Adding a profile name such as ‘Office’, ‘Home’ or ‘School’ changes the banner display to a more relevant scene, and while it has no major function, it serves as a very nice aesthetic touch. Setting the profile trigger is pretty simple, and user can choose from a range of triggers including date, date range, time range and much more. There are location based, battery level triggers and more as well, but those can be unlocked by getting the Pro version of the app via an in-app purchase.

Next up, set the ‘entry tasks’, which are the tasks that will be triggered when the said profile is activated. Tasks are split into categories based on ‘Wireless & Network’, ‘Sounds & Volume’, ‘Display’ and ‘Phone’. Advanced tasks such as ‘Brightness’, ‘Change Wallpaper’, ‘Place a Call’ and a few more are retained for the Pro version. However, most tasks such as ‘Ring Type’, ‘Ring Tone’, ‘Ring Volume’, ‘WiFi Enable/Disable’ etc. are available in the free version of the app.

Similarly, ‘exit tasks’ will define tasks that will be triggered when the said profile is exited i.e. when you switch to another profile from that one. You may or may not set up these tasks. Additionally, when setting up a profile, you can check the ‘Lite Profile’ option that will, as the app suggests, “just execute their task, but will not switch their profiles. They will not have exit tasks.”. This can be quite handy for times when you’re already running a profile but simply want additional tasks to be triggered without actually switching to a different profile.

Once you have multiple profiles set up, there is a chance you will have profiles that may overlap each other depending on the day, time range and other triggers. In such cases, users can set the priority for each profile via the ‘Rearrange’ menu.

The Dashboard page will show you all existing profiles on your device, indicating if a profile is enabled or disabled, along with the entry and exits tasks defined. The Quick Overview page highlights all available settings and tells the user the status of those settings. Also available is a History page, logging all profile activations/de-activations in chronological order.

Pros

• Exit Tasks
• Lite Profile
• Intuitive UI

Cons

• None to speak of for now

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Please note that this tool is not a final release and isn’t meant for inexperienced users. It may or may not work depending with every carrier variant out there. So far, it has received mixed feedback regarding its success.

Disclaimer: Follow this guide at your own risk. AddictiveTips will not be responsible if it results in your device getting damaged in any way.

Requirements

• ADB installed on your system. See our post on what is ADB and how to set it up on your computer. (If already set up, make sure to upgrade to the latest SDK for Jelly Bean devices.)
• revone tool.

Instructions

1. Make sure USB debugging is enabled on your HTC One and connect it to the computer via a USB cable.
2. Open command prompt / terminal, switch to the directory to which you downloaded revone and enter the following commands:

   adb push revone /data/local/tmp/
   adb shell

   If your device is unlocked and rooted, enter ‘su’ to switch to root before entering the following commands:

   cd /data/local/tmp
   chmod 755 revone
   ./revone -P

3. If revone reports success, reboot the device, but if it reports that you need to reboot the device and try again, or simply reboot it, wait 2 minutes and try again starting from from step 2. Assuming revone reported success and you rebooted the device, open a second command prompt / terminal and enter the following commands:

   adb shell
   cd /data/local/tmp
   ./revone -s 0 -u

   You can use the ‘-l’, ‘-r’ and ‘-t’ attributes later on for locking, relocking and resetting the device’s tamper flag respectively. (Example: ./revone -r)

4. If the tool reports success again, reboot the device into bootloader mode by entering the command below and check the screen for the S-OFF signature:

   adb reboot bootloader

For updates and queries, head over to the original XDA-Developers forum thread linked below.

[via XDA-Developers]

Read Gain S-OFF On HTC One With The revone Tool From Revolutionary by Zayed Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

We saw such a feature earlier in Camera+ – a very popular iOS app. While that app is paid and sports other extensive features as well, the front flash concept remains the same, utilizing a bright white screen.

You won’t find any magically appearing LED lights here, rest assured; the app simply generates a white screen with an overlay of a shrunken camera frame to help you pose a bit. For this purpose, it is essential that you keep the brightness levels of your phone at maximum so that the white can emulate a flash as best as it can.

There are fancy settings to play around with in this app, and while it could definitely use some tweaks, it still manages to do the job well enough. Taking a picture is easy, requiring just the touch of a button at the bottom of the screen. Once a picture has been snapped, you can share it via Facebook or Twitter, email it, and of course, save it locally. Don’t like a picture? Simply hit the cross icon to discard it when previewing.

Maybe in the future, Front Flash could add support for video recording as well, which would certainly make it a hit amongst a lot of users.

The app is available as Free and Pro versions on the Play Store. The Pro variant sports a brighter flash, faster loading times, and no ads.

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The Holo theme will be obvious from the start with it’s blue accents. You can browse through a multitude of categories for your favorite forums, or use the manual search option to find what you’re looking for.

