Alchemy and Holiday

I hope my readers enjoyed their holidays. I know I did. My son got a Nexus 7, my daughter a new vanity dresser for herself. They're both enjoying them.

One of things we had fun doing together is a little game called Alchemy. The game is simple. You have four basic elements: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. Combine them and their products to get more than 300 new elements. You can create a life, beer, vampires and skyscrapers. You just drag an element on top of the other one to get something new.

You end up with a library of items you can add together. The game is part puzzle, part education and a lot of laughs. I've combined things to end up with Mario, Yoshi and Lance Armstrong. lol! On the other hand I've gotten oxygen, hydrogen and ozone.

 The game allows you to create profiles on a single device so everyone in the family can see how many they can find and later compare. So far my wife is leading with 186, I'm a close second at 183 and our son has 136.

Its on the Android Store and on iphone/ipad so go get it.

Shortyz crosswords

So far I've been mentioning mentioning customization, utility or productivity apps but I don't want to forget the games out there. These days I find I prefer games that expand what little is left of my mind.

In that vein I wholeheartedly recommend Shortyz crosswords.

What's so great about a crossword app?
Well there are a few things that really stand out for me.

First is that I can choose to reveal any letter in the crossword at any time by hitting the menu button on my phone. I'm no crossword genius so being able to reveal a letter or two of a word allows me to actually learn while playing rather than just getting frustrated and giving up.

Secondly is that the app is set to automatically download daily crosswords from around the net when I log in.
Always fresh!

Finally its just how easy it is to navigate around the crosswords. It intelligently allows you to pinch and zoom snapping the crossword to various sizes. You can also rotate your device to landscape mode if you want a bigger view.

If you're going to have one crossword app on your phone or tablet this is the one to get. Oh yeah its free!

CamScanner

Scanners were pretty useful in their day. You took a piece of paper, a magazine article or whatever you wanted to make digital and laid it on top and scanned it.

I see students all the time taking pictures of items on chalkboards and notebooks of friends. They then presumably email them to themselves and then somehow copy those notes to where they need to be.

I wanted an app that allowed me to take a picture, crop it, enhance it so the text is readable, save it as PDF and then email it, print it or upload it to the cloud.. Lo and behold there is an app for that called CamScanner and its free.

This autocropping of an image and trasnforming it into a nicely readable text file is amazing. I've done it quite a few times with various applications requiring ID such as a copy of your driver's license.

Of course upload to the cloud too!

Get that thing!

Pocket

One of my favorite things about my Galaxy Note 2 or any device running Android is how easy it to stay connected to what I want to do even on multiple devices. As I've said before I'm on my home desktop, my work desktop, back to my phone and sometimes on a tablet all at various locations and at various times of the day.

This little app called Pocket allows me to do some neat things. First I can be on my desktop computer with either the Chrome browser extension installed or the Firefox extension installed and then anytime just  hit the little pocket in the top right corner of the screen. The page site I'm looking at will be properly formatted and sent to my phone for reading later (offline too!)

I hit this little button in the top right of the browser. 

And then a little pop up appears jn the browser telling me the article was sent to my phone. 

Then I go to my phone or my tablet and open the Pocket app and the article is there all nicely formatted. 

In addition to that, many apps on my phone have a 'share via' function built into them. If I hit that button I have the option of sending it to Pocket for later offline browsing on the phone or switching back to my desktop and going to the Pocket website. Great!
  

If you go between devices and locations or you find yourself not wanting to use your data plan but still want web page reading on the go this is your app. Go get it!

Launchers

Launchers are apps that are very specific to Android phones like the Galaxy series from Samsung. There is no such add ons for Apple products or for Windows phones.

A launcher basically reconfigures the whole layout of your phone. It sometimes adds conveniences such as gesture controls (e.g two finger swipe to get to a list of your apps) or the ability to put folders inside of folders. Sometimes it just runs faster or looks prettier than whatever your phone manufacturer has decided to use on your phone. There are a lot of different ones on the Google Play store and are often up near the top of the paid apps list.

My current favorite is one called Nova Prime Launcher. You can check it out a detailed video review below.

There is a free version to test here as well. Go get it if you want a different look and feel for your phone.

Wunderlist

So let's get into my favorite app for keeping lists. Wunderlist!

What's the deal? This app lets you organize your tasks, synch them between devices and share your lists with anyone.

I often find myself on multiple devices. When I'm at work I'm on the desktop there. When I go out the door I'm on my phone. In the living room I might be on a tablet. I want a way to quickly organize the ideas I have and make sure they don't get lost. Whenever I write something in Wunderlist on any of my devices it is synced to the cloud and I can see it on any device.

Its very easy to add lists.

add tasks to those lists...

add notes and due dates to the tasks.

Its simple, elegant and free. What more do you want in an app? Get it!

Aix Weather Widget

"What's a widget?" say the iOS toting sheep of the world.

In a nutshell its an icon that can show and update information over time. Anyway if you're reading this you likely know what I'm talking about so on to the point.

There are a ton of weather apps and weather widgets out there. My favorite so far is called Aix Weather

It takes data from the National Weather Institute and shows temperature, maximum/minimum precipitation and sun rise/set times graphically to give you a compact and accurate forecast.

Like this...

It breaks things down nicely so you know if its supposed to rain in the next few hours or if its going to change from sunny to overcast. Is the temperature supposed to go up or down in the next little while? When you live in an area with pretty changeable weather and you spend a fair amount of time outside its nice to know what is on the way in the near future. Get it!

Oh and those funky icons at the bottom of my screen? Next review!