Software : How to use the new Photos app for Mac |
- How to use the new Photos app for Mac
- Tame your email: how to achieve Inbox Zero in Gmail and Outlook
- Making Windows 10 apps just got a whole lot easier
- How to backup your Android device
- iOS Tips: iPhone widgets: How to install and use on iOS
| How to use the new Photos app for Mac Posted:  IntroductionFor the better part of a decade, iPhoto was arguably the cornerstone of Apple's successful suite of consumer creative iLife products. Many of us got in the habit of shooting our daily and family adventures, then manually syncing them to our Macs when we have a free moment. But times change. We now live in an age of ubiquitous cameras, always-available cloud photo libraries, and one-touch editing. With the meteoric success of iOS, Apple has elected to retire both iPhoto and "iPhoto Pro" (a.k.a., Aperture). It's no secret that iPhoto was getting bulky and slow, and the pro-centric Aperture has been eclipsed by its largest competitor, Adobe Lightroom. Both products have already been "sunset" and will receive no updates going forward. A successor now rises in their place that is both familiar and different — an all-new Mac edition of the Photos for iOS app, which over 700 million people (and counting) are quite familiar with. Over the following pages, we'll explain how the new Photos works and give you helpful tips. Quick look: the main Photos area
This should feel pretty familiar, whether you have previously used iPhoto or just about any similar app or service. It's all your photos (and videos), displayed in a simple grid. If you're using a Trackpad, you can pinch in and out to quickly resize the grid and see larger photos with more detail or more photos all at once. A. Sidebar: Here is where you can slice and dice your library. In fairly standard Apple practice, new Albums, Smart Albums, and Folders you create are listed here. This also displays any Shared Photo Stream albums you have created or joined. B. Smart Sidebar: Photos for Mac does quite a bit of library organization for you, automatically sorting some items into sections like Faces (Mac-only for now), Favorites, Panoramas, Videos, Slow-Mo, and more. Unlike albums you create, you cannot remove any of these sections. C. Toolbar: An app's toolbar is often your anchor, your home base for figuring out where you are and what you can do next. For iPhoto and Aperture users, the Photos for Mac toolbar is dramatically simplified. Only a couple options are visible while browsing photos and albums, and options to share and edit a photo appear only once you select or double-click, respectively. D. Editing: Click the Edit button at the right of the toolbar to craft a photo into your own image. A suite of tools, which iOS users should recognize, appears to the right of your photo as the app switches into an editing interface. This is where the magic happens. E. Search: What good are ever-expanding photo libraries without a way to search through them? Here you can zero in on just about anything, including metadata like locations and dates that is automatically captured when you shoot with an iPhone, as well as album names, Faces, and other information you add. Organizing your photos
By default, and just like iOS, Photos for Mac punctuates your photos and videos using basic metadata of time and location (when available). Combine this with the new built-in sidebar categories, and many people will be happy with this level of automated organization. For the more adventurous, you can create albums to organize media for just about any purpose or topic you want. If that isn't enough, you can also use Smart Albums, a longtime staple of iPhoto, Aperture, and OS X itself, to automatically filter your library by criteria such as date, text in titles you add, and even the camera used. Of course, the fabric tying all Apple products together is iCloud, and it is a first-class citizen here with a custom feature name: iCloud Photo Library. If you enable this, your entire library will automatically sync between all devices as long as they're on Wi-Fi. Yes, even edits you make to photos will sync, as will your ability to revert a photo to its original form. If I have a complaint with the organizational features of Photos, it's that not all of them sync with iOS. You can create Smart Albums and organize Faces on Mac, but as of this writing, Apple's latest iOS doesn't see them. Our ever-expanding photo libraries sync to all devices now, but the smart tools we need sift through them do not. Also, out-of-the-box, Photos is woefully short on filters. I hope Apple allows third-party apps to add filter tools on Mac like they can on iOS. Step-by-step: get organized
1. Import Your Photos: Of course, you need to get your photos into Photos for Mac to do anything with them. If, like most people, you shoot everything with your iPhone, be sure to enable iCloud Photo library on all your devices for effortless sync. To manually import from a traditional camera, simply plug it in via USB to trigger the Photos for Mac import tool.
2. Create an Album: Use File > New Album to create a blank album in your sidebar, give it a name, and start dragging photos into it. Alternatively, if you hold Command or Shift to select multiple photos, then click File > New Album, all selected items will be automatically organized into that new album.
3. Get Smart: If you really want to start organizing, use File > New Smart Album to create a live, dynamic filter of your library. For example, you could combine criteria like "date" and "Face" to find all photos of yourself from that one time in your life and delete them to leave no evidence… or simply reminisce.
