Word games are a bit of a guilty, time-wasting pleasure for most of us - they certainly keep the old grey matter chugging away and while away tiresome waits when needed. And Equal Words is beautifully constructed and pitched, almost the perfect mobile game, with just the clumsy cross-platform port that lets it down.
This has been around for a while, but I'm just catching up with some side projects of major UWP app developers. Photo Shader sounds like a fairly ordinary image adjuster/filter package, but there are numerous ways in which this shines - literally. It's a full UWP app for phone/tablet/desktop/Continuum and works faster than anything except Microsoft's own Lumia Creative Studio. For which this is excellent competition - and also actively supported. See below for my full review and some examples of Photo Shader's capabilities.
You've seen brain-bending, mind-mangling puzzles before. But never this hard, never this eye-boggling, never this enjoyably frustrating. Inspired by the famous optical illusions of MC Escher, nothing in the block puzzles here is quite what it seems. Beautiful puzzles, beautiful music and no time pressure make this the perfect mobile brain-training geometrical puzzle.
I've always been a huge fan of Lunar Lander style games - balancing retro rocket pulses with gravity and wind shear, avoiding obstacles in order to land upright on a trickily-positioned pad. And 'Landing Confirmed' here is a new Windows Phone game in the genre, having been ported from Android, combining classic Lunar Lander concepts with outrageous mechanisms and layouts. It's insanely hard - and addictive. And best of all, seems to be completely free. What are you waiting for?
It's that time of year, when the sun starts making regular appearances in the sky and when I start to think about walks, camping and the great outdoors. Which means smartphone accessories that - ideally - prove really useful, doing multiple jobs with minimal bulk. In this case, a USB power bank that you can leave facing the sun to charge itself from empty, and which doubles as a powerful flashlight or tent lantern.
Although a UWP application for Windows 10 (and thus 'Mobile' as well), anyone with Windows Phone 8.1 shouldn't switch off, since GeoPhoto has existed (and been updated) for 8.1 for years - heck, Rafe featured it here back in 2013! Today sees yet another big update to the UWP version though, and it's thus ripe for review.
From the developer of SpotBright and Diarium comes WorkingHours, yet another quality UWP app for Windows 10 of all varieties. This one's an implementation of the classic 'log your time spent on various projects/clients' and it's very slickly done indeed, with multiple views, a ton of integration and backup options, and full adaptability to different screens and sizes. Top notch.
In a change from my periodic look at ultimate accessories, such as the Lumsing Glory P2 Plus, with 45W output(!), I had a different aim over the last few weeks - to find a genuinely pocketable way to carry around USB Type C high current output. I found a capable - and novel - solution in the AUKEY 'Halo'.
Yes, this is Google Drive and Google Photos - except it's not programmed by Google, but by a Windows 10 third party developer instead. GDrive.NET has in fact been around as a WP8.1 application in various forms for a few years and functionality was always a bit hit and miss, but the last few months have seen both a full UWP version and lots of bug/API fixes. It's now ready to be reviewed, giving you some of the best of Google as well as can be expected on a rival (and different) platform.
I've always been a sucker for applications which curate/aggregate free live video streams from around the world - it's true that (even on Windows Phone and W10M) we have dedicated channel apps, Netflix, YouTube and more, but perhaps there's also a place for old fashioned, niche interfaces like this - though 'Live Sports and TV' doesn't quite live up to its name, in that the Sports section is very underwhelming.
