Med student at Glasgow University, will write reviews and the like for Digixav and maybe the occasional rant on my own site if I haven't deleted it already
A while ago I did an app of the week post about an app called YouTube Pro, but due to the use of the YouTube name the app was removed from the Marketplace. Eager to enable people to get the best YouTube experience on Windows Phone, the developers just changed the name to SuperTube and re-submitted it. The two apps are basically identical save for the logo, but make sure you download SuperTube even if you already have YouTube Pro to ensure that you get the latest updates and features on your phone.
I’m sorry that I haven’t done an app of the week for a while, but I’ve been busy at this thing called school. But sitting here gated to my room on a Saturday night and listening to Garden by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs inspired me to get back to the work that really matters. Without further ado, this week’s app of the week is YouTube Pro.
This fantastic app is better than any of the other YouTube apps that I have personally tried, simply because it is the only one I have tried that allowed you to log in to your YouTube account. Upon opening the app, you are faced with a Metro style start screen, you then slide along the panorama to view things such as the top rated videos and your subscriptions. However most of the interesting stuff is located on the first screen. The ‘Recorded Page’, where…
This week’s app of the week is Fhotoroom. To put it bluntly, it’s Instagram for Windows Phone. With this app, you can take and edit photos and then ruin enhance them with effects, writing and frames. You then can proceed to upload these either directly to Fhotoroom or to a number of places such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr.
Upon entering the app, you are prompted to create an account and upload your first picture, which will be used as your profile picture. You are then able to proceed to edit and upload as many photos as you wish. Some of my personal masterpieces include a picture of bacon and multiple pictures of coffee.
But in all honesty, I recommend this app for the sole fact that the pictures that appear on the title screen are either really cool or contain boobs just hilarious.
Fhotoroom, Windows Phone, Free
Download from the Marketplace or visit the website
Recently I have been playing a fair amount of Minecraft as it is a great game (and unfortunately extremely addictive), so I have decided to take a break from building my castle and write about some of the many thousands of mods that are out there to improve this already superb game.
The first Minecraft mod of the month is Mo’ Creatures. This is by far the best mod that I have personally installed. This mod introduces a vast number of new mobs, including creatures such as snakes, birds, bears and even dolphins, but my personal favourite thing about this mod is the addition of werewolves. These mobs are incredibly hard to kill and thus simultaneously the best and the worst part of the Mo’ Creatures experience. The fact that they are almost impossible to kill with anything other than a golden sword is incredibly aggravating, meaning that they are the one thing that you do not want to meet on a dark night away from your castle/tower/hole in the side of a mountain. But, no matter how annoying they can get, killing you the second you go outside, it is impossible to hate them, due to the fact that during the daytime they turn into normal humans, screaming ‘OUCH YOUR HURTING ME!!!!!’ when you hit them. This makes up for the fact that the second the moon comes out they are out to kill you.
If you play Minecraft, I highly recommend that you download this fantastic mod, created by DrZhark. If you don’t play Minecraft, go and buy it as it is scientifically proven to be awesome.
Well I never saw this coming – I have chosen an Android app of the week. If you have read some of my earlier articles, you will be as surprised as I am. The reason for this is that my mum got an award-winningAndroid tablet and, me being me, I had to play with it the second I came home from school and, having been using it for the last few hours I was inspired to do an Android AOTW. So here it is: This weeks Android AOTW it Dungeon Hunter 3.
This is the best android game I have played so far, but admittedly I haven’t played a lot, and I wish that it were available on more platforms. When you start playing the game, you have to chose between four different classes, each one with different strengths and weaknesses. I personally chose the warlord as I always chose the tank class, but you can also chose from the astromancer, trickster and the shaman. Once you choose your class you are then given a quick tutorial, showing you how to both play and upgrade you character. Once completed, you are then free to kill and maim to your hearts contempt.
The gameplay is very detailed, with each kill giving you both money and experience, slowly helping you to buy countless upgrades and items to help your character on their way to becoming invincible, but, for those more inpatient people out there, each level and mission comes with three additional goals that, when completed, give you a large boost to both gold and XP. The game is easy to get the hang of, with the tutorial teaching you know all you need to know, but having played it for about two hours I can tell that completing it and fully upgrading your character is no mean feat. It will take countless hours of gameplay.
Dungeon Hunter 3, iOS and Android, Free
Download from Google Play or the App Store
The title of this article is a little misleading, as those of you who read my posts, follow me on Twitter or know me in person will know that I love Microsoft. Windows Phone is my phone platform of choice, I would never consider using anything but a Windows computer, and the thing that I want most in the world right now is a 15.6″ one of these. But even with all the love I bear for the love-child of Ballmer and Gates, there are a large number of things about them which annoy me.
