Great conversation today on TWiG with our guest Chris Messina, who dropped knowledge on the history and differences between OAuth and OpenID--which in an age of "Facebook wants to own all your sign-ons," is an important discussion. My tip this week: to grab the Android Swype beta within the next couple of days while it's still available, as previously-recommended ShapeWriter is no longer in the Market.

Twitter was down, the news didn't have anything yet, but I remembered Reto Meier, a Googler who did an Android talk at I/O had demo'ed an earthquake detection app. It's called Earthquake!, and it's got some very useful features, especially when you're worried about the earth cracking open and swallowing your home whole.

More screenshots inside--click to enlarge.

The default app view is a list of earthquakes by location, magnitude, and date. This is a pretty long list--a LOT more quakes and aftershocks happen around the world than you realize. (I believe the data comes from the USGS.) You can see that after last night's SoCal quake, the list is littered with aftershocks.


I set my magnitude filter to 5, because even the "can be felt" and "can cause damage" filter level makes a long list.

I also like the homescreen widget, which shows you the latest earthquake on your list.

At Google I/O, Meier did a talk about the best and worst practices for Android developers, which I watched with interest, as I hope to be an absolute angel while creating Todo.txt Touch. Aspiring mobile developers, this is definitely worth a watch.

In the meantime, my working list of Android apps is continually updated on the excellent AppBrain. Here's every Android app I've currently got installed.

Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4 yesterday in his WWDC keynote, and it's a gorgeous device with software upgrades that include multitasking, a video chat app called FaceTime, and more. I'm still a happy Android user, but I have to hand it to Apple. They continue to school the industry on aesthetics and marketing. Case in point: the FaceTime demo video.

First, some background. I got a Sprint EVO at Google I/O which has a front-facing video camera, and presumably the ability to do video calls. So far, I haven't tried it. My general feeling about video calling is "Why?" I hate talking on the phone, so giving someone else the ability to see me while I talk on the phone seems like a yawner. I can't imagine walking around holding my phone out in front of my face to do a video call.

Then I watched the FaceTime video from Apple, which features babies, people in love, grandparents seeing their grandkid in a cap and gown on graduation day, girlfriends showing off new boots, deaf people signing to one another, and the one killer scene that sold me. A soldier, presumably in Iraq or Afghanistan, sits on the edge of his bunk, holding out his iPhone, video-chatting with his pregnant wife/girlfriend at the hospital back home, who is getting an ultrasound. His eyes well up when he sees his kid for the first time.

Maybe it's because I'm a woman in my child-bearing years, but that scene--even as contrived as it was--laid me out. That's the thing about Apple marketing. They don't talk about how many gigabytes of memory or how many CPU cycles or how many apps (much). They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments.

Contrast this with the Droid ads, which actually scare my friend's two-year-old daughter away from the TV when they come on. The dark, rainy background, the spinning globe of glowing apps, the robot hands poking at them, nary a human in sight.

Droid does. Does what? Show, don't tell.

I'm really glad the new iPhone has been officially announced, and that Apple continues to set the bar for beautiful software and clear communication about the intersection of technology and life.

Update: I didn't fully address the "aesthetics" part of my thesis in this post, but in short, it's that the iPhone operating system has a polish and level of design quality that no other mobile OS has. I haven't tried iPhone 4 myself yet, but the crazy-high resolution retina display and the multitasking/folders demo especially left me green with envy. I'd love to be able to switch between running apps so beautifully on Android.

In this week's episode of TWiG, Leo, Jeff, and I talked about Google's "ban" of Windows PCs for employees, Android tablets, the Sprint EVO (which I love), blogger journalism, and some of Steve Jobs' remarks at D8. My tip of the week was the new "Save to Google Docs" link in Google's PDF viewer.

Hopefully better late than never: in this week's episode of TWiG, Jeff reboxes his iPad to return to the store, we talk Twitter developer relations, and my tip of the week was a web front end to the Android Market, at thanks to doubleTwist.

Thanks to AppBrain, I'm now syncing my list of installed apps to the web for easy sharing and updating. Here's the complete list of what apps are installed on my phone right now. To the left you'll find a neat widget that shows their icons on a handset. Click on any icon to get more info about the app and what it does.

By publishing this list I'm coming out of the closet as cheap: not one of my apps cost anything! In my defense, I did indeed pay for the desktop version of PdaNet.

What other apps should I install or upgrade to the pay-for version? Post your suggestions--and your AppBrain list--in the comments. (Man I would love to see Leo's list!)

For example, I've got a few specific things I use on my phone when I go to the gym: a workout music playlist, a stopwatch app, my gym locker combination, a bookmark to an exercise program I'm following, and an app that tracks how far I've run. I only use these shortcuts when I'm at the gym, so I've put them all in a folder called "Gym," as shown here. When I get to the gym, I plug in my headphones, tap that folder, and everything I need to work out is there.

Here's how to create folders on your home screen to organize your Android icons.

In Android 1.5 through 2.1, tap and hold your home screen. From the "Add to Home screen" pop-up, choose "Folders," then "New Folder."

A folder called "Folder" will appear on the desktop. Tap to open it. Then, tap and hold the folder's header to rename it, as shown. (I called mine "Gym.") Tap Ok.

From there, close the folder and drag and drop any applications, playlists, contacts, or shortcuts to that folder.

Here's what my "Gym" folder looks like when I tap it:

So, while you don't have unlimited home screens in Android, you do have the ability to create home screen folders--which is nice for place/context-specific icon groups, because you can name them. You'll see in the second screenshot that there are lots of other folders you can add to your home screen; I'm a fan and user of the Starred contacts folder as well.