Software : In Depth: Getting rid of Google: best replacement apps for Android users |
- In Depth: Getting rid of Google: best replacement apps for Android users
- Industry voice: How to deliver first-class mobile services in the enterprise
- Microsoft's Minecraft buy said to have cost it $2.5 billion
| In Depth: Getting rid of Google: best replacement apps for Android users Posted:  Best replacement apps for Android usersAndroid is an operating system built by Google but that doesn't mean that every app you use on your Android handset has to be the creation of those fine folks in California. There's a whole world of faster, sleeker, prettier apps, that don't store all your data just waiting for a download. Here's the complete solution to purging all of Google's in-built apps. K-9 Mail is probably the most well known alternative to Google's inbuilt Mail or Gmail apps. Although the interface can feel a little clunky on occasion (namely, every time you open the app up), the range of customisation options is comprehensive, and should let you tweak things to your heart's content. The full range of support for pretty much every mainstream email account is, of course, very welcome.
AquaMail also deserves a mention as the honourable runner-up here. It's a little easier to set up, and also has a more powerful tablet interface, if you prefer to handle your electronic mail on a bigger fondleslab. The paid version is £3.00 (US$4.95, AU$4.95) if you want to unlock all the features, however. SMSA texting app should, in our opinion, be the simplest thing possible – and Hello SMS is about as stripped back as it gets. It claims to be "the first tabbed texting app", and while that's not strictly true, thanks to Google's own Hangouts app, Hello does provide a pretty neat SMS experience. The side tab lets you navigate through conversations, with good touches like adding a flag to show which country an unknown message has come from, or the initials of someone who's actually in your contacts. Messaging is as simple as you'd like it, with threaded conversations just as you'd expect, and a full range of notification customisation options. It even offers and iMessage-style feature (currently in beta), where texts to other hello SMS users are free. CalendarThe replacement that we have used for Google Calendar for a few years now is Agenda, which offers a radically different UI to most calendars. While a month, week or day view is offered, it's the grid-free agenda view (showing your next 10 or so upcoming events) that is most useful. Navigating round the app is simple, once you get the hang of swiping between different views, and even adding events is fairly easy (although multiple calendars could be handled better). The only real downside is the £1.49 (US$1.99, about AU$2.20) asking price. ClockGoogle's Clock app is fairly utilitarian – which, in fairness, is all you really need to get you out of bed in the morning.
If, however, you want to wake up to a design that someone's really put the time and effort into, Timely is a good bet. The simple clock app is better designed than some cathedrals, and once you've got your head around the swipe-based navigation, it's also a fast way to set alarms. Best of all, it won't cost you a single shiny penny. CameraThe main reason to ditch Google's in-built Camera app is the lack of fine manual controls, with The Big G favouring a simplified UI. Camera FV-5 Lite is an excellent free alternative, which puts more advanced controls (exposure, ISO, and metering modes, in particular) onto the viewfinder, as well as a histogram. There's even more under the hood. A good exposure bracketing option can help you make good HDR images, which is often a major help given the small sensors on smartphones. The intervalometer enables timelapse photography, assuming you can bear to part with your smartphone for the duration of an entire sunrise. GalleryQuickPic is everything you want in a photo viewer: super-simple, fast navigation, options that get out of the way quickly when you want to full-screen a photo. It also has integration with all the major cloud services, so that you can pull all your photos into one place.
The tablet interface is just as good, and best of all, there's support for almost every image format going – including your entire collection of cat GIFs. ChromeChrome's in-built browser is fantastic if you're constantly hopping between desktop and mobile browsing, but its UI isn't the simplest, and there's always the nagging concern about Google recording your worst internet depravities. The most straightforward replacement for Chrome is Dolphin browser, a fast-and-light Android that trades Chrome's frills for some serious performance. There's also a gesture option, that lets you create a gesture to launch the browser from anywhere on your phone. LauncherProbably the most visual change you can make to an Android phone is to strip it of its default launcher (the program that 'makes' the homescreens and app drawer), and replace it with one of the many third-party options that litter the Play Store. The best of the lot is Nova, which offers a ton of features in its free version (and a positively overwhelming smorgasbord in the paid-for edition). You get control over icons, colour schemes, transition animations – pretty much anything, although Nova just about strikes the right balance between simplicity and customisation.
