Just got the latest update for the OneDrive app and saw the new tags section that tries to classify photos automatically based on content. Tags range from #building to #group. It is reasonably accurate too, though I don’t take too kindly to baby photos being tagged #dog & #animal. Either ways, good to see a feature like this make it to an app rather than having a research lab project having its thunder stolen by a competitor’s published app (Hyperlapse from Instagram did pretty much this).
Author: Aditya
-
My iPhone Home Screen for 2014
2014 was the year I finally switched to an iPhone all thanks to the broken screen on my much loved Lumia 720. I got an iPhone 5s in June and my iOS app collection from my iPod Touch (2nd gen), iPad 2 & iPad mini made the switch pretty much seamless. I’m making this post inspired by a similar annual exercise by M G Siegler, and hope to study my usage over time. I do still have my Galaxy S3, but that hasn’t managed to become my primary phone in 2.5 years
So, here goes my list of apps used on the iPhone (in the order featured in the screenshot):
- The first party Apple icons are self explanatory as expected. That said, I also use Dropbox, Google+ and OneDrive for my photo backups in addition to iCloud.
- Checkmark 2 is mainly for my location based reminders (Apple’s solution is pretty poor in this regard), and also for general lists
- Alarmed (a free clone of Due) is one of my favourite reminder apps due to its extensive options for setting event repeats (x days from completion being the killer feature for me). Plus it also supports creation of timers and iCloud sync (hasn’t been updated for iOS 8 though).
- Whatsapp is my preferred mode of exchanging online messages with my friends & family.
- Mailbox is mainly for managing Gmail (and no, I don’t have an Inbox invite).
- Paper for browsing facebook, though I still have the main app as lots of apps use it for login.
- Wikipanion to look up stuff on wikipedia, an app I’ve carried over from my iPad. The history feature makes it more convenient than the integrated Spotlight search or using the browser.
- Olacabs is pretty much the Indian take on Uber, and their recent support for the Mumbai Kaali Peeli taxis has made the app more useful than ever. Plus their mini AC cab service is a just hair costlier than the Kaali Peeli and they don’t have any premium for night time rides.
- Google Maps is pretty much the defacto map app for India, and I use it to check traffic before leaving office every day to choose the route to take home.
- Day One is my go to app for daily journal entries, and it is one of the reasons why my online posts (blog, facebook, twitter) has actually gone down. This is a paid app, but I picked it up during Apple’s app store celebration giveaway. That said, I did purchase the Mac version for my office MacBook, albeit at a discount.
- Chrome pips Safari to the browser slot due to its cross platform capabilities since I do use the Galaxy S3 and a Windows laptop at home where its sync functionality comes in handy.
- Argus is a decent fitness app, but I just use to track my daily step count against a goal of 5000 steps. I had also purchased MotionX 24/7 for this purpose and did find its idle reminder handy, but it turned out to be a bit of a drain on the battery in spite of the M7. I’ve also tried quite a few other similar apps like Move, Breeze, Human etc, and each has their strong points. With the Apple Watch coming out soon, I have a suspicion that this area is going to get an overhaul.
- Camera+ is my secondary camera app after Apple’s, mainly for those backlighting situations, and when I want to get the horizon level.
- Shazam has taken over from Soundhound for song identification due to its better record with Hindi songs. I still have Soundhound though, and its active lyrics can be pretty handy.
- Accompli has taken over from Mail & Cloudmagic as my office mail client that’s based on Exchange. The integrated calendar feature is quite handy, and so is the attachment section. Microsoft’s purchase of the software only increases the likelihood that it’s going to become even more handy as an Exchange client.
- MoneyBook is probably the oldest of the lot and one of the first apps that I purchased (for my iPod touch). It’s a pretty simple expense tracker with a nice interface and online backup capabilities.
