Category: Reviews-HowTos

If you haven’t yet played around with Apple’s slo-mo feature on the iPhone 5s, now’s a perfect time to start. This week’s video tip has Macworld associate editor Serenity Caldwell demonstrating how to shoot slo-mo video, preview it on your own device, and share it with others.

Transcript:
One of the great features of the iPhone 5s is its slow motion video mode. To use this mode, just swipe over while in the Camera app to the Slo-Mo setting.

To begin shooting a slow-motion video, make sure you’ve got your target focused, then press the record button. Your video will begin recording in what looks like real time, but don’t be fooled: there’s some slow-motion magic yet to come.

If you just want to view your masterpiece yourself, you can open up the Camera Roll. There, two new blue edit handles will drop down, allowing you to phase in and out of slow motion. But if you’d actually like to send those videos to anyone, you have to move over to iMovie, Apple’s free software for editing and sharing home movies.

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Your iPhone is remarkable in many ways, but its camera will simply never capture photos with a deliciously shallow depth of field like your DSLR. And unless Apple finds a way to cram a much, much larger sensor into the phone, that will always be the case. You can simulate that luxuriant, shallow depth of field effect through software, though. Tadaa SLR does just that.

Actually, Tadaa doesn’t simply let you artificially tweak the depth of field; it lets you change the focus point of the photo. And it does that after you’ve taken the image, not unlike what you can do with the innovative Lytro camera.

You start Tadaa in camera mode; compose and take your shot. If you want to start with an existing photo, you can alternately choose one from your camera roll. There are a few widgets: Display a line of thirds grid, switch between a square or wide shot, and turn the flash on and off. Tadaa even gives you access to both the front and rear cameras.

After taking the shot, you paint a mask over whatever object you want to be in sharp focus. Tadaa has pretty smart edge detection, so you can just dab with your finger and the app selects the whole subject for you. If that’s not working—and I did run into some subjects that Tadaa refused to select in their entirety—you can turn off edge detection and do the painting manually. In general, though, the trick is to slightly overpaint your subject so that Tadaa can find the edges.

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When introducing you to GarageBand in our last lesson, I claimed that nonmusicians could find uses for Apple’s audio and music application. I can hardly blame some of you for responding with a hearty “Prove it, buddy.” And so I shall, by outlining how to craft a ringtone from one of your favorite tunes.

Choosing a track

Launch GarageBand. In the Project chooser select Ringtone and click the Choose button. The main GarageBand window will open. Inside you’ll find a single track called Audio 1. The Cycle button will be engaged, and the ruler will bear a yellow bar that stretches for 20 measures. (That yellow color denotes the length of the cycled section.) To the right, the Loops pane appears by default.

In the display (which currently shows bars, beats, divisions, and ticks), click the Note/Metronome icon and choose Time from the pop-up menu. Then drag on the right side of the yellow cycle bar so that it ends at 0:40. You do this because you can make ringtones no longer than 40 seconds; creating a cycle bar of that length shows you how much audio you have to work with.

Reader Chris Sinclair would love to have a copy of his old email. He writes.

My company has used Gmail for a few years and recently switched to Office 365. The IT department said that it would be removing my old Gmail but I wasn’t worried about it because I had a copy of that mail in Outlook (which is the email client I use). I launched Outlook the other day and started searching for an old message. I found it but suddenly it and almost all of my old email disappeared before my eyes. Can I get it back? What’s going on?

Having gone through a similar experience I can tell you exactly what happened. You had a Gmail IMAP account, which feeds messages from a central server. The relationship between your computer and this server is such that when messages are deleted from one, they also disappear from the other unless you’ve taken specific steps to back them up.

Some time before you last launched Outlook, the folks in charge of transitioning your email from Gmail to Microsoft deleted your old Gmail messages. When you launched Outlook it showed you a list of the email messages it currently held. However, it then synced with the server, found that a load of those messages had been deleted, and then set about to do the same thing with the locally stored copies. So, they were there one second and gone the next.

The important question is what you can do about it. The first is to pray that the IT department archived those messages and can provide you with access to them. Ask nicely, please.

