tips and tricks - page 36

Once you’ve laid down a solid rhythmic foundation with your drums and your bass, it’s time to sweeten things up with some different sounds, like guitar or keyboards. GarageBand for iPad makes this sincerely easy, with Smart Keys and Smart Guitar, letting you widen the range of harmonic counterpoint in any arrangement, regardless of any experience with real instruments.

All the work is done by your iPad and the GarageBand app, just like with the Smart Bass and Smart Drums functionality discussed earlier. Simply launch GarageBand for iPad and follow the steps below, and you’ll be listening to your own sweet tunes in your own sweet time.

GarageBand for Mac OS X is a full recording studio for your Mac. It allows musicians to connect microphones, guitars, basses, and other instruments for a fully analog recording session. It has MIDI playback and recording capabilities as well, allowing anyone with a MIDI capable keyboard to record right along with those instruments.

One of the less-touted features, however, is the Loops section. GarageBand comes with pre-recorded MIDI and sampled audio that fit together in various ways. Without knowing to play a single instrument, you can create amazing sounding music with GarageBand, simply using Loops.

With GarageBand for the iPad, Apple has brought an inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right to your favorite mobile device. This fantastic $5 app lets anyone with an iPad create, record and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.

With a killer beat in place, it’s time to add the second (mostly unsung) hero of modern music: the bass. Whether your tastes run to big, fat and bottom-heavy or quick, snappy and distorted, GarageBand has you covered. With GarageBand for iPad, you can create bass tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.

Let’s take a look at the simplest way to do that: Smart Bass.

Ringtones, right? How can you be the coolest kid on the bus without your own custom ringtone? You can’t, that’s how.

With GarageBand ’11, it’s very simple to make one, and we’re here to show you how.

All you need is the latest copy of GarageBand, iTunes 7.5 or later, a Mac that runs OS X, and some music. Oh, and an iPhone, of course. You can use music that you create with Magic GarageBand, record yourself all fancy-like, or import an MP3 track to GarageBand to make your ringtone. Here’s how.

With GarageBand for the Mac, Apple created something no one else had – a relatively inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right on the computer. Several iterations later, GarageBand came to the iPad, doing the same thing for mobile musicians in a big way. For $5, anyone with an iPad can create, record, and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.

The foundation of any good rock, dance, or pop song is the beat. Creating a drum track that stands out will take your music from “meh” to “wow.” With GarageBand for iPad, you can now create drum tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.

GarageBand for OS X changed the way mere mortals create great music on their Macs. The latest version, GarageBand ’11, makes things even easier with Magic GarageBand. Essentially, this will guide you through the steps needed to create a great music track for video projects, ringtones, or just your own music to share with family and friends. Here’s how to begin your journey.

With the tagline, Gantt 4 Humans, iScope promises to give you the benefits of a centralized project management suite like OmniPlan ($50) for a lot less money ($5) and a lot less hassle. While I’m not reviewing the app here, I do like what I see so far.

iScope uses what it calls horizontal rails, which are basically Gantt chart-style tasks and schedules.

If you use your MacBook with external displays, you might want to use it with the display off but the lid open at some point. If so, today’s tip should help you accomplish this goal, with not one, not two, but three different ways to do so.

You can do this with the laptop lid shut, but with ever more powerful MacBooks out there, avoiding the heat that might build up in there is probably worth leaving the screen up, right? Leaving the screen up with the display off will let heat leave the Mac through the keyboard, and will allow the graphics processor give all of it’s power to the external screen, which is helpful if you’re working on graphics-intensive applications.

Resources are important to any project. They are the people, equipment, and materials necessary to complete a project. Even you’re just building a treehouse for the kids in the backyard, you still need to track the lumber, nails and screws, types of tools you’ll need (like a saw, hammer, etc.), and the people you’ll rope into helping you.

OmniPlan for iPad can help track the resources for projects that are smaller or larger. Let’s look at how.

