Sponsored - page 28

This post is brought to you by Avi, maker of Smart-Spools.

“Cable organizers” is one of those useful product categories that no one can quite seem to get right. The engineering problem seems simple enough: Give me a way to neatly wrap up and stow my peripherals, like earbuds and power cables, ideally in a form that’s compact and not overly complicated to use.

Many have tried, but too often — whether due to improper sizing or an emphasis on form over function — cable organizers end up being less convenient than simply wrapping your headphones around a few fingers and stuffing them in your pocket.

Smart-Spools finally got it right, though.

This post is brought to you by Tenorshare, maker of ReiBoot and iPhone Care Pro.

Too many of us know the sense of powerlessness that comes with staring at a red Apple logo on an iPhone screen for minutes on end, or seeing the device stuck in an endless restart loop. When the time comes to restore a corrupted or compromised iPhone, the simplicity of an iOS device can turn into an imposing, tangled mess as you use iTunes to wake it up from its digital coma.

This post is brought to you by Wondershare, maker of PDFelement.

If you work with a computer (which, since you’re here, is likely), you have to deal with PDFs. And while PDFs are a great and reliable way to send forms, presentations and contracts — basically anything that can be read or written on — they’re not exactly flexible. In order to edit, add to, remove from, or otherwise alter them, you might think your options are limited to pricey software from Adobe.

This post is brought to you by Tenorshare, maker of iPhone Care Pro.

Oh, iTunes. We gave it a good run, but I finally realized I’ve just been using you to take care of my iPhone. And that I can do better.

After finding my iPhone never quite properly synced, waiting through lengthy backups and updates, and putting up with your strange behavior because “that’s just the way you were designed,” it’s time to move on.

This post is brought to you by You Need A Budget.

Given today’s economy, there’s a good chance you’re a freelancer. The self-employed, as much as and maybe more so than the salaried, can only benefit from being strategic and disciplined in handling money.

Of course many of us don’t have the bandwidth to plan beyond next week, let alone the next six months. But with shifting sources of income and hard deadlines for bills, improvising with your finances is a sure way to lose cash you could be keeping.

This post is brought to you by Code Atlas, maker of Veer.

Sometimes great innovations are really just refinements of something few would have thought of trying to improve. If you think Apple’s already figured out the best way of reaching out to your contacts in iOS 9, Veer will make you reconsider. It’s a novel new iOS app and Notification Center widget that blends seamlessly into your iPhone’s normal operations, simplifying and streamlining how we use the device to reach people.

This post is brought to you by iMyfone Technology Co., maker of iMyfone Umate.

Sure our iPhones look sharp, but the sleek exterior hides an inner life that resembles the floor of a bachelor pad. Broken bits of uncompressed photos, unused files, app caches, cookies, backup logs and whatnot clog up the works (there’s probably a few empty pizza boxes in there, too).

This post is brought to you by LG Electronics.

When it comes to TVs, more is the new black. As the visual fidelity of film and television gets ever more refined, the visual subtleties and dynamics can be lost by TVs that aren’t able to produce a true black tone. It’s a benchmark of a monitor’s quality along with contrast ratio, and no TV can produce a more complete black than LG’s latest generation of OLED monitors.

One thing that apps like Instagram and VSCO have mastered is making photo retouching on a mobile device (e.g. smartphone, ipad, etc.) a breeze. Simple sliders grouped in easily understandable categories and real-time results make the editing process a snap. It’s fun and easy to dial in the overall look of an image on your phone’s screen! However, with that convenience, comes limitations. For instance, if you want anything more precise than a slider you’ll have to open up a professional application like Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture.

This post is brought to you by VMware, maker of AirWatch.

Whatever your organization’s mission, synchronizing all your employees’ mobile devices can power up your operations. However, wrangling together an array of phones, tablets and laptops is very tough. Making sure they’re all caught up and in sync with the same software versions and whatnot — let alone sourcing or (gasp) developing the applications your business will run on them — is a lot for a business of any size to take on.

This post is brought to you by Coolmuster.

There’s no sense pretending some of us iOS and Mac enthusiasts don’t dabble in the world of Android. Whether using phones, tablets or other mobile devices, we’ve come to rely on all our gadgets communicating reliably with one another, but when using both Apple and Android gear that isn’t always guaranteed.

Luckily, there’s a fix: Coolmuster Android Assistant, which will keep your Android devices working in harmony with your PC or Mac.

This post is brought to you by Hulltex, maker of the Hullo Buckwheat Pillow.

If you’re one of the millions of people sitting at a computer for eight hours a day, keeping proper posture is a constant concern. You buy all kinds of stopgaps — yoga ball chair, curved keyboard, ergonomic mouse — but how often do you think about keeping your spine lined up while sleeping?

This post is brought to you by VideoBlocks.

High-definition video is increasingly fundamental to all sorts of online content, and it’s an ever-more-critical part of any design project. Unless you’re a pro videographer in addition to being a digital creator, you’ll have to get your footage from an agency or stock video site, often a pricey proposition for quality visuals.

This post is brought to you by Jutiful, maker of AZZL and other smart games.

Much as candy makers know what taste buds they’re appealing to, game makers have learned what makes people respond. Similarly, the “animation puzzles” in AZZL make it feel like a game that’s also a confection: sweet and a little addicting.

This post is brought to you by Lucid Software, maker of Lucidchart.

Visual diagrams are one of the best ways of conveying complex ideas to audiences and collaborators. Making them is also an invitation to get frustrated by how little diagramming software has apparently advanced in recent years (people still use Visio?).

We live in an age of sleek design and intuitive user interfaces, so why is it still easier to scrawl a simple chart on a napkin than to draft one on a computer or iPad?

This post is brought to you by LG Electronics.

Since the dawn of YouTube, anyone with a webcam and something to say has had a chance to become a bona fide superstar.

A huge portion of the vlogging celebrities on the Tube make their name and fame by reviewing technology or games — searching “let’s play,” the genre of YouTube videos in which vloggers entertain viewers by getting way into playing video games, yields some 7 million hits. “Unboxing” — literally videos of someone unboxing some new toy or gadget — pulls up more than 20 million.

This post is brought to you by Squirrels, maker of Reflector 2.

Our phones and tablets are packed with great content, from videos and movies to articles and games. It’s a bit of a shame that the contents of our mobile devices are so often confined to a small, handheld rectangle of a screen.

This post is brought to you by Tenorshare, maker of iPhone Data Recovery for Mac.

Sometimes it’s helpful to think of your iPhone for what it actually is: a sleek and fragile glass box where you keep lots of really important information. Luckily, it’s a box you can back up, but pretty much only by using iTunes or iCloud — not exactly user-empowering tools for protecting and recovering your data.

This post is brought to you by BuzzBundle.com.

The power of the internet lies in the conversations it carries. If you’re looking to build an online reputation for your business or brand, you’ve got to make sure your voice is heard where it counts.

Wherever someone is talking about something you can relate to, there’s an opportunity to attract new followers and customers. The trick is finding them, and BuzzBundle can help.

This post is brought to you by Aptonic Limited, maker of Dropzone.

Drag-and-drop functionality — which lets us quickly and easily move files from place to place, into apps, onto websites — might be the most fundamental way we interact with our computers. That’s why we’re impressed by Dropzone: It’s basically an upgrade of good ol’ drag-and-drop for OS X.

With version 3.5, which drops today, Dropzone is even better.

This post is brought to you by iSkysoft Studio.

Videos are the new family slideshow, a way of turning visual memories into entertainment for friends and loved ones.

Our computers double as digital junk drawers, with photos, video clips and audio recordings collecting in folders and collecting dust — one of the best ways to bring those memories back to the light of day is to make videos out of them.

If you’re running your business on Apple machines, it’s probably because you want to keep things clean and simple. But wrangling desktops, tablets, phones and the employees who use them isn’t as easy as syncing your calendar.

Emails, point-of-sale operations, apps, security settings — an enterprise of any size can quickly present a symphony of stresses that’s too much for any business owner to orchestrate.

This post is brought to you by Lucidpress.

Anyone involved in digital publishing is pretty much forced to work with one of two applications: Microsoft’s Publisher or Adobe’s InDesign. The pricing of the two reflects the fact that they’re the only two games in town. And since Publisher is PC-only, Mac users have only one option.

Lucidpress thinks people are hungry for a viable alternative, so it’s created a web-based publishing platform that’s as scalable and feature-rich as any of the big-name desktop software — but priced for access to anybody.

This post is brought to you by Paragon Software Group, maker of NTFS for Mac.

It’s an unfortunate truth that Macs and PCs generally don’t get along. Snickering ads aside, the discord between the platforms is a real inconvenience for anyone trying to make the jump from one to the other, or for people who work with both at the same time.

Luckily, software can help — and you can enter to win a three-in-one bundle that helps bridge the Mac-PC divide.