Articles about Mobile App

Thanks to some smart lawyering or perhaps fears CEO Steve Ballmer will show up unannounced, Microsoft has negotiated envious patent fee payments from nearly all major Android licensees. So there's something fitting about the software giant giving a little something back to Android, by way of an exclusive app -- well for now -- on{X}. Or perhaps it's a Trojan Horse to undo Android phones, chopping up performance or draining battery life. Or maybe Microsoft sees Android users as easy beta testers, considering the more rigorous standards for getting into Apple's App Store than Google Play.

One thing is certain: Early on{X} users despise the app, which has some of the worst reviews you'll see at Google Play. As I post, the app has average rating of 1.8 stars out of five. Among the 244 reviewers, 178 give the app a single star. Ouch! I had planned to grab this one, which is available in beta, but skipped after seeing the scathing response.

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Instapaper, the popular iOS application that lets users save web pages for offline reading, was released for Android on Monday, and can now be downloaded in Google Play.

Instapaper's creator Marco Arment released the app exclusively for iOS, and showed a public preference for the platform, hence earning him the label of "Apple Fanboy" from much of the platform-partisan Web. But due to the undeniable success of Android tablets such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble's Nook, Arment and Android app makers Mobelux have ported Instapaper to Android.

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The need to prioritize emails is an idea that has been around for some time, starting with spam filtering that aimed to reduce the amount of junk reaching your inbox. Google and other email providers have made further advances by highlighting emails believed to be more important than others you receive based on content, sender and previous correspondence. EmailTray provides you with even more control by automatically filtering your mail into high priority, lower priority, no priority and spam.

This is a desktop app that can be used to check as many email addresses as you want providing you are working with POP3 or IMAP accounts, but all of your email is made available in one place. The program analyzes your email messages as they arrive and filters them in to inboxes of different priorities. Emails that are sent by people with whom  you regularly communicate with will be assigned a higher priority than other emails, and all of your mail is sorted into ‘Top priority’, ‘Low priority’, ‘No priority’ and Spam.

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How much tax are you going to be paying over the coming year? It’s not always the happiest news, but it’s the sort of things that it is certainly best to know in advance -- rather get the bad news now than get a nasty surprise further down the line. HMRC Tax Calc is a free app for iOS from HMRC which can be used to work out how much tax you’re going to be paying from your wages each week or month as well as showing you what this means for your annual tax bill.

The app is designed for people whose tax situation is fairly simple -- if you have anything other than a tax code of 810L or a National Insurance letter A, you’re going to have to look elsewhere to have your tax calculations done for you. All you need to do it tap in your gross pay or wages along with how many hours a week you work, and everything else will be done for you. At a glance you can see how much of your earnings are tax free and where all the rest goes.

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Google is the go-to search engine for most people, so the existence of a dedicated mobile app should come as no surprise. There has been a tool available for iOS for some time but the release of Google Search 2.0 sees the introduction of a completely redesigned app that not only boasts a new interface and new features, at least if you have an iPhone, but also easier access to other Google searches such as Gmail, Docs and Calendar.

As before, it is possible to conduct searches by typing, using your voice or taking a photo with your camera and using Google Goggles. There have been improvements made to the speed of autocomplete suggestions  so you should find that results are available faster than ever and you can take advantage of a preview pane that slides in from the side to view individual page results. Switching between search results and pages takes nothing more than a swipe, and this gesture can also be used to switch search modes, such as moving between a standard search and an image search.

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If you want a gander at one of iOS 6's new features, just ask developer Rogue Amoeba. Apple unceremoniously pulled Airfoil Speakers Touch, which has been in the iOS App Store since 2009. In the past, the company has refused apps or pulled others that compete with Apple repeat functionality iOS offers. The ban hints at streaming capabilities coming in the next version, while raising questions about appropriateness or fairness. Hence the question to you: Is Apple right to ban Airfoil Speakers Touch?

"Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store", CEO Paul Kafasis says. "We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch. Needless to say, we’re quite disappointed with their decision, and we’re working hard to once again make the application available for you, our users." Apple had already approved the removed version.

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Google announced on Thursday that Android developers can now use in-app Billing to sell monthly or annual subscriptions from inside of apps sold in Google Play. The feature brings Google Play up to speed with Apple's iTunes App Store, which rolled out this feature over one year ago.

With the new feature, developers set the price and billing interval and Google Play manages the purchase transactions for both the seller and the subscriber. Users can view their subscriptions in the "My Apps" screen in the Play Store app, the same place they view their updates, or they can view them in the app's product details page in the Play Store app. This is where users can cancel subscriptions if they choose.

