We’ve put together some of the best apps we could find into one convenient, quick, video! Hope you enjoy our first in the series! Here are the apps that we are reviewing this week.

Oscura

Oscura is a quirky platformer that will put you in the skin of an imp on a noble quest – to bring light to a world that only knows darkness. In the process, you’ll be confronted with flying spiked balls, huge cogs that are wont to crush you, and other pain inducing obstacles. The game art is reminiscing of the PC title Limbo, so, if you enjoyed that (or simply if you like your games dark and edgy), you’ll love Oscura.

Get Oscura now from Google Play for 99 cents.

Falcon Pro

One of the best Twitter clients in the Play Store, Falcon Pro impresses through its sleek appearance and intuitive interface. Swipe right, swipe left, tap – everything you need to cultivate your Twitter presence it’s right there, in a beautiful package.

Get Falcon Pro from Google Play for 99 cents.

Press

The new RSS reader app Press has made a name for itself on iOS, and now it’s available on Android devices. Another app with a well thought, well-made design, Press lets you keep up with your internet world, pain free.

Get Press now from Google Play for $1.99.

Fun Run

Get ready to die, repeatedly. But worry not, dying is fun in Fun Run, a crazy multiplayer racer that pits you against fellow internet players. Jump your way to the finish line, but don’t forget to set traps for your hapless opponents. Quick, mindless fun. An aptly named game, indeed.

Get Fun Run now from Google Play for free.

Stay tuned for our next Apps of the Week. Meanwhile tell us, what’s your favorite app from the ones we’ve reviewed here?

Spacetime Studios’ office is a beautiful place, but you’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there. Housed in one of the tall, white office buildings that line the highways in Austin, it remains a well-hidden gem from the outside world, where ideas and games and coding all symbiotically co-exist, and hits are made.

I’m lucky enough to arrive just as CEO Gary Gattis is signing for a package, and we exchange small talk before he goes back inside. We’ve met before, but the last time I was here was more than a year ago, and Spacetime was in a smaller office then. They’ve grown, just like their library of titles, and as such, have moved into a bigger space.

Walking into Spacetime’s office space, their walls are lined with posters and art of their games, but also with newspaper articles and awards they’ve won. It’s a clean setup, and you can tell there’s a real sense of pride about what they’re doing between these walls.

I walk into a long conference room where Gary is sitting. Half of the room is covered with incredibly detailed concept art, and the other half is blanketed with bizarre doodles on dry erase boards. All sorts of strange characters live here, from men with disproportionate noses and heads, to, well, animals with disproportionate body parts (and extra appendages). I sit down.

I reintroduce myself to Gary and his memory is (hopefully) jogged. More small talk, this time about my career as a music teacher and his son joining the band program at his school. Finally, Gary pops the question.

“So, what’re we here to talk about?” I mentioned that I wanted to talk about the creation of Arcane Legends, from idea, to early concepts, to actual fruition and publishing in the Google Play Store. “Cinco’s the man you’ll want to talk to, then.”

Inside Spacetime

Cinco Barnes is the Chief Visionary Officer for Spacetime Studios, but aside from that, he’s also a hilarious person, eloquent speaker, and shredding guitarist (or so Gary says). He hosted his own Tosh.0-style show before Tosh.0 was ever on the scene, and he emceed Spacetime’s presentation at the Big Android BBQ 2011.

So yeah, if there’s someone you want to talk to, it’s Cinco.

He’s the kind of person that immediately makes you feel like you’ve known each other your whole lives, and he did just that to me. He bounded in with an almost infectious excitement, but also a warmth that immediately puts your apprehensions at ease.

But I want to know about Arcane Legends, so that’s what I start with.

“Arcane Legends is the fourth in the legend series of games. We started years ago with a game called Pocket Legends, and Pocket Legends did extremely well for Spacetime Studios.

We followed it up with a couple of other Legends titles, refining the kind of gameplay, the sort of experience that you could have with the various features of the game and wound up in a position for Arcane Legends where we could take the best of everything in an extremely fast, extremely responsive, action-oriented combat system.

