Apps to make you feel better

We might spend all day in a mainframe environment, but, when we leave it, the closest computing device to hand is probably our mobile phone. And if you’re waiting for someone or something, you probably get out your phone and check your e-mail and texts, and then what do you do? You could play a game, or you, perhaps, could try some self-improvement apps. I thought that, this week, I might take a look at some of the apps available for hypnotherapy.

Now, if you're hypnotized, you're meant to be in a state of heightened suggestibility and responsiveness. So rather than getting you chicken dancing or eating a raw onion, as you might see on a stage show, hypnotherapy can make positive changes, creating new responses, thoughts, attitudes, behaviours, or feelings. So, while you’re waiting for a burger or your friend to turn up, doesn’t it make sense to use an app on your phone to make you a better person?

A lot of people worry about giving presentations and generally feel that they could do with a bit more self-confidence. The good news is that there are hypnosis apps for that. There’s Total Confidence & Success (Darren Marks hypnotherapy), Confidence Now, and Confident Public Speaking Now (Pocket Hypnotherapy range), Free Hypnosis and Self Esteem (Erick Brown Hypnosis), and Automatic Motivation Hypnosis (Mastermind App).

Sleep is another area where people don’t feel they’re getting the right number of hours or the right quality. And here, again, there are apps available. There’s Sleep Deeply (Darren Marks hypnotherapy), Sleep Soundly Hypnosis (Kym Tolson and Hani Al-Qasem), Relax and Sleep Well (Diviniti Publishing Ltd), Sleep Now (Pocket Hypnotherapy range), and Deep Sleep and Relax Hypnosis (Mindifi).

Or perhaps your issue is weight loss (although a good therapist will never use that term because if we lose things – like our keys – we tend to spend a long time searching for them and making sure we get them back). Anyway, you can try Easy Weight Loss (Darren Marks hypnotherapy), Weight Loss Hypnosis (Mindifi), Lose Weight Now (Pocket Hypnotherapy range), or Lose Weight with Hypnosis (Shanedude).

For smokers, there are stop smoking apps – and, again, in solution-focused terms, I mean becoming a non-smoker. Remember, no-one goes to anti-war rallies anymore, everyone goes to peace rallies. Anti-war is problem focused, peace is solution focused. There’s Easy Stop Smoking (Darren Marks hypnotherapy), Stop Smoking Now (Pocket Hypnotherapy range), and Quit Smoking Hypnosis and Quit Smoking Hypnosis Pro (Mindifi).

There are some generic self-hypnosis apps. For example Self Hypnosis Tips (bigo), Self Hypnosis (IDJ Group), Hypnosis Session (Andrew Brusentov), Hypnosis (Adam Eason Hypno), and Free Hypnosis/Hypnotherapy and Self Development Audios by Joseph Clough (Free Hypnosis).

And there’s a mixed bag of other hypnotherapy treatments. Darren Marks hypnotherapy provides Freedom From Negative Feelings, Control Alcohol, Freedom From Fears and Phobias, Total Relaxation, Sport and Fitness Excellence, and Healing Hypnosis. The Pocket Hypnotherapy range includes Relax Now, Manage IBS Now, Manage PMS Now, Manage Fear of Flying Now, and Cope with Bereavement Now. Mindifi supplies Law Of Attraction Hypnosis, Free Your Mind Hypnosis, Personal Development Hypnosis, Money and Success Hypnosis, Business Success Hypnosis, and Hypnobirthing Hypnosis. And, to complete the list is Anxiety Free Hypnosis (Hypnosis, Meditation, and Coaching Group)

So no more playing Angry Birds, try a little personal development and relaxation with hypnotherapy apps. Then it’s back to the mainframe world for work.

How are you?

In the past, if someone asked, “how are you?”, you would politely reply that you were fine and ask them how they were. The conversation would then move on. But now, there are apps for your phone and tablet that can actually tell you how are and can make suggestions about how you could be better! Let’s have a look at what’s available.

Apps like Instant Heart Rate from Azumio Inc let you place the tip of your index finger on your phone’s camera and in a couple of seconds your heart rate is displayed. A real-time chart shows your every heartbeat. It uses your phones built-in camera to track colour changes on the fingertip that are directly linked to your pulse. This is the same technique that medical pulse oximeters use.

iPad apps, such as Cardiio (from Medgadget) and What’s My Heart Rate (from ViTrox Technologies), measure your heart rate by detecting the micro colour changes in your face caused by your heartbeat. The increase in blood volume as the blood vessels in the face expand with every heartbeat causes more light to be absorbed, resulting in a decrease in the amount of light reflected from the face. The iPad’s camera can pick up these changes, thereby allowing the app to calculate a person’s heart rate.

