What’s New with Social Media Software/Services, Google's Advanced Search and iOS 13 Text Editing Gestures

If you use social media as part of your overall marketing arsenal, do investigate what social media marketing/management software and services are available to you. Cumulatively, this is a deep and broad topic that includes options that can vary in cost and sophistication.

If this topic interests you, an efficient way to get started is to visit www.g2.com, and/or www.capterra.com. When you arrive at these sites, simply do a search using “social media” as your search keywords. When you do this, you’ll discover categories of social media related software and services. While exploring these sites, pay attention to reviews, articles (on related, or other interesting topics) and filtering options that can help to narrow down your software and services options. I think you’re going to be amazed at how many choices are available!

If you’re more interested in obtaining a couple of quick recommendations, simply do a web search using variations of keywords/phrases such as, [2019 best social media marketing], [2020 best free social media management], [best social media automation], [best social media scheduling], [best LinkedIn marketing tools services], and [best Facebook marketing tools services], etc. By exploring the results of these types of searches you’ll be able to find tools, software and services that will likely meet your needs. Have fun exploring!

Google’s Advanced Search

If you’re not familiar with Google’s “Advanced search” page, you really should check it out. Google “Advanced search” page makes it easy for you to perform more refined searches without having to memorize any special search terms/syntax.

Some of the “Advanced search” options/capabilities offered include: 1) Find pages with…All these words; This exact word or phrase; Any of these words; None of these words; Numbers ranging from, and 2) Then narrow search results by…Language; Region; Last update; Site or domain; File type. (I find myself using the narrow a search to “Site or domain” and “Last update” quite often.)

To get to Google’s “Advanced search” page, simply visit the following web page www.google.com/advanced_search

Tip: Please consider bookmarking the above link for future reference.

If you’re interested in reviewing some other Google search commands, I would recommend that you review a lifewire.com article that’s titled “How to Use Advanced Google Search Commands.” Here’s a link to the article…www.tinyurl.com/gqe76wz.

iOS 13’s Improved Text Editing Features

If you have an iPhone or iPad that has iOS 13 installed, you should familiarize yourself with the new and improved text editing gestures that are now available to you. In a howtogeek.com article titled “How to Use Text Editing Gestures on Your iPhone and iPad,” you can review the gestures. After reviewing the article and spending a few minutes testing/practicing things for a few minutes, you’ll be a better and more efficient iOS text editor than you are currently! The following link will take you the article…www.tinyurl.com/y46922dy

Google’s Chrome Browser (Version 75 And Later) Now Has a Built-In “Reader Mode”

“How to Use Google Chrome’s Hidden Reader Mode” is the title of another helpful article that’s available at howtogeek.com. Once enabled, the new reader mode allows you to toggle between a web page’s normal view (that may be full of ads and other extra stuff) to a much simpler, ad-free, and overall easier to read rendering of the page. As a bonus, once you’ve toggled “Reader Mode” on, the stripped-down web page is also usually reformatted in a way that makes printing the web page easier as well. The following link will lead you to the article…www.tinyurl.com/yy9gskvw

4t Tray Minimizer (Windows)

While working on my Windows computer, I often find myself in a situation where I’m running multiple applications. Each running application typically adds a corresponding button to the Windows’ “Taskbar” at the bottom of my computer’s screen. Unfortunately, I sometimes get careless and close the wrong application from the taskbar by mistake. In most instances when this happens it’s not a big deal and can just reopen the mistakenly closed program and continue. Occasionally, however, my accidental closing of a running application ends up leaving me in a more problematic situation (losing my place in a document, losing unsaved information, etc.). To help combat this situation (as well as address some others), I’ve found that being able to minimize applications down to an icon that resides in the Windows “Notification Area” instead of the Taskbar, to be helpful. How can you minimize applications to Windows Notification Area instead of the Taskbar? Answer: Get, install, and use the handy 4t Tray Minimizer software utility!

Another common computing frustration occurs while copying and pasting from one window to another. Example: After copying something from one application window and then clicking on another window (where you want to paste the copied information), the paste operations target application is moved to the foreground, which often results in the source document being covered over. Unless you move, resize, or arrange your copy and paste source and destination application windows in a way so that they don’t overlap each other, the above situation repeats/continues. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make an application’s window stay in the foreground without having to move, resize, or rearrange windows? Fortunately, you can! How? Again, by using 4t Tray Minimizer!

4t Niagara Software’s “4t Tray Minimizer” software utility is a handy tool that addresses the headaches described above (as well as a few more). I use the free version of this utility almost every day, and if you can relate to either (or both) of the issues described above, I encourage you to give the utility a try. Tip: After installing the application, open it up and review the information that’s available in the applications “Help” area to learn more about how to configure and use the utility.

Here’s a link to 4t Tray Minimizer’s product page…www.tinyurl.com/fo445

If you have any comments, suggestions, tips, questions, or just want to say “Hi,” you can email John at john@johnvrooman.com.

John Vrooman
John Vrooman keeps an eye out for cool new hardware, software, apps, gadgets; SaaS solutions; social media developments, trends as well as personal/SMB productivity and related solutions. He gathers information for his column from a diverse range of resources and he enjoys sharing his discoveries with others. He has been authoring this column since August 2000 and welcomes feedback from his readers.