App Releases: The latest popular mobile apps and desktop apps

You can quickly jump to the content you are interested in through the article directory. If you find other apps or topics of interest, please feel free to discuss them with us in the comments section.

New apps can’t be missed

DoMemo: Notes and memos taking

Platform: iOS / iPadOS
Keywords: note taking, memo
Unlike the previous pursuit of “big and comprehensive”, this new DoMemo can be called a “small but beautiful” app. On the one hand, DoMemo is restrained by the 200-word limit, no account login, and plain text format, and on the other hand, it provides advanced features such as tags, two-way links, speech-to-text, and mind maps.

In DoMemo, each note is in the form of a card, sorted by time stream in the notes screen. When the list of notes scrolls to the top, keep scrolling down the screen to create a new note. In addition, there is a button in the bottom right corner of the notes screen, which is the “New Note” function when the notes list is at the top, and the “Back to Top” function when the notes list is not at the top. Editing notes is also easy, just click the note card to pop up the keyboard, and the developer also designed a shortcut ribbon above the keyboard for editing mode, which can be used to move the cursor, insert pictures, change the style, etc.

DoMemo’s notes also have a very innovative timeline mode. Simply click the “clock” icon in the top right corner of the note card to switch to timeline mode, where each new line of text will be automatically added with a timestamp.

DoMemo not only allows you to type the notes manually, but also to record them by means of audio recording. After the recording is done, this recording will be inserted directly into the notes, and it can also be directly converted to text, and the recognition rate is pretty good from the test results.

In addition to attributes such as notes and memos, DoMemo can also give each card the attributes of a diary. In the diary tab, each note is categorized in a calendar according to the time it was created, making it easy to trace and view. At the same time, the calendar view can also insert system calendar events, forming a mechanism similar to the integration of calendar events and to-do tasks.x

DoMemo has added a very interesting design to the writing thing. In the achievement tab, you can see mountains and water, and according to the design, every 1000 words written will automatically plant a tree, and the height of the water wave will become higher as the word count increases. However, after adding more notes, I found that the achievement page still shows a word count of 0. I don’t know if this is a bug.

DoMemo has made a separate tab for the review function and a review mechanism of “30% random display, 70% according to memory curve”. DoMemo is free to download and use from the App Store, and for a fee you can unlock unlimited document count, speech-to-text, two-way links, tags, rich export formats, historical versions.

Bookland: Keep track of your reading

Platform: Android
Keywords: reading history, reading tracking
For people who are accustomed to reading daily, it is often necessary to record their current reading, whether it is a book that has been read, a book that is being read, or a book that is accidentally learned that it is ready to be read in the future, it needs to be recorded in time to achieve the effect of tracking and recording. Compared with other applications, the Bookland recommended today may be slightly simpler in function, but in terms of recording itself, Bookland is also competent.

Bookland is divided into three sections, namely books you plan to read, books you are reading, and books that have been read, Bookland allows us to find books by searching for titles, authors, keywords or ISBNs, with the help of the huge database of Google Books API, Bookland supports a wide range of book content. After the search is complete, Bookland will also give a brief description of the current book and provide a link to Google Books, so that users of Google Books can further view the book’s details or comments. Of course, everything is two sides of the same coin, and it is precisely because Bookland mainly relies on the Google Books API that its search for books is slightly inferior.

If you have other needs to record the progress of a book, Bookland may not be able to meet you, but for simple reading statistics, Bookland is useful, at least it has a beautiful interface, a simple design, and no redundant functions other than the recording itself.

You can download Bookland through the Play Store, which is free, open source, and ad-free.

App updates to watch

In addition to “fresh” apps, many old faces in the App Store are constantly iterating and updating to add more interesting and useful features. We wans to help you filter the app stories that are worth following in the App Store so you can quickly keep up with the latest news from apps and developers.

VirtualBox 7: Supports full encrypted virtual hosting, experimental support for Apple Silicon processor Macs

Platform: macOS/Windows/Linux
Keyword: virtual machine

When it comes to virtual machine software, our first reaction is often cross-platform VMware Player, Microsoft’s own Hyper-V, and if it is on a Mac, there is a fairly good experience of Parallels Desktop, but most of the above virtual machines are commercial closed-source software. When it comes to open source virtual machine software, then we have to mention the old VirtualBox. Compared with the previous commercial virtual machine software / platform, VirtualBox may not be the best in performance, but the supported platform may be the most complete, you can install a variety of mainstream desktop operating systems on Windows, Linux and macOS, and even can be used to install Android and some ancient old operating systems, basically can meet the needs of most discerning users in multi-system scenarios. However, because it is open source software, the new version of VirtualBox is not fast to develop, and this time the release of VirtualBox 7.0 is also the first major version update in four years, and finally added support for new systems and new hardware architectures.

