Category: Reviews-HowTos

Got an Apple, Mac, or iOS tech question? We have the answer. In this week’s installment of Ask, we’ll let you know how to put a stop to spam email.

Question: I receive hundreds of spam emails per day. Is there a way to easily add the sender to my “delete email from this sender” rule or otherwise make the spam easier to block using my Mac?

Answer: The built-in Mail spam filtering that is included with Apple Mail is good (and it has definitely gotten better over the years), but it’s still not the best that’s available. However, there’s an easy-to-use plugin that is available for Mail that allows for better email spam filtering. 

The plugin is called SpamSieve, and it’s available from the developer’s website (http://c-command.com/spamsieve) for $30. It provides a blacklisting feature that allows you to block a sender’s email address and catch all of the emails from them. Plus, SpamSieve includes a Bayesian spam filter that can learn from your emails and color your emails based on how spammy each message is by parsing the language in the email.

Blocking emails with SpamSieve is a piece of cake, and it ensures that 100 percent of the blacklisted email will not get through to you.

After installing SpamSieve, navigate to Filter > Show Blocklist (or press Command + 4). Here, you can blacklist the sender of a message by pressing the + button in the toolbar, then entering the email address of the sender. When using a smart spam filter like SpamSieve, it’s a good idea to read the manual and train it on each of your messages until it begins to learn from your habits.

Ask is written by Cory Bohon, a freelance technology writer, indie Mac and iOS developer, and amateur photographer.

Got a tech question? Email ask@maclife.com.

Audiobooks are great because they mean you can enjoy a book while doing something else — or just because it’s always nice to have a book read to you! With Siri on the iPad offering voice control and dictation, you might think you can “convert” your books into audio books by enlisting the help of Apple’s virtual assistant, but sadly, it can’t help. While Siri can speak out individual passages from iBooks, you can’t just sit back and let it read out the whole thing. 

However, all is not lost. There is a great app available called Natural Reader that reads out the text from all kinds of documents, including Word files, PDF documents, and ePub digital books — you can even use it with web pages. This means work documents or reference material can be read out loud while you work on projects or reports. It’s also great if you’re studying and need to take in lots of information. Think of Natural Reader as turning long-form online writing into a kind of podcast to listen to at your leisure.

We’ll show you how easy it is to set up Natural Reader so it can then read out your stored iPad documents, as well as online text, whenever you like.

1. Import a Book

Once you’ve downloaded Natural Reader onto your iPad (www.naturalreaders.com), you need to put text into the app. This can be a digital book (such as epub, the format used by most digital books), text document, Microsoft Word, or PDF file. Perhaps the easiest way to add files is through Dropbox (www.dropbox.com); upload the files using your Mac, then tap on the Dropbox icon in Natural Reader to retrieve them. Alternatively, you can connect your iPad to a Mac and copy the ebook using iTunes.

2. Open the Book

When you open the book in Natural Reader, it appears in the main window. (It’s also copied and stored locally in the Natural Reader app.) Tap the next-page button at the bottom to move to the page where you want to start listening, then press the play button in the bottom-left corner. A Setting Up Stream pop-up appears and the audio starts playing. The iPad needs to be connected to the internet to translate the text.

3. Listening to Audio

As Natural Reader starts speaking, the text that’s being read out appears highlighted in blue on the screen. Tap on any paragraph to hear that portion. If you’ve missed what was said, you can quickly repeat the last sentence by tapping on the Previous icon in the bottom-right of the window. You can also skip forward through the chapter by tapping on the Forward icon, which skips forward by 15 percent of the chapter.

4. Adjust the Language

The settings icon (top right) lets you adjust the voice. Tap Settings and Language to choose from US English, UK English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian. This works with any book, no matter the language, although a foreign accent with an English-language title makes the voice somewhat difficult to follow. You can use the settings to adjust the text display using Font, Size and Paragraph. You can also purchase offline voices to use Natural Reader without an Internet connection. 

5. Voice Settings

You can also choose from a range of male and female voices by tapping on settings and then Speaker. You can further fine-tune voices by tapping Speed, and choosing a value from -4 (slow) to 10 (fast). This changes the speed but not the pitch, so it’s possible to listen to books very quickly. When you’ve finished listening to a book, tap Library (top left) to return to the main library. Tapping on settings pauses the playback, so press the play/pause button to carry on.

6.  Read from the Web

Natural Reader can read out web pages as well as digital books and files. Tap on Web in the sidebar of the main library window and tap on the URL field. Enter the address of a website and tap Go. Pick a web page and tap on Read Now in the top-right of the screen, then Play. You can use this to read books displayed as web pages, such as on Project Gutenberg, but it’s also great for reading online articles. Just go to any site and choose the article you want to hear — it’s as simple as that.

