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13 apps that will make you wish you had an Android smartphone

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FP: In most cases, developers prefer to make new smartphone apps for iPhone first, only moving to Android and other platforms once they get some traction.

There are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

AP Photo/Marcio Jose SanchezThere are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

In most cases, developers prefer to make new smartphone apps for iPhone first, only moving to Android and other platforms once they get some traction.

(Android owners who had to wait months for Twitter’s video app Vine know what we’re talking about.)

But there are some outliers. There are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

Ingress is a unique real-world scavenger hunt game.

 

Ingress is a unique real-world scavenger hunt game.

Google

Ingress is a sci-fi game that sends you on a scavenger hunt through the real world to find “hidden” virtual goodies.

Google developed the game. Here’s the plot:

“A mysterious energy has been unearthed by a team of scientists in Europe. The origin and purpose of this force is unknown, but some researchers believe it is influencing the way we think. We must control it or it will control us.”

So, basically, you run around your town trying to find this illusive “energy” before the bad guys do.

Price: Free

Facebook Home turns your home screen into a Facebook photo gallery

Facebook Home turns your home screen into a Facebook photo gallery

William Wei, Business Insider

Facebook Home adds a Facebook-powered wrapper to your Android phone. Instead of seeing your normal lock screen, you get a beautiful slide show of your friends’ Facebook photos and status updates. You can comment and like those updates directly from the lock screen without opening the regular Facebook app.

Price: Free (Only works on select Android phones.)

DeskSMS makes sure you’ll never miss a message again.

DeskSMS makes sure you'll never miss a message again.

DeskSMS is a nifty app that allows you to forward text messages (and picture messages) from your Android smartphone to your desktop via Gmail, Google Talk, and the Chrome Web browser.

Price: Free

WiFi Analyzer lets you determine how strong a wireless network is in your vicinity

WiFi Analyzer lets you determine how strong a wireless network is in your vicinity

Have you ever been stuck on a slow wireless network?

WiFi Analyzer lets you see how strong networks are around you, helping you to pick the fastest, most reliable one.

Price: Free

Weather Bomb gives a data-intensive view of the weather on your Android device

Weather Bomb gives a data-intensive view of the weather on your Android device

Weather Bomb is an extremely detailed weather app that gives users seven days of data.

There are various views, but our favourite is the graph view, which gives the week’s rain, wind, and cloud forecast at a glance.

Other data includes rain, wind, cloud, temperature, pressure humidity and wave height.

Price: Free

Google Skymap lets you know exactly which star you’re staring up at.

Google Skymap is an open sourced app that lets you point your smartphone up at the night sky to decipher constellations, planets, and stars.

Price: Free

Llama Location Profiles uses where you are to change aspects of your phone like ringer and Bluetooth

Llama Location Profiles uses where you are to change aspects of your phone like ringer and Bluetooth

KnowYourMobile

Llama is a nifty app that automatically switches specific phone settings depending on where you are. You can automatically silence your phone when you arrive at your office or turn Bluetooth on at 7 a.m. to pair with your headphones for a morning run.

Best of all, the app doesn’t use your phone’s GPS, which can drain your battery. Instead, it uses cell towers in your area to figure out where you are.

Price: Free

BetterBatteryStats helps you spend more time unplugged.

BetterBatteryStats helps you spend more time unplugged.

BetterBatteryStats lets you analyze your phone’s behavior, pinpointing exactly which applications are causing your battery to drain. Once you know what the culprit is you can specifically fix the issue.

Price: $2.89

APP Lock password protects specific apps.

APP Lock password protects specific apps.

The premise behind APP Lock is simple: password protect installed applications with a password or pattern. Now you don’t have to be nervous when someone else is playing around with your smartphone.

Price: Free

SwiftKey 3 will change how you type on your Android smartphone.

SwiftKey 3 will change how you type on your Android smartphone.

Business Insider / Matthew Lynley

SwiftKey improves your productivity by helping you to type better.

Swiftkey gives much more accurate corrections and predictions than other keyboards. Very sloppy typing will make sense, even if you miss spaces, and SwiftKey 3 also predicts your next words.

Price: $3.99

Tasker lets you automate everything on your smartphone from settings to SMS

Tasker lets you automate everything on your smartphone from settings to SMS

Tasker is an awesome app that lets you tweak specific phone features like turning the flash on for alerts. You can even cancel specific notification pop-ups.

Tasker features more than 200 actions, triggers, and even an app creation section for making your own app.

Price: $6.49

Friday helps you discover new things to do

Friday helps you discover new things to do

Friday’s makers say that the app brings self discovery to your life by introducing the first passive auto journal.

Friday captures your entire life through your phone and builds a timeline of the things you do. You can even filter and search your life to find the exact information you want.

Friday allows you to share and log your favourite activities that you’ve been doing all day.

Price: Free

Robin is a great alternative to Apple’s Siri

Robin is a great alternative to Apple's Siri

Before Google Now, Robin was the first true Siri challenger.

We love the expanded capabilities of the newer virtual assistant. You can ask Robin for directions, local places, real-time parking, traffic info, gas prices, weather, your Twitter news, and much more.

Robin is disrupting the personal assistant arena, and we only hope that her existence pushes developers to make personal assistant apps feel more like true personal assistants.

Price: Free

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Linux Today

Computers

Infiltration complete: Google's Chrome app launcher lands on Windows

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Play Cut The Rope on your desktop with the Chrome packaged app.

