Everything today seems to be converging to a single point - Mobile Phones! Email, web browsing, document viewing, etc have now become such common features that one doesn't even count them as a premium feature anymore. With the ever so expanding arena of what you can do with your mobile today, we bring to you here an useful little app that just adds more value to your handset. The Hindustan Times Mobile Application (titled mPaper) is a light app that can be downloaded to your mobile phone and brings the top news stories to you on the move! I have been using this application for a few months now and it has recently undergone an upgrade that further refines its usability and performance. The application is customizable as per your preferences and you can choose from an array of sections which in turn are customizable into categories that you wish to view on your app's home page.

The sections on offer are - news, entertainment & lifestyle, columns & blogs and education. I pick the most used section for review here - The News Section. The app segregates news items into tabs including headlines, national news, world news, sport, city specific (Delhi & Mumbai) and business. You can select the ones that you wish to receive refreshed content for. The news stories updation is fairly frequent making the content quite fresh. You have the option of clicking onto a news item that you wish to read more on, which opens up the story in full. The app also has a news ticker scrolling at its top that highlights important and most recent news headlines. What's more, you may leave your app running in the background and you have a scrolling ticker on your phone's home screen displaying recent news. Although the app has undergone an upgrade and is far superior to its predecessor, there still remain some glitches that would need attention to be resolved. To start with, although the news is reasonably fresh, it does not compare to real time breaking news stories that may be available on mobile enabled sites of leading news agencies. The news ticker in particular needs to be updated much more frequently for it to have any relevance on your home screen. Besides, the app if left on in the background for automatic refresh of the news feeds consumes a lot of your battery backup and exhausts it at a much more rapid rate. Again, for the app to be relevant for auto retrieval and a home screen ticker, it needs to work seriously on making it much lighter on the battery consumption. And last, a little more aesthetic appeal would do no harm to an otherwise useful and innovative product. I would rate the app at 2.5/5 in its present form - a product worth trying for sure.

What is Mixed Media? I will go through each item in the order that I would likely use it in a painting. Most of my paintings are abstract in nature and so I can use mixed media to create various abstract ideas. If you have read my other articles you will know that I use a lot of texture in my paintings and in fact I make my own texture most of the time. Paper: You can add some tissue paper to your texture base or perhaps add corrugated cardboard on top of the texture. Grains: You could add substances that come in small grain format to your texture for example sand, crushed shells, or rice. Mix these in with the texture and apply to the canvas. Other items to add to texture could be string, nails, screws, shells, glass beads, fine shingle or very small stones. You can either mix these in with your texture or else place them on wet texture that you have already put on the canvas.

When adding items on top of the painting I always try to make sure I have done as much of the actual painting as possible. In particular I am talking about adding any paper items (pictures of relevant things) onto the painting in the fashion of a collage. The worst thing is if you add the picture and you realise you want to do more painting or add different colours and you have to work round it. So, there are a couple of things that you can add in terms of pictures: you can add photographs of your own. I often do this and find the best way is to print them on plain paper. I also might manipulate the photograph so that it has a tint to it that matches the colour scheme of the painting, then it looks more part of it. Another thing I like to add is newspaper clippings.