Bakari

These days, Apple is all about getting your data synced between your Mac and iOS devices. The company realizes that many Apple customers have more than one device and, although they may have a slightly different purpose, we rely on the ability to share data between those devices without the hassle of emailing documents or using some sort of iDisk or Dropbox connection to make it happen.

One notable example is Apple’s iCloud feature called Photo Stream which, when enabled automatically, shares your photos between all your Apple devices.

Updated Photo Stream

Since I last wrote about Photo Stream, one significant improvement has been made that probably makes the feature more inviting to most users. Before the Photo Stream update you could not delete photos from your stream once they got sent there. Thus your poorly shot iPhone photos had to sit right alongside your keepers. But now that’s not the case.

Now you can delete photos from Photo Stream, and those photos automatically get deleted from all your devices as well. This might seem like Apple went to the other extreme with this new update, but if you take a few minutes to set up Photo Ptream on your Mac and iOS devices you can take a few extra steps to manage and organize your photos coming from the cloud.

Setting Up Stream Works

In case you don’t know, Photo Stream is an iCloud service that uploads the photos you have taken on your iPhone, iPod touch, or camera-supported iPad onto Apple’s server and then delivers them to your other devices and Macs.

For example, take a photo on your iPhone and it will appear in your iPhoto or Aperture Library on your Mac. You must enable the feature on your devices. On your Mac (running the latest 10.7 OS) go to System Preferences > iCloud and enable Photo Stream.

Now open your iPhoto or Aperture Library on your Mac and select Photo Stream in the Library column. When you launch your photo application you will be prompted to select, “Turn On Photo Stream.”

Likewise, on your iOS 5 device open the Settings App, scroll down and tap iCloud, and enable Photo Stream.

Now take a photo on your iOS device and wait a few seconds or longer, depending on the speed of the Wi-Fi network, to see that photo appear appear in the photo library you set up on your Mac. You can do the same setup between say your iPhone and iPad. Note that one copy of each of your photos shot by your iOS 5 camera also gets placed in your device’s Camera Roll, while another copy gets sent to your Photo Stream account.

In order for photos stored in your Photo Stream to appear you must be connected to the Internet. Your photos will only sync over your local network. If you’re out and about taking photos they won’t sync to your other devices over 3G; a hardcopy of those photos are not downloaded to your devices. They are actually viewed from your Photo Stream account in the server cloud.

Advance Photo Stream

Okay, now that you have Photo Stream up and running on your devices, there are a few advanced considerations you might want to make, especially if you take photos on a regular basis. On your Mac open Preferences in the iPhoto or Aperture in which you enabled Photo Stream. Unfortunately you can’t run Photo Stream on both applications at the same time.

Notice that you have a few options for using Photo Stream on your Mac. First off, note that Photo Stream stores the last 1,000 photos you uploaded to your account, or the last 30 day’s worth of photos (whichever is greater) stored there.

If you want to make sure those photos actually get copied to your iPhoto or Aperture library you must do that manually, or enable the photo application to do it for you. So you will probably want to check “Automatic Import” in Preferences. This means for example that iPhoto will copy photos from your Photo Stream and place them in an album arranged by month. So if when those photos vanish from your Photo Stream you will have them safely stored in your iPhoto library.

You can also manually create a new album of selected photos from your Photo Stream, or drag photos from the Stream into an existing album(s). This too of course will copy photos to your library. If you open and manage your photos in your iPhoto or Aperture library on a regular basis, you should not lose any of your images.

Note also that in Preferences you can select to have any photos you import into your iPhoto library on your Mac be copied and sent to your Photo Stream as well. Those images will get synced to your other devices.

Using The Keyword

All the photos that get imported into your iPhoto or Aperture library automatically get tagged “Photo Stream.” This can be useful for creating smart albums using the keyword and other attributes.

Hopefully there’s more to come with Photo Stream and iCloud, but for now it’s a pretty useful way to show off and manage your photos between your Mac devices.

For other iPhoto related articles, check out these:

• First Look: Features & Tools Of iPhoto [iPad & iPhone]
  
• How To Create Photo Journals In iOS iPhoto
  
• Latest in iPhoto

Let us know if and how you’re using Photo Stream. What other features are you looking forward to?

Thanks to my wife and other inexperienced users of iOS devices, I’m always learning about which features many people are not aware of on their iPhone or iPad. I’ve met users who still don’t know for example how to put apps into folders on their device.