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Well, perhaps I should qualify that with "almost", depending on what matters more to you as a user. On Thursday, 15 days after releasing a major Google+ update for iPhone, the Android version arrived. Timing is interesting. According to NPD, considerably more Android users access Google+ from the browser than the app -- 16 percent to 10 percent overall reach, in March, respectively. My question for you quick downloaders, will that be true for you, or is the app now preferred? It's no idle question, because the web experience is now so vastly different from the app.

Like its counterpart, Google+ for Android offers bleeding-edge photos. Pretty much everything about Google+ bleeds the edge of the screen. The effect is immersive. You just want to scroll and scroll -- and you will since so much less content fills the screen now. But the Android version has better visual flow than its iOS counterpart. Stated differently: It's snappier, more alive. "We're building for a mobile future", Google senior veep Vic Gundotra says. That's apparent from just how different the app is from the web experience -- and how immersive.

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After a consistent stream of bad news from Yahoo's executive offices, the fading giant search company has finally launched a big new development that takes on its core business challenge: staying relevant. The company on Thursday launched its own Web browser called Yahoo Axis.

Axis is centered around searching, bookmarking, and content syncing across multiple devices. While Yahoo says Axis is both a desktop and mobile browser, it is really just a mobile browser for the iPad and iPhone, and a plug-in for Safari/Chrome/IE/Firefox which amounts to a little more than a "next-gen Yahoo Toolbar."

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Oregon developer Panic has released a brand new version of its Mac web-coding tool, Coda 2, plus launched a streamlined iPad version, appropriately titled Diet Coda. Diet Coda is designed as a companion tool to Coda for use on the move.

Coda 2 launches with over 100 new features -- many of which are based on user requests, adds 64-bit compatibility and provides a completely refreshed user interface. It’s billed as a one-stop shop for web developers, incorporating editor, terminal, CSS and files management within a single application.

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Ahead of Facebook's Friday IPO, NPD released usage data for Android smartphones. Unsurprisingly, user reach is quite high. In looking over the data, I honed in on Google+, which makes a surprising showing for a social network not even a year old. But behind early adoption is a lesson for Google and Android developers about the app vs browser.

First, the data NPD highlights: Nearly 75 percent of Android users accessed Facebook, via app or browser, in March. But, separately for both, reach declined from February to March. However, the overall trend for the app is up. By comparison, Twitter: 23 percent web, 16 percent app. Google+ reach is 16 percent web, with the app swinging between 10 percent and 15 percent. For all three social networks, web reach exceeds the app.

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Today is Facebook Day, the day when the most-successful-social-network-so-far opened up to public investment and outshone all other American IPOs up to this point.

With shares initially priced at $38, Facebook (FB) opened at $42.99 on the Nasdaq at 11:30am EST on Friday. After a brief delay in trading on Friday, a reported 82 million shares (of 421.2 million) were traded in the first 30 seconds of availability, totaling $116 billion.

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LastPass.com, developer of the LastPass family of password-storage products, has released a new free app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. LastPass Wallet is designed to give iOS users a taster of the LastPass feature set by providing a tool for viewing, creating and managing secure notes, one of the service’s lesser known features.

The app provides templates for users to quickly create notes for sensitive personal information often found in the user’s wallet or purse, such as credit card details, passport number and wireless passwords.

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iOS app Flipboard has already earned itself something of a name as a great way to aggregate multiple social networks and news media into a single, more easily managed stream. The latest version of the iPhone and iPad app sees the introduction of support for audio as well as the more usual text and image based content. Audio content can be scanned through just as you would the rest of your feeds, but it can also be played in the background while you continue with your browsing.

There is support for SoundCloud, NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International), which gives you the opportunity to listen to a wide variety of podcasts,  radio broadcasts and more. By connecting Flipboard with SoundCloud you can listen to sounds that have been created or shared by your friends. There is a whole new audio category for you to explore and this interesting change in direction for the social networking tool.

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Anyone who’s tapped into Microsoft Word’s autotext and autocorrect features will know how useful they can be, but what happens when you need that kind of automation in another program? The answer lies with a free-for-personal-use tool called PhraseExpress 8.0151.

This clever and powerful text replacement tool, also available as a portable build, gives you Autotext and Autocorrect functionality – plus a heck of a lot more – across your entire desktop, letting you speed up the way you enter and manipulate text in any program you have installed on your computer, not just Microsoft Word.

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