Create a Beautiful Photography Website in Minutes

John is not a professional photographer, the day job keeps him busy, but he’s an enthusiast who loves photography. One fine evening, he got a call from someone in his friend’s network who was willing to hire John for a photo shoot but, before signing the contract, they wanted to see more of his work.

John has captured some stunning and impressive photographs over the years but they are clearly not sorted and arranged in a manner that can be easily shared with a client. His photographs can be found all over the social web – from Facebook to Instagram to Flickr – but, for lack of time and technical know-how, he never considered building a portfolio website to showcase his work.

How to Make a Photography Website

There are WYSIWYG website building tools, Squarespace and WordPress for example, that make it extremely easy for you to build beautiful photography websites but the little downside with these tools is that you’ve manually update them every few weeks or months.

Siftr is a new web app that is trying to tackle the same problem but with a “build it, forget it” approach. The app, created by ex-Adobe employees, monitors your Instagram and other social networks, and automatically makes a portfolio website by pulling your ‘best’ photographs. Unlike other website builders that require you to manually upload photographs, Siftr syncs pictures from your social accounts, where you are actively posting pictures anyway, and puts them in your portfolio website.

Here’s a sample photography website that Siftr created using my Instagram page. It created the website and curated the photos automatically and the total time I spent in the entire exercise is 0 minutes. The website is responsive and looks great on a mobile too. Here are better examples.

Smart Categories, like Google Photos

You may be wondering why would anyone need such a tool when similar functionality can be emulated in WordPress using services like IFTTT. For instance, you can have an IFTTT recipe that will automatically cross-post your pictures to WordPress as soon you put them on Facebook or Flickr.

Well, there’s more to Siftr than just syncing your photos from social networks. The tool uses object recognition techniques to automatically classify your photos in categories. For instance, there are categories like “Nature”, “Buildings”, “People”, etc. and the photos are tagged automatically based on the pixels. So if a prospective client is only interested in the landscape photographs, you can directly point him to the relevant tag.

Siftr offers a host of layout templates and you also have the option to remove pictures that you do not wish to show in your portfolio website. At the time of writing this, Siftr can import your photos from Instagram, Flickr and Facebook but there’re adding support for 500px too, all the popular destinations where you’re more likely to upload photographs.

Siftr.co is completely free at though some of the upcoming features, like custom domains, templates, etc. could only be available to premium users.

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The story, Create a Beautiful Photography Website in Minutes, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 17/10/2015 under Instagram, Photography, Internet.

Chrome Notifications in Google's Navigation Bar

It looks like the Google Notifications section is not only for Google+ and Google Photos. Daniel Fletcher, a reader of this blog, noticed a Chrome notification from a supervised user who sent a permission request.

It's likely that more Google services and products will show notifications in the navigation bar. Google already stacks the notification cards for Google Photos.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

Google Families?

Google's password manager available at passwords.google.com has an interesting list of URLs in the source code. Most URLs redirect to Google's My Account page, but there's a new subdomain which returns a 404 error: families.google.com. It's not clear if Google intends to launch a new account manager for families.

Google Chrome already has a feature that lets you add supervised users and setup parental controls. You can block certain websites, review browsing history, change settings. Google Play has a Family section that highlights family-friendly content and Google Play Music will offer a family plan for $14.99. There's also YouTube for Kids.

{ Thanks, PhistucK Productions. ]

Google Shows Other Recordings of a Song

When you're searching Google for a song that has multiple cover versions, Google shows a new section below the video: "other recordings of this song". For example, if you're searching for [Felix Jaehn Ain't Nobody], Google shows the original version of the song from 1983 (Rufus and Chaka Khan) and a recent cover version from 2013 (Jasmine Thompson), which was remixed by Felix Jaehn, a German DJ.

You can click the other recordings to find more about them and watch their videos.

How to Tell if Apple Magic TrackPad 2 will work with your Mac

Apple’s Magic Trackpad 2 is a new and redesigned multi-touch trackpad that has a larger surface area than the previous trackpad, includes rechargable batteries and supports Force Touch, a technology that lets you do more with a single touch. For instance, you can press the trackpad to select a word on a web page, apply more pressure and it will pop-up the word definition.

