Furlongs per fortnight: Comparison of unit conversion apps for Android

The Android Market contains software for almost any purpose you may think of. Usually when you search for a program to do a given task you even get multiple hits. The programs can be rated but that doesn't tell much about their features. So, I now present a comparison between free unit conversion programs for Android. All of the programs were downloaded on June 30, 2011 and they are presented in a random order.

First there's Unit Conversion gratis version. The program's main menu has the categories presented in a large and clear light gray font on a black background. The program has a good numpad of its own and doesn't use the default virtual keyboard provided by the system. What bothers me, however, is that when you enter a category there's no usable default conversion selected. Instead the selected conversion is something like "km -> km", i.e. it does nothing. You also need to press "convert" instead of seeing the conversion result change as you type in more numbers. So, all in all not too good.

Second, we have aUnit Converter Free. It also has got a keypad of its own but in addition to that the default Android virtual keyboard pops up if you click the number field. The program is green text on black background -- some people apparently think it's cool but I'm not too fond of the scheme. The program does neatly operate in just one screen as there's first the category selection drop-down box, then the number field, and then the input unit, converted value and ouput unit. So, OK.

The third program is ConvertDroid. Compared to the previous two programs it boasts a way larger number of unit categories: 46. There are, for example, typography, fuel consumption and radiation related units available. The user interface of ConvertDroid feels rather crammed as it tries to display all available conversions at once. You don't select the input and output units from a list but instead just click on the number field for the desired input unit, begin typing and see the result of all conversions immediately. The program uses the default Android keyboard and as a slight annoyance it displays it in the letter mode by default, forcing you to tap it once to switch to the numeric keypad. The program does have a reasonable selection of default units visible in each category and you get less often needed units by clicking "Show all". Not too bad, but the keyboard-thing is annoying.

Next on the list is the cleverly named Unit Converter. The program has a very polished look with green "Web 2.0" icons and black text on white background. As the only program in this selection it has got a button for swapping the input and output units, which is a nice feature. You can also save your most often used unit conversions in the program's Favorites category which is shown at the top of the list. The program also converts currencies, loading up-to-date information from the web on the fly. I like this program, and the only annoying thing is that you have to hit enter or "Convert" to see the conversion result, i.e. it doesn't convert as you type. I might also want to have the categories as a drop-down list at the top of the screen but I'm not too picky on that.

Then, the pithily named Converter. The program operates as pithily as it is named: there are three drop-down boxes, two number fields and a "Clear" button (if you so choose -- you can also hide it from the settings). There is also a separate view for the categories as well but that's not needed at all as you can change the category from the main view as well. I like this one as well. It's simple and plain but has a very decent selection of categories and units. It even does number base conversions, which many of the other programs don't do.

Second to last, we have ConvertPad. The first thing you notice about the program is the insane amount of unit categories: 89! You can do conversions regarding viscosity, entropy, cooking and image resolution, to name just a few. This program would probably be your choice if you had a degree in theoretical physics, astronomy and some third subject as well. For anyone else it seems like an overkill.

Finally, there's another program named Unit Converter. Unfortunately this program also has the questionable honor of getting the last place in this comparison as well. It can only convert units from six different categories, not including such an obvious choice as speed. The Android keypad covers the target unit at least on my phone so at first you only see the "Value" field, "Convert from" text and drop-down box and the "Convert to" text, but not the drop-down box! The program also doesn't have any sensible default conversion values set but happily converts from, say, centimeters to centimeters. When you hit "Convert" the result slides in and you need to hit the Back key to get back to your number field and drop-down boxes. Due to all these little annoyances this program appears almost unusable to me.

There! Now the only thing left is to present the previous information in a nice tabular format. I hope this helps you pick a converter program -- or why not pick two: one for every day use and the other for the odd chance that your life would depend on correctly converting furlongs per fortnight to some sensible unit. ;)

Motorola Defy review

I recently switched from Nokia & Symbian to the Android bandwagon by buying a Motorola Defy smartphone. I got the phone for 261 euros when I also made a new operator contract -- the normal price would have been 299 euros. The price to quality ratio for the device is very good.

