Google Now Launcher Make your phone Pure Android.

Most phone manufacturers place their own software ‘skins’ over each Android handset they release, often changing the OS experience (most notably the launcher) for the worse. Thankfully, Google Now Launcher is here to purify your Android phone. Possibly the most exciting app that Google has released in a while, Google Now Launcher brings a Nexus-style purity to your phone, providing it with a stock Android launcher. You can now enjoy an experience that’s previously only been available on the Nexus 5, so long as your device is running Android 4.x or above. The Google Now Launcher also makes Google’s personal assistant a core part of your phone. It’s a Google service that offers personalised information ‘cards’ that you can reach by swiping left on your home screen, in order to choose what you want to receive notifi cations about. It also provides always-on voice capability, which you can reach by saying “OK Google”, and then asking it a question.

YoVivo

With so many cloud storage solutions available, it’s highly likely that you have your documents, images and videos spread out all over the place, making it very di cult to track down a speci c le. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have access to all of your clouds in the one place? That’s exactly what YoVivo! does. Once you’ve given it access to your Camera Roll, social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram and more) and cloud storage accounts (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and more are supported), your les will be accessible from within the app, so you won’t have to go on a scavenger hunt every time you need to nd something. Its user-friendly interface lists all of your services together for easy browsing. There’s even an easy-to-use slideshow creator that lets you drop in images, videos, music and text from any of the les you’ve linked to the app, with further editing options like lters and emoji livening things up further. YoVivo! is useful and fun. Stephen Lambrechts

BitTorrent Shoot

Eager to get away from its reputation as a piracy tool, BitTorrent has gotten into the habit of releasing apps that show a number of positive uses for its P2P protocol. First its storage solution BitTorrent Sync, then its completely private messenger app BitTorrent Bleep, and now comes BitTorrent Shoot, an app that uses P2P technology to send and receive large photo and video batches to your friends super fast. Simply enter Select mode to start picking the les you want to send, then hit ‘Send Selected’ to produce a QR code. Your friend (who must also have the BitTorrent Shoot app installed) can then scan the code, transferring the les directly onto their Camera Roll. The app lets you receive an unlimited amount of transfers for free, though an in-app purchase of $2.49 if you want to send your friends stu after your third batch. BitTorrent Shoot is a fast and easy-to-use app that makes sending multiple les to another device an absolute breeze

Photoshop Mix Adobe is mixing things up a bit on iOS (and Android) tablets.

Adobe’s latest app for tablets is a slick, touchbased tool for compositing simple double-layer images in a way that’s very reminiscent of what the full version of Photoshop offers. Admittedly short on features, Photoshop Mix is nevertheless a responsive and attractive package that could do with some fi ne-tuning. Dropping in and out of its various tools can feel a little confusing, and we’d appreciate some additional refi nement functionality, but for the most part, Photoshop Mix does a decent job of guiding you through its various areas. The integration of Creative Cloud tools allows you to save your compositions as Photoshop .psd fi les on your Camera Roll, so you can pull them back and keep on working on them. You can also apply various Looks and Enhancements to your images, though don’t expect Photoshop Mix to be a retouching tool — for that, we recommend the previously released Photoshop Touch app. Free and straightforward, Photoshop Mix makes for a fi ne addition to your stable of Adobe apps.

Perfect Tube

There are plenty of YouTube clients on the Windows Phone platform, including a YouTube app published by Microsoft itself, so the fact that Perfect Tube is worth a mention speaks for itself in a way. It’s clear that this third-party YouTube app, developed by Perfect Thumb, was built from the ground up for the Windows Phone platform. The video player has a full set of large controls that are intuitive and discrete. Changing the volume or skipping through a video is navigated by swiping up/down or left/right, respectively, making the controls a lot less ddly than nding little icons or dragging a miniature toggle. However, it isn’t just the controls that are useful — the app also facilitates the full range of video interactions if you sign in, and the home page features your subscriptions page and a ‘popular local clips’ section. Unfortunately, you can’t comment on videos, which may turn some users away, but if you can live without that social element, Perfect Tube is a great YouTube app for Windows Phone

Gestimer

If you thought reminders were sown up by Apple’s own app and the likes of Wunderlist, then this menu bar app for Yosemite will make you think again. Gestimer says it’s for those ‘little reminders’, which is something we sco ed at, but after just a few days you’ll begin to see the truth in it, and how Gestimer can work alongside your existing reminder apps, rather than replacing them. To set a new reminder, you click and hold on the app’s menu bar icon and then drag it down to the centre of the desktop. As you drag, the time for that reminder increases. Let go and you can enter your reminder text and click ‘add a description’ to set it. Gestimer is perfect for quick reminders when you’re in the middle of something because its dialog boxes are unobtrusive. We found ourselves using it for things we wouldn’t normally bother adding to Reminders. You really won’t bother jotting down last-minute things on paper now!

