Best apps for Android, July 2013

NFC Task Launcher

Have your phone do just about anything after a quick NFC tap.

Now that smartphones with built-in near-field communication (NFC) are — after years of promise — finally becoming commonplace (although Apple will say otherwise), we’re finally beginning to see interesting and useful apps pop up.

NFC Task Launcher is just such an app. The idea behind it is that you can use an NFC tag to trigger an action on your phone — from enabling ‘silent’ mode (put a tag on your bedside table), to checking into a venue (if you’re one of those who checks in to work), to texting your other half (good on your dashboard), or joining a friend’s Wi-Fi network.

The tags (or connections to Bluetooth or Wi-Fi networks) can trigger just about any action, or set of actions, that you’d want. The developers claim that they’re constantly adding more and are open to suggestions (visit the web site at nfctags.tagstand.com).

Tags can be reprogrammed using the NFC Writer companion app, or read-only tags associated with Tagstand’s cloud service, so no matter who reads them, the same action will be performed.

This concept will already be familiar to users of Locale or Tasker, but neither natively support NFC events just yet. On a side note, it doesn’t really make a great deal of sense to run two automation apps in tandem, so Tasker/Locale users should perhaps check out Locale NFC Plugin, which gives both apps the ability to react to NFC tags).

Simple Text — text icon creator

Simple Text is an easy way to create text-based icons for use on your phone's home screens, enabling you to better achieve a clean, minimal aesthetic that stands out from the rest. Obviously, you can choose your own text, but you can also select the icon size; text size, colour, placement and rotation within the icon; the background colour (or a gradient); how round the edges are; and what type of shadow it should have. You can even use your own TTF fonts by placing them in the \sdcard\Simple Text\fonts\ directory.

Colors

 

 Further building upon the stark, minimal aesthetic for your Android phone, why not remove all texture from the background of your phone and apply just a single colour? With the option to do so notably absent from Android, it’s great that there’s now a free method to do so, especially as it goes just that little bit further. How so? By allowing you to not only pick a colour from the colour wheel (or a hex value), but also scroll through the many user-generated (can you believe it?) colours from the online colour-obsessed community at colourlovers.com.

ezPDF Reader

With no native PDF support on Android, this app’s addition to our handsets may not have brought much excitement, but it did bring relief, especially when we found ourselves at a gig, having forgotten to print out our tickets. If you work with PDFs, you’ll also be pleased to hear that you can fill out forms (including calculations), annotate, select text and place it on the clipboard, as well as view embedded multimedia and more. ezPDF Reader natively supports Dropbox and Google Drive integration is but a free plug-in away.
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