TECH/ APPS SPECIAL ..............Make Your Life Easy

 Make Your Life Easy

Set your agenda, type and take voice-control of your device

What's On Your Agenda

The calendar app Agenda has made the journey from iOS to Android. It's not feature filled by any means but for those who want less complexity, this is a plus. Agenda is swipe operated. You switch from year view to month, week and day with swipes and the only buttons around are a plus sign to enter a new event and a navigation button to jump to today view. Creating an event is much the same as elsewhere. You set your date, time, location, contacts, and add notes. An annoyance is that to delete an event you have to scroll all the way down to press the delete button.
 

One thing missing from the Android Agenda app is themes which are a nice extra on iOS, especially the white on black theme.
 

Agenda is free though, so see if you like it for very basic appointments.

Tap And Swipe To Type

Fleksy is an interesting typing app for the iPad and the iPhone. It’s got limitations, but is nevertheless usable, as long as you edit and clean up your writing later. The app provides a bold high-contrast black and white keyboard and as you type on the keyboard, the app guesses and calls out your word. If you don’t get the right one,  swipe and it will take you through options. This happens rather

fast so typing isn’t very slow , though, it’s not as fast as a real keyboard. There’s no spacebar here.

You swipe left and it gives you a space. To get a punctuation, swipe for a full stop and then down for more options.
 

This app is more suited to those who know the QWERTY keyboard layout well. If you need to look, you’ll only slow down and make errors. It has a free and a paid version.
 

Butter With Utter

Utter, still in beta, but available on the Play Store lets you take voice-charge of your Android phone.

There’s a whole bunch of commands listed that you can give Utter to execute. Call, navigate, etc, Siri-style. More enjoyably, you can create your own commands or even questions and answers.

For example, I say “let’s see the news,” and it opens up Flipboard. Or I say “Let’s read” and it says “Yes, let’s!” and opens up the Kindle app.  Utter works very fast with the buttery Jelly Bean and it takes a mere heartbeat to get it to open apps like Gmail. It doesn’t interact inside the app, but gets you to it. Calling people is a challenge because the names are not native to it. Sadly you will not get information on movies and restaurants around you.
 

There’s a choice of voices, but you have to download paid plug-ins for that which take up a lot of space. The app is still being developed and a lot of features are being worked on.

Mala Bhargava

- See more at: http://www.businessworld.in/news/science-and-technology/app-reviews/make-your-life-easy/882646/page-1.html#sthash.nuUunc5C.dpuf