Hot Gadget Hacks Posts

Apple AR: PuzzlAR Dazzles with Interface & Gameplay Designed for AR

Last week, I tried out StackAR, a puzzle app updated to support ARKit where the AR features felt mostly unnecessary.

Kodi 101: How to Get Free Subtitles for Your Favorite Movies & TV Shows

When it comes to streaming your favorite movies and TV shows, there aren't many media players that are better than Kodi. With its fast performance and easy-to-use interface, it is definitely one of the best options. But what really sets it apart is its ability to add functionality.

Apple AR: Assisting the Technically-Challenged Is Easier With Vuforia's New App

If you're a regular reader of this site, there's a good chance friends and family turn to you as their volunteer technical support staff.

Gaming: The 9 Best Paid Action Games for Android & iPhone

Thanks to ever more powerful smartphones — the iPhone X with its advanced A11 processor and the Galaxy Note 8 powered by Snapdragon's 835 come to mind — the mobile industry is fast closing in on consoles and PCs with regards to gaming. Game developers have been aware of this fact, and have ported many games once dedicated to computers onto our handheld devices.

Kodi 101: How to Customize the Main Menu

The default look for Kodi is a menu that shows all of the possible media playback options available to the media player. From movies to radio, Kodi's main menu has an option to meet your needs. But everyone's needs are different, and sometimes we don't want all of these options.

News: Microsoft & Ford Demonstrate AR's Potential for Innovation in Enterprises

ARKit and ARCore generate excitement among various segments of the tech industry for spurring adoption of augmented reality with consumers via mobile devices.

Market Reality: Snapchat's World Lenses Are Just the Tip of the AR Advertising Iceberg

Snapchat is mostly credited as the first AR social network, and, like most social media companies, its revenue model is nested largely within advertising. As such, the company now has a new avenue for branded content.

Apple AR: There's Really No Point to Playing StackAR in AR

When explaining augmented reality to the uninitiated, Pokémon Go is often cited as an example. For all its popularity, though, many players would recommend disabling the AR capabilities in catching Pokémon.

Apple AR: The Only Thing Holding The Machines Back From Greatness Is the iPhone Itself

Directive Games received the enviable honor of unveiling their ARKit game, The Machines, on stage as part of Apple's iPhone launch presentation.

How To: Get Back the Camera's Missing HDR Button on Your iPhone 8 or 8 Plus

Out of the box, when you shoot a photo on your iPhone using the stock Camera app, it will either shoot a normal or HDR photo. That's because Apple's high-dynamic-range setting is set to automatic by default. However, there's a button in the app so you can turn HDR on or off manually. While this HDR toggle persists in iOS 11 on the iPhone 7 models and older, it's not visible on the iPhone 8 or 8 Plus.

HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 5 (Building the UI Elements)

Alright, calm down and take a breath! I know the object creation chapter was a lot of code. I will give you all a slight reprieve; this section should be a nice and simple, at least in comparison.

Dev Report: These College Students' AR Game Had Their School LARPing a Cyberpunk 'Humans vs. Zombies' in AR

Anyone who knows me well is aware that I am a cyberpunk junkie. The conflict between lowlifes, corporations, and the government, flavored with dystopian future, high technology, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and noir storytelling, just does something for me.

Brief Reality: Don't Drink & Drive, Unless It's in AR

ARKit is a marketer's dream. By providing tools for creating augmented reality experiences on mobile devices, AR apps can now be deployed easily alongside just about any campaign. As expected, we now have ARKit apps pushing wares ranging from automobiles to tequila.

Kodi 101: How to Change the Default Skin for a Fresh New Theme

When you first use Kodi, it can be intimidating. The main menu has numerous options for the various types of media Kodi can play back, and the settings menu has a broad array of tools to customize Kodi to your needs. After poking around in theses menus, you might realize that you don't like the default look. But whether it's the color, font, layout, or just the general theme, Kodi skins can change it all.

How To: Avoid Tolls on Waze to Save Money While Driving

Discovering you're on a route filled with tolls while you're already on the road, with no cash on hand, is never a pleasant surprise. Fortunately, Waze has an incredibly simple solution to nip this potential headache in the bud and save you money while navigating.

