#appsreview

App review

You can play those games. Aman has brought a game for them. Whose name is AFK Arena games.

This app is new. So I shared.

The rating of this game is 4.7. This app has been installed more than 1,000,000+ times.

You can install the app in a free way.

Collect leg legend hero cards.

 Come back and enjoy all the awards that come your way.

M reserves the secret treasures.

Unite and fight together with players around the world.

 Once you play this game and enjoy how much fun

After installing all the buzzins how to play.

Install from the following link.

Lilith Games

After listening to more than 250 episodes of Podcast in the last two months with this application (Castro tells me so), I can now talk about it with confidence. In the past, I have used several applications, and they mostly have the same behavior, you subscribe to stations, you get the episodes, and you listen to them. But none of those apps were any good for managing a large number of shows. And that is the thing that catches my attention with Castro, the control of the complete podcast experience.

As you know, if you know me I'm a huge fan of podcasting. I have been doing it myself on 85% Cocoa, and listen to it since 14 years more or less.

But before talking about the tool itself, it is better if I list the requirements that I would like a podcast application to cover for me. I won't put them technically or in detail but broad terms:

I need to subscribe to more than 100 feeds. I won't listen to all episodes of all feed, but I want to a notification when new episodes appear on the feed.

Because of de number of feeds I do not want the shows to download automatically but on my request. I other words, I like to plan what I will listen to every day.

I want a good track of what I have been listening to. Also, some statistics will be helpful.

On the player, I want the usual controls, and I would appreciate a nice way to navigate the audio of an episode.

So, what's up with Castro? Well, Castro covers most of my requirement and excel in the most important one: the workflow for managing feeds and episodes. I do not know if there is any other in the Store that does exactly that but for me, now that I have tried it with Castro, it is a must.

I talked a lot about "workflow” so let me explain how do I use Castro, so you will quickly understand how it works and what are the benefits.

Every morning, as I do my GTD daily review, I review the Castro inbox. There I have all the new episodes published for my subscriptions. Then I can decide, for every one of them, if I want to listen to them, so they go to the playlist. Otherwise, I'll move them to the archive for the future. Then the inbox contains all the new episodes that I have not yet decided upon.

The playlist is just a nice sorted list of the shows, and you can move them around at your will. Stop one and switch to another and more. Of course, every episode in the playlist gets downloaded and ready to listen directly.

Then we have the archive. There I can find the list of feeds that I have subscribed to with all its episodes. It has convenient ways to filter them and navigate them. That tab also contains a history where I can see the played episodes in order.

All around Castro there are nice usability features that show the care put into the design and development of the tool.

You may be thinking, why I have to decide for every episode? But you do not need to. Whenever you subscribe to feeds, you can select whether new episodes go to the inbox, the top or bottom of the playlist or the archive. That is perfect, for the shows that I want to listen to every single episode I set them to go directly to the playlist. Some others that I have just for reference are configured to go directly to the archive. Those are useful for those moments when I do not have anything to read or want something different. The rest goes to the inbox for me to decide.

Even If subscribe to tons of feeds, I only have from 10 to 20 every morning to review and decide. That helps me tailor my daily playlist every day according to the kind of day I foresee. Of course, there is always leftovers from the previous days, and also some episodes that I started and do not enjoy, are thrown back to the archive from the playlist.

Because I've subscribed to tons of good feeds, even if I do not listen to a lot of them, it is very nice, on weekends, when I have more time, to visit the archive looking for episodes to discover. For me, it is a pleasure.

For now, the one thing I could ask to the guys behind Castro (Supertop) is to add a statistics section. Somewhere where freaks can get crazy analyzing their habits and know, for example, how many shows on every language or other "very” useful things.

Apps are no longer a fashion. There are thousands of new apps launched in App Store every day. It is pretty common that you download a fancy app, try it for a few times and find it useless, and then delete it forever. These apps come and go easily and rather quickly.

Eventually, there are only a few apps that survive and stay in my home screen. These apps have become my routine. They don’t have fancy design or amazing features. Instead, most of them are simple and only doing one thing really well. The most important thing is, they’re reliable - never let you down.

