Pro Software

I know I just wrote a post about how Mighty’s ROM was so much better than Juicy’s, but the ROM war continues and Juicy just released a new ROM (4.5.5) for the Sprint Diamond. It has all sorts of new, super-cool features that put it a few notches above Mighty’s latest ROM.

If you want this ROM (Juicy 4.5.5), but aren’t sure how to flash your phone, you may want to check out my How To Unlock, Flash the Sprint Touch PRO guide. Note: If you want to know how to flash the Diamond, do not follow the explicit instructions that I wrote on that post. It’s the same process, but if you download and flash to the ROM that I point to in that post, it will jack your phone up – and that’s not a good thing.

What I love about Juicy’s new ROM:

- Facebook app

I never thought I would see the day. This app has pretty much all the bells and whistles you could ever want out of a Windows Mobile Facebook app. Now someone needs to whip up a cool Twitter app for Windows Mobile.

- New keyboard and tap-sensitive vibration

This was on the previous ROM, but it’s still worth mentioning. The new keyboard makes typing on the Diamond a lot more fun easy. The typing still sucks, but this keyboard + the touch vibration is a complete step up from the standard keyboard.

- TouchFLO upgrade

Now you can customize the options you want to see instead of having to scroll through all the crap you don’t want to see (i.e. the music player).

- Improved iconography

All of the icons seem to have had an overhaul. I’m not sure who made them or whatever, but they look good. It’s nice to see something new.

- In-call recorder app

Apparently you can now record calls while you’re talking. I haven’t used this app yet, but I look forward to posting some prank phone calls.

- Flip It App

I haven’t really used this either, but this will come in handy for screen rotation tweaking.

If you’re still using the Mighty ROM, you may want to Flash to this ROM. It’s definitely a step up from Mighty’s latest ROM.

For the record (and thanks to The Hat for letting me know): Apparently Juicy couldn’t keep up with the development of two ROM’s, so he got a new guy (JMZ Taylor) to pick up where he left off. Each new ROM gets Juicy’s stamp of approval though – which is good.

Well that sucks.

I was super excited when I saw Google’s Tweet that said:

Yes, it’s true: Google Voice is coming http://bit.ly/oIj55

And I was even more excited when I watch the teaser demo and saw what Google Voice could do:

But then I read:

Google Voice will be available initially to existing users of GrandCentral, a service we acquired in July of 2007.

and got depressed…

Too bad I didn’t have a GrandCentral account already.

Oh well. I guess I can wait a couple weeks. Good job though, Google. Looks like you hit another home run with this app. Keep em’ crankin’.

P.S. if you go to voice.google.com and try to sign in, it will say “invalid request”. In other words: don’t waste your time trying to.

[Google Blogspot post about Google Voice]

[Info about when Google Voice will be available to you]

[Tech Crunch's Two Cents]

It feels good to solve problems. If you’re having the error shown below, then the solution is no more than a few sentences away.

“An error occured while attempting to connect to your blog: Blog Server Error – Server Error 405 Ocurred XML-RPC services are disabled on this blog. An admin user can enable them at……/wp-admin/options-writing.php. You must correct this error before proceeding.”

It actually tells you how to solve the error right in the error display box shown above, but I was too impatient to read it, think about it, and do what it told me. So I googled and found this post, which gave me the info I’m going to share below.

Instructions For Fix

All you have to do is log in to your WordPress admin by going to yoursite.com/wp-admin or whatever it may be. Then expand the “settings” options and click “writing.” This will display a new page. Look for a setting that says:

XML-RPC

Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.

Tick the little box and “Save Changes.” You should be good to go. Try logging in again with Windows Live writer and you shouldn’t have any issues.

Bulleted instructions
(for people like me that are too lazy to read a paragraph)

1. Log in to your wordpress admin
2. Go to “Settings”
3. Click “Writing”
4. Find the XML-RPC option as shown above.
5. Tick the little box
6. “Save Changes”

P.S. Windows Live Writer is a sweet program that I would suggest you install on your PC if you blog. I’m writing this post right now and set it to auto-publish at 3/11/2009 @ 6:00 PM. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m posting so much all of a sudden? Usually when I get a new piece of software I use it, abuse it, then never use it again. I will probably repeat this same pattern with Windows Live Writer, but for now, I’m loving it and it gives me another reason to blog.