I gather most of my MUO readers know that, but below are a handful of other features and tips that you might not be familiar with if you’re still fairly new to iOS 5, or if you haven’t had the time to look for them.

Opening PDFs

Any iOS device should set you on the road to paperless reading. These days you can turn any webpage or text document into a PDF and send it to your  iOS device via email, Dropbox, iTunes or similar services.

When you open a PDF on your iOS device, in an email for example, you can tap on ”Open in…” in the drop-down menu, and you are presented with iBooks as an option to export and view your PDF document to. Any other PDF readers you add to your device will also show up there.

The iPad of course is especially useful for reading PDFs because of its size and form factor. So definitely save yourself ink and printing costs by reading documents on your device.

AirPrint

If you need to print a document from your iOS device, you might be able to use Apple’s AirPrint feature which allows you to print any document (e.g., email, photos, webpages, PDFs) wirelessly over your network.

However, you must have an AirPrint-compatible printer in order to use this feature. Apple lists AirPrint-enable printer models here. If your computer is not on the list, but you really want this type of setup, another option is an Mac application called Printopia 2 which cost $20.

Keyboard Clicks

I still run into iPhone users who don’t know they can turn off the clicking sound the built-in keyboard makes on an iOS device. I realize the clicking can help you type better, but in some cases you either should mute the sound on your device, or you can go into the Settings app and click on Sounds. Scroll down to Keyboard Clicks and turn it off.

Notice there are other settings for possible annoying sounds your iOS device makes.

Notes Font

If you use your Notes app a lot, you might not know that Apple gives you a whopping three font styles to choose from – the default Noteworthy, Helvetica, and Marker Felt.

This is not much (pardon the pun) to write home about, but a few different style options is better than none. Again, just go into Settings > Notes to make the font change.

Hide Caller ID

There are occasions when you might not want your phone number to show up on someone’s phone when you make a call. Open Settings > Phone > Show My Caller ID and turn it off.

Notice also there’s a feature for Call Forwarding in which you can set to have all your iPhone calls forwarded to another number.

Your Twitter Contacts

The iOS 5 update now includes Twitter integration which means you can for example send a tweet directly from the Safari app on your device.

But you may not know that if you have the official Twitter app installed on your device, you can go into the Settings app, select Twitter, and then tap Update Contacts.

The app will do a search of all the email addresses and phone numbers in your Address Book and then add Twitter usernames and photos to their respective contact cards. This means you can tweet contacts directly from your Contacts list.

Quit Background Apps

Sometimes if your device is running sluggish, or an app is not working properly, try completely quitting it. Here’s how – double-click on the Home button of your device, and then press and hold on the app that you’re having problems with. When the red dots appear, tap on the dot of that app to completely quit it.

Open the app again from where it is located on your device. If you have a lot of apps open in the background, you should occasionally swipe to the left and quit the ones you don’t use very often, because a high number of opened apps could possibly slow down your device or cause apps to crash.

That’s it for for this round of iOS 5 features and tips. If you’re interested in finding about more of them, check out these two previous MUO articles:

• 10 iOS 5 Tips For iPhone, iPad & iPod Touch Users
• 10 More Tips & Apps For Better iPhone Photography & Videography

The social RSS feed magazine app, Flipboard was the first of its kind for the iPad. Now it’s the first to add audio, via SoundCloud, to its list of features and content. Just as you can browse and read articles, tweets, Instagram images, you can now listen to podcasts, news segments, music, and more.

After you download the Flipboard 1.9 version update, things won’t look that particularly different. But tap on the red search ribbon and then Audio, and you get a long varied list of audio content, including programs from NPR’s Fresh Air, music by the likes of rapper Snoop Dog and Diplo, podcasts episodes from The Fader, TNW Daily Dose, comedian Baratunde Thurston, news programing such Democracy Now, and several dozen more selections.

In addition, if you tap on Accounts and scroll down to SoundCloud, you can subscribe to the massive community of sound creators and posters via that online site.

Thankfully you can also listen to selections in the background while you view other articles or navigate to another non-audio app. You don’t have to flip back through pages to locate the audio you’re listening to; instead, you can tap on the little tune note icon in the bottom left of the iPad screen to access a pop-up menu.

On the iPhone version of the app, the icon appears at the top of the screen when you play audio. To get quickly back to the player, tap on the top white area of the app.

