[Android General] codertimt:
I'm not sure where I found this info, but I don't believe it was here, so I thought I'd leave a little write up about enabling Google Voice Search. First I found and downloaded the old voice search apk. You will need to search for voice search 2.1.4 apk..should be a legitimate free download. However, as I'm sure many have tried and seen, it simply force closes when installed. So, as mentioned, I found a post somewhere that pointed to the missing lib...oh so obviously named libvoicesearch.so. It can be found in the gingerbread gapps zip. Again, you can just search for that...I found it on goo.im/gapps. Now on a basic level, we're done, you can have your voice control icon and a voice input button will be added to maps and the browser.

So, we're just missing one more thing...voice typing from the keyboard into any app. Unfortunately whatever it is that triggers keyboards to display a voice input key is still missing. So, simply installing Gingerbread Keyboard isn't enough to enable the functionality. I tried out quite a few keyboards and obviously they are all keying off the same thing...perhaps it's a bit to flip in some config file...regardless it's not there currently. I did find two keyboards(there are possibly more) that will present the key. One is SwiftKey, the other Kii. Neither are free, Kii only clears it's fancy prediction dictionary when not registered, so I went with it...plus it has a better voice input presentation. Only final caveat is that neither of these will show the voice key as a primary key...you have to hold another key and it will popup as the first option...so it's not too bad. Still looking for a perfect solution, but this functions in the meantime.

I guess I'll go ahead and post up a few other things from my setup that folks might find useful since I'm here.

1. Tablet Talk - Direct Text message forwarding from your phone. There are a few programs like this, but this one uses a direct link (BT or Wifi) from your phone and doesn't have to go out to some other server to store/fetch messages. Interface it okay, designed for tablets, so a bit cramped on the small screen. But seems to function pretty well. I'm connected via bluetooth and it doesn't interfere with voice call functionality at all. You do have to run a service on your phone also, but so far I haven't noticed any negative impact. Oh yeah, needs an Android phone...but we're on XDA right...so that shouldn't be a problem for most.

2.Android Weather Widget - I have discovered, along with others, that the majority of weather widgets don't play nicely with the Asteroid. Since it's gingerbread, the widgets basically think it's a phone and even when connected to some wifi network, when it can't get initial location triangulation via a cellular data network...it will never get a location lock. Elsewhere someone found a non-free widget that functioned correctly, but I'm cheap... I finally found the Android Weather Widget after trying quite a few. It's pulls location via the gps and then grabs the needed data from wifi. Works and looks great. Using it with ADW in the screenshot of my current setup. As an aside, so far ADW is working nicely.

3. PerApp - Most of the time I like to use Google Navigation for my mapping needs. I quickly found there was no way to adjust the volume on the Asteroid. It is not tied to master or notification...well it does adjust with master(since, you know, it's the master volume), but it's at a much lower level than the music so can't play nicely. Found PerApp, which allows me to go in and set up to a +15db increase for the app. Works like a charm. Also has rotation functionality(again per app) that functions great. Only caveat can be found in one of my previous posts. Make sure to turn off it's screen timeout functionality. You can't set it to 0(which in this case is no timeout) and it will default to 1 minute. You will then get an annoying clock popup every minute and go crazy trying to find out why. So after installing you might needs something like SOFFT to reset the default timeout.

4. AsteroidTweaker - Mentioned just above, I basically use this to have a reboot functionality without having to have a paperclip handy along with getting my unit to resume from my USB drive most of the time. Also has various other tweak and fixes. Worth a look. Steering wheel control people, it claims to have some fixes for that also...but I haven't looked into it much as I do not. One negative I have noticed is that when switching between sources, it get's a little confused and jumps back a forth for a second...I don't switch sources that often, so minor annoyance for me.

5. Droid VNC Server, Dropbear SSH Server(not my first choice and now discontinued, but works). Using VNC to capture screens, it's also nice to play around from the comfort of my house. A bit slow to refresh and makes some actions pretty difficult, but overall works well. Always nice to be able to SSH in and take a look around also.

6. AdAway - Host file ad blocker.

7. Mongoose web server - This is actually for running on a windows PC. Just throwing it in because it's handy. Basically just throw the executable in a directory of file you want to access remotely and start it up. Then you can browse to your pc from the Asteroid Smart web browser and download the stuff you are wanting to get on your device. Sure you could also start up the SSH Server and scp, or install and sftp server, but this is just handy sometime.

Anyway, hope this might help some folks out. I had nice helpful links in place for the apps, but XDA apparently did not care for that within my great wall of text. Not quite sure why it refused to let me post with the links... Anyway, let me know if you have any questions on things I've mentioned...