Articles by Patrick Nelson

This story was originally published on Nov. 28, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Electronic communications are reshaping personal life, and may right now be causing the rapid demise of print....

BeyondPod Podcast Manager,a mobile app from BeyondPod, is available for US$6.99 at Google Play.I was horrified by the prospect of Google's Listen podcast manager app for Android beingdiscontinued when I first heard the news some months ago....

A few weeks ago, I wrote about building a simple, home backup power system forcharging phones during extended electricity outages -- like that which occurred during storm Sandy However, there's a limitation to any battery system, and that is that any battery powersupply will eventually become depleted. I reckon to get a theoretical 13 days out ofmi...

Reference is the perfect genre for app and extension exploration. Web page pop-upsand on-the-fly search results are all possible. This week, TechNewsWorld's All ThingsAppy takes a look at the best in this category....

Facebook Graph Search is coming, and now -- before it hits -- is a good time to tweakyour Facebook privacy settings What is it?...

One of the ways apps and plug-ins contribute to our computer-driven lives is in providingutilities that streamline the optimization and configuration necessary to get thebest out of our machines. Firefox, the Mozilla browser, has a formidable set of utilities This week, All Things Appy takes a look at the five best, must-have utility add-ons availa...

The United States Department of Homeland Security Computer Emergency ReadinessTeam has recently been advising computer users to update or switch off Java in browsers Oracle's Java is a programming language that's used in browser plug-ins. It's used byvendors to make applications function across operating systems. A vendor can developone piece of co...

Welcome to All Things Appy. We scour the app stores and bring you thedefinitive top five available free apps in a particular genre for a particular platform Here's TechNewsWorld's selection of the best music and video apps for Windows 8....

New York Subway,a mobile app from Visual IT, is available for US$2.37 at Google Play....

Many of us have got health and fitness on the mind as the new year gets under way, and thesmartphone is proving itself to be a remarkable little healthcare provider This week, All Things Appy takes a look at key players in this area....

FlightTrack,a mobile app from Mobiata, is available for US$4.99 at Google Play.Keeping track of airport information can be a challenge even for a nonstop, there-and-back trip. Multiple legs increase the number of things that can go wrong geometrically, but I recently took the risk, in a week-long loop from Los Angeles to Los Cabos, Mexico, then to...

Microsoft's latest version of its operating system, Windows 8, has more personalizationoptions than any predecessor. Backgrounds, themes, colors, start screen, apps, picturepasswords and more can all be customized Here's how to get the best personalization features out of Windows 8....

Just which are the best apps out there enabling us to make the most of our phones, tabletsand computers? Over the last few weeks, TechNewsWorld's All Things Appy has beentaking a hard look at these newfangled software program disrupters This week, All Things Appy looks at must-have, 21st century business-orientedtools in the Chrome Web browser envi...

With screen real estate, as with the dirt version, more is generally better Like earlier incarnations of the OS, Windows 8 has external monitorfunctionality that lets you spread out. However, there are Windows 8-specific features -- like the snapping of apps that lets you use apps side-by-side to do two tasks at once; and communications like Skype ...

TechNewsWorld's All Things Appy has been taking a hard look at the apps that arechanging our lives Some of the best apps available take existing mobile phone functionality tothe next level, and all of our Top 5 featured here are outstanding examples....

Welcome to All Things Appy, TechNewsWorld's analysis of the best apps living on ourdevices today Before we became used to the slew of apps cluttering up our smarthones, desktopbrowser environments like Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox created "add-ons" and"extensions" -- the precursors of apps....

This story was originally published on Nov. 14, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Welcome to TechNewsWorld's new series exploring the app phenomenon that's threatening to relegate search and Web browsing to the technology history books....

Falcon Pro (for Twitter), an app from Joaquim Vergs, is available for US$0.99 at Google Play.Falcon Pro (for Twitter) pitches itself as "the ultimate Twitter experience on Android," and whileone can usually take these app-store hyperbole laden statements with an idiom-ladenstatement -- in this case a grain of salt -- there is one thing that I'm lo...

This story was originally published on Nov. 20, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series How can classic retail, the brick-and-mortar physical stores dotting ourneighborhoods, compete with the likes of Amazon and Zappos? Can real-world retail survive e-commerce? And if it can, what's the trick? How do retailers inten...

Flipboard: Your News Magazine, an app from Flipboard, is available for free at Google Play.