Rob LeFebvre - page 78

SpeakingPhoto is a new social photography app that lets you connect in real-time with anyone you like, using photos and recorded audio to share your special moments. Competing with Vine, Snapchat, and Digisocial, SpeakingPhoto aims to be a nicer place to be; instead of the party-atmosphere of the latter two apps, this one wants to let you record and archive the “memories, notes, and stories behind milestone moments in your personal and professional lives.”

Pretty heady stuff for a photo sharing app, right?

American McGee’s Spicy Horse Games (Akaneiro, Alice: Madness Returns) revealed its new real time strategy (RTS) digital collectible card game today, tentatively titled Hell Invaders.

Assisted Touch is an accessibility feature for iOS, usable on any iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, that recreates the hardware buttons and other gestures that someone with a motor disability might need to use. It also lets other folks use the Home, volume, screen lock, wake/sleep, and multitasking bar without using any of the hardware buttons themselves.

This can be pretty handy if you have the device in a case or holder of some type where accessing the buttons is tricky or impossible, like a home-made picture frame, for example.

Here’s how to activate this useful feature.

Another advantage of the Mac App Store, besides pausing downloads, safe uninstalls, and easy re-downloads of Mac OS X apps, is the safety of knowing that anything in the Mac App Store has been vetted by Apple.

One way your Mac makes sure you’re (relatively safe) from rogue apps is what’s called Gatekeeper. By default, this bit of software only allows you to install verified apps from the Mac App Store on your Mac. What if, however, you want to download software from a Mac developer who doesn’t distribute their software on the Mac App Store? You’ll need to bypass Gatekeeper in order to do so.

Here’s how to do that safely.

Apple submitted a new proposal, dubbed Submittal 6, for it’s super futuristic circular spaceship campus in Cupertino. The revision includes new details like bike and pedestrian paths, enhancements to street areas, and parking spaces for the huge project, which is behind schedule and $2 billion over budget. The current move-in estimate is in the summer of 2016, a date that continues to show up in the lastest revision.

Alzheimer’s disease affects over five million people in the US, making it the sixth leading cause of death in the country. One in three seniors die with Alzheimer’s or another dementia, and almost 15 percent of the folks caring for these seniors are long-distance caregivers, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Clevermind, LLC, led by the son of an elderly father who experiences Alzheimer’s, CEO Glenn Palumbo, has created an iPad app to help people with varying cognitive abilities maintain or improve their neurological function. He hopes to help many people who may not yet see symptoms of Alzeheimer’s or other dementia maintain their own social awareness as well as aid their independence over time.

Another accessibility option like VoiceOver and Zoom, originally created for those with visual impairments, is Speak Selection. There are times when you may not want to turn the entire VoiceOver system on, having Siri read every button and icon on the screen, but would prefer to just have your iOS device speak text you’ve highlighted on the screen.

As an added bonus for those with print or learning disabilities, you can have your iPhone or iPad highlight the words as it speaks them for true bi-modal output (seeing and hearing the words at the same time).

Here’s how to make this happen.

Using the Mac App Store is helpful in many ways, what with the ability to re-download apps, pause them during download, and the like.

There’s even an easy way to delete apps you’ve purchased from the Mac App Store these days, aside from the tried and true “drag app icon to trash” method we’ve all grown to know and love since OS X debuted oh so many years ago.

Tim Cook is a well-liked CEO, at least according to employee ratings on Glassdoor, a website that allows employees of any company to post reviews, ratings, and other such metadata about the companies they work for.

The current rating of Apple CEO Tim Cook on the service is a high 94 percent, gathered from all the employees who have rated him on the service, a total of 724 as of this writing. While Glassdoor is an opt-in survey system, it is anonymous. If they hated the guy, they’d probably say so. Anonymity plus the internet is anything but overly polite.

Seems like Apple is ramping up the developer seeds for the beta of OS X 10.8.4, with yet another release today, this one of seed Build 12E36.

Similar to the last seed, the release notes mention that the focus areas for developers to look at are Wi-Fi, Graphics Drivers, and Safari. The notes also say there are no Known Issues at this time.

This is the 4th release this month for the beta of OS X 10.8.4, while 10.8.3 (itself going through 13 revisions over a five month period) was released to the public a few weeks back. The previous 10.8.4 seeds were sent to developers on April 1, April 9, and April 17 of this year.

Source: Apple Developer

Another accessibility option built right into iOS is Zoom. Like VoiceOver, it was originally created to help those with a visual impairment access their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Zoom is made for those who need things magnified on the screen, and it can be pretty darn helpful for those of us who may not have a specific visual disability. If your iPhone is zoomed in on lock screen and you’re unsure how to fix it, there are simple ways to adjust this setting.

Some apps zoom in within the app itself, like Maps, Safari, or Google Earth. That doesn’t help if you need the buttons and iOS controls magnified, or the text in apps like Mail, right?

Here’s how to set things up with Zoom.

The Mac App Store is a great way to download apps to your Mac, as it takes care of the download, the install, and the post-install clean up for you. Sometimes, however, things can get a bit wonky, whether by accident or design, and you’ll want to go and download an app you think you’ve deleted.

Sometimes the Mac App Store will think the app you’ve deleted is still on your Mac. Or, you’ll want to re-download an app that’s behaving weirdly. When that happens, there will be a “Downloaded,” or “Installed” button there that won’t let you do anything.

While not all Mac App Store apps will work the same way, here are a few things to try out.

I don’t know if you have kids or not, but one of the more difficult things to keep track of, at least for me, is their allowance. Yeah, you might say, just write it down on a piece of paper or something. While that may seem to have merit, it rarely works out in my family. Let’s say my son gets $5 every two weeks for allowance. That’s a $5 bill I need to have each and every week.

