If you have creative skills, these apps will help you to design your own animated characters. Below, we provide a list of 12 Best animation apps for Android & IOS.
Contributor If you’re a news addict but just can’t seem to stay ahead of all the content coming your way, you might be trying to find a solution. After all, searching through a variety of websites each day to find news you care about can be daunting, to say the least. In a bid to address that challenge, companies as large as Apple and Google, as well as a variety of startups, are all offering news apps that in one way or another help you organize the news and ensure you access all the content you care about.
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Best of all, many of them are available on both Android and iOS, ensuring you can use them on the smartphone of your choice. We chose the following apps by analyzing their performance on Android smartphones and iPhones. We also dug into user reviews to ensure they’re offering users an experience most folks like. They all come with outstanding user ratings, work well on most smartphone models, and are regularly updated with new features. The following roundup will feature five of our favorite news apps for iPhones and Android smartphones.
Indeed, if you download any of the following options, you shouldn’t have any trouble staying on top of the content you care about most: Flipboard. Flipboard Flipboard has established itself as one of the most popular news apps for both Android and iOS. And for good reason. Flipboard accesses content from around the world and curates the content you care about most.
You’ll find a tab called For You to see the content you’ll like best, as well as the option to explore stories you might not typically see. Its reader is outstanding and makes accessing content simple. Flipboard is available as a free download for both iPhone and Android smartphones. Apple News If you’re an iPhone owner, Apple News comes with the company’s iOS operating system. That means you can immediately get access to the news you care about without ever needing to download a third-party app.
Apple News kicks things off by first asking you what kinds of content you care most about. It then uses that information to create a curated list of news stories that might suit you. The service will also send you notifications to let you know when a new story comes in and if you’re a Mac user, you can syndicate content across devices.
If you’re an Android user, however, Apple News isn’t available to you. There’s some hope that Apple will bring its many apps, including Apple News, to Android in the future, but there’s no telling whether it will happen. Apple News is available for free. Google News Google has been a major player in the news business for years.
Its aggregation engine is widely viewed as one of the best in the market and those who have been accessing news in the browser have relied on it for quite a long time. Google News on the iPhone and Android smartphones offers a similar experience. Like its competitors, Google News comes with a function for analyzing your tastes and delivering you the content you care about. And when you boot it up, you’ll see the top five stories right now. Better yet, you can find a single story, but also get a timeline of articles to help you see how the story has evolved over time. And since it works with your Google account, you can access news in the browser, on mobile, and elsewhere. Google News is a free download.
Feedly Feedly is smaller than some of the heavyweights in the news app market listed above, but it’s coming on strong, thanks to one of the more appealing designs in this roundup. With Feedly, you’ll find an app that comes with a stripped-down design that eschews bulky banners, ugly sidebars, and other issues. Instead, the app simply provides you easy access to the content you care about and a nice, full-screen pane to read the articles on your phone.
Best of all, it comes with a night mode for reading content in the dark. In addition to surfacing content around the Internet, Feedly also comes with an artificial intelligence feature that identifies the kind of content you care about and delivers it to your phone.
It’s a handy way to find the news you love. Feedly is available as a free download. Inoreader Inoreader is another small startup that hasn’t attracted the kind of attention Flipboard enjoys, but it’s still a solid choice for anyone looking for alternatives.
One of Inoreader’s most important features is its design. The app’s Dive feature separates content along different topics and lets you build your own newsfeed based on the content you like most. Best of all, it does it all by making visual components, like still images, the centerpiece. Inoreader features a night mode for reading content in the dark and you have the ability to save content you want to read but don’t yet have time to get through. You can even export content and send it to others.
Inoreader is available for free.
I have written over 20,000 articles about startups, gadgets and large technology companies over the last ten years. My Forbes column focuses on the tech economy, startups and gadgets. When I am not writing for Forbes, I spend time hanging out with my wife around metro Detroit and working for a technology news website called Pulse 2.0 at my office in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I graduated from Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business in 2006. And I love hearing from entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts!
Feel free to contact me anytime: [email protected] The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Every day more than 350 million Facebook photos and 95 million Instagram photos are shared.
