The on-screen gestures on the iPhone X have taken touchscreen interaction to a whole new level. While they're needed due to a nearly bezel-less display and lack of a Home button, you can actually get these iPhone X-exclusive swipe gestures on any other model iPhone. The only catch is that you need to be jailbroken.
One of the standout features of Nova Launcher is its vast customization options. Not only does it includes numerous tweaks to alter the aesthetics of your home screen, but it even has plenty of features that reduce clutter. One area of our device that has a high potential for disarray is our home screen.
There's no shortage of reasons to love the One, yet a feature curiously omitted from the device, much to the chagrin of power users, is a multitasking button.
Phones are getting bigger and taller, so it's increasingly harder to reach the notification tray. But Samsung is here to the rescue, as they've introduced into One UI for Galaxy devices a gesture that makes it easy to access the notification drawer on your home screen.
I've been using the Galaxy Note 10+ as my daily driver for a while now. I love it, but as with any phone, it loses its pizzazz after a while. But since it's an Android phone, there's always a way to add fresh features and functionality to the UI.
Remember when typing without physical keys seemed ridiculous? Now, touch typing is the smartphone norm. That said, mistakes are inevitable on small screens. So before you start hammering on that delete key or shaking your iPhone like a madman, know that there's a better way to undo text you didn't mean to type — no shaking involved.
While augmented reality headset makers are faced with tackling numerous challenges before the category is truly ready for prime time, a start-up comprised of former Microsoft engineers may have nailed fast and precise tracking of hand gestures and full-body locomotion.
The new and improved Side button, as well as a plethora of new swipe gestures, are responsible for picking up the slack left by the missing Home button on the iPhone X. If you're really missing that Home button, however, Apple's built-in AssistiveTouch tool can help you out by adding a virtual Home button on your iPhone X's screen.
Among the many new changes ushered in by the iPhone 7, only one has the potential to completely change the way you interact with your smartphone—a new 3D Touch-enabled home button. Instead of the mechanical click we've grown accustomed to, your home button will now behave like the rest of the phone's touch screen interface.
Leap Motion created gesture control for all sorts of things, including virtual reality, long ago, but developers must build in support for their tracking peripheral to use its full potential. As a result, they've created an "Interaction Engine" for Unity, the primary platform for developing virtual and mixed reality experiences, to try and take gesture interaction to the next level.
The Oculus Rift's virtual experiences become a little less immersive when you're barely moving in a chair with a headset on, playing on a gamepad—but you don't have to accept that reality anymore.
Google Now, Siri, and Cortana aside, the main way you interact with your smartphone is through the keyboard. Every app you use, every search you perform, every message you send—the most fundamental interface between you and your device is that handful of characters and those 26 letters on the bottom half of your screen.
The term "selfie" is taking the world by storm. Having been around since 2002, the slang word for "self-portrait" went into hyperdrive thanks to the addition of front-facing cameras on mobile devices. It's even popular enough to have been included in the Oxford Dictionary, and to have broken Twitter (thanks to the Oscars selfie taken by Ellen DeGeneres).
Pinch-to-zoom has been a well-known feature in Google Maps, but one-finger zoom has always been a more practical way of navigating, especially for those of us using our phones with one hand.
Undo. Redo. These two actions are forever intertwined, but they're missing from the standard keyboard on Android. Accidentally delete a word, and there is no Ctrl + Z to undo this mistake. But there is finally a solution available on Samsung Galaxy phones.
Shake to undo is now the worst way to take back what you just typed on your iPhone. Among the many changes in iOS 13, Apple has updated text gestures, including how you select a word, sentence, and paragraph, copy and paste text, and undo and redo what you type.
With the new navigation gestures in Android 10, you reclaim a lot of screen real estate that used to be occupied by the back, home, and recent apps buttons. But there's still a small bar on the bottom edge of the screen, and in most apps, it still sits atop a black background. Thankfully, an easy hack will give you true full-screen without breaking the new gestures.
It may sound like deja vu, but neural interface startup CTRL-labs has closed a $28 million funding round led by GV, Google's funding arm, for technology that reads user's nerve signals to interpret hand gestures.
If the iPhone XS, XS Max, or XR is your first Home button-free iPhone, you might have some questions, such as "How do I access the app switcher?" and "How do I use reachability?" While iPhone X owners have had over a year of practice, newcomers to Apple's buttonless revolution might feel a bit confused when it comes to actions they used to perform on iPhones with ease.
Thanks to Android Pie's gesture controls, features like split screen mode now take several additional steps to activate. This change is due to the revamped navigation bar which removed the recents apps button. Luckily, we can still change it back.
Now that we've had a few days to recover from the VR geek versus augmented reality nerd battle between Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz, we can get back to taking a closer look at the Magic Leap One. This time, we take a very brief dip into the Abductor app.
