Google Analytics Android App Review

Every cell phone spy – particularly an Android Spy brigade –has been on the lookout for the Google Analytics app ever since it’s been in the works. And with the tail end of June seeing its release, the curiosity regarding what the app brought to the table skyrocketed fittingly. Analytics or monitoring traffic on websites can be of particular use for a wide array of people, and after sifting the pros from the cons, here’s what this app boils down to…

Real-Time Report

This gives you the exact number of visitors currently on your website, albeit with a five-minute update time. It also showcases the ‘top landing pages’ list, with ‘top referrals’ and ‘top active pages’ listed below. If you’re monitoring news domains or are a webmaster and don’t find five minutes an eternity, the app is a godsend to cater to your needs. This would help you keep yourself and your website up to date, and would help you muster up enough means to adjust the pages according to the rise and fall in traffic.

A Comprehensive Dashboard

The Dashboard is a piece of tech artistry. Not only does it default view showcases the daily unique visitors and conversion rates, it does so with unprecedented accuracy and frequency. These two are obviously the two most frequently checked – and the most relevant – metrics that any potential Google Analytics user would want as the first thing he sees on his desktop. This is precisely why our Android spy brigade is particularly intrigued by Google setting their priorities straight over here.

This feature could potentially dig out a goldmine for search engine operators and their relevant marketing firms, because it conjures up data on the much revered ‘on-demand’ basis. Also those website managers that have to deal with a barrage of traffic inflow, which can fluctuate massively as well, can summon changes at the drop of a hat to accommodate the pressing needs.

Automatic Updates

Okay so it’s official: Gone are the days where you had to manually nosedive into tedious numbers to synthesize the relevant data. This app provides automatic alerts, which ensure that you’re never late to come up with a response to the late afternoon traffic drop, because you were wandering around outside your office. You will get exhaustive, regular updates that would help you monitor and adjust the traffic related data according to your needs.

Of course this would also mean that this feature could disturb your holidays to beep about your website’s negative turn. But let’s face it, you wouldn’t want to log in to the laptop each time the negative alarms clatter the daylight out of your peaceful dillydallying.

Custom Circus

If you were to endeavor to set up custom alerts on the desktop version of the app, it would not be showcased on the Google Analytics interface. That would only happen if the condition required that would fulfill the alert trigger, surfaces. This in turn connotes that if one were to forget their custom alerts, or what they actually are, they would need a recheck on the desktop version.

Hence, as far as Custom Alerts is concerned, one should only earmark the very crucial alerts here. Or one could even set up more than one alert that are high on the priority list, ones that require immediate action, and that could work just as well.

The Verdict

All in all, with everything said and done, Google Analytics is an ensemble of decent functionality and the ability to efficiently track data. And it’s simple really whenever a web-based app is converted to cater to the mobile platform the advantages are pretty obvious. That’s precisely the case with Google Analytics, which combines efficiency with user-friendliness, seamlessly enough to conjure up as close to a complete package as it gets.

Author Bio:

Natalia David, an author significantly contributes towards PC security Software, cell phone spy and spy software for android. If you want to know more about Natalia you can follow her on twitter @NataliaDavid4

Tags: Google Analytics, Google Android, Google App Review

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com

Introducing Instagram 3.0: Photo Maps

Instead of delivering new filtering options with the next version of Instagram (don’t worry, those are also in-the-works), the popular photo-editing tool creators have decided to take what’s become one of the world’s most popular apps in a whole new direction. Says Instagram CEO, Kevin Systrom, “Instagram 2.0 with its new filters, etc. was all about the user’s production experience. Instagram 3.0 is about a new kind of browser experience, Photo Maps.”

With the new version, Instagram developers hope to create a more narrative experience for users. Up until now, users have uploaded their shots and their shots alone – with no real background, story or structure to go along with the images. Now, however, a new kind of location data will serve towards creating a unique map of the pictures and thereby allow users to express their stories-through-pictures more lucidly (and more interestingly). Users will even be able to extract photos from the past, tack on a location to the photo and essentially revive it with a whole lot more chutzpah. Sound a lot like Facebook’s Timeline? It just may be – in fact, word through the tech journalist grapevine is that this strategy may in fact be a mobile-based rebuttal to the giant social network’s new format, since Instagram 3.0 will be available on both iOS and Android phones.

Photo Maps will allow users to organize their life-stories by geo-tagging the images they upload – the map will then be displayed on a user’s profile. Says Systrom, “In the beginning, social media was thought of as this ephemeral medium — you put something out in the world and it falls off people’s feeds in an hour or two. But really photos get more valuable as time goes on, they become points for nostalgia…up until not, we made it too difficult to access [the old photos]…We want to let you browse through [them] in a fast…manner, and we realized that the way to organize them wasn’t time, but [location].”

