With floating song lyrics displayed over the screen, apps like musiXmatch and Floating Lyrics are perfect for people who want to go beyond just the tunes and delve into a song's message and meaning. And while these floating windows can be convenient, they're not always necessary.
Enough with zoodles (zucchini noodles), spaghetti squash, and carrot 'pasta' spirals. A well-prepared dish of zoodles with sauce is beautiful and tasty, but let's get real, it doesn't fill you up. If you use it as a meal replacement, then you'll be hungry about 30 minutes later.
Google debuted YouTube Music Key in November, and for $10 a month, this essentially turned YouTube into a music streaming service. With ad-free music videos and background audio playback, YouTube serves as a viable alternative to Spotify or Pandora for Music Key subscribers.
Among the many gifts that Italy has bestowed upon the world, culinary and otherwise, pesto stands alone. The exact birthplace of pesto, that herby sauce made of pine nuts and olive oil, is an area of Italy called Liguria, whose microclimate is particularly kind to basil, one of pesto's key ingredients.
Soup can be one of the most finicky dishes to make. While seemingly innocuous at first, the texture of this meal can change in an instant. For example, adding too many vegetables can result in soup that's too watery, such as tomatoes, which contain a lot of liquid.
Many modern Android devices use a display technology called AMOLED. These screens differ from traditional LCD displays in that each pixel emits its own light, so a backlight is not required. Even better, when rendering a black element on the screen, AMOLED displays simply don't light up the associated pixels, meaning virtually no power is used. Since black pixels use little to no power on an AMOLED screen, more black pixels means lower battery consumption.
Holidays are a time for good food and good drink, but more often than not, we substitute good drink for, well, cheap drink. However, cheap wine doesn't have to be bad.
An app with overabundant features can make it more customizable, but too many options can also be overwhelming, even on a mobile web browser. If you're tired of Safari or Chrome on your iPhone, try out Frameless from developer Jay Stakelon, a simpler web experience using just the essentials.
Who says you have to cook on Thanksgiving? If you need a break, have surprise guests in town, or simply don't want to be in the kitchen cooking all day long, never fear: you have options.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a working Super Nintendo in someone's house nowadays, but back in my adolescence it was gaming heaven. But now there's no reason to have an SNES console at home, because there are so many ways to play those retro games without one. All it takes is a good emulator.
I think it's safe to assume that most of us appreciate a little privacy and security when it comes to our mobile devices, which is exactly why we have lock screens that require unique passwords, patterns, or PINs. Although someone can discretely peer over your shoulder to see what your password is, it's much more difficult for them to duplicate your face to unlock the device.
While the new Google Inbox is currently invite-only, if you were able to snag one, you'll want to learn the best ways to navigate it. Google Inbox coins itself as "The inbox that works for you," and after a brief run through of it, we think it's definitely living up to that slogan.
With over 2 million uploaded videos and over 28 million people who had talked about it online by the end of August, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was the most viral social media event of 2014. Its popularity provided the ALS Association with $115 million in donations to date, with everyone from students to veterans to celebrities contributing.
Minor mishaps occur all the time in the kitchen, whether you cut your finger while dicing an onion, scorched your hand in a grease fire, or burned the roof of your mouth because you were to eager to taste-test your killer pasta sauce.
Who said you need a smartphone to use Snapchat? A new application in the Mac App Store, appropriately dubbed Snappy, allows you to send and receive Snapchats directly on your computer. Check out the guide below to learn how to go through all of your Snapchat stories, take and send photos with filters, and text just like you would on your mobile device.
If you're like most people, you've stretched before a workout or playing sports. Doing so should help you get your muscles ready to work. While stretching is good for your muscles, you're wasting your time if it's the first thing you do. I talked to Dr. Brian Parr, professor at the Dept. of Exercise and Sports Science at the University of South Carolina Aiken, who explained this misconception and what you can do about it:
Making a good pie crust can seem intimidating to the uninitiated, but once you master this skill, a whole world opens up to you. Not only can you make all manner of fruit, custard, and cream-filled pies once you know all the tricks, you can branch out into the world of quiches, savory pies, and flaky, crispy turnovers, too. We've already told you how to get perfect, firm fruit pie fillings, so now, let's learn about crust.
Biting into a perfectly ripened piece of fruit is enough to convince you to give up baked goods and plant your own garden. The combination of flavor, juice, and sweetness in a ripe mango, apple, plum, or berry is the stuff of life itself.
I love me some salad, but I'm also kind of a big baby when it comes to eating them. The greens have to be perfectly crisp and fresh, which is why I'm such a nut about storing them properly, including rethinking how I use my refrigerator, using a paper towel or dry cloth to wrap them, or even puffing a little CO2 into the plastic bag to keep them fresh. I've even developed an arsenal of tricks to restore life to soggy greens.
