Articles by Zek

When I head out for a run, a long walk, or a bike ride, I try to bring my phone with me. It’s less so I can take calls as I’m huffing and puffing, and more for safety reasons. It seems logical that as a smartphone with GPS, my phone should be pulling double duty tracking my workout. I tried a few different ones on Android, but hands down my favorite is My Tracks by Google. My Tracks is very simple to use. When you’re gearing up to run, hike, walk or bike, turn on the GPS in your device…

(check out Snaptic at SXSW) Talk cloud-based notes on a smartphone, and everyone thinks Evernote. But there’s another competitor in that space, Snaptic, and they are quickly becoming a strong presence. Snaptic recently passed 2 million+ downloads of their 3Banana Android application! Their goal is to help your brain along, connecting all the pieces so you don’t have to. Specifically, they work to bridge your notes with context-aware items, using hash tags (#), pictures, even bar code scanners. The concept is that your notes should be available everywhere, in the cloud, on your device, and interconnected with apps you use…

The default music widget for Android is, well, not so great. It’s actually downright terrible. Luckily, there’s a far better alternative: Pure Music Widget. Like the Pure Calendar Widget, Pure Music offers a huge number of sizes, so you can cram music controls onto your screen no matter how much room you have (or don’t have). What’s really nice is that you also get album art, so you can admire your taste in music right on your homescreen. Most importantly, you also get rewind AND fast forward buttons, a woeful omission on the stock widget. Setup is a snap; there’s…

I usually need several types of productivity and reminder applications. Tasks need either alarms or some sort of agenda view or I won’t remember them, but they need to have a date. Floating tasks tend to be forgotten and languish on my lists for days or weeks. To combat this, I’ve usually relied on the old “email it to myself” trick. I also leave myself voice mails and even use old-fashioned sticky notes. It looks like I may have found a high-tech solution to my issues; is it more effective than my various low-tech strategies? Read on to find out!