6 Spotify Apps You'll Use Every Day

With more than 15 million songs on Spotify, deciding what to listen to can be overwhelming. This list highlights the best Spotify apps for discovering new music, reading album reviews and exploring the social buzz of emerging bands.

What's your favorite app on Spotify right now? Let us know in the comments section below.

1. Fuse

Best for: Creative playlists

The Fuse Spotify app is a perfect resource for curated playlists. With a gorgeous, image-heavy layout, the app is fun to use and very visually appealing. Fuse's "What We're Listening To" playlist features over 200 tracks and is updated by staff members daily. You probably won't find new songs with this app, but you will enjoy the creative approach Fuse takes when compiling its playlists, such as "This Niles Rodgers Playlist is Like the History of Disco and Dance," "The Daft Punk Samples Playlist" and "Single Ladies: The Best One-Named Female Singers."

2. Blue Note

Best for: Perusing classic jazz songs

Blue Note is an essential Spotify app for jazz enthusiasts. The app features more than 70 years of music. Its interactive timeline and filters let you customize your browsing selection. "View" or "Read More" links bring you to a landing page with historical context and profiles of contributing artists. "Add as Playlist" and "Share" buttons make the interactive experience social, too.

3. TuneWiki

Best for: Looking up lyrics

Say goodbye to those "[song name] +lyrics" Google searches. The TuneWiki Spotify app generates lyrics for whatever track you're listening to, and then as the music plays, it automatically bolds the current line. The app struggles with more experimental music like Dillon Francis and XXYYXX; since the words are so muddled, it simply says:

[Instrumental]

(Instrumental)

{Instrumental}

And I have to admit, I appreciated the creativity in conveying the different sets of instrumentals.

4. Emerge

Best for: Tracking social buzz of emerging artists

The Emerge Spotify app uses data visualization to track new artists you care about. While most apps on the Internet try to cater to Millennials' notoriously short attention spans, Emerge takes a more long-term approach: It tracks social buzz and Spotify activity of 10 upcoming artists over a six-week period.

5. Pitchfork

Best for: Alternative music discovery

Pitchfork's publication is exceptional for finding new music, so it's no surprise that its Spotify app is equally helpful. You can browse album reviews in three ways: an all-inclusive stream, the best new albums, or Pitchfork-made playlists. Each album listed comes with a numerical rating, an "Add as Playlist" option, and a "Share Album" option, as well as a full-length, Pitchfork-style album review.

6. Rolling Stone Recommends

Best for: Reading reviews of new releases

The Rolling Stone Spotify app works hard in all the right places. The interface is hassle-free and the album and song reviews are hosted directly on Spotify. A large selection of the playlists are curated by top artists, from David Guetta to Tom Petty.

Source : mashable

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Qualcomm's BatteryGuru App Improves Android Battery Life

Battery life is always a huge concern with any smartphone. If you’re not careful, especially with Android devices, you can wind up with quite a few applications running in the background, which drains battery.

Several smartphones now come with built-in software to optimize battery life. For those that don’t, Qualcomm released Snapdragon BatteryGuru, an Android application that monitors what’s going on behind the scenes on your phone, and adjusts your phone’s settings to maximize battery life.

The app has received over 100,000 downloads since its debut in beta February of this year, and is officially launching Tuesday.

The app learns your personal phone behaviors, and then devises ways to optimize battery performance based on those behaviors.

For instance, leaving on the Wi-Fi can drain battery power, as your phone is constantly searching for a Wi-Fi network for connection. BatteryGuru learns your most frequently used Wi-Fi hotspots, and then enables Wi-Fi when you’re around.

Android apps often refresh more than necessary, which adversely effects battery life. BatteryGuru pays attention to app usage patterns, then refreshes your apps based on those patterns. This ensures apps are updated when you need them to be — but aren’t draining battery when you don’t want them to.

Lots of little tweaks ultimately leave you with a little more juice at the end of the day.

You can download BatteryGuru for free now from Google Play for the majority of Snapdragon-powered devices, including smartphones created by Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG and Sony.

Source : mashable

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Will That Tweet Get You Fired? This App Warns You

If you've complained about your boss or job on Twitter, watch out for a warning from a new app called FireMe!. Ricardo Kawase and his team at the University of Hannover, Germany, created the tool, which tracks certain negative phrases about bosses and jobs and rates how likely they are to get the poster fired.

When FireMe! flags such a tweet, it automatically sends a tweet to the user in question, reading something like, "Can you imagine if your boss gets to know that you said: 'I hate my job so much'. You said that on Twitter and the whole world can see it!" according to New Scientist. (I’d be surprised if that exact tweet was sent, since it clocks in at 138 characters with no space for a handle.)

The offending user is also sent a link to their FireMeter! score, a percentage showing how likely they might be to get fired. It's based on negativity toward their job and how often they'd cursed in the last 100 tweets. The score is just for fun, but weighs into the overall philosophy of helping people watch what they tweet. For the record, I have a 4% chance of being fired, according to the tool, probably because I use bad words now and again.

Those sent a message were given the option to delete their tweet. After 4,304 warning tweets over three weeks, 249 people deleted their questionable message within two hours. Kawase's team, which will present findings to the Web Science conference in Paris next month, found those slamming their jobs tended to tweet more often than others and had fewer followers than those who shared positive thoughts about their work.

With that in mind, FireMe! also highlights those who have kind words for their jobs and employers:

A little love can go a lot further than some hate.

Source : mashable

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Durex launches condom delivery app

Durex condoms has a new cellphone app that will save the day for guys, specifically during hot dates. Called “SOS Condoms,” the app, which is available on iTunes, promises “professional teams” to deliver condoms to customers “quickly and discreetly.” 

