Author: yazdi

How I work – 56 – Appsales


If you are an app freak but do not like to pay highly for your apps, Appsales is a must for you. This simple app, just keeps track of all the apps which are on sale, even if for a brief period, and sends you periodic notifications, so that you can grab your favourite app at discounts which may range as high as 90% of their normal price.
You can even view the price history of the apps, so that you can decide when and whether to buy them at the discounted price. You can put some apps on watch so that you will be notified as soon as their price drops on the play store. You may setup your own filters, share sales with your friends and also get information on the other versions e.g., lite, professional, etc.

A very good app to monitor the prices of your desired apps.

How I work – 55 – Shush!


Whenever we enter a meeting or a theater, we tend to put our phone on silent, at least all sensible and disciplined people do ! But then, such people invariably forget to switch on the Volume of their phone when the meeting is over.


Shush! is a great help at such times – Once you instal the app on your Android device, whenever you mute the volume on your phone, up pops a friendly reminder asking you when would you like to restore the volume back to normal – after a few minutes or a couple of hours ? Having set the time, you need not worry about the volume of your phone getting back to normal – it will automatically be reset once the period is over !  Of course, if your meeting ends earlier, you can restore the volume back to normal, manually.


A very handy app for everyday use.

How I work – 53 – Jpegmini.com


Jpegmini.com is a photo compression tool which compresses your .jpg photos significantly without affecting their visual resolution or quality. The compression can be upto 5 times, i.e. the converted photo could be upto one-fifth the size of the original.
With JPEGmini you can store more photos on your hard drive and online photo service accounts, attach more photos to your emails, and upload your photos faster to the web. If you have an image-intensive website, your pages will load faster, improving user experience and you’ll also reduce your storage and bandwidth costs.
Online registration is simple. Once you register yourself, you can use the service free for single photos or for unlimited albums processing – each album that you upload can contain up to 1000 photos, and can be up to 200 MB in size. You upload your photos and soon you will receive an email, requesting you to download the converted, re-sized photos.

It’s a real treat. Easy to understand and simple to use.

How I work – 54 – hundredzeros.com


If you have Kindle on your Smartphone, Computer or Tablet, you would also have read many books on your device. However, each time you buy a book, it makes a tiny hole in your pocket. Wish you could find books on Kindle which are free to download from Amazon ? Head to www.hundredzeros.com where you will find hundreds of books free for download, to be read later on your Kindle Device.


The books are organized by subjects ( Fiction, History, Humor, Reference, Sports, Travel, etc. etc.) or you may just like to browse through fresh stock to see what is the latest available.

FREE books are always welcome – don’t you agree ?

How I work – 52 – zamzar.com


Have you ever wanted to convert files from one format to another without the need to download software ? Zamzar.com is the site you need to head to ! Just upload the file that you want to convert and define the format of what you want to convert to. Enter your email address and within a few minutes, the link to the converted file will be sent to you by email. Click on the link and you will have the converted file ready for download.


The straightforward no-nonsense approach to file conversion is refreshing. It handle a whole lot of popular file formats. The only limitation with the free version is the file size. Each successive paid version allows you higher file sizes and greater amount of storage.


If you need file conversions on the fly, Zamzar.com could be your final destination !

How I work – 51 – StayFocusd


Many a times, when you are working, you tend to drift away to websites where your time gets drained. You start by sitting down at the computer, and swearing you’ll be productive. Next thing you know, it’s twelve hours later. You’ve checked your email, updated your Facebook status, browsed the trending topics on Twitter, read your RSS feeds, looked up your favorite band on Wikipedia, googled yourself, and lost a week’s pay playing online poker. What you haven’t done is WORK.


StayFocusd is a Chrome Extension which helps you Stay Focussed.  It increases your productivity by voluntarily limiting the amount of time that you can spend on time-wasting websites. Once installed, you can add multiple websites to the list of your time-wasting websites and also define how much total time during the day you would like to waste on such websites. Suppose you specify that you won’t spend more than an hour on such websites in a day, once you cross that limit, your browser won’t allow you to go those websites any more, during the day !

It has some interesting tweaks, also worth exploring. But the prime objective is to STAY FOCUSSED !

How I work – 50 – Addictive Dots


Dots: A Game About Connecting – Here, we have a simple game of connecting the dots and earning points in the process. Not at all complicated, but the more you play it, the more you may get addicted – you have been warned !


The game is all about connecting similar colored dots that appear on the screen and earn points !  You get 60 seconds to do it. You can connect with your friends on Facebook and Twitter and compare and brag about your scores,  if yours are higher ! You can also prove that you are better at Dots than your friends with the local Multiplayer mode.


Simple, addictive fun – difficult to find these days.

How I work – 49 – BurnNote.com


Many a times it so happens that you have to communicate something private to a close friend / family member. And you are worried that it may fall into the wrong hands. e.g. in an emergency, you need to send your Bank Account no. or your Credit Card no. to your spouse. You may send it via email, but there is a chance that after using that information, the recipient does not delete it from his mailbox. Anyone having access to that mailbox can then misuse that information.
BurnNote allows a user to send a message to someone in such a manner that the message will be automatically deleted after a predefined number of seconds after it has been read. So, if you have set it to 180 seconds, the message will destruct itself 180 seconds after it has been read by the recipient.
The implementation is quite simple – you go to BurnNote.com and fill up a simple registration form. Now, you can compose a mail to anyone and define, say 180 seconds after reading it, it should self-destruct. If you want to be doubly sure, you can even create a password for accessing the mail. The site will generate a link and you can then copy-paste that link in your regular email. The recipient just needs to click on that link, enter the password (if any) and read the mail as desired. Once the mail has been read, after 180 seconds, the link will be inactive and no longer accessible to either the sender or the receiver.
In short, Burn Note puts you in total control of your privacy. Maybe the US Government should have used it for their diplomatic cables !

How I work – 48 – Aviate


Android is a great place for customization.. And a Desktop Launcher is an App which replaces your Android Desktop and allows you to customize it in a variety of ways.
Aviate is a Desktop Launcher which almost “knows” and “shows” what your Desktop should look like, depending on where you are and the time of the day !  As a result, your desktop may change automatically in the morning, when it will display the weather, your appointments app, and your favorite news app; as you proceed to work, it has maps and music apps are ready to go; and when you reach work, it may have your favorite email apps. If you visit the Gym, your favorite workout apps may stare you in your face ! In the evening, maybe some restaurant apps would be more appropriate and when you are ready to go to bed, your alarm settings would pop up on your home screen.
The idea is to show you the appropriate app that you are most likely to run, depending on the time and place you are in, without your having to search for them.

Briefly stated, it is an intelligent homescreen that simplifies your phone. Try it, it is free !

How I work – 47 – Fluid Monkey

When you are stressed and need to loosen up, sometimes there’s nothing better than chilling out with something simple. Fluid Monkey is great for this kind of relaxation. The basic idea is to interact with a pool of liquid — by using your finger, you can paint, smear color over the screen, or create fluid with different colors, bouncing balls and sparkles or even fling brightly-colored balls through puddles of mud.
Preset configurations are available to show what’s possible: Ink in Water, Finger-Painting, Milky Way, Thick Paint, Gelatin, Oil Paint, Wet Mud, and Bowl of Paint.
Customize properties to create your own unique fluid environment. Change the colors, add sparkles or bouncing balls to your liquid.

Pointless, but can be a great stress buster !