The first and foremost of these annoyances is with Zune. As a Windows Phone user, I am forced to use Zune in order to update, add music and video to and do a large number of other things to, my phone. This is fine, I can add and take away music to and from my phone quickly and easily, and updates will automatically commence if they are available. But when I got my HP Pavilion dv7 with Beats Audio, I began to play music through my laptop, whereas previously I had been using speakers connected to my phone. It soon dawned upon me that Zune, a beautiful piece of software, is one of the buggiest pieces of crap since Windows Media Player. Quite often while playing music, the song will randomly pause, move to a different point or just skip altogether, and on occasion I have closed Zune to find that the song that was playing doesn’t stop playing, much to my teacher’s dismay. When this is Skrillex, chemistry lessons can be quite awkward. What the hell is up with that? A company whom incorporated software into its very name can’t be bothered or is unable to iron out the bugs in their music software. Even iTunes, something which is essentially designed to work on a different operating system and much maligned on Windows, is nowhere near as buggy. This being said, with the Zune name being dumped, and the software being incorporated into the OS, I surely hope that for Windows 8’s sake that at least some of the bigger glitches will be ironed out.
And secondly, what is the point in Windows Media Player any more? The whole thing is utter crap and nobody in their right mind would ever use it. I mean seriously, software that causes computers to blue-screen (I speak through personal experience) through use is not right in any way. And if any person out there does use this utter piece of crap, please explain to me in the comments below why you would put yourself through it. Please.
My final point is the most obvious one. Internet Explorer. This is in every way the single most hated piece of software out there. It is crap, it crashes, freezes and is only there for sane people to download either Firefox or Chrome. And, to make matters worse, you have to have specific permission from Microsoft to be able to uninstall the software. Of course, you can do what both I and Xavier (our EIC) have done and bury it deep within our program files, but it will always be there, taunting you with the possibility that you may one day, have to use it.
So those are the main reasons that Microsoft pisses off even myself, a true Microsoft fanboy. Despite the wonders of things like the Arc Touch Mouse, SkyDrive and Windows Phone, Microsoft isn’t perfect, but by ironing out the bugs and listening to consumers, they could get pretty close.
This week’s best Windows Phone app is GIFStudio by Daniel Gary.
This great app allows you to create animated GIFs from the comfort of your own Windows Phone. You use your phone camera to take a number of pictures that the app then stitches together into GIF form. You then can proceed to manipulate the GIF, by changing the speed, adding and removing frames, including those already saved on the phone, or sharing them with your friends. We at Digixav love GIFs and web have had quite a lot of fun with this app. Without GIFs, we would not have lives.
GIF Studio, Windows Phone, £0.79
Download it from the Marketplace
This week’s Windows Phone app of the week is Gerbil Physics by Pencel Games. This great game is one of my favourite games on the Windows Phone platform. It may sound weird, but you play as an apprentice to a gerbil wizard who has to save the other gerbils from the toad king and his army of flying penguins. The toad king has imprisoned the other gerbils inside indestructible blocks and he has made them into monuments to himself. You have to destroy them in order to save your fellow fur balls.
As you can see from the picture above, you do this through a mixture of bombs, explosives and other demolition equipment to get all the gerbils below the magical yellow line. This simple game, with an excellent back-story, comes with 200G of fairly challenging achievements, which is a nice change from games such as Collapse which it took me about 10 mins to get all the achievements.
Gerbil Physics, Windows Phone, £2.29
Download from the Marketplace or visit the website
Many people would just say that you don’t need a Twitter app on a Windows Phone as it is already built into the OS. I personally love the Twitter integration that was added with Windows Phone 7.5 but, for some things such as actually reading my feed, it is not that great. So, after a while of struggling to keep up to date with all of the people that I legally stalk, I decided to download an app to use instead.
I started off with the official Twitter app for Windows Phone, which was horrendously bad, before going on to Birdsong which was better but still not that great. Eventually I came across Rowi, and everything changed. This little app is great, being incredibly simple to use and designed with a perfect Metro theme. When you open the app, your feed is the first thing you see and, with one swipe of the screen, you can see both your mentions and direct messages. You can even set it so that your notifications such as mentions and messages appear on a live tile. I think that the single most annoying thing about the Twitter website is that you have to manually update tweets, but Rowi auto-updates and, although new posts will appear while you are reading, the app leaves you where you are and just stacks the tweet on top of all the previously read ones. Now when you are reading what @JustinBieber was doing a week ago and a new tweet comes through, you don’t have to scroll all the way back down to where you were before.
Rowi, Windows Phone 7, £2.29
Download from the Marketplace or visit the website
Follow me on Twitter @huntho21 for random babble and cool stuff!
I’m sorry that I haven’t done an app of the week for a while, but I’ve been busy at this thing called school. But sitting here gated to my room on a Saturday night and listening to Garden by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs inspired me to get back to the work that really matters. Without further ado, this week’s app of the week is YouTube Pro.
