Regardless how big the storage space you have in your Android phone, if you do not maintain it, plenty of useless stuff (such as cache, app history, leftover files and folders after you have deleted the app etc) will pile up and affect the performance of your phone. If you have installed and uninstalled plenty of apps, it can be troublesome and difficult for you to go into your phone internal system to delete every single leftover and useless file. 1-Click Cleaner aims to make that process a breeze.

After you have installed 1-Click Cleaner, all you need to one click (or should I say, one tap) to clean up your system.

1. Install the 1-Click Cleaner app from the market.

2. Open the app. You will see a big circle at the center, yearning for you to tap it.

3. When you click the center circle, you will get a prompt asking you to confirm your action. If you select the “do not prompt after”, it won’t show you the prompt in the future.

4. Once it is done, it will show a report of the stuff that it has cleaned up.

Other than the 1-click cleaning, there is also the individual items such as cache clear, SMS clear, history clear or carry out a deep clear.

The cache clear feature will scan all your applications and clean up any cache leftover by the apps.

The SMS clear allows you to easily multiple messages and delete them immediately. It saves you the effort to go into your SMS app and delete the message individually.

The history clear comes in two parts: web-based history and call history. The web-based history deals with items such as browser history, Gmail search history, Google Maps search result and market search result. The call history allows you to delete your call logs.

For the deep clear, it scans your SD card for useless files left over by apps that you have uninstalled. Most of the time, you can select all the items and press “Clear” to delete them all.

It would be great if 1-Click Cleaner comes with a scheduler so you can schedule it to run regularly. When that happens, the name “1-click cleaner” won’t be a fitting name anymore, since you no longer need any click (or tap) to clean up the system. Hopefully that is not the reason it didn’t implement the scheduler feature.

This may not be a fanciful app, but it can be a lifesaver if you need to squeeze out extra space or performance for your phone.

What do you think?

1-Click Cleaner (Android market link)

Simkl is an application that will keep all of your chat histories stored in the clouds. This means you can access a chat from anywhere you have internet access, not just your local machine.

Something to download

Even though everything is stored in the clouds, there is still an application you need to download and run on your local machine. Simkl isn’t magic, it needs something on your machine to record your conversations.

What Simkl works with

Right now you can use a few different instant messaging services. Skype, Windows Live Messenger (WLM), ICQ, Yahoo and AIM can all have their chat histories recorded and stored online. You will also see you do not need to use the actual application. Simkl has been tested with apps like iChat, Pidgin, Digsby and many others.

Why use Simkl?

I asked myself this question when I looked at Simkl. For a freelancer or person who travels a lot for their job, having access to your chat history can save you a lot of headaches.

Imagine you are on the first day of your business trip and you get an email from a client asking the exact price of the quote you talked about via Skype chat. Instead of telling them you will need to get back to them in 4 days when you return, you can login to Simkl and look up your chat with that client.

What you can save

If you use any of the instant message services, you can save the chat logs. These histories will be saved for later reading on history.im. Saving your chat logs in the clouds is a fantastic feature for those of you who use multiple computers during the course of their work week. Using Simkl will combine your chat logs so you don’t need to remember which computer you were on when you talked to a certain person.

If you are using Skype or Windows Live Messenger, you also have the luxury of storing your voice chats as well. For those of you who conduct interviews through WLM, there really isn’t a good way to record your chats. If you use Skype, you will need to use a 3^rd party application to review the dialog.

Having access to the voice conversation recording is ideal if you want to go back later and transcribe the conversation.

What else Simkl does

Another feature of Simkl is saving your instant message contacts. This may not seem important because you can always just re-download the IM application and sign in again if your PC crashes. Well, what if your account gets hacked and you can’t access it?

If you are looking for a specific part of a conversation but don’t remember when it was, you can search through all of your logs for a specific bit of text. I don’t know about you, but I am a big IM user and it can be a huge pain to remember who you talked to about what. Searching for a phrase can be a monstrous time saver.

What are your must have instant messaging applications or add-ons?

There are many options to use with the bash history, some of them I use nearly every time I open a command shell. Today I’ll be covering some of the most useful aspects of the history, but I certainly won’t be able to cover them all.

Up/Down Arrows

Many of you probably know this one, but for anyone who doesn’t, it’ll make your life a lot easier. Any time you’re in the command shell, simply use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to move through the list of previously entered commands. Next time you enter a long command that turns out to have a typo, you don’t have to retype the whole thing just hit the up arrow and make whatever edits are needed.

!!

A similar feature to the one listed above is the double bang (!!). Those characters entered in the shell represent the last typed command. Let’s say you’re trying to run a command only to find out that you need root privileges to do it. Instead of retyping the whole command, you can simply enter

sudo !!

Bash will substitute the !! for the previous command, as in the example below.

This also works further backward, you can do something like

!-5

to recall the command 5 entries back in the history.

!(word)

Perhaps a few days ago you typed a long, complex command into your shell, for example a series of options for “wterm”. You can find and re-enter than command by using the history’s built in search. You simply add the first few letters of the command after the ! and bash will find it.

Be careful with this one. You may end up running something other than what you expected. Don’t use this for potentially dangerous commands like “rm” or “fdisk”.

!?(word)

This is similar to the last feature in that it searches the history for the word entered, but unlike !(word) this will find the word anywhere in the command, not just the beginning.

Be careful with this one. You may end up running something other than what you expected. Don’t use this for potentially dangerous commands like “rm” or “fdisk”.

Ctrl-R

This one may be my personal favorite history tool. It’s a bit like the !? item above, but interactive. In your command shell, hit Ctrl-R, and it will begin a search. As you type, bash will search the history and show you the results as you type. When it shows the command you want, simply hit enter and it will run that command. This can be safer than things like !? because you can see what the command will be before you run it, so you don’t have to guess or rely on memory.

Manual Search

Perhaps you don’t like the way Ctrl-R works, or you want to see ALL the commands you typed, or just the ones that contain a particular word. The history command will show you your full command history, along with the history number of each command (hold that thought, we’ll cover those numbers in a moment).

You can also specify the number of items the history command will show. To see the last 10 entries in the history, you could type

history 10

To see all history entries that contain a particular word, you can use grep to filter the results, like below.

!(number)

When you use the history command to view your command history list, you’ll notice each item in the list has a number associated with it. You can use that to recall that particular command. For example, item 87 could be run again by entering

!87

into your shell.

Word replacement

This one’s pretty great. How many times have you written out some big long command only to realize you put, say, hdd when you wanted hdc? Well bash has you covered. You can replace a word in the previous command with another using “^”, as in the example below

Managing Your History

By default, the history is saved in ~/.bash_history. You can deal with this file however you see fit, but there are some useful things you could try to manage it automatically. Namely, setting the environment variables HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE. To set the number of entries that can be saved in the history file to 1000, enter

export HISTFILESIZE=1000

into your shell. This will limit the file to 1000 entries. If you want to make this change permanent, put that export command into your .bashrc or .bash_profile file.