By now you know that Alfred does a lot more than just launch apps, right? You can directly command your Mac OS X system from Alfred as well as launch stuff without ever taking your hands from the keyboard, the true power user position.
Did you also know you can send emails, with or without attachments, from Alfred as well? You need to purchase the £15 PowerPack (~$23 USD) to make it happen, unfortunately, but it seems like a pretty good price for such great functionality.
Messaging alternative MessageMe just updated today with several new features, like the ability to chat in landscape mode if that strikes your fancy.
The iPhone app won’t save chat doodles to the camera roll by default anymore; you’ll be able to save them if you like, or turn the feature off completely, saving valuable space on your iPhone should you so choose. The Voice Notes feature has been improved, and you can search for other MessageMe users using their email.
Audio now works for messages with video, and you can save videos as well in the new version. There’s also other “minor fixes and performance improvements” to be found.
Jefferies analyst Peter Misek is at it again. Apparently his own trips to Apple’s Asian suppliers are leading him to predict that the rumored iPhone 5S, which has yet to be announced by Apple, will most likely be delayed. His delay timeline is based on earlier predictions that the iPhone 5S would come out in July, which would in itself be odd, since Apple has typically released iPhones on a yearly cycle, putting a new one sometime in September or October.
He’s also on record as predicting that an even-more-rumored low-cost iPhone will also be delayed until the fourth quarter of this year, and that the iPhone 6 won’t actually happen until 2014.
One of the central conceits of new iOS mail client, Mailbox, is getting to Inbox Zero, a zen state of pure joy, in which you feel much better having dealt with all your email. The way the app does this is with swipes. Swipe partway across an email to the right and you archive it with a pleasant green checkmark. Swipe completely from left to right and you send the offending email to the trash. It’s lovely, and easy, and oh so nice.
But what happens when you make a mistake and long swipe to Trash when you really meant to short swipe to Archive?
Alfred brings a number of joyful ways to work on your Mac, including launching apps and searching through files. It’s a true power-user’s friend, as it lets you interact with your Mac in all sorts of ways without removing your hands from the keyboard, saving you valuable time in the long run.
Did you know, though, that you can also control many system functions on your Mac with Alfred? Here’s how.
After the successful announcement of Facebook Home for Android, the Menlo Park-based social networking giant is apparently in talks with Apple and Microsoft to bring the software to iOS and Windows Phone.
Facebooks’s director of product, Adam Mosseri, spoke with Bloomberg today about these talks. “We’ve shown them what we’ve built and we’re just in an ongoing conversation,” he said, making sure no one thinks anything is a done deal.
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.
Did you know, however, that instead of swiping each email one at a time, there’s a way to take care of all of them at once? Here’s how.
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.
Let’s take a look at one of the most basic things Alfred can do for you: launching apps. Once you’ve upgraded to or downloaded Alfred version 2, you can import your version 1 settings, and be ready to roll.
As a user of Google calendar, I’ve often ignored Mac OS X’s Calendar app, formerly iCal, for the bright internet lights of the easy to use, sharable online calendar from the folks in Mountain View, California.
I forget, though, that Calendar has a ton of great features for folks who really don’t need or want to use Google’s option, or who just want to stick with Apple products. There’s a dedicated group of folks out there that use nothing but Calendar, because it integrates well with iOS, comes free with every Mac, and pulls other calendars in, like Google Calendar.
So, here are five great tips to help you master this ubiquitous OS X app, Calendar (née iCal).
One of the cool features that I didn’t realize Calendar had until recently is natural language event creation in Calendar itself.
Bill Campbell, an Apple board member as well as the chairman of the Intuit board, sat down for an hour long chat with Intuit’s CEO today to talk about technology. This is a rare move for Campbell, who’s known for his behind the scenes work (as well as his salty language, apparently).
Without giving away Apple secrets, Campbell talked about a new era of technology, one that will include all sorts of “intimate objects” as our new devices.
While the term intimate objects may mean completely different things to some folks, I’m betting he was talking about tech that you wear on your body, like glasses, or watches.
Zynga, the veritable king of social game publishing, is bringing yet another card battling game to mobile platforms, starting with iOS today. War of the Fallen is a digital collectible card game, one that mirrors real-life card games like Magic: The Gathering. Zynga’s game is free-to-download now on the iOS App Store, and will come to the Google Play store, soon.
You probably already knew about how to tap and hold on the .com button in your iOS version of Safari to bring up the top level domains that come with the basic web keyboard, right? Tap into the URL bar at the top of Safari, and the web keyboard will show up. Tap and hold on the .com button and you’ll see all the top level domain suffixes for .com, .edu., .org, .net, and the like (if you’re in the US).
But what if you want to be able to quick access domains not in your main country, like Australia (.au), Canada (.ca), or the UK (.co.uk)? With a quick trip into the Settings app, you can add these and others, super easily.
Remember that tip we gave you about showing more than seven days in a week in iCal? It’s been a while (and the app is now called Calendar), but there used to be a way to enable a Debug menu in iCal to allow you to open multiple windows, change the number of weeks that appear before and after the start date in Day View, and even show more than just seven days in a week.
