Author: Clinton

In a move that makes all kinds of sense, Evernote has moved the premium feature of being able to lock your note with a passcode to their free tier.  This means every users of the service can lock their notes from prying eyes.  This is great to see as it corrects something I personally never liked about Evernote:  Security should not be a premium option.  It should be there by default.

I have been a user of the service since 2011 and a premium user of the service (for other reasons) so the ability to associate a PIN with the app has always been there for me.  It prevents anyone from picking up your phone, opening the app, and reading your notes.  It is simple yes but does the job.  In my mind, Evernote has corrected a wrong with this change.

The podcast app Pocket Casts has received a healthy update this morning, bringing with it a host of bug fixes and other stability improvements.  Pocket Casts is by far my favorite podcast app for Android with its ability to sync between my devices and generally good performance.  The update, however, aims to improve that performance and stability.  The updated build is 5.4.1.324 for those keeping score at home and is available now in the Play Store.

It is now official.  Unicode 9.0 has been ratified and is now available for companies like Google to start baking into their platforms.  We already know that Android N will support the standard out-of-the-box but it is possible that Marshmallow could see it in a future update as well.  In all there are 7,500 characters added to the standard along with 72 new emoji.

One of the more powerful features of Android is the Do Not Disturb function.  It is a feature that has grown in functionality over the life of Android Lollipop and Marshmallow (spoiler alert:  It gets further tweaks in N) for keeping your phone quite while you sleep, at the theater or in a meeting.  Did you know though that you can set up a DND for events from your calendar?  It is a feature that is handy by not requiring you to manually turn on Do Not Disturb before a meeting begins.  In this How To I’ll show you how to set it up.

Twitter has announced on their blog that users can now upload videos up to 140 seconds in length.  The change is effectively immediately and is a huge jump from the previous 30 second limit that the micro-blogging service had on video uploads.

Now, everyone can post videos up to 140 seconds long! We can’t wait to see the amazing videos you create and share.https://t.co/DFsuvnXkuL

— Twitter Video (@video) June 21, 2016

Twitter has acknowledged that video uploading is an ever increasing way that individuals and organizations use the service and the increase in video length only makes sense for everyone involved.

The Nextbit Robin, the flagship phone from the Silicon Valley startup, has dropped to $299 pretty much across the board now, including at the Nextbit store.  For the last few weeks you’ve been able to get the $299 price on Amazon but now pretty much everyone has it for this price.  For those who may not remember, this was the same price for the Robin during the company’s Kickstarter program last year and for a 32GB, Marshmallow running device, it is a great deal.