seNotes blew up its text but won't save your notes as text files

My favorite app to put yellow sticky notes all over my homescreens is seNotes. It comes in sizes as small as a 1x1 widget, it's free, it has no ads, and it never goes online.

It briefly lost its 1x1 widget in an update though, but fortunately not for long. It came back in another update the day after.

A pleasant surprise: you can restore lost notes by long-tapping an empty note, and then hitting "paste from note."

A not so pleasant surprise: the updates increased the font size. This means that notes display less information. I guess bigger text is nice if you're old and your eyes are not what they used to be, but I like to squeeze as much information as possible in the limited space of my homescreens. seNotes would be a lot better if we could simply choose our own preferred font size from the options.

seNotes could also learn something from Papyrus Ex. This notes app saves your notes as plain text files on your memory card, so you can easily back 'em up, sync 'em with Dropbox or any other cloud storage service, share 'em with other phones and computers and tablets, and import new notes simply by dropping a text file on your phone. If seNotes would store its notes as plain text you could even store 'em in a shared folder with Papyrus so all your notes would be available as yellow stickies on your homescreens and organised in a notebook app.

You can send your seNotes to Papyrus with the share menu option, but automatically sharing them through a shared folder would be a lot more convenient. Maybe in a future update? If Papyrus would add an option along the lines of "send to seNotes" we'd have a winning team!

• seNotes
• Papyrus Ex

K-9 Mail cleaned up in the background

K-9 Mail is the best free email client for Android. It has a million ways to tweak, customise, alter, change, modify... It does POP3, IMAP, MS Exchange, push email, and it gives you full control over which mail folders to sync and which folders to leave alone.

The canine has been updated twice in December to kill a bunch of fleas bugs. One of the changes sits in the background. The old K-9 used to leave its background service on the street whenever you took it for a walk, but after a bit of training it now cleans up after itself. So if you prefer to check your mail manually instead of having it automatically shoved in your face your phones RAM gets a bunch of extra megabytes to play with.

Now if they would only clean up that ugly dogface of an app icon..

• K-9 Mail (Android Market)
• K-9 Mail (Google Code)

Bloat Freezer abuses Airpush ads to blackmail you

Bloat and junk

Your phone manufacturer or network operator may have filled your Android phone with bloatware and other junk, such as Myspace, Carrier IQ, a bunch of live wallpapers, etc.

It's tempting to delete all that junk from your phone, but this usually means that you can't update Android the normal way because the update program will complain about missing bits and pieces. And when you need to get something on your phone fixed under warranty you'll have to reinstall all the junk before unrooting.

Freeze it

But there's another way to deal with unwanted junk. Apps like Titanium and MyBackup can "freeze" Android apps. This way they stay on your phone, but they disappear from your app drawer and won't run. If you need to get your phone back to a state suitable to receive updates or repairs under warranty you can unfreeze the junk, unroot your phone, then reroot and refreeze when your phone is updated or repaired.

Unfortunately the freeze features of Titanium and MyBackup are only available in the paid versions.

Bloat Freezer by Trey Holland promises to freeze your apps for free. It sort of delivers: it doesn't cost you any money, but you pay a price anyway.

Obnoxious advertising and market abuse

Bloat Freezer is infected with the most obnoxious type of mobile adverting ever invented: Airpush. This advertising scheme scam pollutes your Android notification bar with ads, even when you're not using the infected app.

Bloat Freezer has a history of malware-like bahaviour. It used to sabotage AdFree and AdAway by infecting your Android hosts file to unblock blocked ad servers.

There used to be an ad-free version of Bloat Freezer. People bought it and paid for it, but then it was pulled from the market. The people who paid Trey Holland for an ad-free app can't use it anymore and are stuck with the ad-infected version. They didn't get a refund.

But Trey has another trick up his sleeve. Now you can remove his Airpush ads for free, but you'll play along with a blackmail-like market rating scam. You're supposed to ask for an activation code by email, but you only get it if you leave a five star rating on the Android Market plus a positive review.

Usually apps with Airpush get lots of one star ratings and matching negative comments. By blackmailing you into giving five stars plus public praise Bloat Freezer abuses the most annoying advertising method to inflate its ratings and turn the market feedback system into a PR scheme scam.

