Continued from the last post!
Textra
The days of SMSes – short for Short Message Service – are gradually fading. There used to be a time when I had to closely watch the couple hundred SMSes that are bundled in my mobile subscription plan to make sure I didn’t exceed that usage level, but few of us still use SMSes to communicate with friends anymore. These days, the only times I receive SMSes are from delivery persons, a colleague at my workplace who still uses those classic Nokia candybar phones (!!), and illegal money lenders who usually begin their messages with “Hey Bro, I heard you want some additional credit…?”
In most cases, the built-in messaging app that comes with mobile phones will work just fine. That I’m still using the paid version of Textra when I hardly ever SMS anymore is only because with this app, like the majority of Android paid apps, aren’t subscription-based. The paid version, as I recall it, removes the advertising, but if you don’t mind the occasional and non-intrusive advert SMS appearing in your inbox, the free version works as well. The look and appearance of messages can be extensively customized, though I had to do quite a bit of trial and error before I settled on a color scheme that was pleasing to the eyes. The developer still issues updates to the app after all these years, and is pretty responsive to bug reports too.
Light Manager Pro
This one’s a fairly recent purchase, and for the small price of SGD1.99, brings with it a huge load of fun. Basically, most smartphones come with a notification LED light – it’s towards the upper left corner on the Samsung Note 9 – but not all mobile phone manufacturers will have a built-in app that allows you to customize it, beyond enabling and disabling the LED notification light altogether. The Note 9 for instance doesn’t have that feature built-in for instance. I remembered that it was possible for me to do simple customizations on the Huawei Mate 9 Pro I had last year, so was hunting around for an app to do the same thing on this new phone. I settled on Light Manager, which lets you set specific colors and behavior for each type of notification:
At the moment, I’ve set different colors for messaging, emails, phone-calls, and also battery levels and status. The app’s fully functional in the free version and is ad-supported, but Light Manager works so well that I didn’t hesitate just buying the paid version and supporting the app developer.
Chronus: Home & Lock Widgets
Like the Android launchers I wrote about in the last post, I’ve tried a lot of home screen widget apps to see find which ones will work best and not drain the phone’s battery too quickly either. I settled on Chronous from two Android phones back – around my Note 5 days I think – and the app still remains the most versatile one I’ve tried. The app offers customizable widgets, and has a basic framework with a bunch of built-in extensions, and a number of other additional ones you can further download. The way I use it on my Android phones is to configure it to display a digital clock, calendar date, next alarms, unread emails, summary weather, and upcoming calendar events.
The app has a few oddities, including selected weather options in the default extension that don’t work very well: but there are sufficient alternatives that you can look for when one doesn’t work well for you.
That’s a wrap for this two part commentary. There’s of course a bunch of other apps that I have on my phones: including half a dozen news readers for the news subscription services I’m on, the usual suite of social media apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, food ordering, currency converters, Internet Banking, online shopping, camera controllers for my Olympus E-M1 Sony A73, and imaging like Flickr and CamScanner. Smartphones have really come a long way!
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