The first is the support of new hardware, VirtualBox 7.0 has finally added support for Apple silicon hardware launched in 2020, and unlike the previous virtualization support through kernel extensions on macOS, this time is completely based on the hypervisor and vmnet framework launched by Apple, so the overall performance is not inferior to those commercial virtualization software currently appearing on macOS. However, the current beta version of the support for Apple silicon hardware is still relatively rudimentary, such as not yet able to support virtual running ARM64 version of Windows 11, and can not directly import .vhdx images like Parallels Desktop, in fact, Apple silicon version of VirtualBox 7 can only simulate the system running x86 / x64 through soft interpretation. You can see how much it will lose performance – if you need to run other operating systems on an Apple silicon architecture Mac, then it is better to choose other commercial virtualization software experience at this stage.

On other platforms, VirtualBox 7 is still a huge improvement. The first is the system, finally support virtualization Windows 11 – corresponding to the addition of virtual TPM 1.1 / TPM 2.0 device support, and the addition of Secure Boot item EFI, if you choose to use the Windows 11 system installation image to create a new virtual machine, you will find that the EFI boot will be booted by default during the creation process.

At the same time, in response to the 3D performance problems that have been criticized by many users before, VirtualBox 7 introduces a new 3D stack based on DirectX 11, and uses DXVK for non-Windows hosts, that is, Direct3D will eventually run on Vulkan, which will be quite good optimization and performance in 3D for newer computers.

Secondly, the most important change in VirtualBox 7.0 this time is the security aspect, that is, the virtual machine runs fully encrypted, including encryption of configuration logs and save state, of course, for the first version of VirtualBox 7, the current global VM encryption can only support the command line interface, obviously for those systems with GUI, the overhead of running under full encryption is still quite large.

Finally, with the changes in the interface and function adjustment of VirtualBox 7.0, a new monitoring disk section has been added to the system interface, which can view the real-time system status of the host and client in the form of charts, including CPU usage, RAM usage, disk I/O, etc.; The new wizard part has also been simplified, for the integrated unattended client operating system, the entire operation process has also been simplified, and finally on the system interface, the system theme support under different operating systems has been improved, such as the bright theme and dark theme on macOS, which can be automatically switched according to the system settings, and the icon of the application has been adjusted (although it is still rougher as before).

If you just want to try it out for a third-party operating system, then VirtualBox 7.0 is perfectly adequate, but if you want to run virtual machines with high performance, then VirtualBox 7.0 may disappoint you.

VirtualBox 7.0 is now officially released, supporting Windows, Linux and macOS operating systems, of which the version for Apple silicon is also in developer preview, all versions can be downloaded for free.

SmartLauncher 6.1: Adaptive widgets go live for the first time

Platform: Android
Keyword: widgets
SmartLauncher is a very sophisticated launcher app for Android, and some time ago, the app released version 6.1 update, bringing us new adaptive widget features. Since the beginning of the Android system, the desktop widget function has been unsatisfactory, one of the reasons is the compatibility of the widget, and the definition of “grid” by each launcher will also cause various strange bugs in the widget. It’s better to ask for others than for yourself, and the SmartLauncher team simply took it upon themselves to create an adaptive widget in version 6.1.

This update features 6 adaptive widgets, including clocks and weather, and scheduled events, and the content of these widgets is not fixed due to size restrictions. Let’s take the weather widget as an example, when the size is large, it can display the time, date, weather, and sunrise and sunset time, and when we adjust to a smaller size, these contents will be reduced, and the time number will be adjusted to arrange up and down; The same is true of the power display, which is displayed in different directions according to the aspect ratio of the widget, and although the display content is simple, there is a nonsensical cuteness in putting a huge battery status on the desktop.

In addition, the music controls, power display, compass and other widgets are also very beautiful. Adaptive widgets can solve a pain point for desktop beautification enthusiasts, even if the desktop layout is adjusted, we do not need to re-add another fixed-size widget, just drag and drop. You can now download SmartLauncher for free on Google Play, with some adaptive widgets and additional premium features available for $2.49/month, $6.99/year, and a buyout fee of $16.99.

Drafts v33 update: Deep adaptation for new systems

Platforms: iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/macOS
Keywords: notes, shorthand

Drafts has always been one of the most popular note-taking tools in the Apple ecosystem with improved feature updates and updates to iOS new features, and recently Drafts also released a v33 feature update, including several feature updates and new and limited iOS 16 features.
The first is a new lock screen widget update for iOS 16, Drafts adds two new lock screen widgets, including a multifunction widget that can quickly create draft drafts directly from the lock screen and a multifunction widget that can be manually set to display menu content such as the inbox.