Did you know that you can send attached files from anywhere on your computer, using Mail? Simply right click on any file in the finder, move your cursor down to Services, and select New Email With Attachment. OS X will open Mail if it’s not already running, and set up a new message with that file as an attachment.

That’s all well and good if you use Mail. But what if you’ve opted for Sparrow, a popular third-party OS X email client? You might think you’re out of luck.

You’re not, and we’re going to show you how to make it happen.

In one of the more meta examples of self-referential design, this Kickstarter project plans to make iPhone cases out of – get this – wood from Apple trees. Each skin is laser-cut and matte finished, less than 1 mm thick, and attaches to the back of an iPhone 4 or 4S with an adhesive sticker.

Project creator Robert Magno (one letter combination away from being even more meta-fruit-like) wanted to keep things simple, a very Apple-like stance, to be sure.

Project management is kind of a big deal, with college level courses, workshops, and seminars taught every day. Big companies hire people with these credentials to help them plan and manage their projects.

With software like OmniPlan, both the trained and untrained can manage personal and work projects with relative ease. It does help, however, to know what you’re doing before trying to organize a mission critical project, even if it is one for home, like building a dog house. All projects are made up of similar things, like timelines, human resources, financial considerations, and the like.

Let’s take a look at how to use OmniPlan to create a new Project – the first step to managing it.

If there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that date formats, measurement units and currency will generally be different when you travel to a different country. If you’re living in a new country, or working there, chances are this will be even more important to change on your computer, so as to make your written communication that much more comprehensible to your friends and co-workers in your new country. Mac OS X makes it easy stay in sync with the region you are visiting with just a few preference adjustments.

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.

When Lion debuted, the Save As… function had been removed from the File menu, and an interloper – Duplicate – was put in its place. The problem is that if you use Duplicate, you end up with two documents, one with “copy” appended to its name. In addition, Duplicate has no keyboard shortcut. This has made a lot of us sad.

While we’ve reported that Save As… functionality is coming back in OS X Mountain Lion, that doesn’t help those of us using plain-old Lion right now. However, with a little work around, we can get the same functionality until Mountain Lion comes out.

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.

Recent keyboards for both desktop and laptop versions of Macintosh computers come with media buttons across the top of the keyboard where the F keys are. For example, my 11″ Macbook Air has F1 and F2 assigned to brightness, and F11 and F12 assigned to volume. When pressed, they increase or decrease the volume or the brightness one little tick mark at a time. But what if you want finer control?

Home movies rock, right? What better way to entertain the family than with moving pictures starring the kids at the beach, weird Uncle William putting carrots up his nose, and the four hundredth video walkthrough of your favorite amusement park. In the past, viewers of these home movies had to sit through hours of badly shot footage and horribly raw video and film of all sorts of activities. These days, however, Apple has saved us all with the creation of one of the best darn video editing packages for the average consumer, iMovie. With iMovie ’11, the development team has refined things to a high sheen, helping us all make short work of some fairly professional and complicated video editing activities.

To make things even easier, we’ve put together a list of tips, tricks, and tweaks to help you get the best out of iMovie, the video editing app for the rest of us.

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.

Remember that audio makes up the first half of the term, “audio-visual.” Movies are just as much about sound as they are vision – a fact that Hollywood never forgets; nor should you. Apple made some fairly great improvements to the audio editing capabilities of iMovie ’11, and here they are.

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.

There are two main reasons to move your iMovie files to an external storage drive. One is that video files take up a LOT of space, and the non-destructive editing that iMovie does can also add to the file load on your main hard drive (or SSD, in the case of a MacBook Air). The other is organizational – you might want to put all your stuff in one, easily accessed place for later retrieval and further editing.

Lucky for you, then, iMovie makes this pretty easy. Here’s how.

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.

Sure, iMovie is now available on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, but nothing beats a big old screen to edit your video on. You no longer have to export the video from your iOS device to your iTunes or iPhoto, then import into iMovie. With iMovie ’11, you can bring it right into the app with no middle steps. How refreshingly simple! Here’s how.