Xoom user interface needs sprucing up

HONEYCOMB may be Google's signature tablet operating system, but its home screen user interface looks bland unless you work to improve it.

Motorola’s new Xoom tablet computer, which uses Honeycomb, comes with stock Android and Motorola widgets, and some useful wallpapers, but there are five expansive home screens to fill.

And the quality of available widgets is below the potential that widgets generally offer, especially with calendar, email, and messaging.

Fortunately there are third-party apps offering alternatives, and even full replacement user interfaces.

Beautiful Widgets ($US2.70 from the Android market) includes a range of clocks, date and weather widgets, and live wallpapers to lift the appearance of Honeycomb's home screens. Its day-night live wallpaper in particular is exquisite.

If you don't have access to HTC’s Sense interface, Beautiful Widgets is a must.

The Xoom has its own email and calendar widgets, but there are alternatives if you want to change skins or configure which mail boxes are displayed. Pure Calendar ($A2.06) and Pure Messenger ($A2.06) are more flexible alternatives.

Touchdown for Tablets is a free app that displays all aspects of a Microsoft Exchange email account: mail, contacts, calendars and tasks, and there are widgets available for each of these functions too.

Alternatively you can ditch the standard Honeycomb UI altogether.

LauncherPro Plus ($US2.99) is a totally fresh UI and it loads quickly; it really spruces up Honeycomb's appearance.

Originally for smartphones, it currently has to be sideloaded onto the Xoom to work. You’ll need to go to the Launcher Pro site to pay for the Plus version.

Once installed, you can reconfigure your entire Honeycomb UI. Select the home screen links and choose the number of screens to display, from one to seven, and you can install specific Launcher Pro widgets, along with anyone else’s.

The other benefit of LauncherPro is that it lets you resize your widgets on the screen. You don’t need to tolerate the higgledy-piggledy appearance that poorly aligned widgets tend to leave.

The Android market currently enjoys one significant advantage over Apple’s iTunes store, and that is its ability to sync apps to a device remotely. You log into the Android market on your desktop, buy apps, and select the devices you want them on.

Android does the rest. It installs the apps on those devices without you lifting a finger.

Android also offers Wifi syncing of music and podcasts through third party apps. For $US4.99, you can unlock the AirSync feature of doubleTwist to achieve this. Your desktop multimedia is synced to your devices without using a cable connection.

Of course, you’ll need to use a Wifi connection for syncing operations and not 3G!

Microsoft's iOS and Android love deepens

 If there’s one group Microsoft can’t shower enough love on right now, it’s those building apps for iPhone and Android. Early Windows Phone 7 adopters are another matter.
On Monday, Microsoft gave its second gift in two weeks to iOS coders, releasing a toolkit for “easily” building iOS apps that work with its Azure cloud.

The Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS includes a complied Objective-C library to work with services on Windows Azure, full source code for the objective-C library, and sample iOS app and documentation to make it easier for iOS developers to build apps for use with Azure.

The toolkit and code has been released by Microsoft to github, here,here and here.
A Windows Azure Toolkit for Android is due to be ready for June, the company said.
Both follow the March release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7. The Windows kit includes binaries for Windows Phone 7 apps, project templates, and sample C# and VB.NET applications, in addition to other tools.
Windows Phone 7 is still new, and it’s market share is still (very) small. So, in addition to offering dev tools for WinPho 7, Microsoft needs to start sucking on the slipstream from the iPhone and Android, the only growing mobile platforms right now in terms of developer and consumer interest.
At this rate, Windows Phone 7 is going nowhere fast. When Microsoft’s NoDo update to Windows Phone 7 choked, early fans of the phone effectively broke their devices in order to update them on their own. An update that was supposed to take place quickly in February was still dragging on through March and April, with no end in sight.
Apologies were as slow in coming as an explanation for what had gone wrong. So, on April 5, a group of Windows Phone 7 users published "ChevronWP7" to bypass Microsoft and carriers and download the NoDo update without waiting for either.
Now, Microsoft has released a new security update, "7392", which fixes nine fraudulent third-party digital certificates. But it won’t be available for phones that used ChevronWP7.
Hacker and Windows Phone 7 user Chris Walsh, who created the hack, now seems to be updating the patch to work with the 7392. But Microsoft is not pulling any punches, and it has explained in no uncertain terms how it feels about those who built ChevronWP7 and anybody who downloaded it to circumvent the delayed update.
Windows Phone 7 director Brandon Watson published a blog post that took the “told you so”stance. According to Watson:

Despite the fact that many people have claimed that an unofficial update mechanism worked fine for them, we cautioned that phones which were updated via this method were not going to be able to update past build 7390. Unfortunately for those customers out there who acted on information from sources outside of Microsoft, the rubber meets the road today.

Watson continues that Microsoft can't promise a fix either, because it's too busy working on the next update to Windows Phone 7 codenamed Mango. "We understand that this isn’t ideal. Unfortunately, our engineering priorities are focused on improving the process by which updates get to Windows Phone, issuing the security update you just got and working to getting Mango to market. Undoing this specific problem was not in our schedule."
According to Watson, Microsoft will work with Walsh and others who created the unsupported update to validate their fix. After all: "The creators of the unsupported tool are a clever bunch."