4. New Shared Album: A great feature of Apple's new photo ecosystem is the option to share and even collaborate on an album with friends and family. Use File > Share > iCloud Photo Sharing to share media with people you invite (Apple devices required). You can even let others upload, making these handy for collaboration.
6. Hide Photos: If you save images like Internet memes or screenshots on your iPhone, but don't want them cluttering your actual photography, Photos for Mac (and iOS) can hide them (Image > Hide Photo). If you put them in albums first, the photo will display in that album, but not in All Photos.
Basic photo editingPhotos for Mac provides a nice, succinct set of editing tools to help most typical users polish their memories. iOS users should feel right at home with the handful of options — Enhance, Rotate, Crop, Filters, Adjust, Retouch, and Red-eye — but iPhoto and Aperture users shouldn't have any trouble picking them up. Like iPhoto, Aperture, and Photos for iOS, edits are non-destructive (you can undo them tomorrow or a year from now), and they even sync across devices if you use iCloud Photo Library. Crop a photo in Photos for Mac and add a filter for that extra style, and later you can revert back to the original from your iPhone or iPad. Yep, we live in the future. As I mentioned earlier, the Edit button won't appear in the upper-right until it's needed (the idea is that users don't need to see certain tools until they are in the right mode or it is necessary). But once you're editing, the entire interface shifts to accommodate. The sidebar automatically hides, the light, Yosemite-standard background turns to black, and the edit tools appear on the right; it's pretty difficult to miss that you have left "organization mode" and are now in a different task. Let's give some basic edits a try with a photo from Unsplash.com, a great photography project that regularly publishes beautiful photos which are free to use for anything you want. Step-by-step: edit your photos
1. Time to Edit: To enter edit mode, find a photo in your library or download one from Unsplash.com (http://unsplash.com/) and drag it in (remember, all edits are non-destructive, so feel free to play around now and backtrack later). Double-click the photo to view it individually, then click Edit at the right of the toolbar.
2. One-Click Fix: If your photo needs a quick boost, use the first tool, Enhance. It has no options or customization, but will assess your photo for things like white balance and color balance, then automatically tune it for sharing or posterity.
3. Right-Side Up: Sometimes a photo falls on its side, or your iPhone's rotation lock might have caused it to appear upside down. Use the Rotate tool to make it right. Bonus sub-tip: hold the Option key to switch the rotation direction.
4. Crop for Focus: Editing tools should appear on the right. Let's focus on a good part of the photo by clicking the Crop tool. Now click and drag the handles that appeared around your photo to move the most prominent person or object to the center, or perhaps near the lower left or right corner.
5. Add Some Style: Move back over to the toolset on the right and click Filters. Apple includes a handful, so you could try "Process" to add a dreamy state, or "Noir" for some mystery. When you're happy, click Done in the upper right to keep your new masterpiece.
6. Throw It All Away: But what if you didn't just create a masterpiece, and maybe even ruined a priceless family memory? No problem! Double-click the photo again to view it individually, then click the Edit button. See "Revert to Original" right next to Done? There's your ticket back to square one.
Advanced editing tools
Despite its focus on the everyday customer with Photos for Mac, Apple packed in a number of advanced photo-editing tools that are easy to access if you want them, yet effortlessly avoidable if they just aren't for you. They surely aren't an end-all replacement for serious Aperture users or professionals, but they may be just what you need when it's time to move beyond a crop and a filter. In true Apple fashion, diving into the advanced editing tools feels deceptively simple. These tools live alongside the others we just tinkered with, at times adding an advanced feature to a core tool (like fine-grained rotate/leveling in Crop), and sometimes being collected in their own section like Adjust. As you might expect, these tools can all stack or combine their effects as you work (and yes, everything is still non-destructive if you have to start over, whether you decide right now or a year down the road). For example, if a photo's colors are all over the map, you can first crop it, then use a White Balance adjustment on the cropped area to better center its palette, then use a filter to add style, again on just the cropped portion. Let's roll up our sleeves and dig a little deeper. Step-by-step: Advanced editing
1. Rotate to a Degree: You may have noticed that a degree meter appeared with the Crop tool, just to the right of your photo. Click and drag this to level your photo with fine control; this is great if you were off-balance when shooting or if you want to add some tension to a shot.
2. Retouch: Arguably one of the most "magical" tools, Retouch is a surprisingly accurate way to make many unwanted elements disappear. This is great for restoring aged, cracked family photos to glory or even, in this example, removing the boat and its passengers from view.