For more info about the application and how it works just visit : http://www.sos-condoms.com/ or see the official video below.

Have fun and stay safe :)

 

From hightech-IT team 

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WhatsApp Processed 18 Billion Messages On New Year’s Eve

Records, as they say, are meant to be broken, and on New Year’s Eve earlier this Monday, WhatsApp claimed that they processed a whopping 18 billion messages – that would mean an average of nearly 3 messages for each person on the face of the earth. This amount is nearly double that of WhatsApp’s 10 billion message record that was set in August, and we are quite sure that as the world’s population continues to grow exponentially with more and more folks taking up smartphones as their primary mobile communications device of choice, the 18 billion mark is set to shatter not too long down the road.

Out of the 18 billion messages processed, around 7 billion messages were inbound, while 11 billion of them were outbound messages. How many messages using the WhatsApp platform did you contribute to be part of this rather historic milestone? Of course if you were to put things in perspective, Apple mentioned that in October alone, their iMessage text service delivered approximately 300 billion texts over the course of a year, averaging out to under a billion a day. 

Source : ubergizmo

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ShadowMe App Lets You Pretend to Be Someone Else on Twitter

Ever wonder how your friends keep posted on the coolest viral videos and articles? Ever wonder how your favorite reporters and pundits stay in the know?

Well, now — as the saying goes — there’s an app for just that.

It’s called ShadowMe [App Store link], and is now available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users, but only if you’ve already upgraded to iOS 6.

And what does ShadowMe do, you ask? Essentially, it lets you lurk Twitter as if you’re someone else. You’re able to see exactly what another user sees in his or her Twitter feed, receiving updates and news from all their favorite follows. It works equally well for a big-name celebrity — pro athletes who seem to only follow teammates and scantily clad women, for example — or simply a close friend.

“While ShadowMe is especially useful for people who need an introduction or education on Twitter, the app also enhances the Twitter experience for even the most active users by enabling them to shadow avid Twitter users, depending on interests or events,” Keith Savitz, co-founder of the app’s parent company, Tendy Apps, said in a press release. “Twitter newbies get quality content, not overwhelming quantity, and all users get the engaging, informative, entertaining social TV/second screen experience.”

While we haven’t yet gotten a chance to test out ShadowMe and can’t vouch for its functionality or ease of use, the idea does strike us as a very, very cool. It has the potential to be a powerful tool for content discovery, as well as insight into how your favorite follows use Twitter.

Is ShadowMe cool or creepy?

Source : mashable

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Email tool SaneBox is amazing, and worth every penny it costs

Email is one of the most broken, and yet critically important components of our lives. Email is also a slow evolving tool. Hotmail is more than 15 years old, and yet email is roughly what it once was. Gmail’s priority inbox, and its offering of huge quantities of storage were big steps, but hardly revolutionary moves.

There exists a plethora of tools in the market to help email become more manageable, and many are useful. I have recently been using a service called SaneBox that is, in my view, one of the best. Let’s get into what it does, and how it works.

Mechanics

SaneBox is essentially a massive filter, one that runs defense for your inbox. The service creates a separate folder in your email account. Email comes in, and SaneBox decides if it goes into the boo-boo bin, the folder, or if it stays in your inbox. You can check the filtered emails any time you want by going into the folder, and browsing. They aren’t deleted.

Now, what happens is that, all of a sudden, your inbox becomes much quieter. It begins to feel like you don’t have any friends any more, it’s so eerily shushed.

How does SaneBox know which emails to filter out, and which to keep? First, SaneBox will scan every email in your entire account. That takes some time. For me, I think it took over an hour. There were about 200,000 emails to churn through, or so. Might have been less. Following, you link up your social networks, allowing SaneBox to draw relationships between people. And, the service can be explicitly told, ‘no, I want that one and all like it my normal inbox.’

Training doesn’t take long. For fun, this is how SaneBox describes its process:

Effect

SaneBox is quite effective about cutting out email that you didn’t really want in the first place. It does lead to a much better email experience. The largest fear, I think, in using such a service, however, is that you might miss an important email. To combat that, the service sends you regular digests (you can pick their frequency) of email that was placed in the bad-kids-folder. An email of your email, if you will.

For the regular person looking to cut down on their email problem, SaneBox is well worth using. And it only costs $5 a month, so everyone can afford it.

However, I have to say goodbye to the service, due to my job, oddly enough. This is going to sound strange, but I essentially need to have an inbox problem. My inbox has to be a bazaar of sorts, which notes from all types of people, about all sorts of things, and at all times. I need to see every message as it comes in. Now, I don’t read the vast majority of it, but since I work in news, I can’t afford to be more than a minute late to any note that matters.

There is no pattern for SaneBox to follow to dictate which message likely from a crazy, is in this one circumstance critical breaking news. You can’t train that, I don’t think, as curation of this sort is part of my job. For example, whilst defending my Gmail account from Groupon updates and bad PR flacks, SaneBox noticed that I had received a very vague email from Microsoft. It wasn’t from an account that you hear from often, I’ve never responded to it (it’s not a person), and so forth. SaneBox put it in the side folder. That email was an invitation to a very special event that’s happening next week.

I would have seen it later on a check run through the side box, but I can’t wait to do that – I need it in my face as now.

It’s annoying that I won’t get to use SaneBox, because it really has made a very nice change to my email life. Before, chaos. Now, calm. If I was in any other profession, I’d throw cash at them.

Recommendation

If you get more than 50 emails a day or more, and if not well-played, I’d try SaneBox. It has a free week trial, so you aren’t at risk for anything. By day two, you’ll be a new person.

