Over the past few weeks, there's been a huge focus on paying attention to the apps you have connected to your Facebook account. While that's certainly a great idea, you shouldn't ignore another large company that you're also probably handing over a lot of your personal info to as well: Google.
If you want to learn how to code, there are a ton of resources out there to help you learn how. Websites like Codecademy, Udacity, and Khan Academy can help you kick the tires a little bit and see if coding is for you. This week, a group from Google launched another option, a mobile app called Grasshopper that can help you learn Javascript during your morning commute.
Android: Smartphones and apps are designed to be addictive, and for a lot of people (myself included), it can hard to resist the pull of a Twitter notification or new photos on Instagram. There are plenty of services to help you spend less time staring at your phone, but one free Android app takes a particularly brutal approach that might work for even the most hopeless smartphone addicts.
Mac: After booting 32-bit apps from the iPhone and iPad in iOS 11, Apple is getting ready give the same treatment to your Mac. If you're worried that you might lose access to some of your favourite apps, here's how to check whether all the software running on your computer is 64-bit or not.
You're at work, or on the other side of the world, or both, and you need something from your computer at home - in years gone by, you would need an IT degree and an expensive software package to connect up to your home computer remotely, but now a number of apps will do the job, simply and free. Here are three of our favourites, and when you might want to use them.
There are plenty of great ad blockers to choose from, but most just delete the ads or replace them with something less offensive. If you're looking for an ad blocker that can do a little more (and you have a Samsung phone) here's a new app worth checking out.
iOS: As a reporter, I end up taking a lot of notes pretty much everywhere I go. Audio recordings are great for not missing anything, but one thing has proved true for me pretty much across the board: The part of the interview I want to find is always the part where I was paying so much attention to the person talking that I failed to note the time code.
Go ahead and get your Breaking Bad jokes out of your system. We'll wait. Once you're done, we recommend installing Amphetamine as soon as you can. This app is a super-tiny download, and it's like giving your macOS machine caffeine pills. Once activated, your system will stop going to sleep.
The Kindle app lets you read your ebooks purchased on Amazon, of course, but it has other useful functions you might not know about. Things like creating flashcards to help you study, importing free classic books to read, and saving articles to read offline later.
Though I have been called a filthy millenial, I'm not the biggest avocado on toast fan, so I can't blame fruit on my terrible savings plan. I need all the help I can get when it comes to putting money away - and now, Ubank has an app that can do just that.
Google Voice has always been a reliable service (even if it doesn't get much love from the company), but there's one obvious feature that's been missing for years: calls over wi-fi or mobile data. Not anymore!
Last month, Google rolled out its innovative Google Lens app to most Android phones. Here's how to get the most out of its visual-recognition abilities.
Facebook has taken action against a network of fake news pages and made it easier for us to ditch apps from our accounts. While relatively small steps, they are a sign that what started as a way for dorky college students to meet girls is trying to rehabilitate its damaged reputation.
Mac: I've never had much of an interest in Chess, but because macOS seems to think that the game is so critical to my operating system, I'm forbidden to uninstall it. You can't drag it to the trash; you can't command-Delete it. You're stuck staring at it in your Finder forevermore - unless you get a little creative.
If you use Microsoft's Edge browser in any capacity, congratulations! You're incredibly rare, so much so that services like Statcounter don't even have your browser of choice in its top-six list.
iOS: Facebook spies on us all the time, and, by extension, so do the companies it owns such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Now, one app is turning the tables by letting you use all that data they're quietly collecting to spy on your own WhatsApp friends and contacts.
Android/iOS: My boyfriend and I live in a two-bedroom apartment with exactly two, exceptionally small closets. The closest are big enough to hold our clothes, but when it comes to other things that one might put in a closet, that stuff is stashed all over our house.
iOS: Making GIFs yourself has always been a pretty involved process either made too simple to suit my desires or too complicated to be intuitive. GIF Toaster blends the best of both worlds, offering more than enough control over the GIFs you're trying to create in an interface that's simple to use and free of ads (if you pay).
Android: Google's Pixel 2 came with a pretty cool if somewhat gimmicky feature: The ability to launch Google Assistant by simply squeezing the device. Now, one developer is bringing that same feature to your current Android phone.
