I must admit that my zeal for testing apps has waned after I limited my phone usage to certain must-have apps but every once in a while, deals show up in Google Play and that is when my inner Kenyan screams out loud because I love free stuff. Free quality stuff. That aside, I have played with a couple of temporarily free apps for the better part of the day. You can check them out too.
GIF PartyPro – GIF Video Booth
‘App development 101: Dear developer, if you want to sell your app, make sure it has ‘Pro’ on its name.’
Here is the thing: gifs (people will judge how you pronounce ‘gif’ because that’s what people do – look for an opportunity to make themselves feel better about everything, so, get used to it) are a thing now. They are all over our social media pages; you can reply to a tweet/Facebook post/ or Telegram/WhatsApp message with one, and that’s good. Some apps like Instagram allow users to make gifs from short videos, although I have always found them distasteful because the picture-sharing app downsizes their quality into a grainy mess.
That is where GIF Partypro comes in. You can make one or a collage of up to 4 gifs, slow or speed them up, save them as a video or gif file, and lastly, share your creations to your social media feeds. All you have to do is trust your duck-making face, and explore the world of gifs.
The app has a price tag on it, but it is free for now because Lacazette scored. On the other hand, you could skip on it and use the always-free Motion Stills app from Google that functionally does the same thing as we discussed here.
There is no shortage of photo editing apps out there. While most of them get the job done, their functionalities are limited to a few tweaks, like changing white balance, contrast and warmth. Other apps have gained popularity by bringing a bunch of cool filters to the table. Remember Prisma that got so popular because we love ourselves so much to share our self-portraits untouched? Sketch Me! Pro does the same thing, but its filters are in form of cartoons, drawings or sketchy images. The app has different effects such as pencil sketch, among others, and the beauty of all these features is that it will not force you to create an account. Tap to open it and start editing.
This app does what its name suggests, which is to watermark photos with text or logos. You can play around with fonts and font colours. Also, it can process multiple apps in batch mode.
Another day, another free photography app. As you might have guessed, this is a black and white camera replacement app. While I would say it reduces the number of steps a user has to take to convert pictures into B&W, several social media apps for which people always share edited images have some form of black and white filters to render the applicability of this app useless. Anyway, the app is for free if its features are a welcome addition for some users.
This is a cool app for people who are learning the Queen’s language, especially school-going kids. Its interface is very simple, with big texts and iconography. I love the study mode, where each English word is combined with a picture. Since it is a paid app, there is vocalization and transcription for proper pronunciation, a feature that is always missing in many free dictionary apps.
