8 Free Apps for the Christmas Holidays
Whatever you are planning to do this Christmas, if you’re among the UK’s 91% of daily smartphone users, we think there’s a good chance that you’ll be interested in the wonderful world of apps. So here we’ve gathered a shortlist of eight apps that you can download and install on your smartphone in time for the holiday season. Our selections were designed to cater for a wide range of different interests. Seven are available for the Android operating system, and all eight for iOs.
Citymapper Transit Navigation
Real-time departures. Transport maps. Line status and real-time disruption alerts. Uber integration. Live cycle hire info. Constant updates. Everything you need — and may not even realise you need.
Citymapper Transit Navigation is a transport guide to some of the world’s most popular cities, promising you maps and timetables for the local public transport systems, information on bicycle hire availability, integration with the Uber taxi service, and live alerts to any disruptions to services. The app currently supports 39 cities, of which three are in the UK, with another 18 in continental Europe including Russia and Turkey, 11 in North America, and 7 in the rest of the world. It is available for both iOs and Android.
Google Translate
Text translation: Translate between 103 languages by typing
Offline: translate with no Internet connection (59 languages)
Instant camera translation: translate text in images instantly just by pointing your camera (38 languages)
Google Translate offers instant computer software-based attempts at translation between 103 of the world’s languages. Its translations are designed to be contextually sensitive, so that it will translate the same word differently depending on the other words in the same clause. In its translation performance, it remains imperfect, and can generally be bettered by a native speaker of the target language, but it’s extremely convenient as a way of getting to a passable approximation to the wording you want in a language at which you are less than fluent, and provided that you know the target language reasonably well (e.g. to GCSE or O-level standard), you can generally spot enough of its mistakes to correct them into something that reads properly or rephrase your source input in a way that is easier for the app to decipher. The app is available for both iOs and Android, while PC users can simply visit the website and use it without any download needed.
Blitz Esports
From League of Legends to CS:GO, this app provides up-to-the-minute scores, complete news coverage, and live streaming games for all major tournaments.
Blitz Esports targets a particular niche in the online video game-playing market: the passive spectators of star players’ games. The app is aimed at fans of four popular games called League of Legends, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch and Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. It promises to live-stream to your mobile device action from all the major tournaments held for players of each game. Statistics, news stories, fan chatrooms, full game action replays, and reels of retrospective tournament highlights are also offered. The app is available for both Android and iOs devices.
Lose It! – Calorie Counter
Lose It! is the world’s most fun and effective weight loss program! Simply download the app, set your goal, and track the foods you love to lose weight. It’s simple: You use it, you lose it.
Lose It! is a diet-tracking app that allows you to set personal goals for weight loss and then recommends to you a daily calorie intake to help you achieve your objective, taking into consideration your age, sex and height as well as your current mass. You can register all the meals you have eaten to help monitor your actual calorie intake. Access to a user support community is also available free of charge. At extra cost, a premium subscription version of the app includes additional meal-planning and nutrition-goal-setting facilities, and allows integration with some popular third-party activity-tracking and fitness-tracking apps. Lose It! Is available for iOs and Android devices, and also as a web-based application and for Kindle.
NOOK
Get the FREE NOOK Reading App for your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to start enjoying Barnes & Noble’s award-winning eBook discovery and digital reading experience.
Nook is an app that allows you to download and read any of the four million eBooks sold by the US-based bookstore Barnes & Noble. The facilities offered by Nook include user-adjustable text size, font style and brightness level. If you don’t have time to read a whole book in one sitting, it remembers the page you got to last, allowing you easily to find your place when you return to it. Compatible not only with iOs and Android but also with PC, it’s available from the Apple App Store, Google Play and the Microsoft Windows Store.
NINE
Built for visual people who use their camera as a way of remembering things they want to take action on - NINE lets you capture quickly, organise simply and find easily.
Nine is billed by its developers as a ‘visual to-do list’. Put simply, it encourages you to take photos representing tasks you want to accomplish, then to store them in its memory. You have the option of adding one of nine text and icon-based labels to each item: choose from ‘do’, ‘make’, ‘go’, ‘buy’, ‘listen’, ‘watch, ‘read’, ‘note’, and ‘love’. These then become virtual filing drawers to which you can return to view all items bearing the same label. Nine currently runs exclusively on iOs. Download it from the Apple App Store.
Feedly - Get Smarter
Feedly is connected to more than 40 million feeds, you can really go deep and find the niche content that is specific to your work, passions or interests.
Feedly is a user-customisable newsfeed generator that allows you to view content from your personal selection of a wide range of online periodical publications, including newspapers, business magazines and industry journals. It also allows you to add in your favourite blogs, YouTube channels and Google keyword alerts so that content from them is blended in. It even allows you to save multiple feed presets, so you can organise your favourite content by theme and only view the feeds of interest to you at any time. You can even handpick articles to save on virtual boards and share these with others. Feedly is available for both iOs and Android mobile platforms, and also for PC and even the Amazon Kindle.
Food Network In the Kitchen
Need inspiration for your next meal? Or looking for a recipe that’s on TV now? Our new app will help you do just that! Delicious recipes from your favorite Food Network chefs and shows has never been so easy.
In the Kitchen presents you with a collection of more than 70,000 recipes produced by chefs featured on a television channel called Food Network. The recipes are organised into categories for ease of browsing, and you can save and share your own lists of favourites. Built-in voice recognition technology also allows you to remotely instruct the app to read the next line of your recipe while your hands are busy trying to make it. The app also features a virtual cupcake-design game for fun. It is available for both iOs and Android.
