When Jim Hamm wrote, " Here is an article explaining that it's not a good idea to keep your laptop plugged into electricity all the time," the question came up: what's been your experience with charging your computer batteries? Jim replies, "Here's what Apple says about their batteries. When using my laptop I have been just leaving it plugged in. I think now I'll start to run it more on just the battery and plug it in when it reaches a 50% discharge state." And we know a happy battery makes a happy computer!
iCloud and iTunes
"Here's an interesting nuance about your iTunes music you may have stored in Apple's iCloud," Jim Hamm states. "As the article recommends, it's a good idea to store your music — or anything else, for that matter — in a separate external device. It's not that I think the 'cloud' is bad, per se, I just don't trust my 'stuff' to something I can't see."
Tips for iPhone and iPad iOS 7
An iPhone and iPad user guide describing the new features of iOS 7 is recommended to us by PMUG Secretary Bobbie Pastor. See it here.
She also reminds us of the Joint PC and PMUG SIG (Special Interest Group) that meets Saturday, from 1 to 3 pm in the Prescott Library Founders Suite. John Carter will be speaking about helpful tips and tricks for the iPad.
Compare Smartphone Cameras
How do the smartphones' cameras compare? Jim Hamm sends this "smartphone camera shootout" video that he found. http://www.usatoday.com/videos/tech/columnist/talkingtech/2013/09/25/2871623/
Curious About Apple?
What do you know about Apple? What's new? Take a look at these lists and links. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/apple
Jim Hamm adds some important info on Apple's iPhone revenue. WOW. http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/26/apples-iphone-revenue-alone-bigger-than-microsoft-boeing-procter-gamble
Features of the Camera in iOS 7
"Here is a helpful article on new features for the camera in iOS 7," Jim Hamm brings to our attention.
Here's the Help You Need
John Carter is a busy guy. You've heard his PMUG presentations, maybe his SIG ones, too. But John can give you personal help for those pesky problems that are slowing you down. At Saturday's PMUG meeting former Prez Howard LaPittus was bragging on John's helpfulness. Email John here. And he passes along the following info, too. Zenda Sergo is another local resource for anyone looking to take a formal class on how to use their Apple device or to learn a particular app like iPhoto or Pages. Zenda has a website that shows what classes she is offering. All classes are 2 hours in length, and she provides handouts ("Unlike me," comments John. "but then I don't have a formal class schedule to work from."). Click here for her website.
Comparing iOS 6 and iOS 7
"Here is an interesting side by side comparison of various features between iOS 6 and iOS 7. If you haven't upgraded yet, this look may help you decide. If you've already upgraded, do you miss what you had, or like the new look better?
"All things considered, I like the new look better," Jim Hamm concludes.
90 Tips for iOS 7
"Here's an article from MacLife with 90 tips for using iOS 7. It looks like it will be quite helpful in using and understanding the new iOS 7," notes Jim Hamm.
iPhone User Guide for iOS 7
"If you've upgraded to iOS 7 on your iPhone, here is a tutorial from Apple that might be helpful," and this tip is from Jim Hamm who is also helpful.
Let's Look at Safari
What's new in Safari :
Describes SmartSearch Field, Tab View, iCloud Tabs, Sharing, More New Features such as better privacy, offline reading list, developer features and improvements for Chinese Users.
What is Safari : http://www.apple.com/safari/what-is.html
Describes HTML5 and CSS3 for integrated audio and video tags, animations, special effects, filters. Scroll half-way down the page to View demos that illustrate the capabilities of HTML5 and web standards.
Describes the “worry-free web.” Privacy pane, protection against cross-site scripting, phishing, and malware attacks. Gives EV (Extended Validation) Certificate support.
Features : http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html describes 250+ innovative features available. It’s a 17 page long list that explains these features.
Safari Extensions are a great way for you to add new features to Safari. Built by developers, Safari Extensions use the latest HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript web technologies. And they’re digitally signed for improved security. You can install extensions with one click — no need to restart Safari.
- Categories
- Most Popular
- Most Recent
- Bookmarking
- Developer
- Entertainment
- News
- Photos
- Productivity
- RSS Tools
- Search Tools
- Security
- Shopping
- Social Networking
- Translation
- Twitter Tools
- URL Shorteners
- Other
Take a look at some of these possibilities:
AdBlock, Social Fixer for Facebook fixes, Exposer, Facebook Photo Zoom, 1-click weather for Safari from the Weather Channel, Gmail Counter, Awesome Screenshot, clea.nr Videos for YouTube, Facebook Cleaner, ClickToFlash, Turn off the Lights, Translate, My eBay Manager, New York Times Updates, YouTube Wide, Duplicate Tab Button, Reload Button, WIT (know which websites you can trust with the Web of Trust WOT), Ultimate Status Bar “which embiggens shortened URLs,” SafariRestore, Add to Amazon Wish List, Firebug Lite for Safari, Cloudy.
