Monthly Archive: October 2015

KEMCO’s latest Humble Mobile Bundle has just been released to the great joy of all RPG enthusiasts in the Android world, their latest bundle makes six extremely popular top end RPG titles available from the highly regarded Japan based video game developer.

Players will be able to pick up these six premier RPGs for the extremely low price of $1 which comprises a massive savings when compared to the normal price of $72 that includes in game content, however from today players will be able to collect them all for just a couple of bucks.A one dollar donation will score players the first three games namely; Eclipse of Illusion, Eve of the Genesis in HD, as well as Symphony of the Origin. Any players that requires access to the further three games making up the balance of the six will need to do better than the average price which currently hovers in the region of $5.64.

The next three titles that will then be made accessible to players are titled; Fortuna Magus, Legend of Ixtona, as well as Silver Nornir. The range of titles available in the Humble Bundle would normally be expanded upon in the following week when the team adds an additional number of extra titles to the bundle, however the current bundle offers additional games that can be unlocked after the players accumulated donation value surpasses $100k, $150k and finally $200k.

The next exciting title to be unlocked after players surpassed the $100k point will be Knight of the Earthends, players will continually need to keep checking on the last two title releases, since the next two games thereafter have not yet been revealed. One of the neatest features of this bundle is that players are offered the option of donating the proceeds of the game bundle to a charity of their choice such as the American Red Cross or any other supported participating charity they may choose.

UStwo Games, a British developer and the creators of the famed 3D Monument Valley Android mobile game that sold in excess of 2 million copies of the game in a single year is now ready to release their latest creation, Land’s End, in just a couple of days, more specifically on 30 October 2015.

The latest creation will be an ultra-realistic and exclusive release made for the Samsung Gear VR headset, that will drop its players into a puzzle filled, dreamy land similar to their Monument Valley game. Their latest, soon to be released video game title Land’s End, will take their players on an adventurous gameplay journey enjoyed from a perspective inside the mobile puzzler, Monument Valley.

The original inspiration for the studio was to create the first VR title of their Monument Valley game specifically for virtual reality gaming headsets such as Samsung’s Gear VR. The gaming creators related they wish to reimagine the experience of gameplay from inside the Monument Valley game. One of the first decisions the team made was that they would not simply copy the original approach they had to Monument Valley, with the team focused on precise 180° turns to to the fact that it would not properly translate to realism of their newly created virtual world. The effect works perfectly when viewed on an iPad, but provides a vomit-inducing effect when players I most in VR.

In order to negate the effect the team had to rethink how the game should be played in VR, which eventually let them arrive at a 360° world that still offers similar aesthetics to Monument Valley, players are required to make their way through a shipwreck while solving puzzles that enables them to find their way out of these individual situations. Ustwo’s latest creation has shown loads of promise derived from its high entertainment value and immersive experience, whilst additionally offering a welcoming break from the proliferation of titles such as first person shooters as well as other high-energy action intense titles.
Land’s End will be available from 30 October 2015 via Oculus’ gaming store on Gear VR only.

Android buffs fortunate enough to have experienced Android’s new 6.0 or Marshmallow OS update will agree that most of the major changes occurred in the previous Lollipop version. However, Android will in its current Marshmallow format be able to prove its newfound transparent, cohesive, and useful nature to the global smartphone community. Marshmallow is at last kind of devoid of frills, despite all the newfound Google added features, with the greater part of its newness found hidden under the bonnet of this newly braced OS.

Android in its evolutionary nature have proven to be more finished and accomplished in each and every new version release, offering a greater number of apps that adhere to its own Material Design Standards. Marshmallow has finally become a fully cohesive OS able to provide to the personal needs of each of its users without the previously unnecessary clutter.
Google Now provides the much-needed contextual abilities that has been lacking until now, with the new Android 6.0 providing tech geeks with a well-received additional deep transparency into the workings of their mobile devices.