Source: Mashable

Journal writing has a strong tradition of not only helping writers improve their writing skills, but the process of writing your thoughts, worries, and challenges can also be useful.

We have written about several online and computer software for maintaining a journal or diary, but if you’re stuck for ideas or wondering about the purpose of journaling, several online sites by experienced journalers might be of help.

EasyJournaling

Though the Easy Journaling blogsite has low cost ebook and audiobook material for salel, Sam, the developer of the site, also provides a plethora of free materials for getting started with mainly e-journal writing.

His “Where Do I Start?” section includes answers to questions about getting motivated to write, how to tag your e-journal entries, and how to improve your journal writing along the way.

The site also has reviews of the top iPhone, and Android journal apps, including My Secret Diary, Day One, and Memories: the Diary.

Sam has been a lifelong journal writer who thinks that recording one’s history is a useful tool for busy professionals, parents and children, as well as students. His article on 37 Reasons to Penzu Pro is also useful to check out.

Writing Through Life

Writing Through Life is more about traditional journal writing – that of using journal writing as a form of memoir and story telling. The developer of the site, Amber Lea Starfire, offers one-on-one mentoring and editing services.

She also produces a free weekly e-zine of journaling topics, writing prompts, tips for renewing or starting a regular writing practice, and she suggest ways to mine your journal for writing your life stories. Her weekly prompts for exploring various facets of your life through writing is a good place to start with her site.

Art Journaling

You may or may not know it, but journaling is not limited to pen and paper, or a digital text editor. You can also express your thoughts and experiences through art. If you’ve never seen or done art journaling, one site to begin with is Artists Journals.

This site features a few examples, how-to techniques, and suggested resources for creating and maintaining an illustrated diary or journal.

1000 Journals Project

Though it’s a not a site with tips and journal prompts, you definitely owe it yourself to check out The 1000 Journals Project, which features photo captures of journals exploring all types of content, from family and friendships, to politics and world events.

The project site is based on a physical exhibition of personal journals and journals created in classrooms and adult learning centers.

A similar site called 1001 Journals is set up for you to pass along your journal in one of three ways: through the mail to a list of people who sign up to participate, by leaving your journal in public location, such as a café or bookstore so that someone else may pick it up, or you can scan your journal and post it on the site.

CreateWriteNow

If you’re in need of some immediate inspiration for journal writing, you might check out Mari L. McCarthy’s site Create Write Now, which among other tips and articles features over 150 journaling prompts.

McCarthy is a therapy specialist and coach, who has published a few ebooks on the subject of therapeutic writing. Her site also features a collection of personal journal stories of self-discovery, in both written and video format, from readers of her site.

There are several other useful journal sites on the net. Let us know which one’s you visit a lot for inspiration.

And for other ideas on journal writing, check out these articles:

• The Advantages Of Journal Writing On Penzu.com
• 4 Awesome Journal Apps To Write About Your Day [iPhone]
• 3 Ways To Keep A Journal Using Your Mac

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Similar to single-click services like Amazon’s 1-Click, PayPal, and the mobile Square, the top credit and debit card companies, Visa and MasterCard, have each set up their own digital wallet services. The payment services enable you to make online, mobile, and in person purchases with a single click at supporting online merchants and stores like Barnes and Noble.

Visa’s V.me and MasterCard’s PayPass work similar in ways in that you register your account and cards with the service, then simply click V.me and PayPass buttons to make a transaction. These services will reduce the need to fill out forms, remember several passwords, or type in account numbers.

With V.me, when you’re ready to pay a merchant website, you enter your registered V.me email address and password during the checkout process and then click the V.me button.

With MasterCard’s PayPass, you first register by providing your personal billing information, mobile phone number– including the physical address(es) where you’d like to receive shipments–for any of your MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club, Discover, or Visa accounts.

Mastercard also says users will soon be able to manage their PayPass Wallet account on their iPhone or Android device as well. These mobile services should also speed up the process for online purchases at supporting bricks-and-mortar stores, for instead of swiping your credit or debit card you would simply tap your PayPass-enabled phone, card, key, or mobile tag.

Both the MasterCard and PayPass services are currently in beta, and are only available in the U.S. for now.

Source: TechCrunch

Often, I come across websites that re-publish or link to my articles here on MakeUseOf. This is how I discovered Scoop.it!  Scoop.it! is a curation platform that enable users to collect news, articles, and other sources found on the net, and share them on a custom-themed Scoop.it! site. It’s like bookmarking articles on Delicious, but with a more visual and online magazine-like format.

