Android has a permission that allows apps to draw on top of other apps, but as fun as that may sound, it has mostly been used to create floating multitasking utilities. While these can certainly be useful, it would still be nice if this permission were taken literally and we could actually draw on top of apps.
Most smartphone games are clichéd and mundane, but every now and then a mobile game will appear with a new concept or idea that sets it apart from all the rest. While other developers continue to regurgitate the same old "winning" formulas, developer Sebastian Goszyla is changing how we play.
Before you purchased your smartphone or tablet, the device had already embarked on quite a long journey. From product development to manufacturing, your Samsung Galaxy device had already developed a rich history prior to your ownership.
We previously showed you how to make your Android's LED notification light dance to music, but the app itself was limited in customization options, the devices it worked on, and the music apps and services it worked with. Now we'll be showing you a similar app that supports more music services and lets you select which colors will display through the LED.
It's been a long time coming, but HBO will finally be releasing their cable-free streaming service next month in the U.S., over two years after they had released similar standalone subscriptions in countries such as Norway.
When opening a link or sharing a photo, your Android device will bring up a list of possible applications that you can complete the action with. However, some of the apps included you never use or didn't even know existed, and this leads to unnecessary clutter. Fortunately, if you're rooted, there's an easy way to remove apps from the "Open with" and "Share via" lists.
Problems with eyesight affect people of all ages and walks of life. And while it is possible to increase font sizes on Android, even the "Huge" setting is neither big nor clear enough for a lot of folks.
Purchasing an actual book from a brick-and-mortar store is becoming increasingly less common for people to do, but it hasn't completely gone out of style just yet. There's something about entering a bookstore and viewing all the potential great stories and epic tales just sitting on the shelves, waiting to be discovered.
Since Apple released iOS 8, many third-party apps have taken advantage of one of its more resourceful features: Notification Center widgets. These widgets have made it easier to interact with features and settings that would otherwise require launching an app itself, instead offering functionality through the native pull-down Notification Center.
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.
You have to give Amazon credit where it's due. Aside from being a retail powerhouse, they're not averse to dipping their feet in new and sometimes strange areas. Take Fresh, the first major effort at bringing your local goods directly to you in same-day fashion. Or Amazon Dash, which aimed to make adding items to your cart a breeze by allowing for scanning goods or speaking them into a small, hand-held device. Along these lines, the company has now introduced an invite-only product, the Amazo...
"Dead or alive, you're coming with me!" That iconic quote from the 1987 movie RoboCop was repeated by kids like me for years. The 2014 reboot introduced the baddest robot-cop on the planet to new audiences worldwide. While it didn't live up to the amazingly high expectations set by its predecessors, RoboCop 2014 did show off some newly upgraded gear. The modern look is cool and all, but rolling to a party rocking the 1987 helmet with the retro visor cannot be beat. With Halloween coming up, i...
There are those who hold their phone or set it down when they're not using it, and others, like myself, who pocket it. If you're like me and are rocking the pants pocket fade, then you'll love the new Android app I found.
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.
A musical hiccup during a DJ's set can completely ruin the mood, and that same feeling can definitely translate to mobile listening as well.
There's a feature that debuted in iOS 7 that lets you to save your credit or debit card information in Safari so that you can auto-fill text boxes when purchasing something online. Unfortunately, you still had to manually fill in your card info the first time, and if you wanted to disable the feature for security concerns, it was entirely useless.
Shazam has ushered in an age where any song we like, but don't recognize, can be almost instantly identified. While the whole process is easy enough—just pull out your phone and hit a button—there are still moments where we might miss those quick and fleeting tunes.
This past year, Facebook spent $19 billion purchasing the popular messaging app WhatsApp, and for good reason. Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to spend that type of money on just any application. WhatsApp is widely popular and frequently used by more than 500 million users worldwide, which is almost twenty percent of the Earth's population.
Last week, I showed off a deeply buried accessibility feature built into iOS 7 and 8 that lets you disable screen touches in certain apps. While useful for many reasons, I found it most helpful for preventing nosy family and friends from swiping through the Camera Roll when showing them a photo.
Even though there are over 1.3 million apps available for Android, we normally confine ourselves to a select few for day-to-day usage. With an average of 41 apps installed per user, most apps on our smartphones lay idle for the majority of the time we spend using them. Instead, we find ourselves constantly coming back to that small set of apps that meet almost all of our needs.
