Google Quickoffice Offers Extra 10GB Of Free Google Drive Storage

Last week, Apple announced that it would be making its iWork for iOS suite available free of charge for new iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Now, Google has made its Quickoffice document editing app available for free as well.

In a blog post titled “Freeing Quickoffice for everyone,” Google notes:

Everyone likes free stuff, which is why starting today we’re making Quickoffice available for free, for everyone. With Quickoffice, you can edit Microsoft® Office documents across your devices, giving you the freedom to work with anyone no matter what hardware or software they’re using. Quickoffice also integrates seamlessly with Google Drive storage so you can safely access your files from anywhere. And while the easiest thing to do is simply convert your old files to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, Quickoffice gives you another way to work with people who haven’t gone Google yet.

Quickoffice was acquired by Google in June last year and was relaunched by the tech giant exclusively for Google Apps for Business users in December. Now, it has been reopened for free, for everyone.

The new Quickoffice app also features a new app icon, the ability to create .ZIP folders, and support for viewing charts in Excel and PowerPoint files. Further, it boasts improved integration with Google Drive.

What’s more, if you sign in to your Google account from the new Quickoffice app by Thursday, Sept. 26, you’re entitled to get an extra 10GB of Google Drive storage free for two years.

Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad running iOS 5.0 or later, the new and free Quickoffice app is available now in the App Store.

Note that all other versions of Quickoffice have been removed from the App Store.

Source: AppAdvice

'The Lord of the Rings: War in the North' hits on OS X

Mac gamers are getting a treat this week, as The Lord of the Rings: War in the North comes to the OS X App Store.

War in the North was originally released on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in late 2011. It lets players inhabit one of three characters doing battle in the northern portions of Middle Earth during the time of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Gamers can play as either tough Farin the Dwarf, stealthy Eradan the Ranger, or spell-casting Andriel the Elven Loremaster. Each character has special abilities based on his or her race and class.

The two characters that are not selected will form a player's party, as they encounter beloved characters from the franchise, including Frodo, Samwise, Legolas and Gandalf. Gamers will also get to explore places familiar to Lord of the Rings fans, such as Elven homeland Rivendell.

The Lord of the Rings: War of the North costs $29.99 in the Mac App Store.

Source: Mashable

Influencers And Innovation 'Dream Database App' by a Kickstarter project

Every morning, sleep researchers lose an enormous data set as people wake up and have their first cup of coffee.

Nightly dreams go largely forgotten, making the sort of broad questions scientists ask about them difficult to answer. Do the rich dream differently than the poor? Do our nighttime thoughts differ from city to city, or from country to country?

The makers of a new app think they have an elegant solution to not only help people remember their own dreams, but to build a database of these unconscious thoughts that can be shared among friends and used by scientists to gain a better understanding of what we think about when we sleep.

SHADOW, a Kickstarter project launched by Hunter Lee Soik and Jason Carvalho this week, would combine an alarm clock with a dream journal. The app would use an "escalating alarm" to gently and gradually bring you out of a dream into the "hypnopompic state" between sleep and wakefulness during which dreams are best remembered. From there, the app would prompt you to record your dreams by voice or text, so that they can be archived for posterity (or just for your therapist).

The pair is asking donors to choose to contribute toward an iOS, Android or Windows Phone version of the app, with the winning platform to be built first.

Much like fitness or money-management apps born of the "quantified self" movement, SHADOW turns dreams into yet another set of personal data to be picked apart by cloud-based computers. Perhaps you have bad dreams when your bank account dips below a certain amount, Soik suggested. Or maybe you dream pleasantly after taking more than 10,000 steps in a day. Such a digital dreamcatcher, in tandem with other apps, could tease out those patterns.

"We don't really know what's out there because we've never been there," Soik said.

The app's data-gathering potential may also be a dream come true for sleep scientists and dream researchers. Current clinical studies of dreams have maybe a few dozen participants each. An app like SHADOW could offer researchers hundreds or thousands of cases to analyze.

If SHADOW grows large enough, Soik plans to encourage researchers to request and analyze users' dream data, with push notifications sent to dreamers so they can grant permission. SHADOW is taking initial steps toward such a project by signing on six sleep scientists as advisors.

Siok, a former creative consultant on Kayne West and Jay-Z's "Watch the Throne" tour, said he got the idea for the app when he took a six-month break from work and started catching up on his sleep. He found he wanted to write down his dreams, but there was no app on the market to meet his needs, he said.

"It snowballed from me falling back in love with sleep to wanting to have dream app for myself," he said.

SHADOW's default setting keeps all dream data private, but the team hopes to build out a more social network, one that could feed users the number of other people who dreamed about the same topic, say, or snippets from publicly available dreams.

That raises at least one disconcerting prospect: SHADOW might reveal that your dreams aren't that interesting or original after all.

Source: huffingtonpost

Quitting Facebook The people who do!

According to researchers at the University of Vienna have just published the results of a study examining the temperament and demographics of the people who leave Facebook, shedding light on what distinguishes those who commit “virtual identity suicide” from the rest of us still enduring the “pokes.”

The team surveyed 310 people who had quit Facebook and 321 Facebook members on their personality traits, Internet addiction tendencies and attitudes toward privacy to see if certain patterns would emerge. The respondents consisted of people from all over the world who were recruited online and volunteered to take the study, though they're a small sample compared to the entirety of Facebook users and are not necessarily representative of all Facebook quitters.

According to those surveyed, it turns out that the people who leave Facebook aren’t so different from the rest of us. They’re also worried about who sees their photos, annoyed by Facebook’s constant changes, irritated by superficial social interactions and concerned by how many hours they spend glassy-eyed and slack-jawed staring at their screens.

And even among those who haven't quit Facebook, a large number say they've considered it. Nearly half (46.8 percent) of the current Facebook users surveyed said they’d previously considered quitting the site. A full 61 percent of members say they've taken extended breaks from Facebook, lasting several weeks or more, according to areport from the Pew Research Center published this year.

Yet the University of Vienna study did find several key attributes that characterized those who'd killed off their Facebook accounts:

- They’re more likely to be men: Among those who had deactivated their accounts, the majority (71.5 percent) were male. Among those who currently used Facebook, the majority (70.5 percent) were female.

Source: huffingtonpost

GSM Moto X Developer Edition on sale for $649.99

Verizon version of the Moto X Developer edition went on sale online for $649.99, while the GSM Variant was listed as coming soon on Motorola’s website. The GSM version of Moto X is now available for sale on Motorola’s online shop for $649.99, the same price as the Verizon variant.

The GSM version is said to work with AT&T and T-Mobile, but unlike Verizon version, GSM Moto X doesn’t include a SIM card with the box, so users have to use their own SIM. Due to high demand, GSM variant of Moto X can take as much as seven days to ship.

The device features a 4.7-inch AMOLED display and is available with 32GB storage onboard with the words “Developer Edition” engraved on its back cover. Moto X developer edition also come with free 50GB storage on Google Drive for two years. Other features include 2GB RAM, 10MP ClearPixel rear camera, 2,200 mAh battery, Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System with dual-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor clocked at 1.7GHz and runs Android 4.2.2 on top of it.

Source: paatak.com