What’s on the smartphone agenda for December?

Minutiae

Stepping sideways and going down a different route in the age of social media dominance seems like an unorthodox idea.
But doing something along those lines is Minutiae, an app that refers to itself as the ‘anti-social’ social app, oh the sweet irony! But wait, here’s the thing; Minutiae really does challenge conventional design by restricting users to just one minute of usage per day and anonymises shares to encourage users to ‘embrace the boring and mundane’.
The app will randomly send subscribers an alarm to remind them to record whatever happens to be around them at that particular moment and they are encouraged to do so regardless of how ‘boring’ that might be.
Once the participants have taken their photos, they are then allotted just 60 seconds to browse their own chronological timeline or that of a random stranger they have been matched with. Once the minute is up, the app shuts down and users must wait until the next random alarm to be able to use it again.

Minutiae NORAD Tracks Santa

This Christmas Santa, Rudolph and the gang are most certainly coming to town and thanks to the NORAD Tracks Santa app, you and your kids can find out exactly when, no matter where in the world you might be.
NORAD Tracks Santa is an annual Christmas-themed programme in which the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) simulates the tracking of Santa Claus, who is said to leave the North Pole to travel around the world on his mission to deliver presents to children every year on Christmas Eve.
The programme starts on December 1, but the actual Santa-tracking simulation starts at midnight annually on December 23. It is a community outreach function of NORAD and has been held annually since 1955.
Today, NORAD has a dedicated mobile app and social media. More than 1,400 staffers run the hotline, which receives around 150,000 calls each year.