How to Shrink Videos to Fit Your Android Phone with VLC

How to Shrink Videos to Fit Your Android Phone with VLC: "

If you want to put a video on your Android phone, you’ll probably need to shrink it down to fit the size of the screen and make it take up less space. There’s lots of conversion software out there, but did you know you can do it with VLC?

There’s a lot more you can do with VLC, for instance, you can also copy a DVD with VLC, take snapshots of your favorite movie scenes, or you can use it to convert video from one type to another. Before you convert any videos, you need to know the encoding specification of your phone. For example, this is the video encoding specification of Droid X.

Add as many videos as you want, and when you are ready, click the “convert/save” button to adjust their size, or video file type.

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5 free must-have Android apps for photographers

5 free must-have Android apps for photographers: "

“The best camera you have is the one with you” is a saying which can easily be applied to your phone. With an endless array of Android apps that enhance the photographer’s experience, there are a few standout apps which are a must-have for taking photos using your phone.

From taking the actual shot, to editing it, and sharing it online, the five apps listed below have you covered. And the best part? They’re all available as free downloads from the Android Market.

Be sure to also take a look at last year’s list of must-have iPhone and Android photography apps, featuring essentials like Adobe Photoshop Express.

Don’t miss the shot with QikCam

How many times have you gone for a shot with your phone, but by the time you fire up the camera app, you’ve missed the chance? QikCam is an awesome widget which you can press to instantly take a photo. While you can’t set up the photo since there’s no preview screen, it’s a handy little app to have for those really fast moments which you don’t want to pass you by. A second QikCam widget is available for launching straight into shooting a video.

Download QikCam from the Android Market

Don’t give yourself away with SilentCam

The shutter sound on my Google Nexus S is embarrassingly loud. A great way to use your camera without letting everyone within a 5 mile radius that you just took a photo is with SilentCam. The app can be used in place of your default camera, and simply lets you take a photo minus the annoying shutter sound.

Download SilentCam from the Android Market

Create a collage of photos with Photo Grid

Photo Grid gives you a quick and easy way to create impressive collages out of photos that you’ve taken with your phone. What’s really cool about Photo Grid is that once it automatically creates the collage for you, you can tweak it as much as you want – from swapping photos around, adjusting which part of the photo shows up in the frame and more. You can create a collage using anywhere between 2 and 9 photos, with a variety of layouts.

Download PhotoGrid from the Android Market

Keep your photos organised with QuickPic

QuickPic serves as a solid alternative to the native gallery app which comes with your Android phone. I’m personally not a fan of the native app’s layout. QuickPic with its list of albums, and extensive settings makes for a much more organised and user-friendly experience. You can sort your albums by name, path or date, and within each album, images can be sorted by name or date. Each image can be shared using Bluetooth, SMS, email, or through various apps.

Download QuickPic from the Android Market.

Apply effects and share with friends with PicPlz

PicPlz, which needs no introduction, is one of the most popular alternatives to the currently iOS-only Instagram. The app comes with a variety of filters including vintage, monochrome and cross processing. You can apply effects to photos you take through the app, or to those that already exist in your gallery. The final product can then be posted to PicPlz, as well as to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and more, directly from the app. PicPlz also has an element of the social network about it. If you connect to your Twitter account, PicPlz automatically finds and follows your Twitter friends, who you can then keep up with through the photo app as well.

Download PicPlz from the Android Market

Camera360 is another hugely popular alternative to Instagram, which all photo buffs have probably already downloaded. The variety and quality of filters in Camera360 probably have a little something to do with how fast this app took off, reaching 6 million users in just one year.

What are your favourite free Android photography apps? Let us know in the comments.

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The 25 Geekiest Google Doodles

The 25 Geekiest Google Doodles: "

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Google is an undeniably geeky company. So when some of the world’s biggest computer nerds get their geek on, some pretty cool stuff can happen.

Stuff like the “Google Doodle,” aka the stylized home page logo that Google occasionally produces to commemorate a historic day or event. There have been hundreds of Doodles since the company launched in 1998, and Noemi’s post this week about the interactive Les Paul Doodle inspired me to search through the Doodle archives for the 25 geekiest Google Doodles ever.

October 29, 2009: French publisher Asterix Comics got the Doodle treatment for its 50th anniversary.

April 7, 2008. Astro Boy.

October 7, 2009: Made to celebrate the invention of the bar code.

July 23, 2009: DC Comics’ Jim Lee created this Doodle to commemorate Comic-Con International. (Click on the image to make it bigger.)

September 15, 2009: Crop circles.

March 6, 2011: Will Eisner’s 94th birthday.

April 12, 2011: First man in space.

September 10, 2008: Large Hadron Collider.

September 21, 2009: H.G. Wells’ birthday.

June 5, 2010: 110th birthday of Dennis Gabor, the father of holography.

September 6, 2010: This interactive particle logo was used to celebrate the launch of Google Instant.

February 8, 2011: Jules Verne’s 183rd birthday. Interactive.

May 16, 2008: commemorating the invention of the first laser.

January 28, 2008: 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick. Google’s founders are big LEGO fans (as we are).

August 30, 2010: 213th birthday of Mary Shelley, writer of Frankenstein.

July 20, 2009: 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

May 21, 2010: A fully interactive and playable Doodle in honor of Pac-Man‘s 30th anniversary.

March 14, 2010: Pi Day.

July 4, 2010: Rube Goldberg’s birthday.

April 23, 2004: For a European Catholic holiday (St. George’s Day), that is one geeky logo. Come on, there’s a knight and a dragon!

July 10, 2009: Nikola Tesla’s birthday.

June 6, 2009: 25th anniversary of Tetris.

September 5, 2009: Mulder and Scully would be proud. This one celebrates “unexplained phenomenon.”

May 22, 2006: Let’s hear it for the great detective! Celebrating Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday.

October 4, 2004: SpaceShipOne wins the X-Prize.

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ADT Plugin for Eclipse updated with visual layout editor

ADT Plugin for Eclipse updated with visual layout editor: "

The ADT plugin for Eclipse, including the new visual layout editor, was updated and made available today. If you go back about a month or so to Google I/O, one of the most popular developer sessions was given by Tor Norbye and Xavier Ducrohet as they went over all the upcoming improvements to Android development tools, and when they talked about this one, the packed house cheered.

I know most of you aren't Android application developers, and are asking yourself what exactly this is, and what all the fuss is about. ADT (short for Android Development Tools) is a plugin for Eclipse -- an integrated development environment used by many to write and build Android applications. Eclipse is a stand alone program that can be used to write all sorts of applications, and is a very popular tool for Android developers writing apps in Java. Installing the ADT brings the tools needed by Eclipse to make those Android apps, and puts everything together into one happy, geeky program.

In today's update, the visual layout editor is the clear star of the show. In previous versions of the ADT, developers were forced to depend on unofficial (but done well in many cases) layout editors or to hard code the way their application looks by hand. As you can imagine, having a graphical WYSIWYG editor was something everyone wanted, and Google delivered. This does two things -- takes the time needed to hardcode the layout of an application and frees it to be used in better ways, and gives designers a unified set of tools to make beautiful apps. We might not understand all the fuss here, but trust me -- this is something developers have wanted and needed for quite a while, and it's great news for both those who code the apps, and those who use them. After the jump you'll find the ADT developers session video if you're looking for more info.

Source: Android developer website

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