Interesting: under Most Recent you can click to install Coupons at Checkout which you click the code to apply to your favorite retail websites from e-commerce websites across US, UK, Canada, and Australia
Under Email: Enlocked gives mail encryption on all your devices and works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and Microsoft Live
Under Mail you can get toolbar extension The Moscow Times and get recent and top English-language news from Russia. Others: breaking news from New York Times, Fox News Ticker.
Under Other: you can choose to install HelveticaTheWorld which allows you to make Helvetica the primary font on every web page.
Want to develop your own extensions? Click to join Safari Developer Program.
Here’s the official notification to consider before adding Extensions:
Extensions can modify the appearance and behavior of Safari, and access your private information at websites. Apple is providing links to these extensions as a courtesy, and makes no representations regarding the extensions or any information related thereto. When you download and install an extension, the file is delivered by the developer, not by Apple. Some of the extensions listed here may require payment to the developer for use of the extension; this transaction is between the user and the developer. Any questions, complaints, claims, or support requests regarding an extension must be directed to the appropriate software developer.
On the Safari menu bar go to File > Share. You can choose to email this page, message, Twitter, or Facebook. Go to Safari Help and note the categories there for additional ways to use Safari. In Help note some useful tips: have you used Reader? You can print an article without all the ads in the sidebars. Do you bookmark and then organize those bookmarks. Read about this under Help, too.
Have you used any of the Safari features and extensions? Improvements can be both challenging and rewarding. Want to share ideas with PMUG? Write me at editor@pmug.us
Learning with Mac is fun! And productive!
This was today's handout at PMUG, 9-21-13 by Elaine Hardt
Password Problems
After speaking to the PMUG meeting this morning, Jim Hamm informs us, "Here's another article about the NSA after our passwords again. As I discussed in my presentation today, articles about passwords and password hacking are increasingly in the news.
"It's a tough call to balance the needs of national security with the needs for personal privacy."
Make that iOS 7 Easier to Read
"If you've upgraded to iOS 7 and find the font a bit difficult to read, here's an article on how to make the font easier to read," says Jim Hamm, in his email to us, short and to the point.
Privacy Settings in iOS 7
"Here is an article with some suggestions for privacy settings in iOS 7," Jim Hamm wants us to know.
14 Mac Tips
" Here's an article with some helpful tips (they refer to them as 'hacks') for your Mac," Jim Hamm introduces his latest email to us. "You may already be knowledgeable of these tips, but a new one (to me) I just tried was the terminal command 'purge' to free up memory. I'm not sure what it exactly did, but the command definitely freed up memory on my MacBook Air and my apps and music kept right on running.
"My 'Air' only has 4GB of memory, and free memory tends to disappear after using my Air for awhile, so this tip is helpful and quick to use. The article refers to a video wherein the author mentions a free App from the App Store titled 'FreeMemory,' which purportedly does the same thing. The app gets good ratings in the App Store."
(And if you come to PMUG on Saturday you can chat with Jim. He's the speaker this month.)
Bypass This Vulnerability in iOS 7
This is just in from Jim Hamm, "Here is an article on how the lockscreen can be bypassed in iOS 7. Apple is aware of this vulnerability and said a fix will be coming in a future update. The article describes what one can do in the meantime."
The 16 Best Things About iOS 7
"If you're still wondering/waiting on whether to upgrade to iOS 7, here's some comments that might help you to decide. The more I use it, the better I like iOS 7," writes Jim Hamm. The 16 Best Things About iOS 7: http://mashable.com/2013/09/19/16-best-things-ios-7/
iOS 7 and 10.8.5 Update
John Carter reports on his experience with updates. "I updated my iPad 4, my iPhone 5, and Jackie's iPhone 4S.
"No problems with my stuff. It took a long time, but everything came up normally.
"Jackie's 4S was a different story. I did that one last.
"The short story is that Verizon was overloaded with updates, and they couldn't keep up. Apple was also inundated, and they couldn't keep up. Hence, during the update process for the 4S, Apple had a hiccup and the 4S was crippled during the update. Not to worry. A fresh start made everything right — almost.
"One thing that happened with the 4S that did not happen with the iPad 4 or the iPhone 5 was right after the iOS7 update completed. I got a notice that a new update was available for the carrier on the 4S. I did that, too.
"When I finally got to use the 4S, it would not connect to Verizon. Getting on the Internet was no problem — but no phone service. A call to Verizon revealed that many people were having the same problem. The fix was to do a complete reset of the phone (wiping all data off) and restore the phone from a backup through iTunes. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention this - MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP YOUR DEVICES BEFORE YOU START THE UPDATE!
"After the 4S was restored (the second time), I was able to validate the connection to Verizon and everything worked."
Take a deep breath, John has more info to share!
"So what's really new with iOS7? I mean, really new? Not just in appearances, but in functionality. The calendar had the biggest surprise. The familiar interface is not only gone, but one of the features is hidden. In order to see your calendar entries as a list, you have to tap on the Search icon. To see the calendar in the month mode, you tap on the name of the month. Then the year shows up where the name of the month was, and tapping on that shows you the whole year. Actually, this is far easier to navigate than it sounds, and I quickly got used to it.
