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Episode Guide
- Show Notes
- This Working Droid Episode 151 Inbox by Google
- App Review - Google Fit (YouTube Preview)
- Chromebook Quick Tip - Bookmark Manager
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The Android Realm App Review Yahoo News Digest
Do you like the idea of curated news but don't want to or don't have time to setup the feeds to do that. Want a digest of morning and evening news delivere automatically to your device. Then Yahoo News Digest is the app for you. After a brief tutorial and no sign-in required, the app will present the latest digest for your locality (currently United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and International).
The menu in the app provides two key settings. The first is the 'More Digests' setting. This allows the user to see when the next default digest will be available along with the ability to open past digests for the week. The second is in the settings area. Here, the user can set which digest locality to load when the app is launched along with toggling the ability to be notified when a new digest is available.
Reading articles is as simple as selecting the article to read. A share button is nicely located at top right of the screen to send via social networks, e-amil, SMS, etc. An interesting feature of the app is that it features an easy to read reference area at the end of the article that can be clicked on to load the source in the user's default browser.
At the end of each digest is a circle of the total number of articles in the digest. Once an article is read, the related article number is filled in to let the user know which article was read along with the total number of articles read in the digest. If the user wants more news, there is a read more news button at the end of the digest to get more articles.
The app does come with a 2x3 widget to easily get articles loaded on the homescreen. It looks very similar to the YouTube widget so it fits in very well as a semi-3D way to see new articles.
The Android Realm App Review Mailbox
If you ever wanted an e-mail app that works to remind you rather than have a multitude of apps to provide the same experience, then Mailbox may be the app for you. The app is developed by the creators of Dropbox and provides the functionality for iOS and Android. The interface is built around swyping to organize and get through e-mails. Short swyping right for example archives emails while long swyping right will delete the email. Swyping left will allow users to setup a reminder for that email later among various other reminders types.
The UI looks like a mix between iOS 7 and Android's HoloUI which gives it a very light look and feel. If Gmail is used, the app supports Gmail aliases to send and receive emails which can be added via settings. The app is very light on resources as well so performance should not be a factor along with nice transitions to make the app feel very much at home on Android.