iOS tips - page 25

OmniPlan for iPad is touted as one of the more comprehensive project management apps available. With such a complex and robust app, it can be helpful to spend a little time with it and learn some of the best ways to use such a system.

First up, let’s look at creating a timeline for your project. In project management circles, such a chart is called a Gantt Chart. It basically places your tasks, goals, and project milestones on a timeline chart, to help project team members know what to do first, second, third, etc. This visual system helps managers know when things are getting behind.

Keeping your projects organized is hard; whether they’re for home, school, or work, projects tend to take on a life of their own. A good task manager can be essential to keeping the project moving, on time, and with a minimum of stress. wunderlist is available for the iPad, is free, and has some great features to boot, making it an obvious choice for many of us who need to manage our projects better.

It’s our inalienable right as citizens of the modern world to take a vacation or a holiday, right? Well, instead of packing your whole family off to an all-inclusive Club Med vacation or Disney cruise, how about taking on one of the most time-honored summer vacation traditions, the road-trip. Long drives through scenic countryside with loving families and family pets are some of the best memories we all have, right? Right?

Well, at least we have iOS devices with us these days to both combat boredom and make sure we arrive where we want to. Here’s a veritable cornucopia of apps and ideas for road-tripping this summer, iOS-style.

We’ve spent a good deal of time on apps that will work on your iPhone, what with its built in cell-data capabilities, but wanted to find some great ones for you iPad-only owners as well. Yes, apps made for the iPhone or iPod touch can run in enlarged mode on the iPAd, but we’re kind of iPad snobs and really only want to run iPad apps natively. That’s why you’ll only find Universal or iPad-only apps in the next list for road-trips with your iPad.

Gone are the days of folding and unfolding huge maps that you get from the gas station or the Automobile Club, what with GPS, Maps apps, and the like. Using the built-in Maps app is a great way to get where you need to go, but what if you want to take your navigation to the next level? What if you need to make sure you don’t get a speeding ticket? What if you want to get your kids excited about the National Park you’re all going to see? Maps app won’t do any of that justice. Here are three apps that will, though.

Road-trips are tons of fun, but it’s easy to forget that the journey itself is just as important as the destination. Sure, you may be driving across the country to head to a resort or amusement park, but there’s fun to be had along the way as well.

Here are three apps that will help you get off the highway and deeper into the joys of traveling the road this summer.

Planning, sheesh, who needs it? Maybe you’re young, fancy free, and willing to take a risk on things like hotels and fuel being available when you get there? Maybe you’re just taking a zen-like trip in your car, and planning really messes with your mojo. Either way, there are apps for that, as you’ll quickly see.

So, you’ve got that big road-trip planned this summer, right? Got everything packed, maps apps at hand, ready to see the world from the point of view of your car, up close and personal in a way jet travel will never be. Pile in the dog and the kids and hit the road!

Of course, once the initial excitement wears off somewhere down the road, the kids are gonna get whiney. Instead of numbing them out with cartoons or video games, how about a bunch of classic car games? Of course you can use your iOS device! Here are a few fun apps that will teach the whole family some great ways to stay interested in the world outside the windows while staving off boredom.

Summer time is vacation time, at least here in the U.S. With kids out of school for the warmest months of the year, families travel to amusement parks, historical sites, and even to other countries, making memories along the way.

What better way to store the photographic memories from this summer’s vacation than with high quality photos, edited, stored, and shared with just your iPad and iPhoto? Sound like a dream come true? Well, it’s not only possible, it’s fairly simple. Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks to use with iPhoto for iPad

If you take a photo in a forest but do not share it with others, does it really exist? Well, yeah, it probably does, but you know what I’m talking about. Sharing photos is really the point, right? Why else take them?

iPhoto for iPad has several ways to share your photos across social networks, to other iOS devices, and even right on the iPad itself. Let’s run through a few of them, yeah?

iPhoto has several Special Effects ready to play with, accessed with a tap on the little sparkly icon, the fifth from the left in the lower left corner of iPhoto on the iPad. Tap that, and a fan of special effects swatches will rise up from the bottom of the screen. There are six filters there, including Warm & cool, Duotone, Black & White, Aura, Vintage. and Artistic. Tap on a swatch you’d like to apply, and then tap or drag along the strip to select the effect that you prefer. Many of the filters can be further tweaked by pinching or dragging around in the photo itself. For example, the Vignette effect, found at the right within the Black & White strip, can be enlarged with a pinching out gesture, and moved around to a new center point with a simple drag. Play around and have fun here. Tap the question mark icon at the top for a tooltip for each of the effect swatches.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The hardest part of vacationing, for me, isn’t the crowds or the time in airports, or long lines at travel destinations. That’s what I have an iPhone for, anyway, right? Killing time? What’s most difficult in my world is the deal searching. Getting the best hotel, car, airfare deals is tricky and time consuming, and I just wish I could hand it all off to an assistant and be done with it.

Fortunately, there is an app to help with this sort of thing.

Packing for an upcoming vacation can be a last-minute affair in which all the important items are left behind at home. With our busy schedules and long to-do lists, it’s rare that we get time to think about all the things we’ll need while traveling to that exotic location, or even just heading home to see the folks. Either way, using a list to be sure we remember all that we need is a smart idea, but I’m guessing that many folks don’t get that far, or, like me, have a congenital aversion to tiny slips of paper.

However, using an iPhone app is ever so much cooler, and it actually helps us stay organized. With an app like Packing Pro – or it’s little brother, Packing – you’ll be able to save time AND stay organized. What a concept, right?

So, you may be thinking of traveling to far off places this summer, blithely jetting off to other countries, bringing your iPhone hither and yon to take pictures, check email, call your friends to brag about the nice weather, and play some Angry Birds while on the long plane rides. Unfortunately, using that beautiful iPhone in other countries could see you coming home with more that just a sunburn and jet lag.

If you use your iPhone and access its network capabilities, you could be seeing a bill of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. Here’s how to avoid having to take out a second mortgage to pay your bill.

Apple introduced Reminders alongside iOS 5 and Siri (for the iPhone 4S) this past October, and while the world wasn’t exactly stunned, the app made an impression. The trick with any app, of course, is finding ways to use it efficiently.

Below are five of the best tips we’ve found to help you use this simple app more effectively, all in one place for your viewing pleasure. We tried to make sure that we focused on features that all iPhone owners could use, so as not to leave out those who haven’t upgraded to the 4S just yet.

Some people are never satisfied. They are always searching for the app that brings just the tiniest advantage to their daily workflow. People like this might not want to just stick with the Reminders app that’s bundled in with iOS 5, no. They might want to try an alternative. One such alternative is NotifyMe. Let us tell you a bit more about it.