I posted earlier of my love for Windows Live Writer, but then I quit using it for a while – go figure. But they just updated the software and I’m giving it another go.

What I particularly like:

1 – Preview Before Publish: Unlike the WordPress backend admin panel, you can preview exactly what your blog post will look like while you’re writing it.

2 – One Time Login: To reemphasize the point above: you don’t have to log in to your account every time you want to blog. Simply set up the program once, then every time you feel like blogging just open the program and start writing. This is particularly good for me because the less hurdles I have to jump to write, the more I write – and that’s a good thing. At least it is for me.

3 – One-Click Publish: 1-click to publish button. Yeah, WordPress also has a one-click publish button too, but this one is cooler.

4 – Multiple Blog Support: I’ve got tons of blogs and I could really do without logging in to each blog every time I would like to grace my readers with my knowledge. This program is my new friend.

5 – Cool Icon/Logo: If you’re starting to use the quick-launch bar (with big icons) as much as I am on my new desktop, then you’ll agree with me that you can’t get enough cool icons.

There are a few other reasons why you should get the program, but if you’re not convinced yet, then I may as well quit trying. Just get the program and uninstall it if you don’t end up liking it.

Get Windows Live Writer

Have you ever worried about what you would do if you lost your smartphone? What about if it got stolen? Yeah, me neither. I’d just call up the insurance company and get a replacement (for $100 bucks….jerks). But a lot of people may not have that luxury. This is where Smartphone Tracker comes in to play. With Smartphone Tracker you don’t need to pay for insurance, all you need is a baseball bat to recover your stolen merchandise.

How it works:

You tell Smartphone Tracker your email address, you tell it a secret code, then if you ever lose your phone you text it that secret code. Your phone will then, in turn, email you back the coordinates of where it is hiding. It not only sends you the coordinates, but it sends you a link to Google Maps and pinpoints where the device is within a few feet. You can even see the house that it is located in with Google Street View. I don’t have any suggestions on how to get the device back besides taking a baseball bat to the thief’s window and extracting it that way, asking the thief nicely to give it back,  but I’m sure you can figure something clever out.

Get SmartPhone Tracker

Better yet, if you have a Diamond, you may as well flash your phone to the Mighty Rom. Mighty already includes the Smartphone Tracker app.

For the record: Mighty is better than Juicy in my opinion (at least as of  Mighty v.4.6)

If you need help installing this app, or setting it up, feel free to contact me or comment on this post.

First of all, SEO for Firefox is an excellent add-on and if you don’t have it already, I would highly recommend it – if you do any SEO work that is.

Secondly, when you first install the add-on, the defaults are set to display about a million things that you will most likely never need. This makes your search results take ages to load, and is enough to drive me out of my mind. The only thing I’m after most of the time is the little number under the results that says the Google Position (i.e. “#2” in the example image below).

Ever since I started using this add-on (about 4-5 months ago), I had all of the defaults turned on, so it took the search engine results forever to load. Call me noob, or what you will, but I just noticed that you could turn all of the extra crap off, so now my results load very fast and I’m able to get what I need done and get on with life.

Turn This:

Into This:

By Doing This:

Just “Hide All” then change the mode to “On-Demand” for the “Google position” item. Then set the delay to “0.” Who has time to delay?

Life is better now that I figured that out. Who would have thought that this add-on had “options”? lol.

If you’re not sure how to get to the options, just right click the “SEO” logo at the bottom right window of your Firefox screen.

Download SEO 4 Firefox

I’ve had my Sprint Diamond for a few months now, and I’ve tried out a few ROM’s. If you’re not sure what a ROM is, then you’ll probably want to find out if you have the Diamond. Sprint’s standard ROM is garbage. It’s slow, has terrible battery life, not very pretty, and has quite a few other problems that I’m too lazy to remember.

