About a year ago I posted about the apps I have on my smart phone in There's an App for That!
Over a year ago, my children had encouraged me to update from an embarrassingly uncool and pre-Diluvian flip phone to a really cool smart phone from a well-known and very cool company that is known for cool computers, cool phones, cool portable electronic devices and advertisements that are so cool I don't really know what they are trying to get me to buy. (But has a very catchy tune from the 'Pixies', watch the Gigantic ad here.)
Before I go any further in my update, let me just say that this is relevant to a library blog, because libraries are now really cool too. The Berkeley Heights Public Library has a phone app, downloadable e-books, a website of course, this really cool blog (ahem) and a very strong presence on social media (ie: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc)
So anyway, in the last year I have added a mini-tablet to my arsenal of techie stuff. The mini-tablet is from the same cool company referred to above. The idea is that my phone and my tablet will 'sync up' with each other, sharing content and reporting it all to the same 'cloud' where my stuff (photos etc) is stored. And my devices and my kids' devices are made by the same company so we can video talk with each other easily without having the battle of rival hardware/software occur. At least that's the idea and that is generally the case except when it's not working, but of course, one always assumes that if one was just 'cool' enough it would all work seamlessly and I would be singing 'Gigantic' and not cursing when both my personal and work to do lists appears on my phone, but not on my tablet.
Here are some of the apps I have added in the last year to my phone and tablet. I'm not saying I couldn't live without them, but they are really cool.
Merlin Bird ID - (free) a bird identifying app that allows you to look up a bird by characteristics and then gives you a best guess list and the calls of the bird plus maps of where it can be found and other information about the bird. That bird with the little beret look? It's a Black Capped Chickadee. Who knew?
BuzzFeed - (free) which is basically the biggest time-waster ever and really fun. If you have ever seen those fun quizzes being passed around on Facebook about which Jane Austen character would you be, or what country fits you best, BuzzFeed is probably the source of those little quizzes.
GasBuddy - (free) for finding the cheapest gas nearby.
United Airlines - (free) for keeping track of my flights and getting a mobile boarding pass.
For real estate searching, I have Trulia and Zillow (free) which are useful for house-hunting or just for snooping about house values in your neighborhood.
Animoto - (free + fee version) which allows you to make free 30 second slide shows set to music. You can use photos from your phone or device, upload them to your account and make a really nice little slide show very quickly. For a fee, you will be able to make longer videos.
Overdrive Media Console - (free) allows me to borrow ebooks from eLibraryNJ through the library website. The reference librarians help patrons set this up on their devices all the time and it is hugely popular when people find out they don't have to purchase ebooks and e-audiobooks.
Zinio -(free) also available from the library website allows patrons to download magazines to their devices. I love this, the magazines look great on a tablet and they do not ever expire or come due.
I also have the apps for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and GoodReads so I can post to my personal accounts or follow what other people are posting.
What apps do you like? Click on 'comment' below to let us know.
Here is the link to one of the library's Animoto slide shows
and below is another library Animoto video. You can embed the HTML into a blog or website. How cool is that?
