Apps

We’re actually pretty big fans of Shazam, the popular music ID service, as it tends to do a slightly more accurate job than the Bing music service. Throw in the ability to pin the scanner to your Start screen for 1-touch access and we’re happy campers.

Today, Shazam is announcing an updated Windows Phone 8 version of their popular app and it looks quite polished. Probably the biggest improvement comes from the tie in to Nokia Music, which is becoming an ever more popular service on Lumia Windows Phones.

The Facebook app for Windows Phone hasn’t been the most exciting app since it first wobbled onto the platform. It became slightly better after each new update, but was still a dog to run. A month ago Microsoft announced a new beta version of Facebook they’ve been working on that brings the app closer to its iOS and Android counterparts. That beta version has been well received in the community and gets a small update today.

If you've tried to log into your Flickr account from the Windows Phone Flickr app you're probably receiving an error message that reads,

"Unable to reach Flickr login services. Press Back to try again."

The error message is rather persistent, no matter how many times you press the Back Button and try again.

The problem? It's likely an API change that wasn't reflected in the app.  The issue seems to be limited to logging into your Flickr account from apps such as the Flickr app and Pixl.  In checking some of the apps that pull images from Flickr, but don't have the account log-in feature, such as Photostream and Flickr Wallpapers, they are still able to pull pictures from Flickr.

The official Tumblr app has been available on the Windows Phone platform for some time now and the team has now updated the app with 11 more languages. For those not familiar with Tumblr, it's a microblogging service that powers over 100 million blogs. The latest release for Windows Phone is already live on the store.

Nokia has updated their Storage Check and Transfer My Data apps to fix a few bugs and add a few new features.

Transfer My Data is a handy utility app to transfer contacts over Bluetooth from your old phone to your new Nokia Windows Phone. The Nokia app was updated to version 4.1 update and with no change log, the changes aren't as obvious. We are seeing that SMS and Photos can be transferred as well as contacts from supported phones.

Locksider and Locksider+ for Windows Phone have both been updated. We've been informed by the developer, Liquid Daffodil that both releases fix an issue relating to consistent lock screen updates, or rather lack of. The team relied too heavily on consistent patterns in the background agents, which often caused scheduled updates to be skipped. What has been put in place is a more reliable update pattern.

We previously went over what's new in version 3 of the popular third-party web browser, UC Browser not long back where many exciting features were stated to be coming soon. Today, we're pleased to relay news that the update is now live for consumers to enjoy. So what's new in the latest release? 

You may have noticed an update available for our app this morning, and perhaps you're curious as to what has changed? It's not the most exciting patch but we are aware of issues that users of 512MB devices have been experiencing with the app and are working hard to try and fix these problems. Patch 4.1.3 is intended to fix said problems by reducing the memory footprint of the app with slightly lower quality image when running on the lower spec devices such as the Lumia 520, 620 or 720.

If you have been experiencing any kind of crashes with the app please update to this version. However if that still doesn't work for you it would be incredibly helpful if you got in touch via app@wpcentral.com. As much as the 1 star reviews in the store make it clear you have a problem it makes it impossible for us to diagnose and fix that problem! Now that we've cleared that up, there were a couple of other things in the patch that were ready at the time, see below for the full changelist.

Camera Preset+ is a nifty Windows Phone 8 photography app that lets you create custom preset settings for your camera. The app was recently updated to version 1.3 which adds Live Tile support to let you pin presets to your Start Screen.

This option can really come in handy by letting you jump right into the application with the settings you need.  Live Tiles for presets can be customized with a descriptive title and custom color.