Tag: technology

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Tech & Media Technology

The Apps I Use Every Day That Make Life Easier

The Apps I Use Every Day That Make Life Easier

You need smart tools to make your life easier in this fast paced world. Otherwise, you won’t be able to succeed with your goals. There are many tools or applications available to maximize your productivity and live a smarter life. This piece will discuss some apps that I used every single day and found effective to make my life easier. Let’s review these apps:

1.     Calm

Meditation has a plethora of benefits to obtain mental peace and clarify thoughts. That’s why meditation classes are mostly full. Calm is a meditation and mindfulness app with a simple and easy interface. If you want to improve your meditation game, you can download the app and enjoy the calmness. The app includes many background sounds such as silent clouds, mountain lakes, and sunset beaches.

2.     Spendbook App

Many of us spend more than what we actually earn. I used to be the same. But, since I downloaded Spendbook to track my finances, I can cut off additional expenses and save more. This application has a user-friendly and sleek interface. Using this app you can customize your spending and record your daily expenses in different categories. The app also includes advanced financial tools such as interactive and intuitive charts to manage everyday income and expenses.

3.     RunKeeper

Do you want to meet your fitness goals but don’t have a personal trainer? You can download RunKeeper to challenge yourself, lose weight, and even practice for a race. You can choose from different levels and customize your running plans. Also, you can partner with your friends and celebrate progress with them. Also, you can compare workout routines and compete with them.

4.     Airtasker App

Whether it is a weekday or a weekend, handling your house chores such as vacuuming and gardening is always overwhelming. A few months ago I found an app, Airtasker that allows me to easily outsource my tasks with few clicks on my smartphone. This application is incredible as it allows you to hire cooks, gardeners, and even revivalists for personal assistance. With this app, you can hire people to handle menial tasks, while you enjoy the weekend.

5.     Pocket

Do you love reading articles and blogs, but don’t get enough time during weekdays? If yes, then you should download Pocket. Pockets allow you to save articles and videos for later. I found this application quite effective as it enabled me to save important content and access them from any interlinked device. What’s more, you can view the saved content even while you are offline. So, if your travel quite often, you can save important content to read on the flight or the bus.

Conclusion

Digital innovation has changed the way we used to perform our daily tasks. The above-mentioned applications are a few examples but there are thousands of apps to simplify your lives. You can find personal and professional applications for different devices such as computers and smartphones to prioritize your tasks and achieve goals.

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Tech & Media Technology

How To Preorder The iPhone 13

How to Preorder the iPhone 13

Preorders on the iPhone 13 started on September 17. The preorders are still open, so you will want to make sure you place your order soon to avoid missing out. There are 4 different iPhone 13 options including the iPhone 13 Mini, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro, and the iPhone 13 Pro Max.

In this article, we will discuss all the different preorder options. We will also help you decide which one might be the best choice for you.

One of the easiest ways to preorder any of the iPhones is to purchase through one of the carriers. You can do this on Apple’s website. This is the best choice if you don’t have an open plan with a phone company. Some phone companies, like T-Mobile, offer preorder plans that can be checked through their websites or in one of their stores.

You can also purchase any of the iPhones directly from Apple. However, they will usually be $30-$50 more expensive through this option. You can also trade in your current phone if you won’t use it anymore and get some money off the price of the iPhone 13.

Preordering the iPhone 13 Mini

This is the smallest of the options and is the best choice if you want a small phone with good battery life. Unlike the iPhone 12 Mini, Apple says they have improved the battery life and battery functions. With the better improvements, you can be sure you will have a phone that can take you through the entire day without needing a recharge.

The iPhone 13 Mini has a 5.1-inch OLED screen and starts at $729 for 128GB.

How to Preorder the iPhone 13

The standard iPhone has a 6.1-inch OLED screen display. It’s the same size as last year’s model. So if you like your iPhone 12 and just want to upgrade, this might be the best choice for you. The internal chipset has been upgraded to the A15 Bionic.

