iPad App Review: ZumoCast

Have you ever been out and about and wished you had synced that one song, file or video to your iPad? ZumoCast solves that problem. It is basically a file sharing and streaming application. It gives you access to files on multiple computers from the application on your device or on the website from any computer with an internet connection. The files can be streamed or downloaded. Say goodbye to planning ahead for your entertainment. You can have access to your entire media collection anywhere you have a network connection without syncing the files to your device. I was amazed how well the streaming works remotely. Very smooth and no noticeable buffering time. My brother uses this app for all of his listening enjoyment. He streams songs to his iPhone while in his car over AT&T's 3G network. Setup is easy also. A simple download to any computer that you want to have access to (Windows and OSX versions are available) and a short setup process to decide which files and folders you want to share and you are ready to go. I was pleased to find that there was no need for me to make changes to my firewall or router. A few other apps that I tried with similar functionality (StreamToMe, PlayOn) have required me to open ports and forward ports and they seem to work intermittently at best. ZumoCast doesn't share any of those problems. One drawback is that I was hoping to stream .wtv and .dvr-ms files from my Media Center DVR but I have been unsuccessful. Those file types seem to be unsupported. I wasn't surprised with DRM issues and very large file sizes. Another drawback is that there is no Android app currently, although one is in the works.

The user interface is clean and easy to navigate.

Music is easy to find with all the standard sorting methods.

Video stream quality is good, even over WiFi. Yes that is Vanilla Ice.

ZumoCast
Thumbs up for ease of use
Thumbs up for usefulness
Thumbs up for visual design
Thumbs up for cost: $0

If you want or need access to media and other files on the go this is an excellent solution.

Android App Review: TasKiller

With the multitasking capability on the android platform it is essential to have some way to manage apps. I have found that most apps don't have an option to shut down or close. They just run, or at least stay open, in the background until you kill them. Most apps that stay open don't seem to cause problems. They go into a low resource mode. On the other hand I have come across a few apps that seem to be resource hogs if left open in the background. I tried quite a few task killing apps, all free. All of them had the ability to close individual apps or all at once. For the most part the task killers fell into two categories. Those that would lead me to believe that an app had been killed by removing it from the list only to find that it was actually still running when the list was refreshed, and those that would redirect me to the system menu when I tried to kill an app where I would have to perform additional steps that I could do without the management app. Every one that I tried seemed to lack the permissions to actually kill the apps. Then I found TasKiller. It has some great widget options that show what is running and it actually kills apps with one touch. There are still some apps that it doesn't seem to be able to kill, mostly system stuff so it hasn't been an issue.

The bottom row is my preferred widget for this app. It shows how much memory is available, a small icon for apps that are running and the red android button kills all apps.

The red android on the second row is a simpler widget that just shows available memory and kills all apps.

When you launch the application you have the option to kill individual apps from this screen.

QR code for TasKiller

I have seen the available memory well below 100Megs and I usually get about 218Megs by using TasKiller.

TasKiller
Thumbs up for ease of use
Thumbs up for usefulness
Thumbs up for visual design
Thumbs up for cost: $0

For me this app is a must have.