Animate your smartphone or tablet with 6 new apps for Android and iOS (almost) all free

Smartphones and tablets are essential companions in an extended quarantine. it is often through them that the news, books and games that animate free time are discovered, but also teleworking and telescope time for the youngest who now have distance learning.

This week we bring several games on the suggestions of the SAPO TEK team, but also several utilities, and even an app that helps you learn to program.

Become a master of programming while playing as a family? With Mimo it is possible

Keeping kids and babies entertained at a time when spending more time at home has become the new reality can be tricky. Mimo promises to help you have fun with your family while everyone learns the b – b of programming.

If you have a techie family and are looking for an activity that reinvigorates kids and keeps them entertained, Mimo promises to help you spend time in a fun and educational way. The application is a gateway to the world of programming through small games and challenges.

At Mimo, users will be able to learn the basics of various programming languages, such as HTML, CSS, Python or C ++, in an interactive way. From there, they will be able to start building their own applications and web pages and even understand what goes on behind the scenes of websites.

Instead of extensive classes, which may become less appealing to the younger ones, Mimo bets on shorter and simpler lessons, with exercises that can be done in minutes. After a short introduction to the subject in question, users can get started and start exploring the displayed code lines.

As you finish the exercises on hand and complete the challenges, the user immediately receives feedback from the application. If you can successfully complete the tasks you can earn points. In addition, Mimo records all the progress made so that the user can follow its evolution.

Mimo is available for both Android, in the Play Store, and for iOS, in the App Store. If you are just getting started in the programming world, the free application mode will be ideal. But, if you really want to embark on this adventure, you can subscribe to the premium service, which has extra features, for 9.90 euros per month.


Snapchat encourages social isolation with new game

It is a social competition integrated in Zenly, another app of the company. The one who stays at home the longest wins.

Snap Inc. is the company responsible for Snapchat. The app no ​​longer has the glow of other times, at least in Portugal, but this is not the only application of technology. Zenly, whose premise revolves around geolocation, is one of the other proposals that is part of its catalog. The app is now gamifying social distance, in order to encourage practice, and even has a leaderboard that assigns points to those who spend more time at home.

Generally, the application is used for groups of friends to come together at specific points on the map, but since crowds and staying on the street are now prohibited, the app has decided to temporarily reinvent itself to encourage the opposite. The idea is to contribute to containment and isolation practices.

The app can now be used to show you how many days in a row that your friends have been at home, in a competitive way, and whoever manages to stay out of the street for the longest time wins.

The app also shows the number of cases diagnosed in a given region, just above the map where your contacts are marked. Zenly is free and available for Android and iOS.

This is just one example of how companies can reinvent their products to make them relevant in the light of the current pandemic. The big social platforms are also following a similar path. Instagram recently launched new features that allow a greater level of remote interaction with other users; Facebook launched an information center for emergency services; and Snapchat itself had already debuted Here For You, a feature that provides expert advice on anxiety, stress, depression, suicidal thoughts or bullying to help anyone who is anxious about the current social context caused by COVID-19.


Little Bubbles is a fun and fun game

Imagining the games during the bath with soap bubbles, this puzzle game challenges to match colors.

It is called in good Portuguese Small Bubbles and it is a match-4 game, in this case, with the objective of coloring four bubbles with the same tone to cancel them. However, this proposal presents a very organic environment, both visually and melodically, being advised to play with headphones for a truly relaxing experience, as if you were in a bathtub playing with the foam.

The objective is to cancel the bubbles of the same color on the board, so you have to fill the different white spaces with the colors that appear in the game area. Whenever four colors are canceled, the adjacent ones are being pushed, so you should not leave unstained bubbles to pass the level.

As the levels progress, the puzzles become more complicated, whether due to the presence of a fish that tends to push the position bubbles with each move, or later, having to make accounts for the primary colors, which are mixed from the origin to others, such as yellow and blue to green, or blue and red to purple.

The game has a pleasant audiovisual atmospheric environment, and the puzzles feature simple controls, but with gradually more complex challenges.

You can download the Android version for free. On iOS the game costs 4.49 euros.


Mirror Lab: With this app you don't need to be a "pro" in the edition to transform your photos

From simple editions of brightness and contrast, to 3D effects or distortion, the options are many and can make a photograph unrecognizable.

There are pictures with "special" effects that you may think you can never achieve the same result with just your smartphone. But the Mirror Lab app comes to show that it doesn't take much time, nor great technique, to have results that impress anyone, giving a new life to photographs and videos.

It will be fun and easy to use, but also powerful: this is the purpose of the application that makes content more creative, with mirror photographs, kaleidoscope images and distortion of faces and landscapes.

With more than 50 filters available, the app gives you the possibility to explore 3D effects or ripples and distortions that, in themselves, are capable of completely transforming a photo. But it can also make the image a kind of planet Earth, in an application that still allows basic editing in relation to brightness and contrast, for example.

If you prefer to bet on the animation you can also do so, but for that, you will have to activate the video options first in the settings. The application is free and available for Android, but still has a premium version. More filters and better image resolutions are some of the advantages for those who decide to support the production company.


Napkin beads fit on smartphone with Napkin

Do you see those beads that are sometimes made (or used to be) in one corner of restaurant table paper? Or the little notes written on the napkin? This app is for that, but on the phone.

Napkin: Calculator and Notepad is a very simple to use application, good to have on hand for disposable accounts and small notes.

The intuitive interface containing only the essentials: access to the keyboard and the basic symbols of a pocket calculator. Just open the app, do the math or notes right now and leave.

The content is saved automatically, so don't worry that you won't miss anything in the meantime. The document accumulates the information it adds, but at any time you can also delete what is going on and start from scratch.

Graphically, there is another option for the user: to write in day or night mode.

In addition, Napkin is free and available from the Play Store for Android devices.


Butter Royale: This app is a kind of Fortnite, but with lots of food and diverse mix

The Mighty Bear Games game is set in a future where all weapons have been banned worldwide. Players participate in authentic food battles, using Nutritionally Operated Machines (NOMs) to fight.

If you are looking for a mobile game to help spend extra time at home, Butter Royal could be a useful ally. The battle royale for iOS presents itself as a kind of Fortnite, however with some differences, such as the fact that players do not fight with realistic weapons.

Mighty Bear Games, the developer studio behind Butter Royal, chose to create a game with a slightly less violent premise. The game is set in a future where all weapons have been banned worldwide, so players participate in authentic food battles, using Nutritionally Operated Machines (NOMs) to fight.

Among the available NOMs, players can find equipment with curious names like Mayonator 3000, Breazooka or even Relisher. To be victorious at the end of the fight, players must be able to evade opponents in the various 5-minute battles.

Although it has an offline mode where the user puts his skills to the test against artificial intelligence, Butter Royale has an online version where 32 players try to fight for survival while collecting resources and hiding from butter storms. Altogether, users can choose one of 52 characters. The creation of Mighty Bear Games is available on the App Store, and since it is part of the Apple Arcade service, there are no microtransactions.