Monthly Archive: September 2015

Firstly Skype in its latest and just released iteration learnt to communicate with and via Android wear smart watches in a truly innovative and very cute fashion, while Google Photos just received its first genuinely major update turning into an extremely powerful imaging tool.

Microsoft added some extremely useful and innovative features into its just launched communication app, Skype version 6.4 currently rolling out via the Play Store. With conversations that can now extend to the wrist of Android Wear watch owners in the form of viewing and replying to messages from their watches by tapping on an alert of the conversation on its tiny screen. Users will then be able to respond to IMs via prewritten responses or even voice, additionally there will be able to sketch out crude drawings on their watch screens for Skype to automatically transform into emoji’s and send. The newfound tricks are quite similar to that offered by Google’s Hangouts available on Android Wear watches. All smart phone users should rejoice in this latest offering from Microsoft since it proves their commitment in its continual transformation and updating of Skype to build into a powerful cross-platform IM service. Additionally Microsoft continually reacts extremely aggressively in relation to its ongoing development of high quality Android applications.

The big Tuesday event for Google was unexpectedly not just about new hardware. The Google Photos app, after its first major update, now supports cross platform sharing of user imagery, while speeding up the search for a specific photo amongst tens of thousands of others through a user-friendly intuitive interface. Users can now clip video lengths, or reorder their albums in a much quicker and simpler fashion made possible by its ingrained powerful tools, while making it easier to share new and old pictures with friends and family. One of the most welcome notable new features must be its shared albums, redeveloped and expanded upon on the back of its current photo sharing facility that even allows sharing between iOS and Android devices.

Android users tired of battling with monthly pay-per-view or channel subscriptions that never deliver the content you want at the time you have available to watch it at your leisure without the need for recording devices can now ditch the satellite dish and toss their cable box.

All they would require to do so are the correct Android applications, because the greater part of the major cable TV and big broadcast networks offer free streaming applications available to android users. The available list of on-line television entertainment include full episodes screening the most popular television shows that includes names like Duck Dynasty, America’s Next Top Model, About a Boy, as well as Scandal stop.

The best of these apps deliver all of the most popular network shows for absolutely free and with no login required as one would normally have to with pay-TV. The A&E app delivers their signature reality TV shows directly to your android mobile device including populates Duck Dynasty and Flip This House. The app is sleek and enjoys all the correct basics built right in, to deliver a glossy slideshow of the available featured series, presented on a crystal clear menu. Part of the menu is a queue of “Just Added” featuring their latest screened episodes with previews made available via clips. In addition a quite convenient “Watch List” helps users keep track of any episodes already viewed allowing them to start up immediately where they left off.

ABC rewrote history to become one of the very first of the major TV networks offering their own free Android streaming app. The app delivers promo images presented in a full screen format offering translucent overlay menus featuring smooth intuitive menus, making its “Watch ABC” app true eye candy. Users will have zero trouble in finding complete episodes of the media giants most popular feature shows.

In second installment of our reviews on several of the brilliant and user-friendly widgets that are now available on iPhones we will spread good news and bring joy to travellers, sports fans, as well as home automation buffs. These fantastic new apps offering these powerful information tools delivers absolutely amazing capabilities that are simple beyond belief to install, activate, and use to enrich our lives and enable us to have more free time for hobbies or even enjoy the information delivered about our hobbies while busy at work, lunch, or even make long boring meetings seem like fun.

ETA’s widget collects and combines the users information with regards to his or her most frequently travelled to destinations available at all times at a glance, immaterial of whether they might be walking, using public transport, or driving themselves. Users will always be fully aware of what time they need to leave and/or arrive to make the appointments on time, just tap your desired destination once to open the navigation app which will plan your route for you just a few split seconds. ESPN is known and loved by all sport hobbyists & hooligans, and now their widget will notify users which games are on and at what times they will air, and spoiler alert the widget will even provide final scores for completed games and events, giving users a full sports page in their notification area.

Hue’s Today from electronics manufacturer Philips is the remote controller that offers the capacity to replace some of the remotes needed to control home automation functions. The widget allows the user to control their customised preferred light settings directly from the notification centre in their iPhone, eliminating the need to stumble around a darkened room or house while hunting for a light switch or a remote.

Increasing numbers of mobile users and companies are becoming more security conscious regarding the privacy levels offered by their cellular communications, with many now insisting that all forms of communication involving the exchange of sensitive information be conducted via secure means. Businesses are legally required to be compliant with the HIPAA act to ensure their client information remains secure, or public figures attempting to keep their private lives to themselves instead of unwittingly sharing it with a stalker or paparazzi.

