Use Your i. Phone’s Battery To Learn Where Your Time Goes. We’ve all done it. Thrown ourselves onto the couch, phone in hand, determined to like only a few Instagram pictures of dogs in backpacks and inspirational calligraphy work. Three hours later, you realize you’ve done nothing but make yourself feel a little bit sadder (your calligraphy work is just fine, by the way). You’re able to track the time you spend on your computer pretty easily thanks to a host of time management apps, but not many exist for your i. Phone, mostly for security reasons. There are apps like Moment, sure, but if you don’t want to pay for an app that makes you take screenshots every morning to tell you what you’ve been doing the day before, your i. ![]() Phone itself will tell you where the last few minutes (or days) went, if you know where to look. Apple’s latest Mac. Book Pro refresh has its fair share of detractors, and for good reason—changes…Read more Instead of taking up phone space with an extra app, you can find out where your precious minutes get spent by visiting your i. Phone’s Battery section, according to The Next Web. InformationWeek.com: News, analysis and research for business technology professionals, plus peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.Engage with our community.The voice interfaces Cortana and Alexa will soon be able to activate each other for functions that one does better than the other, Amazon and Microsoft announced.You should be checking out the Battery section anyway, especially if you’re running low on juice.You can place your smartphone into “Low Power Mode,” stopping. BibMe Free Bibliography & Citation Maker - MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard. ![]() When you hit Settings and tap the Battery section, scroll down to the Battery Usage section (give it a second or two to compose itself).The Battery Usage section tells you how much battery power each app has consumed over either the past 2.Here’s where you can find out where you truly spend your time when you’re looking at your phone.Tapping the clock icon next to the “Last 7 Days” button displays the amount of time apps have spent on your phone’s screen.That will reveal the amount of time and power apps have spent both on your screen—presumably while you’re staring at it—as well as in the background. For myself, the podcast app Overcast has logged the most background time, with 2. As for the app my eyeballs use the most, it seems to be Twitter (ugh), with nearly 4 hours of screen time within the past seven days. You should be checking out the Battery section anyway, especially if you’re running low on juice. You can place your smartphone into “Low Power Mode,” stopping automatic downloads, ending background refreshing, and reducing visual effects. It’s also where you can toggle the numeric battery percentage display in the top right corner of your screen. That granular bit of information might be enough to make you put the Facebook away and close your eyes for a second or two. This hidden i. OS function shows how much time you’re wasting on which apps | The Next Web. Alexa and Cortana Teamed Up, But Consumer Tech Is Still Stuck in an Ecosystem War. The voice interfaces Cortana and Alexa will soon be able to activate each other for functions that one does better than the other, Amazon and Microsoft announced today. It’s the kind of cooperation that we don’t see enough between the Big Five, or really any company that’s grown out of its “desperately cobble together partnerships so we look relevant” phase and into its “abandon all cooperation that doesn’t lock customers into our shitty ecosystem” phase. Cortana and Alexa’s competitors, Google Assistant and Siri, won’t be integrating any time soon. As Gizmodo notes, Google and Apple have far more users locked into their ecosystems, so they have far less incentive to cooperate with competing systems. By combining forces, Microsoft and Amazon are admitting they’ve lost the war for mobile, (the dominant user interface now), and holding onto their own core competencies: Microsoft for business communication, Amazon for consumption. Meanwhile, though Google Assistant runs on i. OS, it’s very limited and can’t be activated without opening an app. Siri won’t run at all on Android. And even on its native platform, Siri won’t control best- in- class apps like Spotify, Gmail, or Google Maps. ![]() Google Assistant is more flexible, but it can’t order things on Amazon the way Alexa can. You can run Alexa on Android, but only through Amazon’s app, and again with limitations.)Your device also won’t play well with a competing desktop OS; Apple’s Handoff and i. Cloud make i. Phones and Macs work together seamlessly, whereas coordinating an Android phone with a Mac is clunky, and plugging an i. Phone into a Windows machine is eye- twitchingly uncomfortable, thanks to Apple’s lousy Windows port of i. Tunes. The TV ecosystem is just as bad, largely thanks to Amazon’s own selfish decisions. Amazon still hasn’t released its promised Apple TV app, so Prime customers have to stream Transparent and Curb Your Enthusiasm from their phones. There are no plans for an Amazon app on the Chromecast, or for Spotify on Apple TV. You can retreat to a third- party media player like Roku, but then you can’t play videos purchased through i. Tunes without a wonky file conversion. Starting at the end of this month, Amazon will no longer sell the Chromecast or Apple TV. And…Read more Meanwhile, Facebook runs around kind- of integrating with all these other services while trying to push its own messaging and sharing platforms, and burying every post that dares link to You. Tube or Twitter. As a customer choosing a phone, computer, and media player, you’re stuck with three choices: Buy into an ecosystem that inevitably has some crappy elements. You could choose Google, and miss out on Apple’s slick interface and seamless desktop- to- mobile integration. Or choose Apple, lose a lot of third- party functionality, and get locked into increasingly bizarre design choices (your Lightning headphones won’t work on your laptop) and inferior software like Apple Maps, Mail, and Calendar. On desktop, choose Windows and miss out on that same integration, or choose Apple, pay more for the same computing power, and get your computer games a year late. Straddle ecosystems, running the Google Suite instead of MS Office and hooking your i. Phone up to your PC or your Android to your Mac. Run Spotify, buy an Echo, and live with their limited capabilities. Maybe even run Excel on OS X. All but the most basic users reach outside their main ecosystem at some point. Install Linux on your Chromebook, jailbreak your i. Phone, run Cortana on your Fit. Bit, hack your Echo to play Tidal, and write a viral Medium post encouraging people to “unplug.”In the short term, all these companies have good reasons to lock up their platforms wherever they still think they can steal market share from the others, and wherever they would rather focus resources on improving their own service instead of handing millions of customers to their competitors through a partnership.But in the long term, this lock- in keeps the Big Five from innovating, their products leaning on the crutch of the ecosystem, alienating customers who will then abandon the ecosystem for third- party services like Spotify, Dropbox, Whats.App, 1. Password, and Overcast. OS has a bunch of great podcast managers these days, but after testing all of them, our favorite…Read more Historically, these ecosystems tend to open up, making way for the next battle. Macs and PCs didn’t always run so many of the same apps. Internet Explorer and Netscape were much more mutually exclusive than Chrome and Safari. And for a while, your Internet came in flavors of AOL, Prodigy, or Compu. Serve. Even Android and i. OS used to have zero apps in common. But each time, interoperability won out, bringing (most of) each platform’s strengths to everyone. But things could get worse before they get better. The Big Five are all racing to win at online payments, wearables, AI, AR, VR, smart homes, smart cars, and the growing Internet of Things. And as long as each company thinks it can win, it will try to push out the others instead of playing nice. Eventually there will be winners and losers, or decentralized cooperation. Every now and then, a new protocol will open up that’s as decentralized as email or HTTP. And the giants of the day will move onto a new fight. In the meantime, there’s nearly always some way to force the ecosystems to play together, at the expense of simplicity and not having your shit constantly break. There’s always some third option to jimmy into the gap and outperform all the defaults. And that’s what Lifehacker’s all about.
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November 2017
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