While 2020 has been brutal on the whole, it’s been an unusually fruitful year for apps. In part, that’s because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has upended the ways we live and work for the foreseeable future. We’ve seen a glut of new and upgraded tools for working from home, of course, along with more apps to help us preserve our mental well-being.
To avoid the obvious, this list of 2020’s best apps won’t include the likes of Zoom and Slack—the stuff you already know about. But our mix does include some lesser-known ways to make those apps even better. Here are the best new and significantly upgraded apps of the year:
Better together
Unpresumptuous scheduling: While there are plenty of tools that promise to simplify event scheduling, Available for Gmail does so without any tacky branded widgets or awkward third-party websites to visit. The free Chrome extension adds a calendar button to Gmail’s compose window, letting you pick times from Google Calendar through a pop-up menu. Once you’ve chosen some meeting slots, the extension inserts them into the email as plain text so recipients can respond with their preferred time. It’s not as slick as other scheduling solutions like Calendly and Boomerang, but that’s the point. [Chrome]
Apple adds more functions to the iPhone every year, but the more it can do, the more complicated it gets.
If you recently got a new iPhone after sitting out several generations — or maybe just don’t fiddle around with your phone a lot — you might be missing out on some easy ways to get more done, faster. The iPhone has a bunch of “hidden” menus that help you do things like search across apps, go back to the last screen, find widgets that show snapshots of certain information, or quickly turn your Wi-Fi off and on.
Cappadocia is a comune and town with approximately 550 inhabitants in the province of L’Aquila in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. It is part of Marsica. It’s also part of the “Borghi autentici d’Italia” club
The area, collected in the Valley of The Nerfa, between the south-ovest versant of the Caresolain Mountains (Padiglione and Aurunzo), and marks the border between Abruzzo and Lazio, in the center of the Appenino Centrale Abbruzzese.
It’s 100 km to Rome 135 km to Pescara, 68 to L’Aquila and 22 from Avezzano. In the comune are included the frazione of Petrella Liri, Verrechie and the touristic destination of Camporotondo, collocated on the Cesca Mountains, and the Homonym ski station.
If you’re a WhatsApp user, you will have seen the alarming stories warning about the messaging platform’s surprise privacy changes, many suggesting you switch to alternatives. The good news is you don’t need to do that—WhatsApp is still okay to use. The bad news, though, is that you do need to change these critical settings to stay safe.
WhatsApp is changing. The messaging platform has now confirmed changes first announced in October, that open up further data sharing with Facebook. This last week has been the toughest for WhatsApp since the damaging spyware revelations in 2019. The idea that the world’s largest private messenger will share data with the world’s most ruthless data machine has prompted a backlash. Installs of rival messengers are soaring, up hundreds of percent in the last few days.
Time for some perspective. Your most private and sensitive data on WhatsApp, your messages, will remain private to you and the people you communicate with; messages are end-to-end encrypted as they’re sent—only you and the other side of each message can decrypt its content. Even WhatsApp has no means of accessing the content in transit, while the messages on your phone are protected by the security of your device.
All of those obnoxious marketing emails that crowd your inbox aren’t just pushing a product. They’re also tracking whether you’ve opened the email, when you opened it, and where you were at the time by using software like MailChimp to embed tracking software into the message.
How does it work? A single tracking pixel is embedded into the email, usually (but not always) hidden within an image or a link. When the email is opened, the code within the pixel sends the info back to the company’s server.
There have been some attempts to restrict the amount of information that can be transmitted this way. For example, since 2014, Google has served all images through its own proxy servers, which could hide your location from at least some tracking applications. And extensions such as Ugly Email and PixelBlock have been developed to block trackers on Chrome and Firefox.
When the pandemic upended our lives, many of us were forced to stay home and shift our work and hobbies to the internet. Office meetings and classrooms were replaced with video calls. We binged on Netflix, played more video games, and shopped online.
The result: We slammed our home Wi-Fi networks with more devices that were doing more than ever before. Our congested internet connections, which contributed to spotty video calls and sluggish downloads, became the No. 1 tech headache.
Now a new generation of Wi-Fi, known as Wi-Fi 6, has arrived to solve this problem. It brings faster speeds and broader coverage. Most important, wireless technology does a better job sharing a data connection more efficiently across a large number of household devices, like phones, tablets, computers, smart speakers, and TVs.
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Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
[Photo: Dousan_Miao/iStock]
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James' World 2 