It’s still early days for packaged apps, but there are a number you can try out, such as a 

After months of behind-the-scenes teases, Google appears to have quietly introduced the Chrome App Launcher in the stable version of Chrome for Windows. The Chrome OS feature—ported over to the Chrome for Windows developer channel in February—wasn’t available through a search of the Chrome Web Store or advertised on the site’s front page at this writing, but Windows users can install it now by navigating directly to the Chrome App Launcher page inside Chrome’s app store.

First spotted by Engadget, the new feature is Google’s incursion into the desktop PC, creating a self-sufficient Chrome ecosystem inside Microsoft’s OS. The Chrome App Launcher lets you directly fire up any Chrome Web app or packaged app right from the Windows taskbar—even when Chrome itself isn’t running.

Packaged apps are HTML 5-based standalone desktop apps based on Chrome that don’t look anything like your Web browser. There are no tabs, URL address bars, or bookmarks, but these apps do rely on Chrome’s underlying infrastructure and are installed via the Chrome Web Store.

Play Cut The Rope on your desktop with the Chrome packaged app.

It’s still early days for packaged apps, but there are a number you can try out, such as a generic text editor and an IRC client, as well as known quantities like Cut the Rope, the Economist, and Weather Bug. For a list of interesting packaged apps to test see this post from Pocketables.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Shopping the Chrome Web Store: name brands, knock-offs and no-shows

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When I set out to shop the Chrome Web Store, I wasn’t just browsing for fun. The The Chromebook Pixel’s many charms had lured me toward Google’s Web-centric Chrome OS, but I needed to know whether it offered an ecosystem I could live with long-term—especially since I’d be leaving behind all the Windows applications I’ve used for years. The Chromebook’s popularity has only increased over the past year, so I couldn’t be the only Windows user with a wandering eye.

Robert Cardin
The Chromebook Pixel lured me into the Chrome ecosystem, but could I really forsake Windows?

I already knew that the Chrome Web Store offered decent alternatives to the business apps that I use most of the time. The bigger adjustment for me required basic trust. A Microsoft application, whatever its faults, rolls out on the desktop like a marching band, with a drum major, fanfare, and neat formations. You know you’re getting something from a big company with some level of oversight and accountability. But the Chrome Web Store, has no marching band—just a mob of random players, all vying for my attention. Who are these people? Can I trust their apps? Finding the classy ones—and avoiding the creepy and the crummy ones—is a DIY job I didn’t want.

Creepy: Bad Piggies malware and other epidemics

There are good reasons to be wary. Late last year, impostor versions of the popular Rovio game Bad Piggies created a malware epidemic in the Chrome Web Store. Before Google could get a handle on the situation, tens of thousands of users downloaded fake Bad Piggie games that displayed extra ads and sniffed out passwords. And just a few months ago, another Chrome app scam hijacked users’ Facebook accounts to generate fake Likes and bogus posts.

Malware isn’t exclusive to the Chrome Web Store, of course, but the way Google handles new apps invites trouble. Apple and Microsoft vet apps before allowing them to post on their app stores, but Google’s automated scanning procedure checks new apps after they appear in the store. “That’s a losing gambit,” says Paul Roberts, editor of The Security Ledger, “because it still allows a window of time for malicious content to appear on the Chrome Web store.”

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From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2034454/shopping-the-chrome-web-store-name-brands-knock-offs-and-no-shows.html#tk.rss_all

Computers

Google Chromium project leaves WebKit to work with Blink browser engine

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When Opera announced in February that it would switch to the WebKit browser engine, the same basic technology that powers Chrome and Safari, critics wondered if this was a bad move for the open Web.

The worry was that browser vendors were putting too much power in the hands of one rendering engine. Many, no doubt, were recalling the years when Internet Explorer dominated browser usage requiring Web developers to cater to IE‘s peculiarities.

Fears of a so-called WebKit monoculture may be over now that the Chromium Project is splitting with WebKit, an open source project created by Apple in 2001. Google will instead work on its own rendering engine called Blink, taking the new engine’s initial codebase from WebKit, a practice called forking. Chromium is the Google-led open-source browser project that supplies the code for the company’s Chrome Web browser.

With the addition of Blink, there are now four major Web engines including WebKit, Mozilla’s Gecko engine powering Firefox, and Microsoft’s Trident for Internet Explorer.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Google adds offline editing, viewing capabilities to Slides presentation software

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Google has added Slides, the latest version of its Docs presentation software, to its suite of offline applications, as it tries to play a spoiler role with the official releases of Microsoft Office 2013 and the home user version of Office 365 right around the corner. Slides users will now be able to view and edit presentations without an Internet connection, provided they are using the Chrome Web browser or a Chrome OS device.

Google Docs would be hard-pressed to appeal to power users looking for the full feature set that Office offers. But the addition of Slides gives offline capabilities to Drive’s three primary productivity apps: text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. With a free alternative that you can use on- and offline, Drive is edging closer to being a viable alternative for users that just want to type up a quick document, track expenses on a spreadsheet, or finish up a presentation for work.

But downsides still remain to Drive’s offline capabilities. Google Docs’ offline capabilities have restrictions based on what kind of device you are using. Using Chrome or Chrome OS offline, for example, you can edit and view documents and presentations, but you can only view spreadsheets. If you’re on Android or iOS, you can only view your documents.

Drive beats Office on the mobile front since Microsoft has yet to release mobile apps for its productivity software; however, Android and iOS Office apps are expected.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld