I’ve been extremely frustrated with Facebook’s new chat sidebar.

It annoyed me so much so that I built a simple Chrome extension that hides all inactive friends.

All idle and active friends are visible, while inactive friends are hidden.

If a user comes online, he/she is immediately displayed in the chat sidebar.

The source code is provided here as well, in case you want to see whats going on in the background.
It uses simple jQuery to hide inactive users from the chat sidebar.

Download the Hide Inactive Users for Facebook Chat from here.
You will have to click the Continue button in the prompt that appears below.
Next click install.
That’s it. Now you can use Facebook chat the way it should have been intended to use.
The best part is that you get to retain all the functionality of the new chat system.

Here is the source code for Hide Inactive Users for Facebook Chat.

PS. I know there are other extensions that claim to do the same thing, but I’m extremely security paranoid and don’t want any unwanted access to my Facebook profile. Besides many of these plugins don’t show users when they come online and some don’t show idle users and one refused to work on HTTPS connections.

After getting cheated by Taxi and Rickshaw drivers one too many times, I created an app that shows you the tariff for both Taxis and Rickshaws.
you can instantly compare rickshaw tariffs and taxi tariffs.

It has night rates as well.

It will work on almost any device that supports .Jar or .Jad games and apps.
It works on Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Blackberry, etc mobile phones.
You never need any GPRS or Internet to use it.

The app is free for download.

You can download the app from the link here.

To install the app, either download the jar from the link above using your mobile browser.
You can alternatively download the .jar and .jad files from the link above and copy the app on your memory card and install it from a file browser on your phone.

It works very well on touch and keypad phones.

It is self explanatory and very easy to use.

Just enter the reading as you see it on the meter.
e.g. If the meter says

Rs     P
01    10

Then enter the number as 1.10 and press Ok.

The fare will be shown immediately.

For all my android brothers…

If you have an Android mobile phone, you can find the app from the market.
Just search for “Aditya” in the Android market.
Select “Mumbai Taxi and Rickshaw” and install it.

The app is free for download there too.

Please post your comments if you like it.
You can also connect with me on Facebook as well as Twitter.

Donation

I do not earn anything from the Apps and create apps for the enrichment of the community and for the love of it.
If you enjoyed using this amazing app or any of my apps, please consider making a small donation.

You can make your donations here.

username: adityat90

I was intrigued by the request that a user on XDA had made to disable the Media Scanner on System boot.

You can read about it here.

I felt his pain. Waiting minutes on end at every boot-up for the Media Scanner to complete.

Another user suggested an app called Startup Manager from the market that would kill the service at system boot thus saving your time.

The only issue was that the process to scan media files was killed so to regain the ability to rescan the system, you would have to re-enable the Media Scanner process.

You can find my app that restarts the service temporarily.

Just search for “Aditya” and use either the Rescan Media app or if you have used Startup Manager, Rescan Media ROOT.

It simply executes 2 shell commands that restart services temporarily.

If you have issues for the first time with the ROOT version,
Drop to adb shell or use a terminal emulator and type this command only once.

su

pm enable com.android.providers.media/com.android.providers.media.MediaScannerReceiver

Read this thread for anymore information.

Alex over here has a great tutorial to get you app to bind to the service.

The code still works and it works well.
NOTE: This only works from the 2.1 music player.
The only issue that arises is that it works only for the default Android Music Player.

The default service is called

com.android.music and it uses com.android.music.MediaPlaybackService

Now to go forward, we need the AIDL (Android Interface Definition Language) file from the default music player.
Go here and download the IMediaPlaybackService.aidl from the tree src/com/android/music

I’d suggest getting Tortoise SVN (if you are on a PC) and checkout the entire Music git.

Once you have that, create a new android project in Eclipse.
Name it whatever you want and create an activity, again using any name you want to.

Once you have done that, go to your Eclipse workspace in explorer (The path to the workspace shows up every time you start Eclipse).

Follow this path
%your workspace%\%you app%\src\create a new folder (if it doesn’t already exist) called “com” without the quotes.
Inside your “com” folder, create another folder “android” without the quotes. Inside the “android” folder create a folder “music” without the quotes. Copy the “IMediaPlaybackService.aidl” file here.

Go back to Eclipse now and in your main Activity write the following.

