So I’ve been rushing to wrap up some Android side projects, and I’d like to get them out there before I start my new job tomorrow. OilCan is Greasemonkey on steroids for Android. It lets you customize any website by inserting JavaScript to change the website and help it reach into the Android world using intents.

Vimeo is being a bit odd with videos that don’t have sound. Start playing the video, then drag the seek bar slightly to bring it back to normal speed. Or let it play through the video fast and press play again to watch at normal speed.

Using intents to call other Android apps really powerful, and opens the door to all sorts of web-based apps. For example, you can make a JavaScript call to scan a barcode, pick a contact, or launch into Maps or other Android apps. You really have to peek at this video to get an idea of what it does:

There is an OilCan site with more details about the Userscript format and security model. Check out the source dump for OilCan, or grab a ready-to-run OilCan APK.

Greasemonkey scripts are known for customizing websites to your personal tastes, and this can really help when working on a small screen. One of the scripts in the video above trims away extra columns and margins on Wikipedia pages, giving it more screen real estate.

There are thousands of GreaseMonkey scripts, like one that puts favicons into Google Reader, or one that wraps Google search results into two columns.

OilCan is different than the efforts of PhoneGap, which is focusing on providing GPS, vibration, and accelerometer access to webapps.

So I’ve been rushing to wrap up some Android side projects, and I’d like to get them out there before I start my new job tomorrow.

GroupHome is an app that organizes all the apps you’ve installed on your phone. It automatically groups together apps using the categories shown in Android Market. The “all apps” drawer on my homescreen has become pretty cluttered, and this grouping approach helps you find apps faster.

Oh, and one feature I really like is that you can long-press on an app to uninstall it or view its details.

I wrote GroupHome in about 3 days last week, so it’s still a bit rushed and still rough around the edges. The three remaining things are full-text search, remembering expanded/collapsed groups on close, and moving the static JSON category string to a server.

Check out the source dump for GroupHome, or grab a ready-to-run GroupHome APK.

I’ve been swamped lately with Android and moving across the country, but was able to give an interview to my hometown ABC affiliate in Duluth, Minnesota over Thanksgiving. It ended up running as the main story for their 10PM news, and was also picked up by the Minneapolis ABC affiliate.

I was lucky enough to have an HDHomeRun networked TV tuner handy to record it in wonderful 720p ATSC:

Seriously, if you’re building a MythTV box, this is the tuner to buy–it has two HDTV/Cable TV tuners and everything runs across normal Ethernet, making it perfect for sticking in the attic right next to your antenna for better SNR margins. And yay, they mentioned that I was homeschooled!

And about a month ago I had the awesome opportunity to be part of an Android Developers interview series while I was visiting Google:

It was a great way to show how CompareEverywhere works, and how it integrates with the Android platform. I was also able to talk about Stateful Drawables and the Hierarchy Viewer, which are both excellent tools for developers.

I’m excited to continue getting the word out there about CompareEverywhere, and more new features are still down the road, like seamless wishlist importing and more.