Rewind: Music Time Machine
Platform: iOS and Android
Keywords: music, player
Teachers often say “you’re the worst class I’ve ever brought up”, audiences often say “the aesthetics of the entertainment has been seriously downgraded”, and music lovers often say “the music scene has regressed by twenty years”, in that case, try to turn on Rewind, and let it bring you back to the era of your favorite music through time and space, Rewind spans over 50 years, and allows you to go back to the 60’s, the era when psychedelia was flourishing, the late 70’s when punk and disco were popular, or the wave of electronic music at the beginning of the millennium. Rewind spans 50 years, so you can go back to the ’60s when psychedelia was booming, the late ’70s when punk and disco were big.
Unlike many music apps that center their lists around albums, artists, or a theme, Rewind offers a historical timeline of music recommendations. Tap on the year in the upper left corner to learn about the year’s trends and old news, check out Billboard’s Hot Singles and Albums charts, watch the most iconic music videos, and get to know the hottest performers, as well as the phases of different genres. and the stages of development of different genres.
All singles offer 30-second previews, and if you’re interested you can skip to TIDAL for playback, and most songs and albums also offer skipping to Spotify and Apple Music, while music video content only supports skipping to playback, so you can choose between TIDAL or YouTube for playback.
As years would be a bit too linear, Rewind also offers a music version of Today/This Week in the left-hand column, so you might be able to unearth some of those lost musical memories.
In addition, Rewind has also “birthed” a parallel universe in the app center, and the Alternate Universe section is filled with AI-created music-derived paintings or MVs, and that Beethoven selfie actually poked a few laughs out of me.
App Finder: A More Accurate App Search Engine
Platform: Android
Keywords: app search, app retrieval
There are thousands of apps in Google Play, but when you want to search for a certain app, you forget the name, how can you do it? If you look it up directly in the search engine, the results may not be an exact match; if you scroll through Google Play’s categorized list, it may be hidden 100 pages down. So is there a way to search for apps with more known criteria? Try App Finder.
Although the App Finder interface is not beautiful (or even simple), it includes information about millions of apps on Google Play, so you can search more quickly and accurately than the Google Play search box. Of course, when you first start using it, the App Finder will give you a huge number of results, but it also offers a number of filtering tools. For example, you can set up a sorting method to find the hottest games, the most up-to-date apps, the most downloaded tools that have lasted forever, and more.
For those apps that you can’t remember the name of, App Finder also offers a number of search operators, such as “OR” for “or”, or “#” and “@” symbols to search for a specific name or author. If that’s still too much for you, you’ll need to use the App Finder’s killer feature, which organizes the app information into a number of filters, including the app’s category, whether it’s paid or unpaid, whether it has in-app purchases or not, whether it has ads or not, and the status of Play Pass entry, etc., which is perfect for pinpointing a particular app among the many search results. Combine that with the sorting and searching methods given above, and you’re sure to find the app you need in no time.
Looks Like Rain: A weather app focused on rainfall
Platform: iOS
Keywords: weather
I don’t know how other people set up their Apple Watch’s weather module, but I’ve always stuck to the “precipitation” section. In Wuhan, I’m more concerned about the amount of precipitation that affects my traveling than the temperature (the temperature in Wuhan’s weather forecast is useless anyway). Before I go out, I always look at the chance of rain to see if I need to bring rain gear, but mobile apps are still more focused on temperature and weather conditions, and Looks Like Rain (LLR) is a rainfall-focused app that fits my personal preferences.
The logic of the app is simple, presenting the daily weather on a horizontal axis with the time of day as the horizontal axis and the day as the vertical axis. 24h weather is a medium widget at the top, focusing on the temperature and the probability of rainfall, down to the hourly forecast. Below that is a rainfall forecast for today and the next ten days. The various types of weather are differentiated by color. The brighter the color, the better the weather, and the darker the color, the worse the weather.
Overall, what attracts me to LLR is not only the precipitation-centered forecast, but also the simple UI design. Many weather apps have complex images, such as temperature distributions and lines, that I can’t read, but they make me feel important and I can’t focus on what I want from a weather app. LLR ditches these complex images and uses simple probability distributions and data to give me a clear picture of the weather at a glance.
LLR’s desktop widgets are available in two formats, one for today and tomorrow and one for a 5-day timeframe, but both widgets require a subscription to be available, which costs $10/year or $2/month. Subscribers can enjoy widgets for the desktop and lock screen, multiple favorite locations, and synchronization with multiple subscriptions.