There are also apps like Blood Pressure from Klimaszewski Szymon that allows you to keep a record of your blood pressure readings. You can record and describe your readings, view them on interactive graphs, study generated statistics and trends, or filter selected data.

Similarly, apps like Monitor Your Weight from Husain Al-Bustan allow you to enter your weight on a regular basis and monitor it using statistics and graphs. It allows multiple users to be monitored. The app also suggests your ideal weight and, for slimmers, recommends the amount of time needed to reach a target weight, based on your current weight, height, body frame, gender, and age.

Other slimming apps available include Weight Watchers Mobile (from Weight Watchers International Inc), which has an extensive library of over 30,000 foods, includes restaurant meals, and gives a WeightWatchers point value for each entry, as well as calculating your daily point allowance and how many points you have remaining; My Diet Coach (from InspiredApps (A.L) Ltd), which acts more like a supportive friend than a calorie counter; Nutrino (from ComoComo Ltd), which builds a personalized menu for you, taking into consideration how many calories you should be eating each day to reach your goal; and MyFitnessPal (from MyFitnessPal LLC), which works out how many calories you can consume each day to hit your slimming target in the timeframe you specify. You might also like Superfoods (from Chourishi Systems) and Low Fat Recipes (from App Cookies).

Of course, you probably want to start doing some exercise. Your first choice of app might be something like MapMyWalk GPS Walking from MapMyFitness Inc. This allows users to track the route, time, distance, speed, pace, and calories in real-time for their fitness activities using GPS. And soon you might be upgrading to running apps such as MapMyRun GPS Running, which helps runners, joggers, and walkers easily track pace, distance, calories, and time, with audio alerts and much more. Other similar apps include RunKeeper - GPS Track Run Walk from FitnessKeeper Inc, My Tracks from Google Inc, Nike+ Running from Nike Inc, and Sports Tracker from Sports Tracking Technologies Ltd. And once you can run, you may want to go out on your bike. There are apps for that too – Strava Cycling - GPS Riding from Strava Inc, MapMyRide GPS Cycling Riding from MapMyFitness Inc, and Runtastic Road Bike from Runtastic.

There are also lots of daily workout apps available such as Fitness Buddy: 300+ Exercises from Azumio Inc, 7 Minute Workout from mphan, or VirtuaGym Fitness Home & Gym from VirtuaGym. Or you might prefer Daily Yoga (All-in-One) from IMOBLIFE Co Ltd.

How you’re sleeping has a huge impact on how you’re feeling, so you might be interested in SleepBot - Sleep Cycle Alarm from SleepBot. It includes a smart cycle alarm, movement tracker, sound recorder, sleep debt log, data analysis, trend graphs, sleep help, auto-Wifi/silence/aeroplane modes, export, and sync to mysleepbot.com. Other sleep apps are available, of course.

If you want to check your eyesight, you could try Vision Test 2.0 from 3 SIDED CUBE or Specsavers Sight Check from Specsavers.

If you want to relax, you might look at iZen – Art of Zen Meditation (from IMOBLIFE Inc) or even Buddhist Meditation Trainer from Spacebug. iZen works by providing Zen music to help the mind achieve tranquillity and peace. The app has a timer for how long you want to meditate. Calming Music to Tranquilize (from IMOBLIFE Inc) gives you several choices of tranquil sound tracks. Deep Sleep with Andrew Johnson (from HiveBrain Software) gives you guided meditation, designed to relax and clear your mind to get you to sleep. Relax Melodies (from iLBSoft) lets you mix your favourite sounds to create and save tracks. It comes with 41 ambient sounds.

Hypnosis – (Free) Relaxation from Nimue uses guided meditation with a voice that speaks throughout the session. It claims to help relax the mind with the use of voice audio and music tracks. Relax Completely from Hypnotherapist Direct Ltd provides a hypnosis meditation session for deep relaxation. Self-Hypnosis for Meditation (from IMOBLIFE Inc) provides sound tracks designed to help the mind find its way to different states of meditation and relaxation. Metaphors and suggestions are also used by the app

And obviously there are lots more apps that you can use to monitor how you are at the moment and help you to take steps to become who you want to be. So when someone asks how you are, you’ll now be able to give them a statistical answer!

