Apple Releases iPhone 5s With Touch ID, Faster Processor & New Camera Features
As expected, Apple introduced the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c this week. iPhone 5s now comes in two new colors, gold and silver, has a fingerprint identity sensor, and a faster iSight camera.
Adobe Announces Special Photoshop CC Program Offer At $9.99 Per Month
Adobe announced last week at its Photoshop World conference in Las Vegas a special Creative Cloud subscription membership for $9.99 per month. The special offer is for existing eligible Photoshop CS 3 or higher users who sign up by December 31, 2013.
Go Back to School Paperless With Notability for iPad & iPhone
With mobile apps like Notability, it's a lot easier to go paperless when it comes to recording lectures and taking notes, annotating documents and keeping your digital files organized. I've reviewed several writing apps in the past and notebooks for the iPad, but newer apps like the best selling, stylishly designed Notability (currently $2.99) seem especially geared to students. The app allows users to mix handwriting with typed text, highlight and annotate scanned or imported documents, complete worksheets, add images, and record lectures.
Get Fooducated About the Snacks, Meals, and Drinks You Buy
If you want to get educated about the food you eat, you might start by checking out Fooducate, a website, iOS and Android app that grades the food and beverages we purchase from supermarkets and fast food outlets. Fooducate consists of a team of parents, dieticians, and techies who have established a way to evaluate the ingredients in food and report on their nutritional value. From sandwiches and breakfast foods, to meat, fish and baby food formula, Fooducate reveals both the healthy ingredients and the not so healthy additives that food manufactures don't always want you to notice.
MinuteTaker and Meetings Help You Produce Professional iPad Minute Reports
In my free online MakeUseOf Online Meeting Guide where I provided some tips for planning and holding meetings over the Web, I referenced a few minute taking apps as well. While very few of us enjoy taking and producing minutes, Meetings ($3.99) and MinuteTaker ($7.99) not only make it easier to take minutes, but the reports you share will actually encourage meeting participants to read the minute reports. If you use your iPad as a laptop and you have the laborious job of taking minutes at meetings, I couldn't make better app recommendations for the job.
5 More Productivity Apps for Your Mac-Based Home Office
When your Mac is the hubbub of your home office, you want to outfit it with productivity tools that actually make you, well, productive, more efficient, and maybe a little faster at what you do. I introduced my first list of Mac productivity tools back in April, and today I will be highlighting another set of tools I regularly access. They each have a single purpose that makes them practical and easy to use for most Mac-based home office activities.
PhotoSync 2.0 Syncs Your Photos and Videos Between iOS, Mac and Windows
The iPhone photo syncing process has never been that easy, even with Apple's Photo Stream feature. I often rely on PhotoSync, especially when I don't want to haul out Aperture just to get at a few photos in my iCloud account. In addition, not only can photos be synced, but PhotoSync can sync videos as well with a single tap. Read on to find out what else makes this a very handy app to have around.
Read, Study & Highlight With Diigo and eHighlighter
The best way to study and review text is to highlight and annotate what you read, and two of the most useful tools for doing this are the online and iPad app, Diigo, and the recently updated eHighlighter. I won't pretend that making annotations with a traditional yellow highlighter and sticky notes is sometimes faster and better for study purposes, but digital annotations offer so much more when it comes to reviewing, sharing, and even archiving annotations.
Use Your Expertise: Author Your Own Money Making Course Using Udemy
In the age of the Internet, you can often surpass traditional and expensive college and technical courses and learn practically anything online. And if you have a particular expertise in a subject and want to teach others, there is a large variety of online resources to make this happen as well. Udemy is one such example of a popular online teaching and learning site that can be accessed online and from supported mobile devices.
8 Evernote Upgrades You Should Know About
It seems like every other month, Evernote gets additional upgrades. A few are quietly released, while others are highly anticipated by heavy Evernote users. Since I wrote my last article about Evernote's new design and file storage upgrades, the popular notebook has gotten important new features, including Reminders, a highlighter and tighter security for subscribers, among others, and today I'm taking a look at what's made it into the latest versions for Mac OS X and iOS.
