This week, we've got new options for getting your daily dose of the news, some big iOS apps that have finally made their way to Android, and an app that will help you figure out your innate talents, so you can better succeed in your career.
Click through for our picks — you could find your new favorite.
Instagram Layout for Android
Instagram’s creative collage-making app, Layout, is now available on Android. The free app lets you select up to nine photos and arranges them in a variety of different layouts you can choose from. You can also flip, mirror, or swap out images before you import the finished product to Instagram for posting. The app interface is almost identical to the iOS version, which launched about two months ago.
For combining multiple photos into a single, composite image, Layout is one of the cleanest, easiest apps we’ve tried.
Thinking Talents
Here’s an app you MUST download: Thinking Talents (free on iOS), made by Levo. This quiz-style app susses out what your career strengths are based on the way you think, so you can make the most of those talents in your career. Levo explains that a “thinking talent” is something innate, like a love of learning or an inclination towards innovation, rather than something learned. After going through 35 talents, the app will analyze your best traits and help you figure out how to take advantage of them in your work. You can also compare your thinking talents with those of friends or colleagues, to see how you can best work together.
Microsoft Office For Android
Microsoft released its Office suite — Word, PowerPoint, and Excel — for iOS and Android tablets late last year, and now the software trio is finally available for Android phones, too. If you use Microsoft Office at work or at home, you’ll definitely want to give it a download so you can easily compose and edit Word documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoints on the gol. The apps share a similar feel and design to Microsoft’s other Office versions (mobile and desktop), and they let you comment and track changes. The free apps are currently in beta and are invite-only.
NewsGIF
There are a thousand apps out there for delivering the news: Some are publication-specific, like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal apps; some arrange the news into a beautiful, magazine-inspired interface (like Flipboard). Others focus on giving you just a basic, time-saving summary (like Yahoo News Digest). The latest news aggregation app to land in the App Store takes a decidedly more fun approach. NewsGIF (Free on iOS) pairs the day’s biggest news stories with user uploaded (and upvoted) GIFs. The app says it’s “bite-sized news that is easy to digest,” and with it, you also get a healthy dose of entertainment. You can tap into a story to upvote your favorite GIF representation for the headline, and once logged in, you can submit your own.
As the app is brand new, there’s often just one GIF per post, but you can change that. This may be our new favorite way to get the news each morning.
Perfect Workout
Windows Phone users, you’re slowly seeing more quality apps land on your platform. One of the latest is Perfect Workout (Free). Based on the idea of squeezing in a short but quality workout into your crazy-busy schedule, Perfect Workout acts like a personal trainer on your phone, guiding you through exercises for a 10-minute, total-body workout you can do from home. The app includes a timer for each exercise, and cute, minimalist animations to show how each move is done. You can also set reminders if you’d otherwise forget to squeeze this toning session into your day. Similar apps are available on iOS, Android, and even the Apple Watch, but Perfect Workout is specifically designed for Windows Phone.
Read on for the best new apps from the previous week.
Bleep
Looking for a messaging client that’s truly, actually private? BitTorrent’s Bleep may be the answer. Bleep (Free on iOS, Android, and the desktop) lets you text, send photos, and make voice calls without giving out any personal details. Nothing is stored on a server or in a cloud (Bleep doesn’t use any central servers), so the only copy of the message is between you and the recipient. For sexting — cough, we mean, “private messages” — the app has a “Whisper” mode where the text and images disappear from both devices after 25 seconds. While the app can’t prevent your recipient from taking a screenshot of your message, it does obscure it: The app either blurs the name of the sender or the image — you can only see one at a time. It’s definitely an interesting take on messaging privacy.
WifiMapper
Finding a quality coffee shop to work from that has tasty coffee, ample outlets, and good WiFi is nearly impossible. While it can’t help you with the first two, a new WiFi-finding app called WifiMapper (free on iOS) can at least help you find a spot with a quality connection. It’s got a database of more than 500 million hotspots across the globe, with comments from Foursquare users and WifiMapper users about each locale, so you can find a place whose wireless network doesn’t crawl along like a dial-up connection.
Splice 3.0
Splice (free on iOS ) is a video and slideshow editing app. As the name might suggest, it makes it easy to “splice” together clips from your camera roll — and, as the 3.0 suggests, it’s not a brand new addition to the App Store, but it is a fresh version. You can edit together videos with a variety of effects (like filters, text overlays, and transitions), and choose from an expanded music selection to accompany your creation. You can record your voice to act as narration for your video or slideshow, and for the latter, the app automatically zooms and pans around the photo for a polished finish. A lot comes baked into the app, but it also has in-app purchases if you decide you want more visual or sound effect choices.
Déjà Vu
Here’s an interesting app you can bring with you on your travels, or the next time you take an afternoon stroll through your city. Déjà Vu ($2 on iOS) is an augmented reality app that lets you use your phone’s camera and GPS to explore the world through old photographs. The app helps you navigate to the exact place where a photographer stood, and then you can compare the scene today with what a photographer captured 50 or 100 years ago. It can also notify you when you’re walking near a photographic site, like Fenway Park or Penn Station. Right now, it’s only populated with photos from New York, Boston, and Washington, DC, but more should arrive in the future.
Snap Me Up
If you have trouble waking up in the morning, it might be time to try a unique solution like Snap Me Up (Free on Android). This app pits you with the enviable task of taking a selfie before the alarm shuts off. You read that correctly: The alarm keeps blaring until its facial recognition algorithm detects your bleary-eyed mug in the morning sunshine. The UI is fun and colorful, and the app allows you to share your morning snaps, if you so desire (we’ll stick with deleting those pics IMMEDIATELY). Right now the app does have occasional ads, but a future update to the app will give you the option to get rid of those with an in-app purchase.
Like what you see?How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
This Site Can Tell How Trustworthy You Are
Silicon Valley Has A Fashion Week?
This Lyft Driver's Heartwarming Project Will Inspire You
No comments:
Post a Comment