Android launchers are a topic of constant fascination here at MakeUseOf: We’re always on the lookout for unique new ways to control and customize our phones and tablets. From well-known behemoths like Nova Launcher to more experimental newcomers such as Atom Launcher, we’ve shown you just about every major launcher out there today. But launchers usually compete in the customization and tweaking arena: Whichever launcher gets you the most unique home screen, wins. Sometimes, though, we just want to quickly launch some app, rather than marvel at the beauty of our painfully-customized home screen. There’s a whole class of “launcher helpers” — small utilities that don’t even try to offer a full launcher experience. Instead, they help you find what you need as soon as humanly possible, then get out of the way. My long-time favorites Gesture Search and SwipePad are such apps, and today, I’m here with Quad Drawer, a $1 tool that aims to replace your launcher’s built-in app drawer with something simpler, faster, and more elegant.

In a Nutshell

First, a video from LevelUp Studio, Quad Drawer’s developers;

The one-line explanation: Launch any app on your device using a T9 dial-pad.

The concept is simple and compelling, but unsurprisingly, the devil is in the details. Users tend to be very particular about the ways they use their devices, and launching apps is something we all do multiple times every day, so the experience must be flawless. Quad Launcher has to be fast, elegant, and customizable. Fortunately, developer LevelUp Studio has the coding and design prowess needed to deliver the goods: After all, this is the same developer behind the wonderfully polished twitter client, Plume, and the very popular Beautiful Widgets.

Dialing For Apps

The default layout for Quad Drawer looks like this:

No big surprises here: Just an app drawer with a dial pad at the bottom. If you want, you can collapse the dial pad, and end up with something that’s almost identical to what you already have in your browser. The only other notable difference is the tabs laid out on top of the screen letting your sort your apps in the drawer: Most Used, Alphabetical, Recent, and Last Downloaded. Start dialing, though, and the list instantly filters, even if you have hundreds of apps:

The particular prefix I dialed (96) yielded a bunch of apps, with Wolfram Alpha selected by default — but really, I wanted one of the other results, YouTube. When I tapped YouTube in the results list, Quad Launcher learned and adapted. So next time I dialed 96, I got this instead:

Now YouTube was the default. It is this sort of subtle machine learning and adaptability that makes everyday tools fast to use.

Themes, Layouts, and the Floating Mode

My launcher (Nova Prime) uses a dark theme which didn’t mesh so well with Quad Drawer’s default white looks; also, I am not a big fan of the densely populated icon grid format: I find it difficult to hunt for the app I need. Not a problem:

After tweaking a couple of settings, this is what I ended up with. A dark Holo-themed drawer with a list layout, and the same dialer interface at the bottom. Pretty much exactly what I wanted, and the elegant Settings screen made it easy to accomplish:

The only thing you don’t see above is the switch for toggling between an icon grid and a list layout. This is one of the only interface inconsistencies I’ve come across in Quad Launcher: To switch between display modes, you’ll have to use the app’s main menu.

Now that we have the drawer looking just so, wouldn’t it be good if we could quickly launch it from anywhere on the device? This is a problem many “quick launchers” try to solve: Gesture Search utilizes a special motion (a way of flipping your device) which you can use from anywhere to launch it; SwipePad uses a swiping motion from the side of the device; and Quad Drawer uses a floating overlay:

What you see above is my Twitter client of choice, Falcon Pro, with a pale little button on the top-left. That button isn’t part of Falcon Pro: It belongs to Quad Launcher, and tapping it brings up a screen overlay:

This screenshot shows both the floating overlay (you can still see Falcon’s top bar peeking from underneath), and the fact that Quad Drawer lets you opt out of its key feature: You can swap out the T9 dial pad with your own regular keyboard, and just search for apps by typing.

The overlay is neat, but honestly, it’s one of the least elegant parts in the Quad Drawer experience. When it’s enabled, the button is always visible, and will inevitably obscure something you’re trying to read, forcing you to constantly drag it around.

There is another way to quickly access Quad Drawer: It allows you to replace the default search action that happens on Android 4.0 and above when you swipe up from the home button. By default, this starts Google Now — but with Quad Drawer installed, you could start dialing for apps after making that gesture.