The newly introduced features include additional lock screen functionality with a more distinguishable font as well as a quick settings option easily accessible from the notifications menu. It’s lock screen has become noticeably less congested featuring a simpler and more utilitarian layout. The copy & paste functionality has been greatly improved over previous versions which is clearly and immediately noticeable over previous versions, but strangely Google’s own naturally preloaded Chrome browser is still disgraced by the older mechanism.
6.0s Settings menu have been gifted with a far greater informative capacity, such as its ability to known form you of the last security update you’ve installed.

One of its greatest improvements arrives with the new Google account settings now integrated into the device settings menu controls which fortunately accounts for the removal of the old blunt Google settings app since it should have been integrated this way into all devices from the start.There are a multitude of other improvements made under the OSs bonnet, the above just represents a few examples of small changes that will make a massive difference in your daily living with your Android smart device.

Google will soon be offering Android platformed WhatsApp users complete peace of mind in the knowledge that their IMs are fully backed up to the Google cloud. This newfound functionality arrives in the wake of Wednesday’s announcement of a newly struck integration agreement between the two Internet giants.

The wholly-owned Facebook IM subsidiary will offer its users the capacity to connect the app to their own Google Drive user accounts where they will be able to store backups of all user data such as photos, voice messages, text messages, as well as video clips that if exchanged between themselves and their friends and family and now stored on their Android devices, within their own WhatsApp user data base.

WhatsApp users will have the option of backing up their personal data and a customisable schedule that includes options allowing users to do automatic backups on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. Users will have further control over which types of data they wish to backup to Google Drive, with options to include or exclude video clips depending on the number and size of videos stored on the local device and their data plan. After the backup options are set up, and the users can relax knowing that their data is safe and if they migrate to new phones the newfound function will easily transfer and restore data onto their new mobile device or even if their device had to be reset.

The newly scribed Google cloud backup agreement makes good sense, since Android is the dominant life-force in global cellular communications today. The part that raises eyebrows the most is the fact that WhatsApp’s parent company does not use its own Facebook infrastructure for its subsidiary’s user data cloud backups. However considering that iOS platformed WhatsApp subscribers also use the Apple iCloud to provide similar functionality, it might not be such a complete anomaly.

Google also committed itself by announcing that they would not be utilising the Google Drive stored WhatsApp user data to personalise its Google and their affiliates’ advertising, and that the new backup functionality would be rolled out within the next couple of months to appear in the WhatsApp settings menu on availability.

Many of us have in the past, after first checking your phone for an expected urgent message or email, and found it switched itself off and then become ever so slightly aggravated because the thing turned itself off, then promptly try to boot your mobile device again only to find out it is as dead as a doornail. How many of us can honestly say that they’ve never pinked away a tear or two after the above-mentioned scenario, the urgent message or mail fades into the background to become nearly insignificant when the realisation sinks in that vast amounts of personal data, in the form of photos, messages, video clips, and game progress saves, many of which carry great personal and sentimental value had just been lost irrecoverably all safely stored on our beloved, favourite mobile device.

The Helium app quickly gained itself a serious number of fans after its launch just more than a year ago. It will save its users many tears with its options to backup their data and apps to either their own phones the highly recommended cloud storage servers as well as synchronising data between two similar devices. Intelligently, the app just backs up your app data to keep file sizes down to save you time and data, however if you prefer partial or even complete backups its fully and easily customisable settings menu can set this right in the moment. In doing so, it will additionally backup SMSs, text user dictionaries, Wi-Fi connection settings, and a multitude of other types of data.

The Ultimate Backup app performs its functions exactly as the name describes, by offering an absolute smorgasbord of options. It can easily be crowned as the best in class app design with a load of additional utility features and a number of UI tweaks. Its users can even set up the layout of their app displays on their phone, including small items such as the type of screen transition animations its users would prefer within the app itself. The app is refined, yet easy to navigate and set your preferences on while backed with incredibly powerful backup options, unfortunately to enjoy its full benefits users will be required to root their phones. Rooted users or even have the option to restore from Nandroid backups.

Helium would provide the ideal solution to 90% of all users, but Ultimate Backup is sure to provide experienced phone tinkerers and developers with the best possible backup tool while still keeping a glossy smooth UI design.

