The Canon PowerShot S120 compact camera shoots images at 12.1 megapixels—a pixel count that seems conservative for a $450 camera. But the PowerShot S120 comes with 1/1.7-inch backlit CMOS sensor that’s larger than the sensor found in your average point-and-shoot camera, plus a bright f/1.8 maximum aperture. Canon opted for quality results in low light without flash rather than ramping up resolution.
In some respects, the PowerShot S120 seems like a more portable version of Canon’s chunky PowerShot G16 (4mice). Unlike the PowerShot G16, the slender PowerShot S120 lacks a proper handgrip, though it does have a padded thumb rest at the back to prevent it from being too slippery in the palm. The outer finish oif the camera is similar to the shell you’d find on a mid-range DSLR, such as Canon’s own EOS—subtly connecting the DNA of the two in the mind of the photographer.
Watches have been around far longer than any Internet denizen has been alive. First appearing in the 15th century, they have been important to functionality and timeliness of people for hundreds of years. However, watches haven’t changed much — outsid…
What’s your story? That’s the question the Adobe Voice app for the iPad is clamoring to help you answer. The app combines the boring task of making slideshows with a fun, iMovie Trailers-esque feel; it’s one of the company’s most beautiful iPad apps to date, and it’s incredibly easy to use.
Unlike most iPad apps, Adobe Voice uses portrait orientation.
Fujifilm’s FinePix S1 boasts a whopping image-stabilized 50x optical zoom, thanks to a huge zoom lens. This enables a focal range that’s the 35mm equivalent of a wide angle 24mm to 1200mm—excellent for shooting landscapes and group portraits, but also for capturing candid close-ups from afar. Since the lens specification is all encompassing, it doesn’t matter that you can’t swap it like you would on the DSLR camera.
There are a lot of DSLR-type features packed into this “bridge” camera—so called because it provides a bridge between a point and shoot camera and a DSLR. The FinePix S1 includes an eye-level viewfinder (of the electronic variety), plus a hot shoe for attaching accessories. Fujifilm also found room atop the viewfinder for a pop up flash that is manually activated by a button sitting just below it on the left.
Using United’s app, passengers will be able to view more than 150 movies and nearly 200 TV shows in the air when on planes that offer Wi-Fi access. It’s unclear whether you’ll need to pay for the Wi-Fi access to view media, or if simply connecting to the network will enable the service.
The service was expected to reach Airbus A319 and 320 and Boeing 747-400 and 777-200 planes first before spreading to other fleet models. Those with upcoming flights can check for availability under the Amenities tab on the app (or the Inflight Amenities section on united.com) within 48 hours before takeoff.
United says that laptop users can also access the service — we imagine pointing your browser towards united.com should help start that process — while an Android app update will bring the service to that platform later this year.
To read Apple’s description on its website, Photo Stream is a flawless cross-platform service that “just works” across all of our devices. Snap a picture with your iPhone and the photo will be magically beamed to all of your iCloud-enabled Macs and iPads, ready to be touched up in Photoshop or emailed to friends.
But while Photo Stream works as advertised across our iOS devices, it’s not quite as seamless on our Macs. Depending on the age of your machine, a trip to iPhoto can bring up the dreaded pinwheel of death, crippling your workflow while you watch it spin. Even on our 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina display, loading our stream is far from instantaneous, often taking several minutes to populate the window with just a few days’ worth of new snapshots. MyPhotostream simplifies the process to the point of enjoyment. By taking Photo Stream out of iPhoto, this lightweight app strips away the bloat that slows things to a crawl and boils the iCloud service down to its two most basic steps: drag and drop.
The entirety of the interface consists of a single window. Each time it’s launched, MyPhotostream scans the iLifeAssetManagement folder in your user library directory to find the latest pictures in your stream and displays them chronologically. Photos are initially shown in batches of 50, but that’s a one-time nuisance; the number of photos displayed at launch is customizable, and we saw no discernible difference in load time between “Few” and “All,” even with a maxed-out Photo Stream of 1,000 pics.
Double-clicking a photo expands it to fill the window and offers a basic set of controls and options. The same menu is more readily available by right-clicking on a photo (or photos) in the main window, but either way presents a number of options: email, Facebook, Flickr, Messages, and Airdrop sharing, along with shortcuts to any editing apps you may have installed. But for our money, the best part of MyPhotostream is the ability to quickly drag a photo right out of the window and drop it on our desktop.
Notification alerts inform you of any new photos that have been snapped or saved on another device, but unfortunately, you cannot add photos directly into your stream without opening iPhoto or Aperture. A similar quibble was the inability to delete photos using MyPhotostream. Both issues are due to Apple’s strict file-system permissions and are unlikely to change. And its speed had us wishing there were ways to automatically filter out photos by source or screenshot.
The bottom line. MyPhotostream is a one-trick pony, but it’s a darn good trick.
The scenario is straighforward: You receive a message with an attachment in Mail and double-click the attached file to open it in the appropriate app. But what happens next is anything but straightforward: file attachments are stored in a hard-to-find folder; they are sometimes downloaded more than once; and different apps treat these opened files in very different ways.
