Fire up your smartphone!

TECHway

I’ve been feeling rather dependent on my smartphone lately. And like every piece of tech I own, I want to be able to squeeze every drop of productivity from it, as I’m sure you do too. So here’s a round up of a few apps you may find useful to that end.

Light Flow

Most of our phones come with RGB notification lights, and while they have plenty of in-house options for you customise the notification light for every text or whatsapp message, or call, or email, or what have you, this app provides even more customisations. You can customise the colours, duration, frequency of lights, rank notifications by priority, control sound, and more. Even better, the app will show only high-priority notifications if your battery is low.

Bleep

Sshhh! You have a secret! And you don’t want it getting out. BitTorrent’s Bleep is a good app to use since it claims to not store any of your calls or messages and is a peer-to-peer service. The Whisper mode lets you chat off the record and messages sent or received here disappear in 25 seconds. Another good part is that if you screenshot a chat in Whisper mode, either the sender’s name or the conversation is blurred out.

Workflow

I have often praised the IF app in this column, but now I have to confess it is facing stiff competition from this app called Workflow. While IF uses the If This Then That algorithm to “get stuff done” and restricts itself to two parts in each “recipe”, using Workflow, you can connect a chain of instructions into a recipe and get the most out of literally every app you have. This is one fun workflow I found – “How about the ability to AirDrop the ‘You’re Fired!’ memo from 

Back to the Future II , while simultaneously printing it on all nearby (AirPrint-enabled) printers?” Go on, create your own!

Flynx

Usually, I have a dozen pages I want to open either simultaneously or concurrently on my smartphone. Flynx is a handy little app that lets me open links/pages/apps in the background while, say, I quickly finish up an email, instead of having to watch the previous link load. There is a floating on-screen indicator, an “intelligent” ad-blocker, and it lets you quick-share links on any social media of your choice. The app also has multiple tab support and displays the web page you were loading pop-up style.