A Polished Complement To Your Launcher of Choice

All in all, Quad Drawer demonstrates one thing: Even when it comes to a humble system utility, the details count. With its sane interface sensibilities and flexible configuration, Quad Launcher is sure to please many users looking for a quick way to launch their favorite apps with a minimum of fuss. I think I’ll be keeping it around, to complement Gesture Search and SwipePad on my own phone.

Will you spend a buck to take it for a spin? Or is there another quick-launcher you’re already using?

Android launchers are a topic of constant fascination here at MakeUseOf: We’re always on the lookout for unique new ways to control and customize our phones and tablets. From well-known behemoths like Nova Launcher to more experimental newcomers such as Atom Launcher, we’ve shown you just about every major launcher out there today. But launchers usually compete in the customization and tweaking arena: Whichever launcher gets you the most unique home screen, wins. Sometimes, though, we just want to quickly launch some app, rather than marvel at the beauty of our painfully-customized home screen. There’s a whole class of “launcher helpers” — small utilities that don’t even try to offer a full launcher experience. Instead, they help you find what you need as soon as humanly possible, then get out of the way. My long-time favorites Gesture Search and SwipePad are such apps, and today, I’m here with Quad Drawer, a $1 tool that aims to replace your launcher’s built-in app drawer with something simpler, faster, and more elegant.

In a Nutshell

First, a video from LevelUp Studio, Quad Drawer’s developers;

The one-line explanation: Launch any app on your device using a T9 dial-pad.

The concept is simple and compelling, but unsurprisingly, the devil is in the details. Users tend to be very particular about the ways they use their devices, and launching apps is something we all do multiple times every day, so the experience must be flawless. Quad Launcher has to be fast, elegant, and customizable. Fortunately, developer LevelUp Studio has the coding and design prowess needed to deliver the goods: After all, this is the same developer behind the wonderfully polished twitter client, Plume, and the very popular Beautiful Widgets.

Dialing For Apps

The default layout for Quad Drawer looks like this:

No big surprises here: Just an app drawer with a dial pad at the bottom. If you want, you can collapse the dial pad, and end up with something that’s almost identical to what you already have in your browser. The only other notable difference is the tabs laid out on top of the screen letting your sort your apps in the drawer: Most Used, Alphabetical, Recent, and Last Downloaded. Start dialing, though, and the list instantly filters, even if you have hundreds of apps:

The particular prefix I dialed (96) yielded a bunch of apps, with Wolfram Alpha selected by default — but really, I wanted one of the other results, YouTube. When I tapped YouTube in the results list, Quad Launcher learned and adapted. So next time I dialed 96, I got this instead:

Now YouTube was the default. It is this sort of subtle machine learning and adaptability that makes everyday tools fast to use.

Themes, Layouts, and the Floating Mode

My launcher (Nova Prime) uses a dark theme which didn’t mesh so well with Quad Drawer’s default white looks; also, I am not a big fan of the densely populated icon grid format: I find it difficult to hunt for the app I need. Not a problem:

After tweaking a couple of settings, this is what I ended up with. A dark Holo-themed drawer with a list layout, and the same dialer interface at the bottom. Pretty much exactly what I wanted, and the elegant Settings screen made it easy to accomplish:

The only thing you don’t see above is the switch for toggling between an icon grid and a list layout. This is one of the only interface inconsistencies I’ve come across in Quad Launcher: To switch between display modes, you’ll have to use the app’s main menu.

Now that we have the drawer looking just so, wouldn’t it be good if we could quickly launch it from anywhere on the device? This is a problem many “quick launchers” try to solve: Gesture Search utilizes a special motion (a way of flipping your device) which you can use from anywhere to launch it; SwipePad uses a swiping motion from the side of the device; and Quad Drawer uses a floating overlay:

What you see above is my Twitter client of choice, Falcon Pro, with a pale little button on the top-left. That button isn’t part of Falcon Pro: It belongs to Quad Launcher, and tapping it brings up a screen overlay:

This screenshot shows both the floating overlay (you can still see Falcon’s top bar peeking from underneath), and the fact that Quad Drawer lets you opt out of its key feature: You can swap out the T9 dial pad with your own regular keyboard, and just search for apps by typing.