Nemo Free

 

Some people think of Nemo as a submarine captain, others as a ridiculously cute clown sh that’s lost, while every Linux Mint user knows that it’s actually a le manager. Nemo 2.6 was released recently together with the whole Cinnamon 2.6 desktop environment; however, it can also be used as a standalone le manager in any desktop of virtually any distro. Nemo history starts in 2012 when developers behind Linux Mint forked the Nautilus 3.6 le manager in order to save it from a Gnome’s attempts at simplifying everything. Since then, Nemo has become recognised as a GTK3-based le manager that supports desktop icons mode, compact view, full navigation options and lots of great con guration options — a lot more than can be found in Nautilus. The most notable feature of Nemo 2.6 is a plug-in manager, which allows the enabling and disabling of Nemo actions, extensions and scripts with a few clicks. The plug-in manager is available as the Plugins entry in the Nemo’s menu. Once the manager is launched, it shows the list of available actions, extensions and scripts with a checkbox in front of each. Linux Mint also runs a separate project (github.com/ linuxmint/nemo-extensions) to port the available Nautilus extensions to Nemo, such as le name repairer, image converter, sharing extensions and some others. Besides new plug-ins, Nemo enables bookmark sorting, toggling of the location bar to a path-bar and putting le operations in a queue (this is the default behaviour in 2.6). Thanks to this, the le manager combines the simplicity and elegance of Gnome-styled applications with a feature set very close to Dolphin. The Nemo le manager comes with Linux Mint by default, but there’s also a separate PPA for Ubuntu where you can install Nemo without Cinnamon dependencies (ppa:webupd8team/nemo). Outside of that the availability of Nemo is quite limited: it’s o ered for Fedora, OpenSUSE and Arch/Manjaro, while you’ll nd that the lesser-known distros are left out in the cold.

digiKam Powerful and free photo management for Linux.

Most of us shoot photographs and store them on a hard drive of some kind, whether that’s just our smartphone snaps or more sophisticated RAW fi les from a DSLR camera. Since it doesn’t take long for the amount of photos to get out of hand, most of us need a way to store, sort and organise them. In the world of Linux photo managers, digiKam is the most advanced and solid application for this job. This splendid and heavyweight open-source application shows very robust development speed, delivering good news every few months. The 4.x series is constantly updated with maintenance releases, bringing scrupulous bug fi xes as well as better multi-monitor support, improved geotagging, face recognition, colour management, extra key strokes and lots of many minor goodies. In digiKam, photos can be organised into albums, which can be sorted chronologically, by directory layout or by custom collections. Each photo can be assigned with one or many tags, so you can view and browse tagged images all at once, despite the photos being spread out across multiple directories. Besides tags, custom comments and star ratings can be added to each photo and altered in future. All this is stored in a robust and reliable SQLite database. digiKam makes use of KIPI (KDE Image Plugin Interface) plug-ins for lots of added functionality and shares some image effect plug-ins with other KDE-related applications, such as Gwenview and Krita. There are tons of features in digiKam and the most prominent ones are its gorgeous photo-importing dialog; its automatic facial recognition and sorting; its powerful editor for playing with colours and exposure; batch queue manager; and light table for comparing similar shots. digiKam also features Marble integration for showing maps and a very useful fuzzy search tool for coping with ‘nearly identical’ shots. digiKam is included with almost any distro, so the only question left is where to get the latest release. Users of Ubuntu and Mint can get it from dedicated ppa (ppa:philip5/ extra), while Arch/Manjaro users can always turn to AUR.

TextExpander 5

TextExpander enables you to de ne phrase shortcuts that, when typed, it replaces with some other content – that can be a spelling correction, emoji, a multiline address, a snippet of code, or a combination of text and images. You might set ‘;esig’ to expand to your email signature, or use ‘rrecycle’ to write the Unicode character for the universal recycling symbol. Advanced snippets include operators and placeholders, so you can use a shortcut to enter today’s date, or boilerplate text with placeholders you quickly complete in a oating window. The app’s performance proved solid and snappy throughout testing, boosting productivity, which this release aims to boost with suggestions. It monitors your input and noti es when you could have saved time by using a shortcut; it also suggests new snippets. The former is great, but the latter too often recommends very short, commonly-used phrases, which we didn’t nd that helpful.

Howzat

Even if you’re not into cricket, chances are you’ve been out to bat in one of the many variations of Stick Cricket since the fi rst web browser version came out in 2006. Though it’s been available on Android and iOS for a while, Microsoft is pushing it as a drawcard launching on the Windows 10 for Mobile platform. The game’s actually compatible with Windows Phone 8.1 and up, so there’s no need to wait for the new smartphone OS to launch here. Stick Cricket Premier League might trick you into thinking that this game is simple — the only controls are a left and right shot — but the bowlers get progressively slower and somehow that actually makes hitting the ball exceptionally hard. The base app is free, but in order to build your own team with decent players you’re going to have to fork out for some in-app purchases, of which there are many — something to be cautious of if kids are playing. Other than that, it’s a worthwhile app for Windows Phone.