In addition, this update of the Focus interface allows users to manually configure the automatic adjustments corresponding to the Drafts of the iPhone after turning on the focus: such as turning on/off in-app settings such as dark mode. However, this option can only be enabled in iOS, and the corresponding option for iPadOS and macOS will be enabled after the update is released this fall.

The new Library Summary is also an iOS 16 / macOS 13 device-limited feature, this new feature button can be found in the lower right corner of the iOS version Drafts UI interface, used to quickly display various tags and text statistics in the current content library, currently only iOS16 is available in the v33 version, and in iPadOS and macOS versions, this feature will not be enabled until a subsequent update released this quarter.

The update also includes updates to Drafts’ built-in Shortcuts command, which allows users to use Siri directly to quickly launch more features built into Drafts: such as directly turning on content search, creating new drafts, and directly recording a new voice draft.

Although shortcuts are not an iOS 16 limited feature, operating systems prior to iOS 16 are not currently supported, and the developer said in the changelog that this new feature will make this feature as compatible as possible with more iOS versions in the future.

Finally, there is the new Scoped Tags tagging feature: a special tag classification mechanism that uses tags like prefix::tag to quickly group drafts and make them easy to search, but only one such tag can be added to each draft, as can be seen in the official demo case, this tag can be easily managed by users to manage the completion status of the current draft.

In addition to these major feature updates, the v33 version also includes the addition of photo OCR transcription generation drafts, small feature updates/bug fixes for some corresponding versions of iOS/macOS, which will not be repeated here; The full Drafts v33 version changelog can be found in the official website changelog. You can download the latest version of Drafts from the App Store.

Obsidian 1.0: The well-known double-chain note-taking tool is finally available in version 1.0

Platforms: macOS / Android / iOS / iPadOS / Linux
Keywords: notes, double-chain notes, Markdown

We didn’t wait for the various beta versions of Obsidian v0.16 in the rumor, but unexpectedly waited for a leapfrog version upgrade like Obsidian Desktop 1.0 last week. The new version features a new look that supports custom accent colors, similar to the previously popular Minimal theme, making it easy for new users to get started. Existing users can also continue to use the updated Minimal theme to try out richer customizations.

Multi-tab display can be said to be the core function of the 1.0 update. Obsidian tab rules are very similar to browsers, they all set tab management at the top of the page, when you create a new or open document, a new tab will appear, you can click the page title to switch preview, click the “x” to close the tab, click the “+” sign to create a new tab, and you can also right-click to lock the tab. When you want to read another document, press and hold “⌘” and click on the document title to open the preview in a new tab like the browser. At the bottom of the tabs, there are also familiar “Back” and “Forward” buttons that you can use to quickly view your browsing history.

On the basis of “page” management, the application also adds a “group” mechanism. Drag any tab to the app compartment, and the tab will break away from the previous “tab group” to form a new group, achieving the effect of split-screen viewing. Each group’s tabs don’t affect each other, so you can preview more information at the same time. If you’re not used to the new tab mechanic, click the “Stack Tabs” button in the downward arrow in the top bar to change to the stacked tab display mode. This mode is also independent of each other, and you can use it together to further improve reading and editing efficiency.

In addition, the new version has “patched” more than 30 issues that affect the use or presentation, and this release means that Obsidian has thrown away the “Beta” label. As a “mature” application, I hope that the confident development team can bring us more “real fragrance” experience.

Other app updates

Apple Music (Android): Updated to v4.0, introducing “Favorites”, a new way to get better recommendations and the latest music from artists you follow, and a new playlist sorting option.

Vivaldi (Android): Updated to v5.5 with a newly designed welcome screen that allows users to customize the browser in seven steps. A new option to automatically close inactive tabs when necessary is also integrated.

Steam (Android|iOS): Updated to v3.0, players can view their game library on the mobile phone, and can control the PC on the mobile phone to remotely update or download games on the PC; You can also scan the QR code on the web side to log in by scanning the web client, so you don’t need to enter a username, password or Steam Guard code.

UninstallService: UninstallService is the most cost-efficient app removal solution for both Windows and Mac computers. It has released the 2023 upgrades to both the well-known UninstallService Windows and Mac uninstallers. All users can choose to upgrade to the new 2023 versions at no extra cost.

macOS productivity launcher Alfred has announced the launch of Alfred Gallery, which allows users to submit custom workflows.

Posted on October 18, 2022 uninstalledly editor