Thursday 1 August 2013

Installing applications on my Samsung Galaxy S3

Rooting Tooting success

Root android
This morning I have been installing quite a few applications on my phone and I started with Framaroot which allowed me to root the phone. This was from a suggestion by my friend Stefan Svartling. I had followed a couple of his previous suggestions to root the phone which had been unsuccessful and I was delighted that this one actually worked. It must have been the fact that there was something done that was a little bit weird by the telephone company, that messed it up before. Now that I have the phone rooted I will have to decide what I am going to do next. Stefan has been flashing a custom ROM onto his Android phone in order to get rid of some of the bloatware that comes with Samsung Touchwiz. I have noticed that when I use applications such as Helium, the backup application, that I do get some extra functionality because of the phone being rooted.

Off-line maps

While we were visiting Estonia it would have been very useful to have some off-line maps. This was so that I could have used a map to show where we were. This is considering that the maps from Google were not available as I didn't want to download any data while roaming. I did get to see some of the Google maps, but only when I was within range of some Wi-Fi. One of the great things about Estonia is that there are very many places that give you free Wi-Fi and I even had Wi-Fi when I was sitting on a tram travelling into the city of Tallinn. There are some open source maps available and I have found a couple of applications which give access to these maps on Android. The one that I downloaded is called OsmAnd when you get the application started up you get some options about which maps you will want to download and also where you want to put them. I put them onto the external SD card and as they are vector maps they shouldn't take too much space. I downloaded a few based upon the possibilities of me actually going to those places. I won't really be able to get the benefit from these until I go travelling again and that could be who knows when.

Global positioning for photos

Gps4cam
I also downloaded an application for getting the GPS coordinates for photos that have been taken with my DLSR camera which will save the expense of buying one of these new fangled cameras with GPS included. The way that it works is that when you go out to do some photos with your DSLR camera, you also start the tracking application on your iPhone or Android device. Then you use another piece of software on your Mac to marry the two sets of data together and hey presto you have all of the tracking information within your exif data. You do have two synchronise the clocks on the two devices, I don't think it has to be exact, but I will be doing some testing to find out how close it has to be. It is possible to do GPS tagging for free, but you do have to remember to take a photo with your mobile device every time you take pictures in a new spot with your big fancy digital camera. As soon as I have tested this way of working with the photos and GPS I will post a new article all about it.

No comments:

Post a Comment