Action Launcher 101: How to Use Quicktheme to Make Your Home Screen Match Your Wallpaper

If you're like me, you change your wallpaper often. After maybe a week of looking at the same picture, you just have to have something different. Depending on the new wallpaper, you may spend another hour changing the background color of folders, the app drawer, and even Quickpage to match your overall theme. But you probably don't want to spend that much time tweaking your layout every week, so let me show you a way that reduces the time from an hour to a few seconds.

News: This Creepy Holographic AI Concierge Could Be Following You Around Hotels Soon

Back to the Future Part II missed wildly on many technological advances for the year 2015, such as flying cars and rehydration ovens. However, it connected on several predictions, such as video calling and biometric security, and it was in the ballpark (pun intended) on others, such as the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.

Action Launcher 101: How to Change the Icon Pack for a Custom Look

Eventually, we all get tired of our home screens. There's nothing wrong with it, but after hundreds of times seeing the same thing, it all starts looking a bit stale. You can rearrange icons and widgets, or even just pick a new wallpaper — but sometimes, your layout is perfect and you still want a fresh look. Well, thanks to Action Launcher and icon packs, this is really easy to accomplish.

Apple AR: Army of Robots Enlists ARKit for First-Person Shooter

The promise of augmented reality when it comes to gaming is the conversion of the player's real-world environment into a virtual playground.

Apple AR: Lowe's Builds Pair of AR Apps with ARKit

Lowe's Home Improvement has been an early adopter of augmented and virtual reality in their business practices, so it was a bit of surprise that their name was absent from the ranks of companies launching ARKit apps last week.

How To: Add Additional Emails to FaceTime & Messages in iOS 11

Using either iMessages or FaceTime on the iPhone is a great alternative for coworkers to stay in touch in the event that messaging services like Slack go down. They're also a handy means of communicating between buyers and sellers, as it provides a more intimate way of either checking out or showcasing a product. But you're not always going to want to give out your real number to everyone.

How To: Get Back the Missing 'Message' Icon in iOS 11's Share Sheet

Some iPhone users who updated to iOS 11 can no longer see the "Message" icon in the share sheet when in apps such as Photos, which means they can only text or iMessage an image from within the Messages app itself now. This is a bug with remote management software which will hopefully get fixed soon, but until then, the solution isn't pretty.

Dev Report: Unity 2017.2 Is Out

Being on the bleeding edge is a place that you will get cut from time to time, as has been the case for many developers in the HoloLens space.

How To: Force Restart Your iPhone 8 or iPhone 8 Plus When It's Acting Up

If your iPhone is acting up, frozen on a screen, and/or won't respond to you, force-restarting it is a surefire way to whip it back into shape. And the process is easy on older devices ... just hold down a two-button combo until the Apple logo appears. That's no longer the case with the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, which require a more extensive procedure that's harder to remember.

Dev Report: Machine Learning Agents Come to Unity

As we have seen previously with the likes of SethBling's Mar I/O videos and other examples, video games seem to be a great source for training AI neural networks. Augmented reality and machine learning are part of a collection of technologies that seem to be growing toward a point of maturity, and that will likely cause them to be intertwined for the foreseeable future. As developers, machine learning will definitely change the way we create software in the coming future. Instead of going lin...

Market Reality: Mira Closes Funding Round as Cappasity Prepares Blockchain Crowdsale

If competition in the augmented reality space was a spectator sport, then ARKit, ARCore, and HoloLens dominate the prime-time broadcasts on ESPN.

News: Why Google's HTC Purchase Is Nothing Like the Motorola Ordeal

Google just bought a huge chunk of HTC for $1.1 billion. They're bringing in around 2,000 employees, mostly from the hardware division, and these folks will presumably work under hardware chief Rick Osterloh. There's a massive patent portfolio involved, too, so stop me if you've heard this before — Motorola, anyone?