Apple Magic Trackpad 2 costs $129 but it isn’t just expensive, it may not be compatible with your older iMac or Macbook. The Apple website suggests that the new Magic Trackpad 2 requires Bluetooth 4.0-enabled Mac running El Capitan (OS X v10.11 or later) and thus it may not work with MacBooks and iMac that are older than 3-4 years.

If you are looking to buy the Trackpad but are not too sure if it will work with your Mac, here’s how you can perform a quick check.

Does your Mac have Bluetooth 4 for Magic Trackpad 2

Click the Apple logo in the menu bar, select “About this Mac” and check for the version number. If it says 10.11, you’ve El Capitan. Next click on “System Report,” select “Hardware” underneath Bluetooth and look for the “LMP Version” in the report. If it says 0x6, it means you’ve Bluetooth 4 on your Mac and the Trackpad 2 will work without issues.

If you prefer the command line approach, open terminal on your Mac and enter the following command to know your Bluetooth version.

system_profiler -detailLevel full | grep “LMP Version”

The LMP (Link Manager Protocol) Version will be 0x6 if your Mac is equipped with Bluetooth 4 or 0x4 if it has an older version of Bluetooth. You should have also upgraded your Mac to OS X 10.11 (El Capitan).

There are inexpensive Bluetooth USB adopters, like the ones from GHS2 and IOGEAR, that will plug into the USB port of your Mac and bring Bluetooth 4 connectivity to even older models but they are not ‘officially’ supported.

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The story, How to Tell if Apple Magic TrackPad 2 will work with your Mac, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/10/2015 under Apple Mac, Software.

How to Create Photorealistic Screenshots of your Mobile Phone

Capturing screenshots on a mobile phone is easy. If you have an iPhone, press the Home & Sleep buttons and the screenshot image will be saved in the Photos app. Android users can press the Volume Down & Power button simultaneously to capture the screen. And in the case of Windows Phone, press and hold the Start and Power buttons at the same time to take a screenshot.

That’s a raw screenshot saved in your camera roll but if you would like to use that image in your website, a presentation or even in your Apps Store listing, consider adding device frames. This is important because people should be able to figure out whether a screenshot was captured on an iPhone or a Microsoft Lumia or a Google Nexus phone. The device frames can be actual photographs so your screenshot images appear gorgeous and more realistic.

Realistic Device Mockups for Beautiful App Screenshots

A layered photo editing tool like Adobe Photoshop (Win/Mac) or Pixelmator (Mac) makes it really easy for you to add hardware device frames to any screenshot image. Go to Dribbble and search for “freebies PSD <mobile name>” and you’ll find beautiful mockups for any mobile device. The Facebook design team too provides Handskit – photos of hands holding devices that you can use without restrictions.

Download and import the PSD file into Photoshop and then use the File -> Place command to place the screenshot image as a new layer over the device mockup. Then use the Save for Web option to export the image in JPEG format.

[*] Dribbble users usually add the tag “freebies” or “free” to indicate that others can reuse their design(s) for personal and commercial use. Other than Dribbble, Deviant Art and Behance are also good places to discover high-quality hardware mockups for all popular mobile devices.

If you don’t have Photoshop, you can use web apps like Magic Mockups, Dunnnk and Frame to add photorealistic device frames to your mobile screenshots.

These tools offers a collection of professional-quality photographs of mobile phones, tablets and computers placed in realistic settings. You need to drag your app’s screenshot image on to a photograph and it will automatically get placed in the screen area of the mobile device perfectly aligned with the hardware frame pixel by pixel.

Google’s own Device Art Generator lets you quickly add vector device frames around screenshots of Android phones and tablets. Device Art Generator includes templates for Android Wear and all Google Nexus devices. Drag the mobile screenshot image on to a device frame and it will quickly wrap that frame around your image. You also have the option to add screen glare and depth (for perspective) to the generated screenshots.

MockuPhone is another useful web app for adding device frames to your mobile screenshots with a unique feature. You pick a device frame, upload the mobile screenshot image and the tool will generate multiple screenshot images of the same device but at different angles.

The tool produces very high-resolution screenshots and they offer device frames for the iPhone, iPad & iPad Mini, Windows Phone, TV screenshots and Android.

PlaceIt and Mockerie are other good services for adding device mockups to your screenshots but they requires a subscription.

