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Video App Demo: VideoBot Camera
Do you find it hard to sort through the videos on your iOS device? Apple didn't give users any organizational tools to speak of, unless you count alphabetical sorting. The lack of folders or any method for making sense of your video library can be a pain, so VideoBot hopes to make it easier. Chief among the features in VideoBot is the ability to add tags to videos and sort them accordingly. A nice touch if you happen to carry a lot of videos on your iOS device. It will also allow you to record videos and add metadata to them, with a few bells and whistles to help improve your recordings (like a rule-of-thirds overlay). Check out the video for a full walkthrough. There are iPhone and iPad versions of VideoBot Camera. if(typeof AOLVP_cfg==='undefined')AOLVP_cfg=[];AOLVP_cfg.push({id:'AOLVP_1034498181001','codever':0.1, 'autoload':false, 'autoplay':false, 'playerid':'61371448001', 'videoid':'1034498181001', 'width':480, 'height':270, 'stillurl':'http://pdl.stream.aol.com/pdlext/aol/brightcove/studionow/p/b58b6c9b6da74/r/53eec84160932/al/193074/poster-10.jpg', 'playertype':'inline','videotitle':'TUAW - App Demo - VideoBot','videolink':'#'});
EVE Evolved: Power players and player retention
As I mentioned in our coverage of the EVE Online Fanfest, the best part of the experience for me was discussing EVE with players who are as involved in and enthusiastic about the game as I am. On my first night there, I got into a fascinating discussion with a few players on a topic I hadn't really considered before -- power players. Every MMO has players who get heavily involved in their chosen game. EVE's Fanfest really highlighted this, as around a thousand of EVE's power players flew to Iceland just to talk about the game, contribute ideas in roundtable discussions and find out what the future holds for the game. Ultimately, the fate of EVE lies in its community. EVE's main strength as an MMO is the fact that with so many players in one game universe, people form very real ties with each other. Corporations and alliances are more than just collections of people; they're sub-communities with their own aspirations, internal politics, playstyles, personalities and even senses of humour. These organisations give people support and a place to call home in an unforgiving universe, and it's the power players of EVE who make all of that possible. In this week's EVE Evolved, I explore the importance of power players in MMOs and what the concept means for EVE's development.
Sony's Kaz Hirai consolidates power as likely CEO successor to Howard Stringer
Sony's in the midst of yet another realignment this morning. Most notable is the promotion of Kazuo "Kaz" Hirai to Representative Corporate Executive Officer and Executive Deputy President, effective as of April 1st. The change in title also carries new responsibilities for Sony's Consumer Products & Services Group putting Kaz in charge of all of Sony's consumer electronics businesses including TV, audio / video, imaging, PC, gaming, and mobile in addition to overseeing Sony's global sales and marketing, common software platforms, and design operations. The move makes Kaz the number one candidate to replace Howard Stringer, the 69 year old boss from Wales, who is expected to step down in 2013.
Paperless: A solid, easily customizable document manager for OS X
There are several bloggers here at TUAW who are slowly moving toward a paperless office. Steve Sande has had the best success, sharing some of what he's learned about culling out the piles of paper in his freelance business. However, it doesn't stop reams of paper from entering your life, or to even begin to manage it. Paperless from Mariner Software, formerly known as ReceiptWallet, aims to pull all of the paper pieces of your digital life into one location, then encourages you to keep going by adding to it by creating separate databases within the program to sort out different parts of your life -- a digital file cabinet, so to speak. Paperless works with almost any scanner and even offers a few bundled packages with Fujitsu's ScanSnap scanners that include a boxed version of Paperless. Yes, the irony of including a boxed version of a software designed to make your life paperless isn't lost on us. The folks at Mariner were good enough to let us dive into the software.