Another standout option, however, is Apex Launcher, which offers nearly the same laundry list of options as Nova. On our test devices, we saw a tiny decrease in performance with Apex over Nova. Although that's arguably balanced out by Apex's superior tablet mode. Either way, both launchers offer a fairly major step up over Google's stock launcher. MapsGoogle's Maps app is hands-down the hardest to replace, because nothing comes close to offering the quality and quantity of mapping info that Google's got on tap. The closest competitior, Apple Maps, is only available on iOS. But if you insist on escaping Eric Schmidt's grasp, MapQuest is probably your best bet. The app itself is surprisingly good, with a simple UI and a good range of options – it's just the mapping data itself that lets it down, with inaccurate and outdated coverage a major problem. At least it's free.
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| Industry voice: How to deliver first-class mobile services in the enterprise Posted:  People using mobile services expect them to evolve as new technology becomes available: innovative features, additional services, improved performance – customers will demand all of these, and won't be happy if they have to wait six months to get them, especially when they see their friends' service providers offering the enhancements within weeks. Agility is the name of the game, and you need to structure your mobile delivery approach to be rapid, iterative and responsive to evolving needs. However, you must also think strategically, to ensure your agile delivery takes you in the right direction. While there can be a natural tension between agile and strategic thinking, the right approach can address this effectively. Moreover, you need more than just a team of iOS or Android developers. High-quality mobile services require a broad range of interconnected skills. Skills blendWhile app developers will play an important part in the delivery of your mobile services, they're one cog in a much larger system that encompasses technical and business skills – all of which are required to make mobile a success. You need expertise in strategy roadmap development, business process design, experience design, systems integration, agile development, and testing and release strategy. No one person will possess all these skills. This is why it's important that the respective individuals understand the others' roles and the implications on their own job. For example, an experience designer must create something that will load in a tolerable time – a mobile user will not want to wait 10 or 15 seconds for a page to appear. Moreover, the blend of skills required to deliver a great mobile service is rarely found within one organisation. It's therefore important to choose your delivery partner carefully, to complement your own in-house competencies and ensure no part of the overall mobile experience is left out. Mobile delivery approachHigh-quality mobile services begin their life as part of a high-level strategy: what does your organisation want to achieve, and how will mobile help it get there? This strategy then needs to be turned into a list of features – a service catalogue or product backlog, if you will. From here, you select which features to deliver first, bearing in mind the relative cost and time required for each. This is when you can set about building your four-tier engagement platform, delivering features iteratively to construct your mobile service offering. Each iteration should follow a typical agile delivery cycle, delivering a carefully defined set of functionality. Whether you deploy this after each iteration or bundle up a few features to release together depends on their importance and complexity. Following deployment, you'll want to test your mobile experience with real users, use your analytics to assess how it's being used, and feed this learning back into your service catalogue. This will help revisit your strategy and shape future iterations to meet continually changing customer needs.
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| Microsoft's Minecraft buy said to have cost it $2.5 billion Posted:  Why would Microsoft want to buy Mojang? Now that's a silly question. Minecraft is one of the most popular games of this day and age, and it has longevity too. No wonder the deal is reportedly already locked in, according to Reuters. The Microsoft-Mojang buy was first rumored this week, and the site's source says that Microsoft has already agreed to purchase the independent swedish developer headed by Markus "Notch" Persson. The final price tag? That would be $2.5 billion (about £1.53b, AU$2.76), said the source. Announcement incomingMicrosoft and Mojang will reportedly announce their union on Monday. Reports earlier in the week said that the deal was close to being inked, and that Microsoft could pay around $2 billion (about £1.2b, AU$2.2b). Maybe Microsoft had to up its offer to seal the deal? After all there are a million reasons why Microsoft would want to buy Mojang, and Reuters says the company will use its newfound ownership of Minecraft to boost its Windows Phone handsets and Surface tablets. But why would Mojang want to bow down to new corporate overlords when it's been raking in dough by the hundreds of millions as an independent company all these years? That much remains to be seen, but hopefully the studio offers some sort of explanation if this deal really is announced on Monday. The scariest thought is what Microsoft owning Minecraft will do to the versions of the game that are already out on iOS, PS4 and other platforms. |
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