Ever since developer bponury created his TouchControl app for the Galaxy Nexus back in 2011, manufacturers and modders alike have been racing to re-implement the "Double-tap-to-wake" functionality it brought to the table. We've seen LG do it with their "Knock On" feature, we've seen Motorola put a twist on it with "Active Display," and we've even seen Google implement the feature in their Nexus 9 tablet.
Android's main UI is looking so good these days that you hardly ever see developers spend time creating themes anymore. But even with the beauty of Material Design working in our favor now, there's always room for improvement, right?
The VLC media player just celebrated its 15th birthday in February 2016, marking a decade and a half of hassle-free video playback for hundreds of millions of users on virtually every major operating system. The free and open-source player is so powerful and easy to use that it has almost completely vanquished all would-be competitors in its rise to the top.
Sony's Xperia smartphones are some of the most beautiful Android devices out there—but unfortunately, they're rarely promoted in the U.S. and are seldom available through major carriers (aside from the new Xperia Z5 devices), so not many Americans are aware of how awesome these devices really are.
Starting in Android 4.3, Google added some code to AOSP that tagged your internet traffic when you were running a mobile hotspot, which made it incredibly easy for carriers to block tethering if you didn't have it included in your plan. But as of Android 6.0, this "tether_dun_required" tag has been removed, which means you no longer have to edit a database file to get tethering up and running.
Hi guys. Hope you all had a good Christmas , today i have a tutorial for you.
The Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P have identical camera hardware—in fact, both use one of the highest-end camera sensors ever put into a smartphone. The only real difference between the cameras on Google's latest flagship devices is that the 6P natively supports electronic image stabilization (EIS) whereas the 5X does not.
Star Wars season is definitely upon us. No matter where you turn, you can't go a day without being bombarded by merchandising and co-branding advertisements that attempt to draw a parallel between some character from a galaxy far, far away and a galactic cruiser like the Dodge Viper, or a midichlorian-laden power source like Duracell. Yep, it's kind of annoying, but at least we can get some fun out of it here and there.
Starting a few months back, you might have noticed that some text messages you received from certain friends or family members had blank or missing characters. This was because Apple included all of the new Unicode 8.0 emojis in an update to their iPhones, but Android devices didn't have some of these just yet, so they weren't capable of displaying them.
Just last month, Microsoft announced plans to take away a huge chunk of storage from the free tier of their OneDrive cloud service, and users are understandably quite upset. At the same time, they reneged on an offer to give Office365 users unlimited OneDrive storage, and instead, will only be offering 1 TB of storage.
I had the chance to play around with an iPhone 6s this past weekend, and I have to say, I found the new 3D Touch feature to be pretty intriguing. It's still only partially implemented, but when it does work, it works quite well—you simply press a bit harder on certain elements like image thumbnails, then instead of opening in a full-fledged view, you'll see a pop-up preview that fades away as soon as you let go of the screen.
While it seemed like jailbreaking methods were always one update behind the current build, the team over at Pangu have already released a jailbreak tool for iOS 9, and it works up to iOS 9.0.2. It is not available for iOS 9.1 through 9.2 yet, but we will update this guide when they are ready.
There are over 1.6 million apps on the Google Play Store, which makes it the largest collection of mobile apps on the planet. However, a large portion of this total is occupied by apps with overlapping functions—think social media, news, weather, music players, and various other categories where developers compete against one another to garner the largest user base.
It's official: The next version of Android will be code-named "Marshmallow," and we're getting a whole number bump to version 6.0. Lots of exciting new changes are coming to the world's most popular operating system, including a "Now on Tap" feature that will give you relevant information about any screen at the press of a button.
Up until now, if you wanted to record videos of the apps on your screen, you had to rely on a third-party option. However, Windows 10 changes this thanks in part to the new Xbox app. One of the new features of the Xbox app is the Game bar, which allows you to record footage of your gameplay.
When we hack a web server, we usually want to be able to control it in order to download files or further exploit it. There are many websites that let you upload files such as avatar pictures that don't take the proper security measures. In this series, I will be showing you how to gain root access to such a web server.
Do you remember the last time we used BeEF? Well, now we get to use it again, but this time with MITMf! We are going to auto-inject the hooking script into every webpage the victim visits!
Sony's Xperia line of smartphones are beautifully crafted and have many great features. But considering the fact that Sony has evolved into a media company over the last two decades, it's their media-related apps that stand out the most.
Apple's latest round of devices—including the MacBook Pro, Apple Watch, and the iPhone 6S—use a new touch input method that can detect when you've applied a bit more force than usual. Dubbed "Force Touch" ("3D Touch" on the new iPhones), this gesture simulates a long-press or right-click, but it usually requires special hardware to detect the amount of pressure you've applied.
