Launched in time for South by Southwest in 2011, GroupMe was one of the 'share messages with a group of people' applications that hoped to help organise discussions with your peers, friends, and family. Some of them disappeared, others were bought out and absorbed into larger networks, and it feels like GroupMe is 'last man standing', even after its purchase by Skype (and susequently turned over to Microsoft).
With the loss of MetroTube, a number of services and mobile applications have stepped up to fill the gap. Some of them continue to poke around the edges of the YouTube API, while others bring you great video content but from other services (such as Vimeo and their official Windows Phone client). Next up in my applications list is Vevo, and it's one for music fans.
For the record, calling this application "Board Game Clock" and not "Chess Clock" was a smart move. I would suspect that 99.999% of Windows Phone users would have no need for a clock to play chess - but there are far more people who need a timer to keep an eye on two different things, even if they don't know it yet.
The internet has a lot of news out there, and while there are many single sources of news that have created their own applications for Windows Phone (let's point out our reviews of The Guardian and Sky News apps). News360 is different - it's an aggregator, looking at the headlines, stories and popularity, all over the web, and serves them up in this Windows Phone application.
Of the two approaches to instrument tuning using phones, Accurate Tuner Pro takes the more technical by far. Never mind generating tones and tuning by 'ear' (the other approach, which this app does too if you pony up for the full version), here we have a chromatic (sampling) tuner on steroids, able to tune just about any instrument in any tuning, in any temperament, in any transposition. Impressive. But is it over the top?
Every smartphone platform has its star applications, the big names that everyone looks for. On the music side of Windows Phone, you'd have to put Spotify on that A-list, and there's a strong argument for Last.FM to be included (if Pandora ever makes it, it can go straight in as well). But many times it's in the B-list that you find the applications that people take to their hearts and defend with a passion. That's where you'll find 8tracks.
For many online publishers, the key to everything is data. If you have good data, then you can learn from it and improve your content. Throw in the current fascination for real-time engagement and stories that can go from breaking news to yesterdays musings in under an hour, and you'll see that access to your website statistics on your smartphone might be a very good idea. Which is when Doug Rathbone's Google Analytics client for Windows Phone, InTheKnow, becomes very useful.
Where there's a camera, there'll be someone wanting to try and take 'time lapse' videos with it, of course. The idea is to take a photo of a scene every few seconds, and then play back the photos as frames in a video at a more traditional frame rate, thereby speeding up the action by a factor of a hundred. Or a thousand. Yes, just like on the TV, except you can do it with your humble smartphone and Timelapse Pro.
It's fair to say that Reddit has made itself part of the fabric of the Internet for many people. The user driven site (which is barely a "social network" but honestly all the better for it) allows people to post links to stories and pages around the site, discuss the stories, and vote them up or down depending on what they think of them. And now Baconit will bring all those links to your Windows Phone... and more.
No matter how minimal and stylish Metro UI can be (and I know that's a discussion piece that could open up a huge amount of debate), there are always people ready to bend it as much as they can without breaking it. Those live tiles just call out to be edited, tweaked, spun, photo-shopped, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, or numbered. But without some help that's not an easy task for the regular user. And as if on cue, over the horizon comes WizTiles.
