Best apps for Windows Phone, June 2013
SkyMap
Price: $1.99 | By: Deneb Soft | From: Windows Phone Store
SkyMap is an augmented reality app that allows you to see the many constellations, stars, planets and other deep space objects in the sky, simply by holding your phone in front of you. The constellations — including the Milky Way — are rendered in 3D and illustrated in a classical style that harks back to a time when constellations really mattered. Additionally, any class of object — planets, stars and so on — can be removed from the view to clean up the interface.
Amateur (or professional, I suppose) astronomers will also appreciate the ability to have the visuals rendered in red, therefore helping preserve your night vision. And if you see something in the sky that you find particularly interesting, it’s a snap to quickly pull down some information from Wikipedia about the object.
Plus, if for any reason you need to see what the night sky is like in, say, France, you can actually enter any location or time of day from which to view the sky from. It’s almost as good as a real holiday. In fact, I sometimes set up a tent in my lounge room and hang my handset from the tent’s ceiling. It’s like camping without the icky bugs.
Battery Level for WP8
There's a strange part of me that, for no justifiable reason, likes to have a number associated with my battery levels. It's not that I can't appreciate the difference between an icon sitting at three-quarters full and a read-out of 70%, but I just like it that way. Battery Level allows me to display the battery level as a percentage on both the lock screen and the main screen of my handset, as well as access some battery stats — because everybody loves stats.
Rowi
Rowi is an attractive, Modern UI-based Twitter client that provides all the features you really want, like name auto-completion, photo uploads from your choice of services, multiple account support and the ability to send articles to Instapaper, Readability and Pocket. It also throws in a few other features, such as viewing articles via Readability for faster loading, editing photos via Aviary before uploading them and Tweet Marker support, so you can maintain your list of read tweets between apps.
Freda
As far as I’m concerned, an ebook reader is a compulsory addition to every handset that I own. Freda is my choice for Windows Phone because it’s free, supports the most popular EPUB, FB2, HTML and TXT formats (unfortunately, it doesn’t support Amazon’s MOBI format, although since I use Calibre on my PC to manage my ebook library, it’s moot) and allows you to download new books from online catalogues like Feedbooks, Smashwords or Project Gutenberg, or from the inbuilt web browser.
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