Even if my phone has only 1% of battery life left, I'll keep using it until I can get to a power source somewhere. Most times I never make it to a charger, and my device eventually powers down on its own.
For every contact photo you add, Android keeps two copies. The first is stored at a 720p resolution, and this is used for high-definition imagery when you're looking at a full-sized contact card. But the second image is only 96 pixels by 96 pixels, and this is used for all thumbnails throughout the operating system.
As it stands, Android's notification system is one of its biggest strengths—but that doesn't mean it couldn't use a few tweaks here and there. For one thing, when you receive multiple notifications from the same app, there is no indication as to exactly how many notifications you've received.
It sounds like a dream come true: just press a button on your phone, and 30 seconds later, a machine produces a custom-made, ready-to-eat meal. Finally, science comes through for the truly lazy!
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a person makes calls but doesn't have a Facebook account, are they even really a person? Yes, of course they are, but it just makes life easier when you're part of the world's biggest social network, as proven with Facebook's latest application, Hello - Caller ID & Blocking.
One of the many additions that appear on Android 5.0 Lollipop is a handy menu that lets users correct for or simulate different types of color blindness. While Google didn't flip the switch on this new feature until Lollipop was released, it turns out they had been working on it for quite some time.
The Nexus 6 has an AMOLED screen that uses virtually no power to display black pixels. To take advantage of this feature, Google included an Ambient Display notification system that shows a black and white version of your lock screen when you get a new message. As a result, the Nexus 6 doesn't use an LED light to notify you of new incoming messages like most phones.
If you're like me, you probably encounter the lock screen on your Android device more than any other screen. Every time you check for new notifications out of habit, or simply pull your phone out to see the time, the lock screen is front and center.
Carriers really suck, don't they? We constantly have to monitor our data usage, even though many of us are on "unlimited" plans, which, in reality, will just be throttled to a slower 2G or 3G connection when we hit a certain download threshold.
Chrome's Incognito Mode is a great feature for folks that don't want their browsing history tracked. When it's enabled, Incognito Mode makes sure that all cookies and cache that are saved while you're browsing are deleted as soon as you leave a webpage.
For some odd reason, the Chrome Browser on Android doesn't allow you to search selected text when you're in Incognito Mode. This must have been an oversight on Google's part, because the feature is definitely present with the browser in its normal viewing mode, allowing you to highlight text and quickly perform a Google search.
When you see a color depicted on your computer, smartphone, or tablet, odds are it was processed as a hex triplet before it was rendered. Most modern websites and operating systems use a hexadecimal coding system to signify certain colors, and these are represented as 6 letters and numbers.
As the granddaddy of all gesture-based keyboards, Swype has seen quite a few updates in its day. A recent version bump, however, added a feature that has been universally panned by Swype users.
Android's lock screen has evolved quite a bit over the years. From the Donut days of two tabs that launched the phone app and unlocked the device, to KitKat's clean and simple approach, shortcuts have come and gone.
If you've ever used a custom ROM on one of your devices, chances are it had a built-in feature that allowed you to kill any app by long-pressing the back button. This function comes in handy quite often, especially in situations where an app is acting up, since it stops all associated processes and clears the app from memory.
A new API in Android Lollipop allows apps to color the status bar to match their overall theme. Google billed this as a more immersive user experience that allows app developers to extend their color branding even further. It certainly seems like a win-win on the surface, but unfortunately, not many apps are using this feature yet.
Maps is great for making sure you always get to your destination, until you miss that critical turn because you couldn't hear the turn-by-turn directions.
Lollipop brought a complete visual overhaul to Android, and while the vast majority of changes have been met with praise, some UI tweaks missed their mark.
Android Lollipop has an awesome feature called "Battery saver" mode that reduces power consumption through various tweaks in order to squeeze in an extra hour or two of standby time when your battery is running low. It does this by disabling background processes as well as location services and transition animations, so the phone is essentially running at half-throttle.
Most custom ROMs are built from the freely-available source code of AOSP, so they share a lot of common ground with stock Android. The difference, though, is the fact that Google adds many minor tweaks and finishing touches to AOSP while creating the version of Android that ultimately comes pre-installed on Nexus devices.
There's no such thing as a perfect Android keyboard. Some, like Swype, have gesture typing down to a science, but lack in predictive technology. SwiftKey, on the other hand, boasts awesome next-word prediction, but less than stellar gesture typing. Many others are optimized for multiple languages, space saving, or emojis, but none are without their flaws.