Forums can be easily browsed through from the app’s Navigation sidebar – a feature we’re increasingly seeing in many Android apps these days. It manages to keep the interface neat and sleek, while still ensuring that all relevant options for the forum are easily accessible. You can see how the thread layout takes its cue from Google Now. Bothered by the dark look and wanna brighten things up? You have the option of switching between a light and dark theme.

The rest of the navigation and interactive forum features include pretty much all that you’ll need from a forum app, including quick replies, attachments, sharing, and setting a forum as favorite for quick access, in addition to other not-so-obvious features such as widget support, push notifications, and a comprehensive integrated photo editor that launches itself when attaching a picture.

The app feels like a native Android app with it’s Holo elements and intuitive UI. Signing in with your Tapatalk ID also allows for easy forum management on the go, which syncs across multiple devices as well.

Download Tapatalk 4 – Community Reader

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The idea is as simple as the screenshots display; notifications are received as icons of the relevant app, appearing on top of any app you may have open and as mentioned earlier, these floating icons can be dragged around the screen.

Tapping an icon will reveal the notification’s content, which itself is also scrollable, depending on its length. Notifications from multiple apps are stacked neatly just like a hand of playing cards, and tapping on the icon will give you access to all concerned apps. You can interact with these notifications in more than one way to perform different actions on them.

• Tap the current notification to close the stack
• Tap the text of a notification to launch that app
• Drag the first notification in the stack to move it around the screen
• Double-tap to close a notification
• Double-tap a closed stack to close all notifications

Unlike Halo in Paranoid Android, Floating Notifications lets you choose the apps you want to receive notifications from. Even better, you can set that app to:

• Show expanded notifications
• Stack messages to show all or only the latest notifications
• Enable the Jelly Bean-style notification action buttons (Android 4.2+ only; didn’t seem to show up in our testing on Paranoid Android for Gmail and many other apps)
• Always show the app icon
• Wake the screen upon notification

Users can choose from a dark or light theme for the notifications, change the icon and font size, and set the notifications to fade away after a few seconds of inactivity, but only if the stack is closed. Not that most of you will need to, but you can set the double-tap threshold level as well. The units you enter here will define the interval between two taps in milliseconds.

If you want more themes for this app, head over to this forum thread at XDA-Developers.

Pros

• Comprehensive per-app settings
• Intuitive and easy management
• Availability of third-party themes

Cons

• No action buttons showed up in our testing (If you try it, do let us know if this feature works for you)
• WhatsApp expanded notifications only show the first message

The app is not available on the Play Store right now and can be downloaded for sideloading from the link below.

Download Floating Notifications from XDA-Developers

Update: The app has been released on Google Play as a free, full-featured 30-day trial, and can be unlocked for extended use beyond 30 days by purchasing the Unlocker for $1.97. This version also brings many enhancements and stability improvements over the beta. Links to both the trial and the unlocker are provided below.

Download Floating Notifications (Trial) for Android

Download Floating Notifications Unlock Key

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Google Now’s aesthetics and design have prompted quite a few apps to take some cues from that design language. Despite being practically like a live wallpaper, the appis not exactly that per se, and hence does not consume much battery either, the reason being that the wallpapers are themselves static and only change after the set time.

The app lets you choose from a collection of 11 wallpapers that can be set to change according to time, or simply applied without any time constraint. While it may seem that disabling the automatic time-based wallpaper rotation feature will defeat the entire purpose of the app, it can still be useful for those who simply like one of these wallpapers and want it set as their home screen’s background for as long as they’d like.

The times of the four phases can be customized by users to reflect the conditions in their local region. When you select a wallpaper, you will be alerted about the time at which it will automatically change. For this review, I had to change my device’s time manually to reflect the changes in the wallpapers but while doing so, I often had to re-apply the wallpaper for it to show the change. However, this will not be normal practice for most users, and should not be a matter of concern.

If you are interested in wallpapers for your Android device, you will find our compilation of the most visually stunning Android live wallpapers interesting. And should you want something more functional in nature, our list of the best functional live wallpapers for Android will keep you busy as well.

The app is available for devices with both standard definition as well as HD screen resolutions, and can be downloaded using the links provided below.

Download GoogleNowWallpaper For Android

Download GoogleNowWallpaper HD For Android

Read Auto-Set Google Now Backgrounds As Android Wallpaper By Time Of Day by Zayed Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Flayvr lists albums according to the dates that a group of photos were captured or modified. However, the app will only let you choose one album at a time, which can be a limitation. You can choose any album’s folder from the Settings menu, and switch between them any time you want. Testing the app on a Galaxy S2 running a custom Android 4.2 ROM (AOKP), I found the app to be considerably slow in loading the thumbnails for the various albums, often disappearing and re-appearing when scrolling through the album lists.