Scenery is a free Mac App that will helps you convert your app screenshots into professional looking and real-life photographs. Launch the app, drag the screenshot and you can instantly preview it inside gorgeous device photos. The starter pack includes a couple of free images of the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phone.

You can also add realistic device frames to your mobile screenshots via email. Just send the raw screenshot image as an email attachment to smartphones@mailchimp.com and, within in a minute or two, they will send you the processed screenshot with the device frame. You can also attach multiple screenshots in the same email message.

The service will automatically detects the mobile device name and the image orientation (portrait or landscape) using the EXIF data in the image and adds the appropriate hardware frame. It supports iPhone, iPad, Galaxy Tab, Nexus and a bunch of mobile device – send an email with the subject “help” to the same address for a complete list.

Finally, if you know a bit of HTML and CSS, you’ll love devices.css. They have created realistic mockups of iPhone, Android, Lumia, iPads and Macbooks using pure CSS and you can add image screenshots and text captions inside the mockups by editing the HTML. The big advantage here is that your text can be read by search engines too.

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The story, How to Create Photorealistic Screenshots of your Mobile Phone, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/10/2015 under Mobile, Screen Capture, Internet.

How to Watch YouTube Videos with Picture-in-Picture on your iPad

The Picture In Picture support in iOS 9 lets you watch videos while you work on other apps. To get started, open a video inside Safari, click the PIP icon in the video player and it will pop-out the video to a corner of your iPad screen. You can switch to any other app on your iPad and the video will continue playing uninterrupted. The floating video play can also be resized using the pinch to zoom gesture.

The YouTube app on the iPad also supports Picture In Picture but that will only work while the app itself is in the foreground. You can watch a YouTube video in PIP mode while you explore other videos inside the YouTube app but as soon as you switch to another iOS app, the video will stop playing.

YouTube and iOS 9’s Picture in Picture

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could multitask and simultaneously watch movies on YouTube while replying to emails or checking your Twitter stream?

Meet YouTube PIP, my latest web app that lets you watch any YouTube video using the Picture in Picture mode in YouTube. While you are inside the YouTube app, tap the share button and copy the link (URL) of the YouTube video. Open YouTube PIP in your Safari browser, paste the YouTube URL and click the Play button.

Voila! The YouTube video player will have that picture-in-picture icon that you can tap to detach the video from Safari. Now switch to Mail, or any other iOS app and the YouTube video won’t stop playing. Also the YouTube video will support “true” full screen mode which is not available inside the YouTube app.

The trick is very simple. When you paste the YouTube video URL, the app embeds the YouTube video in HTML5 mode. And because it is an HTML5 video, the PIP controls are available automatically. This should work for all YouTube videos that support embedding on external websites.

The Picture in Picture mode is supported on all iPad models including iPad Pro, iPad Mini and iPad Air. Android doesn’t support PIP but there are a bunch of apps that will put YouTube videos in the foreground.

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The story, How to Watch YouTube Videos with Picture-in-Picture on your iPad, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 05/10/2015 under Embed, IPad, YouTube, Internet.

How to do Reverse Image Search on your Mobile Phone

The Reverse Image Search option in Google Images can help you quickly discover related images from around the web. Upload a photograph from your desktop to Google Images and it will show you similar images used on other websites and also different sizes of the same photo almost instantly.

Journalists can use the reverse search option to find the original source of an image and also know about the approximate date when the picture was first published on the Internet. Photographers can use ‘search by image’ feature to know about other websites that are using their photographs.

Reverse Image Search on Mobile Devices

The little problem is that ‘search by image’ is only available on desktop computers and not on mobile devices and tablets. Thus, if a friend has sent you an image on WhatsApp or Facebook that you’d like to verify, you’ll have to first transfer the photograph to a desktop in order to perform a reverse search. Too much work, right?

Not anymore. I wrote a little web app that lets you perform reverse searches on a mobile browser as well. Go to http://ift.tt/1O1Mghz on your mobile phone, click the “Select Image” button and choose an image from the photo gallery of your phone. Next click “Search” and it will upload your photo to Google Images much like the desktop version.

Find related images with Google Images on a mobile device.

I’ve tested the search app on Chrome for Android and Safari for iPad but it should work on most other devices since it uses the standard HTML5 File System APIs. Internally, it takes your image file, converts it to Base64 (data URI) and submit the encoded image as HTTP POST request to Google Image. The browser then automatically redirects to the search page.

