bars

Add shortcuts to your notification shade on Android

Widgets can make toggling Wi-Fi, GPS, or ringtone volume quick and easy. But what if you want more options to help you skip through app menus or even the Settings area?

1Tap Quick Bar is an app that will let you customize shortcuts to be added to your notification shade. You can also personalize the look and feel of the panel that gets added -- meaning you get to pick all the shortcuts from a huge selection.

Here's a list of popular features from the developer:

Direct dialDirect message1-tap direct Web page launcherApplication shortcutApplication launcherDirect e-mail labelNew event, new … Read more

Get a Vaas portable USB sound bar for $14.98

Not happy with the audio coming from your laptop? No surprise there -- it's fairly miraculous that manufacturers manage to squeeze in speakers at all.

And yet many folks use their laptops as media centers in dens and bedrooms. So how can you get more aural enjoyment from your games, movies, and music?

Simple: add a sound bar. Even an inexpensive one should offer a huge improvement over the tiny, tinny speakers built into your system. If nothing else, it projects the sound forward instead of down, out, or up (depending on where the internal speakers are mounted).

Today … Read more

Apple may be looking to smarten up its Genius Bars

Apple could be changing how its brick-and-mortar stores are laid out, according to a new report.

Apple Store tracker ifoAppleStore.com reported yesterday that Apple is currently testing out a new Genius Bar layout in its stores. Rather than have the table run parallel to the wall at the back of the store, the company is considering turning it 90 degrees to make it perpendicular to that wall.

The blog claims to have obtained an image of the new layout, which shows a table stretched from the back wall, and flanked on two sides with stools. That effectively increases the … Read more

Reorder the Google navigation bar in Chrome

There are many customizations you can make to Google products on the Web. Unfortunately, the omnipresent navigation bar doesn't fall into that category (as easily).

You may not even use some of the services that are linked in the navigation bar; or worse, ones you use are swept off into the drop-down menu. With a Chrome extension, Big G Black Bar Sorter, you can order the products any way you like -- putting the stuff you use just one click away. Here's how:

Step 1: Install  Big G Black Bar Sorter for Chrome.

Step 2: … Read more

Get a refurbished Vizio sound bar for $59.99 shipped

HDTVs have notoriously bad speakers. That's understandable, if only because there's just not a lot of room for cones and whatnot inside those skinny LCD and plasma panels. It's also disappointing: here you spend all this money for a beautiful screen, and your ears pay the price.

The best way to improve the audio situation is to invest in a surround-sound system or a good set of stereo speakers plus receiver -- but that gets expensive.

A more affordable option: a sound bar, which is a speaker/receiver combo that sits above or below the screen and … Read more

Low Latency No. 25: Finders keepers

This week's comic is inspired solely by a tweet from our very own CNET TV editor Ty Pendlebury. After at least two documented cases of iPhone prototypes getting lost in bars, you'd think Apple employees would have learned their lesson by now.

Will Apple unveil an HDTV at WWDC? That remains to be seen; we're just hoping one doesn't show up left behind in some bar in Southern California.… Read more

Get more from your sound bar by using your TV as a switcher

Many sound bars offer a shockingly small number of inputs, with often just a single digital and analog audio input on the back to handle your gear. That's hardly enough for a modern home theater packed with a DVR, game console, Blu-ray player, and streaming-media box.

Luckily, you can get around your sound bar's limited selection of inputs by using your TV as a switcher. You'll be able to connect as many devices as your TV supports, and it will even simplify the input selection process.

Here's how to do it:… Read more

Read this before you buy a sound bar

Sound bars are an excellent compromise between shelling out for an expensive surround-sound system and settling for the tinny sound from your TV's built-in speakers, but that doesn't mean they're perfect. In fact, sound bars have quite a few real-world problems and limitations that are often glossed over, only to rear their heads after you've got one set up at home.

Here's what you should know before you make the jump to buying a sound bar.… Read more

Friday debut of SF bar-cams stirs sour reception

When San Francisco watering hole The Boardroom signed up last year to capture video at the bar and stream it live to the Web, manager Casey Gray liked the idea as a way to promote new business and remotely check in on what was going on.

So much for the best laid assumptions.

"At the time we didn't have any security cameras here, so it provided a service to me. I could hop on the phone and see what the bar was doing," Gray said in a phone interview from The Boardroom, which straddles the city's … Read more