TextSecure is a free app that can accomplish just that, it functions with the current phone dialler and user mobile number, but will keep the paparazzi, NSA, or the weird geek from IT from hacking into your messages. The app encrypts all over the air communications and keeps them safely encrypted once the message arrives on the mobile device as well.
RedPhone, another free app and peer to TextSecure also works in conjunction with your current contact list and dialler, but allows its users to conduct secure encrypted VoIP calls to other RedPhone users. It also alerts its user when another RedPhone user is calling them so the call can be conducted fully encrypted, and users have no need to worry that they might fall victim to the NSA while discussing their plans to take over the world with Dr Doom.

Wickr a third free app whose developers believe the most secure message is one that does not exist and no-one can prove otherwise if it went poof up in virtual smoke. It offers its users a fully secure texting service than even offers the capacity to manage media. The user sets the time of validity before sending a message and it then self-destructs when that time limit has been exceeded….no not the phone, just the message! This ensures ultimate security, even if the receiver shows it to another person there remains no evidence and the information simply becomes ugly hearsay.

Over two years have passed since its initial launch on Android, and Google has finally deigned to bring its brilliant note making and taking app called Keep to iOS. This latest re-platforming of the app should give iPhone users good reason to rejoice, since one of iOS users ongoing frustrations when supporting Google’s services on their devices is the tremendous lack of urgency with which the search engine giant brings its latest tools to the iOS.

The strategy speaks of good logic on Google’s part to assist the company in its goal of achieving primacy in the competitive mobile market, providing iOS users with the latest and best versions of their own in-house developed operating system apps could potentially provide Apple as a company with a Google created marketing advantage, which, while good news for Google is generally terrible news to strictly iOS supporters.

Keep was designed to pool and store all the various bits of information users pool from all over the web into one currently existing central app controlled data base, which offers users an easy to manipulate intuitive interface of recognisably “Post-It”-like notes. The sticky notes can be easily recognised by the user through customisable colours, where the note has the capacity to carry a variety of data forms such as images, audio files, and checklists.

To later enable users to quickly retrieve an idea or memory they had seen and stored by simply searching through their notes guided by colour, type and context without having to revert to a massive web search. Users can also then share their own Keep notes with other people in order to collaborate on shared tasks and interests. Keep also offers its users customisable notifications that may be location or time based to remind them to collect dry-cleaning, buy groceries, or even remember distant relatives’ birthdays. In many aspects offering functionality similar to Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana that is currently available on Android and its own Windows 10 and what Apple is developing into the iOS’s Reminders app and the independent, long time unmatched and brilliant Evernote app.

Stickies are the virtual comparable of the Post-It notes, and have over the years built up a long history with Apple which dates back over a decade to the Mac System 7.5 release in 1994. The utility was pushed to the backburner and became a bit of an afterthought to Apple who deleted the useful little scraps of virtual note paper from its finder into a dashboard widget with the start of OS X Tiger.

Chronos developers quickly dispensed of its personal third-party engagement its concept after realising that Mac owners became award of their vibrant desktop notes. However good ideas won’t stay hidden for long, and now StickyBrain has been given a new lease on life for use by the younger generation. The app still offers the familiar feel and looks originating from Apple’s built-in Notes, StickyBrain making a case for itself offers several new improvements such as customisable background colours and hierarchical folders. The relaunched version of StickyBrain offers a completely new design having been remade from ground its level with the assistance of Apple’s latest Swift software programming, which resulted in a much faster, leaner note manager.

The latest app makes it a doddle to speedily find whatever users may be searching for by organising its information into hierarchical folders. The developers Chronos compares their latest StickyBrain app to a massive drawer where its users may deposit their uncategorised, jumbled information, which may include photos, screenshots as well as text files that might have been imported from other third-party apps via basic formatting intact, this would include information from your ancient Apple Stickies. As a bit of the old and familiar, the latest app still retains colour schemes thereby reminding one of the one good reason why the original gained such popularity in the first place.

It is late September 2015 and the below games urgently beg to be played starting before the end of the month and will carry through the next slew of brilliant new game releases are made in October, the current crop features a brilliant new dungeon crawler and a fast action zombie shooter.

