In one of the motivational talk shows I saw on TED, I learned that
freedom to make mistakes helps you to free yourself from all constraints
of being perfect and helps you to open yourself to all kind of
opportunities and possibilities. This holds true in all walks of life,
even when you are working on your computer. As you are working on
Windows or Mac, the OS gives you the freedom to work carelessly with
files. You know that there is a fail safe designed called the Recycle Bin that will store deleted files, giving you a chance to restore them if deleted by accident.
However, even after six generations of Android, there is no failsafe
yet to tackle such accidents. A file deleted from your phone is gone
forever. You can certainly try to recover them using some file recovery tool, but chances of success are thin and totally dependent on your luck.
So today, I am going to introduce you to an app for Android that will give you the freedom to commit mistakes. Dumpster for Android
is a free app which brings in the recycle bin feature, just like one
you have on Windows and Mac, right on your Android. Also, you don’t need
root access for the app to function and works with all the file
managers out there.
Dumpster for Android
To get started, the very first thing you will have to do is install the Dumpster app
from the Play Store (which is free, btw) and once it’s initialized,
simply press the home button and let it run in the background. If you
have a built-in Auto Start App Manager, make sure to include this app as an auto start app so that the services are not stopped in case you reboot.
Dumpster will now monitor your internal storage and no matter what
you delete from any of the file managers, it will be recorded and cached
by Dumpster.
The Features of Dumpster
The best part about using Dumpster is that unlike other recycle bin
apps available on Android, you don’t need to share files to the app in
order to add them. The app automatically monitors the files that have
been deleted from the files system. Also, the app works on almost all
the file types including images, videos, audio, pdf, zip, mp3, mp4, ppt,
doc, avi, mpg, jpg, rar, etc and you don’t need to work on a 3rd party file manager to manage your files.
After the deleted files are collected by Dumpster and you now have
two options. You can select files and restore them to the original
location if you deleted them by accident or you realize later that you
needed those files. Or, if you wish to free device storage, you can
delete them permanently. In the settings menu, you can choose which of
the files you would like to protect using Dumpster and which one you
would like to delete directly, as all the files stored by Dumpster are
still in the system storage and thus, occupy storage space lest you
delete ’em permanently. You can also choose self-cleaning period after
which the cached files on Dumpster will be cleaned automatically.
There are premium features using which you can get cloud backup along
with ad-free interface, but it’s expensive at $2.99 per month or $29.99
per year. The ads are not obtrusive and you can work with a free
version as long as you don’t need cloud backup for files through
Dumpster. This can anyways be done for free using other apps available on the Play Store.
Conclusion
That was Dumpster using which you can have a failsafe on Android for
files that you might delete by accident. No need to root your device and
even Internet connection is absolutely not required. The only thing
that it needs is a persistent notification so that its services are not
killed by the OS in order to free up some RAM as any file deleted while
it’s not running will be deleted automatically. So make sure you try out
the app and don’t forget to share your views about it.
Sometimes the notification drawer in Android gets too crowded with
multiple notifications stacked under each other. And, most of the space
is taken up by those fully expanded notifications (*ahem* Amazon Ads
*ahem*). So, did you ever feel the need to personalize (or customize)
such notifications in Android? Maybe bundle up multiple notifications of
the same app in one notification or always show a notification in it’s
expanded view. Well, guys, don’t worry if you didn’t feel the need for
it. Because NOW YOU DO. Let’s fix the notifications and personalize it the way we want.
Many developers don’t make full use of the Notification API for
Android. They’re not giving you full control of how the notification
should look in the notification drawer. For your information below are the notifications types.
Bundle: Collection of multiple notifications into one single notification. (Like we have in Gmail.)
Head-Up Notification: You know that. (eg. WhatsApp)
Multi-Line Text: Notification with a large chunk of text or data in it.
Elastic List: Minimized version of Multi-line text but can be stretched to get the full view of it.
Yes, you can. A new open source Android app called Nevolution
can give your smartphone the ability to do so. Nevolution gives you the
freedom to customize the views of notifications in the notification
drawer the way you like. Let’s dig in and see how you can do it. It can
run on Android devices powered by version 4.3 and above.
Choose a Notification of an App to Customize it
After you download and install the app you’re pretty much good to go.
If you already have notifications in the notification drawer then it
will show up in the Notification list of the app. Tap on the notification to customize it.
At the bottom, the customize button will pop-up. Along with that, you
get the option to make the notification appear again in the
notification drawer if you had swiped it away.
