Grooveshark for free: Dood's Music Streamer died and resurrected, TinyShark is alive and kicking

Dood's Music Streamer and TinyShark are two apps that let you stream and download music from Grooveshark for free. You don't even need a Grooveshark account!

Dood's Music Streamer used to be the better app, but a new layout and badly placed ads were not an improvement at all. Not that it matters, because Dood's Music Streamer stopped working. Since a week or so it refuses to connect with Grooveshark.

TinyShark is a pretty good Grooveshark client too, even though its user interface is rather clunky. It doesn't need Adobe Flash anymore, and it can now scrobble your tracks to last.fm.

Anyway, there's not much choice now. TinyShark is the only free Android Grooveshark streamer left until Dood's Music Streamer goes live again.

March 1, 2012 update: Dood's Music Streamer is updated and works again.

September 4, 2012 update: Last time I checked TinyShark was no longer available in the Google Play Store. But you can download the APK elsewhere. The app still works for now, until Grooveshark changes their setup again.

October 19, 2012 update: Dood's Music Streamer got booted from the Google Play Store, but you can download it straight from the developers website.

• Dood's Music Streamer (Android Market) This app disappeared from the Android Market Google Play Store
• Dood's Music Streamer straight from its maker
• TinyShark (Android Market) This app disappeared from the Android Market Google Play Store
• TinyShark (Exigo Software)

Clean up your image with Aviary, Easy Photo Editor and Camera MX

Need a new image editor

Flashing CyanogenMod to get rid of Motoblur was a great move, except for a few things. I had to sign up with Swype to get their beta test app, because the built-in Swype version wouldn't restore in a working state to my custom ROM. And the built-in picture editing tools were gone, including Kodak Perfect Touch.

Cell phone cameras still can't replace the real thing, and you often need to process the pictures shot with your phone to make them look good. Kodak Perfect Touch corrects brightness, contrast, and colors with a single click, and usually with great results. But when I flashed a new ROM I had to look for an alternative, because the photo editing tools from my Motorola stock ROM don't work in CyanogenMod (if anyone knows a way to make them work in non-stock ROMs, please let me know).

Apps that downsize

The Android Market has many free image editors, but most of them have so many limitations that they're useless.

For example, Easy Photo Editor (by CBS Co., Ltd.), Aviary Photo Editor, TouchUp Lite, and Photo Editor by dev.macgyver won't save edited pictures at their original resolution. Instead, they shrink them into oblivion. Magic Hour only lets you keep all your pixels if you upgrade to the paid version.

Apps that keep your resolution

Magix Camera MX and Easy Photo Editor (by Paradise Android) (edit: and Aviary too) keep your pictures at their original resolution for free. These apps have one click image touchup, and you can tweak brightness, contrast, colors, and saturation by hand. They both come with red eye removal and effects like sepia.

Easy Photo Editor is based on Aviary, but it doesn't have the resolution limit of its parent app. Easy Photo Editor lets you draw on your photos and add text overlays. Unfortunately it has the annoying habit of storing your edited images in its own folder with a .nomedia file, so they won't appear in your gallery unless you move them to another folder.
Edit: the app is updated, the .nomedia file is gone. It would be nice if a future update would let us choose our own save folder. For example, saving the edited image to the original folder would make it a lot easier to find. An option to save the original file name with a custom suffix would be a welcome addition too.
Another edit: Aviary now keeps your image resolution up to 8 12 megapixels.

Camera MX has white balance correction and some effects that Easy Photo Editor doesn't have. like lomo and sketch. Camera MX also has a built-in camera app, but you're better off with the stock camera or Camera360 Ultimate.

Easy Photo Editor and Magix Camera MX both fail to preserve exif data. This means you'll lose information like the date and time you took the picture, so they'll show up out of order in your gallery. If anyone knows an Android photo editor that keeps the exif data, or an app that lets me copy exif data from one image to another, please post a comment or hit the contact link at the bottom of this page.
Yet another edit: Aviary and Easy Photo Editor now save all exif data!

• Easy Photo Editor by Paradise Android
• Magix Camera MX
• Aviary

Sometimes Android task killers make sense

Android doesn't need task killers to free up your RAM. Just mention "task killer" on any Android forum and a million people will shout that task killers are bad. Always and everywhere.

Task killers are bad if you use them the wrong way. Many task killers automatically kill apps at random, and then Android puts them back into RAM, and the task killer takes 'em out again, and then Android reloads them, and then...

Apps loaded in memory usually sit quietly in the background. They don't use any processor cycles, they don't eat your battery, and they go away by themselves if other apps ask for RAM.

But some apps do not keep quiet in the background. Google Maps is a notorious offender that keeps its network location service active when you don't need it. Facebook keeps going online after you move away, and if you try to log out it punishes you by deliberately forgetting your password. Shazam won't stay quiet either. When you exit the app, it keeps going online in the background to do who-knows-what. If you don't start the app, it still goes online all by itself when Android caches it in RAM for future use.

