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.
Editing videos can lead to a great sense of fulfillment when you’re all done and showing off the fruits of your labors to a packed house of admirers, but you have to admit that the grunt work can be kind of a slog. Anything that makes the editing process a little faster or a little bit simpler has my vote for being a tip worth knowing about.
iMovie ’11 has a host of under-the-radar tricks that will help you take your editing workflow up a notch. One sweet trick that both saves time and impresses other video editors is using multitouch gestures right on the trackpad.
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.
Not to overstate it, but it’s summer time and as such, it’s time for vacation movies, right? Whether you travel to the banks of the Champs-Elysse, the patriotic visage of Mount Rushmore, or choose a more modest stay-cation, making home movies is a time-honored tradition.
Editing the videos with iMovie on a Mac after you take them is joyful work as well, and those that have been doing it a while may not be huge fans of the current iMovie ’11 visual interface. I haven’t been, until I was able to make a couple of tweaks to make the iMovie of today look and feel more like the iMovie I came to love a few versions ago.
While many of us already have our eyes set on the new iPhone, which Apple will likely release this fall, there are still millions of people using the iPhone 4.
Released on June 24, 2010, the first round of iPhone 4’s are about to hit their two-year anniversary. This means that those who purchased an iPhone 4 along with the AppleCare protection plan, which effectively extends warranty protection to two years, are about to lose coverage.
If you bought an iPhone 4 in the summer of 2010 you should take some time to examine it in order to ensure that no part of it is showing signs of defect. Here’s what you need to know.
iPhoto is a fantastic photo storage and editing app for Mac OS X. It’s been around forever and a day, and continues to get upgrades every couple of years. The lastest version, iPhoto ’11, is chock full of features and tools that let you organize and share your photography with your family and friends on the web, on your Mac, or on your TV. Wouldn’t it be great to use all those features to make your photographic life just that much nicer?
You can, and you will, if you read through the following tips and tricks for getting the most out of iPhoto in Mac OS X.
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?
While organizing iPhotos by date using the iPhoto Events system seems like a great idea, what if you want to organize them some other way, like all your orange pictures in one place and all your blue pictures in another? What if you just want to see all your photos of dogs really quick but don’t want to have to create an entire album for them?
Spending a little time organizing your collection will pay of in the long run as you go back to find that perfect special picture for a project, and realize you have thousands upon thousands of photos. Yikes! Using a combination of Flags and Keywords, you might just organize yourself into having the perfect iPhoto system. Here’s how, using iPhoto ’11.
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.
You guys, we all have a ton of photos! We take them on vacation, during school plays, on walks with our dogs, and while drinking at the bar with close friends (careful with that last one, folks). The upside of carrying around cameras of all kinds, from iPhones to iPads to serious DSLR cameras, is that we can record our lives at any given moment. The downside, of course, is that we have a veritable flood of images to sort through whenever we get them back to our computer.
iPhoto is a great virtual shoebox for keeping our photos handy, and it’s pretty good at basic editing tasks as well. There’s value, however, in viewing our photos in something other than the standard photo view.
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.
Look, showing your vacation photos to friends and family is a time honored tradition. That doesn’t mean that you have to be boring about it. With a few easy steps, some photos, and iPhoto for Mac OS X, you can create some really nice slideshows to make your audience ooh, ahh, and perhaps even applaud. Here’s how.
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.
Using your iPhone or iPad to grab videos as well as photos is all the rage. Small wonder, as these devices and the seamless apps that power them make grabbing a quick video or photo as easy as can be.
Unfortunately, when they all get imported to iPhoto, they get placed in there willy nilly. Well, actually, they’re put in via Event and the date they were created, but you get my point: iPhoto sorts video and photos you take with your iOS device into the same place. Here’s how to segregate the videos out for easier organization.
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.
Most of us have considered moving out iTunes library to an external hard drive to save space at one time or another. If you use a MacBook Air, you know how squeezzed for space you can feel after using a laptop with a much bigger hard drive. Heck, we’ve even written about saving space via iTunes migration.
But what about iPhoto? True, pictures take up less space than iTunes videos, or even MP3 tracks, but more and more these days we’re taking photos with huge pixel counts with similarly large file sizes. And what about all the movies we use our iPhones or cameras for? They eat up a lot of space, too. So, you might at some point want to move all the photos and home movies you manage in iPhoto to an external drive to save space. Here’s how.
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.
If you’re a Mac user of some length of time or experience, you know that there are a ton of keyboard shortcuts laced throughout the operating system. In addition, every application you run on your Mac has a ton of these same shortcuts.
One easy way to see them is to click on a menu in a running application. To the right of each menu command, you’ll see the Keyboard shortcut for that particular menu selection. For example, clicking on the Edit menu in most applications on the Mac will give you the Cut (Command-X), Copy (Command-C), and Paste (Command-V) shortcuts.
There’s an easier way, however, to see all the application’s associated keyboard shortcuts, in the form of an application you can download right now.
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 do any kind of writing on your Mac, you’ll need a definition of a word from time to time, whether you’re writing for your job or writing for pleasure, writing an email or an anti-corporate screed for your blog.
There are many ways to get a word’s definition on your Mac, including the built-in dictionary app, using a site like Dictionary.com, or the like. Did you know, however, that the file index and search app, Spotlight, also allows you to find a definition super quick?
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.
Those of you using OS X 10.7 Lion (which I hope is all of you) may have missed the ability to adjust the system volume in tiny quarter steps. This feature was available in Snow Leopard and ditched in the Lion "upgrade." Now, in good news for obsessive compulsive Mac users the world over, the option has returned.
Let’s face it, rotating a bunch of images can be a time or a money sink. You either have to open each image one at a time, rotate them manually, and then seave them, one at a time, or you need to purchase an image editing program like Photoshop or Fireworks. And don’t get me started on figuring out how to do this in Gimp, a free, open source image editing program.
Turns out, though, you’ve already got all you need right on your Mac. Batches of image can be rotated all at once with Preview.
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.