AC editors’ apps of the week: Steam, PBS Kids, Atomas and more

Our weekly app picks

It’s Appday Sunday and that means we’re back with more of our favorites to share. Every week we bring a handful of great apps to the table and share them with everyone. Sometimes they are new apps, sometimes old standards, but every time they are apps we love to use.

Give these a look and then take a minute to tell us all about the apps you are using and love so we can give them a try. We all find some of our favorites right in the comments on these posts!

Russell Holly — Steam

I usually spread my gaming across just about everything, but with Fallout 4 and a recent urge to play through Bioshock: Infinite sucking up most of that time I’ve been on the PC. It also means I’ve been spending a whole lot of time logged in to Steam, which lead me to grab the app so I can keep an eye on what my friends are doing and decide if I need to wander back to the PC for something.

I don’t think I’ll ever use it for shopping or anything, but having Steam in my pocket is a nice way to keep up with friends that don’t play elsewhere.

Download: Steam (Free)

BBC Weather

I’ve gone back and forth on weather apps, particularly as most phones now have them preloaded. But BBC Weather is still my main choice. As well as a breakdown of the upcoming week’s weather, either by day or by hour (for the next 48 hours), the BBC’s weather app lets you pin cities of your choice to a slide-out menu for easy access. There’s also a bunch of extra info provided for the meteorologically inclined, including pressure, wind speeds, visibility, humidity and pollen counts during the summer.

What’s more, vital stuff like weather warnings and UK flood alerts are included too. If you’re in the UK, this free app is definitely worth adding to your lineup.

Download: BBC Weather (Free)

Phil Nickinson — PBS Kids Video

We absolutely should not be using our gadgets to babysit our kids. But we do it anyway. So when my 5-year-old gets a little impatient, PBS Kids is a great emergency download that puts a lot of great (and arguably educational) content in front of her. Peg + Cat, Arthur (which I remember reading as a kid), Daniel Tiger, Odd Squad (her favorite!) — and so much more.

So if I’m gonna fry my kid’s brain with too much on-screen stimulation, and least I don’t have to feel quite so awful about it.

Download: PBS Kids Video (Free)

Jen Karner — Amazon Kindle

I’ve always been a voracious reader, and my most prized possession is my library. My problem turned into having too many books, and not enough room for all of them — or room for new additions. Rather than having a room with books overflowing off of shelves and piled to the ceiling, I’ve started picking up about half of my books via Amazon Kindle.

The ability to pick up the next book in a series at a tap, find new authors, and carry around a full library on my phone just can’t be overstated. There are also dozens of books, series, and authors, that I never would have discovered without the Kindle. While Ebooks aren’t necessarily about to replace print books entirely, they are a great way to supplement your library, or carry certain books with you always.

Download: Amazon Kindle (Free)

Ara Wagoner — Nova Launcher

This week we updated our Best Launchers, so I spent much of it floating between various launchers seeing how they’ve held up in the year since we last visited them. And while it’s always fun to try new things, it’s also nice at the end of the week to come back to something familiar. Nova was my first third-party launcher, and while it certainly wasn’t my last, it still feels like coming home.

Also, my HTC One A9 started giving me attitude this week, so I decided it was time to give it some spring cleaning and was reminded of one of my favorite Nova features: cloud backup and restore. Yeah, many launchers allow you to back them up, but they’ll back it up locally, and/or they’ll often given it an ambiguous name that’s either hard to find or hard to distinguish between your other backups (assuming the launcher lets you keep multiple backups at all). You tap backup in Nova, not only can you name it whatever you want, but you can back it up directly to Google Drive, Dropbox, or anywhere else your little heart desires. So after re-installing all my apps, I could restore my Nova backup from Google Drive and get everything back in its place rather than spending time getting everything back where it was.

It’s not a feature many of us think of when we’re picking launchers, but it’s more of us should keep in mind.

Download: Nova Launcher (Free, $4.99)

Jerry Hildenbrand — Atomas

This isn’t a game for everybody, but it might be great for you.

It’s a lot like any of the popular alchemy games — you mix different elements to create new elements, and you can win by creating them all. Only this time you’re dealing with actual chemical elements. And it’s hard — really hard.

You’re doing all of your mixing inside a circle. You start with two hydrogen atoms, and through chaining and fusion you keep going and going until the circle is full and you can’t do anything else. Then you curse under your breath and start back at the beginning. There’s also Google Play Games support so you can share your success (or your shame) with your friends.