Source : thenextweb

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Best apps to show off your new iPhone 5

After picking up your brand new iPhone 5, you probably immediately noticed that many of your favorite apps didn't take advantage of the iPhone 5's nice big screen. While this is a disappointment, don't fret, because a countless number of apps are being updated daily with optimizations for the new screen. But in the meantime, take a look at some of our favorite iPhone apps that have offered support for the new iPhone 5 since its release.

Tweetbot

Tweetbot has been one of our favorite Twitter apps since its release, and the already awesome experience is better than ever on the iPhone 5's bigger screen. Since the iPhone 5 has a taller screen, you are able to see at least one additional tweet making the entire Twitter experience with Tweetbot extra enjoyable and inviting.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a gorgeous app, but on the smaller screen of the previous iPhone models, the UI felt a little cramped. Well, Pinterest has definitely benefited from a taller, vs wider, screen. It's a joy to scroll though all the pins and view the gorgeous photos on the iPhone 5's vibrant display. You can also quickly scroll down your feeds without a single hiccup. If you're a recovering Pinterest addict, you may just have a relapse once you experience the Pinterest app on your new iPhone 5.

Flipboard

Flipboard for iPhone is your own personal magazine featuring the articles and social feeds you care about most. On the iPhone 5, this magazine is just stunning. First of all, each page now displays six full squares, and second -- they're gorgeous. Since Flipboard is a very image-heavy app, the extra vibrance and contrast in the iPhone 5's screen really makes Flipboard look amazing. Your friends will be in total awe when they see Flipboard on your new iPhone 5.

Weather 2x

Any app that provides information will definitely benefit from the iPhone 5's larger screen and Weather 2x is no exception, especially since it's paired with beautiful imagery. Weather 2x is seriously one of the most beautiful weather apps I've ever laid my eyes on. It displays basic weather information over a beautiful photograph and with a simple tap, you can see even more. Sliding the screen up will reveal a 5 day forecast, sliding to the left will reveal an hourly forecast, and sliding to the right will let you choose the location. Beautiful app -- for real.

Pocket

Pocket is a very popular "read later" service that lets you save articles that you find on the web, social networks, apps, and more. On the iPhone, Pocket displays your available articles in a list with a thumbnail featuring the articles' main image. Everything about Pocket benefits from the iPhone 5' taller screen. The list is longer, the photos are more beautiful, and more of each article can be read at once.

Agenda Calendar

Agenda Calendar has been my favorite calendar app on the iPhone for quite some time now and my love for it has only grown with the iPhone 5. With the taller screen, I can now see my entire work week at once when in the week view. When adding an event with the keyboard in use, I can still see plenty information on the the remaining portion of the screen. If you've ever considered ditching Apple's built-in Calendar app, definitely take a look at Agenda.

iBooks

iBooks is a great app for showing off your new iPhone 5 not only because you can read more of your books at once, but because iBooks has always been notorious for being a bit laggy and lacking in the performance department. On the iPhone 5, iBooks shows off the speed of the new A6 chip. Your books load onto your bookshelf must quicker and you can quickly flip through pages without skipping a beat.

Byword

I've never been a big fan of writing apps on the iPhone simply because of the cramped feeling on the small screen. The keyboard would take up so much of the screen that I would only be able to see a sentence or two at a time while I typed. Well, now that the iPhone 5 has a taller display, they keyboard takes up a smaller percentage of the screen allowing me to see more of what I've written. And what's the best writing app for iPhone? Well that's easy -- Byword!

iPhoto

We've already mentioned several times that the iPhone 5's display is phenomenal for photos, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. When you take photos with your iPhone 5, you will be dying to edit them to perfection to share them with the world -- that's where iPhoto comes in. iPhoto is an excellent photo editing app for the iPhone that is robust, yet easy to use. And since it's optimized for the iPhone 5's larger screen, you'll be able to see more of your photo at once while you edit. This is always a plus.

iMovie

The iPhone 5 has a larger display, a display with a 16:9 aspect ratio to be exact. What a coincidence, that's the standard ratio for HD movies! Not only is watching videos on your iPhone a wonderful experience, but so is editing them. Since Apple optimized iMovie for the iPhone 5's larger screen, the editing tools take up a smaller percentage of the screen letting you see more of the movie you're creating.

Launch Center Pro

The Home screen isn't the only thing that benefits from the iPhone 5's extra row of icons -- Launch Center Pro does as well. While the Home screen lets add another 4 apps, Launch Center Pro lets you add an extra row of actions. That means everything from launching your password manager right into a search for the oft-used login, or adding something right into your favorite task manager, or texting that someone special, or just toggling your screen brightness no longer have to fight as viciously as they used to for screen real-estate. Now 15 of them can get along just fine, all at once, all on the same screen. It's 1/5th more action for your iPhone 5.

Source : imore.com

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Finally! YouTube Just Launched Its Own iPhone App

YouTube announced Tuesday that its long-awaited iPhone app is now available as a free download in the App Store.

In case that sounds like a news story from 2007, let’s clarify: yes, there was a native YouTube app on the very first iPhone, and on every model since. But that app was made by Apple, not by YouTube. It featured an infamously poor selection of YouTube videos.

Until now, any iPhone owner that wanted a full YouTube experience had to go to m.youtube.com in their Safari browser. Apple announced it was dumping its hobbled YouTube app earlier this year, clearing the way for the Google-owned video giant to produce its own version.

Less than a month later, that in-house version is ready for prime time — just one day before the expected launch of the iPhone 5 and iOS 6.

The timing is very interesting, and the fact that an exact App store launch time was given — 3:01am ET — suggests that Apple and Google collaborated behind the scenes to have the new YouTube app squared away in time for the launch.

It’s also likely to be a cash bonanza for Google, which is finally able to show ads before YouTube videos on an iPhone app. 

