[Ask The Readers] Physical Or Virtual: Which Android Smartphone Key Layout Do You Prefer?

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The first Android smartphone – the HTC “Dream” – came with a trackball and five hard buttons on the front: home, menu, back, call accept and call decline. Though as Android has evolved over the years, so have handsets running the OS and by now, we have lost the trackball and phone call buttons. In 2011, Google announced Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich running on the Galaxy Nexus, which used virtual buttons Back, Home and Multitasking Tray, along with on-screen menu buttons that only show when required, replacing their hardware counterpart. Read More

Encrypt & Manage Sensitive Data On Portable Or Local Drives With Protectorion ToGo

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There’s always been a lot of discussion & talk about the importance of data security and how to keep your files safe from thieves and hackers lurking around on the internet. Of course, nobody wants their private or confidential information fall in to the wrong hands. Therefore, it’s better to take optimal security measures before it gets too late. Fortunately, there are tons of free and low-cost apps available at your disposal that let you store important files in a private, password-protected vault, and one such app for Windows that we recently stumbled upon is Protectorion ToGo. Even though we cannot guarantee it will dodge the top-end data burglars or government agents, it does suffice for the job for keeping your sensitive data such as bank details, passwords, login information, and other files containing private information secure from prying eyes. The freeware tool does it all by protecting it using industry-standard AES-256 bit encryption, and boasts plenty of other features as well. Read More

Find Places Recommended By Top Reviewers & Your Circles In The New Google Maps

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Last week was pretty big for Google; in its I/O conference, the company announced a new design for Google+, a music subscription service and the new Google Maps, among other product improvements. We've taken a detailed look at both the new Google+ UI with its card-based UI and Google Play Music All Access. The updated Google Maps interface is invite-only at the moment but if you’re among the lucky ones who have received their invitation, you might be curious about the new search and just how it works. Google’s stated on its blog that every click will give you a new map, and they weren't kidding. Not only is the new search amazing, but it also lets you narrow down places suggested by people in your Google+ circle or by top reviewers. This helps you find places, whether they’re restaurants, hardware stores, or a good place to have your car checked out, that your friends or industry experts recommend. Here’s how it works. Read More

How To Easily Access Or Delete Any TextEdit Document Saved To iCloud

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With Mountain Lion, Apple integrated iCloud more deeply in OS X. Unlike before when it was just your email or contacts syncing, iCloud now lets you sync app data and save documents directly to it. TextEdit, the default text editing app in OS X, asks you whether you want to save a file to your desktop or to iCloud each time you create a new document. The only problem is that Apple forgot to include any sort of real interface for iCloud. Sure, you can search for the iCloud folder but if you can make any sense out of the sub-folders you find in it or identify files there correctly, you deserve a medal! We reviewed an app called Plain Cloud a while back that made it considerably easier to browse files in iCloud without having to open the app it was created in. Those of you who save files created in TextEdit to iCloud might be wondering just how you can delete them. The process is simple enough and described below. Read More

View Definitions For SAT/ACT Words On Any Website With The ProfessorWord Bookmarklet

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Contrary to the popular notion, your vocabulary isn't a function of your cognition or memory; it’s a function of your biceps: how many words you know is directly proportional to how heavy the dictionary is. And the dictionary, legend has it, has a way of doubling in weight a month before your GRE is due. Cry foul and surrender? Well, maybe not; you can use that ol’ brick of paper as a doorstopper while you hop online and go through your reading list accompanied by ProfessorWord. The free bookmarklet highlights all exam-worthy words and proffers helpful meanings while you surf the web. Who knew building your vocabulary could be this easy. Read More

Force-Stop All Inessential Or Malicious Windows Processes Using KillEmAll

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No matter how powerful and effective your security software may be, new malicious threats like viruses and spyware can still find their way into your system, compromising your private data without you even knowing. Some malware can even prevent you from running your applications (including antivirus or antimalware programs), making it fairly difficult to take them down. This is where apps like KillEmAll come to rescue. Sporting a user-friendly interface, this tiny desktop app for Windows is aimed to stop all the currently running processes and programs with a single click, including those that run in background or are auto-executed by viruses, spyware, or other rogue applications. KillEmAll can also prove to be useful to swiftly terminate unstable processes and applications that lead to system crashes or hiccups. Details to follow after the jump. Read More