Stay away from Bloat Freezer and use one of the alternatives instead. If you really want to try Trey Hollands piece of blackmailware, ask for the Airpush removal code and then go back to the market to edit your feedback. Change your rating into a single star and use the comment box to tell everybody what you really think about this kind of Airpush abuse.

The Android Market has a link to report malicious apps. Use it! I'm sure that offering to remove ads in exchange for fake ratings violates the small print.

Update: Bloat Freezer has disappeared from the Android Market again. I guess Google doesn't like Trey Hollands business ethics either.

• Bloat Freezer (no link until Trey Holland cleans up his app)

Alternatives

• App Quarantine (completely free, no ads whatsoever)
• SystemCleanup (can kill and freeze unwanted apps)
• NoBloat (backs up, removes, and restores apps)

SoundTracking: identifies songs like Shazam and SoundHound do

What's playing?

Hear a strange song and want to know what's playing? There's Shazam, there's SoundHound, and there's SoundTracking.

All these apps do the same thing. The record about ten seconds of music, turn it into a digital fingerprint, and check for a match in their database.

Three is a crowd

Shazam and SoundHound have been around for ages, SoundTracking is the new kid on the block. It uses the Gracenote database to identify music, so SoundTracking taps into the largest database of the three.

Which of the three apps is the better one? That's hard to tell, because all of them sometimes fail to identify a track and then you'll want to use one of the others. All three have their problems. For example, Shazam started to misbehave after a recent update and it's not fixed yet.

Scratched record

SoundTracking has a couple of very annoying flaws.

You need to enter your Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare account details to use SoundTracking, because its song identification is added as an afterthought. It first and foremost wants to publish the music you listen to on your social networks. You probably don't want to do that everytime you play a song, but the "create a post" button is the biggest button on its startup screen. If you're not on Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare, you have to make an account there anyway or else SoundTracking won't let you in.

To tag a song you have to tap a tiny little button in the corner of the screen, and then tap once more on the "Music ID" link. Open app, wait for it to log in, tap small button in the corner, then again on the Music ID button... by the time SoundTracking starts recording the song is probably over. The next version of the app should have a "tag now" button on the start screen that starts recording right away without waiting for anything. A "record now" widget would be a welcome feature too.

While SoundTracking is recording and matching you better not look at it, because it pollutes your phone with a really ugly and annoying screen of flickering bright squares. Whoever designed that must have a financial interest in a company that sells anti-epileptic drugs.

The settings have a problem remembering things. When you switch off all the email notification options, the entry that sends you mail when someone "follows" you gets reactivated all by itself. The push notifications when someone "loves" your post refuses to stay unchecked too, but when you switch off everything in the push settings screen that's just a cosmetic error.

When you exit the app with the back or home button it keeps sending data in the background, but not as bad as the totally messed up Shazam version.

As for the quality of its song identification service, it usually works. Sometimes it can't figure out what's playing or it returns the wrong song, especially when the music gets more obscure. SoundTracking managed to get my Monobloco and Baaba Maal tracks right, but it didn't recognise Marabi by Mafikizolo. Strange bug: when you record silence SoundTracking sometimes spits out a random song.

SoundHound and Shazam don't always get it right either, but at least they make it a lot easier to tag what's playing without unnecessary clicks and waits. SoundTracking has potential, but its social networking options get in the way of music identification.

Erase your tracks

If you had enough of SoundTracking and you want to delete your account, you're in for a nasty surprise. You can't. Maybe they'll let you escape in the future, but they've been working on it for a year and you still can't delete your SoundTracking account.

But you can make SoundTracking forget about you by feeding them some fake data:

1) Make a temporary email address like randomgibberish@gmail.com and use it to make a temporary Twitter or Facebook account.

2) Go to your SoundTracking profile page and link SoundTracking to your temporary Facebook or Twitter account.

3) Unlink your normal Twitter/Facebook/whatever accounts from SoundTracking. Delete your name and other private data from your SoundTracking profile, and feed it your soon-to-be-abandoned temporary email address.

4) Deactivate or delete your temporary Twitter/Facebook account and kill your temporary email address, or just abandon your bogus accounts until they expire by themselves.

Now you're still caught in SoundTrackings web, but all info they'll have on you will be useless. For all practical purposes SoundTracking lost track of you.

• SoundTracking

The competition:

• Shazam
• SoundHound