Buying them unlocked from Apple will cost you $30 more of every model. They start at $829 for the 128GB version.

How to Preorder

These models are the heaviest duty and largest. They are a great option if you are looking for more storage options, prefer to have a larger phone, or plan to take photos with your phone often.

The iPhone 13 Pro has a 6.1-inch OLED display with an A15 Bionic chipset. The Pro Max is bigger with a 6.7-inch OLED display. They both support up to 120 Hz refresh rate, which is a huge deal because Apple has said they will do this for years and now they’ve finally done it.

These models cost quite a bit more than the iPhone 13 model. The 128 version is $999 for the pro model and $1,0999 for the pro max model. The storage options go up all the way to 1 TB costing $1,499 for the pro and $1,199 for the pro max.

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Tech & Media Technology

6 Apps For Making Friends In A New City

6 Apps For Making Friends In A New City

Moving to a completely new city can be quite nerve-wracking, especially when you don’t know anyone there. It’s important to make new friends and get to know people when you move into a new place. It’s not easy making friends, but you will eventually make plenty of friends at some point, and apps can help. When you do, you will laugh thinking about how nervous you were when you first moved in.

Mentioned below are six apps that will help you make friends in a new city.

1. Nextdoor

If you want to make friends with the people living in your neighborhood, then Nextdoor is the ideal app for that. Nextdoor allows you to connect to a private social network available in the area you’re living in. This app doesn’t only help you make new friends, but you can also find babysitters, electricians, and so much more here!

2. Hey! Vina

Hey! Vina is a platform where women can meet strong-minded women just like them. This app allows you to create a nice profile and swipe on those who you may find interesting. You get to connect with some strong career-minded women and get to bond with them. This app is one of the best ways to encourage more girls’ nights in a new city.

3. Bumble BFF

Bumble is one of the most popular dating apps that gives women the chance to hit up their matched potentials first. It also comes with a BFF section that allows you to make friends. Once you match with some that interest you, there are so many features you can use on Bumble. These features will allow you to connect with your new friends.

4. We3

Three is better than two, and that’s what the We3 app tries to prove. While filling in the right information about your interests and likings, We3 uses your answers and places you with two other people. The two people you’ve connected with are able to see your profile. This way you can start to make more friends very quickly.

5. Patook

Patook is a goof platonic friend-making app that helps connect you with different types of people based on your pointing system. Considering the points, Patook helps you find potential people to match with and bond with! The best part is that this app is extremely safe to use and helps you find someone you like.  

6. Meetup

Meetup is a category-based app that allows you to find people based on their skins. So if you want a gym partner or someone to go hiking with, you can easily find one by clicking on the right category. This app allows you to learn some new interesting hobbies!

The Takeaway

Now that you have the best friend-making apps in front of you, it’s time to start exploring and making friends. These apps are easy and free to use!

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Credit Financial Tech & Media Technology

Apple To Introduce Card Sharing

Apple To Introduce Card Sharing

To allow customers to share the benefits of a single line of credit, Apple has introduced card sharing. The system would allow multiple customers to use the same Apple credit card, thus benefitting from one shared credit record.

Explained

This is the first time Apple has done something like this, but the move is not unprecedented. Apple has long focused on building a more equitable and flexible credit program. This is why they have a low-fee credit on its Apple Card along with no annual or late fees.

The program will also allow parents to have children over the age of 13 on the Card with them. This means that they would be able to track their children’s spending. This is a great way to get children learning about credit within the confines of a safe, parent-supervised system.

According to Apple, the card was created in an attempt to overhaul the way spouses and family members share credit cards and build credit. In particular, it would like to tackle the problem of uneven credit divisions. Normally, the primary account holder gets the benefits of a shared credit card and credit history. However, the Apple Card Family program would allow credit sharing.

Who Can Get The Card?

The Apple Card sharing program is not only open to members of a family, either. According their announcement, the program will allow the card to be shared with any eligible customer over the age of 18. This means that convenient single monthly bills could be split between not only family but friends as well.

