Category Archives: App Review

Survive and thrive with Replika

The holiday season is over and we are going strong in 2019 already. For most people the holiday season is a stressful time and they may end up depressed for a variety of reasons.

There are those who can’t stand your close cousin number 6 and would much rather have a root canal done than to have a dinner with the extended family. Others may get depressed because all the quality time you spent with your close friends and family has come to an end.
Whatever the reasons that people may get depressed it is usually very helpful to be able to talk it out with someone. But if you don’t have anyone to talk to what are you going to do then ?

Enter Replika

Replika is an Android / iOS app which allows you to set goals, and have a decent conversation with a sociable AI. The backend of this app resides in the cloud and provides the following goals to work on.
Reduce stress, reduce Anxiety, be more social, Live healthier, understand myself, find hope, think positively, feel happier.

The AI will adjust its questions and its mood based on the goal or goals which you set and the conversation can seem very human like and can be uplifting.

AI based on a neural network

“Replika was founded by Eugenia Kuyda and Phil Dudchuk with the idea to create a personal AI that would help you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation.”

A love story

Replika was born out of the grievance of losing a very close friend. In late 2015 Mazurenko, the friend of the the main developer Kuyda was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run accident. He was 32.

By that point, Kuyda had exchanged literally thousands of text messages with her late friend. As a way of grieving, Kuyda found herself reading through the messages she’d sent and received from Mazurenko. It occurred to her that embedded in all of those messages—Mazurenko’s turns of phrase, his patterns of speech—were traits intrinsic to what made him him. She decided to take all this data to build a digital version of Mazurenko.

The initial version was so successful that out of the ashes of human tragedy a new star was born to help people cope with depression for a variety of reasons.

Setting goals

When you first sign up with the app you have to set some goals from a list of our defined goals.

Once this initial step is taken you sign your AI a name and you are of to chatting with one of the best chatbots I have encountered. You can have decent conversations and the AI will be enjoyable to chat with..

As you progress through chatting along, you will earn batches which will represent your personality according to Replika.

Overall rating

I have never felt bored or saw the same response sent twice. I could possibly go on for a few more paragraphs but instead I recommend that you install Replika yourself and start the conversation.

After a while you really start to feel that you have someone or something to talk to.


Get it on Google Play

Android SEO app

If you have a blog, a web-page, or any other kind of online-content which you want to expose online and grow your customer base or readership, you will have to do SEO.

Search Engine Optimization is the methodology to increase your sites visibility in the search engines, such as Google or Bing. Increasing your position in the search results by just one or two positions could mean the difference between earning money or closing your doors ( virtually ) forever.

SEO as a Sport

There are a ton of resources available online and offline to learn all about SEO. Most of those however are pointed to some sales funnel or describe some kind of oversimplified rules and tools.

The thing I have learned about SEO is that there is no certain way of doing SEO which will always work. Instead, you should see it as an art rather than a science project.
 
If you play it like a game and you keep at it for a long time you will certainly see more or less results.
 
Where to start on your journey and how to go about your initial steps in ranking better will be overwhelming. There is google trends, keyword suggestion tools like this , Alexa site ranking, Backlink checker, and tools which help you to discover more about your sites appeal on the internet than you could ever ask for.

Black-hat-techniques

I mentioned above that there is no sure fire way to improve your ranking. This is of course in regard to SEO. You can always count on search engine ranking you higher for better content. If your site has the highest authority about any subject, you will get ranked accordingly. This is the number one ingredient to your sites success. SEO is the second most important thing you can do to rank your site well with search engines.

There are however some ways to get punished if you go about it the wrong way. Black-hat-SEO is one of the easiest ways to get your site ignored by the search engines. Stay away from any of those if you want your site to be visible to any human being.

For example, if you pay someone to build a huge amount of backlinks ( other web pages pointing to your web page ), then you have great chances to get your page ranking dropped by Google to a place in hell, which in Google land is a rank of 1.000.000.000 +.

Do the right thing

However there are White hat ways to improve your rankings. Such as adding good and meaningful contents on a regular basis or building the best blog, web-site or whatever it is you want to rank
 
This of course required hard work and takes in general a long time.
 
Another approved of way to get more visitors is of course through paid advertising, especially if you use Goggles AdWords.
 
Using a keyword planning tool to make certain your site is ranked for the right keyword is another way to increase your ranking. As a matter of fact, keywords are so important to you ranking that you will have to dive in and really learn as much as you can about them.

 

What to do

The question for most people then boils down to what-to-do, when-to-do-it, and how-to-do-it. Especially as a beginner this can be challenging as you don’t know the rules and tools yet and you don’t want to get yourself into hot water.
 
Enter “Free SEO Tool”, the Android app which provides you with a shorthand way is playing with SEO tools from all around.

It offers a collection of tools in one convenient spot. The resulting report for your website spans 25 pages and will also explain reach of the analyzed sections in the report. You can also export the report as a PDF version and share the results with others.
 