3. Crop to a Standard: If you are often cropping photos for a specific use or format — say, 5 x 7 inches for print or 16:9 for featured blog post images — look to the bottom of the Crop tool. Click the Aspect button for a bunch of size presets, or define your own dimensions.
4. Split View: If you're on an editing roll, use View > Show Split View to show a left sidebar of all photos in the currently selected album. This gives you a bird's-eye view of the other photos you can edit, and it's just one click to switch while staying in edit mode.
5. Adjust: This is where you can take complete, manual control over enhancing your photos. Sliders offer fine-grained control over everything from color saturation to highlights and shallows, complete with clever thumbnail previews before you start sliding.
6. Paste Adjustments: When editing a similar group of photos and you get adjustments on one just the way you like, you can copy and paste it to all the others. Simply use Image > Copy Adjustments on the current photo, then Image > Paste Adjustments on the rest.
7. Adjust Your Adjustments: You can add a broad array of tools to the default set. Click the Add button at the top of the Adjustments column — everything from a histogram, to noise reduction (for grainy photos), and even a Photoshop-ish levels panel can give you great control over your photos.
8. Levels: Long hailed as one of the most useful photo-editing tools, a Levels tool is like going under the hood of the Light and Color adjustments. Levels allows you to adjust color and tone by hand, and to fix "flat" images by setting new black and white points. |
| Tame your email: how to achieve Inbox Zero in Gmail and Outlook Posted:  Introduction
Email is a blessing and a curse: while it's a boon for communication and collaboration we've all felt that sinking feeling as we've opened up an overstuffed inbox. But it doesn't have to be that way... With a few easy tricks and a couple of top tips you can be the master or mistress of mail, eliminating annoyances and reaching the famed state of Inbox Zero. In this article, we're going to look at how to achieve this in the two most popular email services, Gmail and Outlook.
Use conversations
This one's particularly important in the corporate world, where what should be fairly simple discussions can get bogged down in endless emails about nothing in particular. Both Outlook and Gmail enable you to view your emails in conversation mode, which means every message in a particular thread is collapsed underneath a single email title. To turn on conversation view in Gmail, click on the gear icon, select Settings and scroll down to Conversation View. Toggle the switch and save your changes. In Outlook, conversations are off by default. To enable them, click on View > Conversations > Show as Conversations. You can also change the settings here to specify how conversations should be displayed. In Outlook.com the conversation option is in Options > Group By Conversation and Pre-Load Messages. Filter the faff and filth
No matter how good your organisation's email filters, some spam is going to get through. Thankfully both Outlook and Gmail have some tools that can help you fight the spam menace (and on the desktop you can add more via plugins). In Gmail, the easiest way to filter unwanted messages is to use the drop-down in the message body and choose Filter Messages Like This. You can then specify what Gmail should do with messages that match the same criteria, such as email address or subject line. In Outlook, you want Mail > Home > Delete > Junk > Junk E-Mail Options, where you can adjust the level of filtering. If you want you can restrict incoming email to known senders only, although that isn't really practical in most offices. In Outlook.com, you can tap Actions > Create Rule to automatically delete unwanted messages. Get to grips with the good stuff
Filters and rules aren't just for messages you don't want. They can be useful tools for organising the mail you do want, too. For example, you might create Outlook rules that colour-code messages so you can gauge their importance immediately, or you might create a rule or filter that gives certain messages a category and files them accordingly so you can worry about them later. Such rules and filters are also a good way of keeping legitimate messages out of your spam filter, or of forwarding messages that aren't your department, and it's easy to create very complex rules – so for example you can have different outcomes based on whether incoming messages have file attachments or include certain words. Unsubscribe from everything
Over time, there's a good chance you'll end up subscribed to all kinds of things – often without asking. That's where the superb Unroll.me website comes in. It works with Gmail and Outlook.com (as well as Hotmail, AOL Mail and iCloud), and it can do two handy things: it can roll all your subscription emails into a regular digest, keeping your inbox tidy, or it can automatically unsubscribe you from mailing lists you don't want. We used the latter option and discovered we'd been subscribed to more than 200 mailing lists we didn't want to be on. It's a fantastic tool. Use aliases
Aliases – having multiple email addresses for the same account – are a great way to categorise incoming email, and they're handy weapons in the war against spam too. In Outlook.com you can add additional Outlook.com email addresses to your existing account, while in Gmail you can add anything after the first part of your email provided you do it with a plus sign – so for example karen.smith+notes@gmail.com would go to karen.smith@gmail.com. You can then set rules or filters to look for your aliases and process them accordingly, for example by sending them straight to your spam folder. Set up Quick Steps
