Smartphone and sleep. There's an app for that.

A lot of us use our smartphones at night before bed. This disrupts a natural sleep cycle. One of the reasons it does this is that artificial blue light simulates daylight to our brain. One way to combat this is using an app to change your display. Twilight changes the blue light to red. Your can change the intensity and the app will modify your screen based on the sunrise and sunset and time of day for your location. You can also manually input this.  In my usage, it has helped with my sleep. Now medically, the best thing to do is turn the phone off. However, most of us are not going to do that. So this is a good medically valid way of curbing the issue. One interesting thing is how quickly you adapt to the screen. In less than two minutes the screen will appear to be white to you. If you turn the app on pause via notification shade, you will see it become far brighter. I highly recommend this to all Android users. Sadly there is no way to do this on iOS.

Check out Twilight here. 

Call Planner - App review

We communicate with people every day through various methods. Some of us are rather bad at remembering or picking up the phone and need that gentle push. Call Planner is a wonderfully simple application to help us. I love this app for two main reasons. First, it is beyond simple to setup a planned call you really can't mess it up if you wanted to. Second reason is that the app notifies you at the programmed time or location as a notification when you look at it in the notification tray. It has the title of the planned call and a call button can't get much simpler than that.

Call Planner has the ability to pull your contacts or manually input a number as well as notes for the call.

Call Planner is free and is holo designed. Get it here.

Glympse

There has always been a problem with location sharing services, they are closed. You either have to have this app or that account or this platform. They may be excellent at what they do but they are horrible to get everyone in agreement. Glympse aims to solve this problem by not only being on all four major mobile OS but it doesn't have to be installed on the persons phone. You send them a web link anyway you want to. They open it to see a mobile site which is live updating. You first set what to share and how to share your location, broadcast your speed, use metric units, low power, and expire on arrival. Now for every Glympse you share how long 5 minutes to 4 hours, where are you going, and who are you sending it to. During a Glympse you have the ability to extend the time remaining by 15 minutes or expire it instantly. From my experience the web view is accurate to 5 seconds of real time that is how long it takes to see the time of the sharing change.

Get Glympse here.

Share location with Google Maps quickly

When you are going to a place with a group of people or meeting somewhere it is often hard to give the location. Google Maps can provide a small bit of help. When you have maps open, tap the locate button and as usual it will show you your current location. If you long tap (tap and hold) you will get a maps pin for your location. Swipe the card up and you will see the location or address where you are. This card has the built in Android share dialog and you can send your location out via any app.

long press standard share.