Also see: Find out where a picture was taken

There’s another workaround as well that will let you use the official Google Image Search website for reverse search on a mobile device. Open the Chrome browser on Android and under settings, choose “Request Desktop Site.” Now open images.google.com and you should see the Camera icon to upload an image for searching.

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The story, How to do Reverse Image Search on your Mobile Phone, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 30/09/2015 under Google Images, Images, Internet.

How to Change a Picture’s Date in Google Photos

Casey Smith uploaded a bunch of scanned images on Google Photos but they are showing the date when the scan was made and not when the pictures were captured. She writes: “Do you have any recommendation on how to re-date pictures that are not appropriately dated? I have a ridiculous amount of photos that are dated as of the date I added them to Google Pictures as opposed to the date they were actually taken. It’s driving me nuts. Any advise?”

There are two ways to deal with the problem. You can either change the date of photos before uploading them to Google Photos or do it after the photos are uploaded. The former option is recommended since it will let you modify the date and time of multiple photos in one go while the latter option would allow you to edit the timestamp of one image at a time.

Both Windows Photos Gallery and Apple Photos for Mac OS X allow you to easily edit a photo’s date and time. Open Photo Gallery on Windows, select one or more pictures by holding the CTRL key, click the date in the Info panel and choose the correct date from the calendar. In the case of Apple Photos, select one or more photos and videos from the gallery and choose “Adjust Date and Time” from the Image menu.

Alternatively, you can use a more powerful command like tool like ExifTool (available for both Mac and Windows) that can “shift” the date and time associated with images by a fixed amount. This is useful if you have taken pictures with a digital camera that had an incorrect time when the photos were taken so the dates can be shifted relatively.

If you’ve already uploaded the pictures on Google Photos, you can still edit the timestamp but you can only do that one image at a time. Also, the date editing option is only available on the Google Photos website and not inside their iPhone or Android apps (yet).

Go to photos.google.com and click on any photo. Next click the “i” icon to open the Info page and then click the pencil icon next to the date to modify the date and time of that photo. Tedious but works.

If you are to edit the date of multiple photos that are already on Google Photos, a less time-consuming option would be that you download them all to the desktop, delete the copy from Google Photos, empty the bin, edit the dates of images on the desktop and re-upload them to the Google Photos website.

And you would still need a desktop based photo editing program to add or edit the geolocation data since Google Photos doesn’t support that yet.

Also see: How to Edit the EXIF Data of Photos

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The story, How to Change a Picture’s Date in Google Photos, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/09/2015 under Image Editing, Images, Internet.

Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets

Would you like to know how much traffic (or page views) other websites in your niche are getting for competitive analyis? While it will be difficult for any third-party to accurately measure the traffic of a site, there are a bunch of traffic estimation services that can give you a better understanding of the popularity of a website. Here’s a list:

1. Alexa – Enter the website’s domain and Alexa will reveal the ranking of that website based on a combined measure of unique visitors and page views. The rank isn’t based on a site’s traffic alone but is relative to the traffic of all other sites that are monitored by Alexa. Webmasters are often skeptical of Alexa number but they the rank is still a good indicator of a website’s popularity over time.

2. Compete – You can use Compete to estimate the total US traffic (unique visitors) for nearly every site on the web. Compete uses data from ISPs, their own toolbar and other data sources to measure the traffic. It offers other metrics like Page Views, average stay duration, demographics, etc. but these are only available to paid users.

3. Similar Web – It started out as a tool for finding similar sites but now offers a range of data including traffic analysis in a clean interface. You get to know the site’s traffic over time, the countries that are sending the most traffic, what search keywords are bringing the organic referrals, how much time users are spending on a site and so on. The traffic reports can be downloaded as PDF files for archiving.

4. SEM Rush – It offers plenty of information around search (organic) traffic for any website. Put in the website URL and you’ll instantly know how the site has fared in organic search over time. The data can be split by country, you get to know which sites are sending traffic and also the keywords that are bringing the most visitors. Open Site Explorer is another popular tool in this category.

5. QuantCast – Like Compete, you can use QuantCast to determine how many people have visited a selected site during a give period from desktop or mobile phone. For sites that have implemented the QuantCast tags, you get more accurate metrics including visitor demographics, traffic by country, and the split in mobile and desktop traffic.

