With this being exam season for many people, I'm all for learning aids. And, in this case, something rather unusual and designed to help someone learn a text off by heart. Perhaps so as to be able to quote sections in an exam paper, perhaps to deliver on stage, perhaps just trying to keep the ol' grey cells stimulated. Memorize It! is unusual and effective and I'll even forgive the Americanised spelling of the name....
Yes, yes, Pocket Casts does indeed arrive into a very crowded genre on Windows Phone, yes, it's still early days, there are some rough edges and there's no video podcast support yet, but I've been using it exclusively for the last week and have been pretty impressed overall. It may not have all the bells and whistles of Podcast Lounge, but for pure and fast, straight down the line audio podcast listening and management, Pocket Casts is hard to beat.
The lengthily titled 'My Memories Interactive Slideshow' does essentially what it says in its name but it's not just another photo browser - this one comes with optimisations that help solve a very common family use case: "Can I look through your photos?", asked by a five year old and followed by them getting very confused at family snaps interspersed by boring 'grown up' stuff.
So there I was, responding to a reader request to do a round-up of Flickr apps for Windows Phone. And then it dawned on me that a) there are really only two (thus making it not so much a round-up as a comparison!) and b) we'd never covered Flickr Central on AAWP before. So, in advance of an upcoming head to head comparison, let's start with a full review of this free application. The summary? It works well on the whole, trailing the better known Flickr Booth only by virtue of a few quirks and a little lack of 2015 development.
I know, I know, yet another podcatcher for Windows Phone. How is it that this app genre is getting so crowded when other genres remain sparse and barren? Must be something to do with the Lumia hardware being pretty good for playing back media, I think. In any case, by virtue of being developed after other solutions, CastCenter manages to be fully formed at launch, with every feature I normally demand and a few others besides. It's an easy recommend, with a trial version handling 3 podcasts and only £1.50 or so to unlock CastCenter fully.
The world of Twitter clients is a strange one on any platform - after all, there are free clients for this social service from Twitter itself, there's the good mobile web version, and so on. And still developers keep popping up clients, not even deterred by the knowledge that they'll get blocked if they get too successful (100,000 users). The reason is that a Twitter timeline needs extremely efficient curation and presentation if it's not to overwhelm the user - in a crowded app genre, Aeries pulls out all the stops and ends up at the top of the pile.
The idea of overlaying text and graphics onto what your camera sees and then sharing the result isn't new, of course. Only recently, I reviewed InstaWeather Pro, for example. Momento+ is a commercial ($1) application that aims to provide templates for all occasions and certainly has its attractions, even if it's ultimately not as flexible as most users would like.
Let down by stability issues galore on anything less than a 2GB RAM flagship, PhotoLab is nevertheless an interesting application that goes beyond the usual image filtering to provide combinations and controls that will genuinely fire the imagination. Now if only the developer had programmed in a 'save' function before any final export... Gah!
You've got to feel sorry for utility developers on any platform. An OS comes out, has a few holes, third party developers plug them and then the OS itself starts to fill out and the holes are mainly gone, along with the developer's potential market. Anyone making a file manager is particularly vulnerable, as evidenced by Microsoft's own 'Files', released for free (and then built-in) for all Windows Phone 8.1 devices. So... can Folders Pro here do anything to convince me that it's worth a quid? Actually, yes.
We've seen this style of mobile application before, of course, on most mobile platforms - overlaying weather information onto a photo showing what you see, but InstaWeather Pro seems to have taken on the mantle of front-runner, by virtue of the quality and number of graphical skins available. Given the overlap between smartphone nuts and weather geeks, I'd expect more than a little interest here too...