Lenovo setting up a specialist unit for tablets and smartphones
How far we've come. It was only a couple of years ago that Lenovo was closing a deal to sell its mobile phone business, but a quick re-acquisition in late 2009 and some recent heavy flirtation with the tablet form factor have led to the creation of a whole new unit in the company's hierarchy, one dedicated to the development of smartphones, tablets, TVs, and other internet-connected devices. Headed up by Liu Jun and working out of Beijing, this squad of designers and engineers will focus on harnessing the "tremendous growth potential of the mobile internet." Cloud computing will be a major feature of Lenovo's plans moving forward, which places its goals for the future right in line with just about everyone else's. Still, it's good to see one of the big desktop computing players diversifying its portfolio with gusto.
The paperless office: How to get there (and a discount e-book offer)
Last Wednesday on TUAW TV Live, I discussed my success over the past year at moving towards the ultimate goal of a paperless office. I thought it would be a good idea for me to pass along some of the methods I've been using to accomplish this elusive goal, and also offer a deal to our readers for an e-book all about the subject. My earliest steps towards a paperless office actually came a few years ago, when I went to electronic statements for my banks and credit cards. However, up until the beginning of 2010, the filing system for my business consisted of big binders or folders into which I would slip the printed copies of those statements along with a ton of other paperwork. Now, as the statements come in my email as PDFs or are downloaded from the bank or credit card company website, I save them directly into special folders in my Dropbox.
iCollect Movies HD catalogs your movie collection on your iPad
MacMegasite reports that Hooked In Motion has released the iCollect Movies HD 1.0 app (US$4.99), which lets movie fanatics catalog their Blu-ray, DVD, HD DVD, UMD, VHS, Betamax, and Laserdisc collection right on their iPad. While the iPhone version, iCollect Movies Pro ($2.99), can use its camera to scan the barcode and find your movies, iPad users will have to manually enter either the title or the barcode, which some users may find a minor inconvenience -- at least until the iPad gets a camera, which will hopefully be sooner rather than later. Once movies are cataloged, iCollect Movies provides detailed notes from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes along with regions, subtitles, and aspect ratios. A built-in search function allows users to search for all the movies they own starring a specific actor, how many times a movie has been watched, and any ratings that they may have recorded in the past. iCollect Movies HD 1.0 for iPad syncs with iCollect Movies Pro for iPhone and directly with the icollectmedia.com website. This allows users to back up and share their collections via the Web and other Apple devices. If I hadn't ditched my entire DVD collection a while back, I could totally find a use for an app like this. For those of you with a huge video library, it may be worth a look.
iTunes bankruptcy, step one: The Great Purge
I'll admit it was a problem that I had created myself: I had moved my iTunes library from one computer to another. Then I tried syncing it across two computers. Add in a bunch of music from SXSW, along with other music given to me along the way, and before I knew it, my iTunes library was a 160GB mess. Worse, it was overwhelming. I never listened to any music because I knew that I was going to be frustrated by duplication and a bunch of songs that I didn't enjoy. So, a few weeks ago, I declared iTunes bankruptcy. I moved my ~/Music/iTunes library to my Desktop. I launched iTunes while holding down the Option/Alt key on my Mac and created a new library. It was completely empty, and full of possibility. Click "Read More" to see what I did to restore sanity to my iTunes database.
Report: Foxconn making 1.5 iPhones per second
137,000 iPhones per day. That's how many manufacturer Foxconn is reportedly making these days, its chairman tells the press. That's an amazing figure adding up to 50 million iPhones every single year, even as Apple struggles to keep enough hardware in stock. And the process isn't easy, either -- chairman Terry Gou says that the company found out it needed a certain machining rig usually designed only for prototyping in order to stay in line with Apple's strict manufacturing standards. Foxconn ended up buying over 1,000 of the machines at $20k each, even while other manufacturing companies are buying just one. It's crazy to think about the scale of the operation over there -- not just the equipment, but the workers and organization required to churn out that kind of product. And sadly, it appears the pressure is still on for the company, as we've seen multiple times before. Apple is setting records over here on this side of the world with the iPhone's sales numbers, and it's sometimes easy to forget that behind all of that, there's an industrial machine churning out product by the millions. [via HardMac]
Storyboard: Guilding the lily
If guilds exist for any purpose in MMOs, it's providing drama for the customer support team to secretly observe and laugh about behind closed doors. (That's my suspicion, at least. I wouldn't blame them.) But as a presumably unintentional side effect of that, guilds are a great way for players to get together and bond over common interests within the game. Considering that roleplaying is one of the most group-intensive activities in any game... well, you see where I'm going here. Getting a good guild can be the difference between a consistent storyline and a few disjointed RP sessions followed by uninstalling the client. Unfortunately, if there's a magical formula for getting a guild that suits your needs perfectly in every game, I haven't yet found it. There's a process that works fairly well as a general flow, however, and while it hasn't always gotten me into the guild I wound up sticking with, it has at least pointed me in the right direction. So without further ado, this week's Storyboard is dedicated to finding you a guild. (By which I mean telling you about how to find a guild, after you click the "Read More" link. Which counts as further ado, I guess.)
