Hands-On Android (Video)

Hands-On Android is a video how-to series from TWiT, presented by Jason Howell. The whole show runs on demonstration. Howell picks a task, opens the relevant screen and talks through each step as it happens on screen. Typing gets its own episode. In the Gboard walkthrough he points out that an accidental deletion can be undone with the clipboard button in the keyboard's top row. He then turns on gesture cursor control, which he likens to a little mouse built into the space bar: slide a finger left or right and the cursor follows. For finer movement, he pulls a text editing shortcut out of the three-dot menu and parks it in the top row. Accessibility gets similar attention, framed around features that help any user. One tool reads the screen aloud, either the whole page or just a portion traced with a finger, though he notes that long articles still need scrolling. Magnification can be set to start with a two-finger swipe up, a press-and-hold on both volume buttons, or a third method he says adds some lag. The show's most distinctive thread is ownership. Google Play Music was gone, and Google had announced that free Google Photos storage was going away. Howell's answer was to take his media home. Using Google Takeout, he downloads a photo archive stretching back to 2015 and a full music library. He then serves both from a hard drive plugged into an NVIDIA Shield TV running Plex, with Plexamp handling the music. These episodes are candid about the grind. One 50 GB zip took him 40 minutes to move and unzip, with a full terabyte still to come, and his advice is to set aside the time and space. He also admits that his first music import came out unusable. Old hardware gets a second life too. In an Action Blocks episode, a device gathering dust becomes a home automation control center with big buttons to tap. His welcome home button turns on the living room lights, sets the thermostat to 70 degrees and plays 'Home Sweet Home' by Motley Crue, simply because why not. A goodbye button turns off the lights and drops the thermostat to 68 to trim the utility bill. A year-end episode from 2020 is more personal: a tour of the apps he uses every day. He calls his podcast app a workhorse and notes that Audible has had a redesign after a long stretch of looking the same. He also explains why Plex and Plexamp took over his music once Google Play Music changed and YouTube Music failed to win him over. Episodes carry LastPass sponsor messages and close with pointers to other TWiT shows, including Tech News Weekly, where Howell also appears. Production has ended, so what remains is an archive of practical, copyable projects.