Leaked Samsung App Wants to Track Everything You Do

Samsung calls the Galaxy S4 your “life companion,” but it could take that idea one step further with its next smartphone release. Newly leaked screenshots from an unnamed Samsung phone showcase an app that creates a virtual diary based on your activity.

The app, which is said to be called Life Times, collects information from other apps and services on your phone including call logs, messages, photos and social networks. It then presents your recent activity in one centralized location, which Samsung appears to be touting as a digital diary. With the tagline “Every time is your episodes,” it’s clear Samsung is attempting to build on the suite of personalized apps it introduced with the Galaxy S4.

MORE: Samsung Galaxy S5 Rumors: Specs, Features and More

Judging by the leaked screenshots, which were exclusively obtained by Sam Mobile, users will be able to choose which services integrate with Life Times. The app is likely to be compatible with Foursquare, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn since they’re listed in the interface, but we’ll have to wait to hear from Samsung to know for sure.

The Samsung news blog also claims the screenshots were taken on a phone with the model number SM-G900H, which is rumored to be a variant of the Galaxy S5. The website couldn’t confirm that the screens were taken from Samsung’s next flagship, however.

Life Times sounds suspiciously similar to Sony’s LifeLog app, which was unveiled at CES 2014. Sony’s virtual assistant does exactly as its name implies- it obtains data from your phone to create a timeline of your day that you can playback in chronological order. This means that if you snapped a photo on your way to work, it’ll show up on your timeline for that day. Sony’s offering is meant to work with its SmartBand fitness tracker as well, which is expected to cost around $135 when it launches.

The leak also suggests Samsung is making a bigger push to create its own app ecosystem and decrease its reliance on Google. Samsung is expected to make some fairly significant announcements regarding its work with Tizen at next month’s Mobile World Congress, further hinting that a Samsung-branded OS could be in the works.

Lisa has been reporting on all things mobile for Laptopmag.com since early 2013. When she’s not reviewing gadgets, she’s usually browsing patent databases or interviewing experts to track down the hottest tech trends before they even happen. Lisa holds a B.A. in Journalism from SUNY Purchase and has contributed to The International Business Times, The New York Daily News and Guitar World Magazine.

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Sonar3 review: Track submitted manuscripts, publications, and payments

Even when the book is written and the edits are done, there's still work to do. Keeping track of submissions is a full time job in itself, as manuscripts tend to have a shelf life far longer than an author's memory. Sonar3 is a tiny, free utility that organizes and tracks multiple manuscript submissions.

Enter the information for any submitted manuscript, and Sonar3 will make sure you remember where you sent it (and to what publication you sold it).

By Simon Haynes of Spacejock Software, the creator of yWriter, Sonar3 shares that program's laser-like focus and minimal overhead. The database tracks each work you enter by date and intended market—with provisions for notes, submission guidelines for each publication, a contact information database for editorial colleagues, and more.

It's astonishing what's packed into Sonar3's 600k installer. The Spacejock website, which is full of tips and advice for writers old and new, is worth bookmarking, too.

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Review: Track and follow up emails with Right Inbox for Gmail

I have been using Gmail as my sole email client for years now, and I'm a big fan. But there's one key thing I need my email client to do that Gmail doesn't offer: Follow-ups. When I send an email, I often want to be reminded if the recipient hasn't replied within a few days, so I can resend my message or find out what happened. To me, this is absolutely crucial, which is why I was so happy to find Right Inbox for Gmail.

Right Inbox is just one option in a highly competitive market of email reminder and follow-up services: There's Boomerang, which is pretty costly if you're using Google Apps ($15 per month). There's Followup.cc which is great, and client-agnostic, but that also means it doesn't integrate into Gmail. The list goes on, but my current favorite is Right Inbox, thanks to its seamless integration with Gmail and affordable price. This $5-month service adds a couple of new buttons that blend in well with Gmail's native ones, and presto: You can now follow-up and track emails.

Right Inbox makes it easy to specify when you want to be reminded of an email, and whether or not it should be tracked.

When composing a new email, you need only click the new Remind Me button, and specify when you want Right Inbox to remind you of this thread so you can check up on it. Right Inbox for Gmail offers several preconfigured times, ranging from hours to tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. You can't configure your own favorite intervals (one of the service's few annoyances), but you can pick other intervals using a calendar pop-up.

