Get Ice Cream Sandwich's Roboto Font On Your Android Today

It's easy to take fonts for granted, but a huge amount of effort goes into crafting them just-so. A well-designed font is just as readable large as it is small, and the eye should effortlessly be able to distinguish between characters. Maybe that's part of what keeps us from appreciating them - that a font that's doing its job well is one you won't have to pay attention to at all. Rather than let it become an unsung hero, Google's made a point to draw attention to the Roboto font it will be introducing in Ice Cream Sandwich. If you don't want to wait untilyour phone's running Android 4.0 to check out Roboto, the font is available for download now.

It's a little trickier than getting one of the Ice Cream Sandwich wallpapers on your phone, but with a bit of effort you can install Roboto as the default Android font. Obviously, first you'll need the fontfiles, downloadable over at the XDA-Developers forums. The easiest way to then set it as the system-wide font is with an app dedicated to such tasks. One that will work is Font Changer, but be aware that you'll need root access for it to make the needed changes. If you're using that app, you'll need to copy the Roboto files over to its folder on your SD card. Then simply run Font Changer, change the system font, and once your phone reboots you should (hopefully) be enjoying Roboto. 

What Can You Do With a Barometer on a Smartphone?

At last night's Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich announcement we were told that the new flagship phone, the Galaxy Nexus, would include a barometer, and that the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich SDK included all the bits needed for developers to tie into the new sensor.

What's a barometer?

Wikipedia describes a barometer as "a scientific instrument used in meteorology to measure atmospheric pressure." It measures the pressure exerted by the atmosphere above it. This measurement of pressure can be used to forecast short term changes in the weather and can be used to estimate altitude.

Smartphone Application: Weather Forecasting

HTC's Sense UI includes an iconic "clock and weather" widget prominently featured on the homescreen. Other app developers have created similar widgets, such as Beautiful Widgets, pictured below.

These widgets use your smartphone's geo-location information and your Internet connection to retrievelocal weather information (current, high, and low temperatures; and current conditions) for various weather data providers. Using the same information you can get the weather forecast for the next several days.

Augmenting those with real-time, local, barometric pressure readings may allow these types of apps to be even more reactive to changes in the weather.

Currently, I have Beautiful Widgets set to check on the weather every four hours. Checking more frequently can drain your battery and chew up your data. No, it's not much of either, but when added up, over time your data usage could go up (a problem for those not on "unlimited" plans) and your battery life could go down (a problem for all of us).

Imagine this scenario: you're sitting at your desk, perfectly content in your short-sleeved shirt, and want to run to lunch. You check your smartphone and the forecast says you'll have a storm front roll in sometime in the early evening, so you don't worry taking your coat or umbrella. You head out to lunch. Unfortunately, like me, you set your smartphone to update the weather forecast every four hours; it's been three hours since the last update. Since then, that cold-weather front has moved in faster than anticipated. You find yourself caught in a heavy rainstorm with blowing winds that wasn't supposed to arrive until your commute home.

With a barometer built into your phone, and an app which can read its data, your smartphone could have noticed the drop in barometric pressure and alerted you to the change. It could also have triggered a request to update forecast data, saving your battery and data usage by only updating when the weather changed.

If your phone had a barometer in it, and your weather app was programmed to use changed in barometric pressure to trigger an update, perhaps you could have avoided getting caught out in the rain.

Additionally, since a barometer isn't dependent upon a data connection, you could still get "weather change alerts" even when you weren't under a data umbrella. Such as...

Smartphone Application: Altitude

... when you're hiking.

My family and I like to go hiking in the foothills and mountains around us. Last week my son and I hiked several miles each day in unfamiliar territory. We were in a very remote area which was outside not only data coverage, but cellular voice coverage as well.

We used Google's My Tracks to chart our progress while hiking, and so we could see where we were in relation to where we started (in case we got lost). We didn't have any digital maps of the area (again, we had no data coverage), we could only see the line of where we'd walked, but that was useful enough.

On one of our hikes we were approaching 10,000-feet above sea level. The temperature drops pretty quickly when you're up that high, and weather can change quickly -- very quickly. We didn't know we were that high, at the time we thought we were only about 8,800-feet up... 1,200-feet makes a lot of difference.

Since we had the GPS on and recording our track, a quick glance at the data during one of our breaks showed us our true altitude, so we were a little more cautious and aware of the weather, but if we hadn't been recording our tracks we wouldn't have known, and we could have gotten caught in a bad situation.

Since many people turn off the GPS on their phone to conserve battery life (especially when they're not actively using it), someone in a similar situation might not have known, and that bad situation could have become a major problem!

A barometer is a passive sensor (rather than an "active" sensor, like GPS). An app could alert you to your altitude when you approach certain thresholds -- without sucking down your battery like GPS does. Perhaps apps like My Tracks could be updated to include an "altitude trigger" option, which could turn on the GPS to record your location at 50-foot increments of elevation change, saving your batter, but still recording a relatively accurate track.

Since you're wondering...

That day's hike could have gotten bad. We were only around three-miles from the trail-head, but we had climbed over a thousand-feet in elevation, and were still headed up the mountain. We didn't know at the time, but a storm-front was moving in, and the pressure was dropping -- fast. Since there was a mountain in the way, we couldn't see the impending storm-front closing in on us, and at that altitude, we were a lot more exposed than we thought we were.

If we'd have been at the top of the trail when the storm rolled in (or if there had been rain or snow with it), we could have been in trouble.

If one of us had had the Galaxy Nexus with an app running and set to sound an alert when the barometric pressure dropped, we'd have gotten off the mountain a lot faster than we did -- and all without needing any data coverage.

As luck would have it, we got to the bottom of the trail just as the leading edge of the storm was upon us. It brought wind and clouds and sent the temperature down ten-degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of minutes. With clouds blocking the sun and the wind picking up we started to get cold -- but we were safe.

What Else?

What else can you think of that a barometer could be used for on a smartphone? Let your imagination run wild and let us know what you think in the comments!

Dolphin Browser HD 7.0 Gets Webzine Tweaks, Cloud-Based Bookmarks

Just over three months ago, Dolphin Browser HD for Android hit version 6.0. Today the next major update is arriving, with the release of DolphinBrowser HD 7.0, exclusively through GetJar.

What's new in 7.0? Version 6.0 introduced the Webzine view to the browser, offering a new, casual way to browse web-based articles. That's getting a bunch of improvements in this release, including a smoother interface, a viewing mode switcher for jumping from Webzine to a standard or desktop layout, and a featured Webzine section offering the top 16 most popular destinations for use with the mode.

The introduction of Dolphin Connect adds an element of the cloud to your browsing experience, remembering your bookmarks and app preferences even as you switch between smartphones. Dolphin's hardly the first browser to do so, but it's still a useful feature if you're juggling multiple devices.

A customizable gesture interface lets you quickly pull-up frequently visited sites by linking them to a touch movement. Just what motion you'll use to access which sites is up to you.

For now, the only place to get Dolphin Browser HD 7.0 is GetJar, which has a five-day exclusive on the release. An iOS version is in the works, but no release information is available. 

Ice Cream Sandwich Tour & How to Run the Emulator Yoursel

Yesterday, Google announced Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and, on the same day, released the SDK. That means that you can run ICS for yourself if you run the emulator on your computer. On the bottom of this post you'll find steps (plus a video) on how to get Android 4.0 working on your desktop. But first, we wanted to show you a walkthrough of Ice Cream Sandwich to point out the major new features.

First impressions of Android 4.0? The emulator doesn't give us a good sense of the performance, but what we can tell is that ICS looks much more refined and feels much more consistent when compared to previous versions of Android for phones. We see a ton of UI elements come from Honeycomb, which isn't a bad thing.



To run the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwhich emulator:

1. Download the SDK
2. Extract the Zip to a folder on your desktop
3. Click SDK Manager.exe
4. Put a check in the box for Android 4.0, click Install Packages on bottom right
5. Go back into the Android folder on your desktop, open AVD Manager.exe
6. Click New
7. Give it a name, change the target to Android 4.0
8. Click Create AVD
9. Hit Start, wait five minutes

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