Google Keep is Google’s equivalent of Apple Notes, but a bit better. It’s a place to keep snippets and other stuff. Now that our family has moved to Android phones we need a simple way that we can synchronise notes across Android and Apple devices. Google Keep seems to be the best solution. There is a Google Keep app for Android and a Google Keep app for iOS. The last piece of the puzzle is getting Google Keep on your Apple desktop computer. Here’s how.
Continue reading ⟩Recently I’ve discovered Macdroid and it’s running very will in Catalina with my Google Pixel 3.
I find the ‘Android File Transfer’ app very unreliable. In a previous article I recommended another solution called Pocketshare but it also has its problems. Macdorid is working wonderfully for me.
Step 1 is to Enable USB debugging.
Step 2 is to run Macdroid and plug your android phone into the USB port on you Mac.
Your Pixel or Android Phone will mount on your desktop and you can access it like a regular USB drive. The free version allows you read-only access. The paid version allows you to write files to your Android phone as well as read them.
I’ve been trying out the world of Android Phones recently with a Google Pixel phone. Overall I have been surprised at how simple and effortless it has been to use my Google pixel phone alongside my Macintosh OS X. I was expecting it to be a lot harder to synchronise the Google phone to my Macintosh computer but if anything I have found it easier than my old iPhone.
Each individual application syncs its own data across the internet between the Google phone and OS X. Everything else gets synchronised by Google. I have found this approach surprising simple. It’s just a matter of finding the best application for each job.
Here’s a list of applications that I have found that will nicely share data between OSX, iOS and Android.
Summary: Here’s an app that will let you read an Apple Pages document on an Android phone.
NOTE: This doesn’t work anymore, it’s broken in Mojave, I’ve written an updated article here about the fix.
If you plug an Android phone into your computer the Photos app will open like it does with an iPhone, but it may not see the photos on your Android Phone. This happened to me on my Nexus 5X phone and I needed to give the phone permission to share the photos with my computer. It’s the same for any Android phone. Continue reading ⟩
I tend to get sore thumbs from over-using my iPhone. Here’s something interesting that I noticed when I used an Android phone for 6 months. My sore thumbs disappeared. To tell you the truth, I didn’t really notice this until I switched back to the iPhone again, then after about 1 week my sore thumbs reappeared.
On both phones I was using my thumbs to type. So I think the difference is the iPhone home button.
It’s not a huge force that is required to press the home button, but because it needs to be pressed reasonably hard, and it is used a lot (every time you open a new app) it seems to give me sore thumbs.
So I’m excited about Apple’s move to get rid of the home button altogether with the iPhone X. Looks like they will be using an up-swipe to go back to the home screen. In the meantime, if you get sore thumbs, I’d suggest trying this trick.
If you have an Android phone it’s very easy to copy files across to your Mac computer. Just download this OS X app from android.com and plug in your phone to your USB port. You can then manually copy files across.
You can download the app from here.
Over the past 3 months I have been trialling a Google Pixel Phone. I’m not sure why. I started getting attracted to the Google apps on my iPhone. I found myself using Google Inbox for my email, Google Play for my music, and the Google calendar app instead of Apple’s calendar app. So when Google released their Pixel phone I took the plunge and purchased one to see if it would play nicely with Apple. It’s been a challenging a few months because I can’t get myself back onto my iPhone. I’ve tried three times and I simply cannot go back to the iPhone. The Pixel is a great phone and it works very well with OS X. Google have really nailed the cross-platform syncing. In fact, when it comes to music and photos it syncs more easily with OS X than the iPhone does. So this article is not really a review of the Pixel phone. This my experience transitioning from iPhone to Pixel phone. Continue reading ⟩
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