Anywho, over the last few months, I’ve been experimenting with different apps and ROMs for the phone. The Hat told me about Juicy’s ROM, and that used to be my favorite. Then Juicy got threatened by the big-wigs at Microsoft, so apparently he stopped developing his ROM. Between him getting shut down, and my progressive impatience with his latest ROM, I started looking for something new/better.

Enter the Mighty ROM. I had heard about the Mighty ROM before, but never tried it out. I’m glad I did. Perhaps you’ll disagree, but I think the Mighty ROM blows Juicy’s ROM out of the water for a few different reasons.

1. Sex Appeal (Not in a weird way) – From the Vista Orb (instead of the “Start” graphic) to the sleek black and white notification iconography, I think that this ROM is much better looking than what Juicy ever made.
2. Facebook Mobile Uploads  - If you have this ROM, you may not even be aware how easy the creator made it for  you to upload images to your Facebook profile. To get this set up, go to: Settings > All Settings > Connections > Account Manager > and put in your Facebook settings. It allows Myspace uploads too, but we all know that Myspace is lame compared to Facebook. After you have those settings in there, just take some pictures and click the little menu button (bottom right icon when you’re looking at the picture you want to upload) then tap “Upload to Facebook”. Cool, simple.
3. Opens .Jar and .Jad apps. – I spent a considerable amount of time figuring out how to open .Jar and .Jad apps. I finally figured out that I needed a Java emulator, but no matter which emulator I installed on my phone I always got some lame error (that was when I was on the Juicy ROM). Just flash the Mighty ROM to your phone and you can open all the .Jar, .Jad apps you can handle. This comes particularly in handy if you want to use any of the m.google.com apps.
4. Works with G-Alarm - I couldn’t get G-Alarm to work with my last ROM. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough, or I was just being noob, but I couldn’t get it to work. I’m definitely glad that G-Alarm works on the Mighty ROM because it has some sweet features. Now all I do in the morning is shake my phone to make it STFU (snooze). I can either shake it, flip it over, or turn the light on and it turns off. All cool features thanks to the sweet sensors the Diamond is equipped with.
5. Excellent battery life – Juicy had pretty decent battery life, but Mighty took battery life to a whole new level. This thing lasts forever. I won’t give any metrics because I’ve only had the Mighty ROM installed for a few days and I’m not very observant, but I can leave the phone in bed with me (not in a weird way), use it all the next day till like 5 (when I plug it in to use it for my internet) and the battery is only half gone (if that). Not to mention: when I used to tether my phone (use it for internet) with the Juicy ROM, it would barely put in the amount of power that it was taking out of it. Sometimes more. So I would end up unplugging my phone and it would have less battery life than when I plugged it in. Annoying. Mighty always keeps my battery life near 100%.
6. More free memory. Better use of resources. – When I had the Mogul my memory used was always around 80%. When I got the Diamond and put Juicy on it, it was always around 45-50% used. Now with the Mighty ROM, it’s usually around 35-50% depending on what I’m doing. Very quick.
7. Keeps programs open when you click the “x”. This is something I hated about Juicy: Every time I clicked the ‘x’ it would close the program. Even when I didn’t click the ‘x’ the program seeemed to magically close. This is particularly annoying when your browsing  the net and you switch to something else and when you go back to the internet, the page you were on disappeared. With mighty, I can click the ‘x’ and the program stays open in the background. Some people like when the programs auto-close, but it drives me crazy. Screw that. I opened the program for a reason, and if I want it closed I’ll close it in the task manager.
8. Has slide to answer. – If you get the S2U2 program, you can get the slide to unlock + slide to answer, but that’s just another program to put on your phone. With the Mighty ROM, you don’t need to install anything extra, slide to answer is already integrated. Looks cool too.

I would recommend the Mighty ROM to anybody who is looking to flash their Sprint Diamond.

Get the Mighty ROM | Get G-Alarm

If you have any questions about putting a new ROM on your phone, you can ask me. I’ll probably refer you to a forum thread somewhere and tell you that I’m not responsible if you screw up your phone. There are tons of tutorials on how to do it, but if you’d rather hear it from a trusted source (me. lol) then contact me and let me know that you’re a noob and need some pointers. I was once a noob, and still am with a lot of things…enough of my rambling. LMK if you need help.