Well, that debug menu has gone the way of Mac OS X Lion, but there is a cool Terminal command that does the same thing.
Apparently, junior minister for digital economy Fluer Pellerin thinks that Apple shouldn’t have rejected AppGratis from the App Store last week. Her remarks to the French media make it clear that she feels the tech company isn’t behaving ethically in its dealings with AppGratis, a French startup, or others like it, calling the move “an issue of fairness,” and “extremely brutal.”
Not only that, but Pellerin feels that European regulators might want to think about taking action against Apple for the rejection.
Apple may be signing its first licensing deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) as soon as next week, according to several sources with knowledge of the matter, says The Verge. UMG and Apple are in the final stages of negotiations, and Warner Music is close behind, say those sources. All Apple needs now to complete the licensing for what the media has dubbed iRadio is an agreement with Sony Music Entertainment and other music publishers.
Apple is widely expected to launch a streaming music service later this year, perhaps this summer, with features similar to Pandora, assuming it can get all the licensing squared away for such a service.
You know how when you use the iOS Calendar app, you can tap on the little arrows to the right or left of the Day or the Month? This will move you one unit per tap, so when you’re in Month view, you’ll move forward one month if you tap on the right arrow, and one month back if you tap on the left arrow. Same thing with the Day view: tap on the left arrow to move back one day, the right arrow to move forward one day. Simple, right?
Turns out that you can move through the calendar even faster in either Day or Month view.
The Mac OS X Calendar is great for a lot of things, not least of which scheduling reminders of appointments and such via the built-in alert system. But did you know that Calendar can do a lot more than that? It can alert you to an upcoming event with an Email or a Notification, and it can even open a file on schedule.
If you’ve ever wanted to open a website, MP3, or other such file on your Mac at a certain day and time, keep reading.
Speaking at a conference for the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam mentioned that he had talked to Steve Jobs about the power of LTE in a meeting with the late Apple CEO. McAdam said that he spent some time trying to convince Jobs to add an LTE radio to Apple’s then-unreleased iPhone.
“I was really trying to sell him and he sat there without any reaction. Finally, he said, ‘Enough. You had me at 10 Mbps. I know you can stream video at 10 Mbps,'” said McAdam.
PC shipments plummeted 13.9 percent during the first quarter of 2013 as compared to the same period of time last year, even more than the expected decline of around 7.7 percent. The International Data Corporation released its Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker data today, and reports that these numbers are the worst quarter ever, since the IDC began tracking the PC market in 1994. This also makes it the fourth quarter in a row of year-over-year declines in PC shipments.
Last year, I told you about Picture Safe, a great app that lets separate, group, organize and password protect any iOS device photos you want. It’s an app that I’ve used since then to keep photos that I want to keep privately archived on my iPhone.
Just a couple weeks back, though, when I launched the app, I got a notification to upgrade to Video Safe 2, an app by the same developer that does the same thing as Photo Safe, but allows you to keep video behind the password as well. Even better, it had a migration tool that let me move all my folders and photos from Photo Safe over to Video Safe, using my Mac and the USB Lightning cable that came with my iPhone 5.
When you create a Calendar event, you have the option to have your Mac notify you of that event before it happens. In the case of an all-day event, however, you don’t have an easy option to change the time of day you’ll get the notification.
It can be done, however, with a little digging into the filesystem and a configuration file, letting you change the time of day you’re notified by default for all-day events.
Looks like Brian K. Vaughn’s Saga isn’t the only digital comic getting warned off by Apple’s terms against material it deems to be pornographic lately. French comic app portal app, Izneo, has also been affected by a recent Apple warning to remove a ton of the comic books from its app offerings that Apple deems pornographic, and thus in violation of its Terms of Service.
If you’ve ever handed your phone over to someone to let them use it as a (gasp) telephone, you’ve felt that moment of frisson where you wonder, “oh, man, what if they see that certain app? What will they think of me?” I’m not going to judge you; we all have apps we’d rather not have people see.
Luckily for all of us, then, that there’s a couple of neat ways to hide those apps on our devices, using Apple’s built in Restrictions system. Here’s how.
In Mac OS X, Calendar now uses Notification Center to let you know when events are coming up, by default. What if you don’t want these notifications, or want them only for a certain kind of event, like a birthday or timed event?
Well, using the preferences in Calendar, you can do just that, setting things the way you want them, rather than the way Mac OS X has them by default. Heck, you can even turn them off completely. Here’s how.
Vine’s co-founder and Creative Director, Rus Yusupov, tweeted today that Vine, the social video app of the moment, has hit the top spot on Apple’s own Top Free Apps list in the App Store. He attached a screenshot of the App Store from his iPhone, showing Vine sitting on top, ahead of hot (and highly advertised) games like Warner Bros’ Injustice: Gods Among Us, and Sega’s Sonic Dash.
Here’s what Yusupov said on Vine’s parent company’s own social networking service: “Hey guys, remember that time we made the No. 1 most popular app in the world? @ckb @dhof @bobby @vineapp”