The overlay is neat, but honestly, it’s one of the least elegant parts in the Quad Drawer experience. When it’s enabled, the button is always visible, and will inevitably obscure something you’re trying to read, forcing you to constantly drag it around.

There is another way to quickly access Quad Drawer: It allows you to replace the default search action that happens on Android 4.0 and above when you swipe up from the home button. By default, this starts Google Now — but with Quad Drawer installed, you could start dialing for apps after making that gesture.

A Polished Complement To Your Launcher of Choice

All in all, Quad Drawer demonstrates one thing: Even when it comes to a humble system utility, the details count. With its sane interface sensibilities and flexible configuration, Quad Launcher is sure to please many users looking for a quick way to launch their favorite apps with a minimum of fuss. I think I’ll be keeping it around, to complement Gesture Search and SwipePad on my own phone.

Will you spend a buck to take it for a spin? Or is there another quick-launcher you’re already using?

Tools like Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote put an amazingly powerful toolset into hands that make presentations. The key is realising that you should only need a minute portion of those tools. Not every line of text needs to whirl into view with CGI bravado. Not every image needs to glow and throw a shadow. It’s fun to put these effects in, but what looks cool and engaging is often distracting instead. If you want to engage your audience, focus on the speaker and use the presentation to support what you’re saying. Simple keywords and images get you further than big blocks of text and headache-inducing effects.

Part of making professional presentations comes from focusing on key points like that. Another part comes from using the right tool for the job. PowerPoint is an amazing piece of software, but it gives you twenty degrees of freedom. Fifteen of those lead to disaster. Slid.es is a free online PowerPoint alternative to make great presentations. Simply beautiful and beautifully simple.

Slid.es

Slid.es is a simple web app to make presentations. It’s simple to use and easy to make beautiful presentations with. Think Google Docs, but with a minimalist look and its own approach. All of this freely available, although you can upgrade to a Pro version to get more storage and private sharing.

Getting started is very easy. Just click the big Get Started button on the home page and create a new account. If you don’t want to busy yourself with creating another account from scratch, sign in with your Facebook or Google account instead.

After signing in, Slid.es let’s you know that you don’t have any decks. A deck, in case you’re wondering, is almost the same as a presentation. There are some differences, though.

Decks: Making Multidimensional Presentations

After creating a new deck in Slid.es, you’ll notice something peculiar. Both to the right and below the currently selected slide are buttons to create new slides. Pressing these will effectively add a new slide to the right, or to the bottom of the current one. This means you’re able to create a presentation in two dimensions!

This is better illustrated with an example. I’ve created a small mockup presentation in Slid.es, making use of both dimensions. By selecting Arrange from the sidebar menu, you get a good overview of the relationships between different slides.

In the example below, we start off with a title slide. Going down brings up an overview of the subject. Going right takes you to a new chapter. Similar to a book, you can view the vertical stacks as chapters in an all-compassing presentation, or you could create a deck of related slideshows, each in a separate stack.

How you use it is up to you. Personally, I like the “chapter-y” feel of it. However, you could also simply work in a single direction and make a simple slideshow; front to back.

Navigating works by using the arrow keys, or the virtual directional pad in the lower right corner of the presentation. Note that you don’t skip the entire stack by moving right. Slid.es first draws the different parts of the current slide, regardless of whether you go down or right. Decks created with a free account are public.

Creating Appealing Slides

Before getting started, take a look at the Style menu in the sidebar. Here you can tweak the global style settings of your slides. What you change here, and also at any later stage, affects your entire deck. In this menu, you’ll be able to select a colour scheme, font, transition animation between two slides, and a transition animation when you change the background in a slide.

Now, let’s create our first slide. You’ll notice there are no clickable areas set apart as is usual in these presentation suites (e.g. “Click to add title.”). Instead, there’s just a single canvas. Heading 1 is selected in the top toolbar, so you can just start typing to enter a title at the top of your slide. Press Enter, and Slid.es switches to a Paragraph style automatically.

