Exciting tips

Replying to messages or phone calls when you’re driving is dangerous. Despite the many virtual assistant apps that are available, you should still avoid using your phone when you’re driving. The best practice is to switch it to do not disturb mode. If you have an iPhone that is running iOS 11, you can enable do not disturb while driving. If you have an Android phone, consider installing Can’t Talk. It’s a free Android app that can send an auto reply to messages and calls. If you’re ever busy, simply enable it and it will let people know you’re busy at the moment.

Can’t Talk is currently in beta so before you can download the app, you will need to join the beta program. During testing, the app worked without any problems but you should still remember that the app is in beta and manage your expectations.

Install Can’t Talk after you join the beta. The app can auto reply to messages and calls, and app notifications. You can enable an auto reply for them individually. For apps, you need to give Can’t Talk access to your notifications and then select which apps it should reply to. To edit the auto reply the app sends, tap the edit button under the ‘Auto reply message’.

The app will reply to a message or a text from the same person once every fifteen minutes. This means, if your mom is calling you over and over, she will get one reply after you miss her first call, and the next auto reply fifteen minutes late if she’s still calling. You can change this frequency by going to the app’s advanced settings. Here, you can decrease the frequency to 30mins, 1, 2, 4, and 8 hours, or you can have Can’t talk send an auto reply to every single text message or missed call.

Can’t talk has a free version, a subscription model, and a one-time purchase option that unlocks app replies and lets you set custom replies for specific contacts.

Can’t talk doesn’t block notifications. If you’re driving and you get a phone call, message, or app notification your screen will still light up and your phone will vibrate. You can choose to reject a phone call and Can’t Talk will send the auto reply, or you can let your phone ring until the call ends.

If a person calls you and doesn’t get through, they will receive the auto reply message. If they then send you a message right after, they will again get the auto reply message. For subsequent calls and messages, the reply frequency will come into play but the app keeps calls and message replies separate. Standard text message rates will apply for each message that is sent.

Whatsapp lets you search your message threads. You can search all threads at once, or you can search a particular thread. In-thread search is useful for obvious reasons; it’s an easier way to recall a part of a conversation. For example, if you settled on a day or time to meet someone, the search will help you find it without scrolling through the entire conversation. Whatsapp has just added group participant search in its most recent update. You can now search Whatsapp group participants.

Whatsapp has group conversation threads and if you’re the admin of a group, you control who is in the group. If you’re trying to avoid someone in a group for whatever reason you might want to know if they’re in the group or not. Regardless of why you may want to search Whatsapp group participants, the fact is that you can now. You don’t need to be the admin of a group to search its participants.

Search Whatsapp Group Participants

Open Whatsapp and tap on the group conversation thread that you want to search in. Tap the group name at the very top to go the group’s detail page. Scroll down and you will see a new section called ‘Participants’. It will tell you how many people are in the current group. Next to it you will see a Search option. Tap it. You can search Whatsapp group participants by name or by phone number.

If you tap a participant in the group, you have the option to view their information, call them, send a direct message, or verify their security code. This will not reveal information about a participant that is otherwise hidden to you. For example, if a participant is not your contact, their info will not reveal their name. The call, message, and security code verification options will still be there.

This is mostly a tool that benefits admins of Whatsapp groups. If you manage multiple groups on Whatsapp, this tool can be used to control who is added to which group and prevent adding the same person to multiple groups unnecessarily. If you think this compromises the privacy of other participants that isn’t the case. All members of a group chat have always had the option to add someone from a group as a contact. Their phone numbers and names have always been visible to everyone else in the group. The direct call button is new in that it lets you call someone without adding them as a contact but again, it’s not a huge privacy issue.

Banking on the infinite power of nostalgia, Nintendo announced the release of Super Nintendo Mini — a retro reboot of SNES as a mini console.

The move made SEGA rekindle a once forgotten rivalry with the launch of SEGA Forever. The Super Nintendo Mini fits into the palm of your hands and is every bit the platform as the original. This brings a seemingly lost era of gaming to a completely new generation. However, supply will never fully meet demand. So if you want to ride that nostalgia train but aren’t that lucky with your order, know that you can do it right from your Android device.