Arcane Legends is our best in class, mobile MMO. Arcane Legends really is, so far, our finest game, our finest multiplayer game, our finest MMO, and by far, one of the best mobile games I think, anybody’s gonna play.”

It’s quite inspiring and almost riveting to listen to Cinco speak about Spacetime and their plans. It’s clear from the start that he’s an integral part of everything, and based on how well he knows his Spacetime history, there’s no doubt that he’s been there every step of the way.

The games made by Spacetime are, without fail, top of the line. Played in hundreds of countries by millions of people, they can log a quarter of a million concurrent users over the weekend, which is impressive, considering they only employ just over 50 people.

When it comes to Arcane Legends, though, I’d noticed some striking similarities to Spacetime’s first installment, Pocket Legends, namely the medieval fantasy world. Sure, the differences are clear enough (like having animal characters in Pocket Legends and humans in Arcane Legends), but there was still something I was curious about.

Did Spacetime ever think they were cannibalizing their own user base? Or more importantly, did they think Arcane Legends was different enough from Pocket Legends to stand on its own and be successful?

“Well, we have a style as a studio and that’s something that I’m very proud of. We do medieval fantasy, we have sort of a snarky, kind of funny look at what medieval fantasy is all about. And when we decided to make Pocket Legends, Pocket Legends is very much like Arcane Legends is today.

And [the Pocket Legends world], though, that world is still a medieval fantasy world that’s more of a story book, more of fractured fairy tales, and less of a serious and dark fantasy. And that’s something that as a studio we do.

So we decided that we were going to go back to medieval fantasy for our fourth Legends title. We knew we needed to do some stuff to freshen it up and so we took a little bit more of a serious approach, not to the tone but to the way we told the story. In Pocket Legends, the story is told in a pretty haphazard way, where it’s just a quest dialogue and a handful of cinematics.

For Arcane Legends, we wanted to treat the story with a lot of respect because we worked very hard in order to create characters that you could understand, with motivations that made sense, so we invested really heavily in the cinematics system, in conversations.

Largely what we wanted to do was we wanted to bring the focus back to, you know, a believable story of motivations, and having evil characters who, at their root, have dysfunctions that you can understand, and that as a hero your opportunities to win the day are pretty clear, and that’s the way the story begins. But as we get deeper into this story we have a lot to reveal.

All of this is told through our eyes, and it takes on a kind of a snarky and funny and fresh vision. We’re in no way sitting around thinking that we’re inventors.

As originators, we feel like we have a voice but we don’t get caught up with trying to do something no one else has done before in story. We do something that matters to us and then we just be honest about it.”

Hack-and-slash

Looking at the three current character classes in Arcane Legends, it’s pretty obvious to any veteran MMO-player than Spacetime built a tank, a caster, and a damage dealer.

It’s certainly familiar, if not a bit par the course, but both newcomers to MMOs and experienced players will understand the rock-paper-scissors design of the warrior, sorcerer, and rogue.

Still, with a company as innovative as Spacetime, I wanted to know if they didn’t think they were “playing it safe” with their character design.

“So each of these classes represents, from our perspective, it’s a classic trilogy, so the trinity rather, the classic trinity of those three classes makes it fun for us to create content where there’s monsters that are going to eat a lot of health points, so it’s important to have a tank.

There’s gonna be monsters that are going to have a lot of defensibility, that are going to need to be locked down and you need to crowd control, because you’re going to need to put certain DPS moves on them in order to defeat them. That’s all really fun.

And keeping it to those three, making a chord out of the tanking, DPS, and support feels like we can make a bunch of different kinds of content that make the player groups really entertained, entertained as groups of three and four, or entertained as one or two as well.

It’s that level of interdependence that’s really fun for us when we play and we just wanted to stay with that, plus it opens us up to being able to offer other character classes in the future. As it stands these three, these three are really good, a really solid beginning.”

For any followers of the Legends series of games, one thing that immediately jumps out when you start playing Arcane Legends is how quick the combat is. Compared to earlier title Star Legends, which was all rounding corners and targeting one enemy at a time, Arcane Legends is all flash and bang, with quick, hack and slash gameplay, as furious as your thumb can deliver it.