Firefox Tab Candy groups your tabs, but that's just for starters (video)
Although Firefox already has a strong selection of tab management helpers like TooManyTabs, which gives you extra rows and memory-preserving options, or Tree Style Tab, which shifts things to a tree-based vertical menu, Mozilla has rolled up its scaly sleeves and decided to rethink the whole thing. Tab Candy starts off much like Safari's TabExposé, by showing you all the tabs you currently have open in thumbnail form, but from there it allows you to organize them into separate groups (with sub-groups promised for the future), which then act in very much the same way as opening a new Firefox window. Yes, it's folders within the browser, and it's all based on good old fashioned HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so no pesky additional downloads will be required once this Alpha-stage code gets added to Firefox's official release. If you want to give it an early spin, hit the source link below, but don't neglect the video after the break to see what else Mozilla is thinking of cooking up with Tab Candy.
Announcing Trunk, an app store for Evernote
Evernote announced a new extension to their platform today, Trunk. It's essentially an App Store for Evernote, highlighting applications, hardware and platforms created by third parties which integrate with Evernote in various ways. Trunk offers easy access to new tech for users, as well as a means for third-party developers to capitalize on their work. Evernote has been a shining example of making good on the "Freemium" business model, where you offer a basic service for free and provide an upgrade path to paid plans (in Evernote's case, a $5 per month Premium plan). It's a very common business model on the 'net, but not everyone manages to turn a profit on it to the extent that Evernote has. The announcement of the Evernote Trunk includes the promise of an App-Store-esque model for developers to make money and share in profits. Among the developers featured on the Trunk and in today's press conference were Egretlist, Voice2Note, SAP StreamWork and social application Seesmic. The latest version of the Evernote Mac client has a button in the top toolbar for Trunk, where you can see services, mobile and desktop apps and hardware which can be added to Evernote to expand its functionality. Some services are free, some are premium. Voice2Note, for example, adds search to voice notes and the ability to add notes via your phone. 5 transcriptions per month are free, but you pay about $30 a year for unlimited transcriptions plus the ability to tag notes by adding "tag with..." to the end of an audio note. Social notebooks from the likes of BlackBook and Make Magazine are now available through Trunk as well. Evernote also mentions potential future enhancements such suggestions (similar to SpringPad, I assume) and semantic analysis. Notable, but not part of any press coverage today, is a change in the tag display of the new Mac client. Selecting View > Show Unassigned Tags will trim the visible tags in the sidebar down to just tags related to the current search or selected note. It's a major improvement to usability and one I'd been hoping would show up for quite some time. Evernote is a free service which can be upgraded to transfer 500MB per month and store any type of file for $5US per month or $45US per year. The desktop client for Mac is free, and so are the iPhone and iPad versions (the iPad app is especially cool). Take a look, and check out the Trunk to see what functionality you might want to add to Evernote.