A couple of months back we gave you the best shooter games and spent long hours (and are grateful for doing this) identifying the best offline games you could play on Android. Today we’re stirring our attention to alternatives to Super Nintendo Mini for Android.

Do note that most of the emulators listed below will be able to emulate other popular consoles of its era as well, such as Sega Gensis/Mega Drive 2, N64 (definitely try out GoldenEye and WWF No Mercy) and more (listed with the console).

John SNES

John SNES is exclusively an SNES emulator designed for Android 2.3 and up. In our tests we were unable to find a game that had compatibility issues with John SNES. It also comes with a built-in cheat engine, an on-screen keyboard and it scans SD Card and Internal storage for any installed games (including zipped files). You can save game states, so that you don’t have to restart your game from the beginning (admittedly it will sully the experience a little). You can speed up/slow down a game, and even supports any controllers connected via Bluetooth.

John SNES has two versions: full and lite. If you get the Lite version first, it can be seamlessly imported to the full version.

Matsu PSX Emulator

This is a multi-emulator supporting multiple consoles. Matsu PSX Emulator is intended for PlayStation 1 emulation (sadly PS2 emulation has not yet been perfected on mobiles), however, it also emulates other major platforms from before the 6th Generation of consoles (that’s everything released before 1998).

Presently it supports PS1, SNES, NES, GameBoy Advance, GameBoy Color, Wonder Swan Color, TurboGrax-16, MD/SMS/GG. They claim that they will add support for Play Station Portable, Nintendo Dual Screen, Nintendo 64 and SEGA DreamCast soon.

RetroArch

RetroArch is an open-source project that makes use of a powerful development interface called Libretro. Libretro is a cross-platform application API  that can use rich features such as OpenGL, and cross-platform camera support to bring some modern power to classic games. It comes with its own library of applications. RetroArch is a front-end of this powerful interface. It is available on practically every imaginable platform. RetroArch requires a little configuration before you can put it to full use, but it couldn’t be simpler:

Go to Online Updater > Core Updater

The disadvantage of such a platform is that it can become daunting at first sight, but the advantage is that you will have a very powerful, community driven emulator on your hands afterwards.

Snes9x EX+

The extravagantly named SNES9x EX+ is an advanced open-source SNES emulator based on the Snes9x 1.53 with near complete game compatibility (a rare title, or two, will have a conflict). Developers recommend it for devices with 1GHz+ CPU processing power, but rest assured you can always download an earlier version and make it work for your specific device.

Snes9x EX+ comes with a copy of the public domain game Bio Worm, the app scans your SD card for any imported games/demos. It picks up ROMs in .smc, .sfc and even in zip/rar/7z formats.

Super Retro 16

Super Retro 16 claims to be the best SNES emulator. It is designed on its own without the use of any external emulation engines. It features a nice interface and takes full use of the advanced hardware in modern phones (especially by SNES standards).

That being said Super Retro 16 adds CRT simulator shaders or high quality 2x/3x streams using chromecast, works well with Bluetooth controllers, and lets you play in multiplayer mode. That way you enjoy the simplicity of the old times with the power of modern hardware. In landscape mode, you see overlay controls, in portrait mode you see an SNES controller on the lower half of the screen and the game on the upper half.

For the cheaters among us, it fully supports a cheat engine as well as a turbo mode (to speed things up, if needed).

Classic Arcade Emulator

Gamers from the 90’s will remember that SNES spawned a cornucopia of copycats that used Nintendo’s boards. These systems came coupled with a few hundred popular games in it. The Classic Arcade Emulator brings that concept to Android. It comes coupled with 68 SNES games that you can start playing the moment you install it to your Android device.

You can see how self explanatory this medium is when even the developer description is “The simulator contains 68 classic arcade games, I wish you a happy play”. Even though the app’s text is in Chinese, the games are in standard English.

Edited by Alex Ion

So, have you tried any of the above? How did it go?