Download: Atomas (Free, in-app purchases)

Stop hackers in their tracks with Trust.Zone VPN

Whether you’re connecting at the airport or passing the time at Starbucks, your unprotected wifi activity is prime hacking material for legions of malicious digital minds.

Protect yourself concretely online with a two-year subscription to Trust.Zone VPN, and save 81 per cent on Pocket-lint Deals for a limited time.

Connecting to public hotspots, such as those at your local coffee shop or a hotel, can be a risky prospect. But even your home network is prone to vulnerability. To close the access point, Trust.Zone VPN encrypts your data and hides your identity so that neither can be stolen by hackers.

Your two year subscription offers unlimited data transfer speeds and unlimited bandwidth, so you can stream all the movies and music you want from subscription services, plus you can unblock geo-restricted content from all over the world with 43 servers in 20 countries. That means unlimited access to Netflix, Hulu and beyond.

Trust.Zone works with most popular devices too, such as Mac, Windows, and Linux based computers, as well as iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile phones and tablets.

Features:

• Hide your IP address and location (no logs kept)
• Unblock any website and bypass Internet censorship
• Stop ISP from tracking you
• Download torrents and media anonymously
• Unlock VoIP applications (Skype, Viber, Google Talk, etc.)
• Stream millions of channels and TV shows globally
• Encrypt all your Internet traffic and stay secure while using public hotspots

Trust.Zone VPN steers prying eyes away from your Internet activity, so you can browse freely and anonymously. Stop hackers in their tracks with a two year subscription, just £24.87 ($35.99) right now on Pocket-lint Deals.

Harvard researchers built a health app for former NFL players

Since 2014, Harvard University has been running the Football Players Health Study, a program that examines the well-being of former NFL athletes as they leave the game behind. Now, as part of its ongoing research, the Ivy League college developed an app called TeamStudy, which uses simple physical activities, surveys and sensor data from an iPhone to learn more about the state of a player’s health.

The collected data comes together in one place thanks to Apple’s ResearchKit, and Harvard researches say ex-NFL players helped design the iOS application, as they wanted it to focus on important issues including balance, memory, mobility and pain, to mention a few.

“By bringing the Football Players Health study to this app, we’re able to easily capture data from participants all over the nation, enabling us to better understand the everyday experiences of former NFL players,” Harvard’s principal investigator of TeamStudy, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, said in a press release. “Traditionally, we study participants in one location, failing to capture their real-life, day-to-day experience. Using ResearchKit, we will be able to quickly identify patterns that could lead to treatments for health conditions faced by former NFL players.”

Via: CNET

Source: NFL Players Association

Samsung Smart Windshield needs to go into production ASAP

Every once in a while, a concept comes along that makes so much sense you wonder why it doesn’t already exist. The Samsung Smart Windshield is one such example. While technology for cars and trucks seems to move at a fever pitch, advancing what’s possible each and every year, motorcycles just don’t see the same type of advancement. It’s time for that to change.

The Samsung Smart Windshield is simple, and the technology already exists to put it into production. Using a smartphone like Samsung’s Galaxy series, along with an app and a small projector that shines specific information onto a motorcycle or scooter’s windshield, the concept allows a rider to see navigation information and can send automated responses to emails, phone calls, and text messages while the bike is in motion. While we’re tempted to say something like this could distract a rider, let’s not pretend that plenty of people aren’t already listening to music, glancing at a navigation system or even reading a set of directions printed on paper and attached to the tank or strapped on a wrist.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen heads-up-style display concepts for motorcycles, but having Samsung, one of the biggest names in electronics and technology, at the helm bodes well. Previous concepts like this one from Reevu or, more recently, this one from BMW sought to integrate HUD tech into the two-wheeled world but focused on the helmet instead of the actual vehicle. While that still may be a viable option for some riders, an actual bike-based system seems easier to implement and potentially less distracting since you can choose when to pay attention to it.

As the video clearly indicates, this is still just a concept and not yet for production. Still, we can’t imagine it’s not coming soon. Check out the video above and let us know what you think.

Related Video:

Source: Samsung (YouTube)

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The After Math: OK, let’s try that again

There are just some weeks we’d love to Groundhog Day our way through and try again to get right. Ben Affleck knows what I’m talking about. There was Apple’s snoozefest on Monday that debuted smaller versions of the same stuff you already own. A Texas duplex was razed to the ground because somebody didn’t understand the core concept of Google Maps. And Microsoft hasn’t had to back-peddle this hard since the police arrested Clippy at Miami International with 70 pounds of coke. Numbers, because how else would we keep track of all the superhero movies Ben Affleck ruins?