EACH WEEK, WE highlight five apps that are worth downloading for your smartphone and tablet. There are a lot of apps released on a daily basis, but not all of them are worth paying attention to.
This week features a way to form good habits, saving space on your phone without deleting your photos and a Duolingo rival.
Streaks
For: iOS
Cost: €4.99
- Forming habits is a difficult task. Not only do you have to be consistent, but if you’re trying to do something new, you need something to help you keep on track.
- Streaks tries to help this by giving you up to six tasks that you have to complete every day.
- The format is rather basic. Pick your objectives, set the days you want to complete them and register them.
- Some like the health goals register automatically since your phone counts your steps. Others you can delegate to certain days (go to the gym on Tuesday and Thursday) if you can’t do it every day.
- For those having difficulty sticking to smaller goals and need extra encouragement.
Crunch Gallery
For: iOS, Android
Cost: Free
- If you get into the habit of taking photos regularly, it can quickly fill up space on your phone. But what if you don’t want to get rid of them all?
- Crunch Gallery reduces the size of most photos and videos as a way of freeing up space on your phone.
- It works in the background so you don’t have to activate it every time. Instead, it quietly compresses your photos without reducing quality.
- Unless you blow up the photo on a large screen, it’s pretty difficult to tell whether the photo is compressed or not on your phone alone.
- For those who have to worry regularly about storage space, this will come in useful.
OneLocker
For: Windows Phone
Cost: €2.49 (Trial version available)
- On mobile, it’s difficult to keep track of all your online accounts, especially when they’re all have different passwords for you to remember.
- In which case, it’s better to have a password manager to rely on and OneLocker wants to be that.
- Using AES (advanced encryption standard) with 256bit keys, it ensures that all sensitive information is kept safe.
- What you save on it is up to you. It can be social, credit/debit cards, website login details, emails and WiFi hotspots. The interface is fast, and everything is easily accessible (even if it takes a little bit of time to get your head around it).
- Since keeping track of all your passwords and accounts is difficult enough as it is, it’s worth trying out to see if this one is for you.
Mondly
For: iOS, Android
Cost: Free
- Any language app that comes to the fore will inevitably be compared to Duolingo. It’s difficult to avoid so what does Mondly offer?
- For one, it offers a good range of languages to learn like French, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, Chinese and Korean, some you won’t find with Duolingo.
- The presentation is nicer and while the format of learning is similar, it incorporates touch and swipe gestures
- The major difference between it and Duolingo is you have to pay for a premium service (€9.99 to be exact) which may limit its use.
- Great if you want to learn a language that Duolingo doesn’t cover.
Hitman: Sniper
For: iOS, Android
Cost: €4.99
- If you were one of the people who downloaded the boardgame-like Hitman: Go and felt it was too far removed from the source material, this is more up your street.
- Hitman: Sniper is a fixed-position game where the only aim is to eliminate your target(s) from afar while completing other objectives.
- While there are action elements, it’s better to think of this as a puzzle game. Figuring out how to complete the later objectives and finding more creative ways to dispose of your targets for points is always fun, even if the setting is the same for every mission.
- However, you will need a good phone to run it as it is a demanding game. On a iPhone 4S, it suffered from some moments of slowdown, but more recent phones won’t have the same problems.
- A sniping experience that’s better than you would initially expect.
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