When a recipient opens a tracked email, Right Inbox for Gmail will send you a detailed report including their location and IP address.

Right Inbox for Gmail also offers delayed email sending: For example, you could author an email during the weekend, and have it automatically sent out first thing Monday morning. Finally, you can also enable email tracking, a feature that lets you know when you recipient opened the email. Tracking uses a small, invisible image embedded into the email, so it only works if the recipient opts to display images included with the email (many email clients don't display images by default).

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

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Tractive Helps You Keep Track Of Your Furry Friends

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Use Your Naked Photos to Track Skin Cancer

After your summer tan begins to fade and you worry about all the damage you may have done to your skin, wouldn’t it be great if you could check out your skin for potential skin cancer without trekking to your doctor? Now there’s an app for that. But there’s a catch: You’ll have to fully expose yourself for results.

The University of Michigan developed the iPhone app, coined UMSkinCheck (free), to help you conduct a self exam and detect skin cancer warning signs. Background info within the app says that “studies have shown that total body photography can be an important tool in helping track skin changes that could indicate skin cancer.”

And while whole body photographic self-diagnosis already exists, the app aims to make it a bit simpler – and cheaper. Instead of hiring a professional photographer for full body shots, the app allows you to take multiple shots of different body parts. In other words, take 23 nude photographs in 7 different poses that will be stored on an app. And you can’t take all the photos yourself, so you’ll have to enlist a friend to help.

The app includes useful tools in addition to the full-body survey: You can do a self-exam, where it guides you through checking parts of your body that are most likely to have exposure to sun, a lesion tracker, so you can note if sunspots on your body have changed or become abnormal, and a risk calculator, which asks questions like your race and amount of freckles to determine your chance of developing melanoma.

There’s also important information on sun damage and tips on how to stay safe. A Characteristics of Melanoma tab shows images of what potential skin cancer could look like, a Sun Safety tab has tips on how to preserve your skin while outside and a Sunscreen Tips tab has lots of info on what kind of sunscreen to use and when to use it. And there’s a helpful feature for links on learning more about skin cancer and preventing it.

Thankfully the app has a password protection setting, which, when enabled, keeps your information and images private. But it really freaked us out that users had to think to enable the feature; otherwise their photos could be available to who knows who. Creepy.

You can also set up notification times for when you should do a self-exam or check lesions. And you can set an exam frequency of every 30, 45, 60, 75 or 90 days, so you’ll be reminded to conduct regular exams.

It’s an interesting concept, and we’d certainly like to track potential skin cancer on ourselves since doctor visits typically only occur annually. But we’re not quite ready to fork over 23 naked photos, even if they’re for a good cause.

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Track Billable Time With Klok Pro

You can minimize Klok Pro to a floating bar with a comment pane.Some time trackers, such as RescueTime, work by tracking your active windows to show how you spend your time on your computer, minute-to-minute. If you prefer to enter time data manually (and visually), Klok Pro ($16, free limited version available) is a time tracking application that looks like a calendar at first glance. You set up your projects, subprojects, and even sub-subprojects if you want, and track them using a built-in stopwatch or by dragging them out to a calendar.

Projects are arranged as a tree along the left-hand side of the window. Each project and subproject can have its own color and hourly billing rate. You set your own hierarchy, so if you need to track billable hours for multiple clients, the top level of your project tree can contain those clients, and the second level would contain the projects you do for each client.

To log your work on a project, drag it from the tree, drop it on the calendar and resize it to show how long you've worked for. If you're just starting now and want to use Klok Pro as a stopwatch, you can drop the project onto the target area that says "Drop here to work on." This is a neat feature, but it confused me when I was just starting out with Klok Pro: I tried dropping a document file on it, thinking Klok Pro would launch Word and start logging time for that project. It doesn't work that way--the only thing you can drop on that target is a project from the tree. That area does come in handy once you start working, because you can collapse the Klok Pro interface and leave just the timer visible and on top of all other windows, showing who you're billing at the moment and for what.

Klok Pro supports multiple projects and subprojects.Klok Pro is an Adobe AIR application, and like so many AIR apps, it doesn't try to emulate the native Windows look, instead going with its own dark theme. This dark background makes the colored blocks of projects stand out on the calendar, creating a striking look. Klok Pro can also pull in appointment data from Google Calendar or Microsoft Exchange, and you can click individual appointments to confirm them and log them as billable hours.