Honestly? It never works out that way. So we tried using a calendar, on which I created a repeating event, set for every two weeks, figuring we could just count it up when he needed something. Well, that didn’t really work out, either. We’d be at a store, and he’d want something, and it’d be some non-multiple of five, and we’d try to remember to write it down, and so on.

Suffice it to say that I am doing a poor job at helping my kid keep track of his allowance, and an equally poor job of prepping him for real life money management.

So imagine my joy when I saw Allowance Manager for iOS, a Universal app that basically does what we need: tracks allowance on the iPhone or iPad. Win!

Alternative iOS informational website, AppShopper, had an app that was pulled from the App Store last December due to a conflict with new App Store rules that went into effect at that time. The team behind the app, who also run the website, have spent the hiatus working hard on a new app that is both compliant with Apple’s current App Store rules and useful to consumers.

AppShopper Social was announced today as live in the App Store, bringing with it a host of new social discovery systems along with the familiar Wish List functionality it’s always had.

This is a completely separate app, so if you still have the original AppShopper app on your iPhone or iPad, you can use them both alongside each other.

VoiceOver is the name of the amazing text-to-speech feature in iOS and Mac OS X that allows those with visual impairments to use their Apple devices right out of the box, without needing help from a sighted person. On the iPhone or iPad, it empowers those with a visual disability to become more independent and function on a day to day basis in a world that isn’t really set up for them.

As an individual without a visual impairment (aside from a slight nearsightedness), I use VoiceOver to have my iPhone read to me when I’m in the car but need to catch up on email or want to hear what folks are doing on Twitter. Here’s how to set that up.

When downloading updates in the Mac App Store, it’s a simple thing to start and pause your download. Make sure you’re logged into the correct iTunes account for the specific update, and hit the dark gray Update button when you’re ready. If you want to pause the download, simply hit the same button, which now says Pause.

But what if you want to completely cancel the download and start again later?

Luckily, this is a pretty simple thing to do.

https://vimeo.com/54553882

If you’re one of the lucky ones to have signed up for Mailbox, Orchestra’s amazing new email client for the iPhone, you know how great it is. It allows you to re-think how you deal with email on a daily basis. Mail messages can be archived, set to remind you at a later time or day, or placed in lists you create yourself all with a swipe of your thumb or finger. Mailbox turns email into much less of a chore while on the go.

Here are five great tips and tricks to get you mastering the Mailbox app for iPhone.

If you haven’t been using Alfred, the amazing app launcher (and much more) on your Mac, you’ve been missing out. It started out as an app launcher, a la Quicksilver, but continued to get improvements and additions over time until now, version 2.0 can do a ton of things on your Mac, all with a quick hotkey press on the keyboard, including launching apps, issuing system commands, and more.

Here are five tips and tricks to getting the most out of Alfred 2.0, one of the best apps you can have on your Mac.

One of the advantages of Mailbox only working with Gmail is that a lot of the conventions you’re already used to are present in this fantastic on-the-go email app for your iPhone. If you spend a lot of time on your iPhone using Mailbox, you might have wondered what it does with your mail when you archive, set to later, or add to a list.

Well, it’s really quite simple.

Alfred 2.0 is an amazing customizable app launcher, email sender, system commander that is free for the basic uses and only £15 for more advanced features in an Alfred add-on Powerpack.

One of these latter abilities lets you store and retrieve anything in your Mac’s clipboard history. Anything you’ve saved to the clipboard is accessible from within Alfred. Better yet, you can even store persistent snippets, turning Alfred into its own text expansion system.

Personal social networking app, Path, just released a new icon set into its sticker shop today, called “Iconic Bites.” While the stickers are adorable little bite-sized, pixel-chic representations of food and such, what really makes them cool is that they were created by none other than Susan Kare, the designer of the original Macintosh system icons.

The Path blog posted an interesting interview with her, as well, in which she talks about how her long experience in the design industry has influenced her current designs.

Mailbox for iPhone lets you send each email to a list, set it to snooze for a certain number of hours or days, or even just archive the email if you want.

In addition, you can mark emails as read or unread, and star them, just like in Gmail itself. THis gives you yet another way to sort and classify emails on the go, which also transfers easily to the web version of Gmail, as well.

Alfred has a ton of ways to make your Mac life more productive, like launching apps, commanding your OS X system, and even sending quick emails to your contacts. With the £15 Powerpack installed, Alfred lets you create incredibly detailed and complex customized commands using keywords, hotkeys, and actions, all within the app itself.

But if you’re like me, you’re not a huge fan of re-inventing the wheel. There’s a whole community of folks smarter than me who have made their own Workflows with Alfred and have exported these for everyone to download, import, and use with Alfred.

Let’s take a look at how you can grab some of the best of these, and get them working for you on your own Mac.

Apple’s making a big push in India, and it appears to be paying off. According to an article in The Times of India, Apple India’s revenue already rose by a factor of three last year, and analysts there expect the current brisk sales of iPhones to boost the company’s bottom line to over $1 billion in the current year.

While Apple does not disclose financials for the Indian sales unit, it does file with the Indian Registrar of Companies. In that filing, Apple reported a 431 percent rise in net profit this year, which the Times attributes to iPhone sales.

Mailbox for iPhone is revolutionary, sure, and it lets you “snooze” your emails to a point later in the day, week, or month. But what if you don’t like the way it does that?

By default, Mailbox defines the start of your day as 6 am, the start of your weekend as 10 am, and the end of your workday as 6 pm. It defines Later Today as +4 hours, and Someday as +3 months.

If that doesn’t fit your individual schedule or tastes, here’s how to change it.