Star Trek into Darkness App for iPhone & Android

I’m a Star Trek fan, no doubt about it. Although I have a biased penchant for the Deep Space Nine series, my love of Star Trek anything is excited by almost anything with the associated name. This leads me to be obligated to write something about the new app which coincides with the new movie Star Trek: Into Darkness. I’m going to see the movie for sure. The app is kind of odd though.

It describes itself as, “Join Starfleet for your chance to rise in the ranks, unlock exclusive content and win prizes. In reality all it is is another of those take a picture of something brand related and submit it for points towards stuff apps. I was honestly pretty disappointed. While I wanted it to be something more, it left me feeling empty inside; my Star Trek hole in my heart was left unfilled.

It’s basically a scavenger hunt for anything Star Trek related in modern advertising campaigns. There;s almost no incentive to complete anything and the app itself is really just screenshots of stuff relating to the new movie. There’s really almost no substance to it.

Another thing about this app which is worth mentioning is that it has been getting berating heavily on the iTunes store by users for privacy issues. Apparently it tracks your location at all times even without the app being used and actively running. This has lead a ton of potential users to do nothing more than delete the app and wash their hands of it.

While I appreciate the effort that went into making anything Star Trek related, this app really fell to the wayside. It was disappointing and given the privacy concerns I’d say skip it. I’ll watch the movie for sure, but the app I’ll beam into a subspace storage unit somewhere for the Romulans.

iOS: Star Trek into Darkness App for iOS

Android: Star Trek into Darkness App for Android

[Images Credit: Apple iTunes Store | Google Play Store]

Cloud Music Player: AudioBox now Available on iPhone

The long awaited addition to the arsenal of music playing for your iPhone is now available on the iTunes App Store. AudioBox, the cloud supported music player, allows you to stream your music to anywhere.

Wherever this “cloud” is I want to look into the sky and thank it. For way too long I have been chained by the restrictions of my device’s memory, but with cloud based storage it takes all of those worries away completely. Now that it’s on iPhone with the infamous lack of SD storage capabilities I can make the most of the stock GBs.

No more storage worries and memory alerts now since you can have all of your music stored in a cloud and not in your actual device. Open up all of that memory for yourself and things you really need on your phone. While that is the main plus of this app, it doesn’t end there. This app was designed with the iPhone 5 in mind harboring retina ready display designs to maximize the incredible resolution potential locked inside.

This is a simple app. In it’s essence it’s really just another streaming music app. The difference here is that it’s a n undeniable quality that you expect from AudioBox and it’s all of your music. All of your songs, the ones you actually want to hear, and all of your playlists for driving, or commuting or tuning out your relatives. It’s everything you would want in a cloud based storage for your streaming music. Since I downloaded it I haven’t looked back. It’s a perfect app for iPhone and I don’t see it getting overtaken for some time.

Don’t be held back by your device’s storage or your streaming music apps terrible recommended playlists anymore. Get AudioBox and take all of the stress out of your day’s music playing activity.

Source: AudioBox for iOS

 

[Image Credit: Apple iTunes Store]

Chime: The All in One Notification System for Google Chrome

Getting notifications on your computer usually means going to every platform you want to be updated on and looking at them one by one. This is an incredibly outdated and slow system to keep tabs on your favorite pages. There’s good news though. A new extension for Google Chrome allows you to follow all of your sites at once and get the notifications without doing a thing. After downloading Chime, a window will pop up allowing you to check each service such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and anything else you can think of too. This is also the chance for you to sing into any sites that Chrome hasn’t tracked itself, but you can always add more sites to the list later.

The notifications will start to come in immediately after installation. The interface is great and looks and makes perfect sense. With color coded notification bars for each website, you can tell which service you’re getting notified for from just a glance. This also works great for Mac and Windows just as well.

Another great positive of this extension is that it makes using all of these sites more secure. There’s no server side code which means all of the data being sent and received stays on your computer only, where it belongs. It also saves you from having to sign into all of your services each time you logout or close the window. Chime automatically can be set to remember logins so that they can access all of your sites at once with no hassle. Of course, if you’re someone who never entrusts any saved password there’s a setting to have it not allow it too.

This also makes any other social media or relevant extensions unnecessary which can help you clean up your toolbars and browser interfaces as well. The only thing this extension leaves me hoping for is Google + integration, which is honestly shocking that it doesn’t have.

