Guest Victor von Zeppelin Posted January 20, 2012 Report Share Posted January 20, 2012 A few rather snazzy apps have shown up in the last few weeks, so we thought it was about time to cover some of them. Jotly: First up is an app with a rather peculiar premise – to rate everything. In reality this produces a rather odd selection of featured ratings that are usually interesting to the rater, but not relevant to the viewer. An example of the most recent ratings include a cup of coffee (Given A+, but no indication on where to buy one) and a DVD shelf, which is just a DVD shelf. It would appear to be a joke app, as the video on the market page shows, but too much time has been spent on making the presentation nice and the app functional. It’s rather confusing HaxSync: This is a genuinely useful tool, but one that shouldn’t have to exist. It’s known that ICS doesn’t play nicely with Facebook contact sync, and contact photos from G+ are rather low resolution. This app aims to pull down hi-res contact pictures from Facebook to populate the people app, and apparently does so with aplomb. As much as it would be nice for Facebook and Android to get along, this app seems to be the best compromise – even at 89p. Void Lock: An app with a very simple premise, but one that makes a lot of sense. Say your phone got stolen, this app makes it look like your phone is off until a special gesture or key combination is inputted to unlock the phone. Unfortunately, I had a hard time getting the app to work on my LG O2X. The screen would either switch back on; flash briefly but not accept input; or just not show any acknowledgement of interactivity at all. So while it’s a good idea, especially for the security conscious, the execution is lacking. I’ll be happy to hear other’s experience with this app, to see if anyone has positive results. Dragon Go!: Nuance are masters of voice recognition software, and their dragon line of products are well known for high quality dictation on PCs. Dragon Go! Is the first attempt on Android and a competitor to both Android’s own speech recognition, and Apple’s Siri. Results are a bit of a mixed bag. While there is a large range of websites you can search and some support across apps, voice recognition is nowhere near close to Google’s implementation and natural language support like Siri still isn’t supported. TouchPal Keyboard Tablet: TouchPal is a popular android keyboard that has just recently gained support for ICS. This tablet version has a lot of interesting features, such as being able to pinch to change the size of the keyboard and allowing a quick change to a split keyboard for larger tablets. It also comes with swipe-like tracing functionality and a good autocorrect. This keyboard is also a very good deal, as it’s free where other competitors charge for the quantity of features on show here. DocuSign Ink Beta:Sometimes getting a document signed digitally is a very important thing to do, and a lot of methods out there, such as scanning aren’t always the best to use. DocuSign attempts to simplify the trouble by using an Android device and just letting you draw in your signature. It works on both phones and tablets, but I’ve found it would be much more usable on the larger screen, as getting anything more than a scrawl is difficult with a finger on a tiny screen. Otherwise, it just seems to work, as you can import a range of files to sign and then download the documents from the net at a later stage. This item was promoted to the News page - click here to view. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest 3shirts Posted January 20, 2012 Report Share Posted January 20, 2012 I recently bought HaxSync and after a great start I realised that it was failing to pull a couple of closest friends' pictures over. I have tried turning off contact matching so it pulls all my Facebook peeps down and then trying to manually 'join' them but they don't even seem to be coming down. Not sure why. Posted on the Android Central forum listed in the market app so we'll see but at the moment that's a bit problem for me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest unrandomsam Posted January 22, 2012 Report Share Posted January 22, 2012 Dunno why people care about the functionality of Haxsync (Or social networking at all but thats a different thing entirely). I think reading text is easier / better than recognising from a photo. Weary of digital signature things on something that can be so easily lost / stolen. (Feel safer with something like a secureid and a pin perhaps with a certificate installed in a browser). If I am out and about it can be done physically don't see a need to be able to digitally sign something out of the house. Dragon Go! might be good when it improves. Touchpal still not convinced on screen keyboards are the way forward. (Think I would prefer something like a version of the palm os graffiti mechanism but not a port (I know of the Access app) and designed with modern development best practices.) It is a bad state of affairs if those are the best apps you have found. (I have given up even looking on the market due to the abundance of adware and junk apps). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Victor von Zeppelin Posted January 22, 2012 Report Share Posted January 22, 2012 Not necessarily the best. Just interesting new ideas, really. But thanks for sharing some thoughts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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