- Music: Spotify Spotify is amazing! It’s one of my favourite apps nowadays and I even pay for the service! If you think about it, Spotify is just a music streaming service that allows you to explore all kinds of music free or with a low cost. There are many services have already done that before. What attracts me most is the large pool of music and how easy you can discover new (indie) music. It is frustrating if you cannot find a song or have to find it in another platform (happened to me before). It is a delight when you discover even more great musicians/songs while hunting a particular one. On Spotify, you can find new music by genres, moods, or certain themes. You can listen to what your friends have been listening to. Ever week, Spotify recommends customised new playlist based on your taste. Every year, Spotify even gives you a good summary for a year of music! How cool is that!!! Spotify Run is awesome too, I tried it a few times! I don’t know why they decided to turn it down now :(

- Photo: Instagram I’m one of the early adopters of Instagram. It’s my photo diary ever since then. I use hashtags to organise my photos so I can easily look back. All the good memories are archived there!

- Reading: GoodReads If you ever wonder people still read books nowadays, this is the place to discover! I’m not a bookworm. However, reading has become a habit after I joined GoodReads. There are several reasons that will make you stick to it: the hidden reader community, reading progress tracking, book reviews, annual reading challenge. Reading is fun when you truly dive into it!

- Communication: Gmail, Telegram and WeChat There’s no WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger in my phone, because they’re Facebook!! I’ve already given Facebook way too much data via Instagram. I’d better divert some traffic to other companies, like Google or Tencent =)

Gmail is nothing fancy but functional. Though it looks very normal, Gmail’s UX design is subtle and exceptional! Email is such a routine that we use every day, and Gmail has made the flow so smooth that you don’t have much to complain about - not like Outlook, which is mind-blowing in the worst sense!

Telegram is cool! The fact it’s open source makes it sexier! All of my cool tech friends are using it, so am I! Telegram is probably the first app that supports end-to-end encrypted chat (https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end). WhatsApp is a copycat, unsurprisingly.

WeChat is powerful. If it isn’t for keeping in touch with my Chinese friends and families, I wouldn’t consider WeChat. However, I cannot deny that it is a great app - it has everything inside. At first glimpse, it looks simple and straightforward. But man, this is a way too complicated app with a lot of hidden features such as micro blogs, chat translation, official channel subscriptions, in-app games etc. You can even transfer money and pay bill! There is a concern though… I wonder if the chats are under the government’s surveillance.

- Everything else: Evernote Many people don’t get Evernote. My first attempt was a failure too. Evernote is a simple notebook that you can take everything in. It is so general that users can define their own ways of organising notes and notebooks. But that is also a problem - because most of time we struggle with organising stuff and Evernote doesn’t really provide a feature called “auto organisation”! Then forget about the organising part! Enjoy taking notes and - do a quick search! The search function in Evernote is pretty awesome and it kind of changes the way I organise my notes. Just make sure you have the right keywords in your notes, and you will always be able to get them!

- Lifestyle apps There are some lifestyle apps to recommend too. For example, Lumosity and Headspace. One is to train your brain, the other is to relax your mind. Both are well designed! (Ok, I don’t feel like going on now...)

I use Things.app for all my process stuff but I love this little tool for one single, and very important, thing.

TaskPaper uses a plain text file to create the illusion of having a task management system and that is really smart and useful for a software developer. TaskPaper files can be added to your control version (git in my case) and be handle as a regular code file. I usually add it to the root of the project and write there everything related to the project like ideas, TODOs and planning. In the case where the project has multiple bundles I add one for every bundle to be attached to the proper source code. Even more cool is that you can add it to Xcode for the people that do not have TaskPaper (that is a mistake) so that they can edit the file directly in Xcode.

To help people that do not use Taskpaper, I always included this small text at the top of the document for them to know the basics:

Note that this is a TaskPaper Document. Format in this document: - Ending a line with a semicolon is a project title. like "Format in this document" in this section - Tab + "-" + single space, are tasks as in this line. - @xxx are tags and their use for this project will be explain in the introduction section. Open it with task paper for a better visualisation.

I use projects as sections on a document and tags to qualify task. For example to assign to me I use @jose, or to assign to a milestone version I use @v1.0 and when done I use @done. In fact I devote a section of the document to declare and clarify all tags used in the document. Here you can see a template file with explanations.