In addition to Photo Maps, Instagram 3.0 delivers a revamped Explore tags and user profiles and hashtag and location pages. Users will notice larger photo grids, never-before-offered infinite scrolling, and the ability to report comments as abuse or spam, which is key since Instagram has reportedly had some major issues in the spam department as it has grown. Not long ago, the company also added likes and comments to a chic, updated interface as well.

How exactly does it work? After a user approves his or her photos, a new Photo Map browsing mode shows up on each profile you follow (which means yours, too). The new mode will appear nest to Grid mode and List mode. When a user taps on the Photo Map, he is launched into a map view which organizes snapshots by location. Zoom in, and the shots are divided into more specific groupings according to deeper location.

Ready for it? You can download the new update here:

The writer of this article, Janice Bevilacqua, is an avid content provider for CPS Central, a retailer of extended warranty solutions for electronics. Her niche is primarily technology and gadget related topics. 

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com

Persona 4 Arena review

Can a hybrid of a fighter and an RPG succeed? Atlus and Arc System Works hope to find the answer in Persona 4 Arena.

As a big fan of Atlus’ Persona series of roleplaying games, I had my doubts about Persona 4 Arena. Developer Arc System Works has proven time and time again that it’s got the chops to create some of the finest 2D fighters in the world, yet with P4A the company was attempting to build a fighter in its own trademarked, hyper-kinectic style that also somehow retains the crucial elements fans loved about the Persona titles, that initially built the canon for the game. It’s hard to imagine two gaming genres as disparate as fighting games and epic Japanese-style roleplaying games, and yet I’m relieved to report that P4A is not just a great mashup of Persona and Arc System Works’ fighting game mechanics, it’s one of my favorite fighters of recent years.

Keep in mind that I did not say “one of the best new fighters of recent years.” We’ll get to why that’s important in just a moment.

If you’re unfamilar with Atlus’ Persona games, a quick primer: In short, the Persona franchise is a modern Japanese-style roleplaying series that tasks players both with battling demons and with surviving the rigors of a Japanese high school. The vast majority of the game’s key characters are high school-aged teens (with all the drama, sarcasm and hormones that implies) with the ability to summon and control the titular Personas. Think of Personas as aspects of one’s personality that manifest as giant, supernatural creatures and grant their users all kinds of useful magical abilities. In Atlus’ Persona RPGs the characters used these Personas to battle shadows throughout the many floors of a giant otherworldly tower that replaced their high school every night.

Notice how complicated that backstory gets? Yeah, and that’s massively condensed. That must have presented a pretty massive hurdle for Arc System Works to overcome in creating a fighter based around this mythology. Traditionally, fighting games have had little to no story — they only needed enough to justify the virtual fisticuffs  — so how would they have to change to incorporate a massive, pre-existing storyline?

The answer, at least according to Persona 4 Arena, is that every aspect of the fighting game has to be infused with backstory. Take the game’s Story Mode for instance: It differs for each fighter, and offers two to three hours of playtime for each, but the majority of one’s time in this mode will be spent reading screens of scrolling text. Occasionally you’ll find yourself drawn into a fight, but with these battles ending in a matter of minutes, the Mode is pretty much entirely dedicated to telling a story. While that may offend those who bought Persona 4 Arena as a fighting game, it’s great news for fans of Atlus’ Persona RPGs. The story written for Persona 4 Arena is on par with its roleplaying forebears, and the characters are somehow fleshed out to an even greater extent than they were in their original games. There’s a good reason why Atlus has officially stated that the events of Persona 4 Arena are canonical in the Persona universe, and that that they fit in so very well. 

Of course, those who were hoping for a simple fighting game could just play through the Arcade Mode, which is a Street Fighter-esque string of battles leading up to a fight with the game’s boss. While this is more traditional, it is also infused with story. Characters chat about the plot between rounds, the announcer offers canon-appropriate commentary and the ending is surprisingly lengthy and involved. The online multiplayer and versus modes are more or less standard fighting game fare, but in the end Persona 4 Arena is the most story-rich fighting game ever created. Whether that pleases you or completely turns you off to the project is a personal choice, but given that Atlus and Arc System Works wanted to a create a fighter that would have crossover appeal to RPG gamers, it makes a lot of sense — and it’s impressive that Atlus and Arc System Works were so successful.

