States Chronicle - Latest Breaking World News

Saturday, September 25, 2021
Log in

Birth Control Pills Can Be Ordered With Apps

By Leave a Comment

Birth Control Pill can be bought in the United States via apps or online.

Birth Control Apps give experienced women accessibility and convenience.

STATES CHRONICLE – Birth control medication can be made available to women living in the United States via several smartphone apps. Using an app to get a hold of birth control has both its advantages and its disadvantages. Current statistics indicate that, in some areas of the United States, it is quite the popular option.

Using an app to get birth control offers accessibility and convenience. Firstly, women have more constant access to their smartphones rather than to a doctor. One might not be in close range, requiring both difficult to schedule appointments, as well as a long time to get there.

In addition, the app does not require parental permission for young women who are at the age of 14 or 15. Scheduling a visit to the doctor generally requires having a parent present as well. The apps do not need parental permission. However, on registration, they do require uploading a photo ID to confirm identity as well as filling out a virtual form.

Doctors believe that overall the addition of the app will be beneficial. Nevertheless, they have stressed out the importance of proper research and documentation when picking out the appropriate birth control. None of the current apps on the market have a comprehensive knowledge base integrated.

Women who already have prior experience with taking birth control end up with the most to gain from using the app. Young women or women who have not taken birth control before stand a chance to order or take the medication in an improper manner.

Several of the apps do have various tools which prove to be very useful. The most common option is that of the daily reminder which is a simple notification built into the app. Monthly reminders also exist. In addition, menstrual calendars can help women keep track of their cycles and medications.

Medication ordered from apps is usually procured from pharmacies which are nearby the user’s billing address. It is commonly delivered at an address or can be made available for pick-up. Buying the birth control can also be managed through the app similar to a monthly subscription service. Most apps will charge the user’s credit card for their cost of the birth control and the delivery.

Image Courtesy of Public Domain Pictures.

Who Will Buy The Amazon Fire 3D Smartphone Anyway?

By Leave a Comment

amazon 3d smartphoneThe waiting is over. Yesterday, the infamous Amazon 3D smartphone everybody talked about in the last months made its appearance in the hands of Jeff Bezos.

As suspected, the phone has four cameras and features the ability to deliver greater depth perception in maps and pictures, together with the ability of rendering buildings and art in 3D.

As a phone, stripped of its other features (we will talk about immediately), the Amazon Fire 3D smartphone isn’t something to pay for with your life. It sports a 4.7 inch screen with a solid touch screen, a good key board and other features you can find on almost all premium smartphones on the market.

But the Amazon Fire 3D smartphone also sports other qualities and they are the debatable ones. First and foremost, it is similar with the Kindle Fire tablets, allowing users to access pretty much the same apps, videos, games and other perks common to Amazon Prime members. It also comes with the Firefly, a system that makes the Amazon Fire 3D smartphone different, unique and hard to sell to the masses:

Users can press a button and point the phone at an object such as a can of soup or work of art, or direct it to listen to a song. If the device recognizes it, the user can buy it on Amazon, if it’s sold there. The technology, which works by matching images of items or songs to Amazon’s database of over 100 million items, will be opened to app-developers for use, an approach that rivals Apple and Google have taken with their own mobile software.

After seeing the phone, tech specialists divided in almost two distinct categories: the ones whose minds were blown by the deep perspective and the 3D imagery technology, and the ones considering the phone won’t appeal to anybody, except maybe compulsive shoppers:

Meanwhile, Firefly could encourage more purchases. The feature lets you snap bar codes, phone numbers and more. It can even direct you to facts and data, such as a Wikipedia entry with information about a painting you snapped. It listens to songs, TV shows and movies and can pull up extra info like lyrics, actor bios and other information through its IMDb database.

It is hard to conclude right here and now whether or not the Amazon Fire 3D smartphone will be successful. The point is that Jeff Bezos doesn’t hurry anywhere. He acknowledged the fact that he was way behind smartphone rulers like Apple and Samsung, but all he wanted to do was to bring something different into the world. And from this perspective, he did brilliantly. Not to mention that yesterday, Amazon shares went up 2.7 percent to $334.38.

The Amazon Fire 3D smartphone will be an AT&T exclusive starting July 25. If you want a two – years plan, you will have the new handset available starting at $199. If you are already an Amazon Prime member, your deal is sweetened with some added perks (an extra 12 months of membership).

Scientists Send Smelly Messages via Smartphones

By Leave a Comment

smelly messagesOnce upon a time, when you only had a brick of a cell phone with a monochrome tiny screen, all you could do was to send good old plain text messages.