WinRAR 7.0
Platform: Windows
Keywords: decompression
The last time I heard about WinRAR, Microsoft announced that it would build in support for RAR format decompression in the future File Explorer of Windows 11. Although this support is not comprehensive (it can only decompress but not create RAR-formatted packages), it is a great benefit for many users, who can finally give up WinRAR as an old monster.
While Microsoft’s move makes WinRAR appear to be “emotionally stable,” PC users know that there are a plethora of high-compression-ratio, performance-advantaged compression formats to choose from, such as the high-compression-ratio, open-source 7z, or the second-best alternative, zip, which is supported by almost every modern desktop operating system, so Microsoft’s support may ultimately result in RAR, a proprietary compression format, as well as WinRAR, a new format that is not available on the market. So Microsoft’s support may ultimately lead to the end of RAR as a proprietary compression format and WinRAR as a commercial compression program. You must ask, was there no other decompression software available in those days other than WinRAR? In fact, at least twenty years ago in the PC era, broadband speeds were probably less than one-tenth of today’s speeds, so in the spirit of the principle of “use what you can”, it was naturally not cost-effective in terms of time and money to spend time on selecting and comparing alternative decompression programs, which naturally became the dominant standard for compression software and compression formats at that time.
Of course, WinRAR has not completely entered the history, as a commercial software has been perfecting the proprietary compression format RAR, and the old users also formed a path dependence, prefer WinRAR this more “modern” use of the logic of operation (compared to 7zip is really too simple). Recently, WinRAR has finally released its first major update in years. While retaining the classic user interface, WinRAR brings a number of upgrades for users who still use the RAR format.
First of all, the performance, such as compression in the “dictionary”, now through the WinRAR 7.0 to create the RAR compressed package, will support more than 1GB compressed dictionary, and according to the actual system memory size, you can choose the maximum of 64GB. for more than 4GB of dictionary size, you can choose a non-quadratic power value, for example, 6GB can be selected. Of course, if the dictionary size exceeds 4GB, you can only use WinRAR 7.0 to decompress it, and if the dictionary size exceeds 1GB, you need 64-bit WinRAR to decompress it.
Secondly, if the size of the dictionary in the extracted RAR archive exceeds the “Maximum Allowable Dictionary Size” parameter in WinRAR, WinRAR will pause the compression and wait for your confirmation. By default, WinRAR will refuse to decompress RAR archives with more than 4GB of dictionaries, but you can bypass this by adding a parameter to the command.
Meanwhile, for document compression, if you use RAR to compress your documents, you can now use alternative search techniques to optimize the compression rate and speed, which can be turned on in the Advanced Settings > Compression setting in the Create dialog box when you create a compressed document. At the same time, if you need to increase the compression rate, you can also turn on the page in the “exhaustive search”, but compared to the compression rate and time, but also some of the loss.
Finally, apart from optimizing the compression and decompression performance, WinRAR 7.0 also optimizes many details, such as the security aspect, you can now disable the propagation of web tags in the zip archive to protect your privacy, and you can enable the setting of “Properties” in “Settings” > “File List” “Columns”, and so on.
If you’ve been using WinRAR since version 6.x, this major update may seem a bit lackluster, but that’s understandable, as there are still people who continue to use RAR as a compressed file format for transferring documents and data.
Affinity Suite 2.4 Update: New Layer Status, DWG/DXF Export, Same Alignment Options, and More!
Platform: macOS, Windows & iPadOS
Keywords: image processing, graphic design
The Affinity suite has gained a lot of popularity among creative workers in recent years as a well-known “replacement” for Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, illustrator, etc. In February 2024, Serif released a free update to version 2.4, which includes a number of important new features and improvements. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.
First, the new version adds layer states to Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. This feature, ported from Affinity Photo, makes it easy to toggle between layers on each panel or across pages. On top of that, we can also create queries based on various conditions, which makes it easier to perform batch operations on layers, including selecting layers, toggling layer visibility, and so on. Secondly, Affinity Designer supports exporting DWG and DXF formats. In File > Export, you can select the export format, and the new version includes DWG and DXF options that are commonly used by architects and designers, and can be used in a variety of CAD software. Finally, all three programs in the Affinity suite support a new alignment option that allows selected objects to be set to the same width, height, or rotation, with a checkbox to “keep their aspect ratio”. In addition to the new features I mentioned above, this update also adds 32-bit HDR PNG support, support for locking insertion targets, setting selection boxes, etc. The Affinity suite is available as a free 7-day trial from the website.
Published by YooCare Editor on January 16, 2024 7:53 am, last updated on April 10, 2024 10:14 am