“The new iPhone app is available worldwide and unlocks tens of thousands of official music videos, as well as bringing lots of new features to improve finding and sharing awesome videos and channels,” writes Andrey Doronichev, head of YouTube mobile, in a blog post. “It’s a new app built by YouTube engineers, to give our iPhone users the best mobile experience.”

The app also features autocomplete search, much like Google Instant, with an emphasis on popular videos. To get to “Gangnam Style,” for example, you’re not going to have to type much more than “gan.”

YouTube has been putting the emphasis on channels for a while now, and the app is no different. Swipe from the left, and you get a list of channels you’re subscribed to.

Naturally, the app also lets you post videos to Twitter and Facebook with a tap — although Google+ gets pride of place, with the first sharing button.

One thing we’d like to see in the iPhone app: the same “watch it mostly offline” functionality that the Android YouTube app gained this summer.

The app will also work on the iPad, although Doronichev says his team is hard at work on a special iOS tablet version with more functionality.

What else would you like to see in YouTube’s iPhone app?

Source : mashable.com

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5 Apps That Let You Text for Free

With mobile carriers charging anywhere from $20 to $30 a month for unlimited plans, smartphone users with a love of texting might feel like coughing up this kind of cash is their only option. In reality, there are several great apps available that allow users to text for free.

Many of these apps also offer additional perks like group chat and video. Here are several options that will save you money and offer you more than just your basic text.

1. imo

More than just your basic free texting service, imo allows you to message friends and family on most instant messaging networks — Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Skype and AIM — by allowing you to sync your accounts. It also allows users to send emoticons, photos, video, and voice messages for free. Noted features include group chats, push notifications, and voice calling, which Android and iOS users can utilize without using plan minutes.

Available on: iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Nokia.

2. KaKao Talk

KaKao Talk is a free app that lets you call and text anywhere at any time for free. All you need is a phone number. Not only does it support 12 different languages, but it offers fun alternative communication options like funny voice filters during phone calls, animated emoticons, and a walkie-talkie setting. Sending photo and video is also included, as are group chats, and rewards for adding a favorite brand as a friend.

Available on: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Bada, and Windows.

3. WeChat

WeChat not only provides free texting, but includes multimedia features like voice messaging. Using its “shake” feature, you can exchange information like photos and contacts with nearby friends. Users also have access to a “look around” feature that lets them see if anyone close by is also on the app.

Available on: iPhone, Android, Windows phones, and Symbian platforms.

4. Pinger

Text for free from more than 100 countries around the world, with Pinger. With its photo-based interface, users are able to select a friend’s photo and view their texts, photos, calls, and voicemails in the same area. As far as texting goes, Pinger provides you with a phone number, where texts are unlimited. An added bonus is a feature that allows you to see when your sent text has been read.

Available on: iOS, Android, and Windows.

5. textPlus

The app, textPlus offers free and unlimited messaging no matter what type of phone you have. After providing you with a free phone number, this sponsor-supported app is most known for its group-messaging feature and community texting, which allows you to talk to people around the world in a chat-room type venue. Photo messaging and voice notes are also available.

Available on: Windows phones, iOS, and Android.

Source : mashable.com

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Enterprise mobility: How fast can development go?

I discuss mobile enablement of enterprise apps every day with our clients. The common trend is that it needs to be done now and in the most cost-effective manner (shocking, I know!). The good news is that meeting these expectations is quickly becoming easier. Recently I published a blog post about Backend-as-a-Service. I've recently published my latest research on these BaaS platforms. During this research three things became very apparent:

• BaaS enables mobile apps to be written in hours, not days.  Nearly all BaaS platforms that I investigated had a web-based step-by-step approach to setting up your mobile backend services and some even offered a pure command line interface. Depending on preference, either approach allows for the mobile app backend scaffold to be available in a matter of minutes. Add in some business logic for connecting to your line-of-business (LOB) applications (in your language of choice, no less) and you're ready to focus completely on the mobile interface of your app! At this point the biggest challenge is how to manage your development vs. production backend environments. Not surprisingly, some vendors (StackMob and FatFractal, for instance) already have a solution for managing this as well.

• The mobile developer's toolbox is becoming incredibly diverse and more powerful. Don't need a full BaaS solution but still need to quickly mobile-enable a segment of enterprise functionality? There are a growing set of tools for that as well. Tiggzi is a mobile cloud-based IDE that provides unique drag-and-drop app creation functionality. Cloud Extend Mobile from Active Endpoints allows enterprises to easily customize mobile extensions to existing LOB apps including Salesforce. This is merely the tip of the rapidly growing mobile toolkit iceberg.

• There's never been a better time to be a mobile developer!  Keeping the previous two points in mind, has there ever been a better time to be a mobile developer? The challenges are exciting, the tools are increasingly developer-friendly and, maybe most importantly, the benefits are incredible! We've recently created the Why Mobile App Developers are Smiling Infographicwhich highlights these points along with a podcast where Mike Gualtieri, Jeffrey Hammond and I all discuss the reasons to keep smiling!

As you dive into your mobile development challenges I'd love to hear what tools you're using and how it has changed your day-to-day development work. Come across new tools or platforms? 

Source : zdnet.com

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Google Maps Update Brings Android New Transit Displays, Location History By Date

Google continues to bring new features and tweaks to Maps for Android, building upon an already feature-dense app in its work towards creating the ultimate mapping and navigation tool. To that end, there’s a new version of Maps hot off Google’s servers, ready to bring you new transit display controls, location features, and region highlights.

If you let Maps gather your location data and save it with Google’s Location History, you’ll now have some newly fine-tuned ways in which to access it. When reviewing that data, you’ll now be able to see where you’ve been on a day-by-day basis, useful if you’re trying to remember just when you might have bumped into an acquaintance at the park, or where you ran errands on Friday two weeks ago.