The Setup

Most Scoop.it! sites consist of 10 or more recently published articles linked from the net. Each linked article consist of a leading image and lead paragraph, similar to the layout here on MakeUseOf’s front page. All articles posted on Scoop.it! are linked to the original source where they were scooped.

As a curator of a Scoop.it! page you can manually add the articles you want to share on the page, as well as allow Scoop.it!’s search engine to pull and post suggested content from various sources on the net.

Scoop.it! has free, expert, and business plans. As a curation site, Scoop.it! can be useful in a number of ways, including collecting and sharing your own original content spread throughout the web, or for promoting your business or area of expertise. The free option does have some significant limitations, but there are enough free features to make your page look interesting.

For the purposes of the article, I started a Scoop.it! page to host many of the articles I’ve written on the topic of iPhone photography. The setup was easy and there are a few easy-to-use features that enable you to populate your page very quickly.

Curating Sources

To register and create a Scoop.it! page, you need to select a topic and provide your profile information.

Many popular topics have already been scooped up on Scoop.it!, but in searching and viewing similar sites, you may decide to offer a different niche or collection of sources for your chosen topic.

Scoop.it! can use its search engine to search various sources – like Google News, Digg, YouTube, Twitter – for content related to your topic. Searches are based on site description and the keywords you add.

When Scoop.it! delivers your suggested content, you can decide to Discard, Scoop.it! (add it) or Remove the Source all together. This curation process is automatic, but it may take some time for you get an initial collection of suggestions.

Scoop.it! Bookmarklet

The first Scoop.it! suggestions I received were not specific enough to my iPhone photography topic, so I basically added content I’ve produced here on MakeUseOf.

So far, I found the best way to get a quality Scoop.it! page is to manually add articles. Since you’re an expert on the topic, you are better able than the search engines to know which articles should be shared and promoted.

Scoop.it!’s web browser bookmarklet makes it very easy to manually add content. When you come across an article you want to add to your Scoop.it! site, you simply click the bookmarklet, and it will grab the title, first paragraph, and images from the article. You can select which image you would like to be displayed in the summary box on your Scoop.it! page.

Bookmarking an article only takes a few seconds, but if you want search engines like Google to find your Scoop.it! links, you should definitely add tags to each article you scoop.

You should and can write your own content for your Scoop.it! page. Your post might be a simple introduction to the articles listed on the page, or it might cover an aspect of your topic that no one else has written about.

Promoting Your Scoop.it!

As with any other website, if you want it to be viewed, you will have to promote it, using of course social networks, as well as linking your Scoop.it! site in your and others’s websites. Like YouTube, Scoop.it! provides a feature for creating a Scoop.it! widget for your page that can be embedded into your blog or company website.

Mobile Scoop.it!

Scoop.it! also provides free mobile iPhone and Android apps that essentially work the same as their desktop web client. You can approve suggestions for posting and add content via the smartphone’s web browser bookmarklet.

Though the premium plans for Scoop.it! provide many more options, including Google Analytics, topic branding and domain hosting, the free plan is a great way to develop a magazine-style site especially if you don’t have the time to write a lot of content yourself.

Let us know what you think of Scoop.it!. Do you currently use it? If so, share your page with us and our other readers.

For a few other ideas about sharing content on the net, check out “3 Web Tools to Collect and Share Bundles of Interesting Links and “Bundlr – Easily Collect and Share (Cool) Stuff You Find Online On A Single Page.”

Ever since I started using the iPhone, the simple need or task of sending text from the device to my computer always seemed one or two taps more complicated than it needed to be. While emailing yourself from your iPhone is not the worse or most taxing challenge in your day-to-day life, it seems that such an advanced smartphone should be able to make the process simpler.

Luckily a few solutions have been developed that work extremely well.

Capito – Email Yourself

If you’ve been a heavy iPhone user, you’ve no doubt emailed yourself reminders, notes, or directions to view later on your computer. The default email process is okay, but sadly Apple requires you to type your own email address each time you want to send an email. Even if you only have to type the first few letters of your email to get the address to auto-complete, it still feels redundant to go through those steps.

Well, a little well-focused app called Capito ($1.99) doe simply one thing; it enables you to email yourself with a single tap.

