Category Archives: icloud

Five apps to help you identify birds and their beautiful songs

Posted on May 20, 2013 by admin

Spring means migration and the return of birds to many parts of North America. It also means warmer weather and sunny days that are perfect for birding. Here is a list of apps to help you get outside and start learning about our feathered friends (all prices are USD). Field Guide for birds [iOS Universal; $0.99 to $19.99] There are several big name field guides that include photos and illustrations to help identification, bird calls, range data and other information about each bird species. Included in this list of guides is Audubon, Peterson, Sibley, and the all-digital iBird. Audubon Birds is a digital version of the popular paperback field guide. It has excellent images of the birds, range maps and multiple calls and songs for each bird. It also includes NatureShare which allows you to find and share local bird sightings. The Audubon Birds app is on sale now for $3.99, down from $14.99. Peterson is another pocket guide to North American birds that has made its way to the digital platform. Peterson has a full version of its paperback guide that sells for $14.99. The company also recently introduced a Pocket edition of its traditional guide that features a lower price tag (99-cents) and a few less details. Sibley, another paperback guide , is known for its great illustrations and these details look great on the iPad and iPhone. The Sibley eGuide also has a handy comparison tool and a bird song repeat feature so you can call out to other birds while you are in the field. The Sibley eGuide to North American birds costs $19.99. iBird offers a variety of guides to meet your pocketbook and your geographical location. If you want a guide that covers 938 North American and Hawaiian species, then you should check out the iBird Pro Guide to Birds , currently available for $19.99. This version also includes audio songs and calls, a search feature that lets you save frequently used searches and iCloud syncing for your notes and favorite birds. There is also a Plus version available for $14.99 that has less search filters than the Pro version. iBird has affordable versions ($6.99)for regions like the Midwest , West , South and North . iBirds also has a backyard birds version that’ll get you birding from the comfort of your deck longer for $2.99. Larkwire Birdsong Series [iOS Universal; $14.99 or less] If you want to turn memorizing bird calls into a game, then you should check out the Larkwire Birdsong series . Similar to the bird guides, Larkwire has several universal iOS apps to meet the needs of a variety of birders. A Master Birder version is available for both land birds and water birds. The master land bird version includes 394 sounds that cover 343 land species, while the water bird version has 253 sounds from 135 species of water birds. Between these two guides, almost all the major North American land and water birds are covered. Larksong’s regional guides , core guides and backyard guide will introduce you to bird calling on a smaller scale. There’s even a basic guide that includes 20 essential bird songs for free. Chirp! Bird Song USA+ [iOS Universal; $2.99] Chirp! Bird Song USA+ is part bird song app, part reference app. It uses GPS to find bird calls that common in your location. As your bird calling skills improve, you can branch out to include all 263 bird song and calls in the app. Besides the audio recordings, the app has snippets about each call and quiz feature to test your knowledge. Cornell Lab Bird Q&A [iPhone; $2.99] The Cornell Lab Bird Q&A app is an educational app about birds. It features a question and answer format that cover cool facts about birds, bird feeding, migration and more. These frequently asked questions are answered by the experts from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Birdwatchers Diary [iPhone; $12.99] Birdwatcher’s Diary is a journaling app that allows you to log your bird sightings while in the field. Each entry includes field notes, a time stamp, location information and more. When you are done, you can upload your birding lists to eBird or back them up to Dropbox. Five apps to help you identify birds and their beautiful songs originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 20 May 2013 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Source  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments Continue reading →

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Share between devices painlessly with Instashare

Posted on May 18, 2013 by admin

There will come a time when you would like to simply transfer a file from one iOS device to another or to a Mac; it’s inevitable. When the time arises, you will discover as most of us already have that the process is not as straightforward as one would think, considering how powerful these devices are. The most common methods used up to this point have been emailing oneself, cloud services like iCloud or Dropbox , file sync with the USB cable and iTunes or pleading with the always capricious Camera Connection Kit . Thankfully the developers at TwoManShow have developed a wonderful app to take the pain out of cross device file transfers with their Instashare app. Instashare for iOS is like AirDrop for mobile devices as it quickly and painlessly copies any file from one device to another over WiFi or Bluetooth without a direct connection to the internet. Instashare for OSX currently in beta, adds the ability to send files to and from your Mac and your iOS devices. Both versions of Instashare are free; however, the iOS version is ad-supported and the ads can be removed by a $0.99 in-app purchase. Instashare for Android and Windows are currently in development. Share between devices painlessly with Instashare originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 18 May 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Source  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments Continue reading →