Breakfast Topic: Learn something new every day
This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. I learned a pretty important life lesson from playing WoW. Now, I am well aware that this statement makes me sound like a loon, like someone claiming his whole life underwent a reversal after reading The Secret and now everything is so much better and wonderful. I'm not saying WoW did that for me. But it has taught me something about time management and design goals, by way of dailies. Specifically, dailies have shown me that if you devote a certain predetermined amount of time each day to the completion of carefully detailed and prioritized tasks, you will reap benefits and rewards over a finite and moderate time period, with better benefits and rewards over a longer time period. People who are good at time management and at prioritizing, and who do not have a tendency to procrastinate, are probably thinking, "Duh." But some of us poor slobs out there do have problems managing time and imagining the benefits that can come from consistently devoting time to specific activities, especially when those benefits won't materialize for a long time. Personally, this really hit home for me the past few months as I was planning my wedding. I wanted to do most of the stuff myself, because there was no way I could afford someone to do things for me. I wanted to make my own centerpieces, guest favors, cake topper, wall decorations, thank-you cards, invitations, paper picture frames for souvenirs, bridesmaid's hair pieces and so on. I read enough wedding blogs to scare myself into thinking that making everything was going to result in a time management nightmare. So early on, I set out to prioritize and schedule my daily tasks -- just like planning out Sons of Hodir rep, accumulating Champion's Seals to collect all the pets or running through quest chains on the way to Loremaster. I allocated one to two hours every night in order to complete a set amount of work and determined the best way to space out all the tasks over the following months. I got everything I wanted to get done with two weeks to spare. Days before the wedding, I was stressing out because I had nothing to stress out over. Some will find it silly that it took WoW dailies to get me to organize myself, but it really is just a very good time management model. What have you learned from playing this game? Leadership skills, perhaps? Diplomacy? How to be a politician, or a socializer, or a mediator? Or (dare I ask), an instigator? Have you ever wanted to write for WoW.com? Your chance may be right around the corner. Watch for our next call for submissions for articles via Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. The next byline you see here may be yours!
The iPhone app showdown
This was an intriguing experiment undertaken over at Minimal Mac: Patrick decided to play a little Homescreen Survivor with his iPhone app icons -- he cleared everything off his homescreen, and then only let those apps back on which he used more than once throughout the course of a week. The result? You can see here which ones made it back on. Contacts, Calendar, Camera all showed up, not surprisingly. Photos did as well -- I don't use that one much, but I can see why. Everything else seems to be his own personal use: Tumblr's app, two different Twitter apps (Birdhouse and Tweetie), and then Simplenote and so on. But the real point here isn't what apps he used, it's just how different his homescreen looked when he only put what he used on there. I'll admit it: my iPhone is a mess -- I've got icons all over the place, and they don't seem to stay organized even when I try to organize them. But organizing according to actual usage is a great idea, and undertaking the same experiment on your iPhone might actually clear some things up for you. It's also worth pointing out all of that empty space on his homescreen: he has four more slots there that aren't used at all. Apple, are you listening? I'd guess Patrick's usage is more common than Apple may think -- there's plenty of room on the homescreen for other functions and information.
"Cinch" your desktop windows into place
Cinch is a new Mac utility from Irradiated Software. It helps keep your desktop windows organized by snapping them into predefined sizes and locations when you hold them near an edge of your screen. While its toolset is limited in comparison to its big sister, the keyboard-based SizeUp (which we covered a while back), Cinch is designed as a quick-and-easy window organization tool for users who prefer to stick with their mouse for such things. When you run Cinch, it shows up in your menubar. When you drag any window to a top, left or right edge of the screen, it "snaps" (or cinches) to take up the full width or height of the screen: top half stretched horizontally if dragged to the top, and a vertical half for left or right. It's handy, and it's easy to get so used to it that you forget it isn't built into the operating system. Cinch works with multi-monitor setups, and there's no configuration necessary. Just run it and start dragging windows where you need them. Cinch is available for download as a free trial, and a license can be had for $7US.
