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Xbox One update can automatically put your TV in game mode
Starting today, Microsoft is rolling out its"Spring Update" for the Xbox One, but it isn't done adding new features for the season. The update that all users will get over the next few days adds "auto low latency mode" which works with compatible TVs to make sure they're in "game mode" when the console is connected to reduce any lag. If it's hooked up to a PC display compatible with AMD's FreeSync tech, then it will match the refresh rate and frame output to end stuttering and tearing. The One S and One X now support FreeSync 2 with HDR, as well as 1440p for monitors that deliver a resolution between 1080p and 4K Ultra HD.
Xbox One tests spring update with controller sharing via Mixer
The next big Xbox One software update is closing in, and as Microsoft rolled it out to Preview Update testers, the company also explained what to expect. Once the Spring update arrives, gamers can check out a new 1440p option that fits in between 1080p and 4K displays to make it just right for anyone using a quad HD monitor. It's also adding an algorithmic "What's Hot" feed for club posts that should make things more like Reddit (or Facebook), and a Top Posts option that shows which ones are the most popular of all time.
Productivity Tip: Read the manual, or take a class
There was a time when Mac owners scoffed at their PC-loving counterparts, who had to pore over paper manuals to grok the essentials of a software program before they tried to use it. When graphical user interfaces were introduced, a lot of focus was on making software intuitive and easy to use. There were also hardware constraints -- not much CPU power or memory, minimal storage, low-resolution displays -- that forced applications to be simple by design. Modern applications, whether on the desktop or on mobile, have a lot more room to maneuver, and consequently may arrive with a much steeper learning curve While your average iOS app may seem simple enough, quite often there are bells and whistles you might not know about. iPad apps may use the increased screen real estate to add more (and more obscure) options, and Mac or web applications can be far more complex than anything available on mobile platforms. While it might seem like cheap advice to "read the manual," I find very few people actually do. There's an entire industry built around learning software tools, like the Take Control series, which I find immensely helpful. Granted, most software manuals are written in plodding, feature by feature style and not as entertaining "here's how you solve this problem" books, but even that dry documentation can be vital to your efficacy when using the software. When I started using iBank, shortly after its debut, I was lured in by its accessible design. "This seems simple enough," I said as I started entering transactions. Over time it became apparent that I had barely scratched the surface of iBank's functionality. I eventually gave up on the program -- only to return over a year later, armed with more clues. This time I read the manual, in no small part because almost every question I looked up on the IGG Software Knowledgebase had an answer in the manual. Another example: Productivity software. While applications like Things are simple enough, there's often a lot of functionality hidden in the manual. You may not understand how to tap into these features if you're just reading "This does that" in the documentation. This is where additional help may be required. In my case, for task management I use OmniFocus (after trying every other "to do" application under the sun). OmniFocus isn't a simple list maker; it is a powerful database which can help you sort through mountains of tasks to allow you to focus on what exactly needs to be done next. You could likely spend days reading the manual and still come away with the "what now?" feeling. You could buy a book, but sometimes books on niche products turn out more like dry manuals. There's another answer, however. For deeper, more powerful applications, I recommend paying for additional learning materials. I bought an excellent book on DEVONThink Pro from Take Control and I no longer feel overwhelmed by the powerful software. For OmniFocus, I knew I needed to use it better, so I upped the ante and bought into the Asian Efficiency series of posts on using OmniFocus. Take Control books are great, but (for me) sometimes the low cost can cause a lack of motivation. Asian Efficiency is more like an online course, and the cost is much higher than just a book. It's a powerful motivator to know you're wasting more than an evening of poker's amount of money with a course if you ignore it. This goes double for any app that's crucial to your business workflow; if you're earning your rent with Adobe's CS suite, don't stint on the training or courseware as you move from CS 5 to CS6. The hour you save searching for that missing dialog box or hidden feature might be billable. We're starting to see some really amazing ebooks arrive on the iBookstore, too. These leverage all the multimedia functions in iBooks and if you're a visual learner, they can be vastly more effective than reading text alone. A great example is Markdown by David Sparks and Eddie Smith (our review here). By using video and audio in addition to text, there's almost no chance you'll walk away scratching your head. The downside is these media-enabled iBooks will quickly fill up your iPad's storage. I also recommend going to focused conferences, or events like Macworld/iWorld, where there are sessions aplenty on various software packages and workflows (several TUAW folks have given talks at Macworld). Often these give you a bigger picture and show you how to integrate multiple tools into a consistent workflow. You'll also have the opportunity to ask questions of speakers and attendees, and this can often be the most helpful thing of all as you share tips and tricks and learn what matters most to you. Finally, don't be afraid to seek out a guru who knows the app backwards and forwards. Many app experts share their tips and training suggestions on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus, or on application-specific forums hosted by the developer or third-parties. Be polite, show that you've done your legwork first (if the question could have been answered by a fifteen-second scan of the manual, it's not a good use of your time or the guru's wisdom), and you might be able to draw on some help from above. This is the first in a series of weekly productivity tips here on TUAW. If you have any of your own, send them in via our feedback page.
