App Weekly: Loffee, CatchUp, Drops and other apps to make you a super-charged master of productivity

This week, we bring a collection of diverse apps to help you boost your productivity and essentially help you reach the superhuman heights of legends like Howard Roark. [caption id=“attachment_4356735” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representative Image.[/caption] Focus intently on your work with Loffee and keep up to date with news in the creators sphere with CatchUp. Have a change of pace with Orbia, a relaxing game for when you need a little break from attending meetings and writing reports and creating budgets. Learn a second or third language using Drops and suck out everything that life has to offer! Loffee - Lo-Fi Music Loffee is an app that claims to fulfil all your lo-fi music needs. Low fidelity music sounds a little more organic than the usual songs because this genre embraces the mistakes that occur while recording. The result is a bunch of songs that are the perfect background score to help you focus on the task at hand. Apps like Atmosphere or Tide include atmospheric sounds to help you create a cushion of sound you can get lost in. When you want to listen to something more melodious, open up Loffee and select one of around 50 songs or simply select a mood. The app runs offline too but the selection is limited. You can find out more about the artist from their profiles which include links to most of their social media presence. With a minimum of words, Loffee can help you get to a productive, deep work stage quickly. Pair it with a Pomodoro timer maybe and become an organised God among humans, who has no trouble focussing and getting all the work done just in time to chill over the weekend. [caption id=“attachment_4356727” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Loffee is a collection of music gathered from all the avenues of the web. Image: Google Play Store[/caption] Sudoku - The Clean One If you have always loved Sudoku but couldn’t bear the stale interfaces in almost every Sudoku game, this is the app for you. The design is used as an integral part of the game. The puzzles are timed and there are clues built in for you. For example, if you want to see where a certain number is in each of the little boxes, simply tapping on them highlights the same number across the board. Placing the number becomes much easier as the gaps become more noticeable. There are plenty of themes but keeping with this minimalist rendition of the popular Japanese puzzle, all of them are combinations of white or black with one bright colour. This app makes for a good primer for those who haven’t been introduced to the game and never felt the urge to fill in the numbers when they came across the puzzle in the newspaper. You might be surprised at how slick your beloved game of Sudoku looks on the screen when you play this version. [caption id=“attachment_4356733” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A fresh and clean look for the puzzle that we all love. Image: Google Play Store[/caption] Speed Reading Reading is a great habit to cultivate. It will make you more aware, improve your command over language and help you structure your thoughts better when you write or speak. However, for all the purported benefits of reading, few of us find the time and motivation to keep reading once work or academics catch up. The Speed Reading app can help you get more out of every minute you spend reading. Instead of having the same book linger in your room for weeks on end, you could go through books faster than you ever have. Speed Reading is the practice of honing your peripheral vision so you are able to take in more text with every glance and read much, much faster. The app guides you step-by-step towards your speed reading goals. You can even upload your own material into the app to aid your reading practice. The course is quite comprehensive and with consistent practice, you’d be well on your way to absorbing the written word faster than you can flip the page. FYI: The world record holder can read up to 25,000 words per minute! [caption id=“attachment_4356731” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Speed Reading allows users to independently increase the reading speed to the desired level without expensive courses. Image: Google Play Store[/caption] Drops Drops is an innovative way to learn new languages. A blessing for visual learners, Drops presents a series of flashcards to help you learn new words. The app is quite similar to other popular language learning apps like **Memrise** and Duolingo. However, it places more emphasis on learning from the very basics and relies on constant repetition and simple exercises to drill the words into your mind. Obviously, Drops alone will not be sufficient to learn a language, especially one that includes a script you don’t know, but it will help increase your vocabulary. Many language learners advocate complete immersion in the language you are trying to learn for faster results. Drops is a brilliant app for doing just that. Follow this up by watching TV shows and movies and reading books in your target language. [caption id=“attachment_4356723” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Learn to speak and read 28 foreign languages in a visual & fun way. Image: Google Play Store[/caption] CatchUp CatchUp is a neat reader which aggregates the best content from popular websites like Medium, GitHub and Reddit. If you are a designer, programmer or simply someone who likes catching up on the better parts of the Internet, this app is great for you. The app itself simply sources links from the other websites. The huge advantage of this is that you can scroll through the top links from each site and decide which ones to open instead of being stuck in a quagmire of link-hopping weirdness. The disadvantage is that you lose the level of customisation you’d get if you open the companion apps for many of these websites individually. However, if you have limited time to read but would want to catch the coolest updates in tech and design, this is one of the best apps for the job. [caption id=“attachment_4356721” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] CatchUp is a neat reader which aggregates the best content from popular websites like Medium, GitHub and Reddit. Image: Google Play Store[/caption]