So even though task killers usually do more harm than good, keep in mind that there are exceptions. Sometimes there are very good reasons to kick apps out of memory after you're done with them. Just don't let them kill apps at random, but only zap those apps that really need to go away.

• Bomb That Task

MRKAlarm wakes you up smarter

There are many good reasons to ditch your stock alarm clock and wake up with an alternative alarm clock app on your Android phone instead.

Timers4Me comes with an alarm clock (in addition to a stopwatch and countdown timer), but not a very good one. My favorite alarm clock app for now is Alarms Solo.

But that may change, because MRKAlarm looks very promising. If the app matures and the bugs get ironed out it may become the default alarm clock on my phone.

Good stuff

MRKAlarm is free, and it doesn't have any ads. It has a PayPal donation link hidden in its About screen, but that doesn't work on my phone so for now I have a good excuse for not donating until it gets fixed ;)

It has a simple user interface, lots of options, and some features that you won't find elsewhere.

You can choose between the alarm tones in SD card/media/audio/alarms folder (if you added any in there), but it won't use Androids built-in alarm sounds (not on my phone anyway). On the bright side, you can choose any mp3 as an alarm tone, and it doesn't stop there. You can select multiple songs to wake you up with a playlist.

What makes the app unique is its calendar integration. You can set an alarm for every weekday, and then open the calendar tab to auto-disable the alarm on public holidays, days marked as vacation, etc. Instead of shutting off the alarm you can also make it ring later on holidays.

When the alarm rings it wakes up your screen and pops a large snooze button and a small shut up button. A "slide to stop" option to avoid dismissing an alarm by accident would be nice to have, but it's not a dealbreaker. Of course you can set your own snooze interval in the alarm settings. The alarm doesn't need to start at full force, because you can make the volume increase gradually over a period up to a minute.

Nice touch: you can set quiet hours and choose what should happen during that time. You can either silence the app, make it shake instead or scream, or play the alarms at a lower volume. And you can tell the app to sound an alarm when your battery level drops below a critical value.

Things to fix
Update: most issues are fixed in new versions.

It takes too many taps to see which alarm tone you've set, and if you've chosen a bunch of mp3s there's no list of what you've picked. If you've set some songs and you want to change them, you have to tap the right artists and albums to sea and deactivate unwanted songs. That's a tedious job if you have a large music collection and you don't remember what songs are on your alarm list.

MRKAlarm only uses sounds from your SD card. If your SD card is disconnected because you forgot to take it out of USB mode you might miss your plane or lose your job. The app should be able to use the default sounds from your phones internal memory, or at least have a built-in backup sound to play when your SD card is unavailable.

Cosmetic issue: wednesday is abbreviated as wen, not wed, in the alarm settings. I guess that will change in the next update.

Another cosmetic issue: snooze interval input needs fixing. MRKAlarms default snooze interval is 5 minutes. If I set it at 10 minutes and then copy or edit the alarm, MRKAlarms says 5 minutes on the Alarm Detail tab even though the 10 min. checkbox is checked. I have to check another interval, and then 10 min. again to make the app get it right.

Major issue (not cosmetic, but functional): you can't set a one shot alarm. If you set the alarm for 9 am it won't ring at 9 the next morning unless the proper weekday box is checked. But if you check the box your single shot alarm will become recurring, so you have to enter the alarm settings and uncheck the day again after you wake up. MRKAlarm would be much better if it understands that an alarm time without day should sound at the earliest opportunity (usually next day, unless you set it after midnight), and not every week.

Missing: a setting to choose whether the alarms should ring in silent mode or not. If I set my phone on silent I may not want to hear my alarms, or I may not want to hear anything (especially incoming phone calls) except for my alarm. Alarms Solo lets me choose whether its alarms should override silent mode or not. MRKAlarm would be a much better app if it had a similar option.

A non-critical annoyance is that you can't set your own default alarm settings. When you create a new alarm you have to set your own snooze interval, alarm sound, etc. again. You can work around the problem by long-tapping and copying an existing alarm, because then its settings are copied over. Anyway, having your own defaults for new alarms would make things a lot easier.

Finally, MRKAlarm needs some options to set the maximum amount of snoozes and maximum alarm duration (after which it stops or auto-snoozes), or else the neighbours might smash my door if forget to take my phone with me and MRKAlarm keeps shouting with nobody home. The main screen could be polished up a bit, because not everyone likes to have a bright white clock flashing off the screen. Grey text on a grey background is not a smart move either, so a few ways to customise the looks of the app are welcome.

Verdict

MRKAlarm is not ready to replace Alarms Solo on my phone yet, but it has lots of potential. With a few more options, tricks and tweaks and it could easily become the best alarm clock app on the Android Market. Take it for a test drive to see for yourself.

• MRKAlarm in the Android Market
• MRK Alarm on xda (forum discussion, do post your ideas)
• Alarms Solo