LostCarPark's Journal

I've been trying out various apps on my Android phone.

First off there's Eljay, a LiveJournal posting app. It'sa big improvement on posting from the website when on the move, as the LiveJournal site is a bit bloaty and slow to load, and I just don't trust it to not refresh when you're about to post and lose everything. Eljay will save your post as a draft on a regular basis so that if disaster happens it's easy to retrieve a recent version. It seems trip cover pretty much the full range of posting options.

Sadly out doesn't let me read my friends page or post comments, so it falls short of my dream LiveJournal app.

The other android add-on that I'm really enjoying is ShapeWriter, a really cool keyboard replacement utility. It gives you an onscreen keyboard, but instead of tapping out words, you trace the letters of a word in a single movement. This is remarkably efficient, as the keyboard recognises patterns, so even if you miss the exact letters, it can usually figure out what you meant.

I've been using both of these for this post, and with ShapeWriter I could see myself going for a touchscreen only phone, something never believed I'd say.

More fun android toys will here soon.

Edit: How embarrassing! I didn't notice that ShapeWriter managed to turn "of" in the title into "PhD". I suspect it works best on a device with a slightly bigger screen.

LiveJournal has a pretty neat "almost Web 2.0" feature that it now saves what you've typed every couple of minutes so that if your PC crashes or your browser goes bananas (as they sometimes do), that the post you've spent hours typing doesn't disappear into the ether. It seems to be working a little too well for me, though, as it just offered to restore the post that I successfully posted last night. Still, better safe than sorry.

This is the sort of incremental development, adding useful features to an existing site that I approve of. Unlike certain other blogging sites that make a big thing of Web 2.0, but turn out to be big on style but somewhat weak on substance.

The next Web 2.0 add-on I'd like to see is a helper for the Tags box, also on the "Update Journal" page. This could be modelled on the address drop-down in GMail, which shows you people's email addresses as you type. When I start to type, I'd like a drop-down list to show a mix of tags I've used that start with the letters I type, combined with the most popular tags on LJ that start with those letters. As I type, the list would further refine itself. There should be something to distinguish tags I've used before from tags I haven't (perhaps colour), and something to indicate how much tags have been used (perhaps font size or a percentage bar). If I select a tag, it would complete it and add a comma so I can start typing another. I think this would be a relatively easy feature to add, but it would make organising posts a lot easier, and help avoid problems like some of my posts being tagged "Doctor Who" while others have "Dr Who".

I am writing a Web 2.0 app of my own, so I can see the point of using the techniques where they are useful and avoiding creating a load of unnecessary hype around it. Web 2.0 is useful, but it is not magic and it won't make your life complete (at least not on it's own).

Perhaps we should call sensible sites like LiveJournal "Web 1.75".