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10 Paid iOS, Android Apps Gone Free

1. Docs To Go Premium Key

Docs To Go is an excellent and office suite on Android. The catch is that you can’t edit documents unless you get the pro version. At the moment, the premium key (a separate app worth Rs. 620) is free. You can install this app on your Android device via the Amazon Appstore.

Amazon for Android (Free, usually Rs. 620)
iOS (Rs. 620)

2. PDF PROvider

If you need an app to manage all your PDF files, then PDF PROvider is a good choice. This app can merge several documents (even if they’re different formats) into one PDF file. It can also scan photos of printed pages and save them as PDF files. It also lets you annotate and sign PDFs, and has a lot of other features that you can check out using the link below.

iOS (Free, usually Rs. 490)

3. Geekbench 3

Geekbench is the ultimate CPU and memory benchmarking app for iOS. Benchmark apps went out of fashion a long time ago, but they’re still useful for app developers and if you’re checking whether your iOS device is performing as it should. It is free for a limited time, so grab the deal while it lasts.

iOS (Free, usually Rs. 60)
Android (Free)

4. TurboScan

TurboScan lets you use your iPhone as a portable scanner. You open the app and point the camera at the document you need to scan. From there, a few taps will scan these documents and convert them into multipage PDF or JPEG files. PDF PROvider also has this functionality, but TurboScan is geared towards scanning documents fast and has nice one-tap readability settings such as brightness and contrast adjustments. The app is free till November 29 so get it by Black Friday if you can.

iPhone (Free, usually Rs. 190)

5. Buzz Player

Buzz Player is a multimedia app for iOS, which lets you play your audio and video files. This app claims to provide smooth playback even with HD video files. If you watch lots of movies on your iOS device, you might want to try Buzz Player. Its interface is not as good as apps such as Infuse, but it does the pretty much the same things – play videos and supports subtitles.

iPhone (Free, usually Rs. 250)
iPad (Free, usually Rs. 250)

6. Alarm Clock Pro

Alarm Clock Pro is a very popular alarm clock app for Android – it has features like multiple designs to choose from, multiple alarms and timers, and best of all, automatically adjusting for different time zones.

Amazon for Android (Free, usually Rs. 60)

7. Perfectly Clear

Want a one-tap photo editing app for your Android smartphone? You might like Perfectly Clear. It has 12 different one-tap editing modes that give your photos a professional look in seconds. A hassle-free editing experience is an absolute must-have on smartphones and Perfectly Clear does the job pretty well.

Amazon for Android (Free, usually Rs. 190)

8. Convertr

DuckDuckGo can do unit conversions, Siri can do them too, and even Google can do them with ease. So why do you need a unit converter app? Because it supports as many as 450 units and 24 categories. You can convert angstroms to light-years and angle to volume with this app, and it’s free.

iPhone (Free, usually Rs. 120)

9. Core Yoga

If you want a quick yoga cheat sheet, Core Yoga is a good app for you. It has a daily 11-minute yoga programme that “helps you tone your abs”. The art in the app could definitely use improvement, but it shouldn’t be hard to learn the different asanas using this app. Free for a limited time.

iOS (Free, usually Rs. 190)

10. Instagrab

Instagrab is an Instagram companion app that claims to enhance your Instagram experience. It lets you discover photos based on your location and bookmark your favourite photos and videos and add them to collections. The best feature, however, is that the app lets you download Instagram photos to your iOS device. It also lets you manage multiple Instagram accounts, which is not possible in the official app.

iOS (Free, usually Rs. 190)

Drive SEO With Proper Keyword Use

Lately I’ve received a lot of questions and comments from my loyal blog readers asking about the best way to use keywords to organically improve their website’s or blog’s search engine optimization (SEO). Based on my personal experience and after doing a little research (phone calling) among some of my marketing colleagues, I’ve developed the following tips to help you improve your sites visibility on the Internet without spending any money. Again, this is another no cost/low cost marketing solution brought to you by your friendly “Marketing Miser Advisor”.

While most entrepreneurs have heard of the term “keyword” many of them have no idea how to use them effectively as part of their Internet marketing strategy. Basically, keywords help your website get noticed and ranked in search engines such as Google. Search engines have a scanning mechanism called “spiders” that “crawl” through websites looking for hidden codes. Specifically, spiders look for keywords that describe what your website is about and then take that information back to the search engine database. The search engine then tries to match web site keywords with the most common words and phrases used by people to search the Internet. Search Engine’s like Google, Yahoo and Bing try to match the two in an effort to give the end user the search results they are most likley looking for when they conduct a search.

When you think about what keywords should be attached to your website or blog, it’s important to think in terms of how someone might randomly search for your product or service on the web. Your goal should be to think of as many of those terms as possible for your site and then use them properly in order to get noticed by the search engine spiders.

[Que music from the movie Mission Impossible humm along in your head. . .] Your mission should you choose to accept it is. . . to make a really thorough list of all the keywords and keyword phrases that people might use to search for the information you have on your website. Then, follow these steps:

1. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat. Repeat the keyword on the page multiple times. Spiders are simple little creatures. They assume that if a keyword appears many times on a page that that word must be what the page is about. Use the keyword naturally in your writing, repeating any keyword or keyword phrase two to four times in your text.

