Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

While an image shared over Whatsapp or one taken with your camera app can be expanded, viewing an enlarged view of an image within an app may not be possible. I recently faced a situation where I needed a magnified view of an image within the Ola (cab aggregator) app & discovered that all the popular mobile operating systems (iOS, Android & Windows Phone) offer a way to magnify through the Accessibility option under Settings . After enabling this feature, triple tapping on an image provides an enlarged view. Ola Cabs verifies the background of the cab drivers but I wonder if they have any checks to ensure the driver who actually turns up to take you around is in fact the same driver whose tiny photo appears in the app or in the bill they send at the end of the trip. On my 5.5 inch screen phone, I could therefore not make out if the person driving the cab matched the picture provided in the app. The cab driver assigned by Ola had a 4.6 rating but the impersonator had troub...

If you've wondered about sensors while reading about the spec of a smartphone, the official Android documentation for developers  is a good place to learn more about them - * Most Android-powered devices have built-in sensors that measure motion, orientation, and various environmental conditions. * A game might track readings from a device's gravity sensor to infer complex user gestures and motions, such as tilt, shake, rotation, or swing. Likewise, a weather application might use a device's temperature sensor and humidity sensor to calculate and report the dewpoint, or a travel application might use the geomagnetic field sensor and accelerometer to report a compass bearing. * The Android sensor framework lets you access many types of sensors. * Few Android-powered devices have every type of sensor. For example, most handset devices and tablets have an accelerometer and a magnetometer, but fewer devices have barometers or thermometers. Also, a device can have mor...

I learnt from the Channel 9 video Windows App Studio: How to take your app from idea to app in record time , how data-driven Windows Phone & Windows Store apps can be developed using the free, online Windows App Studio tool's drag and drop interface & then its functionality can be extended using Visual Studio 2013. Some of the important facts I picked about App Studio that I picked from that presentation are: * RSS, HTML, YouTube, Flickr, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, Static & Dynamic Collection-type Data Sources are supported. *  There is a limit to the number of “rows” in your Data Collection which is currently at 40 per collection . *  For large data, Azure Mobile Services can be leveraged. * While building apps with simple functionality, you can upload the final package generated by App Studio to the Store directly without having to write a single line of code. That way, you don't even need a Windows 8.1 PC to build the app. * To...

Wordament is an addictive free 4×4 grid MMOWPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Word Playing Game, available for users of Windows Phone 7+ & Windows 8. Here are some tips drawn from others & my own (limited)  experience to score better - Hunt for patterns, not words. Practice looking for common letter combinations and roots, which can help you quickly rack up points. A nugget like EAD, for example, can lead to BEAD, DEAD, HEAD, LEAD, MEAD, and READ. Pay attention to prefixes and suffixes. Wherever you find common prefixes (DE, DIS, RE, and UN) or common suffixes (AL, ED, ER, ES, ING, LY, S) juicy words usually aren’t far behind. The most common prefixes are RE and DE. Mind your Vs and Qs. Focus on high-scoring tiles such as Q, Qu, K, Z, V, which help you pile on the points even with short 3-letter words. Don’t forget the past. One common beginner’s mistake is forgetting to swipe in plural and tense variations of a word. In Wordament, JUMP, JUMPS, JUMPING, and JUMPE...