Unlocking the bootloader on Android phones has become easy ever since Android 5.0. The Settings app has an option under Developer settings that let you unlock it with just a tap. This hold true for almost all Android phones. The Samsung Galaxy S8/S9/Not 8 models are no different but there’s a bit of catch; you have to wait 7 days after registering your device to be able to unlock the bootloader. Assuming you bought either one of these devices and you do not want to wait a week to unlock the boatloader, there’s a little trick reported by XDA Developers that can unlock OEM Unlock on Samsung S8/S9/ Note 8 right away.

OEM Unlock On Samsung Galaxy S8/S9/Note 8

In order to unlock OEM Unlock on Samsung Galaxy S8/S9/Note 8 without having to wait an entire week, you need to change how time is set on the device, and how updates are received. Make sure you’ve already configured a Samsung and Google account on your device.

Open the Settings app and go to General Management. Here, look for Date and Time, and tap it. Disable Automatic date and time, and tap the Set Date option that becomes visible when you do.

Here, set the date to a day in the previous month. Make sure the date is at least over a week old.

Return to the main Settings app screen. You now need to enable Developer options. Tap About Phone, and find the build number for your device. Tap it seven times to enable developer options. Again, return to the main Settings app screen, and this time, tap Developer Options.

On the Developer Options screen, turn off the ‘Auto update system option’.

Again, return to the main Settings app screen and find and tap on Software Update. Disable Download updates automatically, and tap on Download Updates Manually. It may give you an error but that’s to be expected since the date is incorrect. Don’t worry about it and restart your phone.

Once you restart your phone, open the Settings app and go to Developer options. The OEM Unlock button should now be active.

This might seem like an annoying restriction but it’s possible that Samsung added it as a security measure. If your new phone is locked, and stolen, an unlocked bootloader makes it easier to get inside your phone and wipe it clean. It might also be there to prevent users from making any drastic changes to their device the second they get it.

Notifications on Android are generally grouped together. Gmail, for example will group all alerts into one notification. iOS did this, briefly, before removing the option and forcing its users to always view a mix of app alerts in chronological order. Notifix is a free Android app that can group notifications by app type. It adds an extra bit of grouping to the notifications shade whereby all notifications that are from a certain type of app are grouped together. You can pull down the notifications shade and Notifix will tell you how many social media notifications you have.

Notifix does not require a rooted device however, it will require usage access as well as access to your notifications. You will also need to connect your Google account with the app so it can keep your setting in sync. There is no option to use the app without connecting a Google account.

Group Notifications

Download Notifix and run the app. Grant it the permission it needs to run. Once you’ve done that, it will automatically group notifications by app type.

When you tap on a group of notifications, Notifix will expand to reveal the notifications inside. In the expanded view, the notifications will still be sorted by app type. This means if you have notifications from both Facebook and Instagram, the expanded view will group them separately.

Notifix doesn’t simply group notifications by app type based on an app’s name i.e. if the app is a popular social media app, it will be grouped as such. It utilizes machine learning to judge which group to put a notification.

Notifix doesn’t have much in the way of settings. You install the app and run it, as is. It’s meant to be a quick, ‘just works’ app which is great but comes with its downside. One reason anyone would want to use Notifix is to remove clutter from the notifications shade and highlight or give more space to what’s important but apps are all treated the same. Notifix doesn’t have an option to exclude certain apps from being grouped into a type.

This may not have any serious drawbacks for say, social media notifications but for messaging apps like Slack that may be sending you work related alerts, it’s not the same. The good news is that this app is under active development and the developers are open to suggestions. An easy way to exclude apps would be great and maybe giving users the option to name their own categories for grouping notifications could be helpful.

Twitter has a dark theme that you can enable on its smartphone apps and on the web version. This dark theme is called night mode and is meant to make using Twitter at night easier on the eyes. Night mode, in fact most dark themes, don’t use black. Instead, they use dark greys and for the most part, it does the job. If you wanted an even darker, theme on Twitter, and you use an iOS device, you’re in luck. There’s a new lights out dark mode on Twitter for iOS that you can enable if the Night Mode isn’t good enough. This new dark mode was added via a recent app update and this update also lets you schedule when Night mode is turned on/off.

Lights out dark mode

Make sure you’re running the latest version of the Twitter app. Open the app and swipe right. At the bottom left of the navigation drawer, you will see a light bulb icon. Tap, and hold on it.

