swipe

Flipboard: Your Social News Magazine 2.0 Review

In an age of information overload, apps like Flipboard provide the much- needed organization and curation tools to keep it all in one place. By taking your RSS subscriptions, Twitter account, Facebook account, and other online accounts and combining them into one easy-to-use interface, Flipboard simplifies the consumption of information on an iPad and makes it faster and easier than ever before to get what you need from your device.

When you first open Flipboard, you'll be prompted to create an account. This account will store all of your subscriptions, and you can choose to either create a new … Read more

Enable swipe-to-delete in Gmail 4.2 on Android

One feature Android users have been asking for in the Gmail app has been the ability to swipe and delete or archive a message. With the release of Gmail 4.2, that's now possible.

By default, the swipe gesture is set to archive or delete a message, depending on whether the message has already been archived. Should you want to change it to always delete (or disable the feature altogether), you'll need to dive into the settings.

To enable swipe-to-delete, make sure you have the latest version of Gmail running on your Android device. After you've updated, … Read more

The best way to browse news and social on iOS

Flipboard is a must-have newsreader and social network hub that lets you organize the info you want to look at and then flip through it like a magazine. Get started by creating an account with Flipboard, then sign in to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Once you're all signed in, Flipboard presents you with an intuitive layout of your social networks and some default news categories to browse. Touching a panel lets you browse through any of the default categories. But touching and holding a panel lets you delete it and replace it with whatever you want. To customize … Read more

Twitter restores popular features to its iPhone, Android apps

Twitter has again tweaked its iPhone and Android apps, reviving a few "high-demand" features that were jettisoned from the previous versions, as described yesterday in Twitter's official blog.

Both apps have brought back the swipe shortcut. Swiping a tweet in your timeline now displays the toolbar of icons that let you reply to, retweet, share, or view the tweeter's profile all without having to exit the timeline.

And both versions have added a new alert to the "Find Friends" feature. Now when you tap on the feature at the bottom of the Discover tab, … Read more

'Reverse smudge engineering' foils Android unlock security

Eat a lot of potato chips? Then consider avoiding one of the ways Google offers to unlock an Android device.

Google's mobile operating system lets people unlock devices by swiping a particular pattern across a three-by-three grid of dots. But Android evangelist Tim Bray raised a concern about "reverse smudge engineering" to figure out the unlock pattern.

"A couple of colleagues had my original Galaxy Tab and needed to use it for something, but I wasn't there. They managed to figure out my pattern by looking at the fingerprints on the glass, and it only … Read more

New speedy swipe gesture may be on the way to iOS

Apple's iOS 5 added a handful of multi-finger gestures for iPad users, and a new patent filing suggests more could be on the way to it and other iOS devices as part of a future software update.

A newly published patent application from Apple, pulled up by PatentlyApple today, details just such an addition. The application cited the difficulties in seeing what's on screen with small-screened devices when moving through content using swiping finger gestures. Called "systems and methods for displaying visual information on a device," it proposes a solution in the form of two possible … Read more

Offbeat music apps for iOS

One of the greatest things about the iPhone (or any smartphone) is that it has music listening capabilities so you can bring your tunes with you anywhere. Also, with tons of music apps in the iTunes App Store, you have even more ways to listen to, edit, mix, and organize your music.

There are many apps in the app store for listening to music, like the popular Pandora Radio that's great for music discovery, or Djay for iPhone that lets you mix and scratch with your music. But there are also some music apps that are in a league by themselves--the ones that are admittedly quirky, but still quite useful to music lovers.

This week's collection of apps are all unique music tools. The first lets you stream your music to game consoles; the second auto-matches rhythms for beat synced mixes; and the third offers a gesture-based interface for easy control of your music.… Read more

Control your music with swipes

CarTunes Music Player is the perfect app for the road or the gym. It lets you use gestures as music controls so you don't need to look at the device to control your music.

Upon launch, CarTunes will go through a brief tutorial showing you the main gestures to play a song, how to quickly move from track to track, and other options using a swipe-controlled interface. Simply touch to play, swipe left or right to switch tracks, or touch and hold in the middle to control a volume knob. To add songs and control the apps settings, swipe … Read more

Apple wins patent for critically important iOS swipe-to-scroll gesture

Two years before the first iPhone, Apple applied for a patent that has become one of the staple gestures of the iOS platform. I recall when we first received the original iPhone at the Apple Store (where I was the Lead Specialist). We unboxed and powered-on a demo unit and the first thing we did was swipe through the preloaded iTunes playlist, amazed by Apple's new mobile operating system.

It is that gesture, the basic swipe-to-scroll motion that is one of the true signatures of Apple's iOS platform, that has been approved by the United States Patent and … Read more