Favourite must-have Android Offline Apps

work in progress!
In this must have list, I will be focusing on apps that do their work without net connectivity.
Utils
Swype apk: This is basically an alternative to the basic keyboard Input in Android. Swype greatly reduces ur typing speed by allowing u to drag ur finger over the letters of a keyboard instead of typing each letter one by one. It then guesses smartly the correct word or gives you options if more than 1 word is eligible! On some Android phones, this comes default installed, but on others you have to install it. Make sure you dont install this if you already have it installed. You wont get this on Market but you can install it from the apk link I've given.
Flashlight by Devesh Parekh apk: One touch app that turns your phone into a white full bright screen. Very useful especially if you usually keep your phone on lowest light and you one day find yourself needing some light in the dark...
Advanced Task Killerapk: EXCELLENT APP. Using this to kill unnecessary apps that run in the background, I was able to extend my Android battery by 6-8 hours (I can get max 48 hours with mild usage and no 3G).
App Monster apk: A good application manager - shows u all user apps that are installed, gives you an option to back up the apps onto your sd card (useful if you installed the app via Market and dont have apk file to install later once you uninstalled).
Cardiometer apk: Inspires you to start losing weight with all its cool features!!! Shows you your calories burnt, distance travelled, even running route on a map if GPS is enabled and so much more...
J2ME Runner Home: Run almost any Mobile Java application on your android with this.
Vignette apk: A great replacement for the default Android Camera
Chomp SMS apk: Alternative to the default Android SMS app. Has a slightly better threaded view and customizable colors.

Fun
Google Sky Map Home: THE BEST APP EVER! Detailed review at my other post here.

Games
Angry Birds apk: Amazing addictive game
Abduction apk: First bestseller on Android - a fun motion sensor game
Fish food apk: Interesting game with a new take on the old matching colours game.

For offline installation and best places to download apk files, check my previous post, Applications for Android - Online vs Offline Installation

Best Software Utilities (Non-IT) List

Here's a list of my favourite, eternally useful list of extremely useful Software Utilities / Tools.

It will be a Forever Updated post, with new additions regularly for Windows - obviously with a slight preference to Java + Open-source versions if competing apps are similar.
For Best Developer Utilities, see this earlier post, Must have tools for the Smart Java Professional.

If an app replaces an existing one, or if there are close seconds, the losing app will move to the Best Software Utilities (non-IT) Honour List.

Find out whats eating your Hard Disk space
WinDirStat: Gives a very unique visual categorization of which files and folders contain what. OpenSource, Windows
FolderSize: A quick way to analyse your usage but without advanced features. Freeware, Windows
JDiskReport: A Java-based disk analyser. Freeware, Java

Recover Lost Files
NTFS Undelete: Free software ported from the open-source Unix version of ntfs undelete utility. EXCELLENT! OpenSource, Windows

Watch any video format without installing codecs
VLC media player: Free all-in-one media player that plays every video format out there without additional codecs OpenSource, Windows

The Little Guide of IT Jargons and Acronyms

Here's an age-old problem perhaps much before the time Pythogaras stated to a non-mathematical audence: "The square of the hypotinuse..."

See most of us techies are really proud of the way we can rattle of so many tech terms and especially acronyms. Unfortunately, a sentence like that would just go right over a non-techie client or a new team member. What makes things worse is that requirement and document acronyms often vary from company to company.

Of course there are people who use them a lot to show off... and its the general opinion of the other crows that lots of jargon/acronyms implies you are loud-mouthed and/or not really knowledgeable. I absolutely agree when I hear Sales people at Mutual Funds talking about CAMS (of course I do catch them red handed if its a computer shop salesperson!).

Unfortunately a lot of the times, we techies are simply unaware when we're doing it! Perhaps what we could do is distribute a common acronym list before a client meeting? Something like below... of course the list would grow (or shrink?) based on client feedback after every meeting.

I would keep updating as the list would be obviously too large to put up at one go!
The Little Guide of IT Acronyms:
Tech Acronyms
BPM - Business Process Mangement
EDI - Electronic Data Interchange
ETL - Extract, Transform, Load
JSeam - JBoss Seam
RIA - Rich Internet Application
SaaS - Software as a Service
SOA - Service Oriented Archiecture
SOBA - Service Oriented Business Application
XSD - Xml Schema Definition
WSDL - Web Service Definition Language

Doc acronyms
CDS/FDS/TDS - Component/Functional/Technical Design Specification
Specs - Requirement Specifications
SSRS - Sub-System Requirements Specification
UTP - Unit Test Plan
UTR - Unit Test Results

Other
UIT/UAT - User Integration/Acceptance Testing

Must have tools for Kubuntu

CCD2ISO
Converts most CloneCD image file (.ccd) to standard ISO image. Only iso images can be mounted in linux.

