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In my preparation for the BlogHer conference (which was awesome!), I wanted to put together several ways to share my contact information with the people I would meet. I have traditional paper business cards, of course. But since I’m a digital geek girl, I also poked into my contact card on my phone and looked into ways I could share it. I assumed that there would be an easy, straightforward way to do this. Sadly for us all, I was wrong.
Sharing contact information via a smartphone is one of those things that many people assume is a basic, standard task. Going all the way back to the days of Palm Pilot supremacy and the rise of BlackBerry, the ability to “beam” your info to another person was a nice and expected perk of having a mobile, business-focused device. I remember that the process didn’t always work on the first try, but it was there and was easy.
Fast forward to now. Last week I went into my Android phone’s contacts, found my contact card, hit the Menu button and tapped “Send My Contact Info.” The menu that came up informed me that I could send via MMS, Mail, or Bluetooth. You might think: oh, that sounds reasonable. Let me explain why it’s not.
MMS is multimedia text messaging; thus, I’d send my contact info as a vCard attachment to an SMS. Not all phones/services support MMS. I use Google Voice for texting. It does not support MMS. So I can’t use that.
The Mail option is what I wanted… except Mail does not indicate the Gmail app, it indicates the Mail app for non-Gmail accounts. I don’t have any accounts set up there because I use Gmail on my Android phone. In order to send via my Gmail account, I would have to set up that account in the Mail app then set it to not notify me when messages come in because Gmail is already doing so. Convoluted? Yes.
Bluetooth is what people meant by “beaming” in the past, but connecting to another phone via Bluetooth isn’t always straightforward. Try doing it in a conference hallway when you’re on the way to the next panel and the person you want to send to doesn’t know how the Bluetooth works on their phone. Not ideal.
So really, my phone offered little in the way of easy or viable options. Why?
The heart of the problem lies with Android. Apparently, there is no native option for sending contact or vCard data in the OS at all[1]. How is my phone able to do so? It’s all down to the HTC Sense user interface skin. Android skins do more than just change the way icons look and offer fancy widgets, they also provide deep interface functions which are sometimes fixes for things Android doesn’t provide.
Who should I shake my fist at more, Android for not having a native contact sharing function or HTC for not realizing people might want to share contacts via their Gmail accounts? I’m inclined to be a little angrier at HTC.
That’s because I also happen to have a Samsung phone. I don’t use it as a phone, only as a MID/PDA. It connects to Wi-Fi just fine, so I could send my contact info from that device. I checked, and lo Samsung’s TouchWiz UI does realize that users might want to send via Gmail and offers that option. My problem is solved.
That doesn’t solve the overall issue though, does it? It also doesn’t help if I’m not near a free Wi-Fi signal. And my HTC phone is my main device; I want to be able to share from there. That’s when I started to look for alternatives.
I’ll share what I found so far in another post. Right now I’d like to know: how do you share digital contact information from your phone? Is it easier on iOS or webOS? Have you found the perfect app for the purpose? Let me know in the comments.
Notes
- This is what I gleaned via research and appears to be true at least up until Android 2.2. Some forum threads suggest that this function is available in Gingerbread (2.3), but I have not had a chance to check this myself. [↩]
Last week I went to a writing retreat with several writing types in a converted barn somewhere in Connecticut. It was glorious. Five days where our only job was to write and our only sin to procrastinate.
There are many ways to procrastinate in situations such as this, and a big one is undoubtedly by faffing around on the Internet. To combat this great evil, my friend Alaya Dawn Johnson employs a Firefox extension called LeechBlock, which allows one to set specific times when the browser simply will not allow you to access any web pages if that’s what you want. It’s very customizable — you can set it to block or allow only certain websites, or block the whole the ‘net, block during specific times on specific days, limit you to, say, 10 minutes out of every hour, or limit you to a certain amount of time on certain websites. So, if you need the wider web for research but need to stay off Facebook and Twitter, you can make it so. There are even more robust block options that keep the more tech-savvy amongst us from going around the block by disabling the add-on or something similar.
I know some of you reading this are thinking: “Why go through all that? Why not just have discipline and not look at the web?” It’s easy to say such things, not so easy to put it into practice. Besides, not all of us have wills of iron. There’s nothing wrong with employing some technological help in these cases.
