Personal money management applications. I know them well. I even wrote the manual for one of the world's best, back in late 1990's. I've reviewed many since then and yet, despite having four separate accounts, I've never - to this day - ever managed to get to grips with using an application to help me keep things tallied up. Can Monetal on Windows Phone help? Not really - but it's a polished attempt.
You'll recall that the world of Windows Phone podcatchers is a little crowded? My own round-up ran to about 5000 words and had to be split into two parts! Well, we now have yet another challenger, in Podcast+ Pro, currently free (though claimed to revert to commercial at some point) - it learns a lot of tricks from other clients, adds a few UI twists of its own and largely manages to get close to the top of the pile.
One of the peculiarities of the Windows Phone lockscreen system is that you can only really have one set of overlaid details (e.g. weather or social or Bing image, etc.) at a time. In other words, you have to choose. Awesome Lock mainly takes away that pain by providing multiple data sources within its own custom lockscreen environment. It's a trifle garish at times in terms of set-up, but it does work and you can see why this has become many people's default lockscreen on the platform.
Guest writer Mayuri Mehrotra had been looking for a Windows Phone DLNA server app for all her media... and finally there is one – Linada Share. A DLNA server app basically allows your phone’s media to be accessed by other UPnP/DLNA clients, with a common WiFi connection. When Mayuri had come across this app earlier, it allowed access only to photos, but now music and videos are accessible too. warranting a proper review here on AAWP.
Yes, yes, technically in 'beta', but Microsoft's betas on Windows Phone are usually very stable and I had no compunctions at giving Movie Creator the full real world experience. As the name suggests, it's a way of stitching your own captured media (in my case on the Lumia 1020) together to create something professional and, hopefully, wonderful. And yes, I include the result of its rendering below for you to scrutinise.
Increasingly, especially with the decent cameras onboard and super HAAC microphones, Windows Phones are becoming good all-purpose capture devices. We've seen a barrage of video editors, it only makes sense that we'd now see some decent audio editors too. Wave Master is fully featured and well worth a look, below.
Downloading YouTube videos - we all do it once in a while. That documentary or that music video or that comedy routine, any or all of which you'd like on your phone (or tablet or whatever) because then you could watch it when you like without worrying about using up cell bandwidth. Or, in my case, having videos to hand when out of coverage - in the UK countryside, on a train, on the tube, on a plane, etc. Which is where YouTube downloaders come in, a specialised breed of utility, exemplified by the rather nice AllTube Grabber for Windows Phone here. As a bonus, it also works with three other video streaming sites.
It's not often I review a web browser - for the very good reason that Internet Explorer in Windows Phone 8.1 is now pretty capable. And Surfy is no doubt based on the same underlying web rendering controls - but it claims to add all sorts of 'bells and whistles' too, making it well worth a look. (Note that I'll be reviewing several other third party browsers in the coming weeks, before declaring a favourite!)
It's one of the ironies of Nokia's original oversampling concept for its Windows Phones with high resolution cameras, that quite a few utilities have now arisen to circumvent or avoid using the oversampling at all. Nokia itself didn't help, by issuing an update for Nokia Camera that offered the chance to shoot in 'DNG' format, i.e. RAW, resulting in large, full resolution files, for the hardcore photo enthusiast. And up until now, doing anything with these files required a desktop OS. Enter Rawer, for Windows Phone....
TouchRetouch is, as the name sounds, a photo retouching application, but don't dismiss it too lightly, as this has previously existed on all other mobile and desktop platforms, meaning that the intelligence behind the retouching is really rather extraordinary. When this works, it's jaw dropping. When it doesn't, it's still pretty useful. And, overall, deserves a high score here on its latest implementation, on Windows Phone.