The sharing program would not keep financial matters private however. Instead it opts to give members of the shared card a significant level of transparency in being able to see who spent what. The graphic Apple provides on their website shows a program with graphs and metrics. It’s somewhat like the Screen Time section of settings, but with money instead of minutes.

How It Works?

Theoretically, customers sharing an Apple Card could tally up their spending, divide them into percent payments, and make payments fairly and according to their overall spending. This means that a member who barely used the card would not have to pay as much as a member who overused.

Credit history will be shared among all the members of the shared card program. This means that if an account’s credit history sheds a positive light on the participants’ worthiness, it would be reported to credit bureaus and used as part of each member’s credit history.

The possible downside to this program is that negative credit history will go on the accounts of all members. So, regardless of whether or not they spend responsibly and pay bills elsewhere, their credit could still be affected. Credit history will be shared across the entire card-sharing group.

Conclusion

According to Apple, the program is meant to help all cardholders achieve a healthier financial life through its transparency. Hypothetically, a card-sharing group could track one another’s payments, and make plans and adjustments accordingly, talking to one another and discussing spending to come to better financial decisions.

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Tech & Media Technology

iOS 14.5 Is Here – Here is Everything We Know

iOS 14.5 is here. Everything we know about Apple's new OS

Finally, iOS 14.5 is here, and it has brought a bunch of exciting features for iPhone users. From Face ID unlock while you’re wearing a mask to choosing different Siri voices and stopping apps from following you for marketing reasons, this new update has brought forward some new and useful features with bug fixes. You can download it right now.

Let’s explore some highlighting features of this latest update that’ll enhance your user experience immediately.

Phone Unlock Using Apple Watch While You Are Wearing a Mask

As wearing masks has become a norm, Apple has realized this and made it easier for us to unlock iPhone while we are wearing a mask. By downloading the iOS 14.5 update, you can find an ‘Unlock with Apple Watch’ option. This enables your iPhone to use Apple Watch as a secondary method for authentication when your iPhone’s Face ID is not able to view your entire face due to a mask.

When you enable this feature, you don’t need to enter a passcode or take off a mask for unlocking your iPhone. To use this feature, you need a running iOS 14.5 with Apple Watch having OS 7.4. You should enable it by going into the app settings.

Accidents, Speed Checks and Hazards Crowd Sourcing with Apple Maps

The latest iOS 14.5 update includes a unique crowdsourcing feature similar to Waze. It reports speeding checks, hazards, and accidents when getting directions along a route in Apple Maps.

You can get the reports by clicking the ‘report’ button in Apple Maps. This feature is similar to the Waze mapping app and available directly for use on your iPhone. By using this feature, you can avoid hazards and accidents.

Transparency in App Tracking

This is the most prominent addition to this update. Apple has enhanced the transparency of its policies by providing this feature. With the iOS 14.5 updated installed on your iPhone, you get a pop-up message asking if you want an app to track you when you download it. You can also select the app tracking settings by going into ‘Settings’ and managing which apps cannot and can track your phone usage.

Enjoy Siri’s New Voices

One of the significant changes to speaking changes in Siri is the addition of voices in Siri’s American English setting. The concept behind this change is a promotion of inclusivity and provides users better options to select a voice of their choice that resonates more with them. To choose the sound, go to the Settings app, select Siri and simply start a search. It’ll show different options. 2 and 3 are the new Siri voices.

Calibration of Battery Health

This new capability of iOS 14.5 aims to make it easy for you to see whether your iPhone battery is optimally performing or underperforming. The new tool fixes any inaccuracies in battery health reporting estimates. For now, this feature is available for iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max.

Some other feature updates include:

  • Teach your most loved music app to Siri
  • Support for PS controllers
  • Support for Apple AirPlay and Apple Fitness
  • Dual-Sim 5G support
  • Find My App feature
  • Features for Apple Card Family
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Financial Tech & Media Technology

Best Stock Trading Apps for 2021

Best Stock Trading Apps

2021 has been an incredible year for retail investors. With the historic surge in Gamestop stock thanks to ongoing short selling and Reddit-fueled investment research, millions upon millions of everyday people are hopping on the rocketship.