Klok Pro's dashboard display shows where your time went.Besides the calendar view, Klok Pro also has a dashboard view that shows you where your time has been going over a given period: You can see how many hours you've logged each day and for what top-level projects, as well as a pie chart showing the percentage of time you've dedicated for each top-level project (or client).

Klok Pro can produce Excel-compatible timesheets for billing.If you get paid by the hour, producing timesheets for billing is crucial, and Klok Pro can easily export timesheet data to Excel, including a subproject breakdown and billing totals. It also has a feature (currently in beta) for producing invoices right from the app as HTML files, or using Xero or Blinksale.

Klok Pro keeps time tracking relatively simple, but offers features powerful enough for users juggling multiple projects for multiple clients, and who need to charge for time spent in meetings and not just in front of the computer.

Note: This download takes you to the vendor's website, where you can download the Adobe Air app.

--Erez Zukerman

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Find Out What Happens to Your Outlook Emails With Track Your Sent

The folks at Caelo Software, makers of some excellent tools for organizing your Outlook email, are at it again with Track Your Sent. Unlike the company's NEO Pro, Track Your Sent is not an overall email organizer. Instead, it takes aim at a narrow part of your email experience: the messages you send. Although plenty of email utilities help bring order to your inbox, your sent items folder is often overlooked, left to drown under the weight of its own unorganized mess. Not anymore.

Track Your Sent adds a button that appears on all new messages you create, allowing you to set its category and folder before sending it. Still, it took me some time to warm up to Track Your Sent, a process that wasn't helped by the utility's unwieldy name. Based on its moniker, I expected this to be a utility that would allow you to find out when your sent messages were read. Instead, it's something more far-reaching and useful: an automated way to file and take action on messages that you send in Outlook.

Once you've installed utility, you can set its default actions for all messages that you send. The first two options are "File to Folder" and "Add Category"; here you can set a default folder and category for all messages sent, or you can set it to "Ask," which means you'll get prompted to make a choice every time you send a message. Yes, every time--something that gets old quickly. Unfortunately, you can't customize these categories.You can't addi messages to a select recipient to a certain folder, while putting messages to another person in another location, for example. But Track Your Sent does add a button that appears on all new messages you create, allowing you to set its category and folder before sending it.

In addition to filing and categorizing sent emails, Track Your Sent also allows you to create calendar entries and tasks from messages you sent. These features are an all-or-nothing sort of thing, though, as you can only enable this option for every message you send. Again, here it would be nice to be able to customize this setting a bit, so you only created calendar entries and tasks when you really needed to.

Track Your Sent does include an option for dealing with messages that you reply to or forward. Its "Maintain Categories" option keeps you categories consistent, and stores them locally, so they're never revealed to your message's recipient.

While Track Your Sent could benefit from more customization options, it will help folks who rely heavily on Outlook email to manage to-do lists and their daily lives.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software appropriate to your version of Outlook.

-- Liane Cassavoy

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How To Keep Track of Your Friends in Windows 8′s People App

Just like with your Windows Phone device, you can also sync your Windows 8 PC with various third-party services like Facebook, Hotmail, Linkedin, and Twitter. Using the operating system’s People app, you can keep track of your friends’ social updates while storing their contact information. Here’s how.

1. Open the Charms menu by hovering over the bottom or top right corners of your screen.

2. Search for People and open the People App.

3. Once in the People app, click on the Me tab.

4. Click on the See Your Updates and Notifications message and add/connect to your various accounts.

David Cogen is a Founder/CEO of TheUnlockr.com, the popular site for wireless how tos, reviews, and news. David loves technology and the only thing he loves more than technology is teaching it to others. Check out TheUnlockr.com for all your Android, iPhone, MeeGo, and Windows Phone how tos.

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Track Billable Hours (On the Cheap) With TogglDesktop

Tracking time spent and billable hours doesn't have to be difficult, even if you work for multiple clients and not all of your working time is spent in front of a computer. Toggl (free; $5/month plan offers more features)) is a Web-based time tracking system with a downloadable client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as mobile applications for Android and iOS.

