Type Like A Pro

FREE APPS of the MONTH

FLEKSY
Platforms: Android, iOS
Description: Fleksy is one of the fastest keyboards in the world. Easy, smooth, colourful and delightfully easy to type – so comfortable you can even type without looking. It is the only custom keyboard available for free on iOS as of now; the Android version comes with a 30-day trial.

KII
Platform: Android
Description: Kii Keyboard may not be the most unique keyboard here, but is still a solid one. It combines the best features from other famous Android keyboards in an all-in-one package. Except for the usual letters and symbols, it supports various different emojis and has regular seasonal themes available too.

IKEYBOARD
Platform: Android
Description: Free with the best colourful emojis, emoticons and text faces, this app will liven your typing experience. It also provides several colourful themes for your keyboard and supports stickers and picture backgrounds.

TOUCHPAL X
Platforms: Android, coming soon to iOS 8
Description: With TouchPal, you don’t need to type letter by letter. Just swipe and the app will take care of the rest. To input even faster, enable the WAVE feature and type entire sentences just by sliding from one word to another. Flip up the space bar to access the emojis and emoticons.

SWIFTKEY
Platforms: Android, coming soon to iOS 8
Description: Earlier a paid app, SwiftKey recently became free on the Play Store. This award-winning app delivers super fast typing, the best next-word prediction, smarter autocorrect, emoji prediction, support for over 800 emojis and much more.

NOTE: With the launch of iOS 8, Apple has allowed installations of third party keyboard apps. Keyboard apps like Swiftkey, Swype and Touchpal will be ready to download from the App store as soon as your device is updated to iOS 8.

TECH ADVICE

I am planning to buy a new computer. Should I go for a machine with the traditional hard disk drive (HDD) or the new solid state drive (SSD)?

Buying a hard drive used to be simple once. These days it’s a little more difficult as there are two very different technologies to choose from – conventional hard drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD). SSDs ditch the platters, the heads and all those fast-moving components present in the HDD that cause problems, replacing them with something much simpler: memory chips. These drives use flash memory which is able to store data even without any power. In layman’s terms, SSD can be thought of as an oversized and more sophisticated version of the humble USB memory stick. SSD drives generally have low capacities and high prices, but you do get excellent performance. Its access time is 50 times faster than a regular drive, but its read and write speeds are much closer to HDD technology.

Go for a small capacity SSD suiting your requirements (say 64GB) on which you can install your OS and heavy applications. Save your digital library of movies, music and sitcoms on the conventional hard drive. You’ll benefit from faster boot times, and a general speed boost as Windows components are loaded more quickly. But if you’re looking for a simple computer to satisfy only basic needs (web browsing, email, word processing) then an HDD is sufficient.

AN HDD MIGHT BE THE RIGHT CHOICE IF:

* Don’t want to spend much money
* You need lots of storage capacity, up to 2TB/4TB (though SSDs are constantly narrowing this gap)
* Don’t care too much about how fast a computer boots up or opens programs

AN SSD MIGHT BE THE RIGHT CHOICE IF:
* You are willing to pay for faster performance
* Don’t mind limited storage capacity or can work around that
* If you need a drive which is shock resistant (not losing your data on a single drop), silent and lighter.

Volume 4 Issue 3

YouthIncMag