Just like Maps in your browser, the Android app will now show the highlighted border of areas or cities which you search for.

Google’s been adding more and more info to its database of public transit options, which now covers some 500 cities. If all that info seemed just a bit overwhelming you’ll now be able to customize just what types of transit are displayed in that modes layer. For instance, maybe you’d just want to examine a city’s bus routes, without concerning yourself with trains.

The new Google Maps is available in the Play Store now, where you can get it as one of the new, smaller, delta updates.

Source : pocketnow.com

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10 Linux Applications You Must Not Miss!

Here is a speedy guide for recent Linux converts and even for those who have been using it.  

An operating system is of less significance, without the right kind of applications to run on it. Here is a speedy guide for recent Linux converts and even for those who have been using it, for a quick checklist. With writer Matt Hartley’s list of must-have Linux applications, we spoke to other Linux enthusiasts to compile a list of applications, without which they feel incomplete. Check them out...  

LibreOffice suite: Linux users are more familiar with OpenOffice, since it was there much before LibreOffice came into the picture. But for those who have used both, very well know that LibreOffice is the preferred option. It offers a dependable office suite to its users, with its brilliant to use, Writer and Calc. Writer is not only stable but also provides control over word processing documents. Calc is smooth for spreadsheet functions.

VLC player: VLC is a preferred media player choice for all platforms. Irrespective of the codecs installed in your distribution, it will also play DVDs, that too without the need of any extra configuration. It saves a lot of your time, since you know that it will run practically any media file.

Envince PDF viewer: Envince is a PDF viewer that is smooth and stable. It is much better than Adobe Reader for Linux. Moreover, it comes preinstalled with many Linux distributions.

Pratice Self Control: It is normal to feel distracted when you are working on a computer. It allows you to block few websites for a limited duration of time. The best part about it is that once you have blocked few sites using it, it is extremely difficult to undo the action, thereby, making you stick to your work.

Kazam for screen capturing: Many will admit that a host of applications that are commonly used on Linux for screen capturing are incompetent. Some offer poor results, others record a grainy or an overcompressed video. So to make your video capturing seamless on Linux, try out Kazam. It works with almost all Linux audio connections and even allows the video to be saved as WebM or MP4.

Filezilla for FTP access: The new Linux distributions offers a number of ways to access FTP server. However, there is nothing as smooth as Filezilla. It allows you to setup the login details for every server that you want to connect to and also supports SSH FTP. You can also store and sort your server configurations within separate folders.

Skype: With the popularity and spread of Skype, it becomes the preferred choice for Linux users. Hartley feels that with Microsoft rekindling support for the VoIP client, he has found that Skype remains his goto VoIP/video call software of choice. Not only does the latest release of Skype provide excellent PulseAudio support with zero tweaking, the video calls made with the client are sent and received flawlessly.

GIMP: GIMP is a handy tool for just about anything you want to do with images. You can use this tool to clean your pictures, resize, crop or add effects. Many who use GIMP actually confess that GIMP is so easy to use that it can put Photoshop to shame. You can even add all missing functionalities by using a script or an add-on. Moreover, it is constantly updated with improvements.

FreeFileSync: It is very important to have your files in sync, especially if you are working on a number of things at a time. This makes the it very important to have your machines in sync, where FreeFileSync can help you. Hartley admits, “Not only does it provide me with a rapid, reliable method of keeping my files in sync from directory to directory, it does so based on the rules and conditions I lay out for it. FreeFileSync even supports advanced functionality such as support for symlinks, conflict detection and a means of comparing files so I can ensure nothing is overwritten incorrectly.”

Invulgotrackers: Time is money! Gnome users can track their time with invulgotracker. Not only is it the right tool for tracking your time spent on a given project, it also generates reports whenever required. It is not really apt for those who work on a large number of projects at a time, but it does offer a lot of flexibility. 

Source : efytimes.com

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How to Detect Apps Leaking Your Data

One reason that smartphones and smartphone apps are so useful is that they can integrate intimately with our personal lives. But that also puts our personal data at risk.

A new service called Mobilescope hopes to change that by letting a smartphone user examine all the data that apps transfer, and alerting him when sensitive information, such as his name or email address, is transferred.

“It’s a platform-agnostic interception tool that you can use on your Android, iOS, Blackberry, or Windows device,” says Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy researcher who created Mobilescope with fellow researchers David Campbell and Aldo Cortesi.

Their first proof-of-concept won a prize for the best app created during a privacy-focused programming contest, or codeathon, organized by the Wall Street Journal in April this year; the trio has now polished it enough to open a beta trial period. Access is steadily being rolled out to the “couple of thousand” people that have already signed up, says Soltani.

Once a person has signed up for the service, Mobilescope is accessed through a website, not as an app installed onto a device. A user can use the site to see logs of the data transferred by the apps on their device. They can also specify “canaries,” pieces of sensitive information such as a phone number, email or name that trigger an alert if they are sent out by an app.

Mobilescope can catch apps doing things such as copying a person’s address book to a remote server, as Path and several other mobile apps were found to do earlier this year. Soltani says the service is intended to level the playing field between mobile apps and the people that use them by arming users with more information about what those apps do.

As became clear when several popular apps were caught quietly copying contact data from users earlier this year, neither Apple’s nor Google’s mobile operating systems currently offer people much insight into or control of what apps are sharing.

“Our focus is making really simple the process of interception,” says Soltani. “If you’re not an advanced user, you can still get at this data using Mobilescope.”