Toggl's Web interface is very simple to get started with.If I had to describe Toggl with a single word, it would be "simple." This is one of the easiest time tracking solutions I've seen to date--even simpler than tracking your time using an Excel sheet. The Web interface features a large text box captioned "What are you working on?" similar to the one used on work log service IDidWork. You can just type in whatever you are doing, and hit Enter to start tracking. A counter appears (accurate down to the second), the Start button transforms into a Stop button, and that's all there is to it.

If you're working with multiple clients and projects, you can also specify a client and a project. You can also tag the task, which is useful for tracking the same type of task across multiple clients and projects (like tracking all design-related tasks, versus coding-related tasks). And if you've already started working on a task some time ago but forgot to start tracking it, you can edit the start time even while the timer is counting, and the duration will update on the fly. You can also add tasks without using the timer, by simply noting their start and end times.

Toggl offers clear, clean reports that can be filtered per employee, project, or tag.Toggl's desktop client is available for everyone, even if you use the free version of the service. At 24MB, it is a large download: That's because it is actually a version of the Chrome browser. Chrome uses multiple processes for stability, and when you run Toggl's desktop client it, indeed, spawns two processes. Killing one of these exposes Chrome's "Aw, Snap!" error page within the client, showing its innards. The only disadvantage to it being an instance of Chrome is that it is a large download with a large memory footprint (23MB in RAM on my system). If you're already using Chrome as a Web browser, worry not: The desktop client doesn't conflict in any way.

In terms of functionality, the desktop client looks like a simple iPhone app, and works well. You can track new tasks, create new projects and clients, and edit past tasks, but when the time comes to generate reports you'll still need the Toggl website.

Toggl's desktop client provides access to all task details.Toggl offers three types of reports: Summary, Detailed, and Weekly. The Summary and Detailed report can be produced for any time span, while the Weekly report can be produced for any single week. Reports show where your time went, and can be filtered by user, project, and tag. Reports can be exported as CSV or PDF files, and are easy to understand. The Summary and Detailed reports include a daily bar graph showing how long you've worked each day, and the Summary report also features a handsome pie chart showing at a glance what projects took up your time. Toggl can also be used in a team scenario (the free plan supports up to five users per team), and reports can show how each member of the team is using their time.

Toggl's free version offers a generous subset of features. The paid version adds support for teams larger than five people, tracking billable vs. non-billable hours, different billing rates for different projects, Quickbooks and Basecamp integration, and more.

I found the free version of Toggl more than enough for my needs, but at $5 per user per month, the paid version is very affordable too.

Note: The Downloads button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

--Erez Zukerman

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FileTrek Lets You Collaborate, Store Projects, Track Changes...For Free

Sure, FileTrek offers 5GB of online storage for nada, zilch, zippo, aka no cash. That's a great deal in this day and age, when most online storage vendors are backing away from the free model. However, FileTrek is far more. It's a collaborative workflow manager and file revision tracking tool that may just change the way you work, as well as the way businesses manage their data and intellectual property.

FileTrek would be worth the download for the 5GB free storage, but the workflow and productivity tools make it intriguing.FileTrek consists of an online storage repository, local clients to track file usage (this is completely optional), and some very clever software. It's the latter two that make the service so interesting. Any file service could keep track of what's uploaded and downloaded from an account, even a shared one. But the FileTrek local client works in real time at a very granular level, tracking when a document changes, and even when parts of a document are copied to another.

FileTrek also works with multiple users within a workgroup that you define online. First you create a project, then you add users to it. Currently, project users have full access to any documents in the project. Once you've added files, you can either track their usage online or using the local client software. It's quite interesting to see "the fan" as File Trek calls it, or visual display of revisions, users, etc.

All versions of File Trek offer storage and syncing. The free version of File Trek only tracks users, while the $20 per month per user version tracks file revisions, and offers more granular management features. There's also an Enterprise version with more reporting and other features, though you must call for a quote.

At the moment, there's no locking of FileTrek documents. Users are on their own to check when someone else is editing a document and not work on it simultaneously. This freedom will work for some situations, in others it could lead to chaos. But this feature is in the works.

FileTrek is fascinating as a work in progress, though it's already very useful. All the applications for this level of revision tracking probably haven't even been thought out yet. Get it for the free storage, but definitely kick the tires on the collaboration and other features.

--Jon L. Jacobi

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