It’s almost the end of the year… but not quite. This November, which is being increasingly celebrated worldwide as the Movember month to raise awareness for prostate cancer, also paid witness to the battering that Haiti, Cuba, New Jersey and New York City received from Hurricane Sandy, and the American presidential elections that saw Barack Obama emerge triumphant for the second time. The following three apps, thus, are about celebrating hope and survival.
Movember Mobile
Movember Mobile picks up where pamphlets, posters and workshops leave off. More specifically, it handles the social aspect of prostate cancer awareness and the little things that are within your arms reach to make that happen well.
The app is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad (while requiring iOS 4.3 or higher) for free. Once you’ve downloaded it, you can attend different fundraisers, check on fundraising milestones, share photos and achievements of yours through Facebook and Twitter, receive health guidance according to your age, and register for Movember 2012 in the UK – all through the app.
Even though it’s not prevalent in India right now, the idea of Movember month is catching up, primarily because it is an issue that cares not for borders or cultures. And what better audience than students when it comes to social preventive healthcare.
Waze
Waze does to driving what Facebook did to your social life: augmentation. Developed by an Israeli company whose name the app uses, Waze is a community-driven navigation assistant that is available for iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry (beta only), and even Symbian – for free.
Step 1: Install it. Step 2: Turn it on while driving for crowd-sourcing your traffic alerts through the app based on your location via GPS. The sole drawback for an Indian user is that the maps in the app are not yet fully detailed, which means that the fewer people who use it in the country, the less the app will be able to tell you.
But no matter: Waze learns with continuous use, like Gmail or Wikipedia. If you can get your own network of friends and family members to work with it, then you’ll have instantaneous updates for the routes you frequently thread, real-time traffic updates, the ability to quickly report accidents and hazards, and information on many other facets of your navigational life.
Which is, you will concede, assuming a life of its own these days.
Threadlife
Finally, a sensible way to share mobile video, something that comes closest to being the Instagram for videos, has materialised in the form of Threadlife. Two other apps, Viddy and Socialcam, are seeing some success in the social media circuit, but they didn’t bring to videos what Threadlife does: portability.
Available only for the iPhone at the moment – and that, too, in keeping with bon APPetite’s preference for it, free – Threadlife works with 3-second clips for starters. Once you’ve installed it on your iPhone, record different clips, each lasting for a maximum of three quick heartbeats called “stitches”. Once you’re done recording multiple stitches, you can piece them together within the app itself to form what’s called a “thread”, and voila! There’s the video whose narrative power you’ve been looking for.
Threadlife is aesthetic, and easy to navigate through, and comes with just those features that’re great for sharing memories and milestones, apart from a cornucopia of other much-likely social benefits.