Defy is small (107 x 59 x 13 mm) compared to many smartphones, such as Samsung Galaxy S (122 x 64 x 9.9-14 mm) and thus fits nicely into your pocket. The 3.7" screen is also very sharp and clear with approximately 265 dots per inch (10.43 dots/mm)! What I was especially impressed by, however, was the fact that Motorola has made Defy a very durable phone. It is water, shock, dust and scratch resistant, as proven by these YouTube videos where the phone is abused but just keeps on going. Also, Engadget couldn't really think of any downsides in this phone, save for the Motoblur UI, which my version of the phone didn't even have in the first place. My version also does have Android 2.2.

As this is my first Android phone I cannot really tell the difference to any other similar phones, but to me the phone feels fast and responsive, although I have had to reboot it once when it for some reason became very sluggish. Other than that playing Angry Birds, for example, has been a pleasure. Only few levels in Angry Birds Rio, for example, have so much stuff around them at first that the game slows down a little, but that is fixed after you slingshot the first bird out and manage to destroy anything. :)

Multiple home screens is also a nice feature. I have my calendar and SMS information along with the most used shortcuts in the first, a Facebook and a Twitter widget in the other, etc. The pull-down menu at the top of the screen is nice and features many kinds of announcements (mostly just for new email and newly installed programs). In the app menu I would like to sort my installed programs into different folders but that doesn't seem to be possible, although there's probably an app for that too in the Android Market, and using the different home screens for different program categories has been working for me so far.

As nice surprises for me the phone also features a radio (once you connect any headphones to it using a standard 3.5 mm plug) and a magnetometer, which basically translates to an electronic compass. The phone also has a GPS receiver so it knows its location and orientation, allowing you to use cool apps such as the Google Sky Map which is basically a virtual planetarium where you can point your phone into the sky (or the ground for that matter) and it tells you what stars and planets are there in that direction. The phone also has WIFI so you can enjoy fast internet connections wherever you have a WIFI access point.

The virtual keyboard takes a little practice but I guess that's inevitable with the first virtual keyboard you have ever used. When you get used to it it's easy and has been called better than the virtual keyboard in other Android smartphones. Swype is also a neat method for entering text -- if nothing else then it at least provides amusing guesses. ;) A little drawback is that if you want to write an SMS message with the phone in a horizontal orientation (to get a larger keyboard), you don't see the amount of characters used until you exit the writing mode, so you risk writing too long messages and having to shorten them before sending (if you want to fit it all into one message). Even when using the phone in a vertical orientation, you need to write something like 40 to 50 characters until the area for the text is made taller and the character count becomes visible.

All this being said, so far I have been very happy with my phone and can recommend it for anyone looking to buy a new Android phone. :) It has been made durable so I would expect Defy to last more than the two or three years which has been the life time for my previous two Nokia phones.

Open letter to Team17 / Worms: Reloaded review

Dear Team17,

Worms 2 was one of the best games of the late 1990s. I remember playing it countless of hours, designing my own maps and even playing some online games over a dial-up connection. Those were the days!

Now, I recently bought Worms Reloaded from Steam. I figured Worms would be a perfect, simple yet entertaining game to play on my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook. Well, I was wrong. I couldn't even get past the initial profile creation screen, the game wouldn't work well enough. It probably has to do with the lousy GMA500 graphics chip, but still I would've thought that a game whose looks haven't really changed in 10 years would have worked. Lazy programming? I even tried searching through the game's configuration files to see if the resolution could be changed by editing them, but no luck.

Anyway, I then tried the game on my desktop computer and sure enough, this time it started without a problem. However, the first WTF-moment came right in the beginning: I was asked to create a team but I could only set names for four worms?! Four? As in half-of-the-previous-maximum-of-eight? Seriously? More worms equals more fun, so why on Earth would you reduce the amount of worms per team?

