Friday

Labyrinth Lite for Android - free labyrinth game

Labyrinth Lite by illusion Labs is one of the most downloaded Labyrinth games for Android. It has 10 Easy levels and 10 Hard levels in it's free version.

You can install this game from the Play store in your Android phone. Search under the Games menu for "Labyrinth". You will find several names in the search results. Look for the one shown below in the picture.

Wednesday

The Jungle Book by Fox & Sheep

The Jungle Book by Fox and Sheep is a free to download multimedia storybook. It tells us the story of Mogli in 12 slides each lasting for one minute each. The pictures, animations and background narration is great. The size of this App is 50 MB.

Monday

Pinball Pro for Android

Pinball Pro by TerranDroid Board is one of the most downloaded Pinball games for Android. It has five different themes. Each theme offers a refreshing different pinball playing experience. There are great sound effects and also there is vibration feedback. Once you select a theme the game begins. You can press and release your finger anywhere on the screen to launch the ball. And you can control the flappers by touching anywhere on the left and the right portion of the screen. You will find it quite engaging game. This is one of the well made games than other ones in it's category.

Tuesday

Scrutiny of movie ticket booking apps

Are you willing to give this level of access to an App on your smartphone just to book a movie ticket?


If you want to book a movie ticket to watch a show at the time of your convenience you would like to book the ticket from one of the apps on your smartphone. Right?

In the past when you went to watch a movie, there was an intrinsic air of anonymity in the movie watching experience.

That is how it should be. But wait, have you ever looked at the permissions your movie booking app makes you to agree to when you were installing it. Now look at permissions list of the most downloaded movie booking apps.

BookMyShow



You can read the details given on the permissions pop up on the App's page
under Additional Information > Permissions - view details

Sunday

Scrutiny of Gas booking Apps for Bharatgas Indane and HP

Does the official HP Gas App really need to have so much access to your smart phone?


Look at the following  images of the Official lpg cylinder booking App by HP (Hindustan Petroleum)



In this mobile security awareness series I will look at different categories of Android Apps and scrutinize the permissions an app seeks during installation on your smartphone. I hope this scrutiny will bring awareness among Android smartphone users to determine essential and non-essential permissions that an app may ask for in a particular App. I will also compare these permissions among most popular apps in that category.

Saturday

Fruits Photos by Wordex Team

Today we will learn about an Educational App that introduces names of Fruits and Vegetables to kids. This app is developed by Wordex Team. This app includes flash cards of 18 Fruits, 17 Vegetables, 8 Dry Fruits,  a Memory game and a matching game

You can install this App from the Play store in your Android phone. Search under the App menu for "Fruit Photos". You will find several names in the search results. Look for the one shown below in the picture.

Fruits and Vegetables by Premium Software

Today we will learn about an Educational App that introduces names of Fruits and Vegetables to kids. This app is developed by a company named "Premium software". This app includes flash card of 48 Fruits and 42 Vegetables.

You can install this App from the Play store in your Android phone. Search under the App menu for "Fruits and Vegetables Premium". You will find several names in the search results. Look for the one shown below in the picture.



If you touch the App's name in the search results, its introductory installation screen looks like the one below. Here you will be able to read more info about the App 


Good thing about this App is that it does not require any special permissions during installation. This is a matter to be noted, because quite often you will find that some Apps ask for a number of permissions which are really not necessary for the functioning of the App itself. The developers may have some other motives in it, particularly to exploit the installation on your smartphone to its maximum to gain advertizing revenue. in some cases someone maliciously may be able to steal your personal and confidential information form your smartphone. So one can not stress enough about the need to scrutinize the Permissions sought out by an App during installation. 


Below you can see a screenshot of the icon of the App


This is the opening screen of the App


You can see the App in action in the video below




Thursday

Fruit words app by Noot Fang

In search of best apps for android smartphones on a subject, I installed and uninstalled dozens of apps and came up with the best available apps. In this article I will tell you about the best App in Educational Apps for the subject "Fruits and Vegetables" for small kids.