Then, technology evolved, at a very fast pace and now you can send virtually anything via a smartphone, from icons and symbols, to photos and videos.

What the world needed, of course, was the possibility to also send smells and scents via a smartphone. Because hey, what can say “I love you!” on Valentines’ Day better than a rose bud picture accompanied by a rose bud scent? Can we possibly be able to send smelly messages via smartphones?

Two Harvard scientists say we are able to do so and they actually proved it. They invented a communication platform, a cell phone and an iOS app to be able to send scents. The experiment consisted in sending a smell from Paris to New York. Their first option? Champagne and passion fruit macaroon. Yummy!

How do all these devices work? Tech experts jumped the opportunity to take a closer look and describe this innovation to us:

A custom-made app allows you to take a photo of something and “tag” it with a few aroma notes (from more than 3,000 scents). These smells — which range in category from “Paris Afternoon” to “Plantation” — are transferred via a pipe-like smelling station called an oPhone Duo and are controlled by an iPhone app called oSnap. When you send an oNote, your recipient will click a link that leads him to a photo, as well as the specific aromatic notes you have chosen. When connected to the oPhone Duo, the hardware piece, it’ll emit slight scents from two separate pipes to be smelled in conjunction with the message. Otherwise, the app will just offer some vivid description of the scent your sender is trying to convey.

This is pretty neat, don’t you think? In case you’re wondering where and how you can get your hands on this interesting device, you can consult the start-up Indiegogo page and buy the oPhone hardware for that matter for $149. If you don’t want to buy the contraption, you can get the oSnapp app from the Play Store and use it with your iPhone to send photos that are tagged with about 16 different scents.

Is this smelly messages via smartphones opportunity useful in some way? Well, we don’t know yet, but its creators are quite confident in its future success. They want to use hot spots for people to try the whole experience and to address  those foodies interested in not only sharing pictures of their roast turkeys, but their scents too. Hope it works as planned.

NHTSA to Impose Restrictions to Automobile Navigation Apps and Devices

By Leave a Comment

navigation apps restrictionsAccording to the recent statistics, distracted driving is fatal in the United States on scales going beyond any imagination.

The latest governmental reports show that a new transportation bill – that goes by the name of The GROW AMERICA Act – will allow the The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to impose restrictions to automobile navigation apps and devices.

We are talking about both built – in navigation systems and also smartphone apps. As you can imagine, this new bill may give a powerful blow in the gut to a lot of big and small tech companies.

While talking on the phone or texting while driving is banned in the vast majority of the American states, just as it is in many other countries around the world, the regulation of apps and navigation software is still unclear.

But how would people drive around nowadays without their Google Maps or Apple apps or other navigation apps? Well, they could buy more expensive cars that feature all sorts of built – in driving aiding systems, but not everybody can afford the latest smart car model. But the Government is set to impose such restrictions and save some American lives along the way.

According to people familiar with the matter,

The department [of Transportation] is intensifying its battle against distracted driving by seeking explicit authority from Congress to regulate navigation aids of all types, including apps on smartphones. The measure, included in the Obama administration’s proposed transportation bill, would specify that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has the authority to set restrictions on the apps and later order changes if they are deemed dangerous, much the way it currently regulates mechanical features of cars.

The first ones to jump to this opportunity were, of course, the car manufacturers, who seem more than compliant with these regulations. The ones shouting about these forthcoming restrictions to automobile navigation apps and devices are the tech companies producing the apps. They consider these measures as impossible to enforce on hundreds of millions of people and very impractical.

It is hard to understand the legal, social and financial implications of this story, just as it is hard to keep a neutral, objective position. It takes a split second to lose somebody in a car crash due to a split second of smartphone distraction. Does it matter if that distraction was caused by a chatting app or a map telling the driver where to go?

Are these new laws going to bury those app makers who created navigational apps so that they can keep drivers safer? These are all hard questions with even harder answers. We will all have to wait and see how this story unfolds. It is true that the NHTSA already has the right to impose restrictions to automobile navigation apps and devices, but how will these restrictions manifest themselves in real life?

Weed Firm Went Out the App Store With a Bang!

By Leave a Comment

weed firm Are you familiar with Weed Firm? This is an iOS game that was described as being similar to Grand Theft Auto meets Breaking Bad and for good reason.

Practically the game allows users to grow a marijuana based – empire, sell the pot, smoke it, make profits, meet gangsters and resist the competition in the drug – dealing market.

Does this sound illegal or immoral to you? It sounded to Apple, which decided to expel the game out of its App Store, to the dismay and rage of the game’s creators.