The majority of users don’t give too much consideration to the keyboards on their smart phones, that is until you get used to one of the SwiftKey’s products. After the experience one can’t help to wonder how you ever got along without a smartphone keyboard that is as quick and intuitive as the typical SwiftKey.

SwiftKey once again are trying to out-do themselves and definitely the rest of the products currently available in the industry, by providing the keyboard with its own neural network simulating technology. Simply put they are providing the keyboard with its own humanlike predictive brain whereby it allows the keyboard to deliver ever smarter predictive word and phrase suggestions as users type i.e. it does all the thinking for its users. The SwiftKey Neural Alpha keyboard utilises its own capacity to self-learn and thereby deliver improved text predictions, in other words neural networking software attempts to reason similarly to the human brain.

Instead of changing its premiere keyboard app prematurely, the company intelligently launched a number of public experiments to improve its upcoming mobile typing revolution. Its earlier Clarity Keyboard prototype showed great promise in its uncanny ability to quite accurately rectify complete phrases once they were typed in full, and now it’s latest brainwave the Neutral Alpha keyboard was just released for the global community to try out. It’s latest keyboard app arrives with a solemn pledge from the company whereby they swear that their latest development has the ability to create immaculately accurate text predictions and an ability to learn its users writing habits and word style in a much faster manner.

Essentially the newly developed software attempts to discern language and word patterns through language data analysis in a fashion similar to the manner in which a human brain operates. The company is adamant that the keyboard will provide a notable difference in a variety of everyday scenarios when compared to its current premier keyboard offering and the current keyboard bases its predictions on a model known as n-gram.

Anyone that is ready to try out the company’s latest ingenious software can do so by downloading directly from Google Play Store.

Smart phones for the greater part have come to serve as a near endless source of entertainment to their users; we take the multitude of other tasks they perform for granted. At times these other functions can be of paramount importance, ranging from warning against inclement weather, or keeping contact with family and friends, and maybe even help to build your career. The below apps generally stand well clear of their peers with a combination of advanced features that might be found singularly in individual apps but very few in the combinations below.

Sunshine, is a new weather prediction app available to iPhone users, that makes the most of your smart phones sensors to read and gather data of the atmospheric conditions from your immediate surroundings and through the analysis of available data give you more accurate prediction of what to expect from weather in your area. Weather apps are a dime a dozen all using second and data sources that are not in your immediate vicinity that may forecast inaccurate weather predictions, which basically renders them useless. Sunshine set about to change this by preventing you from experiencing another surprise downpour.

Vidku is focused at keeping it users connected with other persons they share interests with by making it easy and simple to share their personal video clips with their friends, family as well as any on your contact list. It users would simply create an invite group I up of the people they wish to share their lives with, and anyone part of the group may then share videos in this shared friend stream. All users part of the invite group will be able to view and like any of the footage contained in the stream and other users will be able to see who viewed and liked the film footage. Users always maintain full control over who can view their videos, which means the chance of prying eyes veering footage not meant for them remain negligible. The app is available on both iPhones as well as Android devices.

Even on top end phones storage space is at a premium and in your ongoing search of apps that make your life easier to organise and entertainment to make your phone more fun to spend your precious free time on you will definitely want any good available advice to give you a small nudge in the right direction to make this task as quick and as easy as possible. Then the apps we recommend below is definitely worth giving a thorough once over this week, as next week there will be new ones to check out.

Ipiit, available to iOS and Android platforms alike, makes grocery stores much less intimidating places notably so when you’re trying to adopt a lifestyle of healthy eating. Due to all the GM foods and unhealthy preservatives added to food currently, all foodstuff packaging are labelled with minute illegible print revealing which confectionery contains what unhealthy additives. Unless you are a dietitian or a chemical engineer you will often be required to find a reference as to what most of the ingredient descriptions actually might be, and that is definitely like finding needles in haystacks, but not if you loaded a critical time-saving, informative tool such as ipiit.

With this incredibly handy app you can forego the hunt for Red October, just scanning any items barcode and it will display the item’s corresponding information you might require. Making life even easier you can fill this app with personal preferences and it helps you avoid products at odds with your dietary requirements, whilst helping you find the foodstuffs that you choose to healthify your life with. If you are a newly converted paleo aficionado or just trying to cut down on high energy value foods, ipiit will hope to do so with much greater ease than ever before.