You set up the app by of course entering your email address (or someone else’s address that you email on a regular basis) in the settings, and you’re ready to go. When you launch the app, it presents you with a blank text page where you type your message, and if need be, add an attachment, such as a photo. When you’re done, simply tap the Send button.

Notice also there’s a little file drawer icon at the upper-left of Capito. When you tap on that you get an archive of all your recent messages. You can also selectively delete them.

Automatically Open Capito Email [Mac]

Okay, now let’s get even lazier. If you send an email to yourself, you no doubt intend to read it once you get back to your computer. But why go through the trouble of opening your Mail app, locating the Capito email and then having to click yet again to read it. Instead, take ten minutes to set-up a little Mail rule to carry out the process for you. Here’s how:

• After setting up and sending yourself an email using Capito, click on it in your Mac Mail application. Now launch Mail Preferences (Command+Comma keys).
• Click on Rules > Add Rule
• Set up a rule to look like this:

• All your Captio emails come from the same address, so you only need to add one condition.
• Right below where it says, “Move Message,” click on that drop-down menu and select Run AppleScript.

• Click the Choose button, and navigate to ~Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts/Open Message.scpt. By default that script should be in the specified folder. If not, you can download it here; add it to your Script’s folder, and then add it to your rule.

• Click OK and you’re set. The next time you send yourself an email using Captio, Mail will run that rule and open the message for you. That’s the way computers should work, so we don’t have to.

Instacorder

If even typing an email to yourself seems a little too much, an app called Instacorder (Free, $0.99) allows you to push and hold the center button and verbally record a message. As soon as you take your finger off the button, your recorded message gets automatically sent to your Mailbox.

From there you can download and open the recorded message, or you can simply click on Quick Look to hear your message played back to you.

Well that’s about as simple as it gets for now. Let us know what you think of these fast acting apps for the iPhone. For other iPhone related apps, check our articles here.

If you’re running OS X Lion on your Mac, then you definitely want to download Apple’s most recent operating system update, 10.7.4. Also, by the time you read this you should also download the 5.1.7 update to Safari. Both updates make important improvements and security patches.

First off, you’ll be glad to know in the recent OS update that Apple finally resolved the annoying issue of the “Reopen windows when logging back in” window always being enabled when you try to restart or log out of a Mac account. In this update Apple made so that it’s not automatically checked.

The OS update, among other things, also improves compatibility with certain British third-party USB keyboards, brings raw image compatibility with additional digital cameras, and addresses an issue that prevents files from being saved to an SMB (Server Message Block).

Right on the heels of the OS update, Apple followed with an update to Safari, its native web browser. This 10.7.4 update can be downloaded by OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, Lion and Windows users.

Apple says the update improves the browser’s responsiveness when the system is low on memory, and it also disables out-of-date versions of Adobe Flash Player that do not include the security updates. When an old version is detected by the browser, a dialog box will pop-up and point the user to install an updated version of Flash Player.

These updates can be downloaded and installed by clicking on the Apple icon, and selecting Software Update.

Source: Macworld

The Christian megachurch, LifeChurch.tv recently announced that over 50 million copies of its free cross-platform Holy Bible app have been downloaded. The Holy Bible application is available for mobile smart devices including the iPhone/iPad, Android, BlackBerry, KindleFire, and Windows Phone.

The Holy Bible app is based on the web client YouVersion.com, which was developed back in 2007 by Bobby Gruenewald. The mobile version, launched in 2008, includes free access to the modern English translations, as well as well as 13 other languages including the Spanish, Arabic, French, Japanese, Romanian, etc.

Special features include keyword search, Twitter and Facebook account connection for posting verses, as well as tools for bookmarking passages, taking notes, and syncing reading back to your YouVersion.com account. Content can be listened to through the built-in audio feature, and each scripture can be linked to the full chapter where it originates.

Both the app and website provide a variety of Bible study plans in which users read selected passages each day, marking them off as completed. Categories of plans include devotional, partial and whole Bible study, topical reading, and passages specifically chosen for youth.

The app also includes a daily verse that can be shared via the social network, email, or SMS. Gruenewald said in an interview with TechCrunch that about 60,000 scriptures per day are shared on social networks by both Christians and non-Christians.

The support page for the YouVersion site answers questions about engaging in the Bible plans, managing annotations, and sharing content.

The Holy Bible apps are available for free download from respective sites.

Source: TechCrunch