Apple AR: Star Wars & LucasArts Veterans Create Life-Sized HoloChess Game with ARKit

Until Star Wars Jedi Challenges arrives in November, a forthcoming ARKit revision of HoloGrid: Monster Battle from Tippett Studios and Happy Giant, might be the closest most Star Wars fans can get to playing the HoloChess game from the movie.

Apple vs. LG: How Does the iPhone X Compare to the LG V30?

The highly anticipated iPhone X is finally up for preorder, and it's been almost as exciting as we expected. With the dual cameras, bezel-less display, and high-tech facial recognition, there's almost nothing on the iPhone X that won't be liked. But around the same time as the iPhone X's announcement, another phone was revealed, and almost everyone seems to have forgotten about it. We didn't.

How To: Get the iPhone X's Swipe-to-Go-Home Gesture on Any Android

With the new iPhone X, Apple introduced a buttonless design for the first time. But without a home button, navigation within iOS 11 had to change to accommodate the new model. To solve this issue, Apple created gestures to perform the actions that the home button once executed. But while Apple users have to wait until November 3 to use these gestures, you can get these features right now on Android.

How To: Set Up Face ID on Your iPhone for Enhanced Security

The cutting-edge iPhone X, XS, XS Max, and XR have one-upped their Android competitors when it comes to facial recognition. Apple packed these flagships with an array of front-facing sensors to complement its selfie camera, which allows the new device to more accurately analyze faces, which you need for Face ID, Touch ID's replacement.

How To: Put the iPhone X, iPhone 8 & iPhone 8 Plus into DFU Mode in iTunes

With the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and the exclusive iPhone X, Apple has come full circle in transitioning its users away from the home button present since the first iPhone a decade ago. This gives us a window into Apple's design philosophy moving forward, but it also presents some new problems, especially when it comes to entering and exiting DFU mode in iTunes.

How To: iOS 11 Breaks AirDrop on Some iPad Models — Here's How to Fix It

After installing the new iOS 11 update on one of our iPads, we noticed something peculiar — AirDrop simply stopped working. The button was still there in the revamped Control Center, but it was almost imperceptibly grayed out. Tapping it did nothing, nor did long-pressing or 3D Touching. Even more perplexing, AirDrop was just working flawlessly before the update.

Apple AR: Color BlastAR Rides the Rainbow from Tango to ARKit

Mobile game companies Hit Point Studios and Legacy Games have adapted their Color BlastAR augmented reality game for iOS with the ARKit platform.

How To: Access Your AirDrop Settings in iOS 11's New Control Center

AirDrop is an underrated feature that lets you to quickly transfer files like songs and photos via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi from your iPhone to Macs and other iOS devices. It's been a staple in the Control Center ever since iOS 7, prominently displayed for easy access. However, with iOS 11, that quick access to AirDrop has seemingly disappeared.

Apple AR: Avoid Hills on Your Next Run or Ride via ARKit with Fitness AR

As a long-distance runner off and on for the past, I absolutely detests hills. While there are many apps that can measure elevation and slope for certain routes, understanding spatial data on a line graph or even an elevation map can be difficult.

News: 20 Things That Suck About iOS 11 for iPhone

There's no denying that there are some seriously useful new features in iOS 11 for iPhone. But there's also no denying that Apple got a few things wrong with the latest iOS update, as well as left a few important features out.

How To: Missing the 3D Touch Multitasking Gesture in iOS 11? Try This

Now that iOS 11 is officially rolling out to millions of iPhones, many users are upset with the fact that Apple has removed the 3D Touch multitasking gesture that we enjoyed in older iOS versions. Though not as fluid as this gesture, there is still a hidden way to quickly get into the app switcher without having to double-click the home button.

News: Looking for Your App Store Wish List in iOS 11? We Have Some Bad News

Whether you used it to remind yourself to buy a game or to store away that app recommendation that your friend begged you to download, the "Wish List" in the iOS App Store was a useful tool to keep track of new apps you might have wanted to install on your iPhone. But how can you access your Wish List in iOS 11?

Apple AR: Houzz ARKit App Beats IKEA to the App Store

With the official release of iOS 11, the availability of an app that uses the much-hyped ARKit platform to place virtual furniture in one's home was expected.