Dungeon Boss offers a fierce playing dungeon crawler with battles taking place in a sequential fashion, where players are required to fight their way through the usual cannon fodder consisting of lesser foes only to meet the near insurmountable level boss at the end of each stage of the dungeon. Players will need to defeat this level-end beast to receive treasure trove of gems and gold which they can trade for various upgrades and improved items. Visuals offer an artfully done blocky style 3D graphics with relatively cutesy gameplay environments, however this be not as the more advanced dungeon levels later in the game can get difficult in the most extreme ways. The fast gameplay and excellent graphics will require pretty decent mobile devices to enable smooth play.

Unkilled is a new development from Madfinger Games, they are folks that created FPS hits Dead Trigger 1 & 2. It is a brand-new zombie FPS game offering a completely different style of gameplay, where players may now feel free to blast their way throughout New York City’s streets at the onset of a new zombie apocalypse. Controls offer the use of the screen left side to move around and for aiming the right site is offered for your other thumb. A fire button is lacking, because whichever weapon the player is equipped with will fire automatically as soon as a zombie that requires utter and total destruction enters their sights. The game controls, cross feeling exceedingly smooth but providing an excellent platform from which to follow its cheesy storyline that offers so much fun in blasting your way through a horde of undead, weaponry include rockets as well as bullet-time tracing buffs. Techno buffs that require the latest in current tech capability must certainly give this game a good try-out.

The one comment one continually hears from smart phone users is that the sheer number of available applications featured on Google’s play store makes it an absolutely daunting task to firstly search for, and secondly review other users comments and editor ratings before downloading and installing the app to your phone. Then to find out that despite the fact that it might be a brilliant app, it still does not fulfill all the essential requirements that you may have, then to uninstall, return and repeat the process, perhaps even a couple of times before finally settling on the one that ticks all the correct boxes. The apps discussed and recommended below hopefully should make life a bit easier in that regard, since both represent the best of their kind with a multitude of features and customizable adjustments that can be set to suit your specific needs.

The best Android app that brings to the fore the importance of a good keyboard app must certainly be the good old standby Swift Key, well there is none other just as great and as helpful and perhaps better in some aspects and the newcomers name to join the style what at the top of the best of its kind is Fleksy keyboard. This must be one of the fastest and most accurate typing tools and certainly has become the new favourite of anyone that has tried it. Most users adopt Fleksy to replace all others after just a couple of hours of trying it out, and is fast because it offers large keys, it is clever and after a short period of time users realize the incredible usefulness of some of its smaller details.

Google Play Music has quickly become the favourite app of many users to download free music right at the moment. This is quite a bold statement since there are a multitude of excellent music downloader apps available, the biggest problem with most of these apps are that they are there today and gone tomorrow, this is due to the fact that most of them impinge copyright laws. In contrast Google Play Music offers users a fully legitimate list of ever-changing tunes downloadable for free from all major artists, what can be better than that!

The bundle of new apps under discussion today does not represent any long time Hall of Famers, instead they represent the best of their kind present in Androids hallowed hall of new app affection. From high-tech that finds the best websites from which to watch your favourite TV shows and movies on-line to the most basic input device between the user in his cell phone i.e. keyboards. We get used to keyboards over the years, yet when a truly worthwhile app appears over the horizon and someone is kind enough to introduce you to this snazzy new digit tapper which then allows you to discover the true potential that lies within this often overlooked but most essential app to any touchscreen user device.

JustWatch, launched during the first part of the year, offers a unique on-line service, whereby users can easily locate the best on-line sites to stream and watch or download to watch later TV shows and movies. The great news is, it is now available as a downloadable app On Android, as well as iOS. The concept is simple, to pool the best on-line locations to view movies at your leisure and convenience. The concept might be symbol but due to the billions of websites out there that could still be a near impossible task which this makes this app incredibly useful and a massive timesaver. In addition, the app will also display the lowest available prices where users can buy or rent a specific movie or TV series that users might be interested in, included in this service, it even offers the capacity to indicate availability via subscription services like Crackle, Hulu, and Netflix.

Intel Remote Keyboard app provides its users with the flexibility to utilise the cell phone is remote control for all computers they could possibly wish to control from it without the necessity to carry around, or search for a slew of remote controls that are hidden somewhere in modern day households only to later turn up when nobody needs it any more. Intel have since time immemorial been hardware specialists, yet their various forays into software technology remains an intriguing factor. This latest piece of innovating software from the King of hardware platforms will turn any Android device into a universal remote to control your PC keyboard and mouse, it was initially designed as an input device for Intel’s micro-PCs and offers a most intuitive control interface any user could possibly hope for and its mouse controller is superb and definitely one-of-a-kind.