How To: Take Snapchat Photos Using Your Apple Watch
To take group shots and better selfies on your iPhone, you can use your Apple Watch as a remote shutter for the Camera app—but what if you want to take a snapshot or video with a different app?
To take group shots and better selfies on your iPhone, you can use your Apple Watch as a remote shutter for the Camera app—but what if you want to take a snapshot or video with a different app?
With the high rate of obesity in the United States, it's fantastic to see the massive wave of fitness tools available, even if it's just a trend. And with the companionship of your Apple Watch, keeping track of your progress or fitness goals has never been easier. As my LA Fitness intercom repeatedly announces, "What gets measured gets improved." (Corny, but very true.)
Due to the way Android works, you normally need to be rooted to uninstall the pre-loaded system apps, aka bloatware, that came with your device. This is because the underlying files for these apps are stored on your system partition, which can only be modified with root-level access.
Many of Google's stock Android apps are some of the best options out there—especially now that they've all been made over with Material Design. But generally, as these are pre-installed system apps, they cannot be used on non-Nexus devices.
With our internet-connected devices growing in number by the year, it would be nice if they could somehow all be interconnected. This is becoming commonplace for our tablets, smartphones, and laptops, but our media streaming boxes still seem to be isolated in their own little worlds.
When you're browsing the web, going through emails, or reading a book or magazine, you'll occasionally come across a word or phrase that you haven't seen before. This would be a perfect time to have some sort of built-in dictionary lookup service, but most Android apps lack such a feature.
Some variants of the Galaxy S6 will allow you to silence the camera shutter sound with an option in the app's settings menu. But this is not true of all models, plus there's an additional annoyance—when you're filming video and you get a notification, you'll actually hear this tone on the final recording.
Samsung has a long-standing reputation for packing their devices with lots of added functionality, and the Galaxy S6 Edge is no exception. It comes with a nifty feature called "Information stream," which allows you to get quick, at-a-glance information by swiping the edge of your screen back and forth while the display is off.
With the Galaxy S6 Edge, the curved display is mainly an aesthetic feature. Unlike the Galaxy Note Edge, Samsung didn't include many software features to take advantage of its unique design, outside of the scrolling tickers and night clock. For instance, with the Note Edge, you can launch apps from the curved portion of the screen—but this isn't true for the S6 Edge.
Smartphones are great at keeping us busy with games, social media, and messaging apps, but there has been a recent push for them to also help keep us safe (and I'm not talking about from hackers, though that is equally important).
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.
Believe it or not, there was a time when smartphones weren't the primary tool for taking photos. People actually walked around with bulky film-based cameras on their necks, and some even used cheap disposables. While photography wasn't introduced to the world when smartphones came out, it's definitely more accessible—and everyone is a photographer now.
When ringtones and vibration alerts miss the mark and fail to grab your attention, causing you to miss an important call or text, LED flash alerts are a great backup plan. While we already showed how to activate this on Samsung devices, the apps shown below make this feature easier to toggle on and off. Plus, they work on devices that don't have flash alerts included in the system settings.
Auto manufacturers are slowly starting to debut models with Google's new Android Auto software baked into the dashboard console. Starting with the 2016 model year, we should see vehicles from Honda, Ford, Chevrolet, and many others sporting the new software.
The basic clock app on Android devices is functional and has a few nice features. One of these is a "World Clock" view, which lets you see the current time in different cities across the world, and shows the time in your location at the top.
Using the overview screen (aka recent apps) is a simple way to jump back to a previous task to continue where you left off, but as you use more and more apps, jumping back to that initial task isn't really that "recent" with all of those new tasks stacked on top of it. Now, thanks to developer PhinxApps, we can redefine what "recent" truly means using PinTasking. With this app, you can pin any app or webpage you're currently using onto your device's screen in the form of a Facebook-like chat-...
Smartphone users often wish for a privacy, where no one is able to poke his/her nose in their personal stuff. Unfortunately, none of the smartphones have been able to guard their privacy in this fashion. Smartphones usually come up with none or almost negligible built-in security to serve your purpose.
Deep down at the core of Android lies the system kernel, which serves as a bridge between software and hardware. Custom kernels can be installed in place of the stock offering, and these are generally optimized for better performance or increased battery efficiency.