Intent i = new Intent();
i.setClassName("com.android.music", "com.android.music.MediaPlaybackService");

ServiceConnection conn = new MediaPlayerServiceConnection();
this.bindService(i, conn, 0);

Let me explain the code above.
Whenever we want to do anything to the device or access anything on the device, we create “Intents”.
Above using Intent i we set the class for i to “com.android.music”, “com.android.music.MediaPlaybackService”, ie the process and the source.
Then using a service connection named conn, which we will define later, we connect (bind) to the Music Player service.
Now create another class file under your app package called “MediaPlayerServiceConnection”

Inside paste the following code.

public class MediaPlayerServiceConnection implements ServiceConnection {

		public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName name, IBinder boundService) {
			Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Connected! Name: " + name.getClassName());

			// This is the important line
			service = IMediaPlaybackService.Stub.asInterface((IBinder) boundService);

			// If all went well, now we can use the interface

			try {
				Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Playing track: " + service.getTrackName());
				//Tell the player to pause the song
					service.pause();

				//Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "By artist: " + service.getArtistName());
				/*if (service.isPlaying()) {
					Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Music player is playing.");
				} else {
					Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Music player is not playing.");
				}*/
			}
			catch (Exception e) {
	    		e.printStackTrace();
	    		throw new RuntimeException(e);
			}
		}

		public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName name) {
			service=null;
			Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Disconnected!");
		}
	}

Now start playing a song from your music player.

Next in Eclipse, compile and run the code on your Android device/emulator.

If everything went fine, the song you were just playing will pause after the app loads.

If the song pauses, you have successfully bound your app the default music player service.

From here, you can use the service like any other service.

NOTE: My code is not perfect and will never be. This code is not for use in all real world examples and is just for enhancing your knowledge.
If you have found any mistakes in my code, please bring it to my attention in the comments below. I would gladly fix them up.

Companies try to price different sizes of products at different rates.
Using this app, you can outsmart the companies.

Eg.
Grams          Price
100g             $10
200g             $25

Does it make sense to get 2 X 100g products or 1 X 200g products.
It seems easy when the values are round figures.

Try calculating the result when the weights are 135g and 275g.

Also included is a discount calculator as well as a unit converter.

Screenshots

Main Page

Discount Calculator

Questions/Comments/Suggestions?

If you have any questions/comments/suggestions tell me in the comments section below.

Donation

I do not earn anything from the Android Market and create apps for the enrichment of the community and for the love of it.
If you enjoyed using this amazing app or any of my apps, please consider making a small donation.

You can make your donations here.

California Gurls has similar beats to Tik-Tok.

I cant embed the California Gurls video here but here is a link to the video on Youtube

Your Love Is My Drug

Tik Tok

It’s got a really long name and even longer list of features.

The features are

• Save a default user!
• Store multiple user data!
• Calculate total time, average time as well as fastest lap on the device itself!
• Overhauled UI!
• Upto 5 separate individual stopwatches all running with different lap times!
• Each individual stopwatch can be called and customized at any time!
• Save lap times in an extremely simple to read .csv file!
• Two click e-mail lap times to your specified email!
• E-mail lap times to multiple recipients!
• View past lap times on the device itself!
• Re-sort past lap times!
• Delete lap times!
• Price: FREE forever!
• Open source (Coming soon)!
• Many more features coming soon!

Screenshots

Main Screen

Preferences Screen

Previous Lap Times

Auto Start

Auto Start all timers.
I have added the ability to auto start all timers to my app.

How to use it.

1. Open the app.
2. Open the menu.
3. Tap “Set Preferences”.
4. Make sure that you have more than one timer active.
5. Tick “Auto Start”.
6. Go back.
7. Set the racer name for all the timers.
8. On “Timer 1″, tap “Click here to continue”.
9. Tap the “Start” button.
10. Move to each remaining timer and tap the “Click here to continue” button.
11. You will notice that they have all started at the same time.
12. This is the only way to do this otherwise the app will not work as intended.

I know this method to start all timers at once seems odd but it is the only way to do this right now and maintain maximum backward compatibility with older devices.

Questions/Comments/Suggestions?

If you have any questions/comments/suggestions tell me in the comments section below.

Donation

I do not earn anything from the Android Market and create apps for the enrichment of the community and for the love of it.
If you enjoyed using this amazing app or any of my apps, please consider making a small donation.

You can make your donations here.