Mile
Zero

My love for Locale aside, what else is good on Android? Inquiring minds want to know.

• K-9: I am, apparently, a total weirdo in that I don't use G-Mail. I have an account, of course, because it comes with the whole Android developer thing, but I pretty much only use it when Google requires it. Unfortunately, the POP/IMAP client that ships with devices--even up to and including version 2.1--is awful. It forgets which messages I've read, doesn't easily allow batch operations, and decides randomly not to connect. K-9 started as a fork of that client, but it's reached the point where it's the only reasonable choice for handling non-Gmail on Android. There are still some things I'd like to see added (text-selection, recover from trash), but it also has touches of brilliance (check out the swipe-to-multi-select list mechanic).
• Touiteur: There are lots of Twitter clients on Android, and for the most part it's a matter of personal preference which you use. Seesmic is great, but it keeps asking me which account I want to use even though I've only got the one. Lately I've been using Touiteur instead, for a few reasons: I dig the pull-down windowshade for updates, the UI for jumping out to links is better, and it's super-speedy. Also, the name cracks me up. Like all Android clients, of course, Touiteur gracefully handles checking for messages and mentions in the background via the notification bar, and it makes itself available to the "share" menu for URL-shortening right from the browser.
• Ringdroid: One of the main goals for Android is that it's not tied down to a computer. Everything's either in the cloud, or it's meant to be self-sufficient. Sometimes this can be frustrating (I'd love to have Outlook sync included), but for the most part it's liberating. Take Ringdroid, for example: it's a basic WAV/MP3 editor that you can use to edit and set system sounds directly on the device. I don't use it often, but if I decide to nerd out on the bus and set my notification tone to a Star Trek communicator clip I found online, Ringdroid makes it possible (and yet no less shameful).
• Text Edit: Every platform needs a Notepad.exe equivalent. Unfortunately, most of the note-taking programs for Android keep their data siloed in a private database, which defeats the point of having that SD card filesystem available. Text Edit actually opens and saves files, which makes it tremendously helpful for someone like me who'd actually like to get some work done in a standard format every now and then.
• Smart Keyboard Pro: You can replace almost anything on an Android phone if you don't like the default, and I don't much care for the built-in soft keyboard. Specifically, I hate the way it keeps all the good punctuation hidden away from me. Smart Keyboard offers good foreign language support, swipe gestures (one of the better bits from Windows Mobile), multiple skins, and Blackberry-like autotext shortcuts. But most importantly, it puts all the punctuation on the keyboard as a long-press of individual letters, so I don't have to hunt for question marks or semi-colons anymore.
• Replica Island: There aren't a lot of great games on Android, but Replica Island (which started as a tech demo for the platform) is a well-done little platformer, and it's free.

The interesting thing about making a list like this is, for me, was that I realized how little use most of the native software on the device actually sees. 95% of my time on a smartphone is spent in three places: e-mail, Twitter, and the browser. That's not to say that I don't use other applications--that I don't find them phenomenally helpful, or that I wouldn't miss them if they were gone--only to say that as a matter of routine, those three are what matter most. Everything else is gravy.

(Well, almost everything. When people ask me about whether they should get a smartphone, the first thing I tell them is that Maps will change. Their. Lives. Because it absolutely does. I spend relatively little time in Maps, but it's probably the most valuable application on the phone.)

If you ask me to describe a reporter's tools, I admit that what leaps to mind is more than a little hackneyed. Pen and pad, maybe? One of those goofy hats with the press pass lodged in the band? Typewriter (seriously, not even a laptop)? Thanks, 1930s screwball newsroom comedies! But in my day job, I can't afford to be a romantic about the newsroom's toolkit--we're far enough behind as it is. And I'd argue that when you think of newsgathering in the near future, there are a few other players you should consider: scripting languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript, and Visual Basic.

I'm biased, of course, as someone who's interested in what I call data-driven journalism. But the way I see it, the basic task of journalism is to ask questions, and with more data than ever being made available by governments, non-profits, corporations, and individuals, it becomes difficult to answer those questions--or even to know where to start--unless you can leverage a computer's ability to filter and scale.

For example: our graphics reporter is pulling together some information regarding cloture over the last century years. She's got a complete list of all the motions filed since the 66th Congress (Treaty of Versailles in 1919!). Getting a count of motions from the whole set with a given result is easy with Excel's COUNTIF function, but how do we get a count of rejected motions by individual Congress? You could do it by manually filtering the list and noting the results, or you could write a new counting function (which we then extended to check for additional criteria--say, motions which were rejected by the majority party). The latter only takes about 10 lines of code, and it saves a tremendous amount of tedium. More importantly, it let her immediately figure out which avenues of analysis would be dead ends, and concentrate our editorial efforts elsewhere.

We also do a fair amount of page-scraping here--sometimes even for our own data, given that we don't always have an API for a given database field. I'm trying to get more of our economic data loaded this way--right now, one of our researchers has to go out and get updates on the numbers from various sources manually. That's time they can't spend crunching those numbers for trends, or writing up the newest results. It's frustratingly inefficient, and really ought to be automated--this is, after all, exactly what most scripting languages were written to do.

It's true that these are all examples of fairly narrow journalism--business and economic trends, specific political analysis, metatextual reporting. Not every section of the paper will use these tools all the time, and I'm not claiming that old style, call-people-and-harass-them-for-answers reporting will go away any time soon. But I've been thinking lately about the cost of investigative reporting, and the ways that computer automation could make it more profitable. Take Pro Publica's nursing board investigation, for example. It's a mix of traditional shoe leather reporting and database pattern-matching, with the latter used to direct the former. Investigative reporting has always been expensive and slow, but could tools like this speed the process up? Could it multiply the effectiveness of investigative reporters? Could it revive the ability for local papers to act as a watchdog for their regional governments and businesses?

Well, maybe. There are a lot of reasons why it wouldn't work right now, not the least of which is the dependence of data-driven journalists on, well, data. It assumes that the people you're investigating are actually putting information somewhere you can get to it, and that the data is good--or that you have the skills and sufficient signal to distinguish between good data and bad. If I imagine trying to do this kind of thing out where my parents live in rural Virginia (a decent acid test for local American news), I'd say it's probably not living up to its potential yet.

But I think that day is coming. And I'm not the only one: Columbia just announced a dual-degree masters program in journalism and computer science (Wired has more, including examples of what the degree hopes to teach). To no small degree, the pitch for developing these skills isn't just a matter of leveraging newsroom time efficiently. It's more that in the future, this is how the world will increasingly work: rich (but disconnected) private databases, electronic governmental records, and interesting stories buried under petabytes of near-random noise. Journalists don't just need to learn their way around basic scripting because it's a faster way to research. They may need it just to keep up.