On My Way

On My Way is an pretty cool Android application.  When you are going somewhere, and someone is expecting you, you can use On My Way.

When you launch On My Way, you can start sharing.  When you do that the application generates a url that you can share with people who are expecting you.  If they access that url, they will see an embedded map that shows your current location.

It would be very cool if you could also specify your destination in the app, so then the web page could also show your ETA.

My Movies for Android

A while ago, My Movies came out with an iPhone application that lets you sync the meta data of your movie collection to your phone.  This lets you see which movies that you own while you are out, so you can know whether you should rent or buy a movie.  This synchronization happens by the PC application syncing the collection to the My Movies online collection, and then your phone syncs from there.

They just released an Android application that has the same functionality.  This is yet another benefit of using My Movies to manage my movie collection.

Springpad

I have been using Remember the Milk and Evernote to keep track of things.  Remember the Milk is a great app to manage task lists, and Evernote is an application where notes, pictures or documents can be stored.  Both of these applications synchronize with cell phones, so you can access your data when you are not connected.

One way that I have been using these apps for is to keep track of things that I see or hear about will want to get later.  For example, when I see a video game, that I don't necessarily want to buy when it first comes out, I want to keep track of it so I can add it to my Goozex list later.  Also when interesting movies come out in the theater, I write them down, so I can remember to add them to my Netflix queue.

The problem with using Remember the Milk and Evernote is that, those entries are not typed.  So when I want to take a look at the items that I indicated some preference for, I need to remember what the item was from the name.  When I want to get one of the items, I need to manually do a search on various sites to get the item.

This post mentions Springpad, which looks like a very promising application.  I downloaded the application on my phone, and created an account, and was easily able to add items.  The best feature of Springpad, is once you add an item, it offers contextual actions.  For example, for a movie, you can purchase a ticket, purchase it from Amazon, stream it from Amazon or Netflix.  I also like the fact that I can choose to make my list public, and you can "follow" other people's list

There are a few things that I don't like, or I think could be done better.

1. When you create an account, and add items, you start getting emails when some other Springpad user adds something that is in you list. I would want to opt-in to receiving the emails.  (You can opt out)


2. By default, certain types of items in your list are public.  Once you add the items, you have to modify the sharing preference for each item already created


3. I don't see why you would use Springpad for contacts or tasks.  I think that there are better tools for those data types.


4. In the application on the phone, I would like it if it wasn't necessary to specify a data type to perform a search.

My Movies Upgrade

I finally got around to upgrading my installation of My Movies to the latest version.  There are some new interesting features that were added:

• My Movies Online Collection - Allow you to make information of your collection of movies available online. (Here is my collection)


• My Movies for iPhone - Allow you to sync to your iPhone for offline access to your movie meta data

I do wish they would do an Android application, or a mobile version of their Online Collection

Connecting blog to Google Buzz

This post on Google Buzz describes the steps required to connect your blog to Google Buzz, and have posts automatically imported into your Buzz feed.

This plugin for WordPress makes it very easy to claim your blog, without having to modify the template manually.

Deleted foursquare account

In my spring cleaning of my social networking accounts, I have decided to delete my foursquare account.  I tried both the iPhone and android foursquare applications and, personally, I don't find a use for it.  I don't really want to manually "check-in" to a place, just for the purpose of the check-in.

I haven't used Yelp's check-in feature, but I could see it being more useful than foursquare's, as I assume I could add a review at the same time.  Unfortunately, Yelp's check-in feature is not available in their Android application.

VaultPress and WordPress backups

VaultPress is in interesting WordPress plugin/service.  You install a plugin and then their services offers the following features:

• Automatic backup of your content that is hosted in WordPress


• Automatic patching of your WordPress install

I think that the automatic backup of content is interesting, especially since the backup happens as soon as you add content.  I am not sure about the automatic patching of the WordPress installation.  I would be concerned about the plugin patching the WordPress installation to one that has a problem, without my knowledge.  For example, WordPress 2.9 had a problem with certain version of the curl library in PHP, and the 2.9.1 version fixed it.  When performing the patch manually, you have the opportunity to make sure that there aren't any reported problems.

Also, I am interested in seeing how a restore would work with this plugin.  For example, if my database got corrupt, how would I restore.  Also, how many previous revisions are kept in the backup.  Since they are saving any change made in the WordPress installation to the backup, this could also mean that any accidental/malicious deletion would also be automatically propagated.

Currently, I am just using the WordPress Database Backup plugin, and just having it email me the dumps of the database tables.  If I need to restore, I would just need to restore the database from the backup that I want.  The things that are not being backed-up in this process are any uploaded photos or the installation itself, but that is covered my my hosting provider.

[via Matt Cutts]