There are apps you have on your phone that you never use and you have apps you need but never realize what they are or how they can be used. Ever stumbled upon a particular mobile app and wondered why you haven’t been using it your entire life? That’s a shared experience – everyone has that one app. The Week brings you a list of some applications you may not have on your phone right now but could definitely use. 

Prisma
You see those Instagram pictures your friend posts and wonder how they sprouted artistic wings overnight, don’t you? And when you ask them how they did it, they give you vague answers and imply they’ve always had an eye for art. The thing is most often these pictures are enhanced and altered by the use of photo editing apps. Prisma is one of them. Prisma’s filters are modeled in the likeness of famous paintings (those of Picasso and Van Gogh and other prominent painters’). There are more than 30 filters to choose from and they add an extra dimension to your mundane pictures – mundane for now but art when Prisma is through with it. Randomly choose a picture from your gallery and open the picture through Prisma. Now select a filter from your options.  Air craft, gothic, mosaic are some of the options you can choose from. Pastel, edgy, or abstract – go wild with your pictures.

LastPass
This life of ours is lived in multiple social media accounts, work profiles, and so many other kinds of accounts that ask for their own sets of passwords. These many passwords are often very difficult to keep track of. Using the same password for all the accounts isn’t just unsafe but impractical (different accounts have their own requirements for passwords). LastPass is here to rescue you. The basic version of LastPass is free and for normal dealings, the basic version is enough. LastPass works as an extension on your browser so download the app on your phone or PC and enable the extension. Every time you’re on a page that needs a password or a filled in profile, LastPass will automatically fill the spaces for you. Before opening a browser however you’ll need to login to your account and punch in your password to enable LastPass.

Hear
Too many times we’re itching to reach for our earphones but given the sticky situation refrain from it because it would be inappropriate to listen to music then and there. Or often the non adjustable nature of music makes it difficult to hear it and do something else at the same time. Hear (pun intended) is where you can adjust any kind of audio files to your own liking. Love vocals? Use the ‘Super Hearing’ filter to focus just on the vocals and separate the background score. With ‘Auto Volume’ mute background noise, but you will still be able to hear people when they talk to you. Use ‘Talk’ to turn normal voices into auto-tuned music, quite a chuckler this one. There’s also a filter, ‘Office’ for when you can’t concentrate and need to focus. All these mentioned filters and there are more for free.

Blinkist
Blinkist is everywhere. In paid content, pop up advertisements, and it seems there’s always an article every day written on whether Blinkist is an efficiency tool or just a shortcut for the half-passionate people. Blinkist is basically a mobile app through which people are claiming to read a hundred books every month. What Blinkist does is that it summarizes books into bite sized reads that you can read under 30 minutes. Bear in mind that there are only non-fiction books available with a few rare exceptions. Reading fantasy books through summaries can get pretty sad. Blinkist has its own team of writers and readers who read these books and summarize them in a few words. So far there are over 3000 nonfiction books listed under the app. Often with non-fiction titles, writers tend to overwrite anecdotes and exaggerate an argument. So missing a chunk of the writing is acceptable with these titles if you just want to know what certain books are about.

Pushbullet
How many devices do we own and use on a daily basis anyway? Too many to keep track of and carry around.  For reasons of our own, sticking to one device for all tasks is quite impossible. Suppose you downloaded a photo on device A and when using device B you don’t have access to the picture. Pushbullet exists entirely for this. The core function of the app is to combine just about all that we use on our devices into one main device. Pushbullet also works on PC and Mac. Say you make your laptop the main device then you can text messages from your laptop, and get notification about calls when working on your laptop. Now if you download a picture on device A, the picture will be saved on devices B, C, D, E, and so on. Pretty useful, wouldn’t you say?
 

 
• Apps
 
• blinkist
 
• prisma
 
• pushbullet