When we share photos with our family and friends, we want them to look good. This is why apps that allow you to edit photos have become very popular. There are many choices of apps that have photo editing tools such as filters, brightness, vignette and cropping, but it can be a challenge deciding which ones are the best. In my opinion, here are 20 of the best photo editing apps that you should consider downloading.
Adobe Photoshop Express (//). Adobe Photoshop Express / Photo Credit: Adobe Adobe Photoshop Express has many advanced editing tools and filters built into its photo editing app. Photoshop Express has control tools like crop, straighten, rotate, flip, color, red eye removal, hue, brightness and white balance. And Photoshop Express also has filters like Vibrant, Superpunch and Glow.
Plus you can add borders and frames to the photos. Adobe Photoshop Express also has add-on packs like the Adobe Looks Pack and the Adobe Advanced Pack. The Advanced Pack has options like noise reduction and DeFog (Windows Phone 8 and iOS only). And t here is a Photoshop Mix feature that allows you to combine multiple photos into one single image.
Raw photos are supported so you can import and edit photos in raw formats. AutoDesk Pixlr (///). Autodesk Pixlr / Photo Credit: Autodesk AutoDesk Pixlr is a free photo editor app that has over 2 million combinations of effects, overlays and filters. Using Pixlr, you can create photo collages with various layout, background and spacing options. There is an Auto Fix feature that balances out color. And multiple photos can be layered and blended together. Photos can be stylized with pencil drawings and ink sketches.
To enhance selfies, you can remove blemishes, red eyes and whiten teeth. And you can add captions and overlay photos with text. Camera+ app / Photo Credit: tap tap tap Camera+ has many sophisticated photo editing tools like touch exposure and focus. There is a Stabilizer shooting mode to help you take sharp photos and zoom up to 6x.
One of the best features in Camera+ is called Clarity, which makes intelligent adjustments to improve upon photos even in low light situations. There are many scene modes like Food, Sunset, Night, Portrait and Beach built into Camera+ to ensure you capture shots at the optimal setting. When taking photos using Camera+, I would recommend using the “Horizon Level” feature because it helps prevent crooked shots. Camera+ also has a variety of borders you can choose to touch up the photos.
Some of the other tools Camera+ has include effects (“Grunge,” “So emo,” etc.), brushing, layering, white balance, 1-tap red eye removal, vignette and tone. Camera360 ( / / ). Darkroom / Photo Credit: Bergen Co. Darkroom is a photo editing app that has all the bells and whistles that you would expect plus more.
Aside from being able to crop, brighten, saturate, fade and add filters, you can also adjust the curves, colors and tones. The Darkroom app also has infinite undo history and custom filter support. One of the best features in the Darkroom app has is the ability to edit photos without having to import them. And if there are certain photos that you want to quickly access, then you can “favorite” them. Darkroom is available as a free download, but it has a number of in-app purchases.
For example, the Portraits, Landscapes and B&W features cost $1.99 each. FaceTune (, ).
FaceTune / Lightricks Ltd. FaceTune is definitely a must-have photo editing app. FaceTune was designed to help you improve selfies and portraits. I definitely could have used this app when I was in high school for my yearbook and prom photos. FaceTune can widen smiles and brighten teeth. It can also be used to remove pimples and blemishes and brighten dark circles under the eyes.
Plus it can also remove red- and white-eye effects. Replacing grey hairs with a different color and filling in bald patches is a cinch with FaceTune. And you can use FaceTune to refine jawlines, reshape the nose, add color to your lips and apply blush shades and eye shadows. Font Candy ( ). Flickr app / Photo Credit: Yahoo!
Flickr has been one of the most popular professional photographer communities since 2004. Acquired Flickr in 2005, which enabled the photo social network to scale its growth. There are now over 12 billion photos that have been shared on Flickr.
And Flickr offers 1TB of free storage to all of its users. Flick’s mobile app lets you edit photos, add filters and crop images from the camera roll.
