Software : Pebble now lets you get to important stuff on your wrist more quickly

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Pebble now lets you get to important stuff on your wrist more quickly Posted: Smartwatch maker Pebble released a massive update today that brings an updated UI and new features. Best of all, the update is available for most Pebble smartwatches, new and old. Pebble began targeting the fitness crowd earlier this summer with an updated Pebble Health app for Android and iOS. Today's update focuses on the Pebble Health app on the smartwatch itself, making it easier to quickly glance at important info. Pressing the Up button on your Pebble will now show you your step and sleep performance. You can press the Right button from each info card to find more in-depth info. Pebble Health for Android and iOS also get minor updates that make it easier to understand Activity and Sleep graphs. The update is compatible with the Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel, Pebble Time Round, and the upcoming Pebble 2 and Time 2. First-gen Pebble owners are unfortunately out of luck. Need for speed Today's update also speeds up Pebble's watch interface. From your watchface, you'll be able to see more of your upcoming agenda (up to three days ahead) by pressing down. There's also a new quick launcher that gives you access to your most used features. Simply press the Select button to see these options. Pebble also added quick launch buttons for getting things done quickly. You can program the Up, Down, Back and Select buttons to launch your favorite apps. Even the Pebble smartphone app gets in on the action with cleaner menus and faster performance. Last but not least, iOS users can finally act on their emails from their Gmail accounts. Pebble experimented with this feature earlier this summer but now it's available to everyone. Pebble's support for iOS Email Actions allows you Delete, Archive, Mark as Read, Reply All and Star emails on the smartwatch. The update also brings voice replies to email as well, so you can finally answer emails with your voice like you could already do with text messages. Pebble brags it's the only non-Apple smartwatch that can send replies to received iOS Messages, which gives it a leg up on Android Wear on iOS, which only prompts you to reply by opening the app on your iPhone. "Actionable notifications like Pebble email and text replies are a bit easier to implement for Android users, thanks to that operating system's more open philosophy, but we're always working to make the Pebble experience consistent for both mobile platforms," writes Pebble in a blog post. Apple Watch vs Pebble Time Steel

Round up: The best free PDF to Word converter 2016 Posted: Convert PDF documents to Word format Convert PDFs to Word documents If the precise formatting and fonts of a document are essential, PDF is the perfect format. It requires nothing more than a competent PDF reader for documents to display precisely; everything's packaged in and ready to go. Which is all lovely until you need to extract some of that information. PDFs, if you're using software like Adobe Reader, are usually a one-way street, consigning you to look and not touch. Unless you possess the original document used to generate the PDF in the first place, editing is going to be out of your reach. Or is it? We're here to look at the solution: PDF to Word converters. These tools will analyse PDF files, extract the text and images, and make the best stab they can at creating a Microsoft Word-compatible file that replicates the source. Results are unlikely to be absolutely perfect – particularly if the text in your PDF has been scanned or flattened to an image. Look for a converter with OCR (optical character recognition) if you do have flattened documents. We tested using a sample magazine page from our chums at Computer Arts, and opened the results in Microsoft Word 2010. Note that LibreOffice's much looser interpretation of the DOCX standard will likely lead to quite poor results. 1. Foxyutils A wily utility that copes well with unusual fonts Foxyutils' PDF to Word converter takes the top spot in our test for several reasons. First, it was by far the cleverest when it came to picking a font similar to that of our test document, outputting a Word file very close to the original PDF. Second, it did well with the images in our document, recognising that there was more than one and breaking them up appropriately. And third, when you use Foxyutils' tools, you contribute to the company's tree-planting efforts. Isn't that nice? There are slight restrictions – a lack of OCR chief among them - and obviously you'll need internet connectivity to get the job done. But the lack of a dedicated software package to install, Foxyutils' use of SSL, and its promise to delete files as soon as they're downloaded means you could use this in a business situation if required. 2. Nitro PDF to Word Converter Quick, solid PDF conversion with a couple of niggles You'd be forgiven for missing the free online version of Nitro PDF to Word Converter when visiting its site, given that it's so smothered in adverts for its paid-for desktop app, but this is a perfectly competent free tool – no OCR though, sadly – suitable for occasional use. Upload your PDF, give it an email address to send the results to, and it'll transform that PDF into Word, Excel or Powerpoint files and vice versa; we wouldn't recommend using the Excel converter for mission-critical work, however. We were impressed with its attempt at converting our test document. There was a bit of text cleanup required, possibly as a result of the unusual font, but it separated the page's images into individually editable boxes, got the layout perfectly correct, and even managed to replicate the drop-cap, a feature that's often missed. Overall, not a bad job at all – we'd have preferred a direct download rather than it being delivered via email, but that's a small gripe. 3. UniPDF Great for batch processing but not compatible with all files UniPDF is a completely free Windows desktop app (unless you're using it commercially) but one which fell over for an unspecified reason when converting our test PDF to Word format. But let's not be hasty here: UniPDF happily extracted the raw text, had no problem converting the PDF to a pixel-perfect PNG file, and did an good job of converting that very same PDF to HTML format, which we'll count as at least a partial pass. Although UniPDF doesn't support OCR (so flattened PDFs won't convert to editable text) we were impressed with its ability to translate our document's mildly unusual fonts into similar examples. It's also an easy app to use if you're doing batch processing – just drag in a folder full of PDFs, hit 'convert' and it'll go through each automatically. Considering the long-winded limitations of many online tools, this is a reason to try UniPDF. But if you absolutely must have a Word document? Maybe not. 4. Free File Converter Quick, easy and dirty converter that does more than just Word Free File Converter couldn't be simpler: upload your PDF, select an output format (everything from doc to ebook formats like EPUB and MOBI) and click the button to get a download link to your converted file. As you might expect, it offers a number of different format conversions besides just PDFs, although there's no OCR to be seen. Results were just all right. Some of the text formatting Free File Converter gave us was a bit off, with certain headlines running over from one line to two, and it rendered all of the images on the page as a single background graphic, limiting flexibility. But there's one huge upside: Free File Converter can handle PDFs up to 300MB in size, so if you've got a huge, simple PDF to process it could be just the trick. 5. OnlineOCR An OCR specialist – as long as you feed it the right file Our sole OCR-only tool in this test, but there's a reason: OCR works well in certain circumstances, and very poorly in others. Our magazine page, when flattened and run through OnlineOCR's converter, did not fare well. Whether this is a limitation of the unusual fonts or the background images we're not sure, but the mess it made of the boxes at the bottom of the page suggest it's just not great at this sort of complex work. That's not to say it's a poor tool. Far from it; this outperforms a number of competing sites in its class, so much so that we've actually used OnlineOCR here at TechRadar to pull text from magazines so old that their archive discs have crumbled – although this required a lot of preprocessing to improve the clarity and contrast of text. Scanned PDFs of black text on white background tend to work perfectly without any fiddling, so if you've got a suitable source you'll get on well with this tool.

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