"I tried to take a snapshot of the screen, but the snapshot does not show everything that you can see. So the image below is a screenshot showing both what the calendar looks like (left side) and what you get when you take a screenshot (right side). (Yes, it was tricky getting this shot.)
To enlarge the illustration click on it, then click to go back to the post.
To enlarge the illustration click on it, then click to go back to the post.
"So what does Jackie think about the update? She was very angry that the phone didn't work, and she had to leave before I got it working again. As for everything else, she's flexible enough to not worry about the changes. Besides, she has me to fall back on.
"I very much like the new Compass. Apple has added a secondary feature to it - a bubble level. Very neat, especially for me when I need to level my telescope mount."
Here's John's report on the OS X update:
"So what about the Mac update to 10.5.8. Quite painless on the Mac Mini, the MacBook Air, and my two MacBook Pros. But one thing happened with Mail that I am not very happy about.
"I have several mailbox aliases below the Toolbar (boxed in red in the image below.) This gives me quick access to my most frequently used mailboxes.
"They were all greyed out. No access. I quickly discovered that I had to remove them and add the aliases back in.
"Then I discovered that NONE of my Rules were active. I had to go through each of my several dozen Rules and reference the action back to the original mailbox that the message was supposed to be moved to (see red circle in image below). The weird part was that when I reset one, that same mailbox showed up as the default location for the next one that I needed to fix."
"I'm quite sure that many people will have a serious problem with this, and I'm very surprised that it didn't show up in the Beta testing."
Here's John's recommendations:
"Do I recommend getting the updates right away? To this I always say, why not? How long do you think you will have to wait before you can know for a fact that you won't have any problems with the update? Can you live without the update? Certainly! But eventually you will be faced with having to update when one or more of your apps are no longer supported with your old operating system— just like when Classic 9 became unusable. And if you trade your device in, you will get the latest operating system anyway.
"To update the iPhone, you have to have your computer to get the update. I recommend updating the computer first.
"One last thing. The iTunes update (11.1) modifies the iTunes library. So if you have more than one computer using the same iTunes library, you're forced to update iTunes on every computer. Besides that, if you are accessing the same iTunes library (or iPhoto library) from different computers, you have to shut down iTunes/iPhoto on one computer before launching iTunes/iPhoto on any other computer. This is such a rare situation that it probably isn't even worth mentioning. But if you have, say, a MacBook Air with a small hard drive and a Mac Mini with a large hard drive, it won't be long before you realize that you should have bought a bigger hard drive for the MacBook Air. This cannot be remedied except by sharing files with another computer or by adding an external hard drive to the MacBook Air - and that uses up one of the only two USB ports on the MacBook Air. And you can't run an external hard drive off of a USB port expander along with any other device, even if the USB expander is powered (or so my experience tells me).
"For the most part, the updates do not change how any non-Apple app looks or behaves. As vendors start providing updates for their apps, this will undoubtedly change.
"For the iPhone, just take a deep breath and get the updates in a week or so when things have settled down at Apple and Verizon.
"For the Mac, get it now."
Another iOS 7 Upgrade Report
Prez Art Gorski reports on his experiences with the iOS 7 upgrade. "Well, I upgraded my decrepit iPhone 4 to iOS 7. Even though a lot of features aren't available on a phone this old, I like the improvements that I do get. Mary Ann upgraded her iPad 2 with no problems as well.
"Macworld.com has a huge list of articles covering all aspects of iOS 7 that are very informative.
"We'll be upgrading to iPhone 5s's shortly, so that will be even better."
iOS 7 Comments
Here's Jim Hamm's comments on upgrading to iOS 7. "Realizing that it's better to wait for some time before updating to a new iOS, I, of course, ignored my own advice and went ahead just now and updated my iPhone 5, iPad 2, and iPad Mini to iOS 7.
"All went well, and so far no problems or bugs noted, but discovery still underway. iOS 7 is quite different visually, functionally, and aesthetically -- but so far I like it quite well. I'm listening to the new iTunes Radio as I type this, and I'm gonna appreciate this as I enjoy listening to music as I surf the net on my computer. I suspect iTunes Radio may well put a little hurt on Pandora and other radio apps."
And now, what did Zee do? "My wife was showing me a few tips after her update and one she liked was telling Siri to play James Taylor -- which Siri obligingly did. And she asked Siri 'what is the weather in Prescott?' -- which Siri kindly told her. Kinda cool."
Jim winds up this report with, "I did the update by plugging my devices into my MacBook Air, and the process went much quicker than my wife's updates, which she was doing via Wifi only and not plugged into her Mac. If you decide to update to iOS 7, don't forget to do a backup first, just in case. I backed up both to iCloud and my MacBook Air -- belt and suspenders, don't you know...(grin)."