Kiran Upadhyay

This has happened to you: you’re reading your email, then you realize you should write someone else about something you just read. You hit “Compose”, only to find that the information you wanted to reference is now off-screen. You could save the draft and re-search for the email. You could open a new tab, re-open your email and then find it. Or you could remember to copy relevant information before composing the new message. None of those strategies are necessary, however, because of Gmail’s new compose mode . It’s simple, it’s clean, and it’s a great sign that Google isn’t done improving Gmail yet. Back in July Google acquired Sparrow, a brilliant email client for Mac and iOS users . Their team joined the Gmail team, and if this is a sign of things to come from that I have to say: everyone wins. No More Multiple Tabs Previously, when you hit the “Compose” button, whatever you were looking at was replaced with your new message. The new compose mode, which you ca...

Thanks to a recent Gmail search update, it is now easier than ever before to search for messages by size and date. For example, you can now search for larger:5m to yield all messages that have attachments larger than 5MB. Better yet, you can combine this with the older_than operator and search for size:5m older_than:1y , thus yielding a list of all messages older than a year and larger than 5MB. Gmail’s free space quota has always been generous, and currently stands at over 10GB (and famously, it is constantly growing, as you can see on the Gmail.com page when you’re not signed in to any account). Still, if you’ve been using a free Gmail account for years, you may have ancient photos, videos, and other large attachments clogging up your inbox and taking up precious space. Thanks to these new operators, you can now download these attachments and delete the messages that contained them, freeing up valuable space. For a full list of Gmail’s search operators, you ca...

Google has just announced no less than three new devices, along with what they call a “new flavor” of Jellybean – Android 4.2. The new devices are Nexus 4, the newest of the Nexus smartphone line; a new Nexus 7, and the Nexus 10, with a resolution that beats even the new iPad. All these new devices come with Android 4.2, which is packed with new features despite not getting its own candy codename. Starting with Android 4.2, this new version of the OS brings multiple users for tablets, which can be switched through the lock screen. It also introduces Photo Sphere , which lets you capture images in 360 degrees. Another new feature which was a long time coming is built-in Gesture Typing, which means you now get a sliding keyboard similar to Swype built into Android. You can read more about all these new features and others here . The new Nexus 4 ($299-$349) is an LG smartphone with a big 4.7″ screen, a very high resolution, a quad-core processor, and wireless ch...

Copy the entirety of one hard drive to another. It’s called cloning, and it’s an important process if you want to replace or upgrade the primary hard drive in your computer. Cloning isn’t the same as backing up. When a drive is cloned you have a perfect copy of everything that was on it – the operating system, the software and all of the files included. When you clone a hard drive you recreate its entire environment, partitions and all. Why clone a drive? Sometimes it’s because you’re current hard drive is failing. Sometimes it’s because you want to upgrade to a bigger drive. And sometimes it’s to ensure you have a complete and total backup of your work environment should something go terribly wrong. We’ve covered quite a few free tools for cloning hard drives here at MakeUseOf. There’s Clonezilla, a free advanced hard drive cloning tool based on Linux. There’s also Redo Backup and Recovery, which allows you to back up any drive in its entirety. Person...

While Spotify is the successor to well-known names like Napster and Kazaa (though not P2P and well… legal), those of us that are still stubborn and prefer a solution to download music or stream without interruptions desperately search for a respectable alternative. Service-specific applications, like Groovedown , don’t do the trick for me. Relying on a single service to harbor your obscure musical interests doesn’t always pan out. Recently, I stumbled across Songr and I can’t say enough about it. I’ve used it every day since downloading it and any music freak running Windows needs to have this application in their arsenal. Finding music won’t be quite the same once you’ve tried it out. Let’s give it a look. Songr Songr is completely free. You need to be running XP SP3, Vista, 7, or 8. There’s no peer-to-peer transfers, no ads, no spyware, adware, viruses, none of that garbage. Nothing is forced upon you. The only dependency is .NET Framework 3.5. Songr comes av...

If we are not sitting still, we are travelling. That’s an old trite cliché. But in these busy times it has become so very important to look deeply into how we go from Point A to B. It’s not only for economizing costs of travel but also to save time which is a precious commodity in itself. If you have a vehicle of your own, you might not have given the public transport system in your city much of a chance. Public transport is a great way to save money. It may not be always a great way to save time. But then in special cases and carefully planned itineraries, public transport can be the right ride. If planning is too much of a bother, try out a Chrome app (which directs you to the main web application) like Mapnificent .  Mapnificent shows you areas you can reach with public transport in your city in a given time. Based on just that information, you can decide where to live, work, and thus save money. Disclaimer: Mapnificent is not available for all cities aroun...

If you’re like me, you probably make good use of USB on your PC, from connecting keyboards and printers to smartphones, USB flash memory, Bluetooth, 3G or Wi-Fi dongles, headsets, game controllers and more. USB is a versatile and easy-to-use connection format, but there is one thing that bugs many people (including me) about it: the inability of computer manufacturers from Apple to Lenovo, Dell to HP (short version: all of them) to correctly space the positioning of pairs of USB ports so that two devices can be connected at the same time ! However, upon investigation into this state of affairs, it seems that this inability is little more than an unnecessarily inflexible adherence to a set of agreements governing the use of USB on such devices. The result of this is that users will have to put up with the narrow gap between ports on their PCs and laptops and instead spend money on alternatives. Typical Measurements For USB Ports USB seems to be pretty ubiquitou...

Collecting is part of human nature. Over the course of a life, we collect a lot of things. For a few decades, this has been including digital data. With every backup you make, you are not only duplicating files and folders, but you are also manifesting small errors – empty folders, duplicate files, outdated bookmarks, and broken shortcuts that don’t lead anywhere anymore. Whenever you restore your data from a backup or copy them to a new computer, you carry over those imperfections. Year after year, from one device to the next, and across operating systems. It has become incredibly easy to migrate large amounts of data, but it’s still rather hard to maintain their integrity and keep them up to date. If you want your data to be neat, you will appreciate the selection of tools presented in this article. They can help you get rid of those duplicate, broken, and outdated items in your collected data. This will not only please your sense of order, it might also save you...

Sometimes I feel as though the world is divided. Some people like iOS, some people like Android. Some prefer Windows Phone, and some use Blackberry. For some reason, the mobile OS we choose sort of became what defines us. If you think about it, I’m sure you have some sort of opinion of iOS users that’s pretty different than what you think of Android users. And if you have a favorite OS, you simply can’t understand why anyone would choose otherwise. I hereby declare war on this fragmentation! Why can’t we all just get along? Luckily, Android is one mobile OS which can help us do this, with its infinite number of launchers and themes. Today I’m going to help you be politically correct: you’re going to disguise your Android device and turn it into an iOS device, a Windows Phone device, a Blackberry, and some other cool operating systems. It’s really easy, it can look pretty good, and most of all, it’ll be fun to see your friends’ reactions. Just be careful, I know so...

Around ten years ago I got hold of my first mobile device, a HP Pocket PC that enabled me – wireless networks provided – to get online and browse the web in a very basic version of Internet Explorer. It wasn’t long before I was more interested in accessing the backend of websites rather than the front, using the mobile browser to access the admin page of any sites I was involved with the management of. This is a pattern that has repeated and developed over the intervening years, something that has progressed beyond sending blog posts by email into having a requirement to manage a full website from my mobile phone or tablet. The need for this was finally underlined during a recent holiday, during which time I was required to edit and publish posts for my own website. It was then that I realised that a standard dedicated mobile app for a particular blogging platform simply wasn’t enough… WordPress As the most popular blogging platform, WordPress must surely get ...