The fact that the iPhone X, XS, XS Max, and XR don't have Home buttons means that you'll need to learn a few new gestures. There's the home gesture, the multitasking gesture, and even a new way to access Apple Pay, among others. But one less-common action that has issues due to the lack of a Home button is taking a screenshot.
If you don't know Clay, you're probably going to want to. According to their website, Clay VR's goal was to not only expose users to the world of AR/VR, but fully immerse them in it. Clay does this by allowing users to feel like they were touching the objects in virtual worlds in order to make the virtual worlds feel more natural and real.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the smartest of them all? Since Max Braun's Medium post went viral back in January of 2016, smart mirrors have been appearing on tech blogs in all shapes and sizes. Some are technically sound, some incredibly easy, but all are visually compelling. However, we've never seen one with a fully functional operating system and gesture support—until now.
The VLC Player app for Android has a really nice feature that allows you to adjust brightness and volume by sliding your finger up or down on the left or right side of your screen, respectively. It helps keep you immersed in the video while you're in full screen mode, since you don't have to mess around with any popups or overlays to perform these basic functions.
Smartphones are designed to be used in portrait mode primarily, so smartphone apps are created with that layout in mind. This means that practically every app on your phone is vertically oriented, which, in turn, means that we have to scroll up and down quite a bit.
Google has added a number of new features in the latest update to Google Keyboard including a one-handed mode and a setting that lets you adjust the height of the keys. The update hasn't gone live on the Play Store yet, but you can download the APK right now for both 32-bit and 64-bit phones.
Over the course of the past year, a lot of Android apps have added pull-to-refresh functionality. It's a very useful and intuitive gesture, because all you have to do to refresh the page you're viewing is scroll to the top of the screen, then slide your finger down one more time.
The buttons on most Android devices are laid out (from left to right) in a Back, Home, Recent Apps format. Samsung is the lone exception to this rule, which flip-flops them, so this can make for an inconsistent experience if you own multiple Android devices.
Looking back at my childhood in the '90s, I can't help but feel like I was deceived. Movies that took place in the "future," like in the year 2015, would showcase awesome technology. You know, self-driving or flying cars, hoverboards, and virtual displays controlled with hand gestures—so where are they?!
On-screen navigation buttons offer many distinct advantages over physical buttons—they can change orientation along with your device, they're capable of visually morphing to indicate secondary functionality, and the user experience is more consistent when buttons and app elements require the same amount of force to press. Add to that the fact that they're far less likely to fail and can be themed or even switched out altogether, and it's hard to come up with an argument in favor of physical b...
In a world where mobile devices are the new norm for interacting and staying in contact with one another, it's important to make the experience as smooth as possible, and typing is the biggest problem for me.
Amongst the trove of high-end features on the Galaxy S5, the display may be the most impressive. Sporting a 5.1-inch Full HD Super AMOLED (Samsung's version of OLED) display with 1920 x 1080 resolution and 432 pixels per inch, Samsung's flagship has one of the best smartphone screens currently on the market.
With CyanogenMod 10.2 recently released and the Samsung Galaxy S4 still waiting on Android 4.3, it only makes sense that the coveted features from both firmwares are highly desired by Android owners all over. We've already brought you a feature from each firmware—the cLock home/lock screen widget from CyanogenMod and the Google Play Edition Camera and Gallery from Android 4.3. Now we're bringing you another in the form of an updated text messaging application, ported from both Android 4.3 and...
Ever found yourself in need of removing the driveshaft hub nut on your front-wheel drive car? It's not quite like removing the lug nuts, because it's much bigger. Well, it can be really easy to remove the driveshaft hub nut, and this video tutorial will show you the secret.
Drones are popular little toys, but they're not the easiest things to control. While hand gestures may not change that too much, donning a HoloLens and flying a physical object with a wave of your hand at least makes the process feel a lot more like a telekinesis.
On the Apple Watch, along with the conventional emojis we've grown to love, there are new animated emojis that add a new dimension of fun for you and your friends. Unbeknownst to many, these animated faces also include a feature that allow you to change their color.
If you are a tattoo enthusiast and love trying new designs but apprehensive about a permanent one, Arabic mehndi design is for you. The designs in this form are not ethnic, conventional or traditional but modern and jazzy. It is made using intelligent spacing that not only enhances the design but gives it a trendy look. They are bright and add a lot of glam to the hands as they are made using different coloured henna- brown, red and black and sometimes even glitters. These are the best form o...
LineageOS is great and all, but custom ROMs were at their peak when CyanogenMod reigned supreme. It had all sorts of innovative features that have since been copied by Google and Samsung and the like. But one thing that still hasn't been adopted into stock Android or One UI is CM13's easy way to adjust screen brightness.
The idea of squeezing your phone might have sounded a bit out there when it was new, but it's now a hallmark feature on Pixel devices. As useful as it is for summoning the Google Assistant, however, it certainly would be nice to be able pick and choose what action is triggered by squeezing the phone. Well, now you can.