Also see: Know Everything About a Web Site

Find Website Traffic with Google AdWords

Few years ago, Google Ad Planner and Google Trends for Websites were the go-to tools for estimating a site’s traffic but they have since been discontinued. You can however still use the Display Planner tool inside Google AdWords to get a good idea of a site’s traffic and demographics. Here’s how:

Go to Display Planner and sign-in with your Google Account. You need not be an AdWords advertiser to use this tool.

Next put the site’s domain in the search box, set the Campaign targeting to United States (or remove geographic targeting to see global traffic) and click “Get Placement Ideas.” Google will now show you the average impressions per week for that domain and if you multiply that number by 4, you get a good estimate of the site’s monthly traffic (hits).

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The story, Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 16/09/2015 under SEO, Internet.

Download Mac Apps and OS X Updates Once for Installing on Multiple Computers

Mac OS X updates are huge with the installation files running into several gigabytes. The same is true for Mac apps like iMovie or Microsoft Office that have massive installers. The problem is compounded when you own multiple Mac computers and you need to upgrade them all to the latest OS X update. It will not just take too much time but you may end up consuming your monthly download bandwidth.

A simple and obvious workaround to the problem is that you download the installer files on one Mac machine and then transfer the downloaded apps to all your other systems through AirDrop or WiFi. The Apple website says that “Apps [downloaded] from the Mac App Store may be used on any Macs that you own or control for your personal use.” This is however easier said than done.

Installing Mac OS X on Multiple Macs

You download a 5 GB Mac OS X installer from the App Store, the machine restarts, your system is upgraded to Mac OS X Yosemite or El Capitan but wait, where has the installer disappeared? Your Mac, in a bid to save space, deletes the original installer automatically after the upgrade and thus you cannot reuse it on other machines.

To get around the problem, after the installer has downloaded, quit the installation routine and do not restart the machine. Go to the ~/Applications folder on your Mac, find the installer file and Option+Drag it to another folder like ~/Downloads to make a copy that will stay even after the machine is restarted.

For minor updates, like OS X 10.10.8 or 10.10.9 updates, Apple releases standalone installers as .dmg files that you can download once and install on multiple machines. The releases are available as incremental updates (containing only changed files) or combo updates (all changed files since the last major release).

A simple Google search for “download mac ox x 10.10. combo” will reveal the direct download links for the .dmg files on the Apple support website.

Installing Mac Apps from App Store

In the case of apps downloaded from the Mac App Store, you’ll find the .app files in your /Applications or /Users/username/Applications folder that you can easily copy to your other Mac machines. Internally though, the App Store downloads the installer as a package file (with a .pkg extension) and this will not reside in the Applications folder but in a separate hidden folder.

You can grab these Installer Package files and install the same Mac app on other machines without having to download it again thus saving data. To get started, open terminal on your Mac and run the following command to know where the App Store has downloaded the installer files:

defaults write com.apple.appstore ShowDebugMenu -bool true

Now open the Mac App Store app and you’ll see a new Debug menu (see screenshot). Click the “Show Download Folder” menu and it will open the location of the download folder inside Finder where the Mac apps are temporarily download. You can find the .pkg files inside one of the sub folders that you copy to your other Mac systems via Airdrop.

[Bonus Tip] If you are upgrading to a new version of Mac OS X, like the upcoming El Capitan, press Cmd+L at the installation screen and it will open the installation log so you know what’s exactly happening behind the scene.

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The story, Download Mac Apps and OS X Updates Once for Installing on Multiple Computers, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 16/09/2015 under Apple Mac, Software.

How to Print Multiple Gmail Messages in one go

John Q. Public is an attorney at a law firm and, as part of an ongoing litigation, the court has asked their clients to produce hundreds of email conversations associated with a case as hard copies. They are using Gmail with Google Apps and all the emails are safely stored in the mailbox but how to automatically print them all on paper?

Gmail doesn’t offer an option to print multiple email threads in a batch but that feature is available in Microsoft Outlook, the desktop program. You can import Gmail emails into Outlook, select several messages and then hit the Print button. Outlook will group all the selected email messages into a single PDF file or you can send them directly to any connected printer.

There’s an alternate approach as well. You can select multiple emails in Gmail and apply a common label. Next use an add-on to save these emails as neatly-formatted PDF files into your Google Drive. Once the PDFs are ready, you can either print them through Google Cloud Print or download the PDF files to the desktop and print to the local printer.