iBook Lessons: Take Control of iBooks Author
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Michael E. Cohen is an ebook designer, instructional software developer and the author of "Take Control of iBooks Author". This new book introduces iBooks Author to users, and discusses publication through the iBookstore. Cohen agreed to sit down with TUAW to talk about ebooks, the iBookstore, and creating books using the iBooks Author tool. TUAW: Michael, you've been doing this a long time -- and by "long time," I mean since before the dawn of the ebook. Can you tell us a bit about your experience in the ebook world, and where you're coming from? Cohen: It all began on Bloomsday in 1990 (for those unfamiliar with James Joyce, June 16 is the day his novel Ulysses was set, and is Bloomsday to Joyce fans). The Voyager Company had just made a name for itself in the Mac world by producing the first interactive CD-ROM for consumers, Robert Winter's HyperCard exegesis on Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Bob Stein, who ran Voyager, and who came from a publishing background, was interested in what could be done with text on a computer and he got a grant to bring a bunch of scholars and geeks together to discuss it at an in-house conference. I was working at UCLA at the time as a technical advisor for the Humanities Computing Facility (actually the job title was User Relations Liaison). One of the invitees was Richard Lanham, a professor of English and specialist in rhetoric. Dick and I were friends, and he invited me to tag along to the meeting (I had turned some of his book, Revising Prose, into a computer program for the Apple II a few years earlier, and had done a sample version of his Handlist of Rhetorical Terms as a HyperCard stack). It was at that meeting that Voyager began what become known as the Expanded Books project. At the end of the meeting, Bob Stein offered me a job -- jokingly, I thought. But it wasn't a joke; a few months later I had left UCLA to work at Voyager, ostensibly on a CD ROM edition of Macbeth but also as part of the Expanded Books team. So that's how I came into this business. TUAW: What were some of the Expanded Books projects you worked on, and what lessons did you learn while creating them? Cohen: Oh, my. Got an hour? TUAW: I do! But the condensed version is fine. We're on your schedule here... Cohen: I began working with the people who were trying to imagine just what it would mean to put a book on the computer (specifically the just released line of Mac PowerBooks). So we spent a lot of time doing mock-ups, trying to imagine what qualities/features/functionality people expected from books and how to best express them simply and cleanly on the PowerBook, in HyperCard. Some lessons were simple: how to mark pages and passages. We came up with interfaces for that (dog-ears, margin lines, and slideable paper-clips). The issue of how to show where one was in a book was another: we developed a hideable "page gauge" for that. Fixed versus variable pagination was another. We went with fixed pages...BUT we also developed a way to double the text size while retaining the same pagination for those who were older and wanted larger print. Taking notes was another. We came up with an in-book notebook. We also looked to the past. We were asked to look at Elizabeth Eisenstein's treatise about the 100 years following Gutenberg, and how printing changed the world. We were very interested in how that was being replicated at a much faster pace with the invention of digital technology. Basically, we came up with an interface that was a book-like as possible. And we consciously decided not to patent or copyright it. We were interested in publishing books and figured that if we made the interface available for others to copy, we could help establish ebook conventions. That way, there could emerge a vibrant ebook market. And it would have worked, too, if that rascal Tim Berners-Lee hadn't unleashed the World Wide Web, and destroyed the nascent interactive media market in the process! I helped write the HyperCard scripts for the first ebooks, and personally laid out the first three ebooks Voyager published: Jurassic Park (before the movie!), The Complete Annotated Alice by Martin Gardener, and Douglas Adam's Complete Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. TUAW: Many of those revolutionary aspects you worked on are now available in iBooks Author. Looking at iBooks Author with all your experience, how do you evaluate this tool? What ground does it break and what does the software mean in the overall ebook world? Cohen: Some of our inventions (like bookmarks and page gauges) are still in use by most ebook makers. Ah, iBooks Author. How do I evaluate it? I have two perspectives on it: one as an educator (and trainer of educators) and one as a crazy geek who likes to customize and extend technology. As one who has worked training teachers to use digital technology in instruction, I have to say that iBooks Author