Access Files & Folders In Record Time With Default Folder X
The Mac Finder includes several shortcuts and features for navigating to recently opened files and folders, but if you are always manually navigating everywhere you might want to try out Default Folder X. The app is a directory assistant that you can access either from the menu bar, via assigned keyboard shortcuts or from the application's icon in the Dock. This Finder-connected application provides some powerful enhancements to the way you navigate regularly used folders and locate and save your most used files, and much more.
Power Up Phone Conferencing With UberConference
There's no shortage of web conferencing solutions and another service that rivals the market leaders is UberConference, a phone and web conferencing service that also allows participants to access online documents and social network content. The advantage of including phone conferencing means participants don't have to be tied to a video camera on a computer or mobile device. Videoconference meetings might also be troublesome for participants who do not have a good Internet connection, but still want to take part.
Browse & Locate Your iCloud Files From Your Mac Using Cloud Mate & Plain Cloud
Apple's iCloud is pretty much an unobtrusive cloud storage service that works well for syncing files between Apple supported devices and supported applications. One shortcoming is that it doesn't easily enable you to access iCloud stored files in your Mac Finder, as you can with files stored in your Dropbox or Google Drive account. For this purpose, Cloud Mate ($6.99) or Plain Cloud (donationware) may just do the trick. These two Mac OS X apps can see all of your iCloud-compatible apps and can reveal their respective folders in the Finder.
Power Up Your Mac With Advanced BetterTouchTool Automations
I started using BetterTouchTool back in 2011, and since then it has become one of the top three Mac applications for boosting my productivity and streamlining my workflow. Though BTT can be used by any Mac user, it does require some time to setup and configure gestures that you can remember and are not awkward to use. The following tips will help users who are familiar with the app get more out of some of its more advanced features.
How the New iWork for iCloud Works With Your Apple Devices
iWork for iCloud is a suite of online office applications (consisting of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers) that sync with the Mac and iOS versions of the programs. The online versions of iWork mirror most of the main features of the desktop versions, and users will be able to import and edit Word files online as well. Here's what you can expect when you finally get your hands on iWork for iCloud.
Tempo Is Your Personal Assistant Calendar App for the iPhone
I stopped using the default iOS Calendar app when Fantastical was released last year, but in the world of mobile apps, there's no end to new approaches for achieving the same results. Recently released "smart calendar" iPhone app Tempo ties your pertinent data from email, calendar, and contacts accounts, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn connections, into one place - saving you the trouble of opening two or more apps to locate related data for scheduled events and appointments. But is it any good?
Write App: A Beautiful iOS Text Editor With Markdown Support & Dozens of Actions
Writing apps for the iPad and iPhone are plentiful. We're lucky enough to live in a time when developers are coming up with new ways to edit text using unique features in new apps. This is the case for a new app that's simply called "Write". If you're a digital notebook addict, Write will probably remind you of the popular iOS text editor, Drafts, which allows you to share notes to other apps like Evernote, Dropbox, Simplenote, Twitter, and Day One.
7 Tips For Automating Your Mac With TextExpander
If you haven't gotten on the Mac automation spaceship by now, you're missing out. Applications like Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, and TextExpander can speed up your workflow and save you lots of clicking, copying, pasting and even the need to remember keyboard shortcuts. I routinely incorporate at least 20 or more TextExpander snippets in every MakeUseOf article I write, and in this article I will provide some advanced tips for getting more out of TextExpander.
NoteSuite: A Combined Notebook & To-Do Manager For Mac & iPad
From Evernote and Springpad to Google Keep, and the never ending list of iOS note apps, don't feel too embarrassed if you use more than one program for keeping track of notes, thoughts and to-do lists. You certainly need to do your homework when it comes to selecting a notebook app that is right for you. One of the newest kids on the writer's block is Theory.io's NoteSuite for Mac and iPad,
TouchCast Enables You to Create Powerful Interactive Videos on Your iPad
In the tradition of video production apps like Videolicious, Video Star, and Socialcam, the recently released free iPad-only app TouchCast helps you create and post interactive videos from your iPad 2 or later. Those of us familiar with creating YouTube videos using desktop programs like iMovie, ScreenFlow, or Camtasia know how powerful non-linear timeline productions can be and TouchCast brings another solution to the table. The app uses the iPad's built-in camera, a useful collection of widgets and a timeline editor to help users produce video productions almost on the fly.