When questioned about the change in action and gameplay speed, I got some revealing and well-thought answers.

“We love a tactical gameplay, that’s core to our earlier MMOs Pocket and Star Legends. Both have a single lock target and that lock target then becomes more of a strategic process where you’re waiting for cooldowns in order to apply the right debuffs on your target, in order to do the right damage and combos, so on and so forth.

In that process of play, is really fun but it’s much more strategic. It’s much more intellectual. And after going through Dark Legends, the thing that we wanted to achieve with Dark Legends was something really splashy. Something that would feel home on a console or game controller just smashing guys, but still it’s an MMO.

When we got to Arcane Legends, because we enjoyed the Dark Legends combat so much, what we decided to do was have the core combat feel splashy and arcade-like, but add a depth where I can choose ranks of a variety of different skills and still play my role and be a good functional part of a team that is trying to survive and succeed but have that sense of connection to my avatar that I don’t have in other games.

I mean, I’ve played a lot of MMOs. I’ve played both our competition on mobile devices and playing PC games and what we offer is different. We reduced the complexity and add what I think is a very elegant level of simplicity for the style of combat that we have.”

More screens, more better

One of the most significant things Spacetime Studios accomplished in the past was their multi-screen strategy. Instead of only limiting their games to phones and tablets, they successfully published their games as apps in the Chrome web store, allowing anyone to play a Legends game not only from their handheld device, but also from their computer.

This three-screen was a huge hit (and a huge deal!) because players weren’t separated based on what device they were playing on. Players playing on their computer existed in the exact same world as their mobile counterparts, and you could just as easily stop on one screen and seamlessly pick things up on another.

That was then, though, and seeing a multiple screen release for a Spacetime Studios game is all but expected. Still, I was wanted to know why they did it, and if they think it’s the future of not only mobile gaming, but gaming at large.

“It was the future when were making Star Legends and we were there up in front of everybody else. We’ve benefited from having knowledge that other people don’t have by going places before they do.

Going there with the mobile MMO to begin with taught us lessons that still I think a lot people have yet to understand and then going multi-platform has also taught a lot and benefits on a number of levels were just undeniable.

From the perspective of just being a service industry, we serve the public that comes in everyday 24 hours a day to play our game and being to able to get a sense of the players’ experience from small, medium, large scale device, whether they’re locked to their PC playing in Chrome, on the big screen, or that they’re running around on their mobile device, all of this helps us a lot to understand the customer’s experience and the fact that we support all these different platforms is largely an expression of our technical muscle.

Our engine is extremely flexible and looking for opportunities to draw audiences from all these different places is great for business. Being able to go out on Chrome, being available on your Android device, being available on iOS, and the mini iPad or whatever.

All of this is excellent for a company such as Spacetime that wants to catch a really broad net and bring in lots and lots of customers. It’s a very good strategy for us overall. I think that the one thing that we offer that other people don’t who do this on multiple platforms is that when you convert to Spacetime account, you play exactly the same game on every device.”

Wrap up

Throughout the entire interview, it’s obvious that Cinco (and probably everyone else) takes a great level of pride in what they do, not only making games, but marketing them, creating them, designing them, and everything else that comes with being your own development studio.

This truly is a remarkable place doing remarkable things, and when asked for final thoughts, I think Cinco summed it up nicely.

“It’s always great to talk about Spacetime. I’m really proud that I work here and that my partners and I, we’ve gone through a lot.

And the team that has been here that has put out so much effort and has given so much of their time and their talent, it’s humbling. Not only are we working on stuff that we care about, that we love and that we’ve invested in, it’s ours.

It’s something that we built and that we sweated and that we fought each other in order to have in this game. And it’s important.

And for us you know who’ve gone through the ringer, who’ve made licensed games and big games, we can look at each other in the face and be proud that all that we’ve gone through is for the right reasons, and it just makes me proud.

It’s just awesome to get the opportunity to talk about it.”

I love making my phone work for me. Whether it’s using Navigation to get me from place-to-place, tapping NFC tags to run custom processes, or just tapping into the power of Google Now for powerful voice search, my phone is usually at my fingertips.