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Caturday: Mac mini is Biru’s pillow

Posted on May 18, 2013 by admin

What can be more comfortable to a cat than a pillow that blows warm air out of an optical media slot and vibrates ever so gently? That appears to be why Biru (Indonesian for Blue) loves to rest on a Mac mini owned by reader Peter Stagg and his wife. Peter says, “Biru is my wife’s British Short-haired and constant companion, especially when she is working in her study or on her laptop. He has claimed the lives of two laptops so far and is working on the Mac mini, very slowly. When he’s not enjoying the warm air expelled from the optical media slot he lies across the front of the keyboard and doubles as a wrist support.” Biru also seems to be keeping a Logitech headset nice and warm for his owners! So there you have it! A cat who not only forces equipment upgrades from his owners, but who is also a working Mac accessory! If you’ve got a Caturday nominee to share, let us know via our feedback page. For security reasons we can’t accept inbound attachments, so you should host the photo ( Dropbox , Flickr , iPhoto Journals , etc.) and send us the link. Thanks, Peter! Caturday: Mac mini is Biru’s pillow originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 18 May 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Source  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments Continue reading →

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iPhone cameras are everywhere at one of America’s best scenic spots

Posted on May 16, 2013 by admin

My last visit to Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah was in pre-iPhone days. My, how things have changed. I went to Bryce on a landscape shoot this week with my usual semi-pro equipment: Canon 5D, Manfrotto tripod and the usual gaggle of batteries, timers and other esoterica. I was especially interested in seeing if people were toting different equipment in the age of the smartphone. I expected to see Android and iPhones snapping away, while the pros and semi-pros were hanging on to their expensive DSLRs. It wasn’t quite what I expected. I saw a lot of iPhones in the crowds of people gathered at the rim of Bryce Canyon waiting for the sunset. I saw a couple of Android phones, but there could have been more. I walked up to a large group of young girls from Tennessee and asked how many were using iPhones? Every hand went up. I asked them if they were still using their old point-and-shoot cameras, and everyone had dropped them for an iPhone. The main reason? Instagram and other photo-sharing services. No one mentioned Apple’s Photo Stream . You just can’t get photos to friends with a point-and-shoot. None of those girls were into editing photos, it was mostly shoot and send. I asked about the iPhone HDR feature . The most frequent answer was “huh?” More marketing needed by Cupertino. I showed some of the people up there how easy it was to activate HDR, and let them compare the results. Sunset at Bryce Canyon is the perfect place for HDR. All were amazed, so I helped create some new converts. The biggest surprise were the pro and semi-pro shooters. Many had iPhones, which they would take out of a pocket for a moment, usually to shoot a panorama . One woman with a big Nikon said she loved her camera, but there was nothing like capturing a quick panorama with the iPhone. Easy to do, plenty of megapixels, and easy to send. A guy from Georgia with all kinds of pro equipment told me the same thing. Gallery: iPhones at Bryce Canyon So here I was at one of the most beautiful scenery spots in the world and iPhones were everywhere. Young, old, novice, semi-pro and some pros. It’s amazing that a company trying to make a better cellular phone has had such an impact on photography. Planning or accident? How about you? Have you dropped your point-and-shoot for an iPhone? And those of you with DSLRs, are you tempted to haul your iPhone out at times too? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. iPhone cameras are everywhere at one of America’s best scenic spots originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Source  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments Continue reading →

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Parenting tip: Recover your lost parental control password, or not