You can change everything involving typesetting in the top toolbar, although generally you’ll only have to change the text style occasionally. This is also where you’ll introduce new bullet lists, change text colour, add links and insert images into your slides.

Just like the top toolbar tweaks properties of the content in the slide, the right toolbar tweaks the slides themselves. Here you can change the background colour or image, make items appear sequentially during your presentation, position elements freely and change the slide’s HTML code (in that order).

Making items appear on a slide sequentially is incredibly simple. Start by clicking the lightning shaft icon in the right toolbar. Now, click on items in your slide to turn them into fragments. Every fragment is an item that only appears on your screen after you’ve stepped through them. There’s no tweaking the order or animation, though. Make sure to preview the slideshow before you finish.

Sharing The Presentation

Select Share in the left sidebar when you’re done to start spreading those slides around. There are two ways to share your slides. You can send people a link, or embed the slides on a website. (If you’ll be giving a presentation in person, this won’t be necessary.)

Behind the link, you’ll find an embed of your presentation. In the lower left corner are buttons to enter full screen or open the presentation in a separate window. Additionally, below the presentation, you’ll find social sharing links and a comments section to engage with your audience.

Take a look at this sample presentation in action. It’s a minimal presentation, but suffices to show off Slid.es features and how easy these presentations are to navigate.

Conclusion

For some purposes, you’ll need the veritable slide-making machine that is Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. However, for most regular presentations, it pays off to keep things simple. Slid.es is an excellent companion in that effort. You can use it to create beautiful slides fast, that’ll show well on any device including mobiles. It is also perfectly optimized for touch enabled devices.

What tools and which approach do you use when making presentations? Share your personal tips with us below!

Though OS X includes a default screenshot application, as a writer and blogger I use more than a few different programs, including Snagit, Snappyapp, and Clarify, for various purposes. But in the ever shifting world of digital applications, a new program can often trump and replace one or more similar programs.

This may be the case for Fliplab’s new screenshot application, Share Bucket, a free download from the Mac App Store, and another program called popShot (donationware). As screen capture applications, their features are pretty common, but they do include some rather useful sharing and file type options not easily available in the OS X’s image capture functionality.

Share Bucket

Share Bucket is similar to the paid application Snagit, and Evernote’s Skitch (Free) in that it allows you to both capture and annotate image captures. Its image editor also includes a drawing, arrow, line, box, text, and even a blur tool.

Share Bucket also allows you to crop images. But what makes it even more productive than Snagit is that it enables you to edit the default “Screen Shot…” file name and select a different output file type (.PNG, .JPG, .TIFF, and .PDF) right from within the editor.

Share Bucket includes other handy features for automatically uploading screenshots to Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive. So even if you already use one or more screen capture programs, Share Bucket could also be useful for quickly taking shots related to a special project where you want to store image captures in a particular place.

Share Bucket can be accessed from the menu bar, and as you might expect, it includes keyboard shortcuts for when you want to either capture and annotate a file in the editor, upload a file to a designated folder, or simply open the image editor. When you choose the Capture and Annotate option, Share Bucket will ask you upon importing a new file into the editor if you want to discard the previous capture. Some users may find this warning a little annoying, especially if using the editor multiple times a day.

You can also drag and drop an image file onto the Share Bucket menu bar icon where it will be copied to your designated cloud service. If enabled, the application’s auto upload feature will even upload image captures taken by other applications. If you have a Retina display, you can select to have Share Bucket automatically scale those images. And you can also choose to have your saved files automatically deleted after a specified period of days.

Share Bucket doesn’t include many of the other annotation features of Snagit, nor does it include video capture. But for a free application, it offers sufficient tools and features for most users.

popShot

popShot is a clean, easy to use screen capture application that you also access from the menu bar or activate using assigned hotkeys. I keep popShot in my menu bar for when I want to shoot captures in .JPG, instead of the default .PNG file type of the OS X image capture application.

You can not only preselect the filetype output for screenshots using popShot, but you can also select to have a shot open directly in an external application, like Photoshop or Preview. And if you want, you can actually name and label a screenshot before it is taken.

popShot makes it easy to change the path to where you want to save screenshots, which again is convenient for when working on a project where you may not want your screen captures to go directly to the desktop.

