David Thacker Blog

Bringing Samsung Android Devices Closer To Stock It is undeniable that Samsung make some of the best Android devices around. The biggest failure is that they come bloated with many Samsung apps for everything. This guide will go through the process of making Samsung devices on Android 7.0 closer to stock Android. 1. Removing Samsung Apps As mentioned above Samsung Phones come loaded with lots of unneeded apps. You no doubt want to use Chrome, Gmail, Google contacts etc. Usually if you try to do this you will have a bloated apps draw full of Samsung apps you dont want or need. To get rid of them you need to navigate over to the play store and install "BK Disabler"  The app comes in at  £ 2.29 GBP and is well worth it. When you fist have the app fully installed it comes with a notification letting you know that you can disable all apps that are marked up as bloatware.I chose not to and to only remove the apps I did not want. Using the search function at the top it allows you to...

The problem with Samsung Android Devices Samsung has been the market leader in the Android phone market for the last 7 years, depending on the sources viewed with approximately 50% of the Android market . That translates into  just less than 20% of the entire smartphone market .  By any yardstick Samsung Android devices must be successful -  correlating that  performance to consumer satisfaction , it would be expected that Samsung must provide the best Android experience. But the sad fact is that while Samsung's Marketing and Manufacturing Departments are probably some of the best in the world. The day-to-day ability of the phones are lacking. Why are Samsung phones lacking The underlying  AOSP  code that Samsung phones run on which in 2017 is now very mature. Stock Android does almost everything you need and for what it cannot do there is an app that can. Flexibility is the power that lies in Android. Trying to mix iOS and Android But the issue with Samsung is that they have tried...

As described in a previous post the team were struggling with managing a shared IMAP Inbox. Emails were going missing or getting incorrectly marked up as Junk. We needed a solution we chose FrontApp. Getting to know FrontApp Automatic Rules Easy to apply inbox rules to carry out specific actions depending on the type of email. We have over 62 rules in place that manage a wide variety of scenarios from. These can be triggered on the body of an message, subject, from address and many more. Further that this you can use a combination of all of them to achieve the correct workflow rules. There are over 30 conditions that you can filter from, 17 Actions that can take place such as automatically pushing a leas to Salesforce or any other CRM you may have. If you want to read more about these rules it would be best to read FrontApps Documentation for it. Not just for Email FrontApp is not just for processing and dealing with emails it can deal with messages from pretty much any channel you can...

In 2014 my team had a issue we were using a standard shared IMAP inbox. Using thunderbird to connect and tags to distribute the work to the team members. This was fine when we had a single sales person working on the inbox and email volume was low. But business was picking up and so was the volume of emails coming in. We were managing but every so often an email would go astray. This was either due to human error or an over zealous junk email filter. We needed a better solution. The standard communication method in the business world is email. Instant chat tools like Slack, Hipchat and Google Hangouts. These tools do bridge the gap between communities and teams for much more rapid communication. Internally we use Hipchat and its good. There are some issues due to the rate that chats progress. Team members can miss out on vial info. Especially notifications and tags are not correctly setup. Most communication platforms are closed. Requiring an invitation or a corporate email to access t...

Netatmo Presence Right so last weekend I installed the Netatmo Presence and it is amazing - I am very impressed. If you are not familiar with it it is an outdoor security camera that doubles up as an outdoor security light. When I purchased the presence was on  sale at Maplins for 199 GBP . So in this review/ overview I will cover my initial journey in getting to know the Netatmo Presence. Installation of the Netatmo Presence Running Power Installation took approximately 3 hours, if power had existed at the location I wanted the presence it would of taken about 20 - 30 mins if not less as it is simply a case of connecting the presence to the mains power supply (make sure you isolate power to your property at the fuse-box before you begin installation). [caption id="attachment_71" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Junction box for Netatmo Presence[/caption] Mounting the Presence Mounting the Presence to the wall is no more difficult than installing an outdo...