Puralax is a great puzzle game where you need to paint every colored tile into one single color to complete each level. There are six stages of this game each stage consisting of 20 levels
You can install this game from the Play store in your Android phone. Search under the Games menu for "Puralax". You will find several names in the search results. Look for the one shown below in the picture.
Labyrinth Lite by illusion Labs is one of the most downloaded Labyrinth games for Android. It has 10 Easy levels and 10 Hard levels in it's free version.
You can install this game from the Play store in your Android phone. Search under the Games menu for "Labyrinth". You will find several names in the search results. Look for the one shown below in the picture.
The Jungle Book by Fox and Sheep is a free to download multimedia storybook. It tells us the story of Mogli in 12 slides each lasting for one minute each. The pictures, animations and background narration is great. The size of this App is 50 MB.
Pinball Pro by TerranDroid Board is one of the most downloaded Pinball games for Android. It has five different themes. Each theme offers a refreshing different pinball playing experience. There are great sound effects and also there is vibration feedback. Once you select a theme the game begins. You can press and release your finger anywhere on the screen to launch the ball. And you can control the flappers by touching anywhere on the left and the right portion of the screen. You will find it quite engaging game. This is one of the well made games than other ones in it's category.
Are you willing to give this level of access to an App on your smartphone just to book a movie ticket?
If you want to book a movie ticket to watch a show at the time of your convenience you would like to book the ticket from one of the apps on your smartphone. Right?
In the past when you went to watch a movie, there was an intrinsic air of anonymity in the movie watching experience.
That is how it should be. But wait, have you ever looked at the permissions your movie booking app makes you to agree to when you were installing it. Now look at permissions list of the most downloaded movie booking apps.
BookMyShow
You can read the details given on the permissions pop up on the App's page
under Additional Information > Permissions - view details
In this mobile security awareness series I will look at different categories of Android Apps and scrutinize the permissions an app seeks during installation on your smartphone. I hope this scrutiny will bring awareness among Android smartphone users to determine essential and non-essential permissions that an app may ask for in a particular App. I will also compare these permissions among most popular apps in that category.
A few days ago an antivirus company found out that several Chinese made android smartphones were carrying trojan virus as part of their pre-installed system software. Which I have reported in the last video I posted on my Youtube channel. If you haven't seen it, you can watch it now above. So even if an antivirus program detects them, it can not remove or delete them.
I found one program on my Micromax Canvas 2.2 A114 smartphone, an App called GameHub which was detected by Avast as well as Malwarebytes as a Trojan
However neither the antivirus programs could delete it, nor could I uninstall it from the phone. Because it was part of the system files preinstalled on the phone, and removing it needed root access. For that I needed to gain root access on my smartphone. It is called Rooting your smartphone in popular terms.
I could not find any help on official Android forums or on Google's. Several search queries that came up searching for "root your android phone" pointed out to some apk files that needed to be installed on the smartphone to root it. But when I tried to download it, my chrome browser refused to download them deeming them as harmful. So I avoided them.
I did come across a program called Kingo Root that you can install on your Windows computer and then connect your smartphone using a USB cable. You also need to enable USB Debugging in Developer options on your smartphone.
The Developer Options are not enabled by Default. To activate them you need to open System Settings > About Phone > Build Number.
Now you need to touch the location where Build Number is written 7 times successively. In the end you will see a message that "You are now a developer". Then you can open the "Developer Options" and select the "USB Debugging". That's all.
This program then detects your smartphone and then it installs and runs necessary scripts on your phone to Root it. Once you see that your phone is correctly detected then you can press the "ROOT" button, and wait patiently for a few minutes, till your android smartphone reboots a couple of times and you get a message on Kingo Root screen that the "Rooting" was successful.
It did work on my phone and I could get root access on my phone.
However, this was not enough to remove the offending App, or its APK file. I had to install an uninstaller on my smartphone, which I selected randomly from the several uninstallers in the Google Play Store. I think most of the uninstallers should do the trick.
