the UIs in many of these apps are not that informative or intuitive to tell you. Never hit the "save" button and always use the "save-as."


Last but not least, the most important thing is stability. All of these apps inhibited stability problems especially when loading large files such as javascript frameworks, libraries and minified files. Loading up the main jquery framework file would often result in a crash in many of the apps. They would attempt to syntax highlight and simply crash. Fortunately, some have the option of turning off syntax highlighting.

My conclusion. Android tablet apps have a long way to go. But if you had to choose, some of these may work for you.

Links:
Touchqode
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.touchqode.editor

DroidEdit Pro
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aor.droidedit.pro

WebMaster's HTML Editor
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.welant.webmaster

Android Web Editor PRO
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.webedit.app
Lite version:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.webeditlite.app

SilverEdit Lite
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.silver.edit

SilverEdit
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dictatordesigns.silveredit

kEdit Lite
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kkteam.kedit
kEdit Pro
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kkteam.KEditPro

AndEdit HD
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.vbs.andedit

Phone Apps

Jota Text Editor
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.sblo.pandora.jota

TextWarrior
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.myopicmobile.textwarrior.android

920 Text Editor
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jecelyin.editor

Keyboards

Hacker's Keyboard
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard&hl=en

Interesting impulse gadget buy. A mini PC the size of a big USB stick.

And it is running Classic MacOS 7.5 via minivmac!

With a simple adapter and bluetooth, you can convert a Samsung Galaxy Nexus into a full desktop computer.


You will need a micro USB to MH/HDMI adapter, a HDMI compatible monitor, and a set of bluetooth keyboard and bluetooth mouse. I use the Apple keyboard and bluetooth mouse.


This will basically mirror everything you see on the phone to the monitor. If you don't have an HDMI monitor, you can use a HDMI to DVI adapter like the one I use on this 24" Samsung.



The screen res will be what is on the phone, 1280x720. Some apps don't work quite right due to the fact they require or shift from landscape to portrait mode. For example, pulling up Netflix's movie browser looks like this:




Overall, it is a silly demo to show off your friends and colleagues. Running ICS on a large monitor is not really that intuitive when you consider the oversized icons and UI elements designed for a 4.65" phone. The phone should have outputted a 1920x1080 display which would have been my preference.
Now, if this could dual boot into something like Ubuntu, then I can see the value of it. The original Atrix and their webtop was a very promising idea in 2011. Since, it the concept and execution has sort of fizzled into obscurity.

One last note, the MHL adapter requires power. You will need to use the existing micro-usb power adapter to power it. This sorts of kills the whole idea of using the Galaxy Nexus as a portable presentation machine. In comparison, the iPhone 4S and iPad 2/3 can be docked with a 30pin-HDMI adapter and run on battery alone.






LINK for MHL adapter: http://www.amazon.com/Menotek-Adapter-IMPROVED-Protocol-Sensation/dp/B005F9W6DU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1342718283&sr=8-3&keywords=MHL+adapter+nexus

Back at Google I/O, Bluestacks made some headlines that announced you could run Android apps on a Mac.I took it for a spin and have something to report.





It is an early alpha so they have to work some kinks out. They have a curated set of 17 apps such as Facebook, twitter, flipboard and Angry Birds. I tried it and quickly removed it. It took 15 seconds to load which is way slow if you are running an SSD with 2 second Photoshop launches.
You can't install any other apps besides the curated apps.

It seems to be an emulator that does ARM binary to x86 translation. I heard of another similar project and decide to find out if it had a better experience.

BuilDroid is that project. Long time Mac users know what Rosetta did for the Mac OSX transition and this takes a similar approach. If you remember, Rosetta did binary PowerPC translation for x86 and it ran reasonably well. This is the same idea but with a different architecture, ARM.
BuilDroid uses the "ARM binary emulator" from Intel ("libhoudini") to make this all work. Libhoudini is what will help Intel's Medfield ATOM platform enter the Android space.
This wan an genius idea to hack "libhoudini" and make an Android distro that runs inside VirtualBox.




The results? Well, VirtualBox booted the whole OS in less than 5 seconds vs Bluestack's 15 seconds.
You can install Google Play and download Google Apps and other applications from the market. I downloaded various apps and they work reasonably well. It has the full Ice Cream Sandwich OS with settings, notifications, and soft menu. In comparison, Bluestack is just an app launcher.

In fact, BuilDroid is faster than launching and running the Android SDK's simulator builds.

Both are early stage developments but I am leaning toward BuilDroid. I haven't tried BuilDroid on another operating system but I assume it will work just fine since it is running in VirtualBox.

Links:
http://bluestacks.com/
http://www.buildroid.org/

In my first multi-monitor display post, I wrote about using the Retina iPad 3 as a high-res portable multi-monitor display for a laptop. Today, I am going to show you the same software running on Android's Ice Cream Sandwich with the wonderful Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 7.0" Android tablet. It also works with other Android devices such as the Nexus.

Avatron makes the same Air Display available for Android on the Google's Play Store. I was looking for something similar to my iOS and I hit jackpot. The desktop client is the same and the app works and feels like the iOS counterpart. The client app works on both Windows and Mac OSX. Below are screenshots of it running in Mac OSX.

Set up is the same as before. You select your device (s) and adjust your secondary display arrangement.



And voila. Wi-Fi palette monitor; using the Galaxy Tab 2 as a secondary portable monitor. You can use the touch-screen as a virtual mouse as well.



A few things to note. With Ice-Cream Sandwich, you don't get the full screen. The virtual soft keys (home/back/menu) and task bar still exists. Hence, you lose some resolution compared to an iOS device.

1024x600 on the Galaxy Nexus
1024x540 on the Galaxy Tab 2
2048x1536 on the iPad 3 in Retina mode. (1024x768 other mode).

The only missing feature from the iOS version is virtual keyboard. Both have virtual mouses but with the iPad, you can pull up the tablet's keyboard to enter text or type within apps inside your Air Display monitor.

Next, the other issue is the inability to power multiple "Air Display" devices; meaning I am unable to use all my devices as 4th or 5th monitors at the same time.
I have some DisplayLink usb powered monitors and I can daisy chain up to 6 DisplayLink monitors to my MacBookPro. It would be nice to have a similar feature with Air Display.

Lastly, the refresh is rather laggy and slow. This is expected since the redraw is taking place over WIFI. The speed of your refresh depends on the speed of your WIFi network and your devices. Both my Samsung devices, in general, have poor WIFI connections. This doesn't bother me because I use these monitors as palette displays to show non-motion material. I use them mostly for displaying error logs, mail, and terminal windows which do not need fast refresh. Depending on your use case, this may not be ideal for you. Considering that the application cost 5,ドル the investment is low compared to buying and lugging extra monitors around.

And a word of advice. If you ever plan to use a WIFI monitor or even some sort of Remote Desktop (VNC/RDP/X11), always choose a solid color like dark grey for your background. It makes it easier on the refresh and redrawing.


Link: Air Display at Google's Play Store