There are a lot of stock trading apps out there, and they can all blur together if you don’t know the ups and downs of each one. We’re going to go over some of the more popular ones, and give you an idea of which might be right for you and your needs, depending on what those are. Let’s take a look.

Robinhood

This app was already doing well when it went viral during the first part of the year in connection with Gamestop. Robinhood boasts an app that allows anyone to invest. They allow investment in stocks, ETFs, as well as options trading, and they require no minimum to invest. Their app is extremely simple, and they offer very little in the way of research tools or in-depth functionality.

E-Trade

One of the zero-commission trade model pioneers, E-Trade is a very popular stock trading platform with zero fees on most trades, and no account minimums to begin. The app is super easy to use and offers a huge array of features. One of the many brokers that support fractional shares, they make it easy to invest a few dollars at a time, so that anyone can start building wealth.

Fidelity

Fidelity has been around for a long time. They offer a huge array of research and tools that are made available to their investors. Additionally, account approval can take a little while. However, the ability to trade regular stocks, as well as many penny stocks, makes this a very appealing platform to many new investors. One downside of the app is that it is basically a tiny version of the website. It does not offer much in the way of streamlining compared to the web version.

Schwab

Schwab is a great platform for new investors and offers zero fees on most trades. They have provided a consistent trade experience for a long time, and are highly trusted brokers. Schwab offers a highly enjoyable trade experience since their interfaces are always intuitive, regardless of the device, it’s viewed on. They do lack the ability to set various alerts on stock movements in their app, however.

TD Ameritrade

One of the most loved apps comes from TD Ameritrade, called Thinkorswim. It provides an amazing amount of functionality for doing market research. They have a legendary trading platform and offer a huge amount of financial education resources for thier customers. They offer zero-cost trades like many others, and also support fractional shares with no account minimum required to invest.

Webull

Another extremely simple to use mobile app like Robinhood, Webull offers a much more extensive feature set than Robinhood, but still struggles to compete with research giants like Schwab and Fidelity. They offer zero-cost trades for stocks, options, and even crypto.

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Tech & Media Technology

The 8 Best Apps You’ve Never Heard Of

8 Best Apps You've Never Heard Of

You probably have all the most popular apps already installed, sure. But now and then you find an app that is just perfect for what it does, even if it is incredibly specialized. Sometimes you find one that just helps you enjoy your life activities a little more.  We’ve rifled through the depths of the app stores, and have found 8 apps that are surprisingly amazing, let’s take a look!

1.   Zombies, Run!

Running can be boring, even when you love it. You can let your playlist run on random sure, or, you can spice up your run with some wandering undead! Zombies, Run! is a great running app that not only tracks your runs but offers timed scenarios and objectives to gamify your run. You can even have your tunes in the background.

2.   iNaturalist

Machine learning is incredible. Now it’s been harnessed to help you identify plants and animals while out and about in nature. Simply enable GPS, take a picture, and upload it. The app will attempt to use your location and native species lists with photo recognition to determine what you’re looking at.

3.   What The Forecast?!!

This app is perfect in its simplicity. It takes the weather, the most boring, small talk abyss of a subject, sautes it with some sarcasm, spices it with some profanity, and serves you up a delicious helping of…well…sarcastic and profane weather. We swear it’s awesome. You can even set the intensity level to ease yourself into it if you like.

4.   Drunk Locker

If you, or someone you know (wink, wink), needs a little help controlling their communication when out having some liquid recreation, Drunk Locker is clutch. It locks out all social media, messaging, and so on, to help you, we mean your “friend”, keep their feelings from running amok while under the influence.

5.   RunPee

RunPee is a gem of an app. It tells you the best part of a movie to make a run to the facilities and can set an alert to give you advance notice. Simple, but useful.

6.   Flush

Frequently looking for a public bathroom at the most inconvenient of times? Flush give you access to the locations of nearly 200,000 public bathrooms, so that no matter where you are, you can stop in for a pit stop if you need to.

