Favorite Android Apps

Still putting the new phone through its paces, but so far I am mightily

impressed with Google Sky Map, Cardio Trainer, TeleNav GPS, and the

augmented reality program Layar. All of these are amazing, and any of

them is worth the cost and hassle of upgrading.



Of the bunch, Cardio Trainer comes closest to the 1990s vision of

wearable/ubiquitous computing. There's no visual interface, but thanks

to clever use of GPS, tower triangulation, accelerometers and compass,

the program knows where you are, where you've been, how fast you're

moving, how many steps you've taken, how big your stride is, how many

calories you're burning, etc. And it talks! It's basically a robotic

personal trainer, deejay, and exercise diary, and it does not get in the

way at all. Quite the reverse.



Layar reminds me a lot of the "Zee Spec" AR goggles people wore in

BLOOM. It uses the camera and viewfinder, so you look "through" the

phone at the real world, appended with various layers (or "layars") of

information. Some of the layers cost money, like Crime Finder, but

there are a bunch of free ones as well, like Bar Finder and Name That

Mountain. I'm also eager to try Google Goggles, a different

implementation of the same basic idea, but apparently I have to wait for

a June firmware update. Google Sky Map is another AR app that I suspect

everyone has heard about by now. Makes you feel like a stellar

navigator. Truly.



There's also a bar code reader that reminds me of some of Karl

Schroeder's stuff from Ventus, about a digitally enlivened world where

everyday objects know, and can report, their own physical properties.

Right now it's fairly primitive -- basically a Google search on the

product name -- but you can start to see the possibilities.



Anyway, these apps really are the leading edge of a whole new type of

computing that science fiction, on the whole, did a good job of

predicting. And now it's here.





--

Wil McCarthy < http://www.wilmccarthy.com >

Engineer, Columnist, Author, etc.

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" -- Francis Bacon