Monday, January 20, 2014

APPS SPECIAL...Apps For All



Apps For All

Our selection includes a photo app, a dashboard app and one that promises to make you happier

Off At a Tangent
In at least one sense, this photo app deserves its name. It’s totally different from the hundreds of others that haunt the Apple App Store. It’s based on the idea of plopping geometrical overlays on top of an image. That may be dots or squares or dots plus squares. And lines. And dots. They do look rather interesting. While professional photographers wouldn’t want to touch Tangent with a barge pole, there’s no reason why those who want to quirk up their pics shouldn’t check it out.

Basically, there are three categories of patterns and each can be tweaked in three ways. But that’s not all — these can all be combined in endless sets of patterns. Play with it until you find the result you want. The app costs $1.99, which I think is a little too much for it, and some of the pattern sets ask for a further in-app purchase to unlock.
 
Try Happier To Be Happier
this app is based on the personal experience of its developer, Nataly Kogan. She had a rough time as a teenager trying to escape from Russia and then from Vienna, where anti-Semitism was rampant. She finally succeeded and made it big, but found that happiness didn’t lie in money.

Instead, appreciating the small things in everyday life made an actual difference to one’s feeling of well-being, or so positive psychology research says. Accordingly, her app, Happier (for iOS), pushes you to share three things that made you happy each day. That could be doing something for someone; eating something you love, getting in a fabulous nap, taking a great picture… You can share on the app’s network and on Facebook or keep it to yourself. The promise is that after a while, you really will be happier. And it will cost you nothing.
 
An All-in-one Wake Up
morning, a dashboard app for the iPad, has a signature iOS app look. The fonts, colours, graphics, etc., spell Apple from a long way off. It’s an attractive look, to be sure, but getting rather stale. Morning is an all-in-one view of the broad information you may need as you start your day. The weather, of course, with the usual details such as, wind, humidity and highs and lows, all in addition to the forecast for the day. There’s a snippet of news from a RSS feed that you can set. There’s an estimate of travel time to your place of work, your appointments for the day and your tasks, and stocks you’re following. You can choose which things to display and how large they appear on your iPad screen. Only problem is that Morning is priced over $3. That’s pretty steep for stuff you will get to know one way or the other.
Mala Bhargava

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 16-12-2013)
- See more at: http://businessworld.in/news/science-and-technology/app-reviews/apps-for-all/1166111/page-1.html#sthash.lNU7lQ50.dpuf

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