This of course leaves out the tons of games that I’ve played on my iPad, but does overlap with some apps on my Galaxy S3. A shoutout to some of my other useful apps like Zomato, OneNote, Swarm, Numerous that I use on specific occasions. I’m sure this list will look somewhat different as more apps start leveraging the iOS 8 features and then there’s of course Apple Watch.
-
PK go home or ET meets Satyameva Jayate
One of the main objectives behind watching PK for me was to make this post. So here goes:
- If you thought the PK poster was controversial, just imagine what would’ve happened had he landed in an urban area and encountered an iPod Shuffle carrying thief.
- I half expected to have an ET like cycle sequence given the carrier equipped cycle that Jaggu was riding in her intro sequence.
- The initial Jaggu courtship track has got to be one of the shortest on record in Bollywood.
- A 6 hour handholding session to just learn a language or two, and nothing else! The Hollywood aliens are much much faster at this kind of data transfer.
- There are way too many dancing cars in Rajasthan & Delhi, given PK’s constantly changing wardrobe.
- I seriously wonder what people in embassies do.
- Then again, solving romantic issues with a call to an embassy is probably better than the use of vacuum cleaners to deliver babies.
- If you do want to watch aliens listening to earth music, check out Guardians of the Galaxy.
- If there’s a sequel, will it be called Prrish?
- Parting thought – imagine PK & friends feeling depressed and doing the cheering up dance sequence on his home planet.
-
Forget Uber, here’s Ola kaali peeli
As an office goer in Mumbai, who commutes by taxis, I’ve had my fair share of trip refusals and ended waiting for upto am hour to get a willing cab. The recently launched Ola Cabs feature of hailing a good old kaali peeli in Mumbai has been a real time and hassle saver for me this past week. I’ve used it 3-4 times already & the experience has been quite smooth. Hope it flourishes from here as it solves problems for both the commuter and the taxi driver. Just hope that it doesn’t run afoul of regulators and unions.
One caveat of you’re using their windows phone app which doesn’t seem to have this feature yet.
-
With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility
Of course the smart governments can have a field day with all the data being collected, and would be more reluctant than ever that one of the essential services get blocked by other states…
-
Healthcare links 07/10/2014
-
We streamed live surgery from South America using … – Explorers Community
Lots of promise, but the hardware has some way to go before it can be used reliably
-
Direct streaming worked about 30% of the time. The majority of failures were due to inadequate wi-fi signal (60%), Glass overheating (20%), power failures (10%), or Glass’s OS freezing (10%).
-
Surgeons who wore Glass could either see the display OR capture the surgical field, but not both at the same time.
-
a >300Kbps stream generated a halfway-decent picture
-
30 – 40-second delay in the stream
-
-
-
Healthcare links 07/09/2014
-
Hospitals Are Mining Patients’ Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick – Businessweek
Replace credit card with your Google data and imagine your online habits being pushed analysed to send you Google Now alerts and that you just might form a picture of healthcare a few years from now, especially considering the recent foray of the major mobile OSes into healthcare.
Also, Google did try using search data to make predictions with Google Flu.
-
-
Thinking about the next iPhone
The rumour mill is really heating up, and there have been quite a few leaks showing a larger iPhone. Healthkit is also getting more features in the new betas, including built in support for step counting.
What will be more interesting this time will be what Apple does with the internals, particularly the SoC and camera. On the SoC front, we’ve been stuck on the 28nm node for almost a couple of years, and they’ve already played the 64-bit card to improve performance last year. Maybe they’ll astound everyone by announcing that the new SoC (A8?) is fabricated on Intel’s facilities on their next-gen 14nm process. In fact, even using Intel’s mature 22nm process would be pretty revolutionary. There have been regular rumours of such partnerships over the last few years, so maybe this is the year of the switch?
On the camera front, the decreasing thickness of the iPhones will surely limit the sensor size & optics. The 5s was probably the limit for the 8MP sensor size. This is going to be a really interesting area as Apple has thus far never traded off device aesthetics for camera specs.