It's hard to believe it's already been a year since I was frantically searching every Best Buy in the Los Angeles metropolitan area to find one with a Chromecast in stock.
Taking pictures, sharing your location, and making calls are easy enough to do with an Android device, but for the most part, they all require your screen to be on with some sort of swiping and pressing actions. Dedicated shortcut keys are virtually non-existent on any modern day phone, but their utility is something that can be very useful.
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!
Rooting your phone is one thing, but to truly be in control of your device, you need to be S-Off. S-Off allows you to flash, mod, and tweak just about any aspect of your phone, including the ability to run custom recoveries and flash kernels, which are vital tools for power-users. Up until now, there have been many ways to S-Off your device, but some newer HTC models have become un-exploitable.
Tricking out your phone is nice, but there's nothing better than saving money in the process. Google Play is full of apps that offer great functionality, but some of them are not always cheap, and that's why AppSales was made. AppSales is an app browser that lists apps that are currently on sale, and can also keep track of those you are interested in buying in case the price drops.
As the world becomes increasingly more connected, there's been a rise in translation solutions. Whether it's Google Translate or Word Lens, there is an ever-growing need to understand and be understood, no matter what your native tongue is. There are plenty of extensions you can add to your computer that can translate text on-the-fly, but what about your phone?
Using Shazam has quite literally spared me hours of searching the internet for the name of a song I briefly heard for a few seconds. At WWDC, it was announced that iOS 8 now has Shazam technology integrated into Siri. What makes it even cooler is that you don't even need the Shazam app on your device.
Modern smartphones can easily handle anything you throw at them, but it's always good to keep a tight grasp of what your phone is actually doing and how well it's doing it. System information can be viewed by looking through your Application Manager, but this process makes it difficult to keep an eye on usage in real time.
Piano keytops can become worn or broken. Replacing them with new keytops isn't as difficult a task as some would think. In the demonstration video you can see how the keytops are replaced and the materials needed in order to complete the job. Having the right supplies and information can make this piano repair job achievable.
Apple computers have long been maligned as the computer for Starbucks aficionados and graphic artists. "Dude, have you used Excel on a Mac? It's terrible," says everyone that owns a Dell. The whole PC versus Mac battle was encapsulated in what I think to be the greatest ad campaign of all time, "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac." And yes, I know that PC really stands for Personal Computer, which means that a Mac would be a PC, but for the sake of the article, it will mean all things non Mac.
I like to hop between apps pretty often, and luckily my Samsung Galaxy S3 let's me do that fairly quickly. By simply holding the Home button for a few seconds, it will bring up my most recent apps, and I can switch between them with a simple tap. So if I am playing Injustice: Gods Among Us and want to switch the song currently playing on Pandora, I can bring up the recent apps menu to navigate there. While this default app switcher is more than adequate, it takes up the entire screen and coul...
In the wake of its 20th anniversary, the folks over at Eltechs have released Original DOOM, a full shareware version of the revolutionary first-person shooter DOOM for Android, available for free on the Google Play Store. It's unmodded and unaltered from the original FPS classic.
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.
Want the best view of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5 without having to purchase a plane or steal a chopper? You can enjoy the sights of the Los Angeles replica by hopping on one of the trains rolling around the city—and forget about riding in one of the cars, we're going straight into the cockpit.
I don't like paying for repairs, and I don't like purchasing extended warranties. When one of my gadgets break, I perform emergency surgery and try and fix it myself. It doesn't always go well, but I've managed to resuscitate a few iPhones, an HDTV, an Android tablet, multiple MacBook Pros, and other gadgets seemingly on their deathbeds.
Quickness and efficiency should always be a fundamental aspect of the experience when using any Android device. Anything less, and we've got a problem. As app development continually progresses, these adjectives become much more refined and polished, making the use of a smartphone a flawless affair of swipes and gestures.
If you didn't already know, Apple is giving away their newest operating system, Mavericks, for most of your computers. While the folks over at Microsoft surely despise this tactic, those of use Mac users still running Snow Leopard surely do appreciate it.
While making the transition from Apple to Android may not be hard for some, there are others that miss the small features that Apple offers on the iPad and iPhone. If you just got a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 or other Android device and want a familiar piece of Apple on your device, check out Hi Dev Studio's new Hi Notes application, which gives you iOS-styled notes.
We have all had buyer's remorse. It's an inevitable fact of life that we get things only to want another. For those of us with a Samsung Galaxy S3, some of those new Moto X features are probably looking pretty tempting.
