Fast company - tech

These 5 Google Calendar features are a must for remote and hybrid work

Remote and hybrid work used to be edge cases. They’re not anymore, and major software is changing to reflect that. Google Calendar, for example, is adding features specific to the transition to remote and hybrid work. The ability to set your work location and split your workday into pieces are both recent changes that reflect the reality of this decade (and the decade to come). When and where you work are more flexible now; Google Calendar is now flexible enough to match that. Here are a

Discover these 6 hidden Calendly settings to make your days more productive

Calendly isn’t particularly hard to use, which is part of why it’s one of the best meeting scheduler apps. That doesn’t mean every feature is obvious, though, and some of Calendly’s best features are just a little too covert. The best way to learn any app is to press all the buttons, but don’t worry if you don’t have the time to do that—I did it for you. Here’s what I found. Give yourself breathing room between appointments Cuttin

The online checkout page is broken. These 3 companies are fixing it

There’s no way around it: The holiday shopping season is going to be a mess. From inflation driving up the price of goods to massive disruption in the supply chain causing shortages and delays, the grim forecast that analysts have been warning consumers and retailers about for months is, indeed, nigh. While there’s little that can be done immediately about a total meltdown in logistics and an economy still reeling from the pandemic, there’s another pain point in the online s

COVID-19 showed that science has work to do in its fight against misinformation

As the world spiraled towards calamity with the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, the essential role of virologists, infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists, and other scientists was thrust into the spotlight. Not only were these public health experts tasked with interpreting the rapidly evolving scientific and medical data, but they were often moved from the bench to the microphone and into the 24-hour media cycle. The public was looking for answers—but where would they derive them? This is w

I write about news for a living. This is why you need to turn off news notifications

There’s a ringing sound as I write this. There’s a ringing sound when I write anything. It reverberates like tinnitus. Several years ago, I started using an app from Twitter called TweetDeck to track my likes and retweets—they call tools like these social media dashboards, but they’re better understood as the vital signs for an internet dopamine junkie. One of the options in the app is to hear a shrill, school alarm bell sound anytime anyone interacts with one of your

How ‘Web3’ could evolve from a trendy buzzword to a better internet

The pandemic lockdowns, the emergence of the blockchain, the metaverse, and the unchecked power of Big Tech have many people thinking about what the web of the future will look like, and whether it can evolve away from the worst tendencies of today’s online world. And the term Web3 has come to represent one vision for what it could all look like. When the World Wide Web first became a phenomenon in the 1990s, it was a pretty static medium, and many websites looked like little more than di

This camera uses AI to automatically identify the birds in your yard

A new camera designed for use with bird feeders promises to tell you when there are birds visiting your yard—and even use machine learning to identify what types of birds they are. The Birdfy, from Netvue which also makes surveillance cameras and video doorbells, has raised more than $38,000 on Kickstarter, with pricing starting at $149 and an initial batch of cameras slated to ship in time for Christmas. The system is designed to detect birds using motion detection, save their pictures t

The Oura Ring is on a quest to become the ultimate health wearable

Even people who haven’t paid much attention to the Oura smart ring may know one thing about it: A whole bunch of well-known people have been known to wear one. The not-so-short list includes Jennifer Aniston, Marc Benioff, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Arianna Huffington, Kim Kardashian, Jimmy Kimmel, and Gwyneth Paltrow, all of whom have talked about the ring publicly, praised features such as its sleep-tracking tools, or shared their own Oura stats on social media. Even Prin

This app makes time-saving keyboard shortcuts even more powerful

Keyboard shortcuts are great—they save you a few seconds each and every time you use them. And if you use them often, that’s a lot of seconds saved. But there’s one problem: just because they’re shortcuts, doesn’t necessarily make them better. Which is why I heavily rely on an app called Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard shortcuts should be easy to pull off and easy to remember, but that’s not always the case. Take Option+Shift+Command+I, for example,

An ex-Googler is giving Gmail a brilliantly productive feature—on his own

By the time Google’s Inbox app launched in 2014, the designer responsible for its vision knew it was destined for failure. “It was kind of [a] dead man walking,” says Michael Leggett, a former Gmail design lead and the person who guided Inbox through its first four years of development. Inbox, in case you don’t recall, was a daring reinvention of the tried-and-true email interface. Google initially described the effort as a “completely different type of inbox&#


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