Going to the Library
Showing posts with label cell phone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cell phone. Show all posts
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Thursday, May 30, 2013
There's an app for that
When you upgrade to a 'smart' cell phone, you will then fall into the world of apps. Complete strangers will accost you and say, 'have you tried the app for ?... well anything from cooking to bird call identification to, oh I don't know, synthesized zither-playing. Let's just define some terms before we get into what apps you should get, meaning: what apps out of the gabillion out there do I personally use? Before I had a smart phone, I had a dumb phone, also known as a flip phone, a burner phone, a feature phone or a phone which causes your children to not want to be seen in public with you. Then I got the smartest phone of all made by the company named after a piece of fruit, or Gwyneth Paltrow's child, whichever came first. The first thing I had to do was rationalize the expense of the monthly fee by some very creative thinking that went like this: well it's cheaper than flying to visit all my friends and family and I can just video call with them if I get this phone. That is if they also have the exact same phone of course. So I got the phone and a 20 second introduction to it at the store and went home and watched videos on You Tube about how to use your new phone. It will be immediately apparent to anyone older than five years that your phone is now smarter than you are. That's not a problem though, is it? I mean we all drive cars and who even knows how they work? And if you are in New Jersey you probably don't know how to pump gas into your car either. Well, anyway, the next thing I did was to "Google" "best free apps". 'App' is a term which is short for 'application' which is really a little thingummy that you download to your phone that does fun stuff that you play with for a day and then forget about. So, as promised, here are some of the apps I have on my phone:
'GoTask' which is connected to my online Google calendar and with which I keep track of my to do list was highly recommended by my very organized son. I had 'GoTask' set up so that it woke me up every morning at 7 am with a cheerful little chirpy noise and a banner appeared on my phone telling me what I had to do today. This raised the anxiety level of having a to-do list to the nth degree, so I spent some time making it not wake me up. Then I learned how to not assign a date to each task and it now basically leaves me alone. What is really hard to do is to completely expunge stuff from the to do list. No, don't email me, I don't want to know. As long as 'GoTask' has retreated to a respectful distance, I'm ok. Really, I'm fine with it.
Next, I added a couple of apps that track what I eat and how much I walk. Again, these things can really keep you on task or they can really make you feel even worse about procrastinating and eating too many carbs and taking the car instead of walking. It's totally up to you. The apps are: 'Walk Star' and 'Lose It.' Walk Star' is basically a pedometer-ish thing that doesn't really work as well as the pedometer I had that clipped onto my clothes which my dog ate after we came back from what she deemed to be too short a walk, but it's free. 'Lose It' has a terrific feature on it which is a barcode reader. That provided a day's worth of entertainment as I went around my kitchen cupboards and scanned the barcodes from all the food boxes into my own personal 'Lose It' database of what I often eat. Here's the thing, if it's got a barcode, you probably shouldn't be eating it.
My smart phone came loaded with apps, but all those smart people who endlessly advise you about your computer and phone habits told me that those weren't as good as the apps I should go out into cyberspace and download to my phone, so I now have two weather apps, two map apps (say that 20 times), and overlapping apps to magazines and newspapers. Then someone showed me how to organize my apps so they don't take up all the real estate on my phones desktop/face- whatever it's called. I learned how to put the apps into little folders like putting all the fiction books into the fiction section in a library. That was fun, but now the apps are kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
What follows is a list of some of the apps I have, but first I can't end an app essay without saying that the best app of all that all our library patrons should have is the BHPL app which is free and with which you can check your account, place holds, read this blog and lots of other things. Here is the link to more information about it: http://bhplnj.boopsie.com/
My apps:
The 'Weather Channel' which I have set up to show me the weather where I live and where my extended family lives. Don't ask, it's just fun to know that it's sunny or snowing or raining on everyone at the same time.
'WebMD' for your hypochondriacal needs on the go. Seriously, this is a pretty good medical app with diagnoses and drug information.
'Urban Spoon' is for finding restaurants by geography or type of food. You can submit reviews or read other people's reviews.
I have apps for all the social media sites I use: 'Facebook', 'Twitter', 'Pinterest', 'You Tube' so to take a photo with my phone and just post it right up on one of those accounts is the work of an instant. And then all my friends out there on Planet Facebook/Twitter can tap 'like' to show that they also are never more than 3 feet from their phones.
I also have apps that connect to my 'GoodReads' account where I keep a list of what I read. You can see the RSS feed of that on the right side of this blog along with the library Twitter and Facebook accounts.
For music, I have a 'Pandora' app where you can set up your own radio station that plays the music you like and suggests music you might like based on what you already told it you like. Also in my little music app folder, I have 'Piano Free' and 'Guitar Free' which turns your phone into a tiny piano or tiny guitar to play or teaches you how to play or plays all by itself.
For traveling information, I have 'Kayak' and also the app for United Airlines. And 'Google maps' of course which is a gift to those of us who have been lost and turned around our whole lives until GPS devices like the TomTom came on the scene.