That being said, sometimes there are things I don’t want to have to worry about. Turning Wi-fi on or off, for instance, or making sure my volume is always at an appropriate level, are things I’d rather not waste mental resources on.

For that, (and a whole other slew of options), I turn to Locale, by two forty four a.m. An oldie but a goodie, come check out what makes Locale such a staple of the Android ecosystem after the break.

With our review of the Phorus Play-Fi finally up, Android Authority is excited to bring you the opportunity to win one of three Play-Fi speakers in our latest giveaway, courtesy of Phorus!

To enter, simply comment on this post, and three lucky winners will be chosen at random!

The contest ends at the stroke of midnight on Monday, so best of luck, and get commenting!

Sometimes you just need to do something epic, right? Well, fortunately, an epic adventure lays in the palm of your hand (or hands, if you choose a tablet) in the form of Epic Raiders.

Epic Raiders puts you in control of some staples of the fantasy genre (the knight and priest, to start), battling hordes of enemies, building out talent tress, acquiring ever better armor for the upcoming task, and doing so will full touch control.

Join me after the break to see Epic Raiders in action.

I love Holo, I really do. When Google unveiled Ice Cream Sandwich to the world, I was instantly smitten with how clean and cool it looked, so when I discovered Tweet Lanes, I was smitten yet again.

Developed my Chris Lacy, (the developer of Action Launcher), it strictly adheres to Android design guidelines, runs like a champ, and introduces some cool new enhancements, too.

Join me after the break and find out why Tweet Lanes is my Twitter client of choice.

First off, just admire how good Tweet Lanes looks. That’s definitely Holo-theming if I’ve ever seen it, and it looks darn good. But what else makes Tweet Lanes so good?

For one, the lanes are a great feature Chris Lacy introduced in the context of Holo design. Instead of any complicated tapping or button-oriented systems, you simply swipe left and right to get from column to column, or, as Lacy deemed them, Lanes. (Hence Tweet Lanes.)

The Lanes you use are completely customizable from the settings menu, and the only thing you absolutely have to keep enabled is your Twitter feed.

The second, and perhaps more important, enhancement is the Context Box. Lacy did away with reply and direct message buttons, and instead wrote a single text input field that changes depending on what you’re doing (or not doing).

Want to tweet? Fill something out in your Context Box and tweet it. Want to reply to someone? Simply highlight their name (via long press) in your feed, and the Context Box automatically adds their name as an @reply! Want to reply to more than one person? Highlight as many as you want, write your message, and they’ll all be replied to at once!

Tweet Lanes also uses what Lacy has termed VolScroll, which lets you move through your Twitter feed using the volume buttons to navigate up and down. In my experience, it works well, but I’m still a finger scrolling kinda guy, so I didn’t use it too much.

Combine all of the these features with multiple account support and you’ve got a wonderful Twitter app on your hands. The one takeaway is no notification support, but if you can get past that, you should definitely look into giving Tweet Lanes a try.

Phorus has a solid speaker in the Play-Fi, but can it compete?

Ask people to list off wireless speaker systems they can control with their phone, and you’re probably going to get a single answer: Sonos. A new challenger has approached, by way of the Phorus Play-Fi, and they’re looking to take on the established name in the franchise by putting out quality wireless speakers of their own. Their big selling point? Total support for Android devices via their Play-Fi app, and even going so far as to brand their products Android ready (instead of the fruity alternative) to elicit support. It’s a bold move, for certain, but does it work? Can the Play-Fi contend with other products on the market? Or is it just another product to make the list of So how does all of it stack up? Join us after the break to find out.

Phorus Play-Fi Hands-On

The Hardware

Let me start off by saying this: the Phorus Play-Fi sounds good. Darn good, actually. In fact, when I first powered it on, I was surprised at the quality of sounds coming out of a speaker so small. This is certainly a speaker to notice, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk hardware.