For all intents and purposes, there are but two names in the desktop-presentation app business: Keynote and PowerPoint. Apple’s version might have a bit more gloss than Microsoft’s, but for the most part, it’s an either/or scenario. Each offers an attractive set of themes with an easy drag-and-drop interface that contains everything you need to make professional, engaging presentations.

Deckset wants you to consider a third option. With a stripped-down interface that stays far out of the way as you work, Deckset puts a fresh spin on the standard formula that skips the fancy graphics and hypnotizing animations, and focuses on what really matters: what you want to say.

As soon as you launch, it’s clear that Deckset is different. Where its heavyweight contemporaries dazzle us with floating pallets and sophisticated tools, Deckset doesn’t offer a single element to help with your design. There aren’t any text boxes, cropping handles, animations, or transitions to speak of — in fact, it’s so minimal you barely need to use your mouse at all.

Instead of fiddling with borders and rotating shapes, Deckset takes all of its instructions from a simple text file. Not unlike the lines of inelegant code that are transformed into pretty websites by our browsers, the app interprets the syntax within the file to create a seamless presentation, giving you the flexibility to quickly edit your document whenever and wherever inspiration strikes. 

The secret is Markdown. Deckset uses the popular text-to-HTML conversion tool to turn your unformatted files into attractive slides. Consequently, fonts and colors are unable to be truly personalized, but the seven available themes do well to give your work its own character. Without worrying about the design, slides come together more quickly than when using Keynote, but since there isn’t a text editor built into the app itself, we ran into some issues with updating. 

While there’s a certain liberation in working with plain text, Deckset’s biggest strength is also its weakness. Markdown might be one of the easiest programming languages to grasp, but mastering the most rudimentary of commands still requires a basic understanding of code. As it stands, its trial-and-error method is a great tool if you’re looking to learn the syntax (and the sample presentation certainly helps), but the app is limiting its usefulness to a rather small segment of the population without any auto-formatting tools or shortcuts.

The bottom line. Watching Deckset turn text into slides is quite magical, but unless you’re already a Markdown pro, the learning curve might be too steep.

Every Monday we show you how to do something quick and cool using built-in OS X utilities such as Terminal, Apple’s command line application. These easy hacks can make life better and simpler, and don’t require any knowledge of coding — all you need is a keyboard to type ’em out!

You may have come accross applications that run in the menu bar without cluttering your Dock with an icon, but did you know that any OS X app can be made to work this way? Continue reading and we’ll show you how.

Hide the Dock Icon

Start the process by quitting any open apps that you want to perform the trick on. Next, you must locate the app’s associated .app package. Find the app itself (it’s usually located in your /Applications folder), then right-click the application icon and select “Show Package Contents” from the menu.

Locate the Info.plist file in the Contents folder that appears. (To be on the safe side, you may wish to make a backup copy of the file, since altering it incorrectly could make the app inoperable.) Open the Info.plist file with the TextEdit application, then add the following two lines of XML into it:

<key>LSUIElement</key>

<true/>

These two lines of code need to go inside the ending “</dict>” that’s just before the line ending with “</plist>” for this trick to work. In other words, place these new statements above the last two lines; if you place them anywhere else in the file, then the hack won’t work.

Save and quit the file, then open the application that you applied this hack to and you’ll notice that the Dock doesn’t display the app icon, saving a bit of space.

Codesigned Applications

There’s one more step to the process if the developer has signed the application with an Apple Developer Certificate — and that includes all Mac App Store applications. Without this step, you’ll likely get a crash when opening the app. To prevent this, you’ll need to re-sign the application using the following command in the Terminal:

sudo codesign -f -s - /path_to_app/appname.app

Replace “/path_to_app/appname.app” with the path and the application name that you just tweaked the Info.plist for. After doing this, press enter, and enter your password. The application will be re-codesigned and you should be able to launch the app without any issues.

Re-show the Dock Icon

To undo this change, simply re-open the “Info.plist” file you made the changes to and remove the two lines of XML you added. Restart the application, and the Dock icon will begin appearing again when the app is running.

Some Caveats

As with all hacks, there are a few caveats you should know when using this method to run applications:

Hiding the dock icon also disables the top menu-bar controls for the app, so unless you know the keyboard shortcuts or the app runs in single-window mode or resides in the system tray, you may want to think twice about performing this trick. Additionally, this hack may be overwritten whenever you update the application, and you will be required to perform the steps above again. Also, even though it doesn’t look like it, the application is still running, and still taking up system resources. If you do this to enough apps you may notice your computer slow down a bit, and you will need to quit apps to bring the Mac back up to speed.