When a person signs up for Mobilescope, a configuration file is sent to his device. Once installed, this file causes all future Internet traffic to be routed through a Mobilescope server so that it can analyze the data that comes and goes to the device and its apps.

That arrangement is possible thanks to the way that smartphones are designed to be compatible with VPNs, or virtual private networks — encrypted communications that some businesses use to keep corporate data private. That design doesn’t add much delay to a person’s connection, says Soltani, in part because users are connected with a server as geographically close to them as possible.

Mobilescope can even examine data that is sent over the most common types of secure connection used by apps, similar to those used by banking websites, by intercepting the certificates involved. The service cannot decrypt other data, but Soltani says that few apps bother to use encryption. Data collected by Mobilescope is discarded after each session of use, and is only ever stored on a person’s own device.

Soltani says he doesn’t imagine Mobilescope will have the mass appeal of something like Angry Birds, but he hopes it will encourage journalists, activists, and ordinary smartphone owners to look into what apps do, and will help put more pressure on app developers to respect privacy.

“Added transparency for everyone — app developers, users, regulators — will help the whole mobile ecosystem.”

An earlier version of Mobilescope gave users the power to send fake data to certain apps, for example sending a spoof location. “We had to pull that out because the ecosystem is not ready for it,” says Soltani, who says this broke some apps, sometimes in ways that could harm other users. A separate project does make that tactic available to Android users willing to use a modified version of their operating system.

In April, Xuxian Jiang, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, published a study showing that the ad systems included in many Android apps endanger users’ privacy. Around half of these systems monitor a user’s GPS location, and some also collect call logs and other sensitive data.

Jiang, who has uncovered other security and privacy flaws with mobile apps, said Mobilescope will be an “interesting” new tool for keeping tabs on apps. However, he adds that it can’t be guaranteed to catch everything, and says mobile privacy can only be improved with greater transparency from developers, improved privacy statements, and action from the creators of mobile operating systems.

“[We] need of mechanisms for users to actually control apps’ access to various personal information,” he says.

Justin Brookman, who directs consumer privacy activity at the Center for Democracy and Technology, says this will require changes to the law, which currently simply encourages companies to write very broad privacy policies to avoid the penalties for writing false ones.

“Detailed disclosures are actually deterred by the law,” he says. The CDT is attempting to get legislation introduced that instead requires companies to explicitly tell consumers what’s happening to their data, and to provide them with more control over it.

 Source : mashable.com

 

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The iPad Game That Took 9 Years (And an Epic Disney Fail) to Finish

Edgar, a mild-mannered window washer, is daydreaming of the girl he loves. In his dream, they meet in a nightclub straight out of Casablanca, flirting from across the room.

The scene, lovingly rendered in hand-drawn animation on an iPad, is controllable: By swiping your finger right or left, you can control the boldness of Edgar’s flirting. Swipe too hard and Edgar will gyrate wildly, causing her to recoil in terror. But swipe slowly, and Edgar will ease on the charm, pantomiming some smooth dance moves that win him the girl of his dreams.

The Act, released last month for iOS, is a game with a remarkable history. Development on the game began over nine years ago and involved dozens of former Disney animators that had worked on films like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Its animation was created the old-school way: pens and paper. And after The Act was completed, it came very, very close to never coming out at all.

The seed of The Act was planted in Omar Khudari’s mind in 1986. A computer programmer for an educational gaming company, Khudari was looking for the next big thing. He was fascinated by Dragon’s Lair, the arcade game that used animation by Don Bluth stored on a LaserDisc. But the game didn’t live up to his expectations.

“It looked like a movie, but it didn’t seem like [one] when you were playing it,” said Khudari. The player wasn’t involved in the story, he just pressed buttons to make Dragon’s Lair‘s hero jump and dodge.

That year, Khudari went to Seattle to attend Microsoft’s First International Conference On the CD-ROM, where technology innovators gathered to discuss what might be done with the exciting new medium. One of the keynote speeches was delivered by Stan Cornyn, a legend in the music business. He was one of the first employees of Warner Bros. Records upon its founding in 1958, and had won multiple Grammy awards for the liner notes he penned for Frank Sinatra. Of late, he was the founder of its fledgling Warner New Media division, which was soon to introduce the innovative but ill-fated CD+G technology that embedded computer graphics onto audio CDs.

Cornyn spoke of the future of media convergence, the possibilities of interactive storytelling that would be enabled with this new technology. Khudari, sitting in the audience, was struck by one particular turn of phrase: “It’ll be like going to the movies with a steering wheel.”

The Warner executive was speaking metaphorically, but Khudari thought about it literally.

“My favorite movie was Casablanca,” he said in a 2008 interview. “That was about love and honor and faith and betrayal. How could you turn a wheel and make love and honor and faith and betrayal happen?”

It would be a few years before Khudari got to answer that question. In the meantime, he made money. He partnered with another employee of the educational software company to form Papyrus Design Group, a game development studio that he sold to Sierra On-Line in 1995. He invested the money and made more. In 2003, he decided to open the game studio that he’d use to create his emotional love story with a steering wheel. He named the company Cecropia, after a type of tree that has a habit of spreading rapidly in otherwise barren places.

The Act, as Khudari envisioned it, would be an arcade game cabinet with a single control — a dial that could be turned left or right; Cornyn’s metaphorical “steering wheel” made physical. It would be a linear love story without branching paths, which Khudari calls “a novelty that the world pretty much doesn’t want.” Linear stories, he thought, were more satisfying.

The game would allow players to adjust the on-screen character’s behavior by twisting a knob either clockwise or counterclockwise. The first scene that Khudari and his team designed was the flirtation at the bar. Players had to watch the girl’s facial expressions and body language, backing off when she appeared hesitant and turning on the charm if she seemed receptive to Edgar’s goofy come-ons. Other scenes were more complex: In one, Edgar had to alternate between encouraging his slacker brother to keep washing windows while placating his boss on the other side of the screen, the player gently turning the dial back and forth with the correct timing, but not too hard or soft.