This one's Outlook-only – in addition to Rules, Outlook has Quick Steps to help you organise your inbox. The difference between Quick Steps and Rules is that the former are run manually while the latter are automatic. A Quick Step is a fast way of applying multiple actions to a message or group of messages, and Outlook comes with predefined ones such as Move to Folder or Reply & Delete. By creating a Quick Step and adding it to your Quick Access toolbar (under the lightning bolt icon) you can turn many email processing jobs into one-click efforts. Create canned responses
You'll often find yourself essentially writing the same message again and again to multiple people, so why not automate it? Outlook's Quick Parts are a blessing here: create an email, write the bit you don't want to write ever again, then click on Insert > Quick Parts > Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery. The next time you need to send that message, put the cursor in the body of the message and click Insert > Quick Parts and then select your canned response. The process is similar in Gmail but you need to go to Settings > Labs and look for the Canned Responses option. Click Enable to turn it on. Use Autocorrect
Canned responses can be overkill for a lot of messages, but there's another way to speed up your email composition and replies. One massive time-saver is to use autocorrect as a form of shorthand, so for example you could replace a long email address with "eml", a postal address with "addr" or a sign-off with "regrd" so the full text magically appears when you type the correct command. In Outlook, you can define your Autocorrect entries in File > Options > Proofing > Mail > Spelling and Autocorrect. For Gmail you'll need to do it at the operating system level using a third-party app, or via a Chrome flag: type chrome://flags in the address bar and look for Enable Automatic Spelling Correction. Use task lists
One of the most practical ways to manage your email is to use to-do lists – flagging a message for future action is only useful if you remember to come back to it, and to-do lists are a great way of ensuring that you do. In Outlook you can flag an email message for follow-up by right-clicking the flag icon and setting a reminder time, or you can drag the message to the To-Do Bar to create a to-do item. In Gmail, click on Gmail > Tasks to bring up the Tasks List. To add a mail message to it, click on the message's More drop-down and select Create Event. This adds the event you create to your Calendar. Do it now
One school of thought says you should only ever read a message in your inbox once: if you just let it sit there, you aren't organising your email effectively enough. Instead, you should take immediate action – delete it if it's irrelevant, delegate it if it's someone else's job, archive if you don't need to do anything or flag it to come back to later. The end result of that should be the much-vaunted Inbox Zero – or at least it will be until someone emails you and spoils it. The method does work, but it's best suited to infrequent raids on your inbox – if you attempt to process every email as soon as it arrives, you'll find it hard to get anything else done. |
| Making Windows 10 apps just got a whole lot easier Posted:  Developers worried that Windows 10 will bring them nothing but misery in the conversion department need not worry - Microsoft has a solution that is already live. Project Westminster, announced earlier this year by the bods over at Redmond, is designed to allow developers to convert web apps and games to Windows 10 and the new concept is already alive and well. In a newly released video, it shows Windows developers are able to convert apps using existing code and workflow with any debugging being done using Microsoft Edge F12 developer tools. Making an app available for Windows 10 is, however, just the tip of the iceberg. The parliament-inspired project also allows apps to work on a wide range of different devices such as laptops, tablets, consoles, mobile platforms and it's very easy to integrate additional features like Cortana voice commands and analytics, add active notifications and make Windows Store purchases. HoloLens coming soonThose asking about converting apps for the revolutionary HoloLens aren't left out with the end of the video revealing that Westminster will help developers do just this, although this isn't likely to be implemented until at least 2016. All this makes it incredibly easy for developers to bring apps to all Windows 10 platforms ahead of the new operating system's release date, which is fast approaching on July 29. |
| How to backup your Android device Posted:  How to backup your Android device
Android is tailor-made for syncing with cloud services, so wherever possible, use online services for core needs like email, contacts and calendar. On Android, Google's Sync Services feature will backup contacts, email, calendar and bookmarks if you're using the default (or Google made) apps associated with each of these. Android can now also back up a lot of critical app data — a feature that's gotten better over time — but it's not quite as thorough as what you'll see on iOS. As such, it's best to take a two-pronged approach to backing up and Android device. Enabling Backups The first simple step is to enable Android's built-in backup feature, if you haven't already. To check, head into Settings > Backup and reset and make sure both 'Back up my data' as well as 'Automatic restore' are checked. Helium: Granting access Install Helium from the Google Play Store. If your handset is rooted, just install the app and you're good to go. If not, there's a couple of additional steps required to give Helium the correct access it needs for backup. The first of these is to enable USB debugging on your phone. Go to Settings > Developer Options > USB Debugging. If you can't see a 'Developer Options' entry, which is hidden by default on many handsets, go to Settings > About Phone and tap 'Build number' seven times to unhide the entry. Next, download and install the Helium Desktop client on your computer. Launch it, then follow the instructions, plugging in your Android device via USB when prompted and launching the Helium app. Helium: Setting it up
