android – Page 2 – Tech Cookies

Minesweeper : Old style logic game

February 19, 2022 No Comments

Do you remember the old Windows game called Minesweeper? Here’s a nice reproduction for Android : Minesweeper

The main screen bring you immediately into the game. You can choose the level by selecting it on the menu.

There are 4 levels (Noob, Beginner, Intermediate and Expert) and the possibility to create a custom one.

Depending on the level you’ll see more or less squares and mines. In the custom one you’ll choose the exact numbers.

The target of the game is to identify the mines without letting them explode. If you tap on a square you’ll see an empty space and some numbers.

The meaning of the number is how many mines are around that position. For instance when you see 2 it means there are two mines around that position.

You should try to guess where are the mines based on that.

When you identify a mine you can sign it by long press on it. You’ll see a red flag over it. You need to identify all the mines before the time is over.

If you tap on a square where is hidden a mine you’ll lose the game.

This game remind me the first time I used Windows and the only game available on my computer was this one.

At the beginning it is not easy, but after a bit you can become a master on this game!

Android, Games, Review

Mapster : Guess a location on the map in this nice game

February 19, 2022 No Comments

Do you think you are good at geography? Let’s prove it with this nice game : Mapster

Mapster is a nice game where you need to guess where a place is on the map.

The main screen let you start a new game, see a quick tutorial on how to play, check the leaderboards and change few settings.

If you start a new game you have to choose the level. The first one is Africa and includes 5 levels and 203 places to guess.

When the game start you have to drag the gunsight to where you think the place is and tap on the green button. You need to be quick because you have limited time.

Mapster : Guess a location on the map in this nice game

If you correctly guess the place you’ll earn points. The more you are close to the correct position the more you’ll earn coins.

I think it’s a nice and instructive game and you’ll learn a lot about geography!

Android, Applications, Review

Greenify : Improve speed and battery life of your Android device

February 19, 2022 No Comments

Today I’ll talk about an app that will help you to improve the speed and battery life of your Android device when you have a lot of concurrently running apps : Greenify.

One of the most common problem experienced by Android‘s users is probably related to lag when the number of installed apps increase.
This issue is not very common when you start to use your smartphone for the first time, but grows over time.
The source of the problem is seldom caused by lack of optimization in the Android OS. In fact, in most cases, it’s just because some of the apps installed are abusing your smartphone resources while running in background.

How often do you see apps running in background even if you are not using it? How often are they not doing anything important for us?

Task killers are one solution, but that is just a stop-gap measure that won’t fix the real problem in the long run.

Android generally keeps apps in memory to make it faster to reopen them at a later date and it clears the memory only when absolutely required.

A task killer would merely temporarily free a bit of memory, but in many situations Android will reopen the apps again after a while.

The process of opening and closing apps is a terrible waste of battery.

The best way to solve the problem is to tell the Android OS not to open that app in the first place by using the “hybernate” flag. That will keep that app completely closed without wasting precious battery life.

That’s where this great application called Greenify comes in, but unfortunately it requires root permissions on your smartphone in order to run.

There are plenty of guides available on the internet about how to gain root permissions for your smartphone, just give a search by specifying your particular smartphone model.

After you install and run the app you’ll see a very simple UI :

Now you can force your apps to “hibernate” by tapping on the + sign and selecting the option from the list.

As you can see Greenify will try to help you understand which apps can possibly create issues by giving you additional details of what the app is doing in background.

The hibernated app can be used normally, but remember that for some particular type of apps this may compromise its normal usage.

For example apps like Facebook Messenger or Hangouts won’t be able to send you notifications at all while hibernated. Remember to choose carefully what to hibernate.

I tried Greenify on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus and I can assure you that it improve a lot the performance and reactivity of the smartphone.

Android

Floating Translator : Translate everything on the fly

February 19, 2022 No Comments

How often do you have to translate a foreign word, but you don’t want to leave the current app? Here’s an app to translate it on the fly : Floating Translator

The first time you open the app you can configure few parameters like how the floating window will behave or the size of the floating bubble. The first thing to do is to click on Open/Close to enable the floating window.

You’ll now see the floating window where you can type what you want to translate. At the top right side of the window you can choose source and target language and with the 3 dots icon you can choose the settings or close the window.