Track Your Habits, Activities & Work Hours With tenXer For iPhone

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The first step towards solving any problem is identifying it. If you feel your life needs some changes but you just can’t put your finger on the problem, there are some apps out there that can help you. The idea of an app helping you get your life back on track might sound a bit too outlandish, but the popularity of apps like Lift and Juice clearly shows how much people can get out of such tools. Both the aforementioned apps, however, are a bit limited because you can’t track everything about your life using them, and the level of automation they offer is close to zero. tenXer, however, has the potential to become a frequently used app on your iPhone by letting you keep an eye on your real-life routine and social media habits. The app can even track your working hours automatically by monitoring your location. Read More

Use Any Photo Or Color As Background For iPhone Notification Banners

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BannerImage has not been around in the jailbreak store for too long, but many people are already comparing it to the FlagPaint tweak. The comparison is justified to a large extent, since both tweaks are designed to let users change the appearance of notification banners, but we have to point out that BannerImage takes things to the next level. While FlagPaint renders quite good-looking results, it gets a bit monotonous after a while, since there are only so many colors or styles you can apply to your banners with it. With BannerImage, on the other hand, you get all that, plus the ability to use any image from your iPhone’s camera roll as the background for the banners. Although the newer tweak’s controls don’t look as refined as FlagPaint’s, we have to say that the customization options are certainly better. Read More

Discover Songs & Listen To Your Own Music Collection With Legato For iPhone

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exfm and MusicBunk are great music discovery tools but a lot of effort goes into organizing and collecting songs in your local collection, and it seems a bit of a waste to rely solely on online streaming to get your daily dosage of music. Legato is a new iPhone app that is part music player, part music discovery tool. You can view a list of songs that have been played by your friends from their iPhone collection, or just let the world know what your favorite song is these days, simply by playing it in the Legato music player. The songs you discover using the app can be previewed and purchased, and users can also leave feedback on them, thanks to the Legato rating system. Read More

Here Are Some Great Velox Add-Ons To Spruce Up Your iPhone Home Screen

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Velox hasn’t been in the Cydia store for even a month yet, but the tweak has made a huge impact on the jailbreak scene. Everyone expected a few add-ons to come out for Velox but nobody had the idea that in less than a month, the Cydia store would be bursting with extensions for the tweak. Velox already works with most of the stock apps but thanks to these third-party add-ons, you can now get a modified versions of your favorite Velox widgets for even the third-party apps installed on your iPhone, and make the tweak handle them. With so many of these add-ons available in the Cydia store, it has become a bit of a nightmare to find the exact extension you want. Searching in Cydia only yields a rather confusing mix of Velox-related themes and add-ons, so we decided to compile a list to help users who want to get the most out of this awesome tweak. Read More

Design Your Own Photo Calendar In Windows, Mac & Linux With Pically

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An album is about the past and a calendar is about the future, but that doesn't mean they have to be mutually exclusive. A great way to combine looking forward to the time ahead while reminiscing your glory days from the past is to make your very own picture calendar with Pically. Pick out one favorite photo for each month, add holidays and special occasions, print the resulting calendar, and hang itin front of you – a portrait of what you have been, and a canvas for what you may yet become. The java-based app is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Details to follow. Read More

Easily Remove Background From Images Online With Clipping Magic

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Photoshop isn't something you can learn overnight and with Adobe moving its tools to the cloud, just using Photoshop for trivial things will be waste of money. You will most likely be on the lookout for tools that you can use for free, or pay for once, and that work just as well for your needs. Clipping Magic is a small web app that lets you remove backgrounds from any image. It is simple to use but surprisingly intelligent. You upload an image and mark the background as well as the foreground. The app mimics the magnetic selection tool in Photoshop and picks up edges that are hard for you to define. The final output can be downloaded to your computer and if you create an account with Clipping Magic, they will also be stored on the service's own servers in the cloud. Read More

Now Playing Is An Android Music Player With A Google Now-Inspired UI

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Some people don’t care much about looks when it comes to music apps on Android and iOS, as long as an entrancing, crisp tune is being injected into their ears. But if you want your apps to be great at both features and looks (as I do), try Now Playing for Android; its Google Now-inspired design might win a point or two from your side. Although it looks simple in comparison to other players available on the Play Store, don't let these simple looks deceive you into thinking it's short on features, because it boasts some really powerful ones of those as well, including an integrated equalizer, album cover art support, automatic lookup for song lyrics and album art, gestures navigation, and more. Read More

Easily Arrange Mac App & Finder Windows In Multiple Ways Via Hotkeys

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Snapping windows to either side of your screen is one of my favorite features in Windows 7. The feature works equally well on Windows 8 for desktop apps, along with a variant for Modern UI (Metro) apps that uses a quarter of the screen in a narrow column. Sadly, OS X doesn't have anything like this and if you're using an iMac, you might find that a lot of your screen space is going to waste. There are quite a few Mac apps that allow you to snap windows to either side of your screen, but they are mostly paid or buggy. iSnap is one free exception that we reviewed last year that mimics Aero Snap quite well. Arranger is yet another Mac app that lets you arrange windows, but it offers more options than iSnap, along with fully customizable shortcuts that differentiate between app and Finder windows. Read More

