Windows 8 App review: Dictionary.com

     Overview

     Every good writer needs a very good dictionary. This is my personal recommendation over the middling competition. It has been available since the Consumer Preview, and little has changed except a few bug fixes. It does the job well, but is not the most feature packed app in the store. Also the design is very ho-hum. It does have "articles" called "The Hot Word" which talks about a word or once in a while a language that may seem a bit controversial or interesting. I really like the live tile which has a Word of the day which if you click the tile, go into the app, and click on the word it tells you what it means. The app start up times are slower than average and there is some noticeable lag inside of the app.

     Functionality

     The app may be extremely useful, but performance is very modest if not below average. The app itself is very light at 4.32 MB which should turn out to be very zippy. Sadly it was below expectations with only a word document open. It takes around 4-8 seconds to load almost at the 66MB Star Chart app. The search function is also slow and sometimes will not work if the dictionary app is not open. Still the search works great, and when you search for a word it shows a list of closely spelled words. It does what it advertises well even if a bit slow on some older hardware. I really loved the website and students would find this very functional given the snapped view mode. I love the app and I think you will too.

     Conclusion

     I loved the website and no longer visit it thanks to the Dictionary.com app! I really love everything about it except the lack of design. 

Rating// 4.5 out of 5

Windows 8 has hit RTM

Well finally after a lot of hard work Windows 8 has reached RTM. It will be available August 16th.

Source: Windows8Update

Windows 8 App review: Fine Cooking

     Overview

     I have always loved magazines and a good "magazine" app is hard to come by. This app shows true potential among the current crop of preview apps. The other magazine that I have reviewed My History Digest goes with a more web styled approach, but the Fine cooking magazine follows the path the Fine Homebuilder app took: the traditional magazine look and feel. The app has a lot of good features that all work unlike the Homebuilder app, and it also has a beautiful look and is pretty quick in app. The speed stops there. It took me 30 minutes to download 1 issue and there was only two to choose from. I was pretty disappointed at the lack of issues, but that is becoming very common among magazine apps before RTM. Another piece of criticism I have to give is that the text is too small for comfortable use. You are forced to view any content in zoomed view otherwise it is unreadable on a 1366x768 screen (a full HD screen renders text even smaller). In zoomed view you can not leaf to another page which forces you to exit the current view and then leaf over. Currently pages are rendered in two page mode so if it was rendered say in 1 page mode the problem would be fixed.

     Functionality

     Loading the main screen was pretty quick probably because there is nothing there. Loading up a pre-downloaded magazine takes about 4-6 seconds and there are some pictures of recipes that work part of the time. In a design aspect there is a lot of empty space that could be utilized by even a simple Office 15 like theme where they put flowers on the edges or lines you understand. It is not like the issues are even new they are from May and April. After you open your downloaded issue you have two options: 1 go to a recipe or 2 start reading the issue. Navigation is powered by the hated side buttons or if you click in the article you can use the left and right buttons. There is no fancy turning animations and the zoom function is not completely polished. There is a full screen mode which wastes some space on the side and the text is still too small for reading. If you try going through the magazine quickly then it starts to stutter and some pages do not display. There are some other functions like showcasing all of the articles in a grid or strip function. 

     Conclusion

     It did not provide the most pleasant experience, but still it laid a good groundwork for what looks to be a solid app come time for the RTM or Windows 8 release.

Rating// 3.8 out of 5

Windows 8 App review: Star Chart

     Overview

      I have not reviewed any Education apps yet and I am very excited to see one that rivals Google Skymap and Google Earth bringing them both into one good app. I could not try out the Augmented Reality function because I do not have a tablet yet. I will accept any people who would like to donate a Samsung Series 7 or if a Microsoft employee is reading has a Surface Pro lying around with palm block and the type cover I will gladly take one. :) Anyway this is some very cool stuff that the developer Escapist Games has made. One my third time of downloading the app it finally worked to my surprise. It is a very large app at 66MB, but that is expected for a lot of 3D models and a fully featured settings and sharing features. I was very happy to see a good feature packed app that has some decent sharing features. It is the slowest app that I own, and I am not giving it a free pass because it looks nice. There has to be ways to make the app faster on any machine or else it ruins the experience on all machines. If it can run on the Ipad smoothly than by golly they can make it run on Atom tablets!

     Functionality

     I was very disappointed to find an app that takes from 7 - 10 seconds to load. This is totally unacceptable. When it does load the app gets a big quicker, and loads up fast enough. Snapped view is nice and when you click on a star a cool sidebar pops up talking about where it is located, what it is, and has a handy zoom feature to see it up close. Looking at the planets is a lot like Google Earth, but some of the roving features and flight simulators is not here. When you exit the app and come back to it that is where the in app lag begins. Or if you are running other tasks it will take even longer to open the app, and going through settings and charms takes forever. Still if you have a good computer or if they update the app to run on slower hardware better than we may see some better performance. 

     Design

     I rarely go into design details on apps because they usually are the same and boring. This has some metro design aesthetics, but it feels like you are actually in the sky. It is not very hard for me to visualize what it would look like for the Augmented Reality mode. Simply you would hold the app to the sky and the e-compass and GPS sensors inside would determine which part of the sky you are looking at and display all of the stars on the map. It works like Google Sky and adding Google Earth modeled stars. The app is very pure and feels distraction free. It also shows you all of the constellations based on how they were modeled in the 15th century which is really cool. The entire catalog of stars is over 120,000 and even has a Search function baked in which is great for finding stars, galaxies, and planets if you have the name or Messier number. It updates in real time and features a night mode which essentially turns everything red. This is an excellently designed app and I would highly recommend schools utilizing this app. Sharing to Wordpress, journal by lifescribe, evernote, e-mail, and Quick Note. It also features a time lapse function that lets you go forward and backward seeing what the sky would look like. This app maintains a good score only because of the high quality design effort that was put into it. 

     Conclusion

     HD star models and a beautifully designed app is very hard to give a bad grade. But the lagginess of the app can't be missed which is why it scores 4 out of 5. Check out the slideshow below!!

Rating// 4 out of 5