By now we guess that most iOS fans learned that the Weed Firm went out the App Store with a bang, and what bang that was! It is a unique moment in one’s life to read black on white an angry note dedicated to Apple. A note that does not only accuse the tech giant of hypocrisy and censorship, but which speaks the mind of a lot of people who don’t believe that playing a pot – based game means they will become drug dealers and gangsters. But before giving you the quintessence of the anti – Apple speech released by the game creators, let’s see what was really the problem.

Weed Firm was a successful game. So successful, in fact, that it scored the first place in the U.S. free app category and held this position for two days in a row. The game was reviewed by an average number of 5,000 people, receiving 4.5 out of 5 stars. It was grand, it was Walter White’s legacy, it was the American dream. And then, it disappeared from the App Store. Why?

The guys from TechCrunch say it like it is:

It’s clear why Apple wouldn’t want a game like this at the top of its App Store charts, but its rejection is also somewhat confusing since it looks like the game was singled out for the sole crime of becoming universally popular. Requests for comment and an explanation from Apple were not returned.

And now, for the fun part. The official statement released by Manitoba Games makes you either laugh or cry, but you can’t escape the feeling that they might actually have a strong point:

One thing we can promise you is that we will be back! The Apple version might need to be censored a bit to comply with Apple’s strictest requirement since they are going to be looking very attentively at what we submit from now on. Google never had a problem with the application itself. The problem was with our publisher and we are expecting to return to the Play Store once we find a suitable publisher.

As for the other platforms we will endeavor to make it as censorship free as possible while assigning the highest maturity rating to the game. We do not want kids playing Weed Firm, but we firmly believe that adults should have a choice to do whatever the hell they want as long as they are not hurting anybody in the process. If we let hypocrites determine what content is suitable for us we will soon all be watching teletubbies instead of Breaking Bad and playing… oh I don’t know… nothing good comes to mind, without some form of ‘illegal activity’ or other really.

The game developers also talk about other objectionable games and apps that are still available in the Apple store, such as the ones inciting people to crash cars, shoot civilians and, our favorite, crash birds into buildings. This is perfectly legit: the App Store is filled with games and apps that teach people how to grow pot, how to choose one strain of marijuana from another or how to cultivate gunja.

weed apps

Censorship or not, objectionable content or not, the fact remains: Weed Firm went out the App Store with a bang for being too successful! Had it been a Mario type of game, Apple would have issued a press release to brag about it. We may not approve the angry tone or the sarcasm, but one thing is certain: Apple just messed with the “freedom of speech” bunch.

Meet Duster, The Facebook Friends Cleaning App

By 1 Comment

dusterSome say that if you don’t have a Facebook profile, you don’t exist. Back in the day, the social network aimed to help people get connected, stay connected and make new friends. In today’s world, one can have literally hundreds of “Facebook friends” whom he or she never spoke with, or never considered worthy of a status Like.

We all have some faces out there we never took an interest in, who never contacted us, who never wrote one single interesting post for us to appreciate. So unfriending these people and unfollowing them is quite the procedure in such cases. You browse your list manually and get a sore finger for pushing the Unfriend button a couple of hundred times.

But unfriending people on Facebook is not so psychologically comfortable. It makes you look like a bad person who doesn’t give people a chance. Not to mention that doing this by hand is awfully time – consuming. Today we have news for the ones challenged by the whole Unfriend shenanigans: meet Duster, the Facebook Friends cleaning app!

Alyssa Bereznak from Yahoo Tech explains us how Duster works:

The free app connects to Facebook and analyzes which of your friends you’ve barely interacted with lately. Within a couple of seconds, it’ll offer recommendations, in the form of a pinboard of forgotten faces, of people to remove from your social circle. The app can also finger accounts that belong to friends you may not interact with much on Facebook, but whom you are genuinely interested in. So as much as this is an app meant to clear the residue of forgotten acquaintances, it might motivate you to rekindle fading friendships, too.

In case you aren’t ready to make irrevocable decisions, such as completely remove a “friend” from the list, you can choose the Hide option Duster offers you: instead of making people disappear, you can just keep them out of your sight. The list will still be cluttered, but at least you won’t have to see the same old boring jokes one floods your news feed with every day.

The downside of Duster, the Facebook Friends cleaning app, is that other people can use it to dust you off from their lists. If the perspective doesn’t bother you a bit and you’re still bent to finish that spring cleaning you started, you can try Duster anytime you want. You will have to sign in your Facebook account so Duster can do its magic and start purging people. You are in control of everything, as the app won’t unfriend anybody without your permission. The app is free and quite successful so far, from what we’ve heard.

