{FREE APP WEDNESDAY} iSyncr for PC

You have yourself a nifty little Android device, but you still have your old iPod Classic or iPod Touch. It's a pain in the ass connecting your Android device to iTunes and drag and drop the music you want into your device. What more of a pain in the ass? Carrying around your old iPod even though you have your Android in your other pocket.

The best answer to your problem is iSyncr. iSyncr allows you to quickly sync your device with the music you have in iTunes using their simple interface. Just plug your phone into your computer, select the iTunes playlist you want, and start syncing. No need to move your music into a new music software, iSyncr works directly with iTunes so you can sync it hassle-free.

There's not much more to say about the app, other than what Apple fan's love to say, "It just works." But sorry for my Apple lovers, this version is PC only. Enjoy saving your $3 on the app so you can get on iTunes and buy some music legally; wink wink.

Here is more detailed information on iSyncr.

[HOW TO] Install Android Apps from Digitally Shanti

[DOWNLOAD] iSyncr

Haunted House HD Review

I love Halloween. It's my second favorite holiday only to Christmas.

The folks at DualBoot Games, creators of other live wallpapers like Celtic Garden have whipped up another for us, this time all haunted and creepy, just in time for Halloween. It's called Haunted House HD, and as far as live wallpapers go, despite it being time-sensitive, it's probably one of the most detailed I've come across.

From the moment you pop open the live wallpaper selector and choose Haunted House HD, the Halloween vibe will wash over you. A camera pans by a creepy house, shrouded in fog, as the lights flicker on and off intermittently. Jack-o-lanterns guard the doorway and frightening messages appear over the door in blood.

Everything is pretty smooth, despite the fact there's so much going on. The door opens and closes by itself while the camera sweeps back, the lights turn on, revealing a silhouette in the window, and the flag on the mailbox moves up and down of its own accord.

If you want to go inside of the house, you'll have to jump into the completely loaded settings menu and change the camera view.

The inside of the house is just as (if not more) busy than the exterior. Lights continue to flicker, the fire is a pale, ghostly blue, and paintings have skulls superimposed over the subject's face. Ethereal footsteps pulse and disappear on the floor, and strange breezes toss the chandalier around. It's a lot to take in, but it's still great fun.

Back to the settings menu, when I said loaded, I meant it. You can pick your camera view, set the name for the mailbox and doorway, pick the kind of face you want for the pumpkins, and individually enable or disable every variable the wallpaper has to offer.

If you feel like getting in the holiday spirit, Haunted House HD has your phone covered. And for a measly $1.99, you can afford getting into the spirit.

[Direct Download] Haunted House HD

Flick Golf Review

All of the typical golf games don’t compare to Flick Golf which is unlike any golfing game you’ve played before on Android devices. The main difference is the amount of control you have on the ball to get it spinning and bouncing in the direction you want it.

Your score is dependent on how close your shot lands to the pin, whether you sink it, land in the bullseye zone or further out in different point rings. There are two modes with quick play where you shoot as much as possible while being timed, and career mode giving you only nine shots. You flick the ball off the tee, and then flick some more while it’s in the air, and while it’s bouncing on the ground.

Rather than playing a realistic golfing sim or even an arcade golfing game you’re given a much simpler golfing experience. Rather than choosing clubs, hitting perfect shots, and traveling across a whole course you just flick once, and your main actions are after the ball has been hit. All of the tedious pre shot adjustments are thrown out the window, and instead you flick to adjust the balls trajectory to land as close to the hole as possible.

Every shot is like playing a par 3 where you’re in one shot range of the hole, and you have a lot of spin at your disposal. You can flick while the ball is in the air to apply back spin or top spin, and even curve the ball. Once it hits the ground you have three bounces to apply the same effects to try to get the ball into the cup.

The game is fast paced arcade action which is quite surprising for a golf game, and can really reach players who have never enjoyed other golf games. The game is simple to pick up and start playing as you just flick trying to get the ball into the hole which is just so intuitive. Also with the mechanic you can be quite successful, and it’s plenty enjoyable having so much control over your shot, and sinking so many hole in ones.