Raw measurements are something I like to sprinkle in, because they’re easy to quantify, and better yet, easy to understand. That being said, the Phorus Play-Fi measures in at 8.3-inches x 6.2-inches x 5.5 inches, and weighs a scant 1.32 pounds.

The Phorus Play-Fi is shaped like a rounded cone, almost, although instead of having a circular base, it’s cylindrical. The speaker is covered in a black, soft, mesh-like material, and the bottom has rubber grip to keep the Play-Fi from sliding around. Above the power and volume buttons is a rubberized “docking” area for your phone or tablet, although I use the term dock loosely.

Instead of there being a proper microUSB interface to dock something on, it’s simply just a piece of rubber. That’s great if you want the look of a docked device, but not so great if you wanted the Play-Fi to tab into your device’s library the same way iDevices do.

Just north of the Phorus logo are your three main buttons: power, volume up, and volume down. All of their functions are self-explanatory, but let me just say this: this speaker gets loud. You wouldn’t expect so much sound to come out of something so small (or maybe these days you would), but if you’re looking for volume, the Play-Fi can deliver.

Just south of the Phorus logo are your Bluetooth and Wi-fi buttons. The Phorus Play-Fi has two methods of control: either as a single,  Bluetooth speaker, or as a speaker that lives on your Wi-fi network.

If you choose to use Bluetooth, you control all of your music straight from your phone, from whatever media player you’re using. If you’re going the Wi-fi route, however, there’s more to it (and more you can do). Phorus has a Play-Fi app in the Google Play Store that syncs up your speakers (yes, plural) so you can control them independently or make them all play as one.

Flipping to the back of the Play-Fi, you’ll notice a couple of ports. From left to right, there’s an auxillary input (3.5mm), a full-sized USB port, a microUSB port, your A/C adapter, and a reset button (hidden behind the power cable).

This is actually where two of my biggest grips with the Play-Fi come into play: the USB port and the power cable. In all promotional images of the Play-Fi, the speaker is shown with a phone “docked” on it, with nary a cable in sight. Seeing that, I figured it ran off of batteries or they’d developed a clever way to keep it wirelessly charged, but such is not the case.

Same goes for the full-sized USB port. Phorus includes two cables with your speaker, a USB-to-micro-USB and a USB-to-mini-USB. While this ensures you should be able to charge any Android device you have around, it forces you to have a cable running from the back of the speaker to your device’s charging port.

For anything that has it’s micro-/mini-USB port on the bottom bezel, that means it won’t be sitting straight up and down, and you’ll have this oh-so-gorgeous cable hanging around the speaker. While it might seem like I’m harping on a small point, in our increasingly wireless society, if you’ve got cables, be upfront about it. If you try to hide it, it only shows you know people won’t like them anyway.

The App

As aforementioned, if you’re controlling your Play-Fi through Wi-fi, you’ll need the official app from the Google Play Store. Upon first opening the app, you’re taken through some very simple and straightforward steps that connect your speaker to your phone’s app.

Once you’re all connected, you can give your speaker a name (which is more useful if you have more than one speaker), choose to connect to it, and you’re off to the races. You’ll also notice that before I’ve even chosen any options to play music, I can already control the volume of the speaker from the moment I’m connected to it.

After you’ve advanced from your speaker selections, you’re finally at the main menu (the first picture of the three), where you can select your source for music. There are three input options (music, Pandora, and media server), and a settings menu.

The settings menu is pretty simple, which choices to add another Play-Fi device, force an update for your Play-Fi’s software, and force your device’s screen to stay on.

Moving back to the main menu, notice that Google Play Music is absent. While this is probably more a Google problem than a Phorus one, for those people who keep all their music in the cloud (like me), it certainly made the Play-Fi a less attractive option. You can still stream Google Play Music via Bluetooth, but only to a single speaker at once.

If you have a media server on the same wireless network, the Play-Fi app can tap into that library and stream it out to your Phorus speakers (picture three).

If you choose the Music option from the menu, you’re shown a list of all the music stored on your device. You can sort by song, artist, album, genre, and folder, although the app doesn’t follow Holo design guidelines, so you can swipe from column to column (only tapping).