The beauty of a grilled cheese sandwich is that even a mediocre one still tastes pretty good (I find the same is true with pizza). However, chefs and cooking pros have come up with some great tricks that will turn a regular grilled cheese sandwich into something sublime.
With so many keyboard options available for Android, there's no reason to limit ourselves to the default one, or to just the ones available in the Amazon Appstore. While the Appstore does provide alternatives, such as SwiftKey, it doesn't come close to the selection available in the Google Play Store.
People tend to skip toasting nuts in recipes or before adding them to salads because it seems time-consuming and the margin for error is high. However, skipping this step is a big mistake. Why? Because when you skip toasting your nuts (go ahead, you can laugh, we're all doing it), you sacrifice flavor and texture. And not just a little flavor, but a lot. Alton Brown recommends wok-frying peanuts before making your own nut butter for this very reason.
Google, like Apple before them, no longer supports mobile Flash, but clearly there's plenty of Flash content still available on the web. From games to videos, it can be frustrating to get the most out of your mobile browsing experience without Flash functionality.
Google may have decided to back HTML5 for YouTube, but much of the internet still relies heavily on Adobe Flash content. While the Chrome browser for Android is unable to play Flash-based content like Amazon Instant Video streams, some third-party browsers will.
Biting into a perfectly ripe mango is living proof of nature's goodness. The flesh is at once creamy, smooth, tart, and sweet. Plus they're incredibly good for you.
Think of all the times you've ever copied and pasted a string of text on your device. At least once, I bet you've wanted to see your copy history.
Auto-correction is a double-edged sword if I ever saw one. It's great because I'd have an abundance of typos without it, yet it's extremely frustrating (and embarrassing) when it doesn't actually work. Just take a look at the very recent example below from Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul. Funny for us, embarrassing for him. I have a particularly difficult time typing on small keyboards (i.e. fat-finger syndrome), so disabling auto-correction on my Samsung Galaxy S4 is a no-go. I'm willing to ris...
When looking at weather applications and widgets, one major characteristic I look for is efficiency; something that will separate it from the rest of the herd. The stock weather widget looks great on my home screen, but I have to exit whatever app or game I'm in when someone asks me about the weather.
You can't always have your media on the same network as your Chromecast. Say you're at a friend's house or even out of town—it sure would be nice to cast your videos when you're out and about, wouldn't it?
As an added functionality to the S Pen, the Pen Window enables you to create floating application windows on your Samsung Galaxy Note 3—a tool that's extremely useful when it comes to multitasking.
As a species, our cells are designed to use sugar for energy. Is it any wonder that as humans evolved, we grew to love the taste of sugar?
When it comes to blocking unwanted calls, your Android device comes stocked with a native blocking feature that allows you to reject certain phone numbers. That being said, the native blocking feature on the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 isn't the prettiest or the smartest, with its non-obvious setup and lack of features.
Popcorn Time is an app that streams movies directly from torrents on to your computer, and it's seen its fair share of publicity, being lauded as a free Netflix alternative and chastised as an illegal file-sharing network.
Ever since the much-lauded effects of the Mediterranean diet became widely known, people have been buying olive oil by the gallon. A diet that prevents heart disease, is based on fresh, seasonal foods, and includes a tasty as hell fat like olive oil? Duh—that's a no-brainer.
One of the hardest tradeoffs when installing a non-Sense-based custom ROM on an HTC One is the loss of Beats Audio. Due to a patent restrictions from Beats and compatibility issues, it's currently impossible to port it to a non-Sense ROM, but with ViPER4Android you can get almost identical results, bringing life back to the BoomSound speakers on your device.
When our Nexus 7s upgraded to KitKat, one key piece of functionality was lost in the mix—Flash support. Of course, even before that we never had official support on the Nexus 7, but hacks seemed to do the job just fine. As it stands now, Google remains on the warpath against Flash, opting instead for HTML5 use, specifically in Chrome (where Flash never worked anyway), and of course Adobe stopped supporting Android long ago.
LastPass is a password manager that's been around for some time, and has finally made its way over to Android for use with apps, not just websites.
Recently, I offered a guide detailing how to run two separate windows on a Nexus 7 tablets for better multitasking. While extremely useful, that mod was limited to only two windows, and you also needed root access to use it.
Update (March 18, 2014): Skype has issued an update to their Android app, and among other things, has "fixed" the runaway camera process issue by creating a workaround...and that's about all we know. No details were provided, but with the considerable uproar over the bug, let's hope it's been squashed for good.
There are a ton of great mods and tweaks available in Cydia, but occasionally there will be one you want to install that hasn't quite made it into one of the main repositories yet. If you're not patient, it can be still be installed by manually placing the .deb file directly onto your device and installing it with iFile.