Once you've got Helium's access rights sorted, you can make back ups (and restore them) from your phone or tablet's internal storage, or a microSD card, if your device has a slot. You can also copy these backups to your PC for safekeeping. For ever better backup security, Helium will let you save backups directly to the cloud using Dropbox, Google Drive or Box — the caveat is that if you want to *restore* a cloud backup, you'll need to purchase the Premium version of Helium, which costs US$4.79. Google accounts all come with 15GB of free cloud storage on Google Drive, which should be enough for your app data. Helium: Backing up app data
Backing up in Helium is a simple matter of selecting the apps you'd like to save data from (the little window that shows 'Buy premium' contains a list of all installed apps), then tapping 'Backup' and choosing a destination. Unless you've got a humungous microSD card inside your device, we'd recommend leaving the default 'App Data Only (smaller backups)' option checked. If you uncheck this, Helium will back up a copy of the application (as an apk file) alongside the data — the only real reason for doing this full backup is if you want to avoid re-downloading an app from the Play Store. Note that some app types, such as for podcasting, often have large media files associated with them, which means they can take some time to back up — and will consume more storage space than most other apps. So, select the individual apps you want to back up, or tap 'Select all' down the bottom to just do everything, then tap 'Backup', choose a destination (we've used 'Internal storage' here) and wait for the backup to complete. Your backups are stored in a folder on storage device you've selected called 'carbon' — we'd recommend copy this to your PC for safekeeping, as it'll be deleted if you ever have to reset your phone. Helium: Backing up to your computer
You can also back up directly to your PC or Mac. Tap the 'three dots' icon at the top right and then 'PC download'. Then, in your PC's web browser, type the address shown and you'll be given a web-based interface that mirrors what's on Android. When you perform a backup this way, your browser with download and save a file called backup.zip, so place this somewhere safe. Helium: Restoring from a backup
To restore an older backup, swipe right and tap on the storage location where your backup is saved. You'll be presented with a list of apps, which you can select from, or tap the blue box icon at the bottom left to show the 'Select all' button. When you're ready, tap Restore to recover the backed up data. Note that if you want to delete the backup for a specific app, tap and hold on an app's entry in the list until you see a 'Delete Backup' prompt, then tap OK. |
| iOS Tips: iPhone widgets: How to install and use on iOS Posted:  Even though iOS 8 has been out for the better part of a year, some developers are just getting their sea legs when it comes to building quality widgets that give you live information and quick actions right from the Notification Center. But that's OK: many iPhone users are still getting used to the idea of widgets as well. They're great for checking baseball scores, skimming the news or finding out when your next appointment is. Once you get your widget section set up the way you want, you'll spend less time hopping through apps to find the content that you're after or to perform a specific task. We'll get you through the basics. How to add widgetsWidgets live in the Notification Center (accessed by sliding down from the top of Home screen), on the left side under the Today tab. The Notifications tab on the right is reserved for all those sometimes-annoying push alerts. By default, Apple starts you out with widgets from its core services. The Today summary, Reminders, Calendar, and Stocks are decent enough, but as with many of Apple's apps there's often a better solution from a third party. Also, you can rearrange the order of the widgets, add new ones, or delete those on display. (The Today summary and Traffic Conditions are the only ones that can't be repositioned).
When you download a new app, you'll see a message at the bottom of the Notification Center if a new widget is available. Touch the Edit button to launch the screen that has all the available widgets to add. You'll see the familiar red button for deleting items, as well as three horizontal lines on the right that indicate you can move an object. Just touch and hold a widget's name to slide it into the position you want. You can rearrange the existing ones, add a new widget, or remove a widget that you don't want anymore. Which widgets?As with any operating system feature, some developers have built better solutions than others. Some widgets do a better job than others at keeping the information updated. ESPN, Nuzzel, and, of course, Apple's offerings are particularly reliable at putting the most up-to-date data in the Today view. Several other news apps, however, require you to jump into the app from time to time in order to get the most refreshed content. It's unclear if this is some type of restriction in how Apple allows developers to implement widgets or if the developers need to work out some bugs. Other widgets allow for better productivity. Evernote's widget is a fine example, as it gives you one-touch access to creating a new note or reminder. Also, PCalc lets you add a calculator widget - a great way to have one within easy access and to save space on your home screen.
Ultimately, you'll need to spend some time building widgets into your workflow to see which ones you like. One-touch actions are the key differentiators here. Widgets that save you time and give you at-a-glance information are the most deserving of a spot in your Notification Center.
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