Matthew's Journal

My first Android device was a Samsung Galaxy S2, back in 2012. If I remember rightly, the do not disturb setting was quite flexible - you selected it from the drop-down and then could set things like vibrate / alarms only / priority contacts only / absolute silence all from that bit of UI (which matches reasonably well with the official docs for Android <=8.1.

Nowadays[0], the only thing you can do immediately is turn Do Not Disturb on and control how long it'll be on for (until you turn off / for X hours / until alarm time (if one is currently set)). Sure, you can long-press and end up in the relevant bit of settings, but that's a relatively unfriendly UI, and it sets how DND behaves until you go poking through the settings UI again.

I want something more like the old behaviour (and I don't think I'm just being neophobic) - particularly, I want it to be easy to do things like: "I'm going to bed, only let priority contacts / repeat callers disturb me" and "I'm at choir, I want absolute silence no matter what" and "Vibrations only" from the main screen (or, ideally, the lock screen). I also want it to be obvious/easy to see what DND is going to do (so I don't accidentally enable the wrong sort of DND when turning it on).

Is there some tool to do this that I'm missing? It's not even clear if this sort of setting-tweaking can be done from an app (I can't immediately find a flutter package to do so, for example)...

[0] I think the switch may have been when I got my FP2, but it might have been a software update instead

Shuffling is not the most interesting part of card games, and folk are often not that good at it; you get more interesting bridge hands if a computer shuffles, for example. Also, I've been looking at playing cards that are more suitable for outdoor use, and they tend to be less easy to shuffle. Which has got me thinking about dealing sheets again (and thus Android apps).

When playing bridge in person (such a long time ago now!) I've been dealing off a friend's handy web dealing sheets - each number tells you which pile to put the card onto, and you end up with a properly-random bridge deal.

Bridge works really well for this approach - you deal out all the cards, and their order within a hand doesn't matter. So using a dealing sheet is basically no more effort than dealing from a shuffled deck in the usual manner.

There are plenty of games where this approach doesn't work so well - games like patience or Bezique where you need to order the entire deck (I'm not sure if there's a not-totally-awful way to do that). I think there are intermediate classes of games where the deal is more hasslesome, but the wins of not having to shuffle (and always getting well-shuffled hands) might still make a dealing-sheet a viable approach...

Take cribbage - you'd still deal into four piles - two hands of six, the starter, and the rest of the deck. And most of the time you could stop part-way through the deck (I'm sure one could calculate the expected distribution of end-points...). So you could have a very similar output, and add a "stop" instruction rather than printing out the rest of the "put all these cards onto the 'rest of deck' pile".

Which brings me back round to thinking about a smartphone app - the webpage is great for bridge, and for places where you have a network connection, but I do wonder if a dealing app would be useful for offline use (and could be extended to support other deal types). Last time I collected opinions on app development there were some interesting suggestions for my stated preferences of Free, drivable from the command-line/my editor, and buildable for F-droid. I have subsequently become aware of Nativescript (for various varieties of JavaScript, none of which I speak), Kotlin (seemingly the new default Android language), and Flutter (a new language and framework entirely). I don't know if anyone's tried any of those (or other approaches)...?

I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to make an android app (basically, a dealing sheet - a friend has an online one, but I'd like one that would work offline and that could do simple things like keeping the display on for long enough for me to deal ;). I'm aware that the default way to do this is writing java (a language I've mostly avoided so far, and that seems to love boilerplate), but I'm wondering if there are plausible alternatives (I spotted Kivy via WP which seems python-based - any good?) and/or if anyone has useful pointers. Vague desiderata:

1) I can use my regular text editor to write code
2) As Free as is possible given mobile OSs :-/
3) Plausibly portable to iOS should someone feel like it

I expect to end up with something to distribute via F-Droid.

My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S II, but it is now damaged beyond economic repair[0]. So I need a new one. Desiderata:

• Not much bigger than my current phone (125.3x66.1x8.49mm) so it still fits in my pockets!
  
• Android or similar (see below)
  
• Decent camera
  
• Easy to transfer files to Linux (Kies Air works quite well; jmtpfs isn't bad in Debian squeeze)
  
• Not vastly expensive
  
• Available unlocked
  
• Will get plausible updates
  

The apps I make most use of currently are the web-browser and email clients, the Met Office app, the torch, and the camera. I also use google maps (and navfree when abroad) and the ssh client, gstrings (a tuner app), the wifi analyser, a metronome, UnTappd, and the Good Beer Guide. After an initial flurry of game-playing (I played a lot of PvZ, and some Archipelago), I seem to have largely stopped.

The things that have annoyed me about this phone are mostly the google apps that you can't remove, and then have filled up some special storage for updates so I can't download updates any more, even though I have loads of space on my SD card and have moved all the apps I can there. The lack of an Android update (it's still on 4.1.2) recently leaves me a bit concerned about security, too.

I don't want to go iOS, which I think means I'm stuck with Android if I want anything resembling enough apps? Although presumably I could install cyanogen-mod (is that plausibly safe these days?). There are Ubuntu phones, but I think they don't really have apps to cover my use cases?

The obvious replacement would be a Galaxy 6 or 7, although they are a bit larger. Any other things I should be looking at?

[0] screen is cracked, and repair is about £150, which for a 4-year-old phone is daft (I could get a new S 2 for that!)