Rob LeFebvre - page 99

Lots of folks might like to remember to follow up on specific emails. I know my life is full of email that, honestly, I don’t care much about, but really need to get back to at a certain point. Or that one email that needs a return reply but gets forgotten in the deluge of other, equally important emails during the day.

Unfortunately, there’s no “official” way to do this in Mail. There should be, of course, but there isn’t. Outlook has this functionality within a contextual menu, and there is a service for Gmail that lets you do something similar, but Apple’s Mail does not.

Luckily with a little ingenuity, we can get around this missing feature in Mail.

Feral Interactive is finally getting around to releasing the Game of the Year Edition of Batman: Arkham City for the Mac. The second installment of the critically acclaimed Arkham series, which started with Batman: Arkham Asylum, itself released on PC and console versions in 2009. The Mac OS X version of Arkham Asylum came out in November of last year, and now, a year later, we’ll have the pleasure of playing this fantastic game on our Macs.

The Walking Dead: Episode Four – Around Every Corner is coming this month to Mac, PC, and consoles like PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Publisher Telltale Games promises only a short lag before the final episode is released, thereby capping the entire five episode series.

The video game is set in the same Walking Dead universe you know from the comic books and AMC television show, but follows different characters, including Lee Everett, the main protagonist for the episodes. The new trailer takes the cast, many of whom will change due to a persistent game system that forces players to live with their own tough choices in each episode. Who did you save? Who got killed? The survivors and mounting dead characters are your own fault, a result of your own heroism.

I use email for a ton of different reasons. I use it to communicate with family, friends, colleagues, and business partners. I use email to keep track of things I need to get done today, tomorrow, and far into the future. Chances are, you do, too.

One of the ways I use email to keep myself on track and informed is by flagging emails for later perusal. I also mark things as read and unread to signal that I am done with the email, or that I need to actually read it later.

Now you can do these things right in the iOS 6 Mail app. Here’s how.

There are many third-party apps out there that let you dictate on your Mac. Dragon Dicate is one, but it costs $199, and includes a ton of extra stuff, like controlling your Mac with your voice. If you just want to talk instead of type, say in an email, Tweet, or Facebook status update, you already have what you need built right in to your Mac running OS X Mountain Lion.

I love my iPod Nano so much, it’s almost irrational. I know it doesn’t have bluetooth or wifi, or any other wireless connectivity, but the form factor is so perfect! I even have a Hex leather watchband for it, wearing it when I’m out on the town.

But it’s tiny. I lose it often. I’m actually on my second Nano due to accidental loss. The clip on the back sucks for anything but casual clipping on clothes when I’m working out, or attaching to my Hex watchband.

The iHook, then, aims to fix these problems, with a funky little bent metal mounting bracket that the manufacturer promises will change your Nano’s life. And yours, by association.

Apple updated iPhoto ’11 today to version 9.4.1, which includes several bug fixes, including an issue with downloading or viewing photos synched from Facebook albums, a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion. The update can be found in the Mac App Store directly, or pulled up in the Software Update item in the Apple Menu.

Apple announced their fourth quarter financial call for Q4 2012, scheduling it on October 25th, from 2 pm Pacific time (5 pm Eastern). The results should include the successful launch of the iPhone 5, which sold over 5 million units in the first three days it was on sale in the US. In addition, the iPhone 5 was launched in 22 other countries, with 100 more to come in the months ahead.

Remember, way back in July, when we told you how to bring Save As… back to OS X Mountain Lion? Basically, we showed you how to add an Application shortcut to the Edit menu, and then create a keyboard shortcut to invoke it.

The problem with that helpful advice, though, is that it modified both the original file and the newly saved file if you’ve changed stuff before invoking the Save As function.

However, now with OS X 10.8.2, you can fix this behavior. It’s really quite easy–here’s how.

So, hey, guess what? You can now set up more than one signature in the new iOS 6 Mail app for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Each email account you have set up will allow you to have a specific signature attached to just that email address.

So, from now on, you can have “–Sent from my iPhone 5” for your personal email, and your professional information sent out whenever you use your email from work. You can create a signature for that secret Yahoo! email account you keep for special purposes, and your boss will ever see it.

Here’s how.

Siri has been updated along with the rest of the iOS in the new iteration from Apple. The personal voice assistant can take dictation, help you plan your wardrobe around the weather, keep track of your buddies, inform you on all sorts of sports information, and help you choose the best movie to go see, all using basic spoken English. You can discover more siri tricks to help you get the most out of your device in this article.

Of course, it helps to know what kinds of questions and commands you can actually say to produce the desired results. Here’s five things you can do with Siri the right way, so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time going to those movies and meeting up with those friends.

While we all know that most consumer electronics are manufactured in places like China, Apple has become the public face of the current practice. While the company continues to rake in huge profits from their iPhone and iPad devices, there has been much finger-pointing in Apple’s direction when unfair and degrading labor practices in manufacturing plants in China, like Foxconn, are brought to the forefront in Western media.

Apple seems pretty aware that it’s fighting this public relations battle on their own. The company’s Labor and Human Rights webpage has just been updated to include data on how many hours per week the 800,000 production workers in their supply chain have to work.

