Historypin
...and over there by the gas works used to be the leper colony
Android App of the Week If you’ve ever wondered what your environment looked like in the past, or just like looking at old photographs of places you know, then Historypin is well worth a download.
Searching for pictures couldn't be more easy. The app shows them pinned to Google Maps so you just pan around to any places of interest. Tap on the pic icon by a pin and the image - or selection of images; you can pin as many as you want to a single location - open up.
Search for pinned images (left) or shake your handset for random snaps (right)
A slider lets you change the time period from which photographs are shown to anywhere between 1840 - a year later than the first glass negative was produced - and the present day.
Join the Historypin community with your Google account and you can upload and geotag historical snaps for everyone to enjoy.
Ruabon between the wars
You don’t have add any details to your uploads but clearly it’s to everyone’s benefit if you at least add the who and why to the when and where.
If you find yourself in the place a picture was taken from you can use your phone’s camera to view a semi-transparent image over the modern vista. Historical augmented reality if you will.
History, more recent than you think
Pictures can also be grouped into collections though this only seems to be possible using the Historypin website at the moment.
The majority of the collections currently on show have been created by the site’s operators which brings me onto the app's one small failing: the amount of images it contains. It’s clearly early days but the site only boasts 50,000 pictures and those are spread around the globe.
Think up your own collection themes (left) and upload your own snaps (right)
That said, this is one community site I will be making an effort to contribute to so look out for my collection of images of Hertfordshire and Denbighshire in the 1950s and 60s soon. ®
Size 1.54MB
App2SD Yes
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COMMENTS
App2sd - why
App development manager here. We didn't originally have app2sd because it wasn't introduced until 2.2. We had to disable use support for 2.1 and below to get this working.
Regarding the Transformer issue, we're releasing a fix for this any moment now. It's a matter of the X Y and Z axis being different on Honeycomb tablets. We can only really test on our Galaxy Tab 10.1 so any feedback on how it works in other tablets would be welcome!
Here's a little bit of info about the issue from Google
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/09/one-screen-turn-deserves-another.html
Um
"We didn't originally have app2sd because it wasn't introduced until 2.2. We had to disable use support for 2.1 and below to get this working."
I may be wrong, but that's not true as far as I know. You can use the 2.2 and above SDK to generate an APK targeted at 2.1 and above if you want, which would allow app2sd on 2.2+ devices but retain compatibility with 2.1 devices.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/uses-sdk-element.html
Thanks for the heads-up about the rotation issue fix and the link. Looks like a nightmare to implement! Will be happy to more thoroughly test the app on my OH's Transformer (I've mainly used it on my own Nexus One).
OMG!
A review getting more than 90%, is everyone at the Reg feeling ok?
Yes
You can supply a 2.2 manifest and set the min supported api to 2.1. Use 2.2 tags and they get ignored by the old version. So yes you can support moving apps to sd.
Google have also changed marketplace so even if this were not possible that now you can upload multiple apks under the same product name and it gets matched up to the right device by magic.
The move app to sd doesn't strictly do that though. It moves resources to sd (within an encrypted loopback device), but keeps the app code on the protected flash. If your app were really large, it would still consume a lot of space. The solution to that is probably to write a custom dex loader, shifting out some classes into an external dex which is treated like a resource but it could be a lot of effort.
Android version
worth noting that this app is only supported in v2.2 and v2.3