And finally, I have 'Flipboard' which is the mother of all news apps. In 'Flipboard' I have gathered all the news sources I like to follow and so I can flip from the BBC news to Al Jazeera to the New York Times with the mere sweep of a finger. Amazing!
'GoTask' which is connected to my online Google calendar and with which I keep track of my to do list was highly recommended by my very organized son. I had 'GoTask' set up so that it woke me up every morning at 7 am with a cheerful little chirpy noise and a banner appeared on my phone telling me what I had to do today. This raised the anxiety level of having a to-do list to the nth degree, so I spent some time making it not wake me up. Then I learned how to not assign a date to each task and it now basically leaves me alone. What is really hard to do is to completely expunge stuff from the to do list. No, don't email me, I don't want to know. As long as 'GoTask' has retreated to a respectful distance, I'm ok. Really, I'm fine with it.
Next, I added a couple of apps that track what I eat and how much I walk. Again, these things can really keep you on task or they can really make you feel even worse about procrastinating and eating too many carbs and taking the car instead of walking. It's totally up to you. The apps are: 'Walk Star' and 'Lose It.' Walk Star' is basically a pedometer-ish thing that doesn't really work as well as the pedometer I had that clipped onto my clothes which my dog ate after we came back from what she deemed to be too short a walk, but it's free. 'Lose It' has a terrific feature on it which is a barcode reader. That provided a day's worth of entertainment as I went around my kitchen cupboards and scanned the barcodes from all the food boxes into my own personal 'Lose It' database of what I often eat. Here's the thing, if it's got a barcode, you probably shouldn't be eating it.
My smart phone came loaded with apps, but all those smart people who endlessly advise you about your computer and phone habits told me that those weren't as good as the apps I should go out into cyberspace and download to my phone, so I now have two weather apps, two map apps (say that 20 times), and overlapping apps to magazines and newspapers. Then someone showed me how to organize my apps so they don't take up all the real estate on my phones desktop/face- whatever it's called. I learned how to put the apps into little folders like putting all the fiction books into the fiction section in a library. That was fun, but now the apps are kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
What follows is a list of some of the apps I have, but first I can't end an app essay without saying that the best app of all that all our library patrons should have is the BHPL app which is free and with which you can check your account, place holds, read this blog and lots of other things. Here is the link to more information about it: http://bhplnj.boopsie.com/
My apps:
The 'Weather Channel' which I have set up to show me the weather where I live and where my extended family lives. Don't ask, it's just fun to know that it's sunny or snowing or raining on everyone at the same time.
'WebMD' for your hypochondriacal needs on the go. Seriously, this is a pretty good medical app with diagnoses and drug information.
'Urban Spoon' is for finding restaurants by geography or type of food. You can submit reviews or read other people's reviews.
I have apps for all the social media sites I use: 'Facebook', 'Twitter', 'Pinterest', 'You Tube' so to take a photo with my phone and just post it right up on one of those accounts is the work of an instant. And then all my friends out there on Planet Facebook/Twitter can tap 'like' to show that they also are never more than 3 feet from their phones.
I also have apps that connect to my 'GoodReads' account where I keep a list of what I read. You can see the RSS feed of that on the right side of this blog along with the library Twitter and Facebook accounts.
For music, I have a 'Pandora' app where you can set up your own radio station that plays the music you like and suggests music you might like based on what you already told it you like. Also in my little music app folder, I have 'Piano Free' and 'Guitar Free' which turns your phone into a tiny piano or tiny guitar to play or teaches you how to play or plays all by itself.
For traveling information, I have 'Kayak' and also the app for United Airlines. And 'Google maps' of course which is a gift to those of us who have been lost and turned around our whole lives until GPS devices like the TomTom came on the scene.
And finally, I have 'Flipboard' which is the mother of all news apps. In 'Flipboard' I have gathered all the news sources I like to follow and so I can flip from the BBC news to Al Jazeera to the New York Times with the mere sweep of a finger. Amazing!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)