Brace Yourselves! Flappy Bird Returns!

By 1 Comment

flappy bird Do you remember Flappy Bird? Back in 2013, it was an addictive and frustrating game that turned players into true junkies and brought creator Dong Nguyen an unexpected fame and fortune.

If you never played it, let us sum up the game’s main features for you: everything you had to do was to guide a small non – aerodynamic bird through a series of pipes, just by tapping on the smartphone’s screen. The thing was, if you crashed the bird into an obstacle or didn’t manage to keep it floating, the game was over and you had to start all over again. Imagine cohorts of people not giving up after the first try…

Translated into real life, reports showed that a gazillion of people got addicted to the game and turned it into an incredible hit.

It was so successful, Dong Nguyen was making around $50,000 in ad revenue per day. On a less positive note, the game received a lot of critique for its addictive features and Nguyen felt suddenly under tons of pressure, both professionally and personally. He felt somehow guilty for delivering the world just another dangerous drug and decided to forever remove the game from the app marketplace.

This took place in February this year, but after a few months of silence, Nguyen resurfaced and spread the word: Flappy Bird returns, with new and improved features and a less – addictive potential. In an interview for CNBC on Wednesday, Nguyen revealed that the game would return sometime August this year and would bring a multiplayer version. This somehow changes completely the notion of “gone forever”, but we are not the ones to judge.

According to the journalists who covered the topic,

The new version will be enabled for multi-player gaming, so you and your fellow addicts can complete in real time. Nguyen also plans to make the new version of the game less addictive to users, though how he plans to do that is unclear. Nguyen could create levels within the game, so users don’t have to start from scratch every time their bird crashes. He could also create a tiered difficulty system. Regardless, based on the craze that resulted from the first release of the game, Flappy Bird 2.0 will still breed some serious addicts.

Now that we know Flappy Bird returns, we can’t wait to see it and burn our fingertips in order to keep that bird flying. After Nguyen removed the original game from the app stores, a myriad of copycats invaded the world. Some of these almost identical games witnessed certain levels of success, but most of them were clearly inferior to the Flappy Bird. As we said, we still don’t have details on the exact changes Ngyuen plans for the game, but there is still a lot of time to find out!

Blink Disappears Into Yahoo’s Acquisitions Portfolio

By Leave a Comment

blink app Have you heard about Blink? This is a mobile messaging app that sports a very interesting feature: all messages you send can self – destruct at a time you decide. The app allows users to send text messages, snap photos, send sketches, record audio and even make videos.

It is not a very popular app, as the world is already hooked on Snapchat and other mobile messaging apps. However, in case you used it by now, we are sorry to give you some bad news: Blink disappears into Yahoo’s acquisitions portfolio.

Recent reports show that Yahoo is in course of buying Blink. So far the details of the transaction weren’t disclosed by either of the two companies, although the developers of Blink, Meh Labs, released an official statement on the company’s blog page:

We’re excited to announce that as of May 13, 2014 Blink is joining Yahoo! We built Blink because we believe everyone should be free to show the same honesty and spontaneity in their online conversations as they can in person. We look forward to the possibilities that will come from bringing the Blink vision to Yahoo.

What does this mean for you as a Blink user?

In the next few weeks, we will be shutting down Blink for both Android and iOS.

Financial and tech analysts took a closer look into the matters and said that Meh Labs had few reasons to be happy that Blink disappears. Statistically speaking, many of the companies purchased by Yahoo in the last year shut down their applications. Moreover, the tech giant didn’t confirm it has immediate plans for Blink or its developers. In other words, Blink disappears and this is all for now.

Yahoo is on a buying spree in the last two years, since Marissa Mayer took over the lead. Yahoo bought 22 small companies and start – ups and it intends to grow even more in order to step things up and strengthen its position among the other behemoths in the tech world. Mobile platforms seem to be the most interesting purchase targets and Yahoo managed to gather over 400 million monthly users for its mobile products. However, specialists consider that Spapchat would have been a better and more logical choice for Yahoo, as it clearly trumps Blink in success and number of users. On the other hand, Snapchat isn’t going through its best of times and the legal issues it has to face probably make it a less desirable candidate for Yahoo’s portfolio.

According to the data available, Blink was installed only 10,000-50,000 times since its official launch last April, so there are quite few people suffering because Blink disappears. However, the self – destruct message feature was interesting and useful, now that Snapchat proved itself to be a liar.

