Apps

Back a few weeks ago, we brought you the news on Chronos Calendar, a powerful and sharp looking Windows Phone calendar replacement that actually hooked into your Outlook.com account. While we rather enjoy that app a lot, many of you shrieked at the design noting it wasn’t “Metro” enough.

Well, we think we have something for you vocal bunch: True Calendar 8. Yes, it’s a rather powerful calendar replacement that also hooks into your Outlook/Hotmail account so that you can directly add appointments and sync your other imported calendars.

The Home Shopping Network (or HSN - www.hsn.com) has released an official app for Windows Phone. It's a home shopping network in the US, if you haven't quite guessed from the name. Consumers will be able to check out products and watch the HSN live while on the go. If you're into the whole interactive shopping experience, you'll want to check out the official HSN app.

If you missed the ‘Red Stripe’ deal a few weeks ago for Runtastic Pro (it was on sale for $.99, down from its normal $4.99), well, you missed a great offer for an impressive service for fitness buffs. The app recently went full Windows Phone 8 on us, bringing a host of new features and a slight redesign. Personally, we’ve been using it with the physical heart rate monitor and have been having a blast.

Even if you don’t run, it has general fitness features too, including weights, skiing, swimming and more. If you use Fitbit and or MyFitnessPal, it can easily link up to both services, giving you a comprehensive overview of your activity level and calories expended.

Pic Stitch is a new Windows Phone 8 photography app that has seen a bit of success over on iOS. It is part photo editor, part collage maker, and part photo sharing app. It caught the eye of Microsoft's Joe Belfiore and we have to admit, it does make a nice first impression.

Fhotoroom is a very nice photo sharing and editing app for our Windows Phone 8 and 7.x devices. You can sign up with the Fhotoroom network to show off your photos or just use the app to edit your photos.

Fhotoroom was updated today to version 8.3 that brings a new user interface to the editor along with a handful of new filters, styles, frames and light leaks. The but that was hindering saving/loading images from your SkyDrive account was also fixed.

We’ll keep this one short, as always, as Nokia has bumped up their Extras + Info app for their Lumia line to version 1.9.1.42 with no Changelog noted, except the normal “under-the-hood improvements to fine tune your Nokia Lumia experience”.

A little while ago we mentioned the AT&T Digital Life app that allows you to control various aspects of your home from your Windows Phone. With the service you can control everything from locking/unlocking your front door to turning on the lights to monitoring your security system.  The problem back in March, when the app first appeared, was that the Digital Life service wasn't available.

Today AT&T announced that the Digital Life service has launched in fifteen U.S. Markets including Atlanta, Austin, Texas, Boulder, Colo., Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Riverside, Calif., San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and select areas of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area. AT&T plans to introduce Digital Life in up to 50 markets by the end of 2013.

JDB Pocketware, the Windows Phone developers of HandyScan and SkyManager, have released a Facebook app. Facebook JDB is billed as being optimized for touch input and includes a set of enhancements to make your Facebook browsing experience the best possible.

We've already mentioned the Mush is part of this week's Red Stripe Deals over at the Windows Phone Store. We are now seeing Ruzzle and My Stocks Portfolio+ joining the Xbox Live title to complete this week's Red Stripe Deals package.

Ruzzle is a Boggle-styled word game that has you finding as many words as possible from a 4x4 grid of letters. The game is played online in matches of three rounds and played against Facebook, Twitter, or Ruzzle friends or with a random opponent.

Nokia has released the beta version of their new Chat app for Windows Phone 8. Nokia Chat lets you keep in touch with your Yahoo! Messenger contacts or friends who use Nokia Chat on other platforms. It's been around for quite a while on Asha, S40, and Symbian, but this is the first time it is being offered for Windows Phone.

UK mobile operator EE has released EE Film for Windows Phone and it's absolutely stunning. We don't tend to have many apps from the UK networks, but this is a given considering Orange (which is owned by EE) offers subscribers the opportunity to check latest movies in participating cinemas at a discounted price each and every Wednesday, coupled with other goodies. 

Speaking of which, this is exactly what the EE Film app is for. Should you enjoy checking out the latest titles and take full advantage of the Orange / 4GEE Wednesday 2-for-1 deal, then you'll definitely need to have this app installed on your Windows Phone.