How to organize apps on your smartphone

There’s no single correct method to organize the apps on one’s smartphone or pack those icons neatly in phone folders. But there are ways to arrange them such that they become not only aesthetically pleasing but also efficiently categorized or organized. Here are some tips and tricks to follow.

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Arrange folders by theme: Go by themes such as social media, travel, or shop; if one has kids who favor gaming apps, dump all those games in there. To find those folders more quickly, use the search function for Android. For iPhones, access the search function by going to the home screen and scrolling all the way to the left. At the top is a search bar for looking up any app. 

Delete unused apps: This is one of the easiest, handiest ways to declutter one’s mobile phone interface. Do this regularly to increase storage space, get better organized, and actually extend battery life. If a mobile app has not been used in a month, it is considered non-essential. Others would consider six months or so months as the basis for deleting apps, so it would still depend on what one thinks is a healthy span of time to keep an app. 

Sort those apps: With all of one’s apps on the Home screen, put them in an arrangement one wishes simply by pressing an app and dragging it wherever preferred. The first screen might best have all of the most important apps, while social apps are best kept together and not mingling with essential work or study apps. Arrange them alphabetically, by color, or whatever feels right.

Image source: Pixabay.com 

Taihwa Terry Ho is a consummate technophile and a tech entrepreneur focused on app development startups. More on his interests here.

Online calendar apps to get you organized in the new year

A good calendar serves as a great personal assistant, especially for small business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs. It’s one way to avoid missing appointments, forgetting birthdays, and disregarding deadlines – all while one stays online and clutched to one’s smartphone. 

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There’s an abundance of calendar apps for both IoS and Android on the market today, but here’s a quick list to get one started. 

Fantastical 2 (IoS) 

Compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, this calendar app boasts new hardware features such as 3D Touch and Force Touch. It also supports multiple languages, allows users to use speech for reminder creation, and supports use of simple text phrases for making reminders and alerts. 

CloudCal (Android) 

Its unique feature is called Magic Circles, which turns the days of the month into clock faces and shows various colored circles (or circle segments). Every one of them corresponds to the tasks scheduled for that day, seeking to give users a picture of what their day would be like and the amount of free time in between tasks. 

Google Calendar 

This app remains the dominant shared online calendar app, and for a good reason: it lets users have separate calendars of corresponding colors for different aspects (from work to family to birthdays). All calendars are shareable, and the app itself can be the back end to any other calendar the user intends to use. 

Microsoft Outlook 

Ideal for businesses, Outlook’s calendar is highly similar to Google’s, but also integrates with the email app so they can be viewed together in one place. The only downside is if it’s not packaged with outer Microsoft products, it may have a pretty hefty price in light of free alternatives out there. 

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Trello 

While a widely used project management tool, Trello offers a great calendar feature where people can discuss tasks and collaborate, assign to-do’s, and track different things. Online scheduling is flexible all the way. Taihwa Terry Ho is a capital investor and technophile. Learn more on this page.

Top 5 educational apps for children

Worried about your child spending too much time on your tablet or smartphone? You can make them worth their while by installing learning apps. Here are fivetop 5 educational apps for your children: 

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1. Elmo loves 123s 

Help your child identify and count numbers from 1 to 20, perform simple math operations, trace numbers and solve puzzles while having fun with the Sesame Street characters. 

2. Disney Story central 

The app helps you with bedtime stories with its large number of e-books starring Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse, the Disney princesses, and Doc McStuffins. The app offers read-along narration and personalized book recommendations. 

3. The Magic School Bus: Oceans by Scholastic 

Scholastic is a leading book company for children, and it follows on its mobile app. This interactive storybook about Ms. Frizzle and her students embarking on an aquatic journey is a going to be a sure favorite. 

4. Stack the States 

Help your child learn about the different states and where to find them on the map with this app. It teaches state shapes, capitals, and abbreviations. 

5. Ansel and Clair’s Adventures in Africa 

Ansel, a friendly intergalactic travel photographer, and Clair, a brilliant robot, will guide your child through puzzles, animations, quests, quizzes located in exotic places such as the Sahara Desert, and the Serengeti Plains. 

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Hi there, my name’s Taihwa Terry Ho, a capital investor and a technophile. I focus my investments on apps that have the potential to make people’s lives more convenient. Visit my LinkedIn profile to know more about me.

