Android 2.3 Gingerbread - Get your own profile picture in text message conversations

Phone: HTC Desire S
OS: Android 2.3.3 (HTC Sense 2.1)

If in text message conversations, your friend's profile pictures are showing up, but your own one isn't, you need to setup the "My Profile" contact. To do this, click People, then at the top, click My Profile (not the button to the right of it). Then either select a photo manually, or if you already have yourself as a regular contact with a picture, then hit Menu > Import and then select yourself.

REFERENCE: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3898

Android 2.2 Froyo - Only Enable Auto-Sync when Connected to WiFi

I achieved this using an app called Tasker (currently £4).

1) New profile: on the Tasker homepage, click the plus icon to create a new profile, and don't bother entering a name.

2) Choose the context: go State > Net > WiFi Connected and click the green tick icon to confirm.

3) Select task: you then have to create a task to run when this context is active. There should be a "Task Selection" popup, and you need to click New Task, and again you don't need to bother with a name. Then you should be on the Edit Task page. Click the plus icon to add an action > select Net > AutoSync > Select On and accept. Finally, finish the task by clicking the tick icon.

4) Repeat steps 1-3 for the AutoSync Off task i.e. set the context to be WiFi Connected, but then check Invert on the next page, and set the Task to be AutoSync Off.

That's it - your AutoSync should turn on when you connect to a WiFi network, and off again when you disconnect.


Alternative Apps
-Locale (with a plugin) - expensive at over £6
-AutoSync Account Activator - FREE, and looks good (though I haven't tested it), but too fine-grained controls (i.e. must set individual sync rules for each sync account rather than just overall enable/disable Auto-Sync, ALSO must select specific WiFi networks as triggers, rather than just overall "WiFi connected")
-Toggle Settings - FREE, but not very intuitive interface - I gave up quite quickly.

If anyone can figure out how to achieve this behaviour using a free app, then please let me know in the comments!

Wireless Sync Music between Ubuntu PC and Android Phone

PC: Linux - Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick
Phone: HTC Wildfire with HTC Sense for Android 2.2 Froyo

I have been looking for a good way to wirelessly sync music to my phone for ages. I tried various android apps that failed to meet my needs in one way or another:

-Winamp - need winamp client on PC - no version for linux
-DoubleTwist (AirSync) - only for iTunes
-Android Sync Manager WiFi - PC client requires winXP or above
-Dropbox - must upload all music to internet first (when dropbox syncs on PC), which takes AGES, AND cannot auto-download anything - have to select each song and long press>download (BUT could work with additional app "Sync Folder with Dropbox")
-SugarSync - no Linux client
-ZumoDrive - same as dropbox in that have to upload everything to the cloud first, and cannot auto sync a particular folder on android, so would have to manually download all songs

And then I found Syncness. It doesn't require a PC client as it connects straight to network shares over your WiFi. Requires minimal setup (see below), and then you can have a directory of music on your PC automatically syncing to your phone every night (or just manually whenever you want). It costs about £1, but is well worth it.


SETUP

Put some music in a dir on your PC, and share it: R click > Sharing Options (then it might ask you for permissions to install some sharing libs). Now open Syncness on your phone and create a new profile and give it a name e.g. Music. Click the "Share" folder icon, and let it scan your network for shares, and then select your share from the list. Next click the "Local" folder icon and select your Music dir (if you don't already have one, you may need to connect your phone to your PC and create it first). Set "Sync Type" to "Push To / Pull From Remote", check "Active" (so it appears in your "Active profiles" list), and also check "Allow file deletions", so it can wipe old music you don't want any more. Then enter your Ubuntu name/pass (I left Domain blank), and do Menu > Save. Then you can setup a sync schedule if you want, but I don't change my music that often, so I just do it manually by pressing the big blue SYNCHRONIZE button on the home-screen.

Android 2.2 Froyo - Moving contacts from Phone to Google

Phone: HTC Wildfire
OS: HTC Sense for Android v2.2 Froyo

Confusing contacts system: you can store your contacts in 3 different "accounts" on your phone: in your SIM card account, on your phone's native account, or in your Google account. Only contacts stored in the third list will be synced to your Google Contacts list (used in Gmail), and so really this is where you wanna store all of them.

So what if you already have some contacts in your "phone account"? Maybe you got sent a vCard in a text message and when you clicked it, it automatically got added there without asking (how annoying), or maybe when you first got your phone, you just imported all your old contacts to your phone account without thinking, and now want to move them to your Google account, so they sync.

The best way I have found of moving ALL contacts from your phone account to your Google account is as follows:

1) Save your "phone account" contacts to a file: go into your contacts list (called HTC People on the Wildfire), and do Menu > Import/Export > Export to SD, and select phone account.

Maybe you wanna connect your phone to your PC and backup this file and check it worked properly, as next we will be deleting the contacts from your phone! You can read more about this later in the article.

2) Delete all your phone account contacts: do Menu > View and only select "Phone", then do Menu > Delete, and then Menu > Select All...

3) Import your contacts to your Google account: Menu > Import/Export > Import from SD, then select Google account. If you did step 2, you will need to update your View preferences again to see contacts in your Google account.

Note: If you decided you wanted to backup your contacts file and check it was working, here is some advice:  The file will be stored in your SD card's root directory, with a name like "pcsc_pcsc_00001.vcf". One way to check the file works is to skip step 2, and just import them to your Google account. BUT then each contact is automatically "linked" to the corresponding one on the phone account, and so if you then delete all your phone account contacts, both of them will get deleted, and you will be left with nothing! Of course you then know you are safe to import them again.

Android Calendar - Duplicate Facebook Birthdays

Device: HTC Legend
OS: Android 2.2 Froyo (with HTC Sense)

In my calendar, I had 2 entries for every birthday on my Facebook calendar. If I went into the calendar options and hid the Facebook calendar, both entries disappeared. I've learnt that this calendar is populated by the Facebook for HTC Sense app.

The solution was to remove the account in my sync settings (Settings>Accounts & sync>Facebook for HTC Sense), do a full sync, and then re-add it the account. My contacts remembered all the facebook link information too, so after re-adding the account and doing a full sync, everything was back just the way it was (inc Facebook pictures in my contact list) except no more duplicate birthday events in my calendar!


REFERENCES
http://www.htcforums.com/android-applications-games/6762-duplicate-facebook-birthday-calendar.html