is the bee's knees and cat's pajamas. Really. It is something that offers most of the features one would want in a digital textbook, and, more importantly, one that I could teach intelligent faculty to use profitably (in the educational, not remunerative sense) in a few hours. As a geek I am disappointed that it is not more extensible, and uses a proprietary framework (but one that IS very close to the EPUB 3 standard). But, overall, I am delighted to see it...and very sad that it took over 20 years since we started making ebooks for it to emerge. As for what it means...gosh, I could speculate. My hope is that it creates a thriving marketplace for ebooks in education. I think Apple is being clever here: use education as a way to expand the capability of ebooks, and then extend that capability to non-instructional books over time. Meanwhile, it solves the ugly problem of ever larger and more expensive textbooks that kids have to carry around. TUAW: What are some of the features in iBooks Author that excite you the most? Cohen: Well, obviously its existence itself is the biggest feature. It's a way to create attractive inexpensive textbooks? That's huge. The various widgets are the other big features: they are suitable for so many different kinds of instructional use. And I'm personally intrigued by the misnamed HTML widget (it's actually more of a way to host Dashboard-style HTML/Javascript widgets inside of the iBooks framework). Had I world enough and time, I'd spend hours and hours playing with ways to use it. The templates are another big feature. They provide an easy way for novices to quickly produce attractive materials, but are also extensively customizable for the more professional book developer. TUAW: Are there some features you feel could still be improved? Cohen: What don't I like? The fact that it is proprietary. I understand why it is, but I don't like that it is. And I don't like that it doesn't easily support collaborative work: many textbooks have multiple authors, but iBooks Author doesn't lend itself well to distributed authorship. Also, there's no change tracking and no sidebar comments, the kinds of tools available in Word and Pages TUAW: Who is the target audience for your book, and what will they get out of it? The target audience is really anyone who wants to learn how to use the software. More specifically, though, I did write it with textbook authors and educators in mind, because that is who iBooks Author itself is really designed for. It is not a general ebook creation tool; it is exquisitely tuned for creating a specific family of book-types: textbooks. For use in the classroom and for home study. iBooks Author can be used for creating catalogs and similar books that require lots of images and interactive sidebars associated with the text, but it really is a textbook creation tool. If I were a novelist, I wouldn't choose it as my ebook platform, unless my novel was in the form of a textbook, of course (which could be interesting to try to do). TUAW: Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to talk. It's both a pleasure and an honor to meet you. You bring an amazing history of ebook creation to the table, and I'm sure there are still many stories to share that we didn't have time for. Would you be open to coming back and talking further? Sure. Ebooks are something of a passion of mine. You may have picked up on that! Take Control of iBooks Author (US$15) by Michael E. Cohen is available from Take Control Books. Michael E. Cohen taught English composition, worked as a programmer for NASA's Deep Space Network, and helped develop the first commercial ebooks at the Voyager Company. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac, Third Edition
Joe Kissell is an extraordinary Mac writer, so when he took on the task of writing the first edition of Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac a few years ago, I knew he was going to do an amazing job. Joe has just finished writing the third edition of this book, which covers every possible method of running Windows or Windows applications on your Intel Mac. In 167 pages, he talks you through how to determine the best installation option (VMWare Fusion, Virtual Box, Parallels Desktop, or Boot Camp) and how to install both the software and Windows.Since peripherals are sometimes problematic in a virtual environment, Joe describes how to make sure those mice, peripherals, and keyboards work happily with Windows. He describes in detail how to share files between the two operating systems, keep Windows secure, and integrate the Mac and Windows interfaces. Joe also talks about how to acquire various versions of Windows, as well as using CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac to run many applications without purchasing Windows. The ebook sells for $10, and you can easily defray the cost by taking advantage of a 10% discount coupon for VMWare Fusion and a $5 coupon for Parallels Desktop. A print edition will be available soon.
Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac: 2nd Edition
Take Control Books has just published the second edition of Andy Affleck's popular Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac ebook. Anyone interested in getting started with podcasting or improving the quality of their current podcasts should read this ebook.Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac: Second Edition adds coverage of two widely-used Mac podcasting applications, WireTap Studio and Übercaster, with information on recording and editing podcasts with these two apps. Andy also updated the ebook to discuss podcasting with GarageBand 4, and dropped his coverage of Audacity as a podcasting tool. Want to hear how good your podcasts can sound? Listen to Andy's promo.As with all Take Control titles, the $10 ebook will be updated regularly and is available for immediate download from the Take Control website. The ebook includes a coupon code good for up to $14 off the price of Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro and Fission, so if you're in the market for both of those products you essentially get the ebook for free.In the interest of full disclosure, I have written two Take Control ebooks.
Take Control of Back to My Mac / Screen Sharing in Leopard
Glenn Fleishman of Macworld, Wi-Fi Networking News and TidBITS fame has written two new Leopard ebooks, both published today by Take Control Books. The new titles, Take Control of Back to My Mac and Take Control of Screen Sharing in Leopard, are part of the popular Take Control ebook series. Take Control of Back to My Mac provides many tips on how to get .Mac's MobileMe's problematic remote access service up and working for you, while Take Control of Screen Sharing in Leopard discusses the many tools available for sharing your Mac screen with others. The books are $10 each, but if you purchase both ebooks and enter CPN006780611BUN as a coupon code, you'll get an immediate $5 discount. There's no excuse to suffer in silence with Back to My Mac anymore!In the interest of disclosure, I've written two titles for Take Control Books, neither of which are discussed in this post.[Via TidBITS]
Take Control of .Mac ebook revised, just in time for name change
Take Control Books has published the second edition of Joe Kissell's Take Control of .Mac eBook. The new version covers the use of Apple's .Mac service with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and iLife '08, with detailed information about: Changes to .Mac in Leopard Adding movies and photos to a Web Gallery Synchronization of multiple Macs through .Mac Configuring an AirPort Extreme for use with Back to My Mac ...and much more! In light of recent news about possible changes to the name and capabilities of .Mac, particularly in terms of iPhone support, it's great that this is an eBook that can be updated almost immediately by the author. If you purchase this $15 ebook now, Glenn Fleishman's upcoming Take Control of Back to My Mac title will be available to you at half-price.In the interest of full disclosure, I have authored two Take Control eBooks -- but not the Books mentioned in this post.
New eBook explains Leopard's permissions
Despite John Gruber's longstanding assertion that "Repair Disk Permissions is voodoo," Brian Tanaka has published "Take Control of Permissions in Leopard" for the Take Control series of eBooks. It's part troubleshooting (how to delete stuck files, for example), part tips and tricks (the best ways to keep files private) and part theory. It's only $10US for 87 pages of very useful information. For example, you might learn that repairing permissions with Disk Utility won't change the permissions to any of your user-centric files -- it's meant to restore [Apple's] application and system file preferences permissions to their as-delivered condition. Even if you do think that Repair Permissions is nonsense, it'll be nonsense you fully understand.[Update: John Welch pointed out the