Where is /Mail Downloads?
When you open a Mail attachment with a double-click, it opens in its parent app, just as you’d expect. But it’s also automatically (and secretly) downloaded into the aptly named Mail Downloads folder.
The folder’s name is the only thing that’s obvious about it: it’s deeply buried in a series of folders, one of which is invisible. To view its contents, choose Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, type (or copy and paste from here) ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads, and click Go.
Every Monday, we’ll show you how to do something new and simple with Apple’s built-in command line application. You don’t need any fancy software or a knowledge of coding to do any of these. All you need is a keyboard to type ’em out!The Dock has been …
Maybe it’s the recent release of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for the iPad. Maybe you want to make sure you have access to the latest version of Microsoft’s Office suite on your multiple Macs (and even PCs). Or perhaps you want the perks, such as 27GB of total OneDrive cloud storage per user and an hour of free Skype world minutes each month. Whatever the reason, you’ve weighed your options and decided that an Office 365 subscription makes sense for you.
There are two extremes when it comes to email formatting: some people prefer strictly plain text, while others like fancy fonts, background graphics, and other kinds of embellishments. No matter where you fall on that spectrum, knowing how to set your personal approach as defaults—and how to override them when necessary for specific messages—means you can easily get your message across in your own inimitable style.
Set text formatting (and cross your fingers)
When it comes to formatting text in a message, you have one major choice to make: plain versus rich text. Plain text is a throwback to alphanumeric-only communications where, for instance, you add **asterisks** or __underscores__ for emphasis instead of using actual italics or boldface. Rich text provides an alternative, using behind-the-scenes HTML coding to format not only text, but also lists.
When you’re collaborating on documents with other people, sharing a folder on a cloud-based storage system like Dropbox is convenient way to keep everyone’s copies of those docs updated automatically. But nothing in that system prevents two people from opening and changing a given document at the same time. That can lead to version conflicts and confusion.
You could avoid this problem—and make it easier to see who made which changes and when—with a formal version-control system. Teams of programmers working on a project often use tools like Apache Subversion (SVN), Concurrent Versions System (CVS), or Git to manage their files. These tools ensure that only one person can modify a file at once, let everyone know who’s working on a file at any moment, and keep a historical record of changes so that any earlier version can be recalled in the future.
iTunes is, in part, a database, and its smart playlists are just like database queries. In this week’s column, I look at an interesting question, which can be resolved with multiple smart playlists. I also discuss what happens when you break through iTunes Match’s 25,000 track limit, and answer a question about gifting content to people in other countries.
Smart playlists find unique tracks in two different playlists
Q: I have two very long playlists, and I want to find out which tracks are unique in each of them. In other words, I know that a number of songs are in both playlists, but I want to find the songs that are only in one playlist, without having to check each track individually. Is there an easier way to do this?
Remember the last time you gave your walls a fresh coat of paint? You probably used a roll of blue or beige masking tape to cover the baseboards and windows so you wouldn’t get paint on them. Masking tape’s digital equivalent—called a layer mask—is a timesaving feature in Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements (version 9+), and the affordable yet powerful Pixelmator. Here’s a quick primer on how to use this great tool in your digital image editing program of choice.
Masking basics
Layer masks make for a far more flexible editing experience because you’re hiding pixels instead of erasing them. For example, say you’re treating yourself to some head-swapping (fantastic for breakups, pranks, etc). If you use the Eraser tool and accidentally remove an ear, there’s no getting it back without some heavy undo action. However, if you use a layer mask to hide pixels instead, you can easily fix an accidental ear cover-up.
The Reminders app makes it simple to keep track of tasks, grocery lists, and even daily exercises with multilayered lists and checkboxes. You can make these lists even more powerful, however, thanks to time and location-based reminders.
For example, I have a “Places to Eat” reminders list, to keep track of interesting new restaurants I want to try. But when you’re craving food on a Friday night, it’s difficult to remember to look at the list.
That’s where time-based reminders come in: I can simply set up an alert on a restaurant I’m interested in visiting by tapping the entry, then tapping the info button to the right. Flip the “Remind me on a day” toggle, and you’ll be able to pick when the app should alert you. You can even make the reminder repeat, in case it’s 6PM and you’ve already ordered takeout.
In a previous post, I looked at how to tag the media in your iTunes library. I discussed what tags were—metadata that describes your files and helps you find what you want to play. I also looked at which tags you should consider filling in for different types of music, movies, and TV shows.
Now I want to show you how to clean up tags you’ve already applied. And what defines a “dirty” tag? Perhaps you have random characters in song names. Or maybe words are misspelled or incorrectly capitalized, or tracks attributed to the wrong artist. Such errors can make it harder to organize your library and find the media you want. These tips and tricks will help you sweep out those cobwebs.
There is no denying that the introduction of Apple’s proprietary Lighting port changed the accessory market. It is becoming increasingly rare to see a company include a dock of any sort with a home speaker. Instead, we now see many companies choosing t…