Perhaps the most shining feature of the Play-Fi app is it’s Pandora integration. Simply tap the Pandora button, login with your account, and you’re presented with a pretty full Pandora experience that includes album art, song name and album, and your Pandora-specific “thumbs up/thumbs down” buttons. Couple this with the ability to stream Pandora to multiple Phorus speakers in different rooms, and you’ve got the start of something very promising on your hands.

The Sound

Wow, where to begin? Phorus touts the Play-Fi as a “Hi-fi over Wi-fi” product, and while I’m not a true audiophile, I appreciate what their speakers are doing me.

Highs are high, mids are ever-present, and perhaps the most impressive of the bunch, is that lows are actually low. I’m a bass player, myself, so low tones hold a special spot in my heart, and with them being full available to my listening range, I think Phorus is doing something right.

An odd quirk I did notice, though, is that speaker placement can really affect the sounds you get (and usually not in a good way). For example, I put a speaker in a corner, where it had walls on two sides. The result was an overly-loud bass voice (I love bass, but not that much), so much so that it actually drowned out the rest of the music. Moving the speaker to a more open area fixed the problem instantly.

Really though, these speakers sound quite incredible. They’re also pretty liberal with how loud they go, so if you really want to crank one up, it’ll deliver. With only a single speaker, I could fill up my apartment with music that was too loud for me, so don’t fret that you’ll need a small army of them to reach the levels you want.

In a word, I’d say: impressed.

The Verdict

So, is the Play-Fi right for you? I’d say that certainly depends.

If you’re someone who doesn’t host your music in the cloud and opts for local storage instead, then I’d say definitely. If you’re a pure Google Music user like me, perhaps not. The Bluetooth functionality is there, but there are plenty of other single purpose speakers to fill that void.

The deceptive pictures (sans cables) is also a con, but if a cord here and there doesn’t bother you, go for it.

At the end of the day, these are all little niggles, and if you want a speaker that puts out some great quality sound at a wide range of volumes and want something you can control over your Wi-fi, then yes, the Phorus Play-Fi is for you, especially if you want to be able to control multiple speakers at once.

At $199 a speaker, the price may be a deterrent for some, but when you compare that to the prices of other wireless speaker options out there, the Play-Fi is actually the most affordable of the lot, and without sacrificing sound quality, to boot.

Chances are, if you’re reading this website, you’re a techie. (That’s okay, we’re even bigger nerds for writing it in the first place.)

Regardless of your geek/nerd/dork/techie status, we can all agree on one thing: saving money is great. Daily deal site Woot! became popular offering one item at a great price each day, but as its reach grew, so did its offerings.

With sites like Woot, Tech.Woot, Home.Woot, and Sport.Woot all offering their own deals each day, staying on top of everything can become a daunting task. Fortunately, GT Media’s own Woot Check has simplified the process, all from the palm of your hand.

Hopping straight into Woot Check, you’ll notice right off the bat how easy it is to navigate around. A simple swipe left or right takes to over to a different Woot column, and every new Woot column is both conveniently color-coded and labeled up top.

A refresh button up at the top allows you to manually refresh the deal, so if the clock has just struck twelve and you’re itching to see what new item is for sale, you’ve got the option to.

Also up top is the item description button (looks like a piece of paper), so you can read the hilarious stories the Woot folks write up for each item.

The last button up top, (and perhaps the most important), is the menu button. Hitting the menu button gives you three options: Comments, Share, and Preferences.

Comments is exactly what it sounds like: reading the comments on any item’s page. The downside is that the comments don’t exist within the app, and you’ll actually be redirected to an external web page in your browser. (Kind of a pain.)

Share is fairly straightforward, giving you a list of places you can share this Woot deal, like Facebook, Gmail, or Google+, to name a few.

Preferences is where you can really take control of the Woot Check experience and fiddle with what you don’t like. Here you can enable or disable background notifications, turn sounds on and off, and change the change the Woot-Off refresh interval.

If there’s a particular Woot site you’re passionate about, you can enable only specific notifications, but a generic, catch-all notification is enabled by default and covers all the Woot sites listed. Other than that, the preferences are bare.