When you run the Uninstaller, you are asked if you would grant Root Access or Deny. After you grant it root access, you can then select the Apps that you want to uninstall. I did remove several Apps that were pre-installed, some of them were detected as malware, some were not useful for me. So it was a good thing to get rid of them and make space on the phone's memory.
The last thing I did was to uninstall the Uninstaller itself.
The Kingo Root program can also "Remove the Root", but for time being I would like to keep root access on my smartphone so that I can try and install some programs that require root access.
Update: It seems that This Kingo Root program installs an App called Super SU on the smartphone which does the root permissions. However there are some issues with the Super SU App itself, regarding updates. Currently I am stuck in figuring it out.
Warning: This is just my experience so far. I would not recommend anyone trying to root their phone. Because on thing leads to another, and you end up resetting your phone to Factory settings.
In this post we will learn how to create a focus over a certain portion of an image and blur the surrounding image. We will use the free image editing App Pixlr express for that. If you haven't already installed it, you can read more about it on this link
I will update this post to add similar information using other photo editing Apps as well. So if you select the focal menu, your image will be opened in the focal edit mode as seen in the image below.
We see two concentric circles in the middle of the image. If you touch in the middle white spot you can drag it over other parts of the photo. Whereas the two circles can be stretched or shrinked separately by touching the periphery of the circles. There are two focus options displayed in the menu. Circular and linear. The linear option will create a focused area from left to the right across the image. You can also choose to make the surrounding portion more or less blurred by selecting the amount of blur from the "blurring" menu.
Let us look at the Vibrance option in Pixlr Express. Pixlr Express is a free image editing App for Smartphones. If you haven't installed it already, you can read more about it on this link.
This is the edit mode of Vibrance. With the slider pointing at 0. You can move it to left or to right to decrease or increase the value.
In this post we will look at the stylize menu of Pixlr Express. Pixlr Express is a free photo editing App for Smartphones. If you are new to Pixlr Express, please read the earlier posts form this link We can see the stylize menu in the above image. If you select it, the image will open in the stylize edit mode. Here is a screenshot of different options that are available in the stylize mode. There are more options visible if you scroll the menu .
Creating a Splash effect in a photo on your smartphone can be a enthusiasm booster to those who like to post their selfies or snapshots often online. This effect allows you to select a portion of your photo and then process the image to keep only that color and remove other colors from different portions of the photo. This effect can be quite amusing if you have a photo with patches of distinct colors.
In the previous article we saw how to crop an image in Pixlr Express. One more handy tool is to rotate the image the way we want to.
The adjacent image shows the icon for rotate in the spread of Pixlr Express "Adjustment" menu If you touch it, the image will open in the rotate mode.
In the last post we saw how you can use the smartphones camera to take photo from within the Pixlr Express. So now we will see how to use the different editing options. Let us do some cropping today. I have taken a screenshot to show you the crop menu icon in Pixlr express.
You can use the camera of your smartphone right within the Pixlr Express to take a snapshot or a selfie. If you select the "camera" menu option if the opening screen of Pixlr Express you will notice that the camera of your smartphone is activated. The white button at the bottom of the screen allows you to take the snapshot.
Now we will look at the screen after you pressed the camera button. You see two options here. If you do not like the photo, you can discard it and take new photo by pressing on "Retake". However if you want to keep the photo, you can press on "Use Photo", which will then open the photo in Edit mode.
In next few posts we will look at an excellent free photo editing Application available all types of Smartphones by the famous software firm AutoDesk.
You can get it by searching for Pixlr Express in the App Finder in your smartphone, and install it.
In this image we look at the opening screen of Pixlr Express. There are three menu options. camera, photos and collage.
The camera option will open the camera of your smartphone and after clicking a selfie, you can straight take it to edit it in Pixlr Express. If you already have some images stored in the folder in your smartphone, you can open it from the "photos" menu. Whereas the third option lets you make a collage from the images stored on your smartphone.
Look at the circular icon at the top left corner of the image, touch it to open a notice from AutoDesk, assuming your permission to collect Usage Data.
You can see the Green Slider button at the bottom of the screen, which you can slide left if you do not wish AutoDesk to collect your usage data.
We will look at all the menu options in this App in the forthcoming posts. Keep reading...