Here’s a step by step guide on how to print email messages and attachments in Gmail in bulk:

1. Go to Gmail, select one or more email threads and apply a common label (like To Print) to all the selected email threads.
2. Go to Google Drive and create a folder, say Gmail Files, where the selected Gmail messages would be stored as PDFs.
3. Download and install the Save Emails add-on for Google Sheets.
4. Inside the Google Sheet, go to Add-ons > Save Emails and Attachments > Create New Rule. Here select the Print Gmail label from the dropdown and then select your Google Drive folder.

Click the Create Rule button button and the add-on will save your marked Gmail emails into Google Drive every hour. Or you can go to the Manage Rules menu and run a rule manually to immediately save the marked email threads (including attachments) into Drive.

Once all the emails have been saved, right-click the “Gmail Files” folder in Google Drive, and choose Download to save all emails to your desktop. And now you can send them all the emails to the printer with the simple Ctrl+P or (Cmd+P on Mac) keyboard shortcut.

Also see: How to Edit PDF Files

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The story, How to Print Multiple Gmail Messages in one go, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/09/2015 under GMail, PDF, Print, Internet.

How to Hide AdSense Ads on your Website

Google AdSense supports Responsive Ads which means that the size of AdSense ads on your website will automatically change based on the visitor’s device. Thus, if they are viewing your pages on a desktop computer, they may be served the bigger 728×90 leaderboard while the same ad unit may serve a smaller 468×60 banner to visitors who are on a tablet.

There’s no need to change the code as the AdSense script smartly detects the browser’s width and serves the right size accordingly.

Now consider a slightly different scenario where, instead of showing a smaller sized ad, you would like to completely hide the AdSense ad if the screen width is less than ‘n’ pixels. For instance, you may have a 160×600 px Skyscraper unit in your website’s sidebar but it should be displayed only when the site is being viewed on a desktop computer and not on a mobile phone.

There are two ways to achieve this. You can either write a CSS media query that will completely hide the sidebar on a mobile phone and thus the included AdSense ad will also be hidden from the visitor. This will however be against AdSense program policies because the AdSense ad will still be rendered on the visitor’s screen though hidden from view.

How to Hide AdSense Ads with CSS Media Queries

What we therefore need is a mechanism where the the AdSense ad is itself ‘blocked’ from rendering on a small screen. This is also possible with CSS media queries but the big difference is that we need to apply the CSS rules to the ad element and not the parent container (which in our case is the sidebar). Let me explain:

What you see above is a standard AdSense code snippet that will render a 160×600 pixels ad unit. The size (height and width) of the ad is specified as an inline style.

If you copy-paste the above ad unit as is into your website, it will always download and render the ad irrespective of the visitor’s screen size. If you however need to prevent the AdSense ad from showing on small screens, we need to make a few “officially permitted” changes to the default code.

The modified code will look something like this:

If you carefully notice the two snippets, you’ll find that we’ve added a new class sidebar_ads (you can give it any name) to the default AdSense snippet. Next we’ve added a media query that will hide all elements of this class if the screen width is less than 480 pixels. That’t it.

With this approach, no ad requests is made to the Google server and thus no ad is shown to the visitor. The ad area will be hidden and the content below will get pushed up leaving no whitespace, just as you’d like it to be.

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The story, How to Hide AdSense Ads on your Website, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/09/2015 under Google AdSense, Internet.

How to Read your Android Battery Graph

Your Android mobile phone includes a built-in app to help you visually monitor the battery usage pattern. Go to Settings > Battery (the app’s location may vary for your version of Android) and you’ll see a history graph detailing which apps have been consuming the most battery power and how long you can use the device before the battery is completely drained off.

If you observe the Android battery graph more closely, you’ll find some other interesting details as well. For instance, you’ll know the pattern of your mobile signal strength, how often apps running in the background ‘wake up’ your sleeping device and so on.

This is the main battery graph and is easy to interpret. If there are any breaks, it indicates that the device was powered off during that period. If there are any red or yellow lines over the graph, it indicates that the charge was critically low during that period. The gray area represents the approximate remaining charge.

Related Tip: Do not let your phone’s battery charge dip the below the 10% mark as that will affect your phone’s battery life in the long run.