It’s the weekend–time to relax, chill out, play some video games. You know, the usual. We checked out the new Mac Game Store app today to see what was on special, and found a ton of great games for $15 and less. Here they are, all available from the new Mac Game Store app or website. All of these are great games (except that sixth one, but it’s great for nostalgic reasons alone), so consider it money well spent.

Apple silently updated the iOS 6 App Store today, adding more accessibility features to its VoiceOver interface for users who experience blindness and low vision. The new changes are in response to user complaints about accessibility in the iOS 6 App Store, and will help those users perform faster searches when interacting with the App Store via the VoiceOver system.

I have to admit, I was intrigued by Passbook when I first heard of it. An app that keeps my airline and movie tickets together with my coupons and customer loyalty cards seems like a good idea. For now, however, Passbook in iOS 6 seems like a placeholder to me, an app with no real purpose in and of itself, a place to link to other apps.

Apple quietly added a little explanation in the form of a paragraph in the iTunes Store page for Passbook apps which shows, at least, that they’re planning on more and that they understand that we all might feel a bit nonplused about one of the bigger features of the new iOS.

The weekend is a great time to hit the theater, especially if it’s cold and rainy out. Siri has been updated in iOS 6 to provide a wealth of information on movies, including local showtimes, movie reviews, and even specific information about movies themselves, like actors, directors, and ratings. There’s a ton of stuff that Siri can help you find. But how do you know what kinds of questions are even possible? Well, you can start here with the following types of questions.

Widgets aren’t new to OS X Mountain Lion, but the way they are presented surely is. If you’re new to the OS X Dashboard, you’re in luck, because adding Widgets is a lot easier than it used to be, and there are a whole lot more of them to choose from.

Notice the screenshot above? That’s what the new Add More Widgets screen looks like. Here’s how to add to the list, until you have more than you can even handle on your Mac, and you need to use that handy-dandy Search field at the top just to find the one you want.

UK-based Future publishing announced earnings over the past year, claiming over $8 million in digital magazine sales, with over 12 million app downloads and five million subscribers. It offers its array of tech and sports themed magazines via Apple’s Newsstand and “container apps,” like Zinio.

Today, the appropriately named Mac Game Store released a Mac app that looks a lot like a simliar service you may have heard of, Valve’s Steam. While Steam began as a matchmaking and leader board service that soon morphed into the premier PC and Mac game digital distribution juggernaut it is today, the Mac Game Store will only sell downloadable Mac games, naturally.

Because a lot of the current attention around iPhones has to do with the latest and greatest iPhone 5, it’s easy to forget that there are plenty of older devices to be dealt with around the world. While recycling may be an option for much older devices, the iPhone 4 and 4S, at least, are helping to create a second-hand market that is both robust and global.

The market, says The Wall Street Journal, tends to be mostly US to overseas in direction and is growing in response to the high visibility of the iPhone brand via the iPhone 5. An entire industry has grown up around the resale of older iPhone devices.

“We are supply constrained. There is insatiable demand for this product,” said Israel Ganot, chief executive of buyback service Gazelle Inc.

I’ve been told that sports are a popular pastime. Some of my best friends love to keep track of sports scores, team rankings, and individual player statistics. If I get pulled into a conversation about sports with any of them soon, I’m totally pulling out my iPhone 5, and I’ll be able to keep pace with their conversation. Or, at least throw out tasty facts that will totally impress them.

Siri is a great personal assistant, helping you create reminders, text friends, and the like. But Siri also has a way of interpreting ordinary questions about things like, yes, sports. Here are some of the best ways to ask her for the latest updates on your favorite teams and sports.

OS X has really good text to speech functionality for users with a visual or other learning disability, but it’s something that I think we all would benefit from at certain times. How about listening to a webpage when you’re folding clothes, or having your Mac your Twitter stream out loud while you do some sort of two-handed crafting project, like knitting?

Turns out, you can make this happen super easily with OS X Mountain Lion, invoking a keystroke to read highlighted text anywhere on your computer. Want to have your Mac read that Word doc your boss just sent over? This little tip will make it happen.

The iPhone 5 runs on an Apple-designed A6 chip, which has been widely reported as running at 1.0GHz. The software that performed that analysis, Geekbench, was recently updated to an iOS 6-enabled version, and the iPhone 5 was tested again. Turns out that the A6 CPU dual-cores are actually running at 1.3GHz, which is a bit faster than previously thought.

Last quarter, courts around the world had filed judgements that showed Android infringing 11 mostly Apple patents, with a couple of Microsoft patents thrown in for good measure. As of today, according to Florian Meuller of FOSS Patents, there are 17 patent judgements against the Android operating system, four in favor of Microsoft, and a staggering 13 favoring Apple.

These judicial decisions only include final judgements, and do not include those where a judgement was made, but the injunction lifted by another court or judge. They include both courts and the International Trade Commission, a body with quasi-judicial authority in world trade agreements.

Want to know where your friend, Scott, is? How about where your girlfriend is? What’s your grandmother’s address again? Siri can answer these questions (and a bunch more), but you’ll need to set things up a bit on your iPhone, first. Here’s how