Android App of the Week Each too simple to warrant a full App of the Week write-up, these five dinky free programs caught my eye over during the past 12 months and have since taken up permanent residence on my Desire HD.
1. App Cache Cleaner
Does exactly what the title suggests and takes a broom to all the guff stored by your apps in their caches. After six months of not bothering to do this, I discovered that I was losing just shy of 300MB of space to cache files, which came as a shock. ACC’s killer feature is an auto-clear setting that can be programmed to run at anything from every hour to every three days.
iOS App of the Week There are quite a few apps that can be used to stitch together a series of overlapping photos in order to create a single, wide-angle panoramic picture.
These apps all use clever algorithms to try to line up elements within the photos in order to create a seamless overlap, but even the smartest software can’t do much to help if your photos are just too far out of alignment.
Hold your phone vertically (left) and wait for the Yin-Yang symbol to guide you (right)
Dermandar Panorama cleverly pre-empts that problem by using the iPhone’s built-in gyroscope to help you auto-align your photos as you take them. That makes it much easier to get good results when the photos are subsequently stitched together. Read the rest of this entry »
Android App of the Week Fist published in 1998 Roger’s Profanisaurus is a compendium of words and phrases inspired by the lexicon and philosophy of Viz comic’s foul-mouthed northern TV reporter Roger Mellie.
Thirteen years later and “the man from the telly” can now spice up your descriptive and euphemistic powers through this handy app. Never before has it been so easy to find an alternate term to describe an ugly bird, taking a dump, throwing-up or passing wind.
Look up rude words
For anyone who doesn’t know what Viz is, the entire content of the app is based on sexual, regurgitory or lavatorial undertakings. There is nothing remotely uplifting, pleasant, politically correct or educational going on here. Much of it is bloody hilarious, though. Read the rest of this entry »
Android App of the Week SanDisk is a name more associated with memory cards than apps, but its new Memory Zone offering should prove useful to anyone who wants to manage and monitor their local and cloud storage from one place.
The app gives you an instant snapshot of how much stuff you have on your phone – system and SD card – as well as your Dropbox, Box, Google Docs and Picasa accounts. Tap on the arrow by each account and you get a detailed breakdown by file type – music, video, pictures, documents, apps and the ever mysterious ‘other’.
The main page (left) gives a simple view of storage status, and you can get a detailed view (right)
Tap on the main graphic for any storage option and you can see all your files listed by size or name., and you can swipe from one file type to the next. Folders are ignored, making this an easy way to find large files you didn’t know you had and may not want. Read the rest of this entry »
Android App of the Week I’m not a big enthusiast of mobile phone photography. As long as the end result is in focus and the lighting doesn’t make it look like it was taken on the surface of some distant planet orbiting a green sun, I’m happy. If I want better, I use a real Camera.
The sketchy UI
But if your photographic emphasis is more on fun than verisimilitude, JFDP Labs new Paper Camera app is worth its asking price. In a nutshell, it takes pictures and converts them into graphic art right there on your handset. Read the rest of this entry »
