Your Mac's clipboard is great when you are just copying and pasting a phone number or address, but sometimes you end up having to re-copy the same thing over and over every day. To make those phrases a lot more easily accessible, the people over at Tiny Robot Software have released Pasteomatic. With this app, you will be able to use a hotkey to bring up a collection of your most commonly used text snippets and paste them into any text field or document.
Windows 8 may have introduced a new, intuitive touch-based interface, but plenty of Microsoft loyalists were unhappy with the absence of the classic start menu that they were so accustomed to.
Yosemite brought a new, Alfred-like Spotlight search to our Macs, but at times I still find myself wanting more out of it. However, after stumbling upon Flashlight by developer Nate Parrot, I am now able to perform Google searches, look up weather, and even enter Terminal commands straight from Spotlight's search bar.
As competition for Spotify and Pandora, Samsung released Milk Music earlier in 2014, a free music streaming service for their Android devices. While Milk was unique to Galaxy owners only, it was popular enough that we showed you ways to get it on non-Galaxy devices as well.
Instagram is all about sharing and interacting with others, but sometimes we hide in the shadows and lurk. Whether their ex-lovers, current crushes, former high school classmates, or future coworkers, we silently view their content without them knowing. You can deny it all you want, but we've all lurked at one time or another.
I'm sure you've been here before: sitting on an airplane, bored out of your mind, and you forgot to install a few games or download a movie before your flight departed. No worries, though. If you have the latest Chrome Beta installed on your Android, there's a fun little mini-game baked right into the "You are offline" screen.
Keeping a close eye on your device storage can be a 24/7 job, especially if you're space is filling up and your device doesn't have SD card support. No matter how close of an eye you keep on it, there are always going to be apps updating databases, adding to their cache, and deleting old files.
Call it OCD if you will, but I make it a priority to have a clean Notification panel. Like a chalkboard that isn't wiped spotless, I get an unsettling feeling that something in the universe isn't complete when there's unnecessary clutter in the drop-down. For this reason, I loathe the fact that I can't remove the "Wi-Fi connected" tile from my "Notifications."
With the Power key located on the back of the device, LG included a convenient "double-tap to sleep" function in their G2 and G3 devices. The function allows users to simply double-tap the display to put their device to sleep instead of picking it up and pressing the Power key.
For the most part, Finder has had the same basic functionality through the various releases of OS X. But Apple's lack of interest in adding new bells and whistles to the backbone of their operating system simply means that 3rd-party developers get to shine, and Tran Ky Nam is one such developer. He created his own extension for Finder that adds tabbed browsing, dual pane mode, cut & paste functionality, and much, much more.
Living in a densely populated city means that I usually have a strong cell signal, but that isn't always the case when I start driving out to the boonies. When I do get that occasional dropped call, it makes more sense to shoot off a text or email instead of trekking around trying to get more bars.
Everyone has that one friend who just can't help but send multiple texts in rapid-fire succession, when they just as easily could have been consolidated into one easy-to-read message. Alert after alert, this becomes extremely annoying as your phone shoots notification sounds and vibrations at you like it was possessed.
Spotlight is awesome for finding items in the stock Apple apps, but what if you want to search through the rest of the apps on your iPhone?
As soon as you plug a set of headphones into a Samsung Galaxy series device, a bar pops up in the notification tray that lets you select from a list of "recommended apps" for earphones. It's a convenient little feature that shows the apps you're most likely to use based on previous activity.
Unless you are or know a developer, you'll have to wait until sometime in September for the official iOS 8 to hit your iPad or iPhone. However, that doesn't mean you can't get some of iOS 8's new features on your iOS 7 device right now. For example, the new Notification Center, which I'll show you how to install below.
Throughout history, the idea of the future has always promised better days, advanced technology, and of course—hover cars. Although we were correct about the better days (depending on who you ask) and advanced technology, we are still without hover cars, or pretty much any hovercraft vehicles—The Jetsons and Back to the Future were a lie!
Jailbreaking gives you root access to the iOS file system, allowing you to install third-party apps and tweaks on your iPhone that aren't available in the App Store. It opens up a whole new realm for what your device can do, but it can also cause instability across the system and can dissuade you from getting future updates from Apple that have important features, bug fixes, and security enhancements.
They say that behind every joke is a half-truth. If that adage itself contains a grain of verity, the Daily Show's satirical Glass piece should raise a few eyebrows amongst the Glass Explorer community.
