The Jelly Bean Thread

[Vulk]

I thought it might be worthwhile to create a thread of tips and tricks for those of us who are using Jelly Bean.

A couple of things I've discovered:

Google Voice Actions:

According to Google, you can do a voice search for "London 2012 medals" and it should show you an up-to-date tally of which countries have won medals at the Olympics. It doesn't yet work for me though; maybe it's too soon in the competition?

In practice, something that I've found Voice Actions useful for is setting an alarm. Since my schedule is somewhat irregular, I don't always wake up the same time, but setting a new alarm can be a nuisance. Just tapping the voice icon on the homescreen and saying "wake me up at 8am tomorrow" or even just "wake me up in eight hours" is one time of those times where voice control is genuinely just way more convenient and simple than fiddling with a touchscreen. I hope that Google Voice Actions starts to get more of these commands to control your phone, because it's currently behind Siri in this area. (In terms of searching for information though, it's already way ahead of Siri.)


Expanded notifications:

Very few apps currently use the expanded notifications. The only third-party app I've found so far that uses them is Foursquare. There are several apps I can think of that would really benefit from using the new notifications API, eg. WhatsApp, Stopwatch & Timer, and Facebook. Does anyone know of any other third-party apps that have implemented them?

On the subject of expanded notifications, does anyone else find the two-finger gesture to pull them down to somewhat annoying? It effectively makes the notifications impossible to expand in one-handed use. I don't understand why you can't just expand a notification with one finger. I imagine this will soon become an option in custom ROMs that are based on Jelly Bean and perhaps eventually implemented in AOSP, just like swipe-to-dismiss was eventually implemented.


Google Now:

Google Now continues to be a bit of black box. One thing that I really like is the feature where it warns you in advance about what time you need to leave in order to be on time for an appointment, based on real-time traffic conditions. But sometimes it doesn't do this - in these cases it doesn't show the map in the appointment card at all - even though I have set a location in the calendar, and that location is listed on Google Maps. It's weird.

Google Now continues to be cool and creepy all at the same time. For example, I sometimes - but not always - pick up my significant other from work at around 5:30 in the afternoon. Yesterday I went to go do that, and as I was leaving Google Now helpfully popped up a traffic report to her work. It also asked me whether I want to give a name that location. I can understand why many people will find this invasive and scary. It is! It's effectively telling you that Google is spying on your every movement. But it's so very, very convenient!

I still haven't really found any other uses for Google Now that don't involve traffic or weather though.


Anyway, that's about all I can think of for now.

 

[milomak]

The medal thing

http://img20.imageshack.us/i/screenshot2012072915292.png/

 

[AntiThesis]

What device are you using Jelly Bean on? I've been testing it with the (unstable) CM10 on the i9000 and so far it's pretty solid.

 

[milomak]

i'm currently running cm10 on my hox

it's pretty stable. good enough to be a daily driver.

 

[Vulk]

AntiThesis: Samsung Galaxy Nexus, manually converted to the yakju build.

Milomak: Yeah, asking it about medals works now. It's also pretty cool that it detects which country in you're in and always displays that country in the list, even if (as is the case with South Africa, lols) your country is far down the list. You can also ask it some other Olympics-related questions, like "when is the next archery event in the 2012 Olympics?".

A couple more observations:

Wallpaper:

I really dislike most of the stock wallpapers in JB. For some reason, Google has mostly chosen to go with light pastel shades that are heavy on power consumption and make it hard to read icon text. I kinda wish they had added to the existing ICS wallpaper collection rather than replacing it completely. Oh well. If you're looking for somewhere to download new wallpaper, there are some good ones available here. Alternatively, the original ICS wallpapers can be downloaded here.

Also on the subject of wallpapers, I notice that one of the effects of Project Butter is that live wallpapers are now usable. On ICS, most live wallpapers would slow down the swiping and app drawer animations my homescreen to the point where it was unpleasant to use them. On JB, there's hardly any visible performance hit at all. I'm still not really using live wallpapers though, mostly because (with the exception of the Phase Beam wallpaper that comes standard with ICS) I haven't been able to find any that I really like.


Notifications:

Since I made the previous post in this thread, at least one new third-party app has come out that uses the expanded notifications in Jelly Bean, and that is Tasks. I'm using the paid version of Tasks, and I was once again glad to have bought the app and supported the developers, having seen the speed with which they implemented the new JB notifications API. This definitely one of the best to-do list apps on Android, for the record (though GTasks is also good).

On the other hand, have I mentioned that WhatsApp really needs to add support for this? On more than one occasion, when multiple WhatsApp messages have piled up, I've tried to expand the notification to see who're they all from, only to feel a sense of irritation when it doesn't work. Sorry - this probably sounds like a fairly whiny complaint to some, but after you've used JB for a while, expanding notifications starts to feel quite natural and normal, especially with apps that create stacked notifications. Once you've gotten used to a particular UI convention, it's annoying when apps don't conform to your expectations.

Something else I've noticed that I *think* is new is the fact that the data monitor now gives you the option to keep using data after you've hit your cap, and provides you with a runny tally of how many megabytes you've gone over. Perhaps I'm mistaken, and this was available in ICS, but I definitely haven't noticed it until now. Either way, it's a nice feature.

Here's a screenshot I took, demonstrating the expanded notifications in Foursquare and Tasks, the, the data usage notification, the lack of expanded notifications in WhatsApp, and a handy traffic card from Google Now:

 

[MarchantV]

Have you encountered any problems with Jelly Bean after yakju conversion?