Greenify Your Android.

Many of the Android phone users have the problem of battery life not lasting over about 6 hours of the day. The main culprit behind this problem is a lot of processes running in the background. Many of you would have observed that as you install more and more applications on your device, the phone becomes slow and battery life becomes very less. This is because nearly each application that you install has a background service that keeps running continuously on your device. Developer Oasis Feng has come out with a solution for this problem.

Create simple application in Android to send SMS

Hello friends, today we will learn to create simple application (app) in Android for sending SMS.

TouchRetouch – Photo Retouching Application

TouchRetouch – Photo Retouching Application

Many of the times, it happens that we take a photograph and unwanted object comes into picture. Even if you take utmost care when taking a photo, there are times when an unwanted object comes in the way. Sometimes, you want to take a picture of the sky and various signboards and wires over your head come in the way to spoil your photo “otherwise”spectacular photos. Well, now I am going to introduce you to an application for an Android phone, that'll fix such problems in your photos, so stop worrying, your every photo is going to be “Perfect”.


TouchRetouch is an application available for both Android and iOS. This application will help you remove those unexpected unwanted objects from your photos. Someone kept a hand over your head in one of your photos? Don't worry. TouchRetouch will come to your rescue. That idiot guy/gal placed a finger in front of camera lens while taking photo? No problem, we'll cut his/her finger away. Lol. :-D


Here I'll explain a little on how to use the app, TouchRetouch:

1. Download TouchRetouch Free on your Android phone or iOS device. For Android: TouchRetouch Free.
   
   
   
2. Open TouchRetouch.
   
3. You'll have option to “Open photos from Folder” or “Take new photo from Camera”.
   
   
   
4. After choosing a photo, you need to select a tool, provided by app, for removing the unwanted things and change the tool size with the slider that's visible.
   

There are 2 tools for selection, Lasso tool and Brush tool. Brush tool allows more accurate selection.
When you are making the selection, a small window appears to show you what is being covered by your finger, a great thoughtful feature.

5. Selected area is shown in red color. You can make changes to the selected area with the Eraser tool. More precise selection of objects would result into more clearer final photo.
   
6. Press Start button (looks like an Arrow) to remove object from the photo.
   
   
   
7. Click on the Floppy icon to save the photo to your Gallery, or for sharing.

The free version of the app works great except that the resultant output is just about 0.5 megapixels. But that's good enough for print sizes upto 4x6 in.
Give it a try and say what do you think in comments..!!!

XPrivacy - Xposed Framework Module

About XPrivacy

In  earlier post, I had explained about Xposed Installer and OpenPDroid. The former explaining about modifying your ROM without modifying an APK or flashing a custom ROM, and the latter explaining about protecting your privacy and providing fake or null information to the apps that access your private data.

Now, today I'm going to explain about a combination of both Xposed and OpenPDroid. Yeah, enter XPrivacy module for Xposed Framework.  Wondering what is it?

I am going to explain about it in a minute, read on..!!

XPrivacy can be used as an alternative to OpenPDroid, though not as restrictive as OpenPDroid can be, but still is a great option for those who cannot patch their ROM to run OpenPDroid. XPrivacy can be used to prevent applications from accessing your private sensitive data.

XPrivacy does this by providing an application with null or fake data.

XPrivacy does not block the permissions of an application, it just provides the application with fake data, hence there'll be no problem of a particular application getting force closed because of using XPrivacy.

If providing fake or null data to an application causes problems in working of an application, then the same can be reversed. By default, all newly-installed applications will not be allowed to access any data, so that any new application cannot leak any sensitive data after its installation. After every application installation, XPrivacy will prompt to ask for the data you want the application to have access to.

As the developer of the XPrivacy module says, XPrivacy will monitor attempts made by all applications to access sensitive data. XPrivacy will highlight (with a yellow triangle) a data category for an application (or an application name in the application browser) as soon as data of the data category has been used. XPrivacy will also display if an application has internet access, indicating that the application poses a risk of sharing the data it obtains with an external server. If an application has requested Android permissions to access data in a data category, it will also be displayed (with a green tick), but this will only be shown when looking at an individual application, since checking permissions for all applications is quite slow.

XPrivacy is built using the Xposed framework. XPrivacy taps into a number of selected functions of Android through the Xposed framework. Depending on the function, XPrivacy conditionally skips execution of the original function (for example when an application tries to set a proximity alert) or alters the result of the original function (for example to return empty calendar data).

Installation of XPrivacy

1.    Requires Android Jelly Bean (4.1 and above) and rooted phone.

2.    Requires Xposed Framework installed.

3.    Download XPrivacy and Xposed fix for your Android version from  here.

4.    Enable XPrivacy in Xposed Installer > Modules tab.

5.    Reboot into Recovery mode.

6.    Flash Xposed fix for the version of Android.

7.    Reboot your phone.

If you have any queries, feel free to comment.!!