As I mentioned in my video review, Woot Check is a “minion” of Woot, which means you could be redirected to a different page (in your browser) before you can purchase anything.

I’ve been assured that this is just so the developers get a small cut for referring you to Woot, (and they say helps pay for further development), but I figured it best to make this clear upfront so no one feels jolted.

(In my experience with it, the external site redirects to Woot so quickly, you probably won’t even notice.)

Overall, I’m very pleased with Woot Check. It offers a streamlined, Holo-friendly Woot experience, alerts you to new deals with notifications (should you choose), and does it all for free.

Pros:

• Holo-theming is consistent with Android design guidelines
• Customizable notifications
• Free-to-use

Cons:

It’s alright, I know sometimes we all need to be reminded. Life gets hectic, we all get busy, and we forget to do the important things. It’s no biggie.

That being said, if you’re not already following Android Authority on Google+, you should be. It’s where all the best news stories get posted, our Hangouts On-Air take place, and generally where loads of fun go down.

(And if you think it’s good now, wait until you see what we’ve got up our sleeve.)

Once you’ve done that, don’t forget to follow all the writers individually:

• Darcy LaCouvée
• Derek Scott
• Bogdan Petrovan
• Joshua Muñoz
• Elmer Montejo
• Lucian Armasu
• Alvin Ybañez
• Carl Parker
• Randy Khoo
• Bams Sadewo
• Gary Sims
• Ankit Banerjee
• Sam Cater
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• Chris Smith
• Derek Ross
• J. Angelo Racoma
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• Kristofer Wouk
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• Brendan Lynch
• Mihai Andrici

Phew! Quite a big family we’ve got here at Android Authority, and we’re really looking forward to meeting all of y’all.

Ever since Android saw a total revamp of its pulldown notification system, I’ve been impressed. I’d always wondered, though, how could I create my own custom notifications? After doing some research, I discovered Notif.

Notif allows you to create four different types of custom notification, and it does it all for free.

When I stumbled upon Notif, I was really just looking for the best app to help me keep a list of things I needed to do. I’d tried Astrid, given Tasks a to-do, but I was unimpressed with their widgets and didn’t want to have to open anything up to check out my list.

Upon finding Notif, however, everything changed. To start, you can create four different types of notifications (Default, Big Text, Big Picture, and List). Each one comes with different options and looks, so you can create whatever you need.

Default is the standard Android notification. Your notification is limited to a title and approximately one short line of text.

Big Text expands upon the Default idea, giving you fields to add a title, an expanded title (what the title becomes when you pinch-scroll the notification to its full size), and a content box. I added a few sentences into my content box, and when I pulled the Big Text notification to its maximum size, everything fit, like magic.

Big Picture is the same kind of notification you get if you take a picture, but you also have the ability to add lots of text, like with the Big Text option. Currently, pictures taken within Notif aren’t high-quality, so you need to take your picture first, then use the ‘Get Photo’ option to have a truly beautiful picture in your notification bar.

If you leave the notification minimized, a small thumbnail of your picture is displayed. Upon pulling it to full size, the picture grows in size and all of your words are displayed.

Finally, we get to the List option (my favorite!). List is pretty straightforward; title your list and add up to seven tasks to said list. That’s it. You can also type up a list summary, in case you want to minimize your list, but otherwise, that’s everything.

The gear icon to the right of each notification’s title (when creating a notification) allows you to choose what icon you’d like your notification to have in the pulldown menu. The free version includes 20, but if you upgrade to the Pro version, you unlock all 200 icons.

You can also make any notification an ongoing notification (meaning you can’t swipe left or right to remove it), which is great for guaranteeing you don’t accidentally remove something before you intended to. The downside is, you have to then go back into the Notif app proper and tap the double-flag icon.

Notable downsides include not being able to cross items off of lists as you go along (that’d be something Tasks or Astrid is more equipped to do), and not being able to save templates. However, for an app that’s following all of the Holo design guidelines, and at no cost, these are small downsides.

Notif is only compatible with Android devices running 4.1 and higher, and can be found in the Google Play Store completely and absolutely free.