At a time when the browser segment hasn’t been seeing any major innovation, Opera has come up with a ‘concept browser’ called Neon that has new features and a whole new look.
At first you don’t even realise you have opened the browser, because it’s transparent: your desktop background shows through it.
The address bar is unconventionally placed a little below the top edge to the centre. You open a website, and the usual tab is seen as a circle at the top right corner. When a page is minimised, it goes into the circle. If you open multiple sites, all of them show as circles to the right. The downside is that these not-too-small circles occupy some space, reducing the actual size of the browser.
To the left, there is a plus sign to open new pages. Below that there is a tab that lets you manage the multiple audio or video sites you have opened, without leaving the current page. It has a pop-out icon that will allow you to watch the video in a miniature window on the currently opened page. This window is movable around the screen and its size can be adjusted.
Another feature is ‘crop out’. You can cut out sections of webpage and store them in the gallery on the left pane. There is also a split screen mode that allows you to open two pages that can be used simultaneously.
Opera say Neon will not replace current browser. However, some of its new features are expected to be added to Opera this spring.
Time spent on apps grows
With the steep rise in the use of messaging and social apps, the time spent on games, once described as the darling of the mobile industry, has seen a drop.
According to the annual global mobile and application usage study of Flurry Analytics, which is a part of the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite, the time spent on games declined by 4 per cent year over year.
In its eighth year, the Flurry study tracked over 2.1 billion smart devices and 3.2 trillion sessions. The overall app usage grew by 11 per cent and the time spent on apps grew by 69 per cent from 2015.
The time spent on social and messaging apps grew by an astounding 394 per cent. Experts attribute this to use of facilities such as voice and video calling in such apps. While shopping apps grew 31 per cent in time spent, the usage of news and magazines apps was down 5 per cent and that of personalisation apps by 46 per cent.
“In previous years, we saw all app categories growing in tandem; however, this year the story is different, with growth in usage and time spent in some app categories occurring at the expense of others,” said Simon Khalaf, SVP, Yahoo.
Meanwhile, Phablets (devices that are bigger than phones but smaller than tablets, usually with a screen size of five to six inches) are becoming the dominant form factor across the globe, capturing 41 per cent of market share.
Appview: Cleartax
This app lets you file Income Tax returns. Based on basic details provided by the user, the app selects the right form. Users then import details from their Form 26AS and Form 16 into the app.
The app has an offline sync feature which allows users to enter their tax details even when there is no Internet. The details are uploaded to the server as soon as there is Internet connectivity. The app also provides users an option to check refund status, calculate taxes and generate rent receipts.
