Triple Town Game for Iphone,ipad

Triple Town Game for Iphone,ipad





A deceptive little beast of a puzzler, Triple Town lures you close and sinks its teeth in before demanding you feed it more of your hard-earned cash. This clever hybrid of match-three puzzles and settlement planning gameplay from Spry Fox is insidiously addictive, but poorly conceived micro-transactions soon suck all the joy out of the experience.

Your quest to develop the biggest town possible starts with plunking down shrubs, trees, roaming bears, and other randomized objects into open squares on the land grid. Matching three of the same resource crafts a more valuable object and frees up crucial space on the playing field. Combining three trees produces a house, for example, earning your more points toward your town construction goal.

A lot of strategy comes into play in planning your expansions to keep the lot from locking up, and the gameplay is a blast once you build into a steady rhythm. Unfortunately, this is right about when everything grinds to a halt and you’re forced to spend an extra $4 to unlock more turns and additional content to keep playing. You can sit and wait for your turn quota to slowly regenerate, but by that point the game’s luster fades away.

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GroupMe Android Application

GroupMe Android Application

GroupMe is a free app that allows you to message multiple people at once. I know what you're thinking: Yes, you can already text-message multiple people at once--all you have to do is add multiple numbers to the 'To:' field in your texting app (even non-smartphones have this ability). GroupMe is different, though. Instead of just letting you send messages to multiple people, it also allows you to have a group conversation.

Let me explain. When you text multiple people at once, all you're really doing is sending the same message to a bunch of different recipients. However, if any of those people text you back, then their response goes only to you--text messages don't have a 'Reply All' button.

GroupMe is like a default Reply All button. GroupMe sets up a dedicated number for each texting conversation, so when you text multiple people at once, they get a text message from that number. Then, when they reply to the text message, their reply goes to everyone in your GroupMe conversation. So it's like a group-chatting app, except via text message.

Your friends don't have to have GroupMe installed for it to work--which is a good thing, because it means that people who don't have smartphones can also partake in the fun. Only the conversation starter needs to have GroupMe installed. However, if you want to message someone directly through GroupMe, the recipient of the message will need to have the app installed on their phone.

GroupMe isn't just about texting, though; it also has conference calling, a mapping service (which gives the approximate locations of the other chat participants), and a still-in-beta 'Ask a Question' feature.

GroupMe's main screen looks like a texting app--it has all of your grouped conversations, a search button, a prominent 'Start a Group' button, and buttons for Home, Contacts, Featured, and News. The Featured button takes you to a list of GroupMe "partners" (such as the TV show Dexter and the artist Ke$ha) and lets you start groups focused on said partners. The News tab is just a random newsfeed of sorts.

Starting a group is as easy as pressing the green plus button at the bottom of the home screen and adding a couple of worthy contacts. Message them once, and your contacts receive a couple of texts, including a note declaring that they have been added to a group, as well as a list who else is in the group with them. Any member of the group can start a conference call by dialing the phone number your group has been assigned for the duration of your group conversation.

The original conversation starter can also disband the group--but once a group is disbanded, its private group number ceases to exist.

GroupMe is an innovative way to get multiple people involved in one conversation. It can be annoying to have your phone constantly go off whenever someone replies to the group, but the tool and service are great if you're trying to get a group of people together to meet, or if you have a bunch of friends who really love to talk to one another.

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GroupMe Android Application

GroupMe Android Application

GroupMe is a free app that allows you to message multiple people at once. I know what you're thinking: Yes, you can already text-message multiple people at once--all you have to do is add multiple numbers to the 'To:' field in your texting app (even non-smartphones have this ability). GroupMe is different, though. Instead of just letting you send messages to multiple people, it also allows you to have a group conversation.

Let me explain. When you text multiple people at once, all you're really doing is sending the same message to a bunch of different recipients. However, if any of those people text you back, then their response goes only to you--text messages don't have a 'Reply All' button.

GroupMe is like a default Reply All button. GroupMe sets up a dedicated number for each texting conversation, so when you text multiple people at once, they get a text message from that number. Then, when they reply to the text message, their reply goes to everyone in your GroupMe conversation. So it's like a group-chatting app, except via text message.

Your friends don't have to have GroupMe installed for it to work--which is a good thing, because it means that people who don't have smartphones can also partake in the fun. Only the conversation starter needs to have GroupMe installed. However, if you want to message someone directly through GroupMe, the recipient of the message will need to have the app installed on their phone.

