Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Fewer web actions are more vapid and vain than that of the “selfie.” What makes it worse is the Oxford English Dictionary legitimizing the nuisance by awarding it “Word of the Year” status. For Cityview’s less narcissistic readers, a selfies a self-portrait taken at arm’s length with a cell phone. While the act itself is not inherently evil, the self-aggrandizing overuse of the selfie becomes extremely annoying when appropriated and shared online by unabashed teenagers and less mature adults, clogging various social network feeds with girls’ duck lips and guys’ shirtless bathroom mirror reflections. Still the Dictionary had its reasons giving the term the crown. According to Oxford, the term selfie exploded in use during the last year, with a 17,000 percent rise in online appearances — a figure so daunting, Dictionary representatives said the decision was unanimous. Apparently it’s hard to turn down a trend so popular eve...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com With the passing of daylight savings time, and two of the more gluttonous holidays approaching, maintaining a healthy lifestyle becomes nearly impossible this time of year. As easy it may be to give in to winter laziness, there is an entire niche industry of tech gadgets designed to keep the susceptible on the path to good health. In the past five years the health and fitness world has ridden the smartphone wave to help users monitor their activity levels. From diet tracking applications such as SparkPeople and MyFitness Pal to phone-synced gadgets such as Nike’s popular “Plus” line of products, technology can help you track every detail of your exercising efforts. The problem comes when deciding which tool to use. Most fitness apps are free, but require serious dedication to update, whereas Nike’s products are exceptionally smart but expensive. Thankfully there is a middle ground tool that offers the robust monitoring and...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com For all of its hip commercials and excellent word-of-mouth buzz, Apple’s iPhone is still second-best. Market analysis from this past quarter revealed four-fifths of the world’s smartphone users are Android users, Google’s mobile operating system. As dominant as 80 percent sounds, why does it feel like Google’s stronghold is an outright lie? Android’s quiet climb to the top of the smartphone world wasn’t about marketing or innovation but pure and simple undercutting the competition and providing the alternative. While the iPhone was undoubtedly the best smartphone for four or five years after its release, it was expensive at first and only available to AT&T customers. Since it first hit the market, Android has been available on practically every carrier, offered extremely similar functionality, and it practically reset the scale for what smartphones should cost. One of the major differences between Android phones and iPho...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com There are two sacred cows in smartphone-user experience: battery life and constant connection to information. One of the best features of smartphones is the ability to notify users of new content through a background tool known as push notifications. For years popular services such as email, text messages and social networks have used push notifications to alert users of updates with little uproar, but a new trend in application development is pitting these two sacred cows against each other. Since Foursquare wove user geographic location into the social media universe back in 2009, developers have been frothing at the mouth to capitalize on user location. Global positioning system (GPS) technology has been a standard feature on all smartphones since the original iPhone. At a moment’s notice, users can find directions, traffic information and local businesses, but too much GPS use drains the phone’s battery extremely fast. U...