Category: Apps

It’s true, Windows 8 is still lacking a little bit in the apps department. But when awesome apps that do what you need them to do come to Windows 8, and they’re free, they deserve a little attention. Now, I know, kiddies, it’s not Instagram, but Adobe Photoshop Express has been released for the Windows 8 Store. You can use great features to clean up your photos quckly, save them, and share them from within the app. It’s got a lot of built in filters, what this app calls Looks.

Lots of very responsive and simple to use sliders for adjusting brightness, contrast, color saturation, hue, and all of those usual photo-editing knobs you can twist and turn all day long. The picture above is a scanned in photo from the 80’s, it’s me at around age 3 or 4 – I applied one of hte Looks that it shows below and viola, I could put this bad boy on the internet and look just as hip as the cool kids.

Alright, so it’s not quite as fancy as you might like, but you’re getting top level software, the pieces you need, and you’re getting them for free. It’s simple to use and a great addition to the Windows 8 Store catalog. Go ahead and download Adobe Photoshop Express.

About a week ago, I noticed something strange in the Windows Phone Marketplace. The “Xbox Live” banner had disappeared from the Angry Birds game. It was no longer “a few bucks” – it was free. “Interesting…” I thought, “Rovio must think they do better with ad-supported games and released a free version!”

Skip forward to the weekend, I couldn’t find my phone in the last few places I had been, as a security measure (and since I had “Find my Phone” disabled), I connected to the corporate Exchange server my employer runs and sent a remote wipe command to my phone. The good news is, it worked. The bad news? I literally found my phone less than a minute after the wipe. Alright, fine, my mistake. So I started reinstalling apps.

Come to Angry Birds. An app which I had purchased while it was on sale for 99 cents. Alright, so I can’t find it in the Marketplace, but if there’s one thing I learned from Xbox Live, you can use your download history to reinstall games. So I find the Windows Phone Purchase History page and click “more” in the lower right until I find my Angry Birds purchase.

App is no longer published

Are… you… kidding. It’s gone. I can’t get it. This isn’t some questionable app using copyrighted IP that has been pulled from the Marketplace. This is Microsoft’s official release of Angry Birds. An app which I had paid for. Don’t try to tell me that I can switch to the free version. I’m an Achievement addict who lives by Xbox Live integration. It was one of the biggest features, it was a selling point for Windows Phone. And if you’re going to pull the app from the marketplace for future purchases, fine – but to remove the app altogether so that those of us who bought it can’t reinstall it? The free version is not a substitute.

I usually talk about apps, but today I’ve got nothing but frustration. Windows Phone is the 3rd place platform. Having not learned a single lesson from the Xbox Platform and how to manage apps after licensing expires, Windows Phone is going to remain the 3rd place platform. I’m trying my best to wait for a Windows Phone 8 on Sprint, I want to be deeply embedded in the Microsoft camp. But every time I turn around Microsoft is going something else to ruin this for me.

Your Android experience, especially those of you who have experienced Google Now, is far and away superior to other Smart Phone OS’s. I’ll be the first to admit it, and I’m a Windows Phone user. For those not familiar, Google Now will use everything Google knows about you to make your life easier. Some people find it creepy, some people fin it useful – but a few examples of what it will do are things like notifying you that you need to leave right now in order to make an appointment. It will pop up useful information reminding you what Gate you need to walk to at an airport as you walk in to the airport, because it procured that information from your GMail. But Google allows you to do so much more with the platform and it can enhance your experience even more.

Microsoft’s On{X} app for Android, takes it a step further. You can sign up on their website and create recipes, something similar to IFTTT.com (If This Then That). IFTTT lets you cover multiple platforms together – an example being IF I publish an article on my website THEN post an update to Twitter and Facebook with the link. Taking that idea to your phone, On{X} is a beta program that detects certain events that your create recipes or rules for, and follows through with specific tasks. Example: when you leave work, you can text your spouse to tell them you’re on the way home.

Sure, at first this seems a bit silly, but this could lead to some brilliant family-friendly features for reminding your kids to check in with you, or having their phone send you a note when they arrive at home after school. There are even more features that I haven’t even begun to play with, but it uses Javascripting to interact with the Android OS in a way that you simply cannot do on iOS or Windows Phone. It’s clearly in beta and doesn’t seem to have anything jaw dropping, but it has promise, and I genuinely think it will fill in a few gaps people are hoping for from their Google Now experience. There are a lot of 1 star reviews, but they seem to be coming from quite a few people who hate the thought of Microsoft on Android (forgetting, entirely, that Microsoft is one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel).

See what it can do for yourself, download Microsoft’s On{X} for Android.

Combinator for Windows Phone is a great app for getting your tech news. It’s not much more than a series of RSS feeds, and some articles can’t be read from within the app. Still, it gets me the headlines that I don’t see at most other websites. The feeds are selected based on the types of things and companies you would find at Y Combinator.

Y Combinator is a company that started in 2005 that often assists other startup companies with advice and investments. It’s kind of like an episode of Shark Tank, but not terrible. A lot of hackers and tech enthusiasts find their way in to mainstream business by going through Y Combinator, which makes all of these related news very interesting to geeks like me. Download Combinator for Windows Phone and see if it gives you the tech news fix you’re looking for!