Seven Top Mobile Apps This Week, Pro Tips & More

You may have missed some of this week’s best new mobile apps. We have made a list of top 5 mobile apps that you must check out. 

EasilyDo Mail

A brand new app of EasilyDo Mail this week that aims to put an assistant right in user’s inbox. The app offers updates on travel delays and shipping notifications as well as features power users will love. This means it would block read scripts and undo sent messages,Mashable.

Pro-tip: Users can now unsubscribe from newsletters and other updates with the help of one-touch email subscription management.

Pad Polly

A community-based podcasting app called Podpolly allows you to create your own podcasts regardless of the size. Users can edit their podcasts and add sound effects as well as a picture to represent it. It also lets you comment and like podcasts that others have shared.

GoPro's New Mobile Apps Are Designed To Make Editing Easy

Quik is hailed by GoPro as the fastest and easiest way to create awesome videos from your GoPro or smartphone footage, offering “automated simplicity”, while Splice focuses on desktop editing software power for mobile devices.
Quik automatically analyses your footage to find the best moments, adds transitions and effects, and syncs it all to the beat of the music (from the app or your own library).

You can choose from 28 unique video styles, each with unique filters, transitions, graphics and fonts. Custom text overlays, title slides and emojis are also on offer.

Quik also has ready-­‐to-­‐watch videos made from related moments on your mobile device automatically created once a week, which you can share on social media straight from the app.

 Splice is designed for those who like to be a little more hands on. You can pick your transition style, trim clips, add filters, show off an epic shot in slo-­mo, and much more. You can add photos to your video and add documentary-­style effects.

Open source framework enables native mobile app development

Although HTML5 has allowed apps to work across platforms, there's still demand for companies to develop native apps for the major mobile platforms.

Progress Software is launching the latest version of NativeScript, an open source framework on the Telerik platform, enabling developers to use JavaScript to build native mobile apps running on the major mobile systems.

With the release of NativeScript 2.0, developers using Google's Angular 2 JavaScript framework can now write native mobile applications for iOS and Android. They can reuse existing skills and code from the web and achieving time and cost-efficiencies.

"Angular integration first shipped with our popular Kendo UI library nearly two years ago, and we continue to see high demand for Angular from our community," says Todd Anglin, chief evangelist and VP technology at Progress. "For the more than one million developers using the Angular framework to write interactive web applications, the NativeScript 2.0 framework represents a giant leap forward -- they can finally create zero-compromise mobile apps with Angular featuring truly native UI and performance".

eBay refreshing mobile apps with updated design + speed improvements

eBay has begun rolling out major UI and overall app improvements to its mobile applications today. Most notable will be both iOS and Android apps seeing a redesign of the main navigation menu. Previous versions of both mobile apps utilized a custom navigation menu: a mix between a top navigation bar and hamburger menu. The app update rolling out from today utilizes standard UI navigation elements for both iOS and Android. Android will be seeing the update released today, and the iOS update will be available in the coming days.

Taking cues from customer feedback and reviews, eBay has put the focus on today’s updates primarily on three key areas within the app: navigation, utility, and design plus speed. Dave Comer, Senior Director and Head of Product Mobile Management at eBay, tells me that the mobile team is putting a bigger focus on releasing more regular updates to the applications. Comer stated, “As we look towards future updates, we will continue to integrate the newest technology, respond to and incorporate user feedback, and evolve the experience to create the best browse, shopping and selling experience possible.”

Brazilian judge orders mobile providers to block WhatsApp for 72 hours

A Brazilian judge has ordered wireless phone carriers to block access to Facebook Inc’s WhatsApp for 72 hours throughout Latin America’s largest country on Monday, the second such move against the popular messaging application in five months.

The decision by the judge in the north-eastern state of Sergipe applies to the five main wireless operators in Brazil and affects WhatsApp’s more than 100 million users in the country. The reason for the order is not known due to legal secrecy in an ongoing case in the Sergipe state court.

In a statement, WhatsApp said the company was “disappointed at the decision” after doing the utmost to cooperate with Brazilian tribunals.

The decision “punishes more than 100 million users who depend upon us to communicate themselves, run their business and more, just to force us to hand over information that we don’t have”, the statement said, without elaborating.

7 ways small businesses can benefit from mobile apps

As many small businesses now know, to stay competitive these days, you need to be mobile. But being mobile is not just about having a mobile-friendly website. (Though if you are a retail or service business, having a mobile website is a must.) It means connecting with on-the-go customers and employees – and helping mobile customers and employees to connect with you (and each other). And these seven mobile applications can help small and midsized businesses do just that.

1. Mobile geo-targeting (marketing & sales). With the rise of beacons and geo-targeting, “it’s become increasingly easy to target key users with location-specific, time-sensitive messages via mobile apps,” says Johan den Haan, CTO, Mendix. “For example, by integrating geo-location technology into a mobile application, businesses can send special offers to customers who are in close proximity to stores.”

“By using this approach, small businesses can decrease spend, narrow their focus and deliver targeted ads to consumers at the right time and place,” adds Roger Hurni, chief creative officer & managing partner, Off Madison Ave.

Furthermore, “combining geo-fencing with SMS texts allows you to connect immediately with customers who are near your business,” says Ashley Orndorff, market research analyst & copywriter, Visual Impact Group. “Set it up for your loyal customers and send them a text about a sale built just for them, a special event or a flash sale when they are oh-so-conveniently close to your store. You'll make them feel special, and by leveraging both exclusivity and scarcity, they'll be more likely to stop in for a purchase or two.”

DHS releases government guide for mobile app development

The Department of Homeland Security released its Mobile Applications Playbook Monday, giving federal agencies a roadmap for creating, testing and deploying apps that will be shared across the government.

The 39-page guide can be used anywhere along an application’s development lifecycle, giving development teams a path forward when they are stuck on an issue related to an application’s progress.

The playbook leans on the agency’s “car wash” process, a continuous cycle that allows teams to build, manage and test source code that has caught on across the government.

Development teams can weigh whether their application would be better on mobile web versus a native app, the difference in user experience between a smartphone and a laptop, what programming language to use, what security and compliance metrics need to be accounted for, and how to test for software bugs.

Satya Nadella: Software bots will be as big as mobile apps

Companies that want to give clients the best possible customer experience should build a bot, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Bots are software agents that can have conversations with customers or other bots and automate tasks such as hotel booking or order delivery. In the future, these bots will greatly simplify our dealings with businesses, he said. 

"Think of bots that you will build as the new websites or new mobile apps. Your customers will interact with your business through these bots," said Nadella, speaking today at the Microsoft Envision conference in New Orleans.

"This is a world that we are at the very beginning stages of. But we think it's going to be much more ubiquitous in terms of its deployment."

The ways these bots could ease interactions between customers and businesses was demonstrated by Lilian Rincon, group program manager for the communications platform Skype