These are the virtues I found about this app.

Pros


0) This is  a FREE app. Many of the good quality apps create a free one just as a trailer or a demo of their commercial app. In this case the publisher has both the versions. But it seems he has abandoned development of his Commercial version in 2014, and concentrated on updating this free version of the app instead.
1) It has 121 flash cards. One of the highest number
2) It has good quality images. The images are prominently displayed in the middle of the screen. The pages can be swiped or arrow buttons can be used to flip pages.
3) The names are written in big letters below each image.
4) The audio quality of the pronunciation is good. The publisher has used different voices alternately which is good.
5) There is a book icon which displays a brief description about the fruit or the veggie in a text window.
6) You can bookmark cards as favorites so that you can just watch your favorites separately. There is a favorites menu in the main menu screen
7) There are Games - three of them, one is about listening to a name and finding its correct picture, another is listening to a name and identifying it's correct spelling. The third is looking at the picture and the name and pronouncing it in your smartphone. All games are good educational activities.

Cons: 


There are several permissions that this app seeks during installation, which might be seen as unnecessary for the functioning of the app. Security conscious people may find it daunting to allow all those permissions for an educational app.

You can read the details of the Permission this app seeks on its page n google play store. Here is a link to the app's page. Look under Additional Information - Permissions - View details.

I could have opted out of reviewing this app for security reasons, but this is the best free app I found therefore I decided to let you know about it.

Here is a video demonstrating the apps different features


Fruits and Vegetables App by Cleverbit

The Fruits and Vegetables App by Cleverbits is one of the most popular free App on this topic. It is a trimmed version of their commercial App.
The free app contains the following number of cards
12 fruits
15 Vegetables
4 berries
4 flowers
4 mushrooms
4 nature scenes
4 natural events
4 seasons

It is a good app with beautiful pictures, clear pronunciation of each word, and background sounds.
You can watch a video of this app below


Here is a link for the App in Google Play store



Wednesday

Muscular Anatomy App


If you are a student of biology, medicine or just a curious enquirer, you will find Anatomy Muscles app quite interesting. It displays images and a description of the human muscular system.If you search for "Muscular Anatomy" under Apps category in your "Play Store" in your Android Phone, you will find this app is the most downloaded on this subject. There is another App which provides a 3D view. You cal also try that one, but in this article we will stick to this App.


These are the different categories displayed on the opening screen after the app is installed and opened


Let us look how it looks if I open the Face



There is a semi circular Arrow that will rotate the view in three angles, in Front, Side and Back. The Plus and Minus button allow you to Zoom in and out the image. The different muscular sections are marked with numbers. Each number has a title and detailed description given in the bottom panel. If you click on the Title of the text in the bottom panel you will get a pop up menu of all the numbers. Select one to read the detailed description. The text can be scrolled in the bottom panel. Thus the image stays always in the upper part while you can read its description in the lower panel. Quite a thoughtful App created keeping in mind the Students of this subject. If you are not a medical student and you just want to see the detailed imagery of the muscular anatomy then you can try the 3D app instead.  

Bones 3D App for human skeleton anatomy


If you are a student of biology, medicine or just a curious enquirer, you will find Bones 3D app quite interesting. It displays the human skeleton in 3D. The model is rotatable and expandable. When you select any part of the skeleton, you can see that part in a different color and its English and Latin name and  you can expand the text layer to read the details.

It also has a feature to take photos or snapshots of the model which are saved in a folder Bones3d, in your images folder.

It is a multilingual App, The circular menu above displays options to select from several different international languages. The Color pallet will mark different bones with separate colors. The Semi circular Arrow is the Auto Rotate menu. You need to touch it again to stop rotating. You can slide your fingers to rotate, use the tow finger expanding gesture to enlarge the view and closing fingers gesture to compact the view.

The rightmost icon will take a snapshot of the current view of the model and save it in a folder.
You can also watch a video of this App in action.


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