For Your Pleasure

Slideshare Now Mobile
It's difficult to believe that Slideshare, the presentations portal now owned by LinkedIn, didn’t have a proper mobile app all this time. However, the mobile version of the website worked pretty well so in a sense it wasn’t missed. But now LinkedIn has just released a free app for iOS and Android. You do a quick sign-in with a route of your choice, and you’re good to go. But you can’t create presentations through this app — it’s strictly a viewer. The app works with a slick smoothness. You choose from topics of interest, or use the search to look for something specific. Problem is you can’t filter and refine the search. The topics are also very broad and don’t help you get to specific interests. The results throw up many old presentations, which is always a nuisance the search. The topics are also very broad and don’t help you.

Click It, Google Style
Google has brought some nice photography tricks to its new app, Camera, available for Android 4.4 users free on the Play Store. The app works separately from your phone’s own camera. It’s obvious that it’s been designed to keep things utterly simple. That will make casual users happy but annoy those who want to have some control over settings like ISO and white balance. Well, they’ll just have to switch to the phone’s camera app for that. On Google’s Camera app, what you get is the ability to take a photo and then give it some bokeh, even if it is faked. You aim at an object, shoot, and then move the camera slowly upward to capture some additional background info. Then, if all goes well, you get the object in focus and the background nicely blurred out. You can also shoot panoramas and 360 degree photo spheres.

Medium On Your Mini
the publishing platform Medium, spun off by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has a stunningly beautiful app for the iPhone which works well on the iPad by going 2x. It isn’t bad looking on the web, medium.com, either, of course, but the smooth way the app works really enhances reading pleasure. Medium (for which you sign in with Twitter) is all about content and is really for people who love to read. From your Twitter feed, Medium collects and surfaces articles you might want to read and also has selections and collections to browse and read from. The free Medium app really uses the iPad’s screen beautifully and fits right in with what the tablet was first envisaged for — leaning back and enjoying content. Swipe to move across articles, bookmark to read again and share with others.

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 16-06-2014)