Innovative Apps You Should Have on Your Phone

Developing smartphone technology leads to changes in quality of life, as these are innovations we carry with us every day, literally at our fingertips. Here are some of these helpful apps that surely transcend sheer novelty.

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Word Lens
This awesome application translates any sign or text into a person’s preferred language via the phone’s camera. It’s now even integrated into Google Translate. More importantly, one doesn’t even need internet connection for it to work.
Assistant
This app is actually the most-acclaimed, speaking personal assistant for smartphones, and is included in the New York Times’ top android apps of the year. It utilizes language tech to launch apps, answer queries, get information, and access many web services.
Be My Eyes
An app that truly impacts people’s lives is this micro-volunteering app that links blind people with volunteer helpers from around the world via live video chat. Anyone with the app installed can either ask for help or offer it and become someone else’s vision.
Cardiograph
Cardiograph is your personal health assistant, using the phone camera and a sensor for measuring heart rate. It works just like actual in-hospital medical equipment. Record and track results, then save them for reference.
SoundHound
You hear a great song in the background but don’t know who the artist is? This app identifies the band or artist, the album, and the lyrics. Just turn it on and it should be able to “sniff” the info you need for more personal listening sessions later. You can even hum that song you’ve forgotten but keeps running in your head the whole day and the app will detect it.

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Hey there. I’m Taihwa Terry Ho, capital investor and technophile. I see promise in developing things people will use every day. Read more apps and new tech innovations here.

Three Apps For First-Time Investors

Investing, whether in the stock market, real estate, or tech, can be intimidating if you’re not intimately familiar with the inner goings of such activity. Fortunately, with the advancements in technology come a plethora of apps that can help us in this endeavor. Here are three of them.

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Robinhood

One of the biggest draws of Robinhood among new investors is its $0-commission brokerage firm that makes it easy for anyone to invest without having to pay the typical fee of $10 for every trade you make. Investors make money through their Robinhood Gold membership and earning revenue from interest gained from cash in their accounts much like a bank.

Hello Money

Hello Money’s idea is centered on letting you choose different funds and stocks to create your ultimate portfolio one piece at a time. It allows you to pick from over 24,000 different funds and stocks.

Wealthfront

Perfect for those who can’t watch over their investments by the minute, this automated management service maximizes the “net-of-fee, after-tax, real investment return for each client’s particular tolerance for risk.”

Hi, I’m Taihwa Terry Ho. I’m a capital investor by trade. I’m a technophile so I focus my investments in apps that I see a lot of promise. Visit my blog for more investing tips.

Gadget Tech Explained: How Gorilla Glass Works

If you own a smartphone, then you’ve probably heard of the material, Gorilla Glass. It’s the screen tech used by most smartphone companies. Gorilla Glass is produced by the company Corning. The glass is the made to be smooth, crystal-clear, resilient, and scratch-proof. So how is this glass fabricated, and what makes it so strong?

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A little history, the Corning glass’s discovery is actually a superhero origin story. In 1952, a scientist at Corning placed a piece of photosensitive glass in a furnace for testing. At some point, the furnace’s temperature suddenly increased from 600 degrees Celsius to 900 degrees. Expecting a failure, the scientist removed the sample and was shocked to find an opaque sheet of material rather than a melted blob of molten mess. He accidentally dropped the sample and instead of shattering, it bounced.
Scientist Don Stookey, accidentally created a glass-ceramic Hybrid.
Here’s Corning’s explanation from its Gorilla Glass website:

Ion exchange is a chemical strengthening process where large ions are “stuffed” into the glass surface, creating a state of compression. Gorilla Glass is specially designed to maximize this behavior. The glass is placed in a hot bath of molten salt at a temperature of approximately 400°C. Smaller sodium ions leave the glass, and larger potassium ions from the salt bath replace them. These larger ions take up more room and are pressed together when the glass cools, producing a layer of compressive stress on the surface of the glass. Gorilla Glass’s special composition enables the potassium ions to diffuse far into the surface, creating high compressive stress deep into the glass. This layer of compression creates a surface that is more resistant to damage from everyday use.

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Joshua Hunt here. I’m a gadget technician from Texas. I enter rodeos during my free time. Follow me on Twitter to get more updates.