Then I tried playing a game with my newly created team. The main menu already has ten different options but I chose the one where it says "Single Player". Now, a menu of seven items appeared:

Huh? I suppose it's good to have some variety, but what are all these Warzones and Body Counts? There's not even a tooltip explanation for them when you hover your cursor over the menu items. Custom Game sounds like some good, old-fashioned fun so let's choose it and ignore the rest. Now the player is greeted with this screen:

Now, pay attention to this. I think this screen is an exemplary example of what's wrong with Worms: Reloaded. Over the time certain standard user interface widgets, such as drop-down boxes and scroll bars, have been developed and established as good and usable features. This screen, however, tries to reinvent everything. It took me a while to figure out how to add teams into the game. Turns out you need to click the team name between the arrow symbols to move it into the Current Teams box. The next question is "How do I get computer opponents into the game?". There's no view of all the available teams, so you need to scroll for more teams. Turns out computer players have a microchip symbol next to their names, but their difficulty level cannot be determined before adding them into the game. So, two major issues in choosing the team alone: you cannot see all the available teams at once and you cannot see the computer team difficulty levels beforehand. This was certainly done better in the previous Worms games. In an attempt to confirm this I even installed and tried Worms 2 and Worms World Party but unluckily neither one of them would even start on my Windows 7.

The next whatchamacallit on the screen is Game Style. What are these? No information whatsoever is given about them here. To find out more information about them one has to abandon the current setup, go back to the main menu, choose Customise, then Manage Game Styles, and then Edit the game style one wants to know more about. It's a bit of a hidden feature and I was surprised you could actually customize the game this much. There are four different categories of options and the menus look like this:

I find it inconceivable that even on 1920x1200 resolution only seven options are shown at once. Team17, you've got more than 2.3 million pixels at your disposal and you waste it by displaying information that could be easily fit into a thousand pixels?! The only reason I can think of is that this game has originally been designed for consoles and that the players are supposed to be sitting on the other end of the room, but you could do so much more for the PC version! The least you could do would be to scale the menus to show more items at once. Possibly the worst example of menu design is the weapon customization menu:

Really? With 2.3 million pixels you could only fit in information for one single weapon at a time? Have fun customizing all the 47 weapons, let alone comparing the settings of different game styles. I certainly don't want to create new styles or edit the old ones with this user interface, so I'm stuck with the pre-created ones. And by the way, what's with that 47 weapons? Worms World Party had more than 60 weapons! Since when have sequels been made by reducing the available options or by making menus more difficult to use? Talking about weapons, here's the in-game weapon menu:

There are less weapons than probably ever before yet the menu takes up the entire screen, as opposed to just one corner like before! Previously, the weapons were also nicely grouped by purpose: bazooka-type of weapons first, then grenades, then handguns, martial arts, explosives, animals, air strikes, and so on. Now, they are all there in one big mess. The numbers are also horribly off: for example, you cannot easily tell if you have got two or three ninja ropes left in the image shown above.

Now, back to starting the game. We have already seen that the Custom Game menu is counterintuitive and is trying to conceal as much useful information as possible. It does very little to actually allow the player to customize a game. So after setting the teams and clicking Start Game, the game, well, does not start. Instead, you get to choose a landscape. The random landscape generator looks like this:

Looks nice enough but you quickly get frustrated: creating a new landscape takes about two seconds. Forget about Worms 2's instant new random landscape button, the ability to enter a textual random seed for new landscapes and the nice and clear landscape profile view. Now, you'll have to watch an animation of horizontal and vertical scan lines going through the screen and then the random objects are placed around the landscape! The buttons that choose the theme and terrain shape also exhibit the "click to cycle" behaviour known from other menus already, so if you know that you want to play a pirate-themed cavern level you may end up having to click many times and watching the new landscape creation animation equally many times. And all I wanted to do was to play a fun game of Worms! Because of the random landscape generator's repulsive controls you might as well keep playing quick games instead because selecting the landscape is not fun.

Anyway, after selecting a landscape you finally get into the game (to be plagued by the weapons menu). Here's an in-game screenshot:

Yep, the entire playing area fits into one screen (if you zoom out). It just doesn't feel right: it has never fit into a single screen at once so why cannot it be bigger now as well? It may be just an optical illusion caused by the large resolution in use but still. And look how sparsely the worms are placed! You could certainly have bigger teams as well. Luckily the actual gameplay is still pretty fun.

