Android Apps: Office Suite Pro

Quick review since QuickOffice Pro is on sale at Amazon for 7.99 for Android devices.

I've tested two and tentatively checked five apps that can read/write Microsoft Office well. This is for the two I've bought; if Documents To Go goes on sale anytime soon, I'll grab it as well.

QuickOffice Pro is currently half price at 7.99 - I paid full price and don't consider it a bad investment at all. It's major problem is that the default view is tiny and you have to zoom out. It also has some odd issues sometimes--only sometimes--with large files, but keep in mind my perspective on large files is 700 pages of Microsoft Word Change documents with tons of screenshots for work; I've never had a problem otherwise.
Amazon - $7.99
Google Play - $14.99

OfficeSuite Pro 6 was .99 yesterday and I'm kicking myself for not posting about this when I saw it yesterday. It has a very good web view to get full screen of documents and it handles very large documents somewhat better than Quick Office Pro. Note: when using with dropbox, do not open file from dropbox; open from the program; dropbox files show on the home screen. Otherwise it will ask you about restoring and don't do that. OfficeSuite also has a separate font package, which if you get this program, I recommend; your office docs will look much better.
Amazon - $14.99
Google Play - $14.99

Both integrate seamlessly with Dropbox, and QuickOffice also integrates with like a lot of other programs as well, but none I like nearly as much as Dropbox (Evernote has potential, but I'm still wary). Honestly, I like OfficeSuite Pro more, but more in a personal preference way than anything lacking in QuickOffice, and if you're a completionist (Dude, I download every piece of software that integrates with Office due to this), get them both on sale.

ES File Explorer

I know a lot of people are somewhat intimidated by using ES File Explorer. If anyone is interested, I can do a short tutorial on using it to access both your files on your Android device, your entire network including your home computer, and using it as an FTP client. It really isn't you; it is not very intuitive, and if you haven't spent a lot of time in command line with Linux systems, it's frankly baffling, and some things just don't seem to go where they should. I will say if you don't have it, you should; it is really useful for moving files around if you download from AO3 and want to put them in the Kindle folder, though I'm going to note, for Kindle users on Android tablets, from what I can tell, Kindle is not alwasy consistent on where it stores the books. It's also fantastic as a way to search your entire tablet.

Mediatomb

A new tutorial is up to compile and manually install Mediatomb to the latest version of Ubuntu. For the first time ever, I got it right on the first try. If anyone wants to install it to their home server or computer and isn't sure, I'll be happy to walk you through it and offer my custom scripts for sorting your media. Mediatomb is compliant so far with every bluray player I've been able to track down. I promise you, this isn't hard--though Christ, the way they talk about it is like brain surgery sometimes--but I know it can be confusing if you're not used to command line, and to use custom javascript sorting for your files, the manual installation and compilation are required.

However, if you don't care about that, the regular version is installable by package and works fine as well.

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

A few weeks ago I dropped a question about Androids on an older entry of yours, but it's probably buried in your inbox and anyway irrelevant since I figured it out (and the next several questions, most excitingly the one about why the data connectivity had gone out, which turned out to be due to T-Mobile still having me down as having a Blackberry and sending my connection to the RIM servers, which after a few hours realized I wasn't using a Blackberry and booted me off and refused to let me connect again).

Anyway, delighted you're making an Android post, and I'm wondering -- do you have a rec for a good copy-and-paste app? I used to have Quick Copy on the Blackberry and it did exactly what I wanted, but I've tried out three or four on the Android and can't figure out how to get any of them to let me copy text from one program (frequently, a web browser) and carry it over to another program (usually, a Tumblr post). Though apparently one of them did work in the Contacts app (which was handy when it came to sticking my sister's former phone numbers into the block list so her boyfriend can't nag me with calls the way he's been doing to both my parents) -- I couldn't tell which one it was, though. (Hazards of installing four different similar apps simultaneously, the idea having been to test and compare and then uninstall the ones I didn't like.)

[seperis]

Try using the dolphin web browser if you're copying from browser. It has an add-on for copying text.

I'll look around and see what I can find. IT feels like that should be standard somewhere.

[fyrdrakken]

Dolphin is one of the handful of web browsers I installed to try out when I realized how much I hated the preinstalled browser. Maxthon wound up being the winner -- I forget what exactly about Dolphin made me uninstall it, though I think part of it had to do with something about the exit procedure aggravating me. I can reinstall it and give it another look -- what's the name of the add-on I need to be looking for?

Mind you, the other thing I was especially aggravated at not having copy software for was having manually copied-and-pasted the text of my old Blackberry Memos from the Outlook backup on my netbook to Google Docs, thinking once I had the text available I'd be able to copy each in turn to a blank memo in whichever note-taking software turned out to please me, or possibly save the files in whichever format the notes app liked to the right folder and be able to directly open them. Have not been able to do either of those -- have been able to access all my old knitting project notes from the Google Drive app, but having to access a given file online every time I want to look at it is annoying (and could be problematic when I'm somewhere with no data connection). I suppose I'll suck it up and deal, though I did some looking for note-taking apps that claimed to work with Google Drive and haven't been able to get one that would take my files from Drive -- yet, though I just ran across a Note Everything add-on that claims it'll do just that, so let's see if that works.

[fyrdrakken]

Update -- NE GDocs worked as advertised, so that particular issue is solved. (And I do like having my knitting project notes backed up to Google Docs -- for one thing, it makes it very easy to copy/paste from a GDocs window to the Ravelry project page when I'm on a desktop.)

I also installed a few more C&P apps Monday afternoon. Something works to let me copy text in the Maxthon browser -- I just have no idea which one, so I'm afraid to uninstall anything. (Probably I should note down each app I got and uninstall them one at a time until I find out which one it was. Or uninstall all and reinstall each one individually on a trial basis, whichever.)

[seperis]

There is a program on Google Play called Copy Paste It:

Paid Version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.edwardkim.android.copyscreentextfull&feature=related_apps#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEwOSwiY29tLmVkd2FyZGtpbS5hbmRyb2lkLmNvcHlzY3JlZW50ZXh0ZnVsbCJd

Trial/Non-Root Phone Version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.edwardkim.android.copyscreentextfree&hl=en

For Non-Root Phone Versio: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.edwardkim.android.copyscreentextfullnoroot#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDIxMiwiY29tLmVkd2FyZGtpbS5hbmRyb2lkLmNvcHlzY3JlZW50ZXh0ZnVsbG5vcm9vdCJd

The first and third are 6.99, but they get amazing reviews.

[fyrdrakken]

Ah, that's one of the apps I'd already tried (at least, the free version). The problem is, it doesn't actually grab the text so much as take a picture of the text in the highlighted box and try to translate the resulting image into text. I tried it and was disenchanted by the number of typos it created in the process.

[brownbetty]

I've had mediatomb installed before, and what turned me off of it was the fact that it wasn't interested in helping me organize my media, just stream them to me, so I'm very interested in this "sorting your media" thing. Where's the guide?

[seperis]

For Mediatomb with the ability to sort it, you have to compile it yourself. Packages will not work and make sure when you do this to set them not to install updates automatically.

Installation takes me end to end about thirty minutes, including download and compile time.

Guides:

1.) http://tobias-zimmer.blogspot.com/2011/12/howto-compile-mediatomb-with-javascript.html - this is the older one, but it's basically teh same. I used it to do 12.4, I think. Also read the comments to the blog. A couple of people had some issues and their fixes.

2..) http://richardappleby.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/mediatomb-on-ubuntu-12-04/ - one for 12.4

Scripts for sorting: http://mediatomb.cc/dokuwiki/scripting:scripting

It's all javascript, so it's fairly easy. There are several examples you can get from there and modify as you like.

You WILL NEED to make a change in your config file to enable javascript so it will use your scripts.

If you are using a bluray player or other DLNA compliant appliance to play media, you also might need to do some manual updates on the config in /etc. I found some of mine during random google searches, and one by getting my bff's husband on the phone to login and see if he knew how it worked.

Please feel free to email or IM me if you have any questions or I can send you my configuration file and current javascript for examples. If you can't make it work, do email or IM. I've done this about six or seven times and this is the first time I did it with no failures; if you have problems, I can make a VM and recreate how I did it from scratch to see what's happening.

...I really want other people to use it like a lot so the pool of knowledge on it isn't so limited. If my C++ was better, I'd be trying to update it myself. I read the source code and can sort of find the problems, but my C++ is way too rusty to fix the entire source. We could have a club!

***Note: for reasons beyond my understanding, ubuntu may need you to install dependencies more than once. I have no idea why, but I had to sudo apt-get install -f several freaking times more than it says.

I'm not sure if this will work, but I have the .deb packages that I created myself still on my root drive. What I'm not sure of is if they are discrete or require the libraries to be installed. I can upload those for you if you want to see if they'll install, but they're for a 64 bit machine.

Good luck!

[brownbetty]

Oh gosh, not sure if it was because I was trying to get this to work on an amd64 machine, or just lucky, but I had to apply three patches to get this to compile. For the historical record, they are:
libav_0.7_support.patch (found here)
mediatomb-0.12.1-gcc46.patch
libmp4v2_2.0.0_support.patch
Patches are applied by entering the unzipped mediatomb dir., and using $ patch -p1 <[location/patchfilename] You might need to use sudo.

I haven't even gotten to trying to configure it yet, I'm going to go get myself an icecream as a reward for getting it to install.

[seperis]

*glee* IT WORKED! It's probably the AMD machine, so seriously, I'm impressed. I'll add mediatomb tag to this entry.

When you start configuring, comment and I'll throw up my config.xml. There is one major (required) and a couple of minor changes including a line for locking the port number so its easy to use the web interface from anywhere on your LAN. Depending on format of the media (mkv, avi, etc) and the DLNA machine you're using, some specific lines need to be added for them to be recognized. For fancier flv, however, profiles are usually created, and I haven't gotten that far yet, though there's a (brief, stubby) tutorial at mediatomb about how to create them.

The javascript sort is really easy and you can do pretty much any kind of sort and folder layout you can think of since he creates a javascript class structure for this for you to use. I ended up creating some basic class prototypes for formatting the names of the shows when I had my structure and sort layers down. This part? Is hugely fun.

I don't know if you enabled it, but there is limited youtube functionality on the web interface as well. The C++ for it is outdated from before google's last update; I shut it off because it really didn't do much. Though it says it has options for weborama and iTunes trailers in config, they don't work either.

I'm so glad you got it working!

[seperis]

I checked my history and the first guide there for compiling/installing is the one I used.