Pause, available on iOS, will help you slow down your world to assist you in reaching a better idea of your itinerary for the rest of the day and get a firmer grip on what you need to achieve in order to make it happen successfully. Pause utilises ancient principles taught in Tai Chi to assist you in achieving and adhering to those critical break periods, required to clear your thoughts of creative processes that you juggle around all day. This will reset your brain clock, reduce stress, make you more effective and in doing so get the creative juices flowing again.

With technological advances in today’s cellular hardware specifically in the fields of CPUs and GPU’s, the current trend in modern gameplay follows a natural progression to additional features and options, and in this world of fantastical next-generation CGI technology finding an uncomplicated straightforward top grade mobile game can be a breath of fresh air. FireWhip is just such a game, where players require just a couple of seconds before cracking their own flaming whip and this is with a game certainly delivers on its promised pyromaniac displays. Like the greater part of high-concept mobile gaming all that’s required of the player to enjoy gameplay is right in its descriptive title.

It is a wave survival game where players out live and outlast as many enemy waves as possible, the main difference being instead of using some fanciful space plaster as a weapon players will enjoy using the singularly coolest gaming weapon ever devised, a fiery blazing whip is the Millie weapon of choice. The whip generates at fiery lethal Vortex whenever players spin their finger on the screen destroying all in its path, the downside is the whip loses energy and shrinks to smaller size, thereby reducing offensive efficacy and operational range. Whip cracks can be had by flicking motions of the finger to deliver a burst of concentrated pain, however the gestures seem unnatural and awkward, especially so on the larger iPad screens, but become more accurate and natural on the smaller iPhone screens.

Due to the simplicity of the game its modest mechanics could occasionally fail extended gameplays, but the styling and art are faultless and provide some truly awesome eye candy. The artwork classify the game as retro styled with its pixelated graphics, it however offers clean unjagged lines and grid style layouts to appear naturalistic. The soundtrack provides good rhythmic thumping from grungy tunes riddled by crunchy arcade like special effects.

This entertaining marble game certainly has a few things going for it such as its fiery explosions to celebrate the numerous explosive victories as well as its retro art styling, with difficulty levels increased by the finesse that is required to accomplish accurate whipping.

Skeptical Science is a free iPhone app that offers users the opportunity to examine a multitude of existing arguments against the global warming theory and provides scientific evidence as proof. Global warming is one of the 21st centuries great burning issues, with numerous arguments in either direction to prove the theory either true or false. It also examines one of the most imported related issues, whether human activity is the primary cause of global warming. The app examines the merits of numerous scientific studies, arguments, and arguments that have been made to disprove the concept of global warming with human activities at the core.

Users now have the opportunity to for themselves examine current evidence that convinced the overwhelming majority of climatologists of the validity of evidence pointing towards a rise in mean global temperatures over the past several decades and that the factors responsible for the increase mostly stem from human activities relating to industrialised civilisation.
The app is structured in a series of discussions, arguments and rebuttals by referencing various studies and presenting far reaching evidence in support of the conclusion against global warming and is a natural outgrowth of Skeptical Science’s website. The group’s self-proclaimed purpose is to further explain the science of climate change while simultaneously rebutting misinformation regarding global warming. Their app overwhelmingly presents evidence and information referenced directly off the group’s website.

Their mobile delivery is mainly purposed in the promotion of a greater understanding in the science of the world’s climate and the changes thereto, by critically examining a wide range of arguments made in rebuttal of the widely accepted global warming theories to determine whether the science is based on scientific principles and studies. The app has been around for a little while but enjoy frequent updates and additions, both to new found scientific evidence and series as well as a number of overhauls in app graphics and presentation. A small number of links referring to discussions and evidence are no longer active. The group provided an excellent option for one of the most controversial issues of this century, where the outcome could affect the future of all on earth. The app now provides a detailed look at both sides of the fence allowing you the user to make up their mind either way, by presenting evidence in a clear and concise manner.