This fantastic app is better than any of the other YouTube apps that I have personally tried, simply because it is the only one I have tried that allowed you to log in to your YouTube account. Upon opening the app, you are faced with a Metro style start screen, you then slide along the panorama to view things such as the top rated videos and your subscriptions. However most of the interesting stuff is located on the first screen. The ‘Recorded Page’, where you can take and upload videos from within the app is a very useful addition, and this along with the uploading page makes mobile uploading a great deal easier. Also, as you would expect, there are pages for your playlists, your downloads and many other features that have in fact been missing from most other apps that I have used. The actual video playback in this app is good also. Before playing a video, you are taken to a page where you are given a choice of what quality you wish to play it in, the description of the video, and the like and dislike buttons. The only problem that I have with this app is the fact that in order to play low quality video, you need to have the standard YouTube app installed, but after having downloading it I have had no more problems.
YouTube Pro is an excellent app which I recommend to any person both with or without a YouTube account.
In August, HP were in turmoil. Leo Apotheker had killed webOS out of nowhere, announced that he wanted to spin off their PC division. Then he was ousted in favour of Meg Whitman who eventually came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea (gasp) to keep the world’s largest PC business. Apotheker is an idiot, and HP make fantastic computers, such as the budget Pavilion g6 range and the award-winning Folio ultrabook. Now, we have our hands on a Pavilion dv7, a high-end notebook designed for work and play, but can it justify its £949 price tag?
Hardware
The dv7-6b51ea that we are reviewing boasts a powerful 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-2670QM processor, capable of turbo-boosting to 3.1GHz, and a massive 8GB of RAM, enabling it to handle almost anything you throw at it. This, combined with the 1GB of video RAM on the AMD Radeon graphics chip and the 1TB hard drive means that this laptop is perched at the higher end of the spec table. HP didn’t stop there, adding in a few small things such as a fingerprint scanner and a Blu-ray drive to make it just that bit better. The display is a 17.3″ panel of 1600 x 900 resolution which, while having great contrast and a crisp picture, lacks in brightness, even compared to lower end laptops like the Pavilion g6. The screen does however have impressive viewing angles. The built in camera is quite crap, despite its misleading HP TrueVision HD label. Both videos and stills come out at a measly 640 x 480 resolution, and the frame rate is worse than a dustbin.
As with all flagship HP laptops, the dv7 range comes with Beats Audio as standard. The clarity of sound is fantastic, even when playing at full volume. Little distortion occurs and the HP Triple Bass Subwoofer ensures that my large Skrillex collection always makes my head bang. Most importantly for a journalist, however, is the keyboard and the one in the dv7 is quite simply fantastic. The keys are not too shallow, and a rubberised coating makes them very comfortable. The number pad, noticeably absent from some smaller HP devices, is convenient and as you’d expect. The trackpad, hilariously coined as a TouchPad by HP, is smooth and responsive, supporting certain multitouch gestures, but I still prefer using a mouse.
Design
The dv7 is a beautiful piece of tech. The core of the device is made from brushed aluminium, which looks and feels amazing. The base of the device is unfortunately made of plastic, but I can live with this. One advantage of the Envy range is the aluminium unibody, even if it is just a carbon copy of the MacBook Pro. The notebook is not the most portable one I have ever seen, but I haven’t had problems carrying it around the school grounds on a daily basis. The lid of the device is emblazoned with the HP logo which, again similarly to Apple devices, lights up when the device is in use. While this is a nice touch, I would rather that HP used these LEDs in a different place such as the keyboard, which suffers from the lack of backlighting. The speakers are placed around the edge of the laptop and on a bank between the two hinges. The Beats branding is clear to see across the device, even in the taskbar, but, when compared to certain HP laptops, the branding is thankfully minimal and bearable.
Software
The dv7 comes with Windows 7 Home Premium as standard, along with the usual preloaded crapware that you have to filter through upon your first boot. Things like HP Games by WildTangent, Bing Toolbar, Internet Explorer 9 and the free trial of Norton Internet Security went without a moment’s hesitation, but HP CoolSense is actually worth keeping on any HP device. CoolSense allows you to juggle fan usage and performance to make the laptop cooler/quieter when required. SimplePass software comes to work with the fingerprint reader and it can be programmed to log into certain sites and open them with a swipe. Being so well-specced, the dv7 has had no problems with almost everything thrown at it. Games such as Portal 2 and Modern Warfare 3 can be played on the highest graphical settings with ease, and I have, on occasion, been able to play at least half a dozen HD YouTube videos simultaneously, but the Zune software has strangely caused a few problems. On a number of occasions it has caused random reboots, but I believe that this problem is with the software itself having heard of others enduring similar experiences.
Conclusion
The HP Pavilion dv7 is a fantastic laptop, perfectly equipped to handle anything thrown at it without being excessively bulky or expensive. For less than the price of a 15 inch MacBook Pro, you get a better processor, sublime audio and, in my opinion, a superior all-round user experience. While the battery life and webcam both leave things to improve upon, overall I would recommend this notebook to anybody who can afford it.
Digixav 