2. Placement. Where you put the keyword on the page is critical to getting noticed. There are certain locations on a website page that are more recognizable to our web crawling friends. Where are they you ask? In the obvious places, of course. Put keywords in headlines, sub-headlines and article titles. You should also put them in link text whenever you want to link to another page or another website. Spiders assume the words in link text indicates the subject matter of the site on the other end. So the lesson here is to avoid using link text such as “Click Here” or “To Learn More” or “For More Info”. Lastly, you should also consider putting them at the beginning and the end of page copy. This helps the spiders not only recognize keywords at the beginning of their “crawl” but it also helps them remember the site as they leave.

3. Title Tags. Title tags is the text that you see in the search bar of your web browser. It is also the text that appears in the search engine results for each page of your website or blog. Both of these are generated from your page title tag. You should customizing the title tags on every page of your website and include your keywords or keyword phrases. This will help get your site ranked higher in the search engines. In fact, some of your pages might be ranked higher than others simply because of the content you have on your site.

4. Meta Tags. As if not confusing enough, yes, there is another type of “tag” that you should know about. Meta tags have only one purpose — to be read by spiders. Sadly, many entrepreneurs build their site and focus more time and attention on developing cool graphics, writing copy and adding photos that they forget about including meta tags altogether. Your meta tags should include your keywords and keyword phrases just like your title tags. You can also customize them for each page of your website.

5. Image Tags.Nearly 99% of the time that I see photos uploaded to a website, there are no image tags on them at all. Like pages on a website, any images you put on your site also need a tag. Otherwise, spiders have no way to recognize the image and no way to rank it on the web. Remember, search engines also have photo/image search ability as well, but since they cannot read images they need a text description in order to recognize it. Without image tags, images in jpg, bmp or gif formats are just black holes on your website. Make them visible to spiders by adding keywords and keyword phrases to the image titles.

Utilizing keywords properly to drive SEO is not a sure-fire way to launch your website to the top of every search engine. However, it will definitely help get your site more visibility. Unless you have a huge advertising budget to buy website visibility on the Internet (and some of you might), I suggest you try these no budget tactics and see if it doesn’t help get you ranked a little higher. Be patient. It does take a while for spiders to crawl through the web and recognize the keywords that you’ve used properly to drive your SEO.

Cheers!!

The art of going beyond the Edge

While we’re still in the Preview 3 stage for Aero, when it comes to features, the development of our very first release is drawing to a close, with the expected final release in May, which makes up for 10 months of development and already over 800 commits to the core since the start. Either way, we’ve talked about it in our last blog post: we’ve planned more stuff. Let’s talk about that.

Aero – 1.0
Aero is, as you know our first stable release. We’re currently hard at work on it, and our weekly releases prove that. We’ll continue this schedual until we reach our first stable release. Either way, it’s a major improvement over ModernBB.

Bittersweet Shimmer – 1.1
Bittersweet Shimmer is going to be our first minor feature update to Luna. It will go by the number of version 1.1. Our main focus will be on improving upon the changes made in Luna 1.0, and we expect it rather quick after Aero is released. Do not expect much new features in version 1.1. You, however, can expect the kick-off of some major changes for later versions. This will also be the first Luna release to be developed with our new Git-structure. We’ll also be more specific in ticket items.

Cornflower Blue – 1.2
A couple of days ago, we’ve given our C-update a name: “Cornflower Blue”. Cornflower Blue will introduce a major revamp to the installer and update mechanics of Luna. These 2 systems are set to become completely rewritten and modular from the Luna core. The new components (as they will become components) will be released under their own license, the MIT license, that is. They will be completely separate from the original Luna core, and are our first steps towards a brand new core, which we like to call Edge. Further Cornflower Blue will introduce other small changes, but more on that later. As we follow semantic versioning, this will be Luna 1.2 and this update is planned for fall 2015.

Denim – 2.0
Next up is Denim. This will continue the work we did in Cornflower. But not for the installer and updater. No. You’ll see our Backstage being rebuild from scratch. A thing we’ve already started working on. Just like the installer from 1.2, the Backstage will become a separate component, as modular as possible, and released under a new license – again MIT. This will leave only the Mainstage behind on GPLv3, something we will fix later. Denim is supposed to introduce support for plugins in the Backstage (not the Mainstage). This major revamp of the Backstage will bring us to Luna 2.0 (as semantic versioning requires us to do so).

Emerald – 2.1
Our final planned update for now is Emerald. This update will have the same function to Denim as Bittersweet Shimmer had to Aero: it’s a minor all around improvement update. And thus we’ll probably go with version 2.1 for it. This update will focus on improving Edge (the name of our core for the installer, updater and Backstage by then). It’s currently planned to be the first update for 2016.

Early communication is good communication
So now you know what we’ve up to our sleaves. With Aero, Bittersweet Shimmer, Cornflower Blue, Denim and Emerald, we hope to keep ourselves buzzy for a while, and we hope to keep you guys happy for a while, until we’re ready to go to Luna “F” and beyond. And I guess that after reading this post, you guys might know what our plans are for the next major update after Aero (Luna 1.0) and Denim (Luna 2.0). On the other hand, note that codenames are not related to their respective version, and only in order of the releases.

We’re talking this early about our plans – which are subject to change – because we think that it is important to include our community in the development process as early as possible, so that’s what we do. And now, back to the development table for Aero.