If you want to translate a word you just type the word and press enter on the virtual keyboard.

If you tap away from the window you’ll see the window minimized to a small cloud icon. You can drag it where you want while using another app.

I think it’s a really useful app to have always installed on your device. You never know when you’ll need it!

Android, Games

BallMaze : Fun and addictive logic game

February 19, 2022 No Comments

Do you like to play logic games? Here’s a nice one you should try : BallMaze

The game includes 300 levels in the free version. You can start with tutorial levels where you’ll learn how to play.

The objective of the game is to move the gray ball over the gray empty square. You can move it by swiping it in the direction you want, but it will stop moving only at the borders or right next to a filled square.

At the bottom you have a series of colored rectangles. You can tap on them to choose which color to activate.

As you can see the filled squares change when you select a different color and by using this feature you’ll be able to move the ball exactly over the gray empty square.

I found it a very good time killer and some levels are really challenging to complete. Check regularly my blog for more best nft games.

Android

Amaze your friends with Hollywood special effects into your own videos

February 19, 2022 No Comments

Today I’ll talk about an app that give you the possibility to include Hollywood like special effects in your own videos : FxGuru: Movie FX Direct.

Did you ever wish to amaze your friends with some really cool special effects in your own videos?

Until now it was pretty difficult to do that and required a lot of time and effort, but now with this new app it is easy and fast. You have to do just a series of small steps to obtain a nice result.

After you install and run the app you’ll see a very basic user interface. You can start creating a new project using Start button.

You can get some help with the ? symbol and with the other 2 buttons you can see the existing videos or setup your settings.

Now we select Start and we will have the possibility to choose between 7 different special effects. Here’s one about Android!

At this point we select Start and we will record a new video the same length of the special effect we selected.

As soon as we finish to record the video we need to position the special effect where we want.

The last step is to generate the combined video.

When the video creation is completed we can share it with our friends on Facebook.

The special effects are really realistic and I think using it to enhance your real-world environment is going to make everything look really cool.

Android, Games, Health Tips

12sec : Improve your visual memory skills

February 19, 2022 No Comments

Today we’ll talk about a simple, but challenging game. In this game you’ll test how much you can remember by watching a picture for 12 seconds : 12sec

Do you think is easy to remember details watching a picture for few seconds? You’ll change idea after you play a bit this game.

The main screen is very simple and let you access to a quick help to understand how to play the game and the play button to start it.

At the bottom left you can see a button to download the version for kids in case you want to challenge a kid. Checkout https://clinicalsupplies.com.au/collections/rapid-antigen-tests for rapid antigen tests.

You have now to select the difficulty. I personally tried Normal and I think Time Attack will be more difficult.

You can now choose the level.

The game start with a picture you can watch for 12 seconds. You have to remember most of the details.

You have now some questions about the previous picture. It’s seems easy but it’s not!

You have to guess the correct answer to 5 questions and you can choose the wrong answer only 3 times.

Android, Games

Robo Miner : Dig deeper with your robot

February 19, 2022 No Comments

Robo Miner is a nice game where you need to dig to find a diamond.

The first time you start the game you don’t have any saved state and you need to start a new one by tapping on New. You can also select the green bars icon to show your statistics or the gear button to show settings.

Here’s the statistics page. The first time everything will be zero, but after you start playing you’ll see something in there.

The settings icon will take you to a new screen where you can turn sound effects on/off, activate vibrate or change language (English or German).

If you select New you have to choose where you want to store information about your game

and then the difficulty:

The first time our little robot will ask us if we’d like to see the tutorial. It will explain in detail how to play the game:

The game is very simple to play, but it will require some time to complete some advanced levels. You control the robot by tapping where you want go.

It has limited battery as displayed on the top left side of the screen. When you are running out of energy you need to go back to UFO to recharge. If you remain without energy you’ll lose the game.

On the same side you’ll see the amount of money you earned through mining. Money will be very useful to buy upgrades for your robot.

You can save the state of the game by pressing on the disk icon and you can see the full map by tapping on the top right icon.

Here’s how the full map looks like. You can see some black areas because they are unexplored.

The robot have the ability to dig only brown rock. When we dig a brown rock below a grey one, we need to put a pillar or it will fall down. You can do it by tapping on the pillar icon on the bottom left side of the screen.