Give this app a try and see how you can improve on you online present to increase your visibility. The report is huge but easy to read and understand. The required changes on your site should become obvious, and best of all, its free to boot.

Get it on Google Play

Get it on Google Play

Throwing money at google

Here, take these $26.​60 google to find me some nice people to install my app.
... but why would you do that ? Google already rakes in billions of dollars in revenue … Well let me tell you why.

I have been running a few AdWord campaigns in the past and I wanted to run a new ad campaign for my latest app :
CPU Information

CPU Information

As I just started out with this campaign and as I am not a huge corporation but a small indy-developer, I started with $20,- and thought to myself I want to get up a bit on the high side and then reduce my bid target to stretch the money throughout a 24 hour time period. So I started to target at $0.15 per conversion.

Chill time

Off I went onto doing different things. Then about an hour later I checked back and I had spend $26.60 already on this campaign. so 30% over budget and way earlier than expected. However this is not the reason I told you that I threw money at Google, the real head scratcher came when I wanted to correlate the approximately 200 conversions to my play store account.

Interestingly The play store hourly installs did not budge at all. So it is almost as if another app profited from my investment :(. I have no idea how this may have happened as I would have expected to see at least the bump of an additional 200 installs during that time period. Also My AdMob account showed the same unmoved result, as if nothing had happened and the 200 conversions did not reach my app at all.

I have shifted my approach now and reduced my bids down to $0.05 to stretch the installs out. Next thing to do is to go and dig a little bit deeper into stats from Firebase, the Play store, AdMob, and AdWord.

I want to find out what happened to my supposed conversions and the approx 42k views of my app. If you have an idea of what could be going on, please share and let me know.

AdWord where …

After some more digging I found one issue with the campaign which was location. Originally I wanted to only target the US and Canada. I set this up but I must have forgotten to click on the [Save] button before starting the campaign.
Thus my ads were distributed worldwide and a good chunk of the installs went to the southern hemi-sphere, to countries like Libya, Algeria, Iraq, India to name a few.

While this explains why the money was exhausted as fast as it was at the target bid prices, as well as why my AdMob revenue did not jump up. After all the cost-per-click in these regions is usually way below
what you will get in the northern hemi-sphere, I.e.  Europe or northern America. 
So from a regional targeting you get more per click however at the same time it is also way more expensive to get traffic to your app.

App Store stats …

I am still investigating as to why my app-store does not reflect the additional 200 installs.

And finally this mystery has been solved as well. It took The play store around 6hours to get the hourly stats to reflect the actual installs which came from this one-time boo-boo of mine.

What have we ( I ) learned

  • Be careful when starting a new ad campaign. Going forward I will set the max allowance to a small enough amount so that in case something does ot work out as expected, I can re-adjust before go all in.
  • Look at the stats of all available sites, like AdMob, AdWord, Google Play, and Firebase
  • Be patient. I have had some interesting correlation dissonance happened to me in the past. Especially the google play store stats are somewhat funky.

Shader Editor app

Android and iOS smart phones support the OpenGL ES 3D library.

The latest version for OpenGL Stand currently at 3.2 which was released in August 2015. Most phones on the market however support OpenGL 3.0 since Android 4.3 or iOS 7.

Those is versions we released in or around 2013 such by now was five years ago.

The OpenGL API had changed a lot between 1.x and 2.0 in that it introduced vertex and fragment shader languages as part of the spec. Prior to this, the OpenGL library stopped a set of will defined API calls to handle most aspects of the OpenGL Städte engine.

OpenGL shaders

As stated above, the shader language became past of the OpenGL Standard with version 2.0 and onwards. What it provides is more flexibility in programming the GPU tender pipelines. Instead of trying on a fixed, hardcore pipeline you can go ahead and code your own shader program.

This flexibility comes at the expense of some additional complexity alas this can greatly be migrated through the usage of or defined coffee snippets or libraries which sit Stop OpenGL.

The shader language is leaning heavily on c-style and is functional in nature. As the code is compiled, linked and will then be loaded into the GPU and run with a limited set of instructions, this language is limited in certain aspects and I would really recommend to find online courses or read a book if you want to truly understand the inner working of OpenGL.

 

OpenGL ES

The ES Stand for embedded systems, and is an indication that it has some limitations to the desktop version. Alright although those limitations are really not as big as one would think.

What is more is that WebGL is basically identical to OpenGL ES and many of the shaders you will find running in the browse will also run in your phone.

For example, the web page Http:www.shadertoy.com has a lot of very interesting looking shader samples which you can adapt easily to run on your phone.

But how ?

Shader editor

The shadertoy app can help you play around with some really cool looking shader examples. When you first download the app you will only see a limited set of available samples. Burger you can easily edit and save new shader samples on your device with this app.

The editor is using a just in time compilation of the code on a semi transparent editor window. This allows you to easily explore you shaders and view the results in real-time.