The New Cinamatic App Allows You to Add Era-Inspired Effects to Videos

By Leave a Comment

cinamatic appEverybody is a visual artist and a movie director deep down inside and this theory is widely proved by the millions of Instagram and Vine videos roaming around the Internet. But how many high quality effects can you add to an Instagram or Vine video? Not enough would answer the creators of the new Cinamatic app, an iOS – bound app that allows the user to record a 15 seconds video in the easiest way possible and then add to it era – inspired effects to make the video look and feel real, give it authenticity, atmosphere and class.

The new Cinamatic app was developed by the same creative people behind the Hipstamatic and came out of a need to have more retro – enhanced videos inspired by all major film eras. According to the specialists, the new Cinamatic app goes beyond the specs featured by Instagram and Vine (which also allow users to add filters and create vintage – like videos) because it gives the user a wide array of choices, including

animation, reflections, built-in glitches, and movie splotches

The final product is a .mov file you can share or not, it’s your call.

While Instagram’s square photos with retro feelings were themselves inspired by Hipstamatic, the developers of the Cinamatic don’t feel threatened by the two social platforms, nor feel they are in a competition. In comparison with Instagram and Vine, the new Cinamatic app is not a social network per se, but a tool dedicated to artists who want to give a soul to their videos. To prove this, any user can share their film – era inspired videos via Instagram, Vine or Facebook.

The app is easy and quite intuitive to use and it doesn’t need the user’s login information, emphasizing on the difference between the app and the more famous social networks we mentioned before. With a simple tap, you can start recording a video and can stop anytime they want – anywhere 3 and 15 seconds, that it. After you are satisfied with the filmed result, the real creative process begins: the app will take you to its page featuring 5 basic movie era – inspired filters (but of course, you can buy more). You can test each filter and choose the one that suits best your idea, while specialists recommend you to check each layer before deciding saving and sharing your masterpiece with the world. In case you wondered, the filters don’t just wash away some colors or add some lights here and there, but they indeed change in an original and beautiful manner the entire atmosphere and feeling of your short film.

The new Cinamatic app costs $1.99, while all the other available filters are $0.99 a piece. Quite affordable for an artist still looking for that old movies nostalgia and trying to recreate a retro atmosphere even for a 15 seconds long video.

FaceSnap for iOS Takes Selfies to Another Level

By Leave a Comment

FaceSnapAh, the famous selfie! The word of the year, the Oscar made – famous hobby, the pride and glory of all Internet users from all walks of life, perhaps the most appraised, mocked and common activity of people having a phone in their hand. Taking selfies is more than a practice, it became a cultural “thing” that invaded our lives and it looks like it is here to stay for quite some time.

Enter FaceSnap for iOS, a new app that allows iPhone users to take selfies with a lot less effort than reaching out their arms, focus on a posture, get the angle right, tap the camera button and still manage to look decent. What is this amazing app, you might ask yourselves? Simply put? The FaceSnap for iOS

is a photo timer for your smartphone. It takes a series of selfies in successive bursts, pausing a few seconds between each take to let you decide on a pose. That way you can spend less time focusing on pulling the trigger and more time mugging for the camera.

A timer for the phone camera? Don’t we already have some of those on several of our Samsung models and the HTC One? Well, you’ll be surprised to find out that the large majority of standard iOS and Android powered cell phones actually don’t feature a timer for their high – end cameras. What is quite surprising about this app is that it took developers quite some time before coming up with a simple solution for introducing a timer. Following this trail of thought, the selfie aficionados should also know that the app is available for $0.99 and that FaceSnap is more than a timer.

It also encompasses two other features powered up by a room – scanning technology that goes by the name of Galileo. If the simple “timer” allows you to snap 3 pictures in a row of your beautiful face and pose, the Party Camera option scans the room you’re in and snaps a series of five consecutive pictures when it detects a face. The second Galileo powered feature, called Room Surveillance, will snap a single picture of a face it recognizes after randomly surveying the space around you. Now if you think these features are a bit creepy, you are not the first to notice that the app may allow people to engage in nefarious activities. Just as Alyssa Bereznak says,

Depending on whose hands this falls into, these tools could be awesome or creepy: awesome because they’re a great way to capture candid images of your friends at a party or crowded room; creepy because the ability to discreetly hold your iPhone up, scan a room for faces, and take photos could be abused by stalkers and weirdos in public places.

But before you get a bit paranoid, let’s just have some fun with the FaceSnap for iOS and take those brilliant selfies we always dreamed of! If you want to know more about the FaceSnap’s user guidelines, you have here a very detailed explanation.

Categories