Inputting+

Ever wanted to have undo, redo, clipboard or ‘ nd and replace’ functionality for text when using your smartphone? That’s exactly what Inputting+ provides. Once enabled, the app places a bubble on your screen whenever text input is available (don’t worry, you can make the bubble small and transparent) that lets you undo what you’ve just written with a single tap, and redo it with a second. Unlocking the Pro version of Inputting+ (for a ~$1.35 fee) will provide you with a timeline of collected text inputs from every app, so you won’t lose anything you’ve written due to a crash or poor reception. If you’ve ever had that happen to you, enabling Inputting+ should be a no-brainer. While you do have to give the app access to monitor your text inputs, it doesn’t have web permissions, so your texts won’t be collected and read by anyone online. If you’re cool with this, you’ll nd Inputting+ to be a very useful addition to your Android arsenal. Stephen Lambrechts

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For many workers, Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps have been the cornerstone of modern productivity for over two decades, but until June of this year, Microsoft had held o releasing its o cial O ce products for Android phone users. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case and, on the proviso you’re willing to set up a free Microsoft account, you can now use your Android phone or tablet to edit and view documents to your heart’s content. That Microsoft account really is the key to the kingdom here, because if you don’t have one — or you’d prefer not to set one up — then you’ll only be able to read O ce les. Once you’re in though, the O ce apps are clean and well-designed, allowing you to do all the basics you’d expect (and more than most users probably need). That includes opening and saving documents through your OneDrive account, or even syncing the apps with Google Drive and Dropbox. As far as Android productivity apps go, O ce is pretty great, but considering how well-established apps like Google Drive already are on this platform, it might not be enough to convert the masses.

Reflector 2 Get your iOS and Android device displays mirrored on your Mac’s screen

Refl ector bills itself as “the last receiver you’ll ever need”, enabling real-time mirroring of iPhone/iPad displays, and Google Cast-compatible Android devices. We quickly got four devices (iPad Air, iPhone 5S, Nexus 4 and Hudl 2) working simultaneously. By default, connected devices are surrounded by a ‘frame’ representing their hardware, which differentiates mirrored content. Refl ector rescales virtual devices, so all can be shown at once, but annoyingly overlays other apps (these settings can be adjusted). A single device can be ‘emphasised’, shrinking others, or you can show/hide specifi c items. Full-screen mode shows all devices, rather than just one. Performance was great with little or no lag, even when playing games, but getting content across from broadcast media apps seemed impossible. Refl ector can also record any device and add a voiceover from a mic input. Output was mostly fi ne during testing, bar the odd dropped frame, but videos are restricted to TV-oriented outputs. Still, ease of use makes this one of our favourite device receivers.

Quite RSS

Instead of sur ng through endless tech news sites, it’s much better to use some dedicated aggregation software. Since 1995, RSS has proven to be the most comfortable method of delivering news and articles. It’s grown from Rich Site Summary in the early days to Really Simple Syndication at present. Many websites make their own RSS feeds, which are designed as custom XML pages on speci c URLs. Though the contents of an RSS feed can be viewed in any web browser, it’s primarily designed to be used with RSS clients, and there are plenty of them about, both for web-based and standalone use. QuiteRSS is one of the latter. It’s feature-rich, yet it doesn’t get in the way unless, of course, you want it to. The top-left pane shows the list of feeds and a toolbar to add new feeds or modify existing ones. Just below there’s a tree of coloured labels, which let you mark feeds and then easily nd them. The main part of the window resembles an email client and displays the list of news from the feeds and shows the contents of the currentlyselected news item. The lower pane presenting the contents is a fully featured web browser – you’ll notice that once you click on any link in the body of the news. It has the AdBlock extension and enables you to switch whether images are displayed, though it won’t let you go to a custom web address in the input bar. Instead, you can use the ‘globe’ button on the toolbar to open the URL you’re at in your default web browser. QuiteRSS has a very clean and easy-to-use interface, it supports classic and newspaper viewing modes, advanced searching tools (including searching in links), several selection methods (such as stars, labels and ltering) and lots of precise controls over the way the noti cation messages work

Pale Moon A speedy web browser that’s m ore than just a Firefox clone

Nearly every web browser aims to strike a balance between features and speed, and provide a more robust and responsive interface and rendering engine. Yet Pale Moon is very special, and in many ways unlike other lesser-known browsers. That’s due to the fact that it was forked from Mozilla Firefox in 2009, in the 3.6 version era, and since then it’s claimed to be faster and more secure than Firefox. Reading the published FAQs and other materials on the project’s website takes time to discover in what particular way Pale Moon is better, because both advertise themselves in a similar way to each other. It boils down to Pale Moon being a Firefox clone with some signifi cant improvements, with most of them focused on speed, such as discarding support for ancient CPUs for the sake of in-depth use of SSE2 and other modern features available since the late Pentium IV (with 64-bit support). It also cuts out accessibility input options, tabs grouping, WebRTC, parental control, PDF reader and some rarely used APIs. The end result is a speedy web browser for general use, which looks like classic pre-Australis Firefox (before v28), but that still supports many Firefox extensions. The Pale Moon developers do try to maintain compatibility with parent extensions, despite Pale Moon drifting more and more away from its Mozilla origins. Pale Moon even provides its own sync server, which, it claims, provides a more secure approach to synchronizing data, without a focus on the “future commercial endeavours of the Mozilla Corporation”