Posted on May 16, 2013 by admin

Parental Controls on iOS are extremely helpful for parents of iOS-device-using kids. They allow a parent to block in-app purchases, restrict explicit content on the device and block apps that are not needed for younger children (Mail, Safari, etc.). Setting up these restrictions requires a special 4-digit PIN that only needs to be entered when a parent makes changes to the parental control settings. Because the code is entered so infrequently, it is easy to forget the password, especially if you set up restrictions in haste and don’t take the time to record the code in your favorite password keeper. This happened to me recently, and I will give you a few tips on what to do if you find yourself in this unfortunate situation. Assess and Review If you realize that you have forgotten your parental control password, don’t panic. The first thing you should do is stop entering password guesses, as iOS will lock you out of parental controls when you hit five incorrect password attempts. After the fifth try, you have to wait for a minute before you can try again. This wait time goes up to five minutes, 15 minutes and eventually an hour, which can be very inconvenient if you find the password written down on some loose post-it note in your junk drawer. If you can’t find that lost password anywhere, then you have two choices to fix the problem — you can either wipe your phone and start from scratch, or try to reset the password by careful editing of system files. I prefer the former solution, but will present the latter for those who are comfortable with hex editors and SHA-1 hashes. Perform a Factory Restore In my opinion, your best option is to wipe the device completely and perform a factory restore. You will lose the photos, notes and other personal information on the device, but you already had those backed up via iTunes sync, in iCloud , Photo Stream or other services like Dropbox , right? You have to restore the iOS device back to factory settings and can’t restore using an iTunes backup , as all the backups contain your parental control password along with your photos and app data. Forget about any saved backups and set up your iPhone or iPad as a new device within iTunes. You can restore your iOS device to factory settings using iTunes and this handy guide from Apple . Keep in mind this will also blow up any game progress or other customizations, so be prepared for that conversation with the younger users of the device. When your device is restored, you can connect to iCloud and download your notes, bookmarks and other data. You will have to configure any email accounts and re-install all your apps. It’s a pain in the neck to do this, but it is the safest solution to get parental controls back and running. Recover the Password by Editing System Files If you are very tech savvy and don’t mind a slight risk of bricking your device, you can edit a few system files and either find the parental control password or reset it. These two procedures assume you are using a Mac or a PC to backup your device and the backups are not encrypted . If you happen to have an older iOS device that hasn’t been updated to iOS 6, you can use these directions from Simon Blog to locate the parental controls password in a system file (com.apple.springboard.plist) that is stored in a backup on your desktop machine . I tested this on a very old (and now abandoned) iPod touch that is still running iOS 4.1, and it works. The PIN is stored as a string and can be found without touching your iOS device. If your device is on iOS 6 or later versions of iOS 5, you may have to dig a bit deeper to unlock the parental control password. In recent versions of iOS, Apple removed the parental control PIN and now keeps it hidden from prying eyes. You can no longer read it as a string, but you can force iOS to change it using a few carefully placed lines of code. The detailed process of resetting your parental control password is explained by iPhone Backup Extractor and requires you to locate a recent iTunes backup from the iOS device. You then edit the com.apple.springboard.plist file and the manifest.db file in the backup, and enter in a new parental control password that overwrites the old one. To send those password changes over to your device, you must restore your device in iTunes using the backup that you just modified. If successful, you will have a new Parental Control password that you can easily enter. The process is straightforward, but it requires you to know how to use a hex editor and understand a bit about SHA-1 hashes. I tried this technique twice — once on an iPad mini running iOS 6.0.2 and once on an iPad running iOS 6.1.3. Both times it did work, and I was able to change my parental control password to 1234. I have to admit that it was a bit nerve-wracking, especially during the restore process, as I was concerned that the smallest mistake would foul up my device. Though I don’t recommend this process, I present it for those who are desperate and don’t mind the risk if it means preserving that important game save, photo or document. Parenting tip: Recover your lost parental control password, or not originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 May 2013 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Source  |  Source  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments Continue reading →

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Apple marks 50 billion downloads from the App Store

Posted on May 15, 2013 by admin

You think 50 billion is a big number? It’s certainly a bit bigger than some other numbers that spring to mind, such as 48 billion , and that in itself gives Apple something to celebrate. As is customary with these App Store milestones, whichever lucky jackanape triggered their download at just the right millisecond will receive a gift — a $10,000 iTunes voucher, no less — while 50 runners-up will get $500-worth of credit each. But none of that is the really big, big news. What matters here is the rate of growth, which seems to have accelerated during the course of this year. It took 14 weeks for the App Store to get from 40 billion to 45 billion downloads between January and April, but less than 4 weeks to get from 45 to 50 billion. Now, we’re totally dependent on Apple’s internal stock-takers, not to mention an erratic ticker (“for illustrative purposes only”), but if those numbers are even remotely accurate then they represent something of a popularity surge. Filed under: Cellphones , Tablets , Software , Mobile Comments Source: Apple Continue reading →