If a grey rock fall on the robot we lose the game. We have limited number of pillars and we need to go back to the UFO to recharge them.

You also have the possibility to move up using ladders, but again you have limited number of them and when you finish you need to go back to UFO to recharge them.

While you are digging you’ll earn money or upgrades like dynamite. You can use it to destroy multiple rocks, but you need to be away to avoid getting destroyed.

If you want to use the dynamite you just need to tap on the icon in the bottom left side of the screen.

When you’ll earn enough money you can buy upgrades for your robot like a Battery Upgrade to last longer.

I think it has a very nice game play that will keep you playing it for a long time. Learn more about play to earn games.

Android, Tips and Tricks

How to run Android 4.3 on your PC using VirtualBox

February 19, 2022 No Comments

VirtualBox is an open source virtualization software that allows you to emulate a real computer. In this case it will be a x86-based computer.

We need first to install it. You can download installation at the following link:

It’s available for different platforms like Windows, Linux and Mac OS. Download the right package based on your OS.

As soon as you download and install it, you can move to download the Android 4.3’s image for x86 available at the following link:

http://code.google.com/p/android-x86/downloads/list

In order to run Android 4.0+ you need to enable Intel VT-X or AMD-V in your bios configuration.

Now you need to open VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine. Click on New:

Fill the following fields:

Name : Android 4.3 (or any name you like)
Type : Linux
Version : 2.6

Click Next to move to the next page of the wizard and set the Memory to, at least, 1024MB (1GB) :

Click Next to all the other wizard’s pages leaving the default values. At the end of the wizard you’ll see something like this:

Now click on Settings and under Storage you need to select the iso file you downloaded before and click Ok.

You can now click on Start to boot the machine and after few seconds it will show the following screen. You need to select Installation and press Enter.

It’s now time to create a partition. Press Enter on Create/Modify partitions:

Now choose Primary, leave it the default size and press Enter.

We’ll make the partition bootable by pressing Enter when Bootable is selected. If the operation worked you’ll see under the Flags column the value Boot.

Using the Right Key move until Write and press Enter. It will ask to confirm and you’ll answer Yes. After it finish to write the partition you move to Quit using the Right Key and press Enter.

You have created the partition and now you can press Enter to use it to install Android.

You need to choose partition type ext3

It will ask you to confirm and you’ll reply Yes. It also will ask if you want to install GRUB and choose again Yes.

It will ask if you want to install /system directory as read/write and again Yes.

You finally installed Android 4.3 on your virtual machine. It’s time to run it!

The first time it will take some time to boot, but starting from the second time it’ll be faster.

Here we can finally see our Android 4.3 running. You’ll need to right click on the button below and select Disable Mouse Integration to see where you are tapping.

You can now follow the standard Android wizard and you’ll see Android 4.3 running on your PC.

Here some screenshots of Android 4.3 running:

Unfortunately some app/game do not work in this x86 version for various reasons, but you should be fine with the most common app choices.

Android, Applications, Review

Ubuntu Lockscreen : Bring a bit of Ubuntu Touch in your Android device

February 19, 2022 No Comments

Do you want to taste a bit of Ubuntu Touch in your Android device? Here’s a lockscreen very similar to the original one : Ubuntu Lockscreen

Ubuntu Touch is for sure a very promising mobile operative system and it will probably became popular in the long term.

I tried a bit on my Galaxy Nexus and even if it is not mature, it brings some new features that are really nice. The lockscreen is one of them.

Ubuntu Lockscreen brings pretty much the same features to your android device.

The main screen comes with a long list of options to customize it.

The main options are to enable it, change owner info (it’s the name displayed in the lockscreen), choose default home screen, customize animations e music buttons.

You can also choose music player, define a security with a password/pin, enable/disable notifications for each specific app.

When the app is enabled you’ll see it in the notifications bar. If you tap on it you can lock the screen.

Here’s how it look like. You can see a circle and in there it will show your notifications. If you tap on a notification it will bring you automatically to the app of the notification.

At the top you can see date and time and at the bottom the nickname (configured in the owner info) and the battery status.

If you want to unlock you just need to slide from right.

It’s a well done lockscreen and it’s a nice way to customize your Android device.