When you tap and hold on the bulb icon, a menu will open. Turn on Dark Mode in this menu, and select the ‘Lights out’ option. Night Mode now has two versions; the Dim version which was the original night mode/dark mode, and the Lights out version which is the new, blacker version.

If you want to try the new dark mode scheduling feature, you can enable that as well from this same panel.

The original dark mode on Twitter didn’t go with grey. Instead, it went with dark blue which made the blue Twitter logo stand out but also made browsing easier on the eyes. Lights Out is a mix of grey and black. You will still see a bit of blue but it’s reserved for highlighting when you have new notifications, and which tab you’re currently on. The buttons are mostly in blue but the text is white on black.

The change, with respect to which mode is easier on the eyes, is minimal. This new mode is for iPhones with an AMOLED screen. The black will not only look better on these devices but will also help save battery. The lights out mode will be available on Android soon, and eventually on the web version. There are quite a few popular Android phones with AMOLED displays so it won’t be long until this same feature arrives on Twitter for Android. As for the web version, it could take a while for lights out to be rolled out to it.

WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps in the niche. Its second only to Facebook Messenger. They’re both owned by Facebook so whatever way you look at it, Facebook owns the two most popular messaging apps available today. Unlike Messenger, WhatsApp works with your phone number and it’s a lot easier to know which of your contacts use it. There’s also the fact that WhatsApp has end to end encryption and it lets you share files pretty easily that make it a popular app. If you have one too many active chat threads, you might have trouble keeping track of the important ones. That’s why WhatsApp has added a new pin feature. You can pin a chat in WhatsApp to the top of the Chat tab and it won’t get lost among the other message threads.

This feature was added via an app update so make sure you’re running the latest version of WhatsApp. The update is already available worldwide so there’s nothing to wait for. All you need to do is update the app.

Open WhatsApp and go to the Chat tab. Swipe right on the chat thread you want to pin. Don’t swipe all the way to the right edge of the screen. This will mark messages in the thread as read or unread. Swipe right until you see two buttons; Read, and Pin. Tap the Pin button to pin a chat in WhatsApp.

A pinned thread has a pin icon on the right edge. To unpin a thread, swipe right again and tap the ‘Unpin’ button.

Pinned chats appear at the top of the Chat screen. It’s an easy way to keep track of them. Normally, the sequence the chat threads appear in changes based on recent messages. This means that if you have a muted group or contact with a new message, it will be pushed to the top. This will obviously push other more important threads down. If you use WhatsApp to communicate with a lot of people, just finding an important thread can become a challenge. In both cases, a pinned chat thread can make life easier.

The pinned thread will not change its position if a new message is sent or received over it. New chat threads that you pin are added to the top which means the ones you pinned before it will be pushed down. You have to be mindful not to overuse this feature. If you pin one too many chats, you will have to search through them too in the end.

Microsoft Edge, the preview version, is now available for iOS and Android. According to Microsoft, people wanted Edge on iOS and Android. The apps aren’t available on the respective app stores just yet. They’re still in beta but it’s a public beta. If you’re interested in checking out the app, you can sign up for the Microsoft Edge preview. There’s just one condition; you must be a Windows Insider user. It’s not enough that you simply join the program. You’re going to need a desktop or laptop that is actually running one of the recent builds.

Get Microsoft Edge Preview

On a system running a Windows Insider build, visit this link. Choose the device you want to install Microsoft Edge preview on. This will open Microsoft Edge on your desktop. It will detect if you’re indeed running an insider build.

If you want to download Microsoft Edge preview for iOS, you need to enter you name, and your Apple ID. Beta builds of any app are installed on iOS via an app called TestFlight. You must have this app installed on whichever iOS device you plan to run Microsoft Edge preview on.

If you want to download Microsoft Edge Preview for Android, you need only enter your email address.

Once you’ve signed up, check your email. iOS users will get a code to enter in TestFlight. Android users will likely be redirected to a Google Play Store where they can join the beta program. The email can take up to 24-hours to arrive. Since this is Microsoft, give them a few days.

Android Launcher

Microsoft already has Cortana available for both platforms and there’s also the Continue On PC app that lets you connect your phone to Windows 10 to sync clipboard, browsing sessions, and notifications in the Fall Creators Update. Still, the company is looking to do more on Android and has also announced a launcher.