7.   Way Of Life

This is the perfect app for making positive changes in your life. Whether it’s quitting smoking, walking more, or just remembering to take lunch at work, Way Of Life will help you build or change those behaviors. Set milestones and celebrate them to bolster your progress.

8.   Wakie

I won’t sugar coat it. If you are a snooze button addict, and it’s gotten you in trouble, get this app. Now. Do it. A stranger will give you a wake-up call, without having to share your number with a stranger. Someone you don’t know, telling you it’s time to get up, is incredibly effective, and only a little bit weird, promise.

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Tech & Media Technology

Venmo vs. PayPal, which one should you use?

Venmo vs. PayPal

In our largely digital culture, we often need to send someone money or pay for something in person, when we don’t have cash on hand. Luckily, there is no shortage of digital or app-based payment options, but even with all the competition in that particular market, there are two heavyweights that most people use, Venmo and PayPal. This has evolved to the point that both brands have become a common meme verb. “Just Venmo me.”

If you are thinking about picking a new digital payment app, you might be wondering whether PayPal or Venmo is going to be right for you. You will need to consider who you will most often be exchanging funds with. Mostly friends and family? Business use? Splitting the occasional dinner tab? Some of these are certainly more suited to one app over the other, let’s take a look.

Accessibility

Both apps are available for Android and iOS, and both also feature full-featured desktop sites. While PayPal can initiate payments either via app or web, Venmo can only initiate payments on the mobile app. PayPal can also be used by a huge variety of merchants and vendors.

Sending Money

The process for sending money in both apps is more or less the same. You sync your contacts, find the username for the friend you want to pay, set the amount, and off it goes. Both apps also have functionality for sending money to those for who you only have an e,mail address for, or a mobile number, for example.

Requesting Money

Both apps allow anyone to request money from others. In most cases this is done as a reminder, since it will generate a notification and essentially, an invoice. Once the recipient receives the request, they can either act on it and pay, or deny it. In both cases, the balance hits your account nearly instantly.

Fees

Both offer free payments from bank accounts that you’ve already linked and verified, but they also allow credit or debit card payments, with a fee of about 3%. Venmo extends the no-fees to debit cards, whereas PayPal only allows free payments from linked accounts.

Limits

PayPal is a much stronger choice if you need to send larger amounts. PayPal will allow sends of up to $10k in a single payment, with daily caps around $60k, or more with further verification. Venmo’s limits are around $7k per 7-day period, with max of $5k in a day.

Business Features

PayPal is a much better bet for small busiess, or not so small business users. They have a robust array of merchant-oriented tools that can be used to sell online, and accept global payments.

Bells & Whistles

In many ways, PayPal and Venmo have a lot of similarities. There are some places where they vary a bit more. With Venmo, the focus is very much on the social side; you can check out your social feed and who is paying whom and notes sent with the payment, just not the dollar amount.

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Tech & Media Technology

How to Make Your iPhone “Aesthetic” With Shortcuts

How to Make Your iPhone “Aesthetic” With Shortcuts

If you are looking to aestheticize your life, then your iPhone is a perfect place to start.

Phones are miniature portraits of modern life. You carry it around in your pocket and take it out to see what sort of day you are having or are about to have. So it is only natural that you would want your phone to be an aesthetically pleasing bearer of this message.

In March of 2021, Apple released iOS update 14, which finally, finally allows users to modify their interface. The biggest change included in this update is the ability to use different icons for apps than the ones provided.

Replacing icons is just the first step, however. Your creativity can go further than that.

These icons can also change in size. Try this for a fun experiment:

  1. Find a quote that inspires you or makes you smile.
  1. Change your apps’ icons to be the words of this quote.
  1. Organize and resize the icons to make the quote visible.

Suddenly your iPhone is inspiring you every time you open it up! Changing icons means you can make them say whatever you want, and changing their size means you can make them as visible as you want.

There are also things you can do that take a bit more precision.