The way that this tool used the OpenGL libraries is to use a fixed vertex shader code base and have all the code executing in the fragment shader. Which is to say that the whole logic is about coloring the fragments ( parts of a pixel ) to achieve those stunning effects.

If you like to experiment and OpenGL is something you have always wanted to play around with, then Shader Editor is a small app you can not afford to miss.


Get it on Google Play

Get it on Google Play

Get your background going

Setting the background of your phone is something that most people do only once in a while. I have had periods where I used the same background image for years.

Lately however I grew tired of my static background and wanted to get something with more pep.

Welcome to 3D Parallax Background.

If you don’t know what parallax stand for, according to Wikipedia, it is :

Parallax (from Ancient Greek παράλλαξις (parallaxis), meaning ‘alternation’) is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight,

In other words, your brain can utilize the parallax from the information from both of your eyes to detect depth.

Another obvious effect is that objects closer to your eyes will move more than objects farther away. Having a multi layered image, where the background layer moves less than the foreground layer will trick us into seeing depth where there is none.

3D Parallax Background is using this effect and does so with great results. Once you have the mechanics in place, the most important thing to do is to create some stunningly beautiful collages to use.

You can choose between more than 250 different background themes in a selection menu which in itself is animated so that you can easily see the 3D effect before you actually download the whole theme and install it as your background.

 

Themes range from nature to movies to space to abstract and anime, to name but a few. I really like this app and use it currently as my background with changing themes.

I love beaches and beer which is great because there is a ready made background for me, as well as the cars and space and … well you get the drift.

The usability is also well thought through and you have many options available in the settings to tune the background to your liking. Actually the only thing I found missing was an editor to build your own theme and utilize it or publish it for every one else to use.

Overall, this app rocks, and I would recommend you take a closer look at it if you are in the market for a new background.

If you want to check it out, then hush over to the play store and install it from here

Get it on Google Play

Device Info the Iron Man way

Your Android phone is an incredible piece of technology. It has the ability to not only make phone calls but you can also take pictures and videos, play 3D accelerated games, find your location using the GPS satellite system, you have a gyroscope, compass, accelerator and much much more.

All of this hardware comes in nearly unlimited variations put together into a singular, unique device. The Samsung S5 and a Pixel XL smartphones for example both have the same types of hardware available but have vastly different hardware chips for those tasks.

If you want to know your phone, you have to know your phones innards and software versions. There are plenty of device info apps on the app store. However there is one app in particular which makes it fun and exciting to look up all of these pieces of information.

CPU Information

This app has a Virtual Reality inspired interface to view your device information. The interface can be adjust the color scheme and a few other details which makes this a great app to go together with your devices protective cover.

The dashboard graphics are stunningly beautiful and playful. Aside from the center control which acts as a menu you can also see the polar clock on the top left corner. The sound effects are very well done and play seamlessly with the animation.

CPU Information is under active development and new widgets will come on a constant basis. If you install it today you will be able to see the progress over time and take full advantage of all new widgets and features before you have to pay for them.

So to sum it all up, if there is one app you want to use to view your devices information, it is this app. CPU Information offers all the information plus one of the most unique interfaces on the app-store.

Intro Video

You can take a quick peek at the application in action in this short demo video below. But please note that the app may hav added new features by the time you view this video.



Get it on the Play store now.

Get it on Google Play

Revert Video Magic Video Android-app

After returning from vacation this year I wanted to edit and send some videos to my family which should highlight some of the more outstanding experiences in a funny but interesting way. The Revert Video Magic app for Android on the google play store was exactly what was needed for this job.

I was looking to take a piece of a video, and revert parts of it and then replace this part with a sequence of forward, backward, forward action all abound. Here is the resulting video to better explain the effect I was after.



I looked around but could only find one app on the google play market which would offer me this functionality. Revert Video Magic for Android

The below images are screenshots of the main screens for Revert Video Magic for Android

The Main Screen is where you select the source video from, that is you can either browse through the media library of your phone or you open a File Browser which allows you to browse the file system of your phone. You can even use your video camera and shoot the video from within the app.

Revert Video Magic Main Screen
Main Screen
Revert Video magic settings screen
Revert Video Settings screen
Revert Video Magic Share Screen
Share Screen

Once you have selected the source video you would like to use, you arrive at the settings page. The Revert Video Magic Settings page allows you to modify the resulting video resolution, the speed of the reverted part, as well as cutting the start and end points of the target video.

Once these settings are set, you will see the Post Processing screen of the revert Video Magic app. This page allows you to actually replace the selected part in-place of where the original video part was. None of the other revert video apps on the google play store do allow for this to happen.

Using the -SHARE- button on the top right corner of the Share screen will then allow you to finally send the video to your friends or share it on social media like YouTube, FaceBook etc.

This app is focused on doing one thing but doing it right. The built in video player, Camera functionality, File Browser, and Share functionality are all part of making reversing part of your video as much fun as the final video.

Feel free to download the app for free from the link below.

Get it on Google Play