What does the blue light from displays do to you?

Other than sun, TV screens, computer screens, tablets and smartphone screens all produce blue light. Blue light has a very short wavelength. Since shorter the wavelength, higher the energy, the incidence of blue lights to our eyes, tricks our brain to think that it's a daytime.

Looking at computer or smartphone screens at daytime is not the problem. The real issue is our brain tricked by the screens that it's a bright day even if it is 2 AM and the body is tired as hell. The blue light from these screens makes us feel active at night which might make us not able to sleep. A lot of research has led to this conclusion and researchers has recommended to not use cell phones or any other devices with bright screens or even bright white room lights. People should dim everything in their room with warm colours at night. Colours with warm temperatures do exactly opposite to what the blue light does. It is said to make the eyes lazy, which is better for a good sleep.

But in this tech-savvy world, no one likes to stay away from their phones even for a minute. People these days wake up with their phones and goes to sleep with their phones. This has hugely hampered the sleep quality of millions of people using the smartphone and it is really important for them to understand what are they doing to themselves using the smartphones at night.

Since warm light helps in gaining quality sleep. Smartphones have been coming with a feature that reduces blue light. iPhone, the leading smartphone brand announced a feature called night shift since ios 9.3. Android phones have been having this feature way before than iPhone. There are tons of apps that are available in the play store to block blue light from the smartphone screen. One app that is best in doing so is an app available in the Google Play Store is Opti Care - Blue Light Filter.

Opti Care - Blue Light Filter is an ultimate app to protect your eyes from the harmful blue light as well as it has a feature that reminds you to take eye breaks from time to time. It provides you with very customizable overlay. You can change the temperature of the overlay, control the intensity and apply a dark overlay to make it seem like the brightness is below the system allows. You can manually toggle the blue light ON or OFF or, you can make it turn ON after the sunset and to automatically turn OFF in the morning. The other feature, which is the eye break reminder feature helps you avoid eye stress while looking at the screen. By default, it is set to the 20-20-20 rule, which is thought be the perfect break rule for the eye according to the researchers. 20-20-20 rule means, Every 20 minutes, look 20ft. away for 20 seconds. Which I think provides enough exercise to the eye.

Some other good apps are Twilight, f.lux.

How to Theme your Chrome Browser with Material Design on PC

Google is testing some new design features the Google Chrome on PC. They are trying to style it with material design, with those ripple effects, depths, etc. Since they are just testing with it, we can't see the customized chrome without some tweaks with the browser. Here are the steps you need to follow to make your chrome browser fully material:

1. Go to chrome://flags/
2. Scroll down to "Material design in the browser's top chrome"
3. Change the option to "Material"
4. Now go for "Enable Material Design policy page"
5. Change it to "enabled"
6. Again scroll down to "Enable Material Design downloads"
7. Set it to "enabled"
8. Click the "Relaunch Now" button on the bottom or manually relaunch chrome

There you go, now you'll get the ripple effects on your buttons, everything will be flat, and many other changes will occur.

The biggest flaw with Samsung Galaxy S7

No doubt Samsung Galaxy S7 is the best looking and super powerful piece of smartphone tech yet.
It has got everything that a perfect smart phone has to offer, except one thing, a common software ecosystem. I don't hate Android but in the real world battle, iOS is still the best in terms of privacy, security and the ecosystem. iOS is more polished, beautiful and every time a new update for the OS is released, the update comes right on to your device on the same day. No matter your device is 5 or 6 years old, the update comes in, until it fully support the update. But in Android devices, if a new version/update arrives, all the device manufacturer has to modify the update(the new code) to fit the phone's configuration as every Android device's model are different. Most of the device manufacturers doesn't bother about this, even Google with its own Nexus devices, the support only lasts for two years. So even if you buy the 'Perfect Device' (which won't cheap) running Android OS then it won't remain perfect after one or two years, but with devices like iPhone, iPad, etc, the device always feels new. More than half of the people use Apple devices, which is a win for Apple. So in the current situation iOS with perfect hardware like Samsung Galaxy S7 would be the perfect Smart Phone. Hope Apple will make an iPhone like/or better than the Galaxy S7. Please Apple, do that, please!