Flick Golf is only $1 on the Android Market. With killer graphics and addictive game-play, it's definitely worth the price

[Direct Link] Flick Golf for Android

Steve Jobs - Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The death of Steve Jobs came as a shock to many, and brought on sadness to many more. A lot of you know I wasn't the biggest fan of Steve or Apple, but being a member of the tech world I know that his absence will be noticed! Steve Jobs was a man that didn't say yes to make others happy, he did what was best for not only his company, but his consumers. For that, I tip my hat.

I know that I will miss him, not because I enjoyed mocking him, but because he changed the life of every person that is fortunate enough to use a personal computer or a smartphone. His ability to make goals and reach them go beyond any other human I have seen to date.

I can't express how much Steve Jobs will be missed, but Bill Gates captures the words that I couldn't create; "The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come."

Many of you may have read the graduation speech Steve gave to Stanford's class of 2005, but I have posted it below for those of you who have not read it. It is the most profound speech I have heard and possibly even life-changing.

"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much."

Rest in Peace Mr. Steve Jobs, this non-Apple fan will miss you dearly!

PicSay Pro Review

As of now, all of you have heard about the new iPhone 4S. One of the only 'major' redesigns to the iPhone was it's camera, which now sports and 8mp camera with some editing tweaks and features. Don't fret too much now; we Android users can do the same with a little help from PicSay Pro!

PicSay Pro is the finest photo manipulation tool available on the Android Market. Take a photo with your Android device, add captions, mind bubbles, stickers, change the color schematics and much more! You're able to add a variety of effects to a picture or add a funny word bubble above a friends head and share it for a chuckle.

The application is extremely polished with an easy UI that makes it easy for anyone to use. Occasionally, larger fingers make it a little more difficult to add small objects, but that isn't the applications fault; just blame your fat hands.

This is by far on of my favorite Android apps. It's entertaining to take a friend's photo and give them a bugs eye and adding a caption above their head saying, 'HELP!'

If you want to have the true editing power your photo's deserve, then just drop the extra $3.99 and give your friends something to look at!

[Direct Link] PicSay Pro

Class Buddy Pro Review

Is it already that time of your college semester? Exams starting to creep up and homework assignments possibly past due? When you have between 15 and 18 hours during your semester, it's easy to lose track of what test is coming up and which assignments have to be turned in when.

With Class Buddy Pro, you can organize each course you take within the respected term or semester. You can schedule class meeting times and input all of your professors information so you don't need to pull out that damn class syllabus to figure out what the office hours are.

One of the best features of Class Buddy Pro is the ability to input assignments, quizzes, and exams and keep track of your grades. You can even tell the app what weight the certain assignment/quiz/exam will be towards your final grade making it easier for you to know how you are doing in the respected class.

A great extra feature of Class Buddy Pro is that it can auto-sync with your Google calendar. It also comes with a customizable Home screen widget.

You've already spent an arm and a leg on tuition, so why not drop an extra $1.50; it'll totally be worth it!

[Direct Link] Class Buddy Pro

SoundHound Review

Upon launching SoundHound, you are greeted with a simple and easy to use GUI. The main screen offers you options to "Tap Here" to identify a current song, or you can press "Title or Artist" to speak an artist, or song title into your phone or, search with text. There are also 2 menus at the bottom of the app that include; History (displays your recent searches) and Whats Hot (displays what people are searching most for).

One of the coolest features I have seen so far is that wheen you press the "Tap Here" for "What's that song?" you can even hum the song that you know and SoundHound will find the song for you (considering you are humming the right tune).

An even cooler feature, if SoundHound finds a song that is in your music library as well, it will have an icon next to the song so you can hear it from your own library.

Here is the official SoundHound Features list:

• Just hold your phone up to a speaker, and SoundHound names the tune in as little as five seconds




• It even works if you sing or hum the melody.




• Instant lyrics and lyrics text search for most songs - whether you find the song with SoundHound or have it in your Android device.




• The world's first ever combined "My Music" and online search: when your SoundHound search results match a song in your music library.




• Charts of the hottest songs, just grabbed songs, and SoundHound's much-anticipated "Underplayed" list.




• Groundbreaking new design with instant access to previews, bbios, top songs and YouTube videos.




• Play a free preview or YouTube video without leaving SoundHound\

Now I've tried out SoundHound and found it to be a feature rich and easy to use app to identify my tunes. I personally love the hum the song feature, even though I can't hum. I do recommend SoundHound to anyone who wants something better than Shazam and willing to drop the much deserved $4.99.

[DIRECT LINK] SoundHound