5 smart albums to help you organize your iPhoto library
Like smart playlists in iTunes, smart albums in iPhoto provide a way for you to better organize your photos. Whether it's a list of your most recent photos or photos with a specified aperture range, there are countless smart albums you could create to fit your needs. Here are a few of my favorite. Recently added: I always like having my most recent photos with me, and this is the smart album that gives them to me. Match the following condition. Date is in the last "90 days" (or whatever date range you prefer). The smart family album: Say there are three family members in a family -- Tobias Fünke (dad), Lindsay Fünke (mom) and Maebe Fünke (daughter) -- and you want pictures of all of them in one place. Match any of the following conditions. Face is "Tobias." Face is "Lindsay." Face is "Maebe." The camera-specific smart album: We've recently added a new member to the camera family, the Canon EOS 40D. But, like many a household, ours is one with several different cameras, and sometimes it's nice to see where each photo originated from. Match the following condition. Camera Model is "Canon EOS40D" A smart album for videos: Some digital cameras these days can also function as "good enough" alternatives for camcorders. Here's a smart album that collects all of your videos imported from your digital cameras. Match the following condition. Photo is "Movie." The best of the best: Your highest rated photos in one place Match the following condition. My rating is greater than "*" (or however many stars you desire) Readers, tell us about some of the iPhoto smart albums that you've created.
Friday Favorite: FolderGlance
FolderGlance 2.55, for Snow Leopard only, is a very useful preference pane that adds a number of additions to the Finder. The simplest and most basic thing it does is to add an expanded contextual menu to any folder when the folder is right (or control, or two-finger) clicked. If there are folders embedded inside the folder you have right-clicked, those folders appear at the top of the display window and can also be right-clicked to inspect their contents. This works for any number of embedded folders. The really neat part, at least for me, is to set custom folders. What this lets you do is to determine folders that you would like to get to right away and denote them as special. Then whenever you right-click, whether in an empty area of your desktop or on any folder, the custom folders appear at the top of your list of folders. This does not replace the functions of the usual contextual menu we've all come to know and love; it expands them. Here's why I love this feature. When I'm writing for TUAW, each post requires a graphic and a link at the very least. Graphics need to be properly formatted, so after adjusting the size, I save the result in a folder called TUAW Pix. This folder is buried about 5 layers into my Documents folder. With FolderGlance, every time I right click, the TUAW Pix folder is right there ready to be opened. Saving the graphics goes from about 8 keystrokes to 2. The preference pane does a bunch of other things as well, but none that I find as useful as the feature detailed above. For the record, here is the feature list: Moving, copying and making aliases of the currently selected files in a folder you browse to Control-free popups: Open the contextual menu without holding down the control-key or using a two-button mouse In-menu preview of arbitrary files Opening files with an application different than the default by using an "Open with..." menu you can tailor to suit your own taste Changing the font size used in contextual menus Browsing into package contents Customizable sorting and customizable display of hidden files and folders. The preference pane gets updated fairly frequently, and in that process, you are asked to force-quit and reload the Finder to make the new version take effect. For me, this doesn't seem to work. I need to either restart or log out and back in for the change to take effect. FolderGlance 2.55 costs US$20 for a license. This is expensive and I'm sure that cheaper alternatives are around, but this, in my workflow, has become an extension of the Finder, and something that I feel should be built into the OS. I use it constantly. You should note that if you are running anything under OS 10.6, there are older versions available.
EpicAdvice.com lets you ask and answer Warcraft questions
Reader Jesta sent us a note about his new website. He's a big fan of Stack Overflow, which is a big Q&A/advice site for programmers -- you show up, ask your question, and then other folks who might or might not be working on the same problem post their answers, in moderated and organized threads for everyone to read. Jesta decided this same type of thing could work for our little game, so he put together EpicAdvice.com -- the idea is that you go there, leave a question about anything in the game, and then wait for your answer from other people browsing the site.Stack Overflow actually has a little "badge" system where answerers can earn reputation points for answering questions correctly, and Jesta says that they're working on doing something similar for Epic Advice (though they'll probably have Achievements, as that's more Warcraft-y). But as of this writing, the site definitely needs more questions and answers, so if there's something bugging you about WoW (that our own Queue hasn't answered yet), or you consider yourself an expert and want to clear some things up, head over and give the site a look.