Work on the game progressed slowly. While Cecropia had enough software engineers to build the program that would flip between the different loops of animation, he didn’t have enough animators who could work at the level of quality he needed. Hand-drawn 2-D animation was becoming a thing of the past.

Fortunately for Cecropia, that’s exactly what Disney was beginning to think.

In 2004, Disney announced to the great chagrin of its fans that it was shuttering its Orlando animation studio, which had produced films like Mulan and Lilo and Stitch, and laying off its 250 employees. The pioneers of 2-D animation were effectively giving up on it, and hundreds of the country’s most talented animators were out of work.

Khudari sat down for lunch with Anthony Michaels, one of the artists who had brought the Mulan character to life with ink and paint. Like a music enthusiast with a fondness for vinyl, Michaels wasn’t ready to give up on 2-D animation.

“I like a lot of 3-D movies, and I like the Pixar stuff, but when I watch those movies I always see little things like ‘oh, when they walk it looks stiff,’” he says.

Over lunch, Khudari explained to him one of the animations he was trying to nail in The Act, a scene in which Edgar sat at a table, dressed as a doctor, and flirted with the nurse. He couldn’t get the right emotions to come through.

Michaels grabbed a napkin and drew a sketch. “You mean like this?” he said. The drawing, Khudari recalls, was exactly what he wanted. Khudari called Disney’s human resources department and starting hiring the animators one by one.

“That company spoiled me,” says Michaels. “With Disney … you have no real freedom,” he said, but Cecropia was “an animator’s dream.”

The flaw in Cecropia’s plan was that Khudari planned to release the game into the mostly dead arcade game market. “It was already tanking, but I thought I could revive it,” he says.

Video arcades had mostly shut their doors by the mid-2000s. Khudari hoped to release The Act into bars, which still set up coin-operated machines for the amusement of their patrons. But that was harder than it seemed.

“In the tavern market, the location owners do not want to give up precious space to machines,” Khudari says. “Many will not allow machines at all, but those who do want one or at most two. So you have to be number 1 or number 2 to have a market of any significant size.”

So although many bar owners wanted the game Golden Tee Golf over by the dartboards, that was all they wanted.

By 2007, with The Act completed and ready to go, Khudari had given up on the impossible dream of releasing it as an arcade machine. He approached traditional console publishers like Nintendo, who were uninterested. In 2008, Khudari decided to bail out. Cecropia had already manufactured about 40 “conversion kits,” sets of parts that could be used to convert a standard arcade cabinet into The Act. They auctioned off 10 of them on eBay, gave the rest away to employees, and closed Cecropia.

Khudari says he doesn’t feel comfortable discussing exactly how much of his money he poured into The Act. “My kids would kill me if they knew how much of their inheritance was sunk in that game,” he said.

Arcade game enthusiasts built their The Act machines. Some would bring them to arcade game conventions, setting them up for other fans to try. Among those in the know, the rare game was something you had to experience, if you ever had the chance.

But The Act wasn’t entirely resigned to obscurity. In 2009, Daniel Kraus, head of a game development startup called React Entertainment, approached Khudari with the idea of porting his game to Apple’s iOS devices. Kraus thought that the simple steering-wheel controls would work well on a touch screen. Khudari was skeptical it would work but agreed. That year, React began the laborious process of converting the game to the iOS format.

The company had its work cut out for it. The Act’s individual scenes and frames were hand-drawn on paper and then scanned in using a traditional ink scanner, Kraus says. When the game was finished, he said, it comprised over 230,000 individual drawings.

“We have that pile of paper in Orlando,” Kraus says. “You wouldn’t believe the size of this thing.”

It would be another three years before The Act was finally released, published by Electronic Arts. The conversion hasn’t been a total success: Nearly every one of the game’s App Store reviews complain about the game’s short length, which would have been perfect for an arcade machine but falls short of expectations for a mobile game.

“I paid $3 for a game I beat in 30 minutes,” said reviewer Shorewire. “It was a cool concept and I enjoyed it but I expected many more ‘acts.’”

Kraus says that React Entertainment can provide more. “We’ve been able to see now that people love this sort of interactive animation,” he said. “With the advances in authoring technology, it’s possible to create, at a much faster speed, something that could be really compelling.”

Although Khudari is happy to see The Act finally available to the public, he is skeptical that something like it could be created again within a reasonable time frame, especially if it were to strive for the artistic beauty that he feels was achieved with The Act.

But, he says, “I’d be thrilled if I was proven wrong.”

 Source : wired.com

 

 

 

 

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Startup Uses a Smartphone Compass to Track People Indoors

People have used magnetic compasses to find their way outdoors for centuries. In a twist, a startup has found a way to use the magnetic sensors in smartphones to locate people themselves—this time, indoors, where GPS signals don’t normally reach. Tracking people in this way could lead to mobile maps that work indoors, and let stores target offers to customers standing in front of a particular product.

The Finland-based startup, Indoor Atlas, launched last week as spin-off from the University of Oulu. The company’s technology, intended for mobile software developers to use in other apps, is a new approach in the growing market for systems that track people inside.

The company says its method pinpoints people more accurately than many current methods, which typically employ the Wi-Fi or radio signals detected by a smartphone and are precise to within several meters. Indoor Atlas says its approach is accurate to between 10 centimeters and two meters, depending on the building. That’s the difference between, say, knowing a shopper is in the freezer section versus knowing he is standing in front of the ice cream. It also does not require a building to have any special equipment.

