Some Android tricks
Jul. 25th, 2012 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuA few things that may be obvious but in case they're not I thought I'd share. I'm also on an older phone, so some of these may be built in to later versions of Android.
Special ringtone when I get email from a family member. There doesn't seem to be a built-in way to have special notification when someone important sends me an email. I worked around this by creating a "Family" tag in GMail, then defining a filter so that mail from my family is automatically assigned that tag. Finally, I set up a notification rule on my phone so that while ordinary mail merely causes a momentary vibration, email tagged "Family" causes a custom ringtone to play.
"Keep forever". Normal "priority inbox" email stays on my phone for 4 days by default. I defined a "Keep" tag for which email is kept on the phone forever. This way if there's something I expect to want to refer to much later, I can be sure it stays on my phone. (Keep in mind that I try to avoid using 3G as much as possible.)
Quick "to do" entry. I created a contact called "To Do" that sends email to an extended GMail address. (You do know that you can add +anything to your email address, right?) Again, I have a special filter to recognize these and then apply the "To Do" tag and mark them read. On my phone, I marked "To Do" messages as "sync all" so they don't expire off the phone, and in my mail GMail configuration, I added the "To Do" tag as an always-visible section of the page. Finally, I added the contact to my home screen, so that with two taps I can be ready to type reminders to myself.
Arbitrary ringtones. By default, only really short MP3 files can be used as ringtones. But with WinAmp you can select any MP3 that you have as a ringtone, and then even if you switch back to your normal preferred ringtone, the longer MP3 remains on the list.
I hope some of these may be useful to others.
Special ringtone when I get email from a family member. There doesn't seem to be a built-in way to have special notification when someone important sends me an email. I worked around this by creating a "Family" tag in GMail, then defining a filter so that mail from my family is automatically assigned that tag. Finally, I set up a notification rule on my phone so that while ordinary mail merely causes a momentary vibration, email tagged "Family" causes a custom ringtone to play.
"Keep forever". Normal "priority inbox" email stays on my phone for 4 days by default. I defined a "Keep" tag for which email is kept on the phone forever. This way if there's something I expect to want to refer to much later, I can be sure it stays on my phone. (Keep in mind that I try to avoid using 3G as much as possible.)
Quick "to do" entry. I created a contact called "To Do" that sends email to an extended GMail address. (You do know that you can add +anything to your email address, right?) Again, I have a special filter to recognize these and then apply the "To Do" tag and mark them read. On my phone, I marked "To Do" messages as "sync all" so they don't expire off the phone, and in my mail GMail configuration, I added the "To Do" tag as an always-visible section of the page. Finally, I added the contact to my home screen, so that with two taps I can be ready to type reminders to myself.
Arbitrary ringtones. By default, only really short MP3 files can be used as ringtones. But with WinAmp you can select any MP3 that you have as a ringtone, and then even if you switch back to your normal preferred ringtone, the longer MP3 remains on the list.
I hope some of these may be useful to others.