Images in an album are displayed as a collage, but the previews are all dynamic, with subtle zooms, fade in/out, and video previews for each thumbnail independently. In short, it looks beautiful!

Users can edit an album’s title and location information, remove existing images, or even add images to it from other folders on the device.

Tap once on a picture to view it, and double tap it or use the pinch-out gesture once it opens for the full screen mode. Browsing through the pictures is easy using leftward and rightward swipe gestures. Another appealing feature of the app is its ability to quickly share an entire album publicly or privately using the available sharing options on your device.

The album is uploaded to Flayvr’s website and shared in the form of a link that leads to a webpage with an identical tiled view of the album.

The full screen mode offers no landscape orientation when viewing pictures, but it seems to work well for videos. The built-in video player offers the most basic playback controls, which should suffice for an app meant as an album viewer and organizer and not as a full-featured video player.

Pros

• Beautiful dynamic tiles
• Album editing
• Built-in video player

Cons

• Album list previews are rendered too slowly (may depend on the device)
• No full screen landscape orientation for pictures

Download Flayvr For Android

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The app’s Holo-themed UI employs red accents instead of the more traditional blue, giving it a distinctively bold look. The interface is well laid out, offering both thumbnail and list views. When running the app for the first time, you will be asked to choose from a multitude of topics that will later translate into various podcast channels appearing on the main screen based on the topic of your choice.

To browse through selective topics, you can use the drop down navigation menu from the top ribbon, or simply swipe right or left to switch to the adjacent ones.

Jumping to the player, it retains the red Holo theme and provides some useful playback controls such as fast forwarding, previous/next, repeat etc. These relatively advanced controls can be accessed via the slide-in and slide-out buttons on the player. Needless to say, the player sticks at the bottom of the screen as you navigate through the app, keeping the controls accessible throughout playback while you browse any section of the app.

The player shows up in the notification drawer as well, with basic play back controls. As mentioned earlier, podcasts can be downloaded manually, and you can also copy the mp3 link, Player FM link or publisher link to the clipboard for accessing later.

Player FM allows import of OPML files as well, so you can enjoy the same channels synced across all your devices and other podcast players that allow exporting in OPML format.

You can add channels to your own channel displayed as your Player FM user ID. Doing so lets you share what you’re listening to with the public. You can also set your profile to be more private and not publicly accessible.

What was offline listening again, you ask? Once the auto-download feature is enabled, the app will automatically download the latest episode from your each of your subscriptions. You can choose to restrict this function to only Wi-Fi as well, so that it doesn’t effect your data package. You can also limit the number of offline episodes to keep.

These automatic downloads cannot be deleted manually, and will automatically delete themselves after a day. Currently the app does not offer in-app playback of older content saved via the ‘Export RAW mp3 file to system’ option, but the developers plan on adding this feature in the future.

Pros

• Offline listening via automatic downloads
• Download any podcast as mp3
• Social element via user channel and sharing

Cons

• Cannot delete offline material downloaded automatically from within the app
• No in-app playback for manually saved content

Download Player FM For Android

Read Player FM Is A Comprehensive Android Podcast Player With Auto Downloads by Zayed Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

The interface sports a theme that can be best described as semi-Holo.  Adding accounts is no rocket science, with the supported services boldly laid out in the main screen. Choose the service you want to add an account for and once done, you will see something similar to the screenshot above. Tracking multiple accounts for a service is made easier by not just the ‘Quota’ displayed, but also by allowing the user to give the account a name of their choice.

Going through the files and folders of your cloud storage is just as you would expect in any cloud storage service’s app; however, users can also set files as favorite, allowing quick access to those files in the future. Uploading is a simple matter as well; simply choose the account followed by the remote folder to upload to, select the file itself, and uploading begins.

For navigation purposes, hit the menu button on the top ribbon to reveal a slide-out menu that lets you access account management, favorites, and files downloading and uploading. Boasting an impressive ‘Synchronization’ feature, the app offers unlimited possibilities. Users can setup sync partnerships between local and remote folders, or specify the transfer-direction as local-to-remote or remote-to-local only, which is not technically not exactly synchronization but can be useful to many users. Synchronization interval can be defined as well, so you can keep your battery in check. These synchronization links are not restricted to one for every account, so you can setup multiple sync relationships for each account, with unique names to help keep track of them.

Settings include enabling a PIN code before launch, enabling/disabling use over mobile data, and the much useful Online-Backup. With this, you can store your account setup and the app’s configuration options for all your accounts in Cloudii to online servers, making it easier for you to setup Cloudii on another device (or on the same device later) the exact same way.

