February/March favorites: Journaling, quotes and books!

Hello guys!

This favorites blog post will be the combination of the last two months’ (This month’s favorites will be coming soon.), since I didn’t have time to really do anything besides getting better (anxiety+ulcer are not a good combination…) and trying to make some advancements with my thesis (which is a serious stress source for me).

This time, we’ll have a bit of a change with books, some nice music, quotes and musicals!I want to say thank you, to everyone who commented on the last post, those who sent me private DMs on Instagram/Twitter (they were quite a few to my surprise!) and for the retweets and shares. Your positive and amazing feedback was such a big help for me to continue to do what I love and what I’ve always loved doing all along 😃 .

Keep the suggestions coming! ☺

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January favorites: Crime, Love and Languages!

Hello sweets!

So, in this blog post I’ll be talking about 5 of my favorites this month, some bonus items might be included 😉. I plan for this to be a new series on the blog, so each month or so I’ll try to do the same. I’m going to see how it works out and whether this is going to be a monthly thing or not.

So, for this month, here are my absolute favorites:

Grooveshark: Music Streaming Wherever You Go!

Music streaming services are the most popular services of nowadays to listen to our longtime favorite songs or the new hits of the week.

There are a lot of services, from Rdio to Mog to Spotify to Grooveshark which I’ll be reviewing in this article. Since all the above services are restricted to certain areas and Grooveshark has been available worldwide, I’ve had the great opportunity to try it for over a year now and experience what music streaming is really like.

Grooveshark lets people upload their own music on their (Grooveshark’s) servers so they, along with other users, can listen to it via the web, their mobile phones or using the desktop app. It’s available for free but for the ad-free web app, the desktop app, Last.fm scrobbling and the mobile app along with the offline mode you have to either be a Grooveshark Anywhere member or a plus subscriber to remove only the ads and be able to use the premium theme .

To not wright a long blog post explaining Grooveshark from A to Z, I decided to do a video review (now that I fixed my 5 months microphone issue ) which I haven’t done for so long. However, I’m warning you, this video is so long, I apologize for that, but it’s only because I explained it very well!!!

P.S: I missed a thing , visualizations, video mode and power hour, but you can get to them thru clicking on songs above the queue. They’ll let you show a visualization while the song is playing and you can choose from 5 different ones and you can also make full screen . Video mode will show you a bunch of videos that match the current song you’re playing so you can watch its video.

Power Hour “A power hour is an American Collegiate tradition that involves a lot of adult beverages. Power Hour Mode accommodates people who’d like to participate in Power Hours by playing every song in your playlist or queue for 60s or 1 minute, creating a convenient signal for “It’s Time To Drink!”

So this is pretty much it. I would love to review the app on my phone but I don’t have a camera to record it nor an app to actually film what’s going on on my screen, I found someone who did that but I never found the app, so If you happen to know one, please share it with us, I have a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic .

If I missed anything, you have a feedback or you just want to tell me to stop saying “mmm…, well…” (I’m still trying, I swear! lol) you’re welcome .

The Review:

The Desktop Application:

The Mobile App:

 

Thank you for watching!

See you soon,

Randa

3 apps I can’t live without

There are many apps that I can’t have a mobile phone without having them installed on it, but since the Ovi Blog Article asked to choose only 3 of them, I can only pick 3 :).

So, I’m going to start with my portal to the internet:

Opera Mobile:

Opera Mobile screenshots VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

A great web browser, the reason why I love, even when I use the built in browser of my phone a lot, is because It has multiple tabs, I love tabs and I love it because it gives me that option. I recommend this app if you’re an internet addict :D.

My music crush:

Grooveshark:

Grooveshark screenshots VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Well, I LOVE IT!!! I wasn’t able to know how awesome it is to have streaming to your phone through the internet and still have the choice to make it offline until I got Grooveshark Everywhere. Grooveshark is a streaming service which you can use on both the web, for free, and on a mobile device as well as using it through a desktop app when paying a small fee. Unfortunately, in my dear country >_< we can’t pay for other services so I didn’t know how great it was until I got a free month of Grooveshark Everywhere. The Grooveshark app let’s you enjoy all the sweetness that you enjoy on the web in addition to the offline ability. This app is always running on my phone even if I have to close every other app ❤ (A special review of the service and the app is coming this week ;)). You can add me and see my songs here.

My photo world:

Molome:

		Molome screenshots VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Although I’m kind of new to this app, I’m so loving it. It’s similar to Instagram for the iPhone but it’s for Symbian^1 and ^3 I believe :).

It has cool effects that you can use and you can share your photos with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. It’s still pretty buggy, and I mean really buggy but hey! It works sometimes! =) You can find me here or search for ranousha ^_^.

So these are my top 3 favorite apps, I still have others but mainly, these are the essentials.

Good luck to everyone in the competition and keep watching for this week’s review :D.

Randa

Nokia Reader

Hello there!

Sorry for not blogging much, I’ve been so busy at school with exams as usual . Also, I’ve been busy with the guest interview that Ovi Blog. did with me , I’ve been so honored to be asked to do one. I’m still happy. You can read it next week on the Ovi Blog .

If you haven’t noticed, I also updated my blogs look and feel. I made this decision late at night after noticing that I haven’t updated it in so long, also, after seeing that the previous one had so much pink in it!

Anyways, let’s get to the point!

So Nokia released a new application on the Beta labs website called Nokia Reader. What this app let’s you do, is it let’s you add your favorite RSS feed and it’ll fetch the feeds right into the app. It’s so simple, easy and very basic. It also has notifications and a widget for your phone, if it supports this option of course. They released it for s^1 lately, so I decided to give it a try as I usually do with beta applications from Nokia Beta Labs .

My experience:

The installation was so smooth and it took only 2minutes or less.

After the installation is done, you lunch the app (named “Reader”) >>

 

After you sign in with your Nokia/Ovi account, the app will connect to the internet, then it’ll show you news from pre-set RSS feeds, which you later customize.

At the top, you can see three section; Reader, My feeds and Directory. Reader tab is the current one which is in the screenshot above, which shows you new articles from your selected or/and added RSS feeds . The My Feeds tab shows you your subscribed feeds. From this tab, you can manually add feeds for sites not available in the directory. The Directory tab, shows you pre-set categories of feeds you might want to subscribe to. (See the next screenshots)

When you click on a category, feeds from that category show up, from there, you can click on a feed either to subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also see feeds you’re already subscribed to a particular feed by seeing that “Right” mark on the right.

Going back to the Reader tab, you can click on an article to expand it and read some of it. To read the hole article, you have to click on “Read More” which will take you outside the app to the article’s web page using you browser.

By clicking on Options at the bottom left, you can choose to change the theme or go to offline mode, which is nice .

What I would love to see in upcoming updates to this app:

• – Google Reader support! I saw at their Beta Labs page that some users already requested that and I agree with them! It would be nice to sync to Google Reader or even just import our feeds from there, we don’t have to re-write our favorite feeds URLs many times!! Especially if you have hundreds of feeds like me.
• – I would love to see the full article opens within the app, native support, instead or opening the browser to read it. This might kill the ram of the phone if it’s like mine!

Final words:

I love this app! It’s simple, very basic and easy to use, which I adore . It needs to be improved more, but hey, it’s still in Beta, that’s why they need our feedback. If you have a supported Nokia device, then give it a try, you won’t regret it!

Stay tuned for more reviews to come!