Customizing the Look of Notification
I’ve chosen Flipboard’s notification. And, its notification view is
of the Elastic list type. But, I always want it to show in multi-line
text view. Always expanded so I don’t need to stretch it down to fully
view it. Now tap on the customize button. On the next screen, at the
bottom, you’ll find different notification styles that you can apply to
the notification. (Notification styles mentioned above).
So, here I’ll choose the Multi-line Text style for Flipboard Notifications.
The same way you can customize the notification by applying different
styles. You can even bundle notification into one single notification.
For example news stories from your News app.
Also, for messaging apps like WhatsApp
and WeChat, you get special tweaks. You can separate multiple bundled
notification into the separate notifications as shown below.
The notification list on the home screen of the app also works as notification log. It saves all the notification and its actions. You can make the notification appear again and perform the same action of notification again.
It’s a great way to keep track of notifications and customize the way you want it.
It’s Underrated
The app currently has mixed reviews on Play Store with an average
rating of 3.7. I myself experienced some issues like notifications not
showing up. But, if you’re having issues with the notifications and if
it’s misbehaving then you should install the extension pack. Go to
settings of the app and you’ll get the option for it. Also, you can join
the conversation about it on XDA-forums thread. One of the reason could be that other notification based app installed by you might be conflicting.
However, in my usage, it’s performed well. I’ll give it a 4.3 out of 5 .
It was the Google I/O Conference yesterday
and as always, there is so much to talk about it in the tech world. So
many new things – apps and services were launched like Allo, Duo, Google
Home, etc. But out of all these, the one thing that caught my attention
was the Android Instant Apps. In simple words, the
feature allows a user to work on an Android app without installing them
on their device and from what it looks like, the feature is going to be a
game changer. The newest Google Feature | Shutterstock
So let’s talk about the new feature as to what it is all about and
how it’s gonna be useful for both, the user and the developers.
What is Android Instant Apps
Android Instant Apps is Android apps running on your phone without
installing themselves. Basically, whenever we open up a website which
needs us to install an app to continue or we get a link in our instant
messaging which redirects us to a page on Play Store to install an app
to view the contents, things become quite tedious. Just because you
wanted to watch live updates of a cricket inning or you wished to buy a
cell phone online, making it mandatory to download an entire app from
Play Store doesn’t make sense.
What Android Instant Apps does is that it rather than downloading and
installing the entire app to get something done, it downloads only the
necessary code which is necessary for the task you are performing and
executes it on the fly. You won’t even feel the difference and it will
run just like a normal Android app. If you think you would want to use
the app in the future, you can tap on the install button to get the
entire app experience on your phone or just close the browser page to
clear the memory.
The Android Instant App download is limited to 4 megabytes and thus,
it makes sure that it’s available instantly and does not take too much
of memory on the device RAM. Google claims that a user won’t even feel
the difference as everything will be as smooth as the app is installed
on the device.
Uses and Availability of Android Instant
One of the most important uses of Google Instant is for the websites
which are mobile only, and ask you to download the app if you are
browsing from the phone. Using Google Instant, they can give you a taste
of the app directly from the web and if you like it, you can go ahead
and install it. These are also helpful in places like a parking lot
where you need to pay for parking using an app but instead of
downloading it, you can go to the pay zone and get things done on the
go.
Google Instant App will not be limited to Android N or Marshmallow,
but will work on any device running on Android 4.1+ (API Level 16) or
higher with Google Play services. Devices which don’t have Google Play
Services, most of them which are from China, will not be able to access
Android Instant App for obvious reasons.
At the moment about a half dozen partners are trying Instant Apps which includes Buzzfeed, B&H Photo Video, and Medium.
Google plans to expand Android Instant App and welcomes more partners
over the next few months and users will be able to experience it later
this ear.
For Developers
As a developer, Google claims that it’s pretty easy to be a part of
Android Instant. As a developer, if the source code of the app is
modularized, it can take less than a day of setup to make it Instant App
ready. Keeping things modular allows Google Play Services to download
only the part which is needed on the fly.
Conclusion
As far as my opinion is concerned, I am glad Google launched
something like this. This can streamline a lot of things when the user
is browsing on the web and he is suddenly asked to install an app to
proceed. I just hope Google does it right and keep things simple for
everyone to catch up to it. If you’re a developer, for more information
and details regarding Android Instant Apps, you can visit g.co/InstantApps.