As a conclusion, I've got mixed feelings about Worms: Reloaded. I really would like to like it and it seems to be the only Worms that works on the current computer systems. However, the counterproductive user interface is taking much of the fun out of the game. Team17, if you've got a UI designer then why don't you listen to that person? Or if you don't have one then hire one quickly! Finally, and I hope this is not the case, if you do have got a user interface designer and that person did design all those crappy menus, please fire them or at least give them a serious warning. Wrapping up, the most serious drawbacks of the game are:

• user interface tries to conceal as much useful information as possible
• weapons menu: lacking many weapons, fills up the entire screen and is not organized
• the maximum size of a team is only 4 worms

In case you decide to publish yet another sequel then I suggest you call it something like Worms: Resurrection and get back to basics instead of coming up with six new single player modes.

Asus EeePC 1101HA review

I wrote this review when I had had the netbook for a month and published it elsewhere in Finnish. People seemed to like it so I have now translated it into English.

***

I have had this netbook for a month now and I've been pleased with it. I've never really liked the keyboards of laptop computers but writing with this one can even be a joy, even though some ergonomic bending would still be nice. Only darkness causes problems: the keyboard has no backlighting and it is very difficult to see the markings in the glow of the screen only. Good details, on the other hand, are the placements of the Delete and Ctrl keys: right in the upper right corner and in the lower left corner, respectively. After using this layout you will be at loss with any other laptop keyboards.

I believe that the EeePC 1101HA comes in two versions: one with a Bluetooth receiver/transmitter and the other without. Because I did not read the specs carefully enough I happened to get one without, so I had to buy a separate Bluetooth dongle. That one has been working perfectly both with my cellphone and with my cordless mouse, though.

The netbook in itself is silent and the fans can only be heard in a quiet room. The keyboard is rather noisy though and you wouldn't want to type a lot in a silent room with other people in it.

The computer does not get too warm and you can, for example, use it comfortably on your lap in jeans in a subway. In a warm room and in thin pants it may still get too warm. Because the computer is so small it is not too stable and when using it on your lap you should keep your legs at least almost together, and certainly not one leg over the other.

The computer is not too fast to wake up from the hibernate mode, at least if there are several programs running. Waking up from the sleep mode is fast.

The netbook came with Windows 7 and you were allowed to choose your language from, if I recall correctly, the Scandinavian languages, Finnish and English. I chose English. Windows 7 is otherwise a nice operating system but you must not let it choose the graphics settings by itself. Some of the bells and whistles of the interface should be toggled of immediately to ensure smoother experience.

The touchpad can do a few two-finger mouse gestures: scroll, zoom and rotate. However, the zoom works quite slowly (or not at all) in many programs and the rotating gesture has even less support. Scrolling works fine, as you'd expect.

The viewing angles of the screen are horizontally in an acceptable level, but if viewed from too high or too low the screen quickly gets darker, so sometimes you wish you could tilt the screen back even more.

As I'm writing this the computer is in power saving mode and informs me that there's 80 percent or 7 hours of the battery left, so the battery life time seems very good.

The 250 GB hard disk is, in my opinion, way too large. I would've liked to have an SSD drive because those are way faster, more durable and less power consuming than regular hard disks. Even 64 GB would've been plenty. Too bad you cannot customize netbooks when you are buying them.

As a 11.6" computer I find this netbook very handy and small but not too small. The laptops with screen size less than ten inches don't really improve the user experience compared to, say, a cellphone. The native resolution of the screen is 1366x768 which is guaranteed to produce too small text for some people by default, but you can always adjust the text size so it should not be a problem.

Finally some raw data about the performance for those who are into numbers:

The Windows Experience Index: A rating calculated by Windows for the various parts of the computer. 1.0 is the lowest rating, 7.9 is the highest.
Processor: 2.1
Memory (RAM): 4.3
Graphics: 2.9
Gaming graphics: 2.3
Primary hard disk: 5.7

BOINC CPU benchmarks:
Number of CPYs: 2
489 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
1005 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU