Software : Apple omits Android searches from Chomp app

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• Apple omits Android searches from Chomp app
• Tutorial: How to use iMovie chapter markers
• Interview: Libre Office is taking off 'like a rocket'
• Tutorial: Get started with Messages for Mac Beta

Apple omits Android searches from Chomp app Posted: While it's hardly a surprise, Apple has removed the ability to search for Android apps from its recently-acquired Chomp service. Back in February, Cupertino snapped-up the San Francisco-based start-up, with a view to improving application search and discovery within its own App Store. SInce then, the web-based version of the service has still allowed users to search for Android applications as well as iPhone and iPad apps. Not anymore. Making the Genius smarter The Chomp application has also been removed from the Google Play store. It is still unclear what Apple plans to do with Chomp long-term, but the company will surely find a way to integrate the tech within the App Store and perhaps improve Genius recommendations.

Tutorial: How to use iMovie chapter markers Posted: How to use iMovie chapter markers Back in the day when Apple was interested in DVDs and pioneered the creation of iDVD discs, iMovie was tightly integrated with that program. This enabled you to add chapter markers throughout your project so that your viewers could easily skip to the next scene while watching the film on their widescreen TV. But just because iDVD is on life-support and Apple is more interested in online digital distribution, it doesn't mean that chapter markers are no longer of any use. Yes, that feature was notoriously absent from the re-imagined iMovie back in 2007, but it made a comeback and it's better than ever - although you wouldn't know it by glancing at the interface. The features are hidden. That's because Apple designed iMovie to be perfect for novice editors. Everything they need is at their fingertips without overwhelming them. However, it's worth enabling the advanced features to get more control over your editing; these will keep you engaged with the app after you've mastered the basics. Here we'll show you how to enable and make use of markers in your projects. 1. Advanced Tools iMovie's interface is relatively bare. You can import clips into Events, browse iPhoto and Aperture libraries, add a part of a clip to one of your projects, and insert titles and basic effects. But the most interesting features are concealed by default. To reveal them, you need to go to iMovie > Preferences (or use the Cmd +, shortcut), select the General tab and tick Show Advanced Tools. 2. Brown bubble With a project open, you'll notice two new icons, top-right of the Project section: a brown speech bubble and a red one with a white arrow inside it. Click the brown one and drag it onto your project. As you do so, it'll offer you '1' as its basic title, but you can overwrite that simply by typing. Hit the Enter key to set the change. 3. A comment This is not a chapter marker but a comment - useful if you have more than one person working on the same project and you want to leave notes about the edit. Don't worry if you forget to remove them since they won't be exported into your finished product. They're there to help you with the editing process for complex projects. 4. Red bubble Drag a red bubble onto your project. You'll notice that it offers you '2' as a default title if you hadn't altered the comment's one. That's because the numerical values for the comments and chapter markers are linked, which could be a little confusing if you're not careful, since brown and red are quite similar when glanced at rapidly. 5. Move around Wherever you've added your markers isn't set in stone: you can drag them to any position. If you wish to be more precise, click on one to select it, then use the left and right arrow keys to move your comment or chapter marker back or forward one frame. This enables you to place it perfectly within your project. 6. Anchored markers Notice that your marker has a small line to its left, pointing down onto a clip. This shows you where the marker is located since a long title can make it hard to see where it's supposed to start. It's also anchored to that clip. This means that if you were to move your clip to another place in your project, the marker would move along with it. 7. Marker removal Since a marker is linked to a specific clip, deleting that clip will remove the marker. To delete a clip, click to select a portion of it (four seconds by default) then go to Edit > Select All (or press Cmd+A). Once the yellow highlight covers the entire clip, hit the Backspace key to remove it. To remove just the marker, click it and hit the same key. 8. Save chapter markers Exporting your film is done via the Share menu, but not all options will preserve chapter markers. Sending it to YouTube for instance will remove them from your film. If you want to be certain your chapter markers are preserved, use Media Browser, iTunes, Export Movie or Export Using QuickTime. Open up your finished film in QuickTime and you'll be able to access those chapters. You can do the same in iTunes or on your Apple TV. And if you upload the video to an iPhone, you'll be able to see and access those chapters by tapping on the menu to the left of the playback controls. Markers definitely have many more uses than just being a DVD tool.

Interview: Libre Office is taking off 'like a rocket' Posted: Libre Office Michael Meeks is a long-time OpenOffice, now Libre Office, contributor and employee of Novell, now Attachmate. We caught up with him to get the inside perspective on the massive changes they, and desktop Linux as a whole, have gone through in the past few years. Linux Format: Given everything that has happened with Attachmate buying Novell, who do you now work for? Michael Meeks: Gosh, that's a really good question. The public-facing brand would be Suse. That's where I report in to. The company is managed as four different units. LXF: Because they split out Suse and Novell? MM: Absolutely. Novell and Suse are now separate. So, in terms of the legal ramifications of how the merger was completed, I don't think that really matters. What matters is the entity that we are, and that is Suse. LXF: Right. We find the idea that they've separated Suse exciting. They're clearly putting a lot of emphasis on that brand again. MM: Yes, there are a lot of differences there. You'll find that, traditionally, employees were trying to be a Novell employee, but now there's a much greater emphasis on trying to identify with Suse. So, in terms of attitude, I think there's a feeling of liberation and freedom. We can do cool things, and we're not constrained by some central, interlocking product management matrix. LXF: The other big story is the Libre Office/OpenOffice split. How are things going with Libre Office? MM: Like a rocket. It's extremely encouraging to get patches on the list, day after day after day - new people we haven't seen before. LXF: We're well aware of all the speed-ups and so on, but have you got anything planned in terms of new, user-facing features? The interface is quite old-fashioned, for instance. MM: Sure, sure. There are many things we can do to improve our usability, I'm sure of that. But there are dangers to big directions that you sit down and put a big team on. We're doing a lot of small shifts, which add up to big things. As journalists, you probably have to write per word. One feature we're introducing is interactive word count; so you can open up word count, stick it on the side, and it will update as you type. LXF: That's great! MM: Other things: getting your projectors right, making it easier to deal with styles, with headings and footers. Polishing what we have - and making it smaller, faster and easier to use - is working. LXF: All of these features are there, they've just been difficult to access and use… MM: Yes, I think there's quite a long legacy of box-ticking product management there: we need this feature, so we'll minimally implement it and move on to the next thing, rather than making it easy to use and attractive. LXF: Let's talk about the desktop more generally. What's the future of desktop Linux, Libre Office, and other desktop applications, in a world where people are moving to the web, to tablets and so on? MM: That's interesting, because the world's always been swinging between these two poles. When I first started programming, I was using a green screen, serial terminal, which was very much cloud. The computer was out there somewhere, and it came slowly to you. And then, of course, PCs became so cheap and so ubiquitous and everyone switched to PCs. Then the server just became something for communication and collaboration. Now, people are trying to drag us back to 'the web is everything, and everything should be hosted in the server room' again, 'it's safer and cheaper' and so on. So, there's a pendulum there, and depending on the economics of it, it swings from time to time. LXF: The cost of a broadband connection? MM: Yeah, of course. My take is that I don't see this trend. It doesn't really make much sense to put desktop applications on the cloud. If you see where people are going with their online offerings, they're all trying to make them offline as well. That solves the deployment and management problem, but that's not such a huge problem on Linux, because there has always been nice packagement. LXF: One of the other big advantages, however, is data security. We're technical guys, but we think that our data is almost certainly safer with Google than on our hard drives… MM: I think there's a valid point there, but it's difficult to know. We've seen outages and data losses in the cloud, too. There's a great hope that it will be better, but I see no reason why you can't just sync your data remotely. That is, if we can make the desktop applications good enough. LXF: One thing that we talk about in the office a lot is the idea of collaboration vs competition. In light of the need to create great applications, does this repeated effort not make you cry? MM: Yes, to a certain degree that does make me cry. However, when you look at collaboration vs. competition, and the matrix of options that go in to making a successful community, my personal take would be that copyleft is a key part of that. The worst behaviour is to develop a feature internally and release it with a product. I've been in companies that've done virtually everything wrong, including this, because it gives you the value add. That's been the reality of the OpenOffice project for some time. We think a big element of fixing that is getting copyleft licensing, and that's what we're sticking out for in Libre Office. And, so far, it's working. Linux as a whole has switched to Libre Office. Since a huge part of our development momentum comes from the Linux world anyway, this is great. If you want to attract developers to create free software on Windows, Linux is the place to start. It fills an important role of seeding and teaching people about freedom. LXF: While we're on the topic of freedom, what's your take on the ethics of free software? Why should people use free software? MM: The feeling of sharing, and working in community with other people; and the depth of interaction, friendship, and the fun that you have, is unparalleled - so I think there's something intrinsically good happening there. LXF: In that regard, free software's certainly advantageous compared to proprietary software. So perhaps proprietary software's not evil, but free software is better? MM: I'm not completely unconvinced that proprietary software is evil: it's exploiting network effects, people's lack of understanding in what they're doing. You buy an iPhone, and what you're doing is not just getting a device - it's not a morality-free zone. There's a whole spectrum of things, like what happens in Foxconn, and the ecosystem, too: are you encouraging developers to write for this platform, and does Apple treat its developers reasonably? LXF: Reversing that, it provides an interesting argument for using free software. It creates an audience for free software developers to write for, it supports an ecosystem. MM: I think that's important, yes. One of the major contributions that companies in our industry make is writing code and contributing it to the community. So, when you choose which Linux distribution you use, I think you need to choose one that contributes effectively and in a positive way to the whole ecosystem. If the choice is between two free distributions, you should ask which one is going to help increase contribution upstream.

Tutorial: Get started with Messages for Mac Beta Posted: Get started with Messages By now you've no doubt heard about OS X Mountain Lion, Apple's upcoming update to OS X Lion. Among the many new features that provide a far more iOS-like feel is Messages. This turns the humble iChat application into a more iCloud-focused messaging centre that stays in sync across all of your devices. As part of its testing of the new platform, Apple has made a beta version of Messages available as a free download for anyone to use. Of course, beta software isn't the most robust and you may encounter some glitches, but if you want to get a taste of Mountain Lion before it arrives then this is the best way to do it. You'll need the latest update to OS X Lion to run Messages Beta, as well as an iCloud account or an account with another messaging service such as Google Talk. To fully appreciate the benefits of Messages, however, an iCloud email address and an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch are best. As long as your Messages account is using the same iCloud account as those on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, your conversations will be available on all of your devices. For example, if you begin a chat on your Mac and then want to resume it while you're away from your computer, iMessages on your iOS device will show the same conversation and show any additional messages you might have received. When you return to your Mac, these messages will have been updated so your chats will always remain in sync. This goes for photo, video and file attachments too. iMessage can be set up from the Settings app within the Messages section. The email address you supply will initially need to be verified for use . In this tutorial we'll show you how to download and install Messages Beta on your Mac as well as how to add your existing iCloud and instant messaging accounts. 1. Download the Beta First download Messages Beta from Apple's site. Make sure your Mac is running the latest version of OS X by running Software Update from the Apple menu and install updates as needed. Next, go to the Message Beta webpage and, when the file is downloaded, locate and run the Messages installer to continue. Once the software is installed, you will be asked to restart your Mac. 2. Enter your details Launch the Messages app. Click through the opening screen until you're asked to enter your Apple ID. Fill in your email address and password into the fields provided or click the Create Apple ID button if you don't have one. Next you'll be asked to include any other chat accounts such as Google Talk and AIM. 3. Additional accounts Messages should automatically use existing iChat accounts associated with your Apple ID; check this by clicking on Preferences from the Messages menu. From here you can click on the accounts tab to view all of the accounts you've set up to work with Messages, and add or remove accounts using the plus and minus buttons. 4. Send a message You can now use Messages to chat to contacts regardless of whether they are using their Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Click the New Message button at the top-left of the screen then click the plus button at the top-right to add a contact from your Address Book that you wish to chat to. Type your message and hit Enter. 5. Emoticons In the same way you can add emoticons to iChat and SMS messages, Messages enables you to do the same from your Mac. Click the face at the right of the message input area to view a menu that includes the images and their corresponding trigger symbols. Emoticons can be viewed on all devices using iMessage or Messages. 6. Pictures, videos and files To send a picture or video in a message, simply drag and drop the file onto the message input area. You can even include documents and other file types. The recipient sees images and video on any of their devices as if it were a normal picture or video message. They can also open other file types using compatible apps they own. 7. FaceTime At any point in a Messages chat you can initiate a simultaneous FaceTime call from within the app by clicking the button at the top-right of the interface. From here you can select which assigned address or phone number you're chatting to, and use it for FaceTime before the FaceTime interface appears and begins your call.

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