Rob LeFebvre - page 113

The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is an invite-only event that centers on the video gaming industry. Held across two massive halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center, it is a draw for any journalist interested in games and gaming, and a source of endless news stories during the week in June it’s typically held.

No matter where I looked at the Expo this year, I saw mobile games and mobile devices. With a few notable exceptions (Nyko had a huge booth full of Tegra-enabled tablets to show off their gaming controllers for Android), most of the devices I came into contact with were decidedly of the iOS persuasion. I’m fairly sure that Apple is winning this round.

Photo editing is all about making changes to the visual image, using your own aesthetic preferences to make the picture just that much better than the original. With some simple tricks in iPhoto for iPad, you can make that good photo better, and that great photo sing.

iPhoto has three tools that you can use to do just that. Brighten, Zoom, and White Balance. While the features may be fairly intuitive, it never hurts to point them out, as not all of us are intuitive in the same way.

Look, showing your vacation photos to friends and family is a time honored tradition. That doesn’t mean that you have to be boring about it. With a few easy steps, some photos, and iPhoto for Mac OS X, you can create some really nice slideshows to make your audience ooh, ahh, and perhaps even applaud. Here’s how.

Imagine for a moment that your three year old daughter has a disability that stops her from using her voice to communicate. Then imagine that a combination of an iPad and a specialized app gave her the ability to talk to you, requesting things, express her needs, and even say, “Daddy, I love you.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d see that iPad and app as some sort of technological miracle.

Now, imagine that the app was pulled from the app store.

Red eye happens, folks. Caused by the reflection of a camera flash in our eye’s retina, it can be reduced by special flashes, but not always completely eradicated, especially in dark environments. Blemishes are a whole different matter, but they do seem to happen more often just before we take a picture of ourselves or loved ones.

Luckily, both of these issues can be fixed after a photo has been taken, and rather easily using iPhoto for iPad.

Using your iPhone or iPad to grab videos as well as photos is all the rage. Small wonder, as these devices and the seamless apps that power them make grabbing a quick video or photo as easy as can be.

Unfortunately, when they all get imported to iPhoto, they get placed in there willy nilly. Well, actually, they’re put in via Event and the date they were created, but you get my point: iPhoto sorts video and photos you take with your iOS device into the same place. Here’s how to segregate the videos out for easier organization.

You know those MacBook Pros that were announced today? Well, apparently there’s already an update out for them.

As can be seen in the linked Apple Support web page, the MacBook Pro (Mid 2012) Software Update 1.0 is available now, in case, like, anyone owns one. Which they do not.

According to the support site, “the update includes fixes that improve graphics stability, external display support, and USB 3 device support.” Which is fantastic for all those folks that bought one and are just wasting away without stable graphics or solid USB 3.0 abilities. Which, you know, they aren’t.

Source: Apple Support

Mac gaming, long the red-headed-stepchild of the computer gaming scene, just stepped up its, well, game. Today’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco saw several announcements from Apple regarding gaming, including the fact that the hot new MacBook Pro will have Retina graphics capabilities.

When Game Center was announced for iOS 5, some folks were skeptical. They didn’t really see the value in Apple taking on the leader board scene with already established players like OpenFeint, Plus+, Crystal, Gameloft Live, and others.

Those very same people would surely have to eat their words when they heard today at the WWDC in San Francisco that Game Center has over 130 million people using it and those folks submit 5 billion scores every week.

And now? Game Center is coming to the Mac.

While the built in Photos app can do some basic things like rotating photos or sorting them into albums, chances are most of us have wished we could do a few more basic tweaks to our photos before we send them off to be printed or shared with friends and family. Now that it’s vacation time for a lot of families, we though it’d be great to run through some basic photo editing tips using Apple’s own iPhoto for the iPad, for easy yet powerful editing on the go.

Most of us have considered moving out iTunes library to an external hard drive to save space at one time or another. If you use a MacBook Air, you know how squeezzed for space you can feel after using a laptop with a much bigger hard drive. Heck, we’ve even written about saving space via iTunes migration.

But what about iPhoto? True, pictures take up less space than iTunes videos, or even MP3 tracks, but more and more these days we’re taking photos with huge pixel counts with similarly large file sizes. And what about all the movies we use our iPhones or cameras for? They eat up a lot of space, too. So, you might at some point want to move all the photos and home movies you manage in iPhoto to an external drive to save space. Here’s how.

Ever been in a note-taking situation where you didn’t write everything down? How about paying so much attention to your notes that you miss what’s actually being said? I think it happens to all of us. Whether you’re a student, journalist, or just at the doctor’s office trying to remember all the instructions she’s telling you, AudioNote may be just what you need to help you keep track of what’s being said.

If you’re a Mac user of some length of time or experience, you know that there are a ton of keyboard shortcuts laced throughout the operating system. In addition, every application you run on your Mac has a ton of these same shortcuts.