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There is a pro version of Flickr that offers advanced stats on your photos, an ad-free browsing experience, a desktop auto uploading tool, a one year subscription for Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC and a couple of other smaller perks. The pro version of Flickr costs either $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year. Google Photos (/). Google Photos app / Photo Credit: Google Google Photos is a free unlimited photo and video storage service that spun out of Google+ and evolved from Picasa. Google Photos is also tightly integrated with Google Drive. Photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution can be uploaded to Google Photos for free.
However, higher quality photos and videos uses up your Google Drive storage. Once the photos are uploaded, Google allows users to search for people, places, dates and subjects of their photos.
For example, you can search for “beach in Florida” and it will find the photos that are relevant to that query. When you tap on the Pencil icon of a photo, the app goes into edit mode. From there, you can adjust the Light, Color, Pop and Vignette effects. Google Photos also has filters, crop and rotation tools. Another useful feature is that Google Photos lets you review each individual shot when you upload photos in burst mode. Photos can be restored to the original state if you decide later on that you don’t like the edits. Instagram (/).
Instagram app / Photo Credit: Instagram Instagram is one of the most popular photo and video sharing mobile applications with over 500 million users. Photos on Instagram can be shared privately or publicly. Instagram has many filters to choose from and there are several editing tools you can use such as: adjust/crop, brighten, contrast, structure, warmth, saturation, color, fade, highlights, shadows, vignette, tilt shift and sharpen. Facebook back in 2012 and integrated its advertising platform with the mobile photo social network since then. Microsoft Selfie / Photo Credit: Microsoft Microsoft built a solid photo enhancement app for iOS called Microsoft Selfie. Microsoft Selfie considers age, gender, skin tone, lighting and several other variables to enhance your selfies. One of the best features in the Microsoft Selfie app is called Intelligent Portrait Enhancement — which fixes photos up with one click.
In dim light situations, the Denoise mode is automatically enabled — which reduces noise by using burst shots. And there is an auto exposure feature that corrects backlit photos. PicsArt (, ). PicsArt / Photo Credit: PicsArt Inc. PicsArt is one of my most favorite mobile photo apps because it has a ton of features.
PicsArt has been downloaded over 300 million times thus far and it can be used for editing photos, making collages and drawing. It also has a built-in social network for sharing your photos.
Some of the tools it has include crop, perspective, stretch, tilt shift, artistic filters, borders, masks, text, lens flare and speech bubbles. PicsArt is free to download, but it generates revenue by selling additional tools like Love Quotes, Tattoo Fonts and Birthday Frames. Prisma / Photo Credit: Prisma Labs Inc. Prisma is a mobile app that turns your photos and videos into art inspired by the styles of Van Gogh, Munk, Picasso and Levitan. You simply take the photo or video while using the app or pick one from your camera roll and select the filter. Prisma uses deep learning algorithms to apply each creative filter on the photos and videos. Primsa has over 30 styles and it has been downloaded tens of millions of times since it was released over the summer.
Photo Editor by Aviary (/). Snapseed / Photo Credit: Google Snapseed is a photo editing app that Google acquired in 2012. Snapseed has 25 tools including crop, rotate, perspective, brush, white balance and vignette. And Snapseed supports the ability to edit RAW DNG files. One of my favorite Snapseed features is Lens Blur, which adds a Bokeh effect to images. And there is a glamour glow feature that works well for fashion shoots and portraits.
Some of the other filters include HDR Scape, Drama, Grunge, Grainy Film, Vintage, Retrolux, Noir and Black and White. Snapseed also supports frames. And you can add focus to the eyes and add face-specific lighting. Trigraphy. VSCO / Photo Credit: Visual Supply Company VSCO is an app that supports advanced camera controls and a photo editing community. With VSCO you can publish images and journals and curate content in your profile. VSCO has a number of presets, tools and filters.
What is the difference between VSCO and Instagram? VSCO does not have social components such as “likes” and “comments” for photos. VSCO seems to be more favored as the go to app for professional photographer portfolios.
VSCO’s app description used to say: “Because beautiful imagery trumps social clout, the number of followers, comments, and likes are absent from the platform.” What are your thoughts about these 20 photo editing apps? Have you used any of these? Are there any other apps that aren’t mentioned in this article that you like? Please leave a comment!
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