GroupMe isn't just about texting, though; it also has conference calling, a mapping service (which gives the approximate locations of the other chat participants), and a still-in-beta 'Ask a Question' feature.

GroupMe's main screen looks like a texting app--it has all of your grouped conversations, a search button, a prominent 'Start a Group' button, and buttons for Home, Contacts, Featured, and News. The Featured button takes you to a list of GroupMe "partners" (such as the TV show Dexter and the artist Ke$ha) and lets you start groups focused on said partners. The News tab is just a random newsfeed of sorts.

Starting a group is as easy as pressing the green plus button at the bottom of the home screen and adding a couple of worthy contacts. Message them once, and your contacts receive a couple of texts, including a note declaring that they have been added to a group, as well as a list who else is in the group with them. Any member of the group can start a conference call by dialing the phone number your group has been assigned for the duration of your group conversation.

The original conversation starter can also disband the group--but once a group is disbanded, its private group number ceases to exist.

GroupMe is an innovative way to get multiple people involved in one conversation. It can be annoying to have your phone constantly go off whenever someone replies to the group, but the tool and service are great if you're trying to get a group of people together to meet, or if you have a bunch of friends who really love to talk to one another.

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OneMediaHub Android Application

OneMediaHub Android Application

You can find quite a few cloud backup services for Android phones out there, but Funambol’s OneMediaHub has a few extra tweaks that make organizing and securing your digital content that much easier.

OneMediaHub isn’t a new app so much as it is a rebranding of a cloud service that has been around for Android and iOS phones. Previously called MyFunambol, the app is sold as a white-label service to carriers and device makers all over the world. Since it is open-source, manufacturers and carriers can tweak its appearance and features to align with their branding. The app is also available as a free download in the Google Play Store, and that is the version this review covers.

Setting up OneMediaHub is a cinch. After you download the app, it asks you to create a OneMediaHub account. Then, it takes you to the OneMediaHub app homepage, where the app will perform its initial sync with your phone’s content. While your phone is syncing, you can sign in to your OneMediaHub account on your PC; from there, you can start syncing your multiple social media accounts to your OneMediaHub account. For instance, you can sync your Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube accounts so that you can send photos from OneMediaHub to them. Also, when you add your Facebook account, your friends' profile photos pop up in your address book.

Syncing my contacts from Gmail was a messy process, as I got duplicate entries for multiple people. For one person, I had three entries with the same Gmail address and email info for each. I’m not sure why the entry duplicated, since I don't have duplicates for that person on my Gmail account. It is easy to delete contact entries via the OneMediaHub website, however, so I was able to clean up my contact list pretty quickly. Still, it was an annoying extra step to take.

If you wish to sync your Outlook contacts, you must first download the Funambol Windows/Outlook sync app from the OneMediaHub portal (you’ll see a 'Download OneMediaHub app for Windows' link). After you download that app to your PC, your Outlook PIM data (contacts, calendars, tasks, and the like) will sync to your cloud account. You can do the same if you have a Mac; just download the OneMediaHub for Mac program, and you’ll be able to sync your Mac Address Book with your account.

One other thing to note is that you can’t back up MMS and SMS messages. Honestly, I don’t really see the need for such a feature, as I tend not to text important information, but some people might find this omission to be a weakness.

A new feature of OneMediaHub is a “timeline view,” which lets you see your media in chronological order. Sort of like the Facebook profile timeline, the OneMediaHub view lists your photos in order of when you took them, and shows your music and videos by when you first acquired them. You can either download this media to your phone or stream it over Wi-Fi or your cellular network.

For organizing and sharing photos and videos, OneMediaHub is a useful, easy-to-navigate application. In my experience, however, contacts were a little more difficult to manage. OneMediaHub is a free service, but it gives you only 150MB of storage. You can upgrade to 5GB of storage for $35 for one year, or to 50GB of storage for $100 for one year.

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Hipster Application for Android

Hipster Application for Android

If you took a picture on your smartphone but nobody sees it, did you really take it? Hipster lets you solve that particular philosophical dilemma by offering a simple way to customize an image into a funky digital postcard and upload it for the world to marvel at.

To get started with Hipster, you'll need a picture that you want to customize. You can either take a new picture--using whichever camera app you have installed--or you can choose a picture from your gallery. Once you have an image to work with, you pick a look: Hipster contains a long list of preset styles, each with its own color effect and frame. Each preset has space for a caption which, by default, contains your location. You can easily edit the caption, and your text will carry through all of the presets as you pick and choose the one that's right for you.