I’ll admit that I’m completely guilty of messing around on the Internet when I’m supposed to focus on writing. I used to dismiss cafes for satellite writing/freelancing if they didn’t have free wireless. Now I’m trying to build a list of places without wireless just so I won’t get tempted. But even in places without Wi-Fi I’m in trouble because now I have a smart phone. And not only does my phone access the web, it’s also a mobile hotspot.
Leaving my phone at home when I go out writing isn’t an option, so I went looking for something like LeechBlock but for Android phones. I found a few, but the only one that didn’t have a lot of issues was StudioKUMA AirPlane Scheduler, which turns Airplane Mode (no cell, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi radio) off at a specified time, then off again automatically. The major drawback is that it’s not designed to keep you away from the web, just to save battery, so there are no restrictions from turning Airplane Mode off or anything. However, sometimes having willpower just requires a little bit of restriction to remind you that you’re supposed to be working, not obsessively checking your notifications.
What tools do you use to keep yourself from procrastinating and foster more laser-like focus?
A few months ago I started using Scrivener as a writing tool because I was going to review it for Laptop. In order to try it I had to borrow one of our MacBook Pros because the program is only for OS X, not Windows. This normally would have been enough to keep me from caring, but all of the writers I know who use the program absolutely love it and would never give it up for anything. This program is so good that several friends have actually switched to Mac just to use it.
Now that I’ve used Scrivener I can definitely say that it’s great and I love using it. (A fuller review will come, as soon as the story I was writing it for is taken off hold.) I don’t know that I would switch to a Mac for it. I like my netbook, for one thing. And I don’t have money to spend on a $1,000+ computer for just one purpose.
There is another alternative, though. You could always turn a netbook into a Mac.
How, you ask? Hackintoshing! This age-old process of fiddling with OS X until it will install on a non-Apple system wasn’t invented for netbooks, but has definitely found a slew of new adherents in the past couple of years. And since Apple is determined not to give the people what they want, the people will have to get it themselves.
Used to be that Hackintoshing required a lot of dedication, forum-lurking, and some soldering skills. But a new website called MyMacNetbook aims to make the process a bit less opaque. Right now there are a few step-by-step guides for some systems, but the real goodies lurk in the compatitility chart. This is where you’ll find a long list of netbooks and the hardware features that work with OS X out of the box. You’ll note that the MSI Wind is about the perfect hackintoshing netbook.
Writers who’re jonesing for some Scrivener but don’t have the money for a Mac but do have the money for a netbook, this is your best bet. And if you’re a Mac lover who longs for the portability of the 10-inch form factor, now you don’t have to pine (or settle for an iPad). Many of the netbooks that work without too much fiddling are older, so you can probably find them at a deep discount these days.
I’m conducting a bit of a survey and I’ll need your help. It’s all about Firebox, the browser I love, and how it breaks my heart every day. Do you love Firefox? Then please help me with an intervention.
If you have Firefox open now and you’re running Windows, go to your Task Manager[1] and click on the Processes tab. Look for the process called firefox.exe and make a note of the number in the Mem Usage column[2]. Then go to your Firefox toolbar, click Help, then About Mozilla Firefox and make a note of the current version you’re running. Then come here and post this in the comments along with the number of tabs (or tabs and windows) you currently have open. Would also help if you said which OS you’re running.
Update: Adam provides instructions for Mac: you can find the memory usage by opening Activity Monitor (in utilities), looking for Firefox in the Process Name column, and seeing what the Real Memory usage is.
Eric provides Ubuntu instructions: you can check out the memory usage under System > Administration > System Monitor, but you’ll have to convert the stats from MiB.
You don’t have to restart your computer or browser or anything like that. I just want to get a snapshot of how much memory Firefox uses for different people. The more data I can collect, the better. I’ll start:
Memory Usage: 920,200K | 11 tabs | Firefox 3.5.7 | Windows XP
Yes, that memory usage is real. Remember the days when Firefox would only use around 300,000K? Or even the long ago when 100,000 was reasonable? Ah, nostalgia.
I showed you mine, now show me yours.
Notes
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