One easy way to see them is to click on a menu in a running application. To the right of each menu command, you’ll see the Keyboard shortcut for that particular menu selection. For example, clicking on the Edit menu in most applications on the Mac will give you the Cut (Command-X), Copy (Command-C), and Paste (Command-V) shortcuts.

There’s an easier way, however, to see all the application’s associated keyboard shortcuts, in the form of an application you can download right now.

Sharing photos from the iPhone is great in a pinch, but wouldn’t it be nice to see them on a much bigger screen? Say, a computer screen, or in a web browser? Guess what? The folks at Scalado AB have solved this problem for you already! Their app, Scalado PhotoBeamer, is available now for a mere $0.99, and they claim to allow you to share photos to any browser.

Chances are if you do any kind of writing on your Mac, you’ll need a definition of a word from time to time, whether you’re writing for your job or writing for pleasure, writing an email or an anti-corporate screed for your blog.

There are many ways to get a word’s definition on your Mac, including the built-in dictionary app, using a site like Dictionary.com, or the like. Did you know, however, that the file index and search app, Spotlight, also allows you to find a definition super quick?

Chances are, if you have an iOS device of some sort, you have apps. And if you have apps, chances are that you have too many of them. They start to get lost in the crowd. I find that, for myself, once I get past the first couple of app pages, I might as well tap at random for all I can find the app I need.

There are ways to launch the app you want, of course. You can bring up the multitasking bar with a double tap on the Home button, and swipe through a list of the most recently running apps. If you haven’t used the app you’re looking for in a while, though, it may not be there.

You can also use the Spotlight search function. When on the first page of apps, either swipe left or tap the Home button once. Type the name of the app you’re searching for into the field there and you’ll see that hidden app. Tap on it to launch. But you’ll have to do that every time. Spotlight won’t tell you WHERE that app resides.

Let’s face it, rotating a bunch of images can be a time or a money sink. You either have to open each image one at a time, rotate them manually, and then seave them, one at a time, or you need to purchase an image editing program like Photoshop or Fireworks. And don’t get me started on figuring out how to do this in Gimp, a free, open source image editing program.

Turns out, though, you’ve already got all you need right on your Mac. Batches of image can be rotated all at once with Preview.

The paperless office is something we’ve been aiming at for at least a decade, if not longer. With the proliferation of affordable yet powerful digital devices like the iPhone and the iPad, the dream may be more in reach that we realize. David Sparks has released an iBook (created with iBooks Author, no less) that will help us all use less and less paper in our lives.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to copy and paste anything into automator or know any Applescript for this tip. However, I’m sure there’s some of you out there that would like to customize iTunes in the ways this freely downloadable application/script allows you to.

It’s sometimes hard to remember that the ubiquitous iPhone had its genesis as a humble music player, the iPod. Remember those? In fact, the Music app was originally called iPod app, right?

Sometimes, when you have a particularly long song name, like with the podcasts or compilation albums in the images above, the small screen of the iPhone doesn’t quite do the full info name justice, leaving off with a disappointing elipsis. What if you want to see the whole thing? With iOS 5.1, you can.

Newer Macs, both portable and desktop, come with keyboards that have shortcut keys on the top row, where the F keys are. These F keys allow you to increase or decrease the brightness of the display, control iTunes playback, and raise and lower the volume.

You may also know that these features have associated preference panes in System Preferences as well. You can find them by opening System Preferences, which can be found in the Applications folder. Then you can click on the specific Preference pane you need, like the one for brightness or Mission Control. There’s also a way to get directly to these preference panes with a keyboard shortcut.

It’s the future, already, right? While we may not have flying cars or jetpacks, we do have computers ad mobile devices that we can speak to and that can speak to us.

Here are a few ways to make your Mac speak to you in a variety of ways. Make it read books to you right from the Kindle app, change text documents into audio files for easy transport, and even let you know when your Terminal session is finished. If that isn’t enough, we’ll even show you how to get better voices to do all this with, even in different languages. So settle in and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Summer time is travel time for a lot of folks here in the US and abroad. In the US, at least, it’s a time for families with kids home from school to head out into the great wide world and see places, people, and resorts across the country.

Traveling with an iPhone is inevitable. If you’re heading abroad or staying in your own country, there are tips, tricks, and potential pitfalls when using your calling and data plans. There are lots of apps, cases, and extra power solutions out there, as well. We’ve spent a little time figuring some of this out so you don’t have to. Keep reading for some great tips on using your iPhone when you’re traveling. As always, let us know what you think in the comments, as well – we love a good conversation.

When traveling, keeping your iPhone safe, charged, and accessible is pretty much a constant battle. What kinds of accessories you need to do so will depend on your destination, your transportation, and (obviously) your budget. Here are a few suggestions for stuff that you might find helpful when travelling with an iPhone.

Mention having a computer read a book to them, and most people will give you that look. You know that look, the one that says, “I hate those goofy robot voices. I want a real person to read to me.”

While there’s no current way to make a computer voice sound like an actual human voice, many of the built in voices are much better these days. In addition, there are some high quality voices you may not even know you have built right into OS X Lion. Here’s how to enable them for use.