Latest app reviews

Now here's an app that might take a little while to get our heads around but stick with me people because it could change your life. Check out your keyboard. Can you see any rhyme or reason why the letters are set out the way that they are? It's known as the QWERTY keyboard because, as you'll notice up in the top left hand corner, they are the first six letters of the set. It was originally designed for Latin-script alphabets back in 1873 for the Sholes and Gidden typewriter before being sold to Remington and Sons. It was so complicated that people had to go to typewriter school to learn ...  More

How many times do you read that some poor person has gone missing while walking in thick forest in some remote part of the country? You'd think that it wouldn't be much of a problem these days given the fact that most of us have a mobile phone strapped to our hands for much of the time but it does seem to happen on a regular basis. Lost? Simple! We can just check our GPS, call the authorities or call Bear Grills to come and rescue us pretty damned smart. The thing is, not only do mobiles run out of power pretty quickly but there are also plenty of places out there that have little or no ...  More

Back in the day and before we had computers and smartphones in our repertoire, many of us would keep a Filofax by our side at all times. It would be an essential purchase around Christmas time each year for keeping our notes, phone numbers, addresses and important information in for future reference. It had neat little compartments where we could write down and store everything that we might need quick access to later on. Then computers and mobile devices hit the market with their emails and digital memories and the Filofax became a thing of the past. However, while our devices made life ...  More

In the UK it's reckoned that over 40% of marriages end in divorce. Mind you, if you think that's a worrying figure, it rises to about 50% in the US. Add to that the number of couples who aren't even married and you can see that there's a big problem out there...and I haven't even brought up the number of people who have simply separated. So, what happens to the kids of divorced or separated couples? I've lost count of the number of stories I've read about kids who go downhill when parents decide to go their separate ways. Some parents go to therapy while others simply try to do their best. ...  More

The pandemic has changed our lives so much over the last year or so. In a lot of cases, it's tied us to our homes and even isolated many of us, to a certain extent. As a consequence, we've turned more and more to social media to communicate with each other. WhatsApp, Tik Tok and Instagram have all had a good workout but people are now turning to other more interesting ways to get their message across and, for younger users at least, that passageway isn't Facebook Messenger. The kids, it seems, want something a bit more interesting than simple messaging.   More

If there's two words that you don't often see written in the same sentence it's weddings and sustainability. Weddings are usually lavish affairs with no expense spared whilst sustainability is all about reusing, recycling and protecting the world that we live in. Hopefully, a wedding is a one-off event and we all want everything to be perfect because it will be remembered for the rest of our lives. However, there's no reason why the two can't overlap. With more and more of us trying to live our lives more efficiently by recycling the things that we don't use anymore there's an opportunity ...  More

Over the years we, as humans, have found numerous ways of avoiding being subjected to personal advertising. Back in the good old days of 'snail-mail' we even went to the trouble of putting little 'no junk mail' stickers on our letter boxes to help prevent our mail being inundated with advertising material. So, advertisers got smarter and started targeting our email delivery. You'd open up your email every morning and have to wade through copious amounts of spam until we learned how to filter it straight into our junk folders.   More

There's little doubt that Tik Tok has made a seriously big splash since it appeared a couple of years ago. However, the revelations that the Chinese were about to steal our identities caused it to be frowned on by some. It got to the point where Governments were talking about banning it from our devices unless it was bought by non-Chinese sources. So, it was inevitable, I guess, that someone would come up with an alternative pretty soon. LypStar is one of the first to raise its head and become a potential contender.   More

If there's one thing that the Covid-19 pandemic will do for business when all this is over, it will be to make it leaner and more efficient. So, the last thing that both the financial team and your employees want is to have more paperwork to slow them down. Expense management has long been a slow-moving process for many companies and often involves the lengthy process of manually handing over paper records before waiting for resolution from the finance team. For many companies it's a slow game of paper chase. Expense management apps have gone some way to speeding up this process over the ...  More

There's little doubt that streaming services have been some of the only success stories during the pandemic given that so many people have been stranded in home isolation on and off for the last few months. Because of its vast catalogue and ease of use, Netflix has probably cemented its place as the leader in the field. However, considering that It is pretty much the gold standard of tv and movie streaming services I'm surprised that there's a necessity for an app like this one...but clearly, there is. WhatsOnFlix? Is a new US Netflix companion app for Android and iOS that serves the ...  More