Find & Trash Clone Files Or Replace With Symbolic / Hard Links Using Fequal

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Even though many of us now use our smartphones and tablets for common tasks like exchanging emails or surfing the web, desktop and laptop PCs still have the edge when it comes to dealing with large amounts of information. Most importantly, it's the huge variety of very elaborate and powerful applications available for PCs that make them so great. Fequal is a handy desktop application for Windows that allows you to find identical files on your system. It also allows you to swiftly remove duplicates from your hard disk with a click, and even replace them with shortcuts, symbolic links or hard links to the copies that you're keeping. If you’re not sure what symlinks or hard links are, they are basically pointers registered on the file system to a specified location. Unlike shortcuts, symbolic links do not take your precious disk space, but are treated as files by programs. Read More

Sync Folders, Document States & Browser Tabs Across PCs With Cupcloud

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Cloud computing has been around for quite a while but unlike its early days, the technology has substantially evolved in a lot of ways lately. Although most users employ it for saving their precious data on the cloud for safekeeping, there’s a lot to it than simply saving your files. A novel example would be Cupcloud - a new cloud startup that aims to take your productivity to the next level. It allows you to save your current computer session to the cloud, and resume it on another PC right from where you left off. This includes your web browser tabs, open folders in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, and Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), Apple iWork, Adobe Acrobat documents, with support for more programs and applications already in the works. Keep reading for more details. Read More

Easily Back Up Files On Windows Complete With Directory Structure

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They say it’s better safe than sorry. They say it’s advisable to backup your important files from time to time. But what ‘they’ usually overlook is the fact that backup tools, although genuinely useful, can be quite tedious to use for many, and some of them often contain plethora of settings that overwhelm the casual user. But since there are always ways around most computer problems, there’s a way around this one too. If you've been looking for a simple, easy to use backup tool without a steep learning curve or complicated configuration, try TSR Backup. The application lets you create backups of files and folders to any location you want. It doesn't boast any complex features, nor does it have an intricate design; instead, it focuses on being extremely easy to install and use. Read More

Tumblr Gets Revamped Posting Options On iPhone & Web

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With the news of Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr still no more than a few hours old, everyone was a little surprised to see the service’s iOS and web versions getting significant updates. Almost certainly though, the updates don’t have anything to do with the acquisition because the new features don’t deal with any additional Yahoo! integration, and the service keeps getting updates pretty regularly anyway. The focus in both the updates seems to be on enhancing the user experience and offering a better interface. This doesn't mean, however, that the main Tumblr UI has been overhauled. The changes have mostly occurred in the options that deal with posting new content to Tumblr blogs. On the web, you get a much cleaner ‘compose’ box for text posts, and a photo upload dialog that support drag-and-drop. For iPhone users, the app might appear unchanged at first glance, but when you try to compose a new post, a revamped selection list for post types shows up. Read More

Flickr Gets New Web, Android App Design, Cover Photos & 1TB Free Space

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Flickr is a treasure trove of amazing photos. Comprising of stunning collections of original shots as well as stunning digital art created by its users, the service is one of the largest online picture collections you will find, and it has just been redesigned. I for one think it’s about time too; visiting Flickr in the past always made me ask myself why it was still the year 2000 on Flickr, but Yahoo has finally given the service a much needed makeover. The interface is now image-focused and instead of the tiny (and occasionally ineligible) text, you have an infinitely scrolling stream of images from your contacts as well as your own albums. There's a new image viewer as well, and the service now offers you one terabyte of storage space, saving and viewing photos in full resolutions, and a very handy little tool that tells you just how many full resolution images you can fit into a terabyte based on their resolution. Flickr’s new design isn't exactly unique or unconventional; it’s done what most image sharing services did a while back and plastered its background with images. Though regardless, it's still a major improvement.. Read More

Install Leaked Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean ROM On Samsung Galaxy S III

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The entire Android world seems to be talking about two devices these days – Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One. Sammy’s latest offering comes with a lot of nifty features added to the software that make it smarter than your average smartphone. If you already have a Galaxy S III and are not sure whether you wanna shell out extra dough just to get those features or stick with what you’ve got, we have some amazing news for you! You can now get the latest S4 camera features and more on your S III without having to shell out a penny, thanks to SamMobile who have shared the latest official Android 4.2.2 XXUFME3 firmware with us that just got leaked hours ago. Read on for details & installation instructions. Read More