Mainframe apps

Who doesn’t have a smart phone these days? Or who goes to meetings without a tablet device? I thought it would be interesting to look at the mainframe apps available for Android devices – and there are quite a few.

The Mainframe IBM Interview QA app provides a wide range of questions that can be asked during an interview. The application answers the most commonly asked interview questions and they’ve been grouped into categories for ease.

Test Your Mainframe Skills!!! claims it will help you to assess your mainframe skills as well as develop them. It’s aimed at people who are looking for a new job and want to hone their technical skills. This app is designed so that you can go through different technical tests, assess your skills, and, simultaneously, hints are provided for each question to help you to understand and learn the information in better way!

Similarly, Mainframe interview questions provides over a 100 interview questions for assistance in getting your next mainframe-related job.

Mainframe Translator costs $1.99, and makes it easier to translate mainframe error codes and even machine instructions without having to always look them up in a manual. It also allows you to view the messages and codes on your device without having to minimize your source code or error screen. You can choose a specific code to translate or choose a translation type and scroll through all of the codes. The current translation options are: ASCII, EBCDIC, Machine Instruction, COBOL File Status, CICS EIBRESP, CICS EIBFN, DB2 SQL Errors, and FTP Codes. It also functions as a calculator performing decimal, hexadecimal, and binary maths. The dual pane feature in landscape mode allows for calculator and translation codes to be seen on the same screen. Users can customize colours and default settings.

Mainframe Guides explains how to code mainframe applications. It includes all the topics that are needed to learn about mainframes with a basic programing knowledge. Currently this app plays tutorials in high quality video.

Emulator Access 3270 cost $5.99, and allows users to easily access their employer’s Web-based emulator and mainframe with this utility. BNSF users get automatic login and their username and password are saved. It’s compatible with all Open Connect / 3270 emulator systems common in transportation, government, manufacturing, and financial industries.

TN3270, costing $16.72,  is a client for connecting to mainframes with the telnet 3270 protocol. Features include: connecting to standard 3270 mainframes; text size configuration through buttons; and keyboard configuration.

Mocha TN3270 for Android provides TN3270 emulation for IBM mainframe terminal access. The paid version includes keys f1-f24.

Julian Date Conv Calendar is a simple calendar that displays a whole month of both standard (Gregorian) and Julian days together in the same display for easy conversion between the two. It’s useful for those who work with Julian dates, eg mainframe programmers and schedulers.

I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that leaped out at me when I searched for mainframe apps. I thought it was interesting to see what was currently available.

All change!

It’s been a funny old week. IBM offering apps for mobile phones instead of sticking strictly to big iron, and Google buying a slew of IBM patents. When the British surrendered to the rebel American army at the end of the war of independence they played a tune called the world turned upside down. That’s what this week feels like.

It seems that Windows 7 smartphones aren’t really up there with the top three yet, because IBM has only made its app available to the app store for iTunes, Android, and the teenagers’ favourite, Blackberry. For IBM, the idea is to make their social networking platform, IBM Connections, available on smartphones – like Facebook and Twitter (and other social media). To be fair, you could access IBM Connections through a browser on these phones, but now there’s a proper app. Obviously there are different processes for making the app available for the different organizations, which will affect how quickly it will be before you can download the app on your device. The good news is that the app is free.

So what is IBM Connections? According to IBM’s Web site: “IBM Connections is social software for business that lets you access everyone in your professional network, including your colleagues, customers, and partners.

“The latest capabilities in IBM Connections, such as Moderation, Ideation Blogs, and the Media Gallery, enable you to embrace networks of people who are engaged and to work in transparent and nimble ways to create business value.”

It seems that the ideation and media gallery modules are natively available in the mobile apps. This allows users to vote on ideas, comment on ideas, and manage the ideas from their phones. In addition, users can take photos and upload them – so they can be shared immediately.

Built in to IBM Connections 3 are ‘moderation’, ideation blog’ and ‘media widget gallery’. Moderation allows users to review content in blogs, forums, and files before lications and approve, reject, or delete as appropriate. There’s a template available for each community to generate ideas, gather feedback, and come to consensus on the best ideas. This is the ideation blog. The media gallery widget is obviously somehwere to upload and share photos and videos.