If you tap the battery history graph, it will provide a more detailed breakdown of the battery usage and charge times as shown in the screenshot below.

The colored bars in the Mobile Network Signal indicate the strength of signal (or number of cellular bars). The dark green bars indicate strong signal (full bars), light green is a good signal, yellow means a weak connection (3 bars or less) while the red bars indicate ‘scanning’ mode meaning the device is searching for a network signal.

If your device is in airplane mode, or when you are out of coverage area, the network signal block will be blank (white or, for some models, black).

The Wi-Fi block indicates the time when the radio was turned on though the device may not be actually connected to a Wi-Fi network. The colored strips for charging indicate the time when your Android phone was connected to the charger. The ascending slopes in the battery graph is also an indicator of the charging time.

The colored blocks in the Awake bar represent background apps that may be running even while the screen is off. For instance, your mail app periodically checks for new email even while the phone is in ‘sleep’ mode. If you notice any extended ‘awake’ blocks, it means that some battery-draining apps are keeping your phone active and should be uninstalled.

The GPS line indicates the duration when the GPS receiver is powered on and some app or system service tried to use GPS to determine your exact location. Finally, the ‘Screen On’ bar indicates the actual usage time when the screen was turned on and not in standby mode.

Also see: How Websites Detect your Battery Level

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The story, How to Read your Android Battery Graph, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/09/2015 under Android, Gadgets.

The Best Google Font Combinations That Look Good Together

Whether you are creating a website, writing your resume or designing a presentation, the kind of fonts or typeface you choose can make a notable difference. The Google Fonts directory offers a myriad of choices but how do you pick the correct font for your digital projects? Should you go for Serif fonts or Sans Serif or a combination of serifs and sans serifs?

Typography is an art and with 100s of fonts available, it is obviously difficult for non-designers to find that perfect font combination. Need help? Here are some useful font pairing websites where type masters have already done the hard work and all you can do is follow their recommendations to pick the most elegant and gorgeous Google fonts for your web and print projects.

1. Beautiful Web Type (hellohappy.org) – Chad Mazzola has created a beautiful showcase of high-quality typefaces from the Google Fonts website. You’ll discover some creative usage of fonts here though they haven’t updated the site for quite some time.

2. Typ.io (typ.io) – If the body text of my website is set in Roboto, what font should I use for headings? Typ.io offers a visual list of beautiful websites that using similar font families and helps you pick the perfect matching pair based on the typography of other websites.

3. Google Type (femmebot.github.io) – Laurel O’Brien’s typography project uses Google Fonts to stylize tales from Aesop’s Fables. This is a great reference source for finding elegant font pairs and is regularly updated as well.

4. Palet Tab (palettab.com) – A Google Chrome extension that inspires you with a fresh font and color combination from Google Fonts each time you open a new tab in Chrome.

5. 100 Days of Fonts (100daysoffonts.com) – Each single day, for 100 days, designer Do-Hee Kim picked a unique and beautiful Google Fonts pair and all her work in now showcased in this single-page website. If you need inspiration for fonts, look no further.

6. Font Pair (fontpair.co) – Another well-designed resources for finding Google Fonts that go well together. The paired fonts can be downloaded as zip files which is handy in case you want to use the fonts with your PowerPoint presentation on the local computer.

7. Font Blender (http://ift.tt/1JMLOPf) – If you are wondering how a set of Google Fonts will look with your text, Font Blender can help. The web app allows you to preview Google Fonts in the browser and you have the option to experiment with the font size and line height as well.

8. Type Genius (typegenius.com) – Choose a starter web font and Type Genius will recommend a list of other matching fonts that will make a good combination. Like Typ.io, this website too makes suggestions based on font combinations of other beautiful websites. Designed by Waveney Hudlin.

9. Type Inspiration (typespiration.com) – A creative showcase of text blocks stylized using Google Fonts. The CSS snippets are included making it easy for you to replicate the style in your web design.

10. Font Face Ninja (fontface.ninja) – A browser extension for Google Chrome and Safari browsers that will help you recognize the font used on any website. You even have the option to download the font files through the Ninja add-on but please check the associated license.

Also see: How to Reduce Google Fonts Size

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The story, The Best Google Font Combinations That Look Good Together, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 07/09/2015 under Fonts, Internet.