Facebook essentially strong-armed us all into installing their standalone Messenger app for mobile devices, but the recent initiative that allows third-party development on the platform definitely makes it worth your time.
As is the case with most software updates, Android 5.0 brought changes that were viewed by users as somewhat positive and somewhat negative. This generally happens because we're accustomed to the old way of doing things, and changes, no matter how useful, can slow us down.
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.
Granting seamless access to your favorite or most utilized apps with just a tap, the Galaxy S5's "Toolbox" feature is one that plenty of other Android users wish they had. Instead of holding your breath for your manufacturer to implement something similar, or hoping that Samsung releases it on Google Play, you can mimic it on your device today with a few simple steps.
The Overview screen (aka Recent Apps) on Android got a huge upgrade when 5.0 Lollipop was released. Chrome tabs now hold separate entries in this multitasking list, which also got a nice new Material Design theme. One of the biggest changes, though, was a new API that allows apps to color the header on their entries in this list.
With intelligent grammar check, accurate predictive text, swipe gestures, and plenty of themes, it makes sense that Ginger Keyboard has well over a million downloads on the Google Play Store, making it one of the more popular keyboards available for Android users.
This is just a heads up that thieves are now using GPS fitness apps to target people. Thieves are using popular GPS fitness apps such as Strava to find out where you live where they will then come and steal your bikes.
The more we use our smartphones, the more storage space becomes occupied—it's an inescapable fact. But as the data accumulates and chokes off our storage, it can become difficult to identify exactly which files are occupying the most space.
Whether you're a secret spy or just a regular person with a few secrets, you may want to keep certain information on your smartphone private, and it's totally possible on Android to do so.
The Nexus 6 came with a hidden kernel module that allowed for double-tap-to-wake functionality, essentially letting you turn your screen on just by tapping it. A simple root app allowed us to activate this feature, which meant we were always two quick taps away from waking our device.
Deciding what to remove from your iPhone in order to free up space isn't the easiest thing in the world. You've got to decide which apps, videos, and photos are worth keeping, even though in a perfect world, you couldn't have to part with any of them.
We use our smart devices for pretty much everything these days, from getting directions to playing games just to kill time. They're extremely important to our daily routine, and as we use our devices more and more, things get a little bit messy.
With Android devices getting bigger by the year, you'd think there would be a native multitasking solution by now. While Samsung and LG have included such features in their customized builds of Android, the stock base that manufacturers start with still doesn't include multitasking support.
Android's biggest selling point over alternatives like iOS or Windows Phone is the level of customization that it offers. If you don't like something about the UI, you can change it, whether it's as small as an icon set or as big as the entire home screen.
By default, any app that requests a certain permission can run automatically as soon as you start your device. Since Android doesn't offer a granular permission control system like iOS, this gets lumped in with all of the other permissions that you have to accept when you're installing an app from the Google Play Store, and you effectively have no choice in the matter.
If you own multiple Android devices, you're surely familiar with the struggle of keeping apps and games in sync. While games with proper Google Play Games support will indeed sync progress across your phone and tablet, many developers neglect to include this feature in their wares.
When you buy a Mac, you accept that you're giving up the customization found on Windows or Linux systems for a more fluid and secure machine. This is great for most consumers, but for those of us who'd rather opt for a tailor-made experience, there are always developers that can combine functionality with stability.
Almost all modern Android devices have a gesture that will take you directly to Google Now. For most phones and tablets, it's a simple swipe up from the home button. With a Samsung or an older Android device, it's only a matter pressing and holding the home button.
Before Continuity and Handoff were even announced, Pushbullet was already allowing users to quickly send notes, links, and photos between their devices with a few clicks.
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.
When on-screen buttons were introduced alongside Android 4.0, it didn't take long before Google added a gesture to these virtual navigation keys. Since then, an upward swipe originating from the home button has always been a shortcut to Google Now on Nexus devices.
Like most iPhone users, I place my most essential apps in my dock as it allows for easier access to them from the home screen. Unfortunately, iOS restricts the dock to just four measly apps, but there may be five or six that I really want to place in it.