How to make your android experience more fluid

Android is already a pretty smooth experience, but still if you've got the not so good hardware on your phone you can see glitches here and there, also even if your android device works good, and if you want it to be more faster then you can use these tips:

1. NEVER KILL APPS OR CLEAN APP CACHE
Apps can automatically get back if you manually kill them. When you kill them, the next time it is used it needs more memory to start up, hence your phone will go slow if it has low memory and it will drain the battery too, so using cleaning apps in your phone is a bad idea, they end up making your phone more slow. Another bad thing you keep doing to free that storage is erasing the app cache. Cache is a good thing, it stores data that the app needs right away when it is starting up. If you delete them the app again needs to create them or fetch them from the Internet, which is a lot of work and makes the experience slow.

2. Disabling or speeding up the Animations.
Animations needs some memory and processing to perform, though make the experience look beautiful, they might slow you phone. Animations work frame by frame which means there are images constantly changing or moving. Speeding the animations can save up a little time and makes the experience fluid, you can do this by going to the settings app. If you can't see 'Developer Options' category at the bottom of the settings, then you need to follow these steps, but if there is already a 'Developer Options' category then you can skip these:
1. Goto About phone from the settings app
2. Tap the build number 7 or 8 times until you become a developer
Once you are a developer you can see the Developer options

Now, inside developer options, scroll down to where the heading is 'drawing', there you can find three options saying
- Window Animation Scale
-Transition Animation Scale
-Animator Duration Scale
Now all you have to do is tweak these settings. Most of them are set to '1x' which is okay, but '.5x' better is seems faster. Set all the three to '.5x' or if your phone has even less than that then select that, maybe '.25x', you can also turn all the animations off.

These won't make your phone fly but this will surely increase your phone's performance.

Android N Preview: Here's everything that you need to know

Google was quite early with this new version of Android code named Android N. Android N seems to be the redesign of the latest version Android 6 (Marshmallow). This release of Android N is just a preview version, which gives us a good indication of where android is heading and what we can expect in the full release.

Taking a look at this preview version we can assume that android N will be packed with some awesome features. Some major changes that we get in this preview version are:

1. Split Screen multitasking:

This feature was already included in Samsung devices back in 2013 and later in 2015 apple added this feature in their new iPad pro to take advantage of the big screen it has, and now the stock Android supports it. The good thing about stock android supporting Split Screen Multitasking is that all the apps on the play store will be able to take advantage of this feature. Samsung's split screen multitasking is not that smooth, and only their own apps support it. But now developers can configure their apps to work on split screens.

2. New customized notification pannel:

Android likes to make sure you catch up with notifications and quickly interact with them, so the new notification pannel is more informative and interactive. It gives you more details about the notification. You can quickly reply to a text message right from your notification pannel, and this feature is something we've already seen in ios devices. Also there is a small row of quick settings on the notification pannel, now you don't have to swipe two times for the quick settings.

3. Redesigned Settings app:

The settings in the new Android is like that of Marshmallow's but now it is much informative. It gives you some quick info about a category, for example you get to see what wifi or Bluetooth connection you are connected to, how much storage is used and how much is free, what is the battery percentage, etc. Also there is a side pannel(Navigation drawer) for you to quickly jump into other categories, for example, you can directly jump from wifi settings to storage settings, this might save you some clicks.

These are the major changes that you can see in the Developer preview. There are still some new features and improvements like the Night Mode, which makes the theme of some of the apps like settings to go dark, which can be made to enable after sunet automatically. There is a new improved Doze, that again saves the batter more efficiently. And the App drawer is not gone. There are still more to see, this is just the first preview version.

A new era for passwords, Two Factor Authentication.

We use a password to log in into everything these days, from your mobile apps to your house doors. But using password really makes the content that secure? The short answer is no. There are many cases where your account is hacked and your password is revealed. To get hold of this problem, the modern world has a new way for you to log in into your account, that is two factor authentication. As the title suggests, this lets you access your account with two passwords. Mostly, one of them is your regular password, and the other is a random password that is sent to your mobile device at the time of login. Also, the random password expires after certain period of time, usually 1 minute. This makes the hacker or any person who wants to get into your account really had to get into it. Tech giants these days has been implementing this feature in their websites or their apps like Amazon, Facebook, etc.