Category / AOTW

App of the Week

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Flipboard heads to Android via XDA and becomes our app of the week – again

Flipboard, last year’s runner-up for Best App in the Digixav Awards, is on its way to Android with exclusivity to Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S III, but one XDA member has got the .apk for anyone with Android 2.2 or later to download and enjoy, regardless of device. This makes it a worthy app of the week – again.

Flipboard, Android, Free
Download from XDA or visit the website

Xavier Voigt-Hill's avatarDigixav

This week’s app of the week is Flipboard.

Flipboard is a fantastic app that lets you add whatever content you desire to a virtual ‘social magazine’. Complete with Facebook and Twitter integration, it is more than a conventional RSS reader as it corroborates your social feeds and go-to websites in one place with a beautiful flipping interface. A free account will sync your feeds across devices, and a recent update allowed the app to work on iPhone and iPod touch. Take a look at what Flipboard themselves have to say about it in the video below.

Flipboard is now my only source for news and social updates. The app is free and gloriously ad-free and I would recommend it to anyone with an iDevice. Even Apple love it, having made it their iPad app of the year. It might also be in the running for a more prestigious award from a

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by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Splashtop Metro Testbed lets you try Windows 8 on an iPad

Want to try out Windows 8 on a tablet but you’ve only got an iPad? Splashtop could have the answer with its new Metro Testbed app, which gives users the chance to use the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in a simple iPad app.

Splashtop Metro Testbed, iPad, £17.49
Download from the App Store or visit the website

by Henry Hunt

Windows Phone AOTW: GIFStudio

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

by Henry Hunt

WP7 AOTW: Gerbil Physics

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.

Gerbil Physics

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

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Instagram launches on Android after iOS exclusivity

Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app cum social network, finally launched on Android today. The app, which lets users apply filters to their pictures and share them across a variety of social networks, including within its own community, has proved wildly popular since its launch on iOS, with over 30 million registered users (from myself to Justin Bieber) and Apple naming it as the best iPhone app of 2011. If you have a phone running Android 2.2 or later and you want to see what all the fuss is about, head over to Google Play for the free download (unless you have the new HTC One X), but don’t blame me if you become addicted. I hear it can have that effect on people.

Instagram, Android & iOS, Free
Download from the App Store or Google Play or visit the website

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

New Tweetdeck apps coming for iOS and Android?

Tweetdeck, my favourite Twitter client for iOS and PC, has been rather stagnant since its acquisition by Twitter last year, but news from TechCrunch of a major update to the fantastic mobile apps goes down very well in my eyes.

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Google promotes I/O 2012 with a free Chrome game

Google’s annual I/O developer conference takes place in the Moscone Centre in San Francisco this June and, to promote the event before registrations open in two weeks, they have released an HTML5-based game – another addition to the fantastic list of Chrome Experiments. The input/output game involves designing contraptions to get a ball from one side of the screen to the other in true Rube Goldberg style. Google will also feature some of the best creations at the conference from June 27-29, so grab it from the Chrome Web Store and get building!

by Henry Hunt

WP7 AOTW: Rowi

This week’s app of the week for Windows Phone is Rowi, a Twitter app by Hidden Pineapple.

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!

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Google Play launches as a rebranded Android Market

The Android Market has today undergone a major rebrand as part of Google’s aim to promote content beyond apps and provide a viable alternative to iTunes. Relaunching as Google Play, the only noticeable difference other than the new logo is the fact that they are celebrating the change with a big sale across the new Play Shop for apps, Play Movies, Play Music (US only) and, wait for it, Play Books. The rebranded store will roll out across devices with Android 2.2 or later within the next few days, and Google’s shift of focus away from the Android branding will undoubtedly be followed by massive promotions to let the world know what Mountain View has to offer.

by Henry Hunt

Windows Phone App of the Week: SuperTube

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.

YouTube Pro, Windows Phone 7, Free or 79p
Download from the Marketplace