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Since the early days of the .epub and .mobi formats, writers and publishers have been trying to find better ways to make ebooks. Some writing apps included primitive built-in options. A few design apps offered limited-functionality exports. But few apps have thoroughly focused on building ebooks.

180g’s Vellum is one of the few pieces of software dedicated to doing just that. It’s not a word processor, nor is it a design program. Rather, it’s an app for turning your finished manuscript into a beautiful ebook.

Rather than launch with half-built bells and whistles, Vellum 1.0 provides the basic necessities you might look for when building an ebook. You can import your manuscript from a Word doc; style text, subheads, breaks, block quotes, and verse; preview a live version of your book for the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, or Nook; and export multiple versions with a single click.

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After upgrading to Mavericks, I ran into an issue where I couldn’t print from a site that used a Silverlight-based Web app. In particular, when I tried to use ‘Open as PDF’ or ‘Save as PDF’ from the Print dialog box, instead of getting a nice PDF, I’d get bupkis. Zip. The big goose egg.

It turns out that this is due to the new sandboxing rules that Apple implemented for Safari plug-ins. The feature is intended to keep you safe from security exploits that affect plug-ins, but it can result in unintended side effects—such as, in my case, not being able to print.

After a lot of searching, I finally came across the solution, suggested by this post at Microsoft’s Developer Network. You can tell Safari to let you run certain plug-ins in “unsafe” mode; sounds scary, yes, but fortunately you can enable that mode on a plug-in by plug-in basis, and only for specific sites that you designate.

One of the most striking differences between your iPhone and a large camera like a DSLR is the way the two cameras focus and control depth of field. In a DSLR, depth of field is easy to manage by changing the aperture—a large aperture like f/4 results in a relatively narrow field of focus, for example, while a small aperture like f/20 delivers deep depth of field in which most of the photo is in focus.

On the iPhone and other smartphones, though, you don’t generally get that kind of flexibility. Without an aperture dial, you get little control over your depth of field. And thanks to the laws of physics, the tiny sensor results in a large depth of field in most of your photos.

You don’t have to be satisfied with that, though. Take control of your iPhone’s focus to capture the photos you want to achieve.

Specify the focus. This is hardly a state secret: All but absolute iPhone beginners know that you can tell the phone where to focus by tapping on the screen. If you want the foreground in focus, tap on something close to the camera. Want the background in focus? Tap a background subject. If most of the objects and people are about the same distance from you, this won’t matter very much, and you can rely on the phone’s autofocus to do the work for you. But if you have something very close and somewhat distant, you can definitely affect what’s in focus.

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Wait!! Yes, you—you who absent-mindedly clicked the link that led you here; realized that you were about to receive instruction regarding Apple’s affordable audio/music application; thought “Heck, I’m no musician, I think I’ll read about user permissions instead”; and now have your finger poised over the mouse button, trackpad clicker, or iOS screen that will whisk you elsewhere. You needn’t be a musician—trained or otherwise—to get some use out of GarageBand. In fact, the application was designed with nonmusicians (or the minimally musical) in mind. And best of all, no talent is required. So stick around, at least for the next couple of paragraphs, so you can learn what GarageBand can do for you.

With GarageBand you don’t have to be able to play a lick to create musical scores for your movies. If you can place blocks end to end, you can use GarageBand’s loops to create a compelling score. You can also create your own ringtones from your favorite songs. You can edit any compatible audio file—not just music files but recordings you’ve made with your iOS device (of class lectures or business meetings, for example). And if you’d like to try your hand at playing guitar or piano, GarageBand includes introductory lessons for doing just that.

And if you’re a musician, GarageBand offers much more. It can serve as a musical sketchpad for writing tunes. You can use its built-in stomp box effects and amps to wail away on your guitar at 3 a.m. without waking your neighbors. The application’s Drummer feature helps make your tracks sound more lifelike. And its software instruments offer you the kind of synthesizer palette that once cost thousands of dollars to replicate.

Let’s begin our look with a stroll through the interface.

