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It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.
We recently took a look at Ultimate Custom Widget (UCCW) and showed you how it can be used to create stunning and versatile home screen widgets. But if you don’t feel included, or don’t have the time to create your own from scratch, there are plenty of ready-made widgets for you to download. Here are some of the highlights.
It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.
When it comes to customizing your Android home screen, choice is more than abundant. All you need to do is think of what you want, and there’s a good chance it already exists somewhere in the bylanes of the official Play store or in a developer forum somewhere. And for things that are too specific for a readymade solution, there are DIY apps that will let you build your home screen widget from scratch.
Ultimate Custom Clock Widget– or UCCW as it is popularly known — is one such app. With more options than you can shake a stick at, UCCW lets you build your own custom homescreen widgets pretty much the way you like. And although there is a whole community of enthusiastic modders who spend hours fine-tuning their UCCW creations and making them available to anyone to download, there is something to be said for the satisfaction of creating one of your own.
It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.
Time and time again when people ask me why I prefer Android to iOS, my number one answer is, “freedom.” The freedom to customize the homescreen as you see fit, not just moving icons around, the freedom to use custom launchers, and the freedom to install apps that are not on the Play Store. And because Android has such an active developer community, that freedom increases a hundred fold when you root your device. Once you do that, you have the ability to install custom ROMs, or builds of the Android OS. That’s when things get really fun.
If you’re anything like me, you get easily irritated by all the Picasa Albums that appear in your Gallery. Thanks to Google account sync, and to the fact that every image you post to Google+ somehow ends up creating its own album on Picasa, your Gallery looks like a never-ending string of albums that contain one or two images each thanks to Picasa.
If all you’d like when you open the Gallery is to see the photos that are actually stored on your device — and the SD card if you’re using it — then follow this walkthrough to get rid of all the Picasa albums.
It’s no secret that I have a lot of devices at my disposal including phones, tablets, computers, and even Google TV. I like that pretty much from any place in my apartment — or office, or coffeeshop I happen to be working at — I can use any of those devices to do things like read, check the weather, or whatever Internet-based task I have to perform. However, when it came to texting I was locked down to using my phone for a long time; all of that changed with MightyText.
Near Field Communication, or NFC, has been mentioned a few times here on Android.Appstorm, including a few articles by yours truly. The topic really fascinates and excites me because of the endless possibilities it affords us. About a year ago I wrote an article entitled Near Field Communication and the Future of Mobile, where I outlined what’s in store for NFC-enabled cell phones, of which Android has a few.
However, NFC isn’t only for phones. There are devices called NFC tags, and they can really shake up the way we do things.
When the Nexus 7 was released, everyone highlighted all of its superior qualities but there was one negative which seemed to spring up everywhere – the lack of external storage. With only one input for micro-USB and no SD card slot, we were limited to whatever size we decided to buy. Personally, I went with the now-discontinued 8GB model, so I have about 6GB to fit everything I want — roughly three films could stop me from downloading anything else. But even the 16GB version can filled quite quickly.
So, as the Android community normally does, they found a way to bypass this problem. This fix comes in the form of Nexus Media Importer, an app that allows you to easily transfer or play files from an external storage device. Read on to find out how useful it can be.
Keeping all your devices synchronized with each other has always been a good idea as it lets you juggle phones and tablets, and continue working from the point where you left off without any interruption. There are plenty of apps available to keep videos, music and apps synced across all devices. However, syncing the app’s data is more difficult, especially if you are new to the Android ecosystem. Normally, this entails knowing the correct files that have to be moved between devices and their appropriate location — an easy feat for really knowledgeable users, but a caveat for most others.
To provide a straightforward way to sync app data, there’s a useful utility available only for rooted Android devices, DataSync. In the following tutorial, I will explain how to set up and use DataSync across multiple devices.
It’s Holidays Week here at Android.Appstorm! We will dedicate our time this week to bring you the best apps for the year-end festivities. From gift shopping to games, cooking and hosting, managing your to-dos, decorating your phone, it will all be about spreading the cheer and reducing the stress of the Holidays season.
Now that we are past Thanksgiving and Black Friday here in the States, it’s time to start really thinking about my favorite time of the year: Christmas and the Holiday season. No matter what you celebrate, there is probably a ton of planning that needs to be done as people get together with family, exchange gifts, travel, and more from now until the new year. In this how-to, I’m going to give you some tips and apps you can use to stay sane and manage it all.
It’s National Novel Writing Month once again, time to challenge yourself to write 50000 words in 30 days, no easy feat! But with your Android device by your side, you can keep working on your novel or non-fiction book anywhere and anytime. Throughout this week, we’ll share our best apps, thoughts, and tips to help you achieve that writing goal.
When you think about it, your Android is actually the perfect writing device. It’s small, portable, lightweight and fast – and when paired with Simplenote, it becomes that bit more amazing!
As a writer, I like to get in some words whenever I have free time during the day. Unfortunately, I can’t bring my laptop or tablet with me everywhere I go – but I can bring my phone. So when I began looking into ways to be keep my writing seamless between my three devices, Simplenote stood out above all others. Read on to find out how you too can have a seamless writing experience via Simplenote.
