Chrono: The Full-Featured Clock App That Won’t Wake You Up
What is the most indispensable function on a cell phone? I’d say it’s not calling and texting, but the clock. Although the clock app that comes with your phone has everything you need, it doesn’t have all the features I need, such as watching the second hand to participate in a sale, or needing a harsher way to wake me up, and so on. Here is a third-party clock app, Chrono, that may be able to replace your old system clock app. Chrono adopts Material You design style and supports dynamic color picking, which makes it more like a native app on Android 13+. Considering the fact that many manufacturers customize their systems by modifying the overall style of the system UI, Chrono also provides a customizable shape of buttons and cards in the settings to make the whole UI more similar to the system’s style. You can also adjust Chrono’s animation effects in the settings, including the duration of animation, whether to enable additional animation effects, and so on. In terms of functionality, Chrono is in line with similar apps in terms of the “basic disk”, providing alarm, world time, countdown and stopwatch functions, but each function is different in the details.
For example, in order to prevent you from oversleeping when setting an alarm, Chrono supports task mode, which means you need to solve a math problem, copy a sentence or input the correct digital sequence from memory before you can cancel the alarm, and each task mode can be customized in terms of difficulty; and in the timer function, in addition to the regular segment timing, Chrono can also provide real-time statistics of the fastest, slowest and average data; and the two functions are also different from each other, In the timer function, in addition to the regular segment timing, Chrono can also provide real-time statistics such as fastest, slowest, average and so on. The only regret is that Chrono doesn’t provide a desktop widget yet, so it can’t be used as a main clock app for the time being. For now, you can download Chrono for free from GitHub, F-Droid, and IzzyOnDroid.
eXpend: Keeping track of personal finances with ease
It’s been another month without bookkeeping, and every time I think of clicking open the app – record expenses – confirm account – fill in the amount – select category – tag it – click confirm, just to record a Hello Bike ride cost, I feel like relying on that meager salary for this kind of detailed record is simply a kind of torture. However, bookkeeping is still a very necessary thing, if we can try to simplify the process of bookkeeping, highlighting the purpose of their own bookkeeping, then perhaps the resistance to adhere to it will be less.
The good thing about traditional bookkeeping tools is that they can keep detailed records, but the bad thing is that they are too detailed and lengthen the process. Most people have the desire to know where their money is spent, so that they can voluntarily adjust their own spending situation. So how can we make people more willing to keep track? eXpend tries to do this by streamlining the process of bookkeeping.
The first time we download eXpend, we need to follow the user guidelines to set up a theme, common currencies, and try to add an account. After entering the main interface, eXpend will show us the total amount of accounts and budgets by default. We can add new accounts or set other budgets at any time in the setup interface, and when setting up budgets, the app will guide us to select the corresponding category, so that accounts under the corresponding category will be automatically counted as budgets in the subsequent bookkeeping process, thus minimizing the number of steps to be taken.
In addition, eXpend allows us to set up saving goals, so that we can prepare for the fulfillment of our small wishes in the future. We can add a goal at any time in the settings screen. Each time we want to accumulate a sum of money, we click on the plus sign, select Transfer, and then add the appropriate amount of money from our account to the corresponding goal.
When it comes to bookkeeping, eXpend doesn’t have a lot of items to record, all we have to do is to record the name, select the category and fill in the amount. Different accounts are displayed in the middle of the screen in the form of small icons, which can be selected with a single click. In addition, we can convert the record items into templates at any time with one click, so that we can use them at any time in the future.
In short, eXpend meets all of our needs for lightweight bookkeeping, with a minimalist interface, good progress display, and a buyout price of $3.49, which is a good price for a bookkeeping app that costs hundreds of dollars. If you want to try eXpend, you can download it from the Play Store. All of the basic features mentioned above are free, and a one-time fee unlocks advanced features.
PPSSPP & RetroArch: A New Choice of Emulators
With Delta’s popularity, various emulator apps have started to hit the App Store one after another.Delta focuses on Nintendo’s games, while PPSSPP is a PSP emulator as you can tell from its name. Once upon a time, the handheld market was divided between Nintendo with NDS/N3DS and Sony with its own PSP/PSV. Now, after Sony announced the death of PSP, people are flocking to PPSSPP to relive those games in order to get back the joy.
But there’s a bit of work to be done. First we need to find the iso file of our target game, download it to our Mac, connect our Mac to our iPhone or iPad, and drag the iso file into the target folder. It’s a pretty tedious process for me. But once it works, I can probably play a game for days or even months. Of course, PPSSPP itself offers demos that can be downloaded from its own marketplace, but those games are just for fun at best, and aren’t the biggest hits.
Aside from Nintendo and Sony, they weren’t the only two personal gaming terminals back in the day. Sega, Atari, and others were also once dominant game console manufacturers. They also had an emulator for their games, namely RetroArch. Like PPSSPP, we need to find the files on the internet and drag them into the appropriate folder to play them. But RetroArch differs from PPSSPP in that it can load different “cores” – Atari, Sega and even Nintendo – and RetroArch also offers a demo – 2048, a time-killer. RetroArch also provided a demo – 2048, a time-killer.
Even today, seven or eight of us nostalgically recall the time we spent playing Monster Hunter on our PSPs at the Waco McDonald’s. But as time changed, it wasn’t just the PSPs that were the centerpiece of the game. However, with the change of time, we are either married or have children, and it has become a luxury to meet and have a meal together. Those memories of playing together have become a contrast to our busy lives, and we lament the carefree days of our youth, as well as the difficulties of growing up. But thanks to emulators, we now have another way to reminisce about those times. You can download and experience ppsspp and RetroArch for all platforms on the official website.