It notes that Android, unlike iOS, lets users customize the app launcher which is why they’re releasing Microsoft Launcher for Android. This app is also in preview though you do not need to be on the Insider program to become a beta tester. Simply go hear to join the beta program and download it to your device. Once installed, the app will ask if you want to replace your current launcher with it. Go ahead and make the change.

Microsoft claims the launcher is very customizable, looks good, and of course has a great news feed.

A lot is lost in text conversations. A text you send or receive might make it seem as though the sender is angry, impatient, being sarcastic, or just plain rude. That tends to happen when your mode of communication is as dry as email. With texting or chat apps, things tend to get more vague with people using ‘text speak’. One way around this is to use emoji but, despite the many technical advances made in the past decade, we still don’t have an emoji standard. Emoji look different on iOS and Android. Emoji Platform Translator is a web app that lets you translate iOS emoji for Android users and see what the look like on iOS.

Emoji Platform Translator is best used from your iPhone. Visit the app in Chrome or Safari, or whichever browser you prefer to use. It should work in most modern iOS browsers. If you find it isn’t working, try switching to Safari.

Translate iOS Emoji For Android

Emoji Platform Translator can ‘translate’ one or multiple emoji at once. In the ‘Your message on iOS’ field, enter the emoji you want to use via the emoji keyboard in iOS. Tap ‘Translate’.

Emoji Platform Translator will show you what each emoji looks like on an Android device.  To look up a different set of emoji, simply delete the ones you’ve already entered, and enter a new one. Tap ‘Translate’ again, and the app will translate the new emoji for you.

Limitations

This app can translate emoji from iOS to the latest version of Android. If you keep up with Android development news, you might know that Google has removed the beloved blob emoji and replaced it with a more traditional set of emoji. These emoji are more similar to the ones you’d find on iOS or even on Facebook. It’s also the set that Emoji Platform Translator uses to translate emoji. If you’re sending a text to someone who is still using blob emoji, this tool won’t be of much help. Similarly, some phone manufacturers like Samsung tend to add their own set of emoji which is different even from the default Android ones. If your recipient is using such a phone, they might see emoji very differently.

There’s no simple way around this. Emoji, of all things, should be standardized. The app in itself is simple and it works great but it falls short of meeting common needs. It ought to support more than just the default Android emoji especially considering how much fragmentation there is and how much Android users love to modify their devices.

Social media is generally regarded as a way to share something, anything, with lots of people. Every social media platform has its own way of sharing but what they all have in common is that you build your audience via friends or followers. Instagram is no different; you build your followers, and likewise follow accounts that interest you. As with any other social media, the accounts you follow don’t always post content that you’re interested in. Sometimes, they’ll post about one topic for so long it will clutter your feed which is why Instagram has added a feature to mute an Instagram account.

Muting an Instagram account is the equivalent of unfollowing someone on Facebook. You still remain friends with the person but you no longer see posts from them in your home feed. The person is unaware that they’ve been muted. Twitter has a similar mute feature.

Mute An Instagram Account

This is a new feature that is slowly rolling out to users. It will be available to both iOS and Android users. Make sure the Instagram app is up to date and it ought to appear soon if it hasn’t already rolled out for your account.

To mute an Instagram account, open the app and scroll through your home feed. When you see a post from an account that you want to mute, tap the three little dots at the top right of the post.

In the menu that opens, tap the ‘Mute’ option. You can mute posts, or posts and story for the account. Alternatively, you can mute an Instagram account by going to the account and tapping the three dots button at the top right. A menu will open with a Mute option.

To unmute an account, visit the account’s page and tap the three dots button at the top right. For a muted account, the menu that opens will have an unmute option. Tap it, and posts from the account will start appearing in your home feed once again.

Like the mute options on other social media platforms, the user you mute will not be aware that you’ve muted them. Likewise, when you unmute a user, they will not know about it. Muting is nothing like blocking a user. When you mute an account, you only block their posts from appearing in your feed. The account, if it follows you, will still see all your posts and everything you post to your story. If a user mutes you, you won’t know about it either.