Month: October 2012

Snap2PDF – An Easy Way to Manage Your Documents

3 Replies RonF

Managing documents is always difficult, especially when you have a lot of them. Certainly, it is not possible to carry all of them wherever you move. But it is easy to carry your iPhone/iPad anywhere you go. You must be wondering what makes this app so special. With just a few simple clicks of your mobile’s camera, you can manage your documents perfectly using Snap2PDF.

About the app

Snap2PDF is a universal app, designed for both iPhone and iPad, for organizing your whiteboards, receipts, business cards, magazine articles, posters, print outs, coupons and newspaper clippings. All you have to do is take a snap of the document and the app converts it to PDF format right away. Now you can share the converted files through SMS and email. It recognizes various languages like English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, Czech, Danish etc.

Working of the app

Snap2PDF is a very simple app to handle. Just take snaps of your documents and they get converted to PDF files automatically. You are provided with many options to manage your documents. For creating a PDF document, you can either take a snap using your device’s camera or select a photo from your album. Your PDF documents can be edited and managed, as per your requirements. You can add/delete/rearrange pages in your document effortlessly. You can also organize your documents under different categories by tapping the category, naming it and adding the document to it. Searching for a document can be easily done using the keyword search option.
Snap2PDFSnap2PDF allows you to share your documents in .pdf format through email. The most convenient feature of this app is that you can create a Dropbox account, select documents and export them to your Dropbox account for safe management. You can open a document as a PDF file in other PDF viewer apps like iBooks, FileExplorer etc. You can make your document search easy by choosing the preferred language of index. There is also an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) facility to automatically pick out blocks of text from images.

Snap2PDF is a very useful app that provides multiple ways of managing, securing and sharing files easily. It costs $2.99 and requires iOS 4.3 or later.

Improve your device speed with Super Speed for Android

Leave a reply RonF

If you are an Android user, sometimes you may be frustrated with the low performance of the device. Especially when you are loaded with lots of apps and media files in your Android mobile, the chance for reduced efficiency goes high. Super Speed is an Android app that helps you right on this situation!

As many other apps in the store, Super Speed may not have the best of screens and features visually visible outside. The app shines where your device is in trouble with loaded cache memory and slow performance. It almost works on the background and keeps your device as a real “smart”phone.

SuperSpeed android app

The first tap on the app takes you to the one and only screen where two buttons are shown to activate the app working and deactivate it. If you activate Super Speed, you will be notified with a simple pop-up message followed by the confirmation. As said, you may not see any further graphics or performance charts from the app, but it should be working behind making your Android device faster!

Once you activate the app, you can simply tap on your home screen to add the Super Speed widget. I am sure there will not be any differences on your devices for the initial few hours, but the app started showing some good results after few hours. The only let down is there are no measuring arrangements on how the device improvements are working!

SuperSpeed app options

There should be some screens that show the memory usage, processor speed and active applications, etc. Some of the competitors of Super Speed clearly showing these features, only the improvements in the speed or memory won’t work in big time! This is a downside for the app, but the effectiveness in the output is highly appreciable!

Super Speed is a paid app available on the Google Play Store for $0.99. It runs on Android mobiles and Tablets with OS version 2.1 and up.

A Possible Breakthrough in Energy Storage?

5 Replies Jonny Hankins

The Institute of Mechanic Engineers says that turning air into liquid may provide a solution for energy storage. At present most energy is stored in batteries, but battery production and disposal is an extremely messy and polluting affair, and so experiments are underway to look into this alternative.

One of the problems particularly with renewable energy sources is that energy is produced at times when it is not needed. The system cannot just be turned on or off, so this excess energy must be stored. Scientists believe that with improvements the liquid energy solution could be 70% efficient, less than batteries but at a much lighter cost to the environment.

To give you an idea of how the process works, it follows a number of stages:

“Wrong-time electricity” is used to take in air, remove the CO2 and water vapour, which would otherwise freeze solid.

The remaining air, mostly nitrogen, is chilled to -190C (-310F) and turns to liquid – this provides a compact storage medium that can later draw energy in the form of heat from the environment.

The liquid air is held in a giant vacuum flask until it is needed.

When demand for power rises, the liquid is warmed to ambient temperature. As it vaporizes, the expanding gas drives a turbine to produce electricity – no combustion is involved.

One particularly interesting thing about this development is that it comes out of a garage in England.

Peter Dearman in his garage

Inventor Peter Dearman in his garage lab

Peter Dearman made the discovery while looking for a way to power his car using air. I have written about these types of experiments before in my Health of the Planet series. Take a look at this video on Youtube to see Dearman at work. Real Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stuff.

The BBC also has an article in its Science and Environment section that you can read here.

One conclusion to draw is that world changing technological innovation has to start somewhere, and it is not always in a sterile lab. Sometimes it is in a garage behind a house in Hertfordshire.