Digital Idea

M y  work involves prioritizing, organizing and managing tasks, information and ideas. I have tried hundreds of todo lists and project management tools to get the job done but finally settled on using Trello. It is now my swiss knife where I do everything from collaborating with my wife on shopping lists to building products for my company to teaching students to writing a book. Trello  provides a very flexible way to do this all and it has a whole ecosystem of  apps and extensions  to make your life simpler. If you are new to Trello, here’s a getting started guide that will help you understand the basics of Trello and how you can use the service to manage work and get things done. What is Trello and why I need it? Trello is like a todo list on steroids. At the core of it is a card which is the fundamental unit of information and it can be around lists. Here is a simple Trello card. It has a title with something I plan to do in the ne...

H o w do you get SMS notifications on your mobile phone for important emails in your Gmail? Google doesn’t support text notifications for their email service but Twitter does. If we can figure out a way to connect our Twitter and Gmail accounts, the Gmail notifications can arrive as text on our mobile via Twitter. Let me explain: Twitter allows you to follow any @user via a simple SMS. They provide short codes for all countries ( see list ) and if you text FOLLOW to this shortcode following by the  username, any tweets from that user will arrive in your phone as text notifications. For instance, if you are in the US, you can tweet  FOLLOW labnol  to  40404  to get my tweets as text messages. Similarly, users in India can text FOLLOW labnol to  9248948837  to get the tweets via SMS. The short code service of Twitter can act as a Gmail SMS notifier. You create a new Twitter account, set the privacy to private and this account...

Let's say you're from France and have set up - just for examples sake - a blog called frenchlitgeek.blogspot.com where you share your thoughts and insights on French literature. Now, with Google's  country specific redirection in Blogger , you might be redirected to frenchlitgeek.blogspot.fr when you try to access your site. The thing is, you perfectly liked the .com and didn't sign up for the .fr but you find yourself being directed there. Sure, your blog works and all but you also wonder why. Why Did Google Do This? Google has always supported the expression of views, and they stated as much on their  official blog . In the post  Free expression and controversial content on the web , which was published in 2007, it said "Our world would be a very boring place if we all agreed all the time. So, while people may strongly disagree with what someone says, or think that a particular newspaper is total nonsense, we recognize that each of us have the right to an opi...

Capturing screenshots on a mobile phone is easy. If you have an iPhone, press the Home & Sleep buttons and the screenshot image will be saved in the Photos app. Android users can press the Volume Down & Power button simultaneously to capture the screen. And in the case of Windows Phone, press and hold the Start and Power buttons at the same time to take a screenshot. That’s a raw screenshot saved in your camera roll but if you would like to use that image in your website, a presentation or even in your Apps Store listing, consider adding device frames. This is important because people should be able to figure out whether a screenshot was captured on an iPhone or a Microsoft Lumia or a Google Nexus phone. The device frames can be actual photographs so your screenshot images appear gorgeous and more realistic. Realistic Device Mockups for Beautiful App Screenshots A layered photo editing tool like Adobe Photoshop (Win/Mac) or Pixelmator (Mac) makes it really ea...

There are apps and widgets for almost everything, but one thing that is lacking is a widget that connects one of the most popular image-based social network to your website. Unfortunately, Instagram has yet to design an official widget that will allow you to easily and quickly embed grams on your website. A widget is like a desk accessory that allows an end user to execute a particular function within a webpage. It fetches information from a particular source and then display it on an intended area. It can be designed to provide easy accessibility to weather, maps, sports updates, calendar and many others. Android and WordPress are two of the biggest contributors of web and mobile widgets, but Instagram still has to catch up. While they're still trying to figure out how to make an Instagram widget, take advantage of any of the third-party widgets for Instagram. But because there are plenty of them out there, choosing the right one can be tough. Well, we did the sorting and guess...

Your Android mobile phone includes a built-in app to help you visually monitor the battery usage pattern. Go to  Settings  >  Battery  (the app’s location may vary for your version of Android) and you’ll see a history graph detailing which apps have been consuming the most battery power and how long you can use the device before the battery is completely drained off. If you observe the Android battery graph more closely, you’ll find some other interesting details as well. For instance, you’ll know the pattern of your mobile signal strength, how often apps running in the background ‘wake up’ your sleeping device and so on. This is the main battery graph and is easy to interpret. If there are any breaks, it indicates that the device was powered off during that period. If there are any red or yellow lines over the graph, it indicates that the charge was critically low during that period. The gray area represents the approximate remainin...

If you're using Blogger as the platform for your personal or business blog, you're probably looking for ways to customize it and make it your own. This way, you'll make your webpages unique and eye-catching and ensure they'll stand out from the many other pages on the internet. You'll also grab the attention of your target market, encourage them to browse through your blog and become your loyal readers and followers. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to personalize your Blogger blog, and one of these is to customize your Popular Posts widget. Haven't installed this yet? Don't worry since putting it in your blog easy. Adding the Popular Posts Widget for Blogger Just click on your blog title, access the Layout menu, click "Add Widget" and choose "Popular Posts". A window will appear asking you to configure the widget by choosing which posts you'll feature (e.g. those that were most viewed in the past 7 days or 30 days or fro...