While it can't do anything to alleviate stress, a recent update to S Health will let you monitor your stress levels using nothing but your Samsung Galaxy S5. If you're feeling stressed, just place your fingertip on the heart-rate sensor and S Health will tell you roughly how stressed out you are (or aren't).
Twitter found a sweet spot with its 160-character limit, but Snapchat sports a social media low of 31 characters, forcing us to condense our ideas into a few short words when typing in picture captions because of their ephemeral nature. While this severely limited amount of words is Snapchat etiquette, I've got so much more to say than 31 characters!
While viewing notifications, I have a nasty habit of accidentally hitting Clear and getting rid of them all before I actually have a chance to read them. There is an easy way to view the notification history on Android, but if you turn off or reboot your Samsung Galaxy S4, the history is wiped clean.
Keeping track of your phone's battery life can quickly become a chore. Since no one wants to get stuck without a charge, we constantly find ourselves checking to see exactly what percentage remains.
This is an easy step by step tutorial how to lock your jewels in a hotel room or in a public safe. Be aware that in a public safe it is more secure to use the second method of locking by a magnetic card, not by a PIN code that can be easily seen by someone nearby.
April Fool's has come early, with an update for Google's Maps application for both Android and iOS that's geared towards finding their next big hire: Pokémon Master.
While both Rdio and Beats Music look to be developing support for Chromecast, Spotify has kept their distance from the Google dongle, focusing instead on "several prevailing priorities."
With the development kit fully open, the functionality of our Chromecasts seem to expand with each passing day. From a portable gaming system to your own personalized news station, our little gadgets have a lot going for them.
If you're a user of Google Play Music, but not a fan of being relegated to a browser tab, I've got you covered. Developer Sajid Anwar has created a desktop client for Google's music service, but since he made no attempt to hide logos and trademarks, it may not be long before the app vanishes completely. So get it while it's hot...and before Google takes it down.
Jotting quick notes can be a pain. There have been countless occasions where I've needed a pen and paper to quickly write something down, but either didn't have them near me or was doing something on my phone and neglected to remember.
Back when 4.1 Jelly Bean came out (boy, how time flies), Android introduced expandable notifications. Depending on the notification, a simple swipe down with your finger could expand it and show extra content, like Delete and Reply buttons for Gmail messages.
There are countless mods and apps for Android devices that give them an iOS-style look, but maybe it's about time we take some notes from Android, especially when it comes to the iOS 7 lock screen.
Scrolling through Instagram, you're going to come across a lot of photographs and videos that you "like." But sometimes, you're going to want to remember a photo, and naturally want to save it to your device so you can look at it for forever and ever.
The iOS 7 release brought with it many new aesthetic upgrades, from new flat, vibrant icons to a sleeker text messaging interface. Another small, yet noticeable, difference is the minimal and clean lock screen, which removed the overbearing "Slide to Unlock" background bar in lieu of just the text.
So, I'm playing Injustice: Gods Among Us and whooping some serious superhero ass when out of nowhere I receive a stupid notification that ruins my game and subsides my thunder!
Closing apps in iOS 6 was different that what is now in iOS 7. Shown in the video below is the old clumsy way of closing apps on the old iPads.
Apple baked multitasking and quick app switching into iOS back in 2010 with the launch of iOS 4, but the multitasking view changed in iOS 7 to show previews of the apps you have open. Unfortunately, this made swiping through open apps slower than before.
Waking up to my Night Owl iOS alarm has grown beyond old. I'd switch it up to one of the other ones, but I pretty much hate all of them. Thankfully, Pandora added an alarm clock feature to their application. Godspeed Pandora, Godspeed.
Snapchat is like that very attractive girl at the bar that has one too many shots and ends up slobbering on the bouncer as she gets led out. Of course she can still recover since she is hot, but you only get so many chances before you just become a complete failure. And that's where Snapchat has been treading these past few weeks.
It's fairly easy to switch between running apps on the Nexus 7 by hitting the Recent apps key in the Navigation bar at the bottom of your screen, but for me—it's just not good enough. I don't particularly like leaving the app I'm currently in to see this menu, and the menu itself is kind of clunky, and overall, not as fast as I'd like it to be.
Android's deeply customizable platform has long been the attraction for those of us looking to make our smartphones more unique, but that doesn't mean that it's always easy. Flashing mods and installing custom ROMs can be difficult at times, as well as dangerous.
Who needs to talk to a girl when you can just text them? I mean, am I right? There's even a movie about a guy who falls in love with a girl inside his cell phone (and it actually looks pretty good too). For all you clowns, the girl is not actually inside of his phone.