Pros

• Multiple cloud storage services support, with plans to add support for more
• Multiple accounts
• Simple and intuitive UI
• Multiple synchronization options including full two-way sync

Cons

• Box account did not seem to work in our testing

Download Cloudii For Android

Read Cloudii: One App To Access & Sync Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive & Box On Android by Zayed Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

The app is in beta for now, but works pretty well, complete with smooth transitions and modern color schemes. The main screen of the launcher allows access to core features including Phone, Diary, Media, and Apps. These menus contain further sub-level menus. How do we do get to them, you ask? Hold down on the screen and move your finger up and down to jog through the menus, and once a menu is highlighted, simply swipe your finger slightly to the left to open up its sub menu. This works the same for all menu levels and if you want to go up one menu, simply swipe slightly to the right. To finally select the final option, remove your finger from the highlighted option and voila! While this trick is pretty simple, it will take some getting used to, and accidental navigation will be a likely issue in the beginning.

What makes the app stand out exceptionally is the extent to which it integrates with the different elements of Android such as photo albums, songs, call logs, messages, calendar, emails etc. Going through these lists is again like using an on-screen jog-dial.

The app also boasts an impressive App menu, with room for up to seven user-defined app shortcuts for quick access. Looking for something in particular? Splay Launcher also sports a search function for both offline and online search queries.

So if you don’t care much for fancy widgets or wallpapers for your home screen, and just want a quick, minimalistic launcher, Splay Launcher is worth a try. As we mentioned above, it’s in beta for now, and the final release may see some more settings and tweaks added that it currently lacks.

Pros

• Minimal interface
• Smooth transitions
• Intuitive navigation

Cons

• No settings or tweaks
• Curtails list of albums, songs, call logs etc.
• Occasional force-closes (Likely due to bugs in the beta version)

We’ve prepared a short video demo of the app, embedded below.

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You can either begin adding your tasks or notes to the default ‘Notes’ list, or create custom lists for organizing your notes and to-do entries lists better. There is no limit to the number of lists you can add, or the number of notes you can add to a list. You can browse through the lists by swiping to the right or left, or use the drop-down list for the purpose in case you have quite a handful of lists added.

To create a note or task, simply hit the ‘+’ button in the bottom bar and type the title of the note, along with the note text. Next, specify the list you want to save the note in. If the entry is a task, you can enter the time for, and add a reminder as well if you choose. To save the entry, hit the check mark button in the top bar.

Reminders will appear in the notification drawer and can be accompanied by alerts including ringtone and vibration.

Got-IT comes with its own widget as well, which can be customized according to your liking; you can choose the list it displays entries from, sort it based on several parameters, and specify a maximum title height. The widget retains the color scheme of the app’s main interface and blends in well with the Holo look of most ICS and Jelly Bean home screens. For Android 4.2 users who want these notes/tasks to be displayed on the lockscreen without the actual widget cluttering up the screen, there’s support for the famous DashClock widget as well.

Got-IT has plenty of settings to tinker with, including the much-coveted synchronization with Google Tasks to keep your tasks and notes in sync across all your devices. Apart from settings that let you customize and toggle display elements such as check boxes, due date and note contents from the list view, you can also customize the notifications settings for your reminders and overdue tasks, and tweak with the synchronization options.

Got-IT can be found on the Play Store as a free and donate (paid) version. The donate version offers two extra features: password-protection for your notes (using the ‘Lock’ button shown in the screenshots above) and shortcuts for quick access to specific lists or notes.

Pros

• Fluid and intuitive UI
• Unlimited number of lists
• Multiple navigation options: swipe & drop-down menus

Cons

• No audio or photo notes support
• No dark Holo theme
• Reminder settings can be a bit confusing

Download Got-IT Free

Download Got-IT Donate

[via XDA-Developers]

Read Got-IT For Android: Beautiful To-Do & Notes App With Google Tasks Sync by Zayed Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Universal Unroot currently supports x86, ARM and MIPS based devices and can unroot devices that are using ChainsDD Superuser, Chainfire SuperSU, and Koush Superuser.

There’s not much to using the app; simply run the app and hit the ‘Unroot’ button to remove the su binary and any Superuser app on the device, permanently disabling root access. To put it simply, it will wipe all traces of root access from your device.

Warranty claims may be a big deal, but so are OTA updates, which also require the device to be in its stock state. However, if you’re running a custom ROM, you will have to flash a stock ROM or factory image on your device. Moreover, note that Universal Unroot will not re-lock your device for you.

Some may feel that a simple unroot app should not be charged for as users can easily do all of this manually as well. True, users could unroot manually, but not all novice users are able to in a single try. This app makes sure it gets the job done right, and that too in no more than a single tap.

Download Universal Unroot For Android

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