If you often need or want to share screenshots online, popShot can take and upload shots to its server, and then you select to share the URL or send the capture directly to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, or more than three hundred other sites. It would be nice, however, if you could share a screenshot to a designated account or stream without having to first open it in popShot.

popShot doesn’t include annotation tools or a built-in image editor, but if you take multiple screenshots per day for various purposes, it’s an app that you may want to have in your arsenal.

Final Thoughts

As someone who takes more than a dozen screenshots a day, I would suggest it really doesn’t hurt to have and use more than one screen capture application, especially if they can help you to be more productive. If you really want to take faster shots, I recommend using the finger gesture application BetterTouchTool to activate the hotkey of your favorite screen capture application, so you don’t have to remove your hand from the mouse or trackpad.

Download: Share Bucket (Free) / popShot (Free, donationware)

What do you use to take screenshots? Have you tried Share Bucket or popShot? Let us know what you think, in the comments below.

If you’re 20 or older, you know what it’s like growing without a smartphone. You also know what it’s like growing without Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the rest of them. There was nothing too bad about growing up without these gadgets, apps and websites, so us old folks tend to conclude that growing up with them is no good.

Smartphones and social networks can be a huge distraction factor for kids in school, and especially at home when they should be doing their schoolwork. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. We’ve already shown you some brilliant ways to use Twitter for education, some educational iPad apps for kids, and even ways to make use of Wolfram Alpha for education. But what about Instagram? Anyone with an Instagram account (or anyone with kids) knows they’re all on Instagram, uploading and editing photos, liking other photos, commenting, etc.

Like it or not, the way kids use Instagram cannot be ignored, and what’s the best way to beat a problem? Join it, of course! Below you’ll find several smart ways to utilize Instagram for educational purposes that are fun for all concerned, and are bound to grasp kids’ attention much more than traditional homework.

Note: Not all kids own a smartphone. Some of the suggestions below do not require an Instagram account, and therefore do not require a smartphone. Instagram can be accessed on the Web as well, without using a smartphone. Using a parent’s smartphone for an assignment is also possible.

Assign Instagram Homework

Photo by: valentina955

Students spend time on Instagram anyway, so why not give them assignments on Instagram? It will still be a school assignment, and therefore not as fun as just taking random photos, but it’s still more exciting than “read pages 1-23 and answer the following questions”.

So how does this work? Some ideas are to use a special account for these things, to where you can upload a photo for the kids to find, and ask them to write something about it. You can also ask them to find a photo they like or a photo that has to do with a certain topic, and write about that. This can be anything from what they think of it, what’s important about it, describing what they’re seeing, etc.

The assignment itself depends on the age of the students and the topic they’re studying. You can even have the students download the photo and do some simple edits on it using a free image editor, or even using Instagram itself, and then upload it in its new form.

Upload Homework To Instagram

While doing some research for this post, I stumbled onto Lisa Highfill and her @HighfillCrew Twitter account. Lisa is a 5th grade teacher, and as part of her teaching, asks the students to capture moments of their lives and upload them to Instagram, with a short description of up to 140 characters. This teaches kids both creativity, and the skill needed to describe only what’s important in one sentence.

This is just one way to have kids upload their assignments to Instagram. You can send kids to find and photograph something specific that relates to what was taught in class; you can ask for group assignments where each takes one photo of a certain group theme, followed by a written assignment that explains it; you can even ask then to take a photo of their own “regular” homework, and say something about that. This method can be used in an infinite number of ways, and can spice up any boring homework assignment.

Long Term Assignments

Instagram can be used for education in summer time too, or over any other long period, whether off school or during the school year. Instead of giving kids yet another boring summer homework assignment describing what they did, let them take photos of it, and describe each photo in a short sentence. You can set a special hashtag for the assignment, and tell the kids to tag it accordingly. The full assignment can be a set of photos showing what they did this summer, how they planted a vegetable garden, how they learned to ride a horse, how they did a science experiment, etc.

For this kind of assignment, you can even use Instagram video, which is a great way to show off a longer process in a 15-seconds video. This is also a super easy way for kids to create their own edited videos without messing around with complicated editing tools.

