Wednesday, January 30, 2013

WordPress Plug-ins For 2013

Presenting tonight at the SLC WordPress user group tonight. Topic is "I'm Using WordPress, Now What? Plug-in Edition".

You can download the presentation here, and view it on Speaker Deck.

Please add your list of must have Plug-ins for 2013.
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Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Nexus 7 Here To Stay

I was pretty excited about winning a Nexus 7 at a recent Google Chrome Developer challenge. I wanted a Nexus 7, and it was on my "buy" list. As it stand right now, there's only one thing I can do (aside from rooting the device) on my iPad 3 that I can't do on the Nexus and that is watch Amazon Prime Instant Movies. That issue makes no sense to me, and is extremely frustrating. If there were an Amazon viewing app like the one on an iPad, I don't know that I would use my iPad as much.

I'm learning how Android works. It's much different than iOS. I'm also learning that the majority of apps aren't nearly as "good looking" as an iOS app. But generally, I can do nearly the same things on my Nexus 7 as I have done on my iPad. Here are some highlights so far.

Codeaway
I am a premium subscriber to Codeaway, the development IDE in the cloud. There is a great Android app (or I can also access via the web).

Twitter
There are a number of Twitter clients for Android (but I really wish Twitterbot was one of them), and they all work fairly nice. Most are not tablet ready, meaning it's really the phone version stretched to the 7" screen.

That seems to be the problem with most Android apps. Not all, but most.

Google
I am a Google user; Google+, GMail, Drive, Calendar, Picasa, and any other app they have out there. Google apps seem to work really well on the Nexus, I wonder why.

WordPress
There is even a fairly decent WordPress client available for Android.

One feature that I really dig is the ability to customize the look of my Nexus. I can change screen, icons, background, and widgets. All of things give me a very customized view of my Nexus.

What are pain points so far?

  • Trying to do any amount of typing on the small screen is really difficult. It's not that you can't type, but you are limited to the amount of screen real estate you can view.

  • Navigation is funky at best. I'm trying to get used to using the back arrow versus the back button.

  • There is no back camera. Very difficult to take photos.

  • The speaker is in an akward place when. When you are holding the device in landscape mode, your fingers tend to cover the speaker.

  • Not a deal breaker, but it would be nice to have an external SD card slot.

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