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When it comes to quickly taking care of daily tasks, the command line can be both powerful and dangerous. Take today’s commands as an example: the rm command allows you to remove (or delete) files. The rmdir command does the same to directories (also know as folders). But be careful: unlike when you move files to the Trash from the Finder, there’s no way to get them back if you use these commands. Still, if you want to tap into Terminal’s powers, this is a command you can’t overlook. I’ll show you how to add a safeguard to ensure that you only delete files you really want to delete.

Why bother deleting files with the command line?

Deleting files with the Finder isn’t too difficult, plus you can always fish files out of the Trash if you change your mind. So why bother using the command line? Here are some reasons:

• You can delete multiple files quickly and efficiently using wildcards.
• You can remove files from the Trash when you encounter stubborn errors.
• You can delete files that are hidden in the Finder; these files, which can contain settings for certain apps or parts of OS X, contain a dot (.) before their names and the Finder doesn’t show them.
• If you’ve lost access to the Finder because your Mac is on the blink, you might be able to use the command line to troubleshoot the problem.

Delete files

It’s dangerously easy to delete files with the rm command. Here’s an example. After you launch Terminal (in your /Applications/Utilities folder) type cd ~/Desktop to navigate to the Desktop directory. If you had a file here named MyFile.rtf that you never, ever wanted to see again, you could run this command:

rm MyFile.rtf

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The command line—that hidden world of code behind your Mac’s pretty OS X face—sometimes offers a quicker way to do everyday tasks. You’ve learned how to navigate files and folders with the command line and get help when you need it from man pages. Today, I’ll show you how to copy and move files, common operations that often come in handy. I’ll also show you how to create directories (that’s Unix-speak for folders), so you can move files to new places.

Why bother with the command line?

It’s certainly easy to copy and move files in the Finder, but there are a number of reasons why you might want to do this from the command line instead:

• You can copy or move files from one location to another without opening windows in the Finder.
• You can copy or move files that are hidden in the Finder; these files, which can contain settings for certain apps or parts of OS X, contain a dot (.) before their names, and the Finder doesn’t show them.
• You can copy or move multiple files using wildcards.
• You can rename a file quickly.
• If you’ve lost access to the Finder because your Mac is on the blink, you might be able to use the command line to troubleshoot the problem.

The difference between copying and moving files

If you’re in the Finder, and you drag a file from, say, your Desktop to your Documents folder, or any other folder on the same disk or volume, you move the file. The file is no longer on the Desktop, and is found only in the Documents folder. However, if you drag a file from your Desktop to an external hard disk, you’ll see that the file remains in its original location; this file has been copied. (You may know that you can copy a file in the Finder, even on the same hard disk, by holding down the Option key when you drag it.)

The same is the case from the command line. There are two commands for moving and copying: mv and cp. The first does the same as dragging a file to a new location on the same hard disk; the second does what an Option-drag does, or what happens when you drag a file to a different disk or volume.

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I usually lose all enthusiasm for the shiny new habits of the new year by about January 4, giving me the rest of the year to feel like a failure. But I’m much more disciplined in work than in my personal life, so when it comes to my home business, I think I have a better chance for success. If you’re considering adopting (or shedding) a habit or two, let my seven resolutions be food for thought.

1. I will keep up the good work

I actually follow most of the advice I give in my books and articles—for example, I have excellent backups, I ditched an email provider (Gmail) that wasn’t meeting my needs for one that does, and I run a mostly paperless office. If you have doubts about your backups, are frustrated with your email, or feel overwhelmed with paper, resolving to fix those things in the new year might be a great idea. But even good habits can use a little nudge now and then. For example….

2. I will keep up with my scanning

My “Papers To Be Scanned” tray is perpetually full, as is my “Scanned Papers to Be Filed” tray. And some of the stuff I’ve already scanned needs to be sorted and named, because I was in too much of a hurry to do so at the time the paper came in. Scanning and filing doesn’t take long if I do it on a daily or even weekly basis, but letting papers accumulate for 6 months is another story.

3. I will be more active