The market for indoor location technologies is beginning to explode (see “The Indoor Positioning System Era“). Google Maps first launched an indoor “My Location” feature last November, partnering with large retailers, airports, and now museums to upload floor plans. Other companies, such as Nokia and chip maker Broadcom, are also developing their own technologies, and Apple and Microsoft are following Google’s indoor mapping endeavor. Bruce Krulwich, a mobile industry analyst at Grizzly Analytics, has tracked at least 40 startups focused on indoor positioning globally, and IMS Research predicts there will be at least 120,000 indoor venue maps available to consumers by 2016 (see “Bringing Cell-Phone Location-Sensing Indoors,” and “Using Wi-Fi for Navigating the Great Indoors“).

Indoor Atlas’s technology works by analyzing the magnetic field inside a building. The structure of a building causes disturbances to the Earth’s magnetic field. Once these disturbances are mapped, people can be pinpointed within them through their phone’s magnetometer. Indoor Atlas’s product arose from research findings that showed the signature magnetic field within buildings was sufficiently varied and stable to be used for navigation, says company founder and computer science professor Janne Haverinen.

To use the technology, a developer would upload a building floor plan to Indoor Atlas’s servers, and then create a magnetic map of the area by walking around with the company’s smartphone tool. He or she could then build an app that communicates with Indoor Atlas’s cloud-based servers to pinpoint user locations.

Krulwich says the requirement for such preparations would deter Google, Microsoft, or Apple from ever using such a technology—they will stick with options such as Wi-Fi, which works immediately as long as a signal is available. But, he says, Indoor Atlas’s technology could appeal to thousands of other more niche application developers who want to track locations at specific places.

“It is difficult to predict the killer application,” says Indoor Atlas’s Haverinen, who, after developing the research and business plan over the past year, has raised seed funding from Helsinki-based business accelerator KoppiCatch. Now he’s reaching out to developers in an attempt to attract early adopters.

Source : mashable.com

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Facebook App Center goes globetrotting with 7 new countries, blankets all of the English-speaking world

 

Facebook's App Center is having its passport stamped quite a lot lately. Just days after the HTML5 app portal set foot in the UK, it's making the leap to seven more countries. Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Taiwan and Turkey will all get a crack at using web apps both on the desktop as well as in the Android and iOS native clients. The new group is coming onboard in the next few weeks. In the meantime, countries where English makes a frequent appearance -- Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US -- now supply the App Center for every single user. To help speed along the virtual customs claims, Facebook is trotting out a translation tool to get developers on the right track. It shouldn't be long before App Center is a mainstay of the entire Facebook world, even though we may end up cursing the company after hour three of a Jetpack Joyride marathon.

Source : engadget.com

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iphone/ipad Application for London 2012 (Video)

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An App to Automate Life's Little Tasks

Microsoft's on{X} takes advantage of smart-phone sensors to set all sorts of helpful rules.

Sure, you can text your significant other that you're on the way home when you leave the office, or turn music on when you go for a run. But wouldn't it be easier if your phone did it for you?

A new, free app and accompanying website from Microsoft's Bing search engine purports to do just that. Released in a public beta version this week, on{X} lets users set up so-called "recipes" that their smart phone will adhere to, performing preset tasks under specific conditions by using the various sensors and capabilities that are built into the device.

You might, for example, add a recipe that orders your phone to show you a weather forecast every morning at 7 if that day's expected temperature is below 50 degrees; or a recipe that has your phone remind you to water your plants when you get home. You can also set up recipes that deal with the absence of an activity, like directing your phone to remind you to go to the gym if you haven't been there for three days.

Tech-minded users can program their own rules with on{X}'s JavaScript API and share them with others; if you're not a coder, you can also choose from several ready-made rules on the site and modify them to your liking.

As Stefan Weitz, Bing's senior director, concedes, the idea isn't really new: The Website ifttt ("if this then that") has long allowed users to set online tasks using specific triggers, like saving a copy of every photo you upload to Instagram. There's also an Android app called Tasker, which, for $6.49, lets users automate numerous tasks, such as putting your phone in silent mode when you arrive at work.

Yet Weitz says that in addition to taking advantage of a phone's sensors and allowing users to code their own rules, on{X} draws on Bing's investments in search. If you set up the aforementioned weather rule or one that e-mails you the top tech headlines every morning, for example, on{X} performs a search to bring you the requested information.

"[People] should expect more from search going forward—get out of the mode of thinking it's just a search box into which they need to input a keyword," he says.

The app is currently available only for phones that run Google's Android software; Weitz says a Windows Phone version is also in the works, though he has no details on whether an app may be forthcoming for Apple's iPhone.

Chris Silva, a mobile analyst at Altimeter Group, says that with about half of U.S. cell-phone users now toting smart phones and the popularity of interactive software and devices like Apple's Siri voice-recognition software and Microsoft's motion-sensing Kinect device, the time is right for something like on{X} to become a mass-market tool.

"The smart phone is starting to go the route of the in-home telephone or the TV, which says to me, 'All right, what else can we do with these things?' " he says.

Silva thinks developers will play around with on{X} initially, coding rules that will be adopted as less tech-minded users gravitate to the service. He can see it being useful for automating business-related tasks, or for making your phone "smarter" when you're driving.

It's clear that the fledgling service has a ways to go, though. Currently, much of the on{X} experience takes place in a Web browser: You can only add, modify, or code rules from the website. The mobile app allows you to delete or turn off rules, or view the activity log related to individual rules.

Still, Weitz thinks users will be drawn to on{X}, since we've long desired the kind of automated intelligence that can alert us in the morning if it will be a cold day.

"That's one of those tiny things that's really powerful, if you think about it," he says.

Source : technologyreview.com

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