Source: Chime For Google Chrome

 

[Image Credit: Chrome Web Store]

Unclutter App for Mac – The Best Way to Clean Your Desktop

I work as a writer and blogger for most of my week days. Although this is great work and fun for most of my time spent on it, my computer’s desktop suffers a bit as a side effect. If I have multiple projects going on at the same time and deadlines left and right it feels a little like a wind storm came by and knocked over my trash bin onto my desktop. With a slew of icons, images, and documents in every nook and cranny the clutter on my desktop is far from manageable. Finally, there is a solution!

The Unclutter app for Mac helps get any dirty and unorganized desktop back into shape in a breeze. The interface is great an comes naturally. It stays as a little bar on the top of the screen. All you have to do drag and drop your stuff in there and it sorts it out for you in an easy and clean looking way.

This is a great solution for people like me who hate having twenty finder windows open and even more document files up. It helps take all of that bulk down in a way that makes it look nice and keep you from dragging windows in an attempt to resize them and fit them all into one screen.

The best part of this app is that since it’s essentially always open it allows for you to maximize the fact that it is also a clipboard viewer and notepad while being a storage space. I use it for a notepad quite often actually. I find myself pulling it down just to jot a quick note or make a small list of priorities of the pages I have up. All in all the design, execution and functionality of the app make it great for exactly what it should be.

Source: Unclutter for Mac

[Image Credit: Apple Mac Store]

Carbon- An App to Sync and Backup Your SD Card or Cloud Storage

There have been years now that we have had to wait for a fully functional and properly executed backup system for our Android devices. Sure, we’ve trusted our entire schedules, our lists of carefully constructed contacts, our incredibly important notes to our Android devices, but with no assurance of saving that information in case of emergency. Now there is a solution! Backup your Android device’s memory with Carbon, the app that will sync your Android device and allow you to finally have peace of mind knowing that the information you have can be saved somewhere without all that extra hassle.

Considering we have legitimately made our smart phones into our personal assistants it’s crazy to think that most of us have gone this long without a backup app like this to sync and store our data to and SD card or cloud storage Imagine one day in real life having an assistant who keeps all of our information, dates, phone numbers and addresses and then just losing them one day. Never hearing from them again would be devastating and a huge blow to productivity. Now imagine that same situation, but now when you lose them you have another version of them, a cloned twin that kept all of that information for you as well. How amazing would that be! That’s what it’s like with Carbon.

That may have been a far fetched scenario, but it’s still relevant. Carbon is a great app for your Android device to carefully and securely save all of your information and back it all up. The only catch is that it doesn’t work on a Motorola device.

Source: Carbon – App Sync and Backup for Android

 

[image via Google Play Store]

Microsoft Launches: “Modern IE”

When most people hear anything about the name Internet Explorer they usually get reminded of that annoying cousin, or a flat tire. It may have been amusing at one point, but now it’s just something that’s there because it was once something. This might be different! As much as it surprises me this new site called Modern.ie is a way that Microsoft is hoping to completely innovate the way the web is developed. The slogan with the site is “spend more time innovating and less time testing”. It actually surprises me to say that I think it will do just that.

It is a site that is going to be a tool for developers. It will allow you to run your code of your site through the page to have the service expose any flaws or error in the page’s coding which needs to be corrected for any web browser. It’s reminiscent of those insurance companies who let you compare their prices to their competitors since modern.ie will allow you to run your code and search it for flaws on other major browsers too. This is because they have teamed up, temporarily with Browser Stack, the service that let’s you search your code on multiple browsers. We’ll see if they extend this partnership in the future because in all honesty if modern.ie only caters to finding flaws and helping you code to Internet Explorer its days could be numbered.

The main concern here is obviously putting your little bundle of joy, your hard worked out code, into a site that is on the internet for others to possibly exploit, and also have your possible site exploits put out for others to find. Modern.ie ensures that security is their top priority and all content placed there will be completely safe, but on the internet is anything really ever completely guarded?

It’s a great gesture, and a nice way to link your code to Internet Explorer, but actually knowing the significance and understanding the effectiveness of the site in the long run is hard to say. For now, all I can say is, thanks, but we’ll see what happens.

Source: Modern.IE