Some useful one-off commands in Kubuntu

This post will be regularly updated with commands as I come across them...

Mounting an iso image
1) First create the location where you want the mount to be made:
mkdir /MyISOMount1

2) Mount the iso:
sudo mount -t iso9660 CoolStuff.iso /MyISOMount1 -o loop
where CoolStuff.iso is the image and /MyISOMount1 is the location where the image is to be mounted.

3) When you're all done, simpy unmount:
sudo umount /MyISOMount1

Must have tools for the Smart Java Professional

Whether it's planning, design, development, reviewing, testing or tuning, there's a wealth of wonderful free (or nearly!) tools out there for the Java professional. It's not like all of them will be useful all the time... but its one of those things you should be knowing. No one wants to be in the situation of having a flat on a lonely highway and not knowing how to change the tire. It really helps to practice and familiarise with certain necessities even though you may not use them everyday.

Here's a list of my favourite tools (I'll stick to free / open-source) which I consider every Java professional should have in reaching distance. I will keep updating this post with useful Java tools - may add separate detailed posts for complex tools... would welcome any suggestions to update this list.

IDE
There are plenty of excellent Java Editors and this is what most beginners are encouraged to start with. But I think other than the geek-appeal, a more proficient Java professional should use a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) - don't give excuses like having to use one more program instead of your all-in-one editor is a pain, or that your IDEs hog your system (come on, you shouldn't be coding if your system is that slow!).
My favourite IDE is Eclipse - it's latest Ganymede release has different packages based on your usage - Java EE Developer, Java Developer, C/C++ Developer, etc, or just get Eclipse Classic.
Other IDEs (all with J2EE development features):
NetBeans - used to be very slow but I'm seeing a LOT OF good reviews about it now!
Oracle JDeveloper - supposed to be ok
IBM WebSphere Studio Site Developer - it's not limited to WebSphere Server btw
WebLogic Workshop - seems to tie you to the Weblogic Server, although that too comes along in the Free version
In general, the trend is love one and hate the rest! So choose wisely...

Security
This is a highly neglected area even though it is most fundamental part of any application especially as we go into the future. My one stop site for this is the Open Web Application Security Project website - Enterprise Security API (ESAPI) & Antisamy are available there. Also see my detailed post on Antisamy.

Code Review
Always ensure any code you touch, whether yours or not, gets time to go through a couple of code review tools. In the heat of reaching a target, developers just can't help taking shortcuts that result in code that can be caught in review tools and some of these mistakes can lead to major headaches at some point or the other.
Some of the common review tools include FindBugs, HammurAPI & CheckStyle. I got some nice feedback for JLint & PMD but I haven't tried them out. Both of these work purely on your source so they are really fast - whereas the other tools actually go through your generated class files and hence would catch logical or even runtime errors.
I should mention that no single review tool does a complete job - when it's upto me, I usually go for a combination of Checkstyle and FindBugs.

One more useful software is an Eclipse plugin called Metrics. This shows minute details of your code including a very good graphical representation of package dependency.

Code Testing
JUnit is the way to go for me but for J2EE applications, Cactus (which extends JUnit) is more suitable if you can stand the complexity. Also, there's Webtest to test interactions with your Web Application.

Code Coverage
EMMA comes to mind as the most comprehensive free tool for this. Emma ensure that there is no unused or poorly used code in use. It can also be used to verify that your Unit Test cases were complete.

User Interface Development
We already know all about the many Frameworks that ultimately give WYSIWYG plugins for our favourite IDE. Here's something different - Metawidget is a 'smart User Interface widget' that populates itself, at runtime, with UI components to match the properties of your business objects - it builds on your underlying framework and so is not competing with it.

Version Control
This doesn't really come in the category of a developer but just listing it to be complete - CVS and Subversion. See here for a good tutorial on how to use these.


HTTP Analyser
OpenScarab: Simple powerful small Java app that inspects all http traffic and shows full request response details - also allows you to tamper inject data... OpenSource, Java

Last Updated: 22-Oct-2010