Despite its variety of styles, image customization in Hipster ends up feeling limited. You can't mix and match frames or styles, and you can't control how the text looks on an image.

On the plus side, Hipster's community is fun and active. Both the app and the Hipster.com website contain a gallery where you can view and comment on other people's public photos. Several of the photographs I came across in the gallery looked quite beautiful, and you can spend a fair amount of time browsing the works of other Hipster savants. From the Hipster app, you can comment on images, follow other users, or "like" photographs--the same basic things you can do on the Hipster website.

Hipster may not rival other image processing apps for power and flexibility, but its vibrant community makes it a fun choice for sharing photos, and for looking at beautiful, spontaneous pictures from all over the world.

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Speaktoit Assistant Android Application

Speaktoit Assistant is an Android app that in many ways resembles Apple's Siri for iphone4s. It acts as a virtual assistant that can respond to voice commands and perform Web searches and other simple tasks. You can use Speaktoit Assistant to launch apps, find contacts, compose email or text messages, create calendar events, give directions, and more.

Speaktoit Assistant uses Google's voice transcription service to understand your spoken commands. The app lets you choose from among several iSpeech voices, all of which sound a bit more natural than Google's robotic-sounding text-to-speech (TTS) service. I ended up settling on a female voice with a British accent that I found quite pleasant and easy to understand.

The app has a fun feature that allows you to design a custom avatar for your assistant. The avatar doesn't do anything functional, but it does give the app a bit more personality and puts a face on screen to go along with the app's voice.

Speaktoit Assistant is easy to use: Simply press the onscreen microphone and tell the app what you'd like it to do. Like Siri, Speaktoit Assistant has a sassy personality and will occasionally offer somewhat snarky responses.

But even though Speaktoit Assistant is one of the best and most versatile voice-powered apps I've used, it had some hiccups and limitations. At times I had to repeat my commands multiple times or manually type them in, in order for Speaktoit Assistant to understand me. Also, the app could not read email or text messages aloud--a feature I had hoped would be included.

Still, overall, Speaktoit Assistant is a good voice-controlled app that supports a fair amount of integration with other Android apps. If you want a Siri-like app on your 'droid, this is one of your better options. Though Speaktoit Assistant doesn't work as a truly hands-free means to control your phone, it's a step in the right direction.

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GasBuddy Android Application

GasBuddy Android Application

The days of cheap gasoline may be gone for good, but the free GasBuddy app for Android can help you find the best fuel deals in town. GasBuddy is very easy to use: The app uses your GPS location to search for nearby gas stations, then returns a list that you can sort by price or distance. The list is conveniently organized into tabs for Regular, Mid-Grade, and Premium gasoline, as well as Diesel fuel. Clicking on an item gives you more details such as the gas station's phone number, services offered, and directions to help you get there.

You can also switch to a view that shows the gas stations and their prices as thumbnails on a map, relative to your current position. Click a thumbnail to go to a page with more details about the gas station. I prefer the map view because to me it feels more visually intuitive than the list view.

GasBuddy has some other nice features like the ability to filter results by gas station brand, toggle between metric and imperial distance units, save searches, and save individual gas stations as Favorites.

I tested GasBuddy in Oakland, CA and soon discovered a spread of 32 cents per gallon between the cheapest and most expensive gas stations in my area (a radius of approximately five miles). That means that I could save as much as $3.84 the very first time I fill a 12-gallon gas tank. Think about it. Here is a free app that actually can save you a significant amount of money on a recurring expense. How awesome is that?

GasBuddy uses crowd-sourced reports from users to provide up-to-date prices, and each price listing also shows how recent the price report is. If you register an account with GasBuddy, you can join in on reporting gas prices for a chance to win a $250 gas card. It's worth noting that you can also log in to gasbuddy online with any Web browser to access your Favorites and saved searches. It's definitely worth checking out, as the Website has some interesting features, like regional and national gas price “heat maps,” that complement the mobile app nicely.

I uninstall many apps after I review them, but I like GasBuddy so much that I plan to keep it on my phone. The only thing it lacks is the ability for a user to rate or review an individual gas station. Such a feature could be helpful to warn other users of potential problems such as poor service, unsafe conditions, or bad gasoline.

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