What do you get if you cross a velociraptor with a spider? The answer is a velocispider, which combines the best of both creatures. Plus, it has a huge gun on its head. It is a silly idea of course, but Velocispider is a lot of fun.

Canva is both an iPad app and an online tool for creating impressive designs. With a few taps you can design a wide range of items and it is a very easy app to use. If you lack the design skills or tools to draw something from scratch, Canva will enable you to create what you need.

One of the new features in the Samsung Galaxy S5 Android smartphone is a heart rate sensor. This innovative new item uses the phone’s flash and camera to measure the rate at which your heart is beating. But is it really innovative? Well, actually, heart rate monitors have been around for years and all you need is an app from the Google Play Store for your phone.

Android 5.0, called Lollipop, has been gradually rolling out to users with various devices including smartphones and tablets. A few people have experienced problems after updating the Android operating system, so here is a step-by-step guide to fixing them by erasing and resetting the system.

A fisheye lens is an extremely wide angle one with a short focal length that captures distorted, but interesting photos. A real fisheye lens can only be mounted to a traditional camera, but InstaFisheye is an app for the iPhone that simulates the effect.

Do you think you know how to uninstall Android apps? You are wrong! In this step-by-step guide is the correct way to uninstall Android apps, leaving you with a clean phone or tablet afterwards. If you don’t do it the correct way you will sooner or later run into problems.

Android has many great features, but also a few irritations too and one of these is apps that run in the background. The more apps you install, the more that hide in the background. There they occupy memory and consume processing power and suck the life out of the battery. What can you do?

I have covered brain training apps twice before and have examined four apps for iOS and Android. I make no excuse for covering two more brain training apps and you simply cannot have too many. In order to have a healthy, active brain you need to spend as much time exercising it as you do the rest of your body at the gym.

Modern life can be hectic and stressful. There may be problems at work, deadlines to meet, awkward people to deal with and so on. Problems can occur in your personal life too and they may be a cause of more worry and stress. Headspace mindfulness meditation can help induce a feeling a quiet, calm, relaxation.

The camera on the iPhone is excellent and it is easy to point, tap and shoot high quality video. Apple has an excellent video editing app and iMovie can do all sorts of wonderful things with videos. However, Replay is a different type of video editor and you can have maximum fun for minimum effort.

One of the nice features of Android is the ease with which it can be customised. Every iPhone looks the same, apart from the wallpaper image, but Android users can add lock screen apps that appear when the phone is woken up. Microsoft has an interesting lock screen app that is simple, but effective. You might think it odd that Microsoft has produced an Android app, but the company actually has quite a lot and some are really good, like Next.

Microsoft recently released a new email app and it is more modern and in some ways has superior features to the old app. You should switch from the old Outlook.com to the new Outlook. It is a bit confusing having two apps with almost the same name that access the same email account, but there is really no need to keep the old app and it can be uninstalled.

There are so many photo editing apps to choose from, it is hard to know which to install on your iPhone. Your choice is made even harder because so many of them offer similar features. Typically you can take a photograph using the iPhone's camera or load a previously taken one, crop it, apply various filters and then save it or share it. LensFlare can do all of this, but it also has some extra features that set it apart from the crowd.

Why is it that nearly every app you install on phones and tablets includes sharing features? They frequently pester you to connect your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social networking accounts. Is this a good idea though? You can end up sharing too much with people you don’t know and this can be dangerous in ways you never realised.

I recently tried Startup Manager (Free) for Android and it turned out to be a useful tool. When it is run, it tells you of a better app that supersedes it and which offers more features. It does indeed offer more features, but it is a slightly different type of app and if you don’t already have a tune-up and clean-up app, or need a better one, All-In-One Toolbox offers 26 useful tools for your Android phone or tablet.

Android phones can slow down as more apps are installed and one of the reasons for this is that many apps run in the background. The more you add, the more that run, decreasing the phone or tablet memory and reducing the speed. To make matters worse, many apps automatically start when the phone is started. Startup Manager can help.

Interest in health tracking using smartphones, watches and bands is growing and some of the biggest companies around are developing hardware and software for this market. I looked at Google Fit not long after it was launched and found it to be an interesting app. Since then, it has grown into a hub that other apps can connect to and store health and activity tracking information and this makes it even more useful.

There are many farming games and many city building games for iOS and Android. Township takes elements from both types of games and blends them into something familiar, but also slightly different. It is not pure farming or pure city building and you get to do a bit of both. I have been playing Township on the iPad for the past week, although an Android version is available too.

Do you have a favourite photo on the lock screen of your phone or tablet? No doubt it looks great, but wouldn’t it be more useful to have the latest notifications displayed too? Then you could see text messages, email messages, missed calls, and other notifications. If you want to make the lock screen more productive on your Android phone or tablet, Echo Notification Lockscreen will do the job.

Some people have been experiencing an odd problem on the iPhone with iOS 8 - phantom notifications. What happens is that a notification sound is heard from the iPhone, but when the phone is checked, there is no notification. The chime can occur throughout the day and night with no obvious cause, but there is a solution.