Teach Art & Photography

Despite what you might think, Instagram can actually be a great tool for learning about art and photography. To start, smartphones are much easier to handle than digital cameras, and can therefore be used to teach kids the basics of photography, light, composition, etc. While many kids use their Instagram account to posts photos of themselves and their friends, this is not necessarily due to lack of artistic skills. Assignments that require taking an a photo in a certain light, using a certain filter, etc., can teach kids to make more out this tool called Instagram.

Open A Class Account/School Account

A class account and a school account are a great way to keep kids motivated and to keep in touch even when not in class. Kids can suggest photos to be added to the class account, and record the class’ adventures in and out of school. This can also be used to hold contests, like photo of the week, where kids need to find or take photos, and the selected ones get published in the class account. There are endless uses for these accounts, you just need some creativity!

What Do You Use?

How do you picture Instagram as an educational tool? Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or a kid yourself, I’d love to hear your own Instagram ideas. We’re lucky to have such interesting ways to interact with each other, why not use them to the best of our abilities?

The developers of the video and image sharing site, Imgur released last Thursday their iPhone and iPad mobile apps. The Imgur free iOS app is similar to the Imgur Android app released earlier this year.

Imgur (pronounced im-ij-er) allows you to browse the most viral images on the Internet, and vote and comment on them. Most of the displayed images are funny, cartoonish, entertaining, and sometimes insightful. Content can be browsed by Most Viral, or by the most recent posts. You can also view a random display of images, or do a SubReddit search of a topic you’re interested in. Selected photos can be copied and saved to your iPhone Camera Roll.

You can also upload photos straight from your own phone and submit them directly to the Imgur gallery. Posted images can be share to Facebook, iMessage, and a URL link to the iPhone clipboard. And if you register an Imgur account (which can be done using your Google, Twitter, Facebook or Yahoo account), you can favor and comment on individual images and videos, as well as of see the feedback by other other members.

The iOS apps also include handy finger gesture features for quickly updating galleries and browsing between images and videos.

The online version of Imgur contains a meme browser and creator that allows you to upload and create your own content, or customize existing favorites.

Imgur started as an online image hosting service, founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009 in Athens, Ohio. Let us know what you think of Imgur and its new iOS apps. Are there features you would like to see added?

Source: Mashable

Spotify is often called a music streaming service, because, well, it’s a service that streams music. Obviously. However… Quick, stop the presses and hold the front pages, Spotify deals in more than just music. I know, right? Because audio doesn’t necessarily mean music, as any fan of podcasts will tell you.

Comedy albums have been a thing for over 100 years, with gramophone records of a comic named Cal Stewart reciting humorous short stories having been released as long ago as 1898. famous comedians and comedy troupes have released albums in every recent decade, and the medium is still immensely popular to this day.

Unless you’ve gone searching for your favorite comedian(s) on Spotify, you’ll probably be totally unaware that they’re there. Until now. Thanks to the Official Comedy app it’s now much easier to find comedians, their albums, and even individual jokes to share on social networks, all within the confines of Spotify.

It’s time to have a laugh, and not just at my overly verbose style of writing.

Spotify Apps

At the end of 2011, Spotify introduced apps to its platform. It was really no surprise, because apps were becoming the be-all and end-all in terms of user interaction across all platforms. Spotify offered third parties the opportunity to create apps that would use the streaming service’s extensive library and powerful tools to reach the mainstream public.

Dozens of apps have been launched, and we’ve published several round-ups of apps based on a theme since then. These include Spotify apps for discovering music, Spotify apps for true music fans, and Spotify apps made by record labels.

The one thing all of these apps have in common is their reliance on music. But as we’ve already noted, Spotify boasts more than just music. Which is where the Official Comedy app enters stage right, microphone in hand and ready to deliver the LOLs.

The Official Comedy App

The Official Comedy app is the first Spotify app to focus on something other than music. The brains behind the Official Comedy app are Bedrocket Media Ventures, which already runs a YouTube channel using the same Official Comedy moniker.

The YouTube channel has in excess of 175,000 subscribers, and delivers a mix of new and classic comedy, original shorts, and pranks played on members of the public.

