The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

Google may not be happy about it, but Samsung’s Galaxy line of smartphones is the currently jewel in the Android crown. It’s the one company capable of standing toe-to-toe with Apple on every level — they’re high quality, look incredible and make  you feel superior than your fellow humans just by having one in your possession. As great as other Android devices are, they just don’t have the cultural cache and rabid fanbase that the Galaxy phones have built in the past couple of years. No wonder Apple has been at war with Samsung over patents for the past forever: this is the only device currently on the market that threatens the iOS position at the top of the mobile mountain.

And it looks like the Galaxy S4 is just around the corner.

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Mobile devices have already changed the way movies are watched, so isn’t it appropriate that they’ll soon change the way that movies are made? Although Apple has developed an iMovie app that allows for basic video editing on your iPhone or iPad, there’s a big difference between iMovie and an actual professional editing suite that will allow you to edit a project that won’t look like it was hashed together in a high school multimedia class. It’s going to take something bigger, grander and significantly more expensive to to make tablets and smartphones a major player in the filmmaking industry.

Enter TouchEdit.

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The Game: Hackycat
The Device: iPhone 5
The Price: $0.99
The Basics: Do kids still play hacky sack these days? When I was in high school the second-favorite activity that involved standing around your friends in a circle was hacky sack. You’d kick around the little woven sack to your friends, trying not to be the one that let it fall. Once in a while someone would get better than the others and start doing fancy maneuvers- behind the back kicks and stalls on the tip of their shoes – and they’d either be ooed and aahed over or just merely shunned from the group. At every gathering someone would inevitably pull out a hacky sack from somewhere on their person and a game would start up, although to this day I can’t really tell you why. More after the JUMP…

Sony is expected to officially announce the PlayStation 4 this Wednesday and it’s expected that Microsoft will won’t be far behind in unveiling the new XBox (which may be called the XBox Infinity if you want to believe the internet). As a casual but always curious gamer, I’m interested to hear the details of the new consoles, but as a writer for a site that deals with mobile technology, I’m especially curious to see what these new consoles have learned from the mobile app world and if they’ll strive to integrate the two worlds.

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One of the keys to the success of Apple has been its retail branch. After all, the iPod, the iPhone the iPad are tough sells on paper. That may sound silly, but go ahed and take a personal flashback. Remember the countless articles and news reports speculating on what risky propositions they were. Remember the countless tech experts claiming that these now iconic iDevices were going to be egg on Apple’s face. But all it takes to sell a great smartphone or a great tablet is to let the potential customer use one. Let an expert show them the features. Give them a retail playground where they can see what they’re getting for the seemingly absurd asking price. It paid off so well for Apple that Microsoft has followed suit, opening countless new stores to help push their Surface Tablet.

And finally, it looks like Google is going to enter the retail fray.

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Last year, Twitter finally delivered on a promise that it had been making for ages: it would allow us to download our entire archive of tweets to peruse at our own pleasure. Well, at least it finally delivered for some users. The feature rolled out slowly and randomly, with some users given access to the feature immediately and others having to wait as Twitter slowly added the option to millions and millions of Twitter profiles. And you can guess which of those two groups I was in.

After weeks of anticipation and anger and angry cries at the Twitter gods, I had given up hope…and then I checked my Twitter settings yesterday and finally saw it: Request Your Archive. It was here. I clicked it. I wish I hadn’t.

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A while back, I caught wind of a new app that was being developed to change the way we manage email. The first article I read about this new app was on TechCrunch, and I scoured the web thereafter to learn more about how this (or any) app could get my inbox down to zero, and keep it there. The magic bullet of an app is called Mailbox, and it is developed by a company called Orchestra, Inc. Follow this link to read more about Mailbox: Putting Email In Its Place.

Mailbox has been in development for a while now. Orchestra has always aimed to help solve the problem of inefficient emailing, and its first app called Orchestra To-Do tried to solve exactly that. The problem they had, as many to-do list apps seem to have, is that people don’t stick with it. Instead of permanently migrating to-do listing activities away from email and into a more robust program, people seem to revert back to emailing themselves to-do items. I’m guilty of that. Orchestra experienced this same phenomenon with the decline in usage of its to-do app, and iterated—Mailbox was born.

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The Game: The Godfather Slots

The Device: iPhone 5

The Price: Free

The Basics: You know what I most think about when I reminisce about The Godfather, one of the greatest films of all time, one whose influence can still be found everywhere in our culture? Slot machines.

So clearly you can imagine how excited I was when The Godfather: Slots was released. Not only would I get to play slot machines in famous slot machine locations such as the Don’s office or Connie’s Wedding, but I would get to play without spending real money! Each location features an exciting static image and icons on the machine that correspond to the scene — the office contains a pinky ring and a nervous Luca Brasi as icons, for instance. To play you choose the amount of lines you want to play and how much to put on each and hit spin. And then you see what you got, and you hit it again. You can keep doing this forever!

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It’s Valentine’s Day, guys! Today. As in Right Now! It’s not too late to save your Valentine’s Day! Whether you’re single or dating someone, you can make it a memorable day if you take risks and explore a little bit! Keep reading after the jump to see what tips I recommend for saving your day. No matter what happens, know this: the best thing about Valentine’s Day is that it will be over tomorrow no matter how things go down!  More after the JUMP…