Cory Bohon is a freelance technology writer, indie Mac and iOS developer, and amateur photographer. Follow this article’s author on Twitter.

Though there are plenty of third party password managers to help you generate random passwords or keep your passwords safe, the newer (and growing) best defence against password hackers is two-step authentications (also called two-factor authentication). With this, you still use your username and password to log in, but you also need that second step: […]

Keeping an eye on the home while out and about these days is common practice. Internet cameras have become popular due to the ease of scanning for intruders or checking on the welfare of a child. Selecting the right model can be challenging, based on t…

Got an Apple, Mac, or iOS tech question? We have the answer. In this week’s installment of Ask, we’ll explain how you can get high-quality album art for your iTunes music.

Question: I have iTunes-purchased music and music from my CD collection that I ripped to my iTunes Match account. iTunes-purchased album covers are crystal clear, but the ripped CD collection album artwork is fuzzy. I have tried everything, including contacting Apple, but haven’t found a solution yet. 

Answer: iTunes-purchased music has artwork that is specially designed to be crystal-clear on all of your devices because it was purchased directly from Apple. Depending on when you ripped your music, the Apple server may or may not have been around to provide you with crystal-clear artwork for your library. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to resolve this issue. 

The first step is to select all of the music belonging to a particular album, and then press Command + I (to bring up the Get Info window). In the Get Info window, select the artwork tab, then delete the artwork for the album. Finally, press the OK button to save the changes. 

Deleting the Album artwork manually will force iTunes to find and fetch it again from the iTunes servers.

You’ll notice that your artwork disappears, but fear not: Select File > Library > Get Album Artwork. This will send all of your album data to the Apple iTunes servers, which will match up your music to the proper, crystal-clear album artwork that is the same that you would get if you had purchased your music directly from the iTunes Store. If iTunes cannot fetch artwork for a particular song, you will be notified when the album artwork fetch has completed. 

Selecting Get Album Artwork from the File > Library menu is the easiest way to kick off a fetch request for iTunes to fill in the missing artwork.

If iTunes cannot fulfill the request for artwork for some of the songs, you will get a notification after it has finished processing your library.

Ask is written by Cory Bohon, a freelance technology writer, indie Mac and iOS developer, and amateur photographer.

Got a tech question? Email ask@maclife.com.

Anyone who lived through the ’80s will remember those ridiculously large “portable” boom boxes that were popular toward the latter half of that decade. If you’re still sore after years of carrying a briefcase-sized stereo on your shoulders, Logitech has a new wireless speaker so small and light that even your chiropractor would approve.

The Logitech X100 is a Bluetooth A2DP-enabled wireless speaker aimed at the mobile crowd, serving up rich audio from smartphones, tablets, computers, or other devices within a 30-foot range. Not much bigger than a donut, the X100 is sold in five stylish colors (green, grey, orange, red, or yellow), each with a rubberized exterior rugged enough to take the music anywhere you want to go.

Around the side of the device are power, volume control, and Bluetooth connectivity buttons; in addition, the X100 features a 3.5mm audio jack for connecting other devices, and a micro-USB port capable of fully charging the built-in lithium-ion battery in about two hours. The X100 can also send or receive hands-free smartphone calls, and the speaker remembers the last two connected devices, although only one of them can actually output at a time.

Logitech claims a full charge keeps the X100 cranking out tunes continuously for five hours, although we managed to go an entire workday using iTunes on our MacBook Pro with Retina Display at lower volumes. While it worked perfectly indoors, the X100 is even better suited to taking music on the road, pumping out impressively rich, clear sound, considering its diminutive size. There’s no stereo output and bass lovers will have to settle for a bit less “oomph” than they may be used to, but the X100 otherwise delivers the goods.

The only real exception we found was hands-free phone calls, which were unfortunately muffled to the point of being nearly unusable with our iPhone 5s; callers reported having a hard time hearing us, as well. There’s no battery indicator to keep tabs on how long it will be before the X100 conks out, although a bright blue light under the speaker grille works in conjunction with melodic beeps to indicate when the unit is powered on or off, and anytime a device is connected or disconnected.

The bottom line. The Logitech X100 Mobile Wireless Speaker delivers surprisingly big sound for its nearly pocket-friendly size, although we don’t recommend relying on it for important hands-free speakerphone calls.