Top Apps for Apple Store

So here I come out of the dark ages of PC and Laptops and notebooks and here comes my first blog from a 4.7 inch smartphone . I wanted to share what apps I love most on iPhone and don’t worry all are free 😛.  So here are a few. Mind you these are my list ( from a Indian perspective)and you are free to have ur difference of opinion.

I am assuming most of us would have installed all the major social networking sites. You might also want to install about.Me for profiling and Flikr for cool snaps you have taken!!



They have a good interface and some great profiles to go through.

For taxi rides I use Uber and Olacabs (only in India)



The advantage with these mobile apps of regular taxis are they give you referrals and free rides which is not available when you their IVR or websites.merucabs are another local Indian fav.



Of news and feeds I rely on Flipboard and Instapaper and Digg.



( sorry but these are regular affair in India and I really wanted to support this brave lady)

Rely on Instapaper and Pocket for reading later when offline or while on travel where u don’t have internet.



Makemytrip ,Expedia , tripadvisor and cleartrip for travel bookings . Hotel right now from makemytrip gives good deals as well.



Coupondunia for deals and Zomato for review on places to have meals !



if you are a football fan like me you would like to install onefootball which gives you content of goal.com and you will get live ticker for games in progress as well from all the leagues in the globe. And if you love cricket then cricbuzz is the app to have.

I know for jobs most ppl use naukri and timesjobs, but glassdoor is invaluable to know the package and the culture of the company !



For rentals and searching houses you can use 99acres,common floor  , majicbricks



For pregnancy apps I can’t think of anything better than babycenter my pregnancy app.

And for reviews if most of  things I use mouthshut..

I use relax m for concentration and soothing sounds.

Ted for great talks and coursera for great computer talks . Meetups for scheduling and reaching out to like minded communities and groups mostly in the tech realm.



I use healthkart+ and webMD for meds and procedures and diagnosis.

Flipkart Ebooks gives you free Ebooks to read . Not just the romantic and the classics.

Justdial for any info on utility in neighborhood

Timeful for managing my time and yes finally WordPress and blogger apps for blogging 🙂

There are a few notable apps like memorado for brain games, busuu for learning foreign languages,topic to insert voice into snaps, awesome scanner for scanning docs and wireshare for sharing stuff . Try ipash tone kewl among geeks and I use procam for editing snaps when not using Instagram!!

There are a few other mentionable apps like my bsnl for paying your bsnl bills or mobile one for Bangalore utility bills and my Vodaphone for Vodaphone users finally 

Flashing Jelly Bean & ICS on HTC Desire

Ha.. finally I updated my good ‘ol HTC Desire A8181 to Jelly Bean.I don’t know how long it will suffer my testing though and how good the ROM from CyanogenMod 10 is.Anyways it was a very satisfying experience, as I always wanted to update the OS on my mobile as easily as I do on a desktop/laptop. But as I have short term memory loss problem ,let me try to recollect what I did in the first place . Also before you go ahead, let me tell you the following are instructions only for HTC and their ROM’s and in some cases specific to HTC Desire.So others back off unless you want your phone bricked .But I presume most of the others have similar or close to same instructions.

First of all you need to have guts and not a mobile with a shade of pink..ok just kidding.

Following are the prerequisites if you want to go ahead .

1)Creating backups of your existing data and please ensure your phone had enough charge left.

2) Install the HTC drivers for your phone.

3)Uninstall the HTC sync from your computer.

4)Set the enable USB debugging on your device.

5)Need to root your phone.How? Install unrEVOked³ recovery reflash tool from their site unrevoked.com .

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6)Install ROM Manager from Play Store.

7) Select the option ClockwordMod Recovery from the ROM Manager.

8)Copy the ROM from http://d-h.st/Nax to your SD card.

9)Boot into recovery by pressing and holding down the Volume Down and Power buttons.

    Select recovery and select backup and recovery next.Select backup in the next screen.

10) Select wipe data/factory reset and confirm in the next screen.

11)Select install Zip from SD card  post step 10.Choose zip from sd card and select the cyanogenMod 10 ROM file by browsing to that path and select the file.

12) Go back after finishing installation and select reboot system now.

And there you go, you have the all new shiny JB on your device.

Mind you there are loads of tools and sdk’s from which you can explore more.There are sites like androidauthority and forum.xda-developers.com  ,which will help you find loads of ROMs and instructions.I must confess, I spent a few hours reading ’em before taking the plunge .

                                          

Having installed it, I realised that the performance was not upto the mark, not to mention the various times it just crashed and restarted while opening media .Hence the desire to experiment with my desire, led to the installation of a lower OS, Ice Cream Sandwich.Having heard lots about a ROM called AOKP Milestone 6 (version 2) ,i decided to test drive it.But first, i wanted to check if my previous backup of Froyo was still existent.So I held the volume down and the power button and selected recovery and chose to install from the  previous backup .After some time i was in familiar territory.So I downloaded the new ROM ( http://www.mediafire.com/?5nzio781hub8533) and the corresponding google apps(http://goo.im/gapps/gapps-ics-20120429-signed.zip) and was ready for the next round of installation. All went smooth and I am very pleased with the new OS.Let me test it out further and will let you know in case of any issues.Till then i will enjoy my Ice Cream Sandwich 🙂