The Evolution of Technology

Posts Tagged ‘easy’

Typically, people have one of two possibly philosophies about keeping their phones on while they sleep. Those who don’t silence their phones don’t want to miss out on one of those important, unexpected phone calls that you’ll never see coming, but you don’t want to miss. Of course, they are left prone to all other nuisances, such as wrong numbers and rude — and drunk — friends. There are others who simply silence the phone at night, but they might miss a fantastically important call. White lists apps provide a quality solution. Via the xda blog, there’s an excellent app that will let you sleep in peace, unless an approved contact tries to call or text you.

There are two ways to use the app. First, you can create groups of contacts and create definitions for them. That is, you can have a business group, a friends group, and a family group. At any time you can set whether their calls and texts will ring or vibrate your phone, or whether they’ll be muted like the rest of ‘em. If you’re in a rush and don’t have a group ready for a certain contact, you can add him or her via a quick activation, which will patch them through when calling. In other words, this app allows you to leave your phone on mute whenever you want, or all the time. Only the people you want to get through will be able to.

As I’ve chronicled in this space, the search for the best Android media syncing app has been a long one. For a while I settled with doubleTwist, and that worked well for what it was. But the more I used it the more I got annoyed by the minor bugs, and eventually I was manually managing my music. That’s not what I want, since playlist sync is high on my list of desires. And so I looked around and found a few that appeared worthy. When I read Phandroid’s walk-through of iSyncr, I knew it had potential. Once I tried it, I was hooked. It’s such a simple solution, and it doesn’t require you to install an additional media manager on your computer.

The way the app works is actually quite clever. When you first run the app it walks you through a tutorial, so you’ll know what to do right away. The process involves installing iSyncr on your SD card. That’s where you’ll run the app, so you’ll need to mount the card. From there you just click on the iSyncr icon, and you’ll see a new window pop up. It should look familiar, as it contains all the sections of your iTunes library, including Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Books, your playlists, and more. From there syncing is easy.

We’ve all been in the situation. You’re on the phone and you need to take down a phone number. Only, there’s no pen or paper nearby. Oops. You can fumble through your Android device and open an email or a text document, but that means you’re exiting out of the call screen and going into other parts of the phone. It’s not convenient, really. Thankfully, Android developers have you covered. There’s an app in the Market called Number Saver, and it lets you take down that number with no hassle. Just click the icon, which is right on your call screen, and you’ll get a prompt, as you see above, asking for the number. From there you can save the number, dial it, send an SMS, or just add it to your contact list. This is one of those apps where there’s little reason not to have it (it’s only 64K). You can download Number Saver from the Market.

Via Talk Android.

This post originated at AndGeeks.com – home to all things Android! Also a great source of info about Android Phones.

Number saver makes taking down a phone number easy

AndGeeks – Android News and Reviews

When it comes to calendars, the easier the better. The more steps I have to take, the less likely it is I will use it. Seeing as how using a calendar is a pretty easy way to stay organized and on top of your life, I’d say that it’s a good thing. Still, entering in events on my Nexus can be something of a pain, if for no other reason than my having to use the touchscreen keypad to create the event. Really, it’s no big deal, since I do it all the time anyway. But if there’s a free way to cut down on that time, all the better. That’s why I’m working with ClickCal. It uses voice and pictures to create a more intuitive calendar.

Instead of typing in the details to your event, you can simply snap a photo of whatever it is — an email, a business card, a save the date, or anything, really. It will then show up in ClickCal, even giving you a thumbnail preview of the pic. When you open up the date you’ll see the full picture, which should serve as a reminder of what needs doing. It won’t parse the image for the relevant info and enter it in as a calendar entry, though you could probably charge a few bucks for such an app. But it will make it easier to create events.