The Spotify app delivers a range of comedy albums and tracks, all curated by editors. The content is divided into four distinct sections which offer different ways to explore the funny stuff that’s hidden in the deepest recesses of Spotify’s library.

Funny Now

‘Funny Now’ is the default section you’ll land on when you click the Official Comedy app. This is, as the name suggests, the section where anything or anyone that’s currently trending is dropped. So you get comedians who are especially popular at the moment for one reason or another, and links to playlists built around current news events.

Clicking on one of the comedians highlighted takes you to their page within the Official Comedy app. You get a brief biography, links to their websites and social networking profiles, and the option to ‘Play All’. Clicking on one of the playlists highlighted gives you a brief note on why that particular playlist was built and the chance to play the tracks either in part or in full.

Comedians

The next section is wholly dedicated to comedians, with the Official Comedy app choosing who it considers to be the “funniest people on Spotify.” The same rule applies as before; when you click on a comedian’s image you’ll be whisked to their profile page to discover what content they currently have available on Spotify.

What the Official Comedy app does really well is blend the old with the new, with Bill Hicks and George Carlin sitting comfortably alongside Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari. This means everybody is catered for, whatever their age and preferred type of humor.

One-Liners

The ‘One-Liners’ section is particularly interesting these days, when if something isn’t shared on social networking sites then it’s considered worthless. Single jokes are pulled from the comedy albums and quoted in text form. These can then be shared instantly on Facebook, with which Spotify already integrates.

Luckily each one-liner is given some context by the inclusion of the name of the comedian responsible for it, the name of the track it comes from, and even the point during that track at which it begins.

Playlists

Last but not least is ‘Playlists’, which we’ve already seen a little of in the ‘Funny Now’ section. These “happy packets of funny” are curated lists of tracks that fit together around a particular theme. These may be animal jokes, jokes about medicine, or (especially for the grammar Nazis among us) jokes about the English language.

Clicking ‘Play’ on any of these will bring up the track listing, which you can then choose to listen to in full or just pick individual tracks out according to personal taste. There are plenty of playlists already on the app, but it has to be hoped they will be refreshed regularly to prevent them from becoming stale.

Conclusions

The Official Comedy app brings spoken-word content out from the Spotify shadows. And about time too. This is a medium and a genre that has so far remained somewhat hidden from view, but the Official Comedy app will hopefully mean mainstream Spotify users will now know what they should be listening to for a daily dose of funny.

Did you already know there are hundreds of comedy albums on Spotify? Will you be using the Official Comedy app to explore the wealth of stand-up comedy content Spotify has to offer? Do you use any Spotify apps? If so, which ones? If not, why not? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Back when Windows Phone 7 was released in 2010, I was an early adopter, picking up a HTC HD7 in October of that year. While the initial release wasn’t perfect it was certainly impressive, helped by the presence of some manufacturer-provided apps.

Over time, the quality of these apps was degraded slightly as new and better third party replacements became available. HTC did a good job with their Windows Phone apps, but they were better off sticking to handsets.

Years later, I’m the owner of a Nokia Lumia 920, powered by Windows Phone 8, and thrilled each time Nokia releases a new app. Although manufacturer apps aren’t available to owners of other devices (for instance, HTC users can’t use Nokia apps, and vice-versa), the Nokia apps tend to have a quality and authority that is missing from many of the poorer third party titles.

In fact, there is a collection of superb manufacturer apps for the Nokia-built phones – apps that you should check out if you’re using a Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone 8.

Benefits of Nokia Apps

There are clear advantages to using apps produced by a manufacturer, from low cost (you’ve already bought their phone) to trusting the company to release good quality software. This is certainly the case with Nokia, a pioneer in the app production business.

With Windows Phone, Nokia has a huge investment of money and talent and their apps reflect this. Phones such as the Nokia Lumia 920, 925/928 and 1020 represent some of the best smartphones available and all come with superb displays, audio reproduction and cameras (the latter being one of the strengths of the Nokia Windows Phones).

As a result, you’ll find a great selection of quality apps in the Nokia collection section of the Windows Phone Store app. These are apps that are either available exclusively to Nokia Lumia owners, or released with a different price point or feature set than can be found on other devices.