I realize that until now I’ve focused pretty heavily on how much storytelling this game does, but underneath all of that is a very functional, interesting fighting game engine. Though characters feel a bit slower than those found in Arc System Works’ Guilty Gear series, they’re still very agile, and “hyper-kinetic” is a good description for the combat. Remember the Personas I mentioned earlier? They accompany characters into battle and functionally serve to power the more spectacular attacks the game has to offer. Unfortunately, while your Persona is throwing a hurricane at your opponent, it is standing out on the battlefield, vulnerable to attack. If your foe is able to hit your Persona enough it will cause a Persona Break which disables all of your Persona-powered attacks for a short period of time. Since Persona-based attacks are your character’s most powerful attacks, you can see how this might limit a person’s options during battle.

Though the Persona Break system is a very interesting quirk, it represents the combat’s only real break from traditional 2D fighting genre tropes. The controls in Persona 4 Arena are a relatively simple riff on the classic Capcom formula, special moves, super moves and all the other flashy attacks we’ve come to know and love are represented here, and you get about eight fights before squaring off against an over-powered boss. Hopefully I haven’t made this sound like it’s a bad thing, because I think that this level of familiarity makes sure that fans of other fighters can quickly acclimate to the Persona 4 Arena system. Likewise, it allows those gamers who bought this thing purely on the strength of the Persona brand name a chance to pick up the basics of how to punch and kick in relatively quick fashion. While it’s not yet known how well the fighting game community will adopt Persona 4 Arena, they seem pretty keen on it so until further notice you can view the fighting game system in this game as pretty solid and robust.

Conclusion

As I said above though, I wouldn’t quite place Persona 4 Arena as the best fighter of recent years. Instead, it’s the fighter that I’ve enjoyed the most over the past decade. Why? To put it simply, I’m a huge Persona fan. I love these characters and any chance to experience stories of their further adventures, even if they aren’t in RPG format, is something I just can’t argue with. While I would recommend the game to fighting game fans, I would first and foremost recommend it to those who enjoy fighters but also love the Persona RPG games. This is as close to a Persona 5 as we’re going to be getting any time soon, and I’m happy to report that it’s a very viable substitute while we wait.

Score: 9 out of 10

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Gamescom 2012: Hitman: Absolution “Saints” content changed in wake of controversy

After the "Saints" trailer came under fire for depicting wanton violence against women, IO Interactive confirms it's changing Hitman.

Hitman: Absolution has been in the works for a long time, so long that the its predecessors are now considered retro. The series it’s born of is fondly remembered, but the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia can cause problems. Truth is the Hitman games were always exploitive, as violent and dumb as a Mickey Spillane novel. Its cerebral, improvisational challenges were sophisticated but that didn’t change the fact that you were still a murderer working for a secret order spouting absurd dialogue. The pre-E3 2012 trailer for Absolution that showed Agent 47 gunning down a squad of lingerie-wearing nun soldiers wasn’t a new low for the series. It was the same old low.

The only thing different is the audience, whose outrage over that trailer’s brazen misogyny has actually spurred developer IO Interactive to change the content of its game. Speaking with Eurogamer at Gamescom 2012, director Tore Blystad said that the level that trailer was based on had to be altered in the wake of this spring’s controversy.

“The Saints trailer is based on a level within the game. One way to go about that level is to in all guns blazing but of course, it’s not the smartest way. We learned from the trailer that we really needed to give these characters some context and some back story,” said Blystad, “We’re working within the game—within that level—to build these characters up before you meet them. That way you know what you’re getting and you aren’t put off by them.”

Know your sexy nun before you fight her, player!

Blystad explained that he was surprised by people’s reaction to the game. “The game is inspired by Grindhouse-style movies, so for us the trailer was a natural way to deal with that subject matter,” said the director, “We’ve been trying to find out, y’know, how could we not see this happening? If we knew it would get such a negative reaction we would have done it in a different way.”

He shouldn’t have to though. There is room in video games for the exploitive, for the grindhouse. There’s room for dirty subjects, just like there is in books, movies, music, painting, literally every form of human expression. Hitman is a grindhouse game, and that’s just fine.

Hitman: Absolution though is coming out at a time when the people of the world are, after thirty years, sick and tired of 99 percent of all video games being grindhouse games. They’re almost all exploitive, all exaggeratedly male. There’s just not enough balance.

Changing the sexy nuns won’t help IO Interactive because sexy nuns aren’t the problem. The problem is that the majority of big-budget video games are made for 15-year-old white boys and are built around their tastes. It just so happens that Blystad’s game was the right target at the right time for the audience’s ire.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com