Imagine you have a group photo with all your friends. You want to use it as your phone background, but you do not want it hidden behind your app icons.

The icons of iPhone apps are usually sized at 180 by 180 pixels. Knowing this, you can divide your picture into a grid, where the squares are 180 by 180 pixels big.

Then, save each square of the grid as its own image. Once you replace your apps’ icons with the squares that they are covering up, it will appear as though there is no app icon at all.

But sometimes, you don’t want a seamless image. After all, not every aesthetic is seamless. Seamlessness hides the effort that goes into creating an aesthetic. It creates the illusion that the aesthetic is natural, that all the component parts fit together.

But what if you don’t want to hide your effort? What if part of your aesthetic is showing that you made it out of disparate parts?

Here is a fun thing to do if mosaics are more your aesthetic:

  1. Get the AutoDesk Sketchbook app from the app store.
  1. Just doodle. Draw curves, loops, and whorls that appeal to you.
  1. Cut that image up into 180 by 180-pixel pieces, but don’t pay too much mind to making it a perfect grid.
  1. Replace your app icons with the images you made

The best part about this is that rather than just using your app icons to remake the same image, you can make an entirely different image out of the components you created out of the doodles.

These are just a few experiments. Hopefully, this will help you express yourself and find a way to show off your aesthetic using your shortcuts.

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Health & Home Recreation & Leisure Tech & Media Technology

The 7 Best Relaxation Apps You Need To Wind Down

best relaxation apps

Sometimes, being able to fall asleep is a luxury that many people don’t have. Whether your anxieties are keeping you awake or you’re on a new sleep schedule, it can be hard to sleep. Then you might wonder how you can relax with a single tap. However, it is possible with modern and advanced tools and applications. Numerous techniques and methods are available on your smartphone to help you sleep. They can help reduce thoughts of social pressure, oppressive deadlines, and destructive politics running through your head. Hence, that is why students cannot sleep during the night while they should be relaxing.

1.     Pacifica

Stress can affect your quality of life in every way. Therefore, Pacifica offers you different tools to reduce your anxiety with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, relaxation, health, and Mindfulness. This application is user-friendly and helps you track your daily routine. You can generate valuable insights into your feelings and thoughts using this application.

2.     Calm

Calm is different than other relaxation mobile apps. It offers well-being with its impressive meditation catalog. They include a section, “Calm Body,” which includes 10 minutes video tutorials for gentle stretching to relax. Sleep stories are another amazing feature of bedtime stories. The best part about this section is that it includes soothing celebrities’ voices.

3.     Desertopia

Using this application for five to ten minutes a day will keep you relax and focus. This is a therapeutic game and involves creating a lively space out of a Desert Island. You need to keep the environment clean by taking away the floating trash, make decisions, and build amazing resorts, etc.

4.     Happify

The developers of Happify designed this game to make you feel happy. It reduces your feelings of anxiety, stress, and depression. Even if you are having negative thoughts consistently, you can control your emotions using this application. Numerous relaxing tools are available, perfect for treating your condition.

5.     Mindfulness Daily

Becoming mindful is out of reach when you are looking for it. Therefore, you can use a few minutes from your busy day and practice mindfulness daily. Play the game early in the morning and enjoy the short lessons. You can take a break from stress and distress for some conscious reflection.

6.     Adult Coloring

Kids aren’t the only ones who need coloring books. You can use coloring as therapy for relaxation. The best part about this application is that it offers you relaxing drawings on your mobile. You can spend hours of coloring by turning on the ambiance. There are hundreds of designs available for you to color.

7.     Yoga Studio

If you cannot afford yoga classes, then you can download this application for HD video classes. You will find these tutorials easy to follow with 65 meditation and yoga classes. Other than that, they offer detailed advice and instructions for each pose from 280. Download this application for your iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV, and enjoy the relaxation classes at home.

Conclusion

These relaxation applications are at the top of the market. But before downloading the application, check if the application is free or paid. After all, meditation is an amazing investment in your body. Ten minutes of meditation every day will lead you to a healthy and active lifestyle.