However, although there are a lot of non-Nokia apps in this manufacturer mini-store, what we’re looking at here are five superb apps produced by Nokia to enhance Windows Phone. The quintet below are available only to Nokia Lumia owners running Windows Phone 8, and are among the best available…

Nokia Music

If you’re a fan of services such as Pandora or Last.fm, Nokia Music should be right up your street. Offering curated selections of music in many specific sub-genres, this free service streams music direct to your phone, enabling you to enjoy the type of tunes that you really like with a single tap.

While the app originally required some programming (by entering the name of a favourite artist) the process now relies on selections chosen by the Nokia Music team. In addition, you can scan the MP3s on your smartphone to update your music profile.

Note that this really is a curated music player, however. Don’t expect Nokia Music to be a replacement for the native player – it’s designed to help you find great new music!

Nokia NFC Writer

The magic of near field communication is available in several Windows Phones, notably those produced by Nokia, and as a result you would be well advised to look at the Nokia NFC Writer app.

Available free, this app contains a number of preset commands for settings and apps that can be initiated simply by placing your Nokia Windows Phone on the programmed NFC tag. Nokia NFC Writer noticeably speeds the process of creating actions and writing them to NFC tags, and is the best such app for the platform.

For more on using Nokia NFC Writer and near field communication on Windows Phone, see How To Program NFC Tags & Automate Windows Phone 8.

Nokia Xpress

Although browsing the web with the native Internet Explorer mobile app is usually fast enough, Nokia Xpress offers a useful speed increase by compressing web pages for download, which can also save you money on metered data connections.

Meanwhile this handy and flexible app also includes a tool to save web pages for reading later and the ability to compile your favourite online content into a sort of magazine.

Although not great as a browser (basic browsing is okay but running scripts isn’t supported) the Nokia Xpress app remains a useful app.

Nokia Reading

One of the things that Nokia has worked hard to do with its Windows Phone apps is to put the platform on a more even keel with the two market leaders, Android and iPhone. One way in which it has done this is to bring Spotify and other popular apps to Windows Phone. Another is by opening a bookstore.

While the Windows Store doesn’t stock books, Google Play and the Appstore do. Nokia Reading is a response to this, offering both a digital bookstore and the ability to read files stored in your SkyDrive cloud storage.

Compatibility for Nokia Reading may seem a little uncertain. Although the app listing above will say that it is only available for Windows Phone 7.5, I have had it on my Nokia Lumia 920 for some months, and it can be installed directly from the Nokia collection. Don’t worry about running the app – it works perfectly well!

Here City Lens

Lost in a new town or city and looking for a coffee shop or museum? Visiting a business park and can’t quite find the company you’re visiting?

What you need is an augmented reality map that combines satellite imagery of the surrounding area with the sort of information found in Yellow pages, listing numbers, email addresses and websites – perhaps even photos – for the business you’re looking for.

Here City Lens might prove initially intimidating, but you should find that you have got it working within minutes. It certainly shouldn’t take too long for you to view an augmented reality representation of your immediate surroundings, scroll through them and follow up a few web links.

Perhaps the problem with Here City Lens is that it is remarkable eye candy – you might forget you ever wanted that coffee!

Apps Are a Good Reason to Buy Nokia Windows Phones!

Sure, you’ve got Samsung, LG and HTC building Windows Phones, and many of them are good devices. But do any of them have the prestige of a Nokia device?

While Nokia might have hit hard times in recent years their stock is still high in the UK, Ireland and Europe. As such, their Lumia handsets have proved quite popular over the past few months, regularly turning up in commercials and product placement.

Most importantly, however, these apps demonstrate that Windows Phone is a competent platform, if given complete manufacturer support. Here City Lens in particular is a surprisingly strong augmented reality experience, and perhaps the closest thing to a killer app for Windows Phone.

Nokia Lumia Windows Phones are great, and Nokia’s selection of in-house apps are excellent – so if you’re buying a Windows Phone device, make sure you opt for a Nokia.

We have a regularly updated list of the best Windows Phone apps and games but do you have any other suggestions for Nokia apps that you might have expected to see in this list? If so, let us know in the comments!