iTunes 9 Focus: Tips for editing your iPhone apps screens
While of my colleagues are tremendously excited about Norah Jones and iTunes LP, I've got to say I was far happier to discover the new iTunes 9 iPhone application management screens that Brett touched on yesterday (Sorry, Dave!). Located in the Applications tab for each iPhone and iPod touch device, the manager lets you organize your applications on a screen-by-screen basis from the comfort of your desktop. Unfortunately, the organizer remains fairly primitive.You can... ...check or uncheck apps that you want to sync or not sync. ...drag apps around individual pages to reorder them ...drag apps between screens to reparent them. ...change page order by dragging them within the page column. And that's pretty much it. There's no way to sort your screens alphabetically or by category. There's no way to copy or share layouts between devices. There's no undo support if you change your mind about any changes. That having been said, there are some iTunes 9 tricks that may help you better organize your applications. Here are TUAW's top four. Use Command-Click to group apps. Command-clicking an application icon adds it to (or if already added, removes it from) the currently selected group. You can move groups all at once between pages. Use empty pages. If you have the pages to spare, use the empty pages that iTunes makes available to you to help organize applications by "theme". For example, you can drag an empty page into, say, the page 2 position and then start filling that page with games from the other pages. Adding apps to that empty page causes another empty page to appear at the end of the list if there is room. You're limited to eight 11 pages total for your applications. Use the dock. Your dock provides a home for up to four applications that you use the most. Docked applications appear on every page, offering the quickest access to your most-used apps. Don't feel limited to the apps that the iPhone OS defaults to. It's your dock. Use it the way that best suits you. Use the home screen. If you have more than four apps that you need quick access to, don't forget that the first screen of apps is always just a Home button click away. Tapping the home button when viewing apps automatically jumps you to the first page. Place your high priority apps on this first page if they fall short of the urgency of the dock items. The new Application editor is certainly a great step forward from the way things were. Here's hoping that Apple will make it even easier to manage your applications in future iTunes releases.
Microsoft offers video tips on organizing with Office
Ah, summertime; the kids are out of school, the pace drops back from 'overdrive' to 'merely hectic,' and you finally have the opportunity to tackle the giant looming crisis that is your personal state of disorganization. Perhaps I'm projecting a little bit. Anyway, if you're looking for a bit of guidance on how your Mac can help you get organized -- and, of course, if you are a Microsoft Office 2008 owner -- the Mac BU has something for you.Organization expert Peter Walsh (possessor of a charming Australian accent, and author of the slightly-less-charmingly titled Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat) is the host of a video tips presentation over at the Mactopia site. Walsh runs through a couple of suggestions for reducing the chaos in the three key areas of Family, Finance & Health, mostly on the straightforward side (keep a family calendar in Entourage, track your website logins in a secured Excel spreadsheet). Walsh encourages us to envision the end state of the life we want instead of the many steps that may be required to arrive there. Unfortunately, the delivery mechanism for these helpful tips is a bit less than helpful. The presentation requires the Silverlight plugin, which lots of folks avoid on principle. You can neither download nor rewind the segments; it would seem that for anything intended to help you reduce chaos and clutter, providing the tips in podcastable and mobile-friendly formats would be a nice gesture towards the overscheduled. On top of that, the tips seem a bit forced into Office's capabilities rather than organically built. While there are more optimal Mac or iPhone single-purpose apps for these tasks (or even multitaskers like Bento), it's true that Office is installed on a lot of Macs and a lot of Mac users could probably leverage it to achieve some organizational goals.With all that in mind, if you feel like you could use a light organizational boost and you enjoy making spreadsheets of your car maintenance appointments, check it out.Update: One thing I meant to mention but forgot: Entourage is a bit of an odd choice for a familial calendar, as it doesn't offer native sharing outside of an Exchange environment (an unlikely setup for parents & kids). Adding BusySync makes it much more flexible, but you're just as well off using iCal in that situation.[h/t The Loop]