Meanwhile, Google has confirmed that it bought 1,029 patents from IBM. These include SEO, servers, routers, relational databases, object-oriented programming, and fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips. It seems that no-one is revealing how much was paid.

Why would they buy so many patents? Perhaps to avoid litigation because they are using someone else’s idea. Or perhaps it’s to stop a rival company using someone else’s idea. It may be little more than synchonicity that Google has recently launched it’s Facebook-like Google plus. The more cynical among you may suggest they are looking for a way to stop Facebook doing something as yet undisclosed that will affect their business! Or it could be to do with the Android versus iPhone smartphone war. Or maybe its because Oracle is seeking billions of dollars in damages and royalties because of Google’s use of Java in Android phones. Or maybe, late in the day, Google has realized how important patents are in the modern business world.

Interestingly, Google was after 6,000 patents from Nortel Networks, but lost out to a consotium including Apple and Microsoft, who paid $4.5 billion for the patents. This could be the year of patent sales.

So there you have it. A week when the king of big iron turns up on the smallest of smart devices, and when Google gets itself a stash of patents. What will next week bring?

Microsoft, clouds, silver linings?

The big news of the week – even overshadowing IBM’s announcement of its latest five-year plan and market happiness at the news; even overshadowing the announcement of coalition government in the UK – was Microsoft’s launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010!

Now, to the untrained eye, the launch of a new version of an Office suite would seem little more than a way of boosting sales in an already saturated market sector. After all, you might say, why not use OpenOffice, it’s free. Or, why not use Google Docs, which is not only free, but doesn’t use up any hard disk space! Well, even in that slow turning supertanker that’s the Redmond HQ of Microsoft, someone thought of that and started steering the ship away from those particular metaphorical rocks.

With Ray Ozzie (once king of Notes and Domino land) somewhere on the bridge of the supertanker, Microsoft has made a big deal of sharing documents – you can’t do that with OpenOffice – and cloud computing – you can’t do that with Google Docs – hang on a minute, oh yes you can do that with Google Docs, but you can’t do it so well with Microsoft Office originated documents!!

But what’s this about cloud computing and Microsoft?!?! Yes, Microsoft now brings you Office Web Apps. And what’s more, they will be offered free to the claimed 500 million users of Hotmail and Messenger. And rather cleverly – in terms of making this legacy Office product appealing to a more youthful audience – Microsoft has integrated Web Apps into Facebook – which you’ll remember it part owns – as Facebook Docs. This allows Facebook users to create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents online. They can then share these files with their friends on Facebook, much like they would photos or videos.

On top of this, Microsoft is offering Office Live Workspace – free online document sharing (notice that word!) and storage. It says on the Web site that it stores up to 5GB online; works with Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; and you can view, edit, share documents with password-protection.

Furthering the cloud idea is Microsoft Live SkyDrive, which (although not new) allows users to upload 25GBs of any type of file and then access it from any other computer they are on. Other products are available (as they say) including Amazon S3, Google Docs, and RackSpace Cloud Files. With SkyDrive, users drag-and-drop files onto the Web page. To make SkyDrive more usable, frequent users might like to download SkyDrive Simple Viewer for WebDAV from http://skydrivesimpleviewer.codeplex.com/, or SDExplorer from www.cloudstorageexplorer.com/.

To really get the best in an organization from sharing and collaboration, you also need to install the new SharePoint 2010.

One minor point, my beta copy of Office 2010 has seen the return of the File menu – well ribbon I suppose you’d call it – which disappeared in Office 2007. Other parts of the ribbon have been made more usable following customer feedback (or complaints as we’d call them!).

So, is Microsoft’s future cloudy? Will Google Docs now wither and die? Yes and no, are the answers in my opinion. Clearly, when you start looking at the nitty gritty detail, Microsoft has a way to go before it really offers cloud computing, but it’s moving in the right direction. Saying that, there are still millions of people who don’t need to share or collaborate on documents and who use only a tiny percentage of the facilities and features available in this venerable product. Certainly the Facebook Docs makes Office Web Apps seem cool and exciting for a new generation – the space that Google usually holds. I think fans of Google Docs will carry on as before. Large organizations (who haven’t got a mainframe and done proper computing!) will probably invest in SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 once the first service pack has come round and assuming the licence price is affordable. It’s certainly a good move for Microsoft.