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Apple job postings suggest iWork team is growing

Posted on May 14, 2013 by admin

Just when you think that Apple has decided to totally ignore iWork, along comes news that the company has added job postings for a number of positions on the iWork team . The last official release of the iWork suite — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — is telling: the name of the suite is still iWork ’09. About the only major changes to any of the apps over the past few years has been to make them available on the Mac App Store and to add compatibility with iCloud. Apple Bitch covered the latest job listing for a software QA engineer to “work on the next generation of Desktop, Mobile and Web application/services,” focusing on bug detection, isolation and reporting in the iWork suite. MacRumors notes that a number of other jobs are open on the team, including three positions for other QA engineers, a Production Specialist, a “Technical Production Ninja,” a Verification Engineer, a Visual Motion Designer and a HiDPI Image Specialist to work on making the apps “the best they can be” on Retina displays. Apple job postings suggest iWork team is growing originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 14 May 2013 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Source  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments Continue reading →

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Apple Looks To Expand iWork Team, Adds Job Listings

Posted on May 14, 2013 by admin

Apple has posted a new job listings to its job board related to a position with iWork team .  Apple has been beefing up its iWork development team since February, and today the company has added a Software QA Engineer position to the board. Other open positions include a Product Specialist, a Verification Engineer, a Technical Production Ninja, a Visual Motion Designer, a HiDPI Image Specialist and the three QA Software Engineers mentioned previously. iWork is Apple’s productivity suite that competes with Microsoft Office. The suite consists of Pages, Numbers and Keynote. These apps are available for both Mac and iOS via the App Store and can be purchased separately for $19.99 per app on the Mac and $9.99 per app on the iPad and iPhone. iWork for Mac is long overdue for an upgrade as the last major iteration was released at Macworld Expo 2009. Since then, we’ve seen small updates pushed to the Mac app as well as the introduction of the iPad and iPhone app. These applications sync with each other via iCloud, so you can start a document on your Mac and finish it on your iPad. Image Source:  renatomitra The post Apple Looks To Expand iWork Team, Adds Job Listings appeared first on Macgasm . Continue reading →

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Google Drive triples free storage to 15 GB

Posted on May 13, 2013 by admin

We were just talking about how Amazon is competing with Apple and other cloud services by offering 5 GB of storage for free. Now, that turns out to be old news, because today Google announced that free storage spanning several Google services like Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive is now going to come in the extra large economy size — a whopping 15 GB. Google says the changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks to all customers. All that space is shared, so if you are just using Google Drive Photo (for example), that 15 GB is shared with any other Google services that require storage. Still, 15 GB is a very competitive number since Apple and Amazon give you 5 GB with iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive respectively, and Dropbox provides a measly 2 GB free. A similar service from MediaFire offers 10 GB of free storage, but the free tier includes ads. All the services allow you to get more storage for an additional fee. It will be interesting to see if Apple and other services respond to Google’s challenge or stand pat. With this move, Google has unified its storage system, a similar concept to the Apple pool of iCloud storage, although at this point Apple does not count image storage in Photo Stream against your 5 GB allotment. Google has a free iOS app so you can access this storage space, and it can also be managed through a web browser on any computer. Google Drive triples free storage to 15 GB originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 May 2013 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Source  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments Continue reading →

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Caturday (late): Max and his Magic Trackpad

Posted on May 12, 2013 by admin

You thought you were going to get through another weekend without that TUAW classic Caturday ? Well, you’re wrong. Today’s feline geek is Max, a six-month-old Singapura who loves to help his human, Sumner Paine, work on his 27″ iMac. According to Sumner, “He helps me type on the keyboard, he helps me swipe on the Magic Trackpad, and he defends against those pesky mouse pointers by pawing and pouncing at them every chance he gets. On those occasional lazy days when he’s in the mood to rest, he enjoys napping on the Time Machine under the desk.” If you’ve got a Caturday nominee to share, let us know via our feedback page. For security reasons we can’t accept inbound attachments, so you should host the photo ( Dropbox , Flickr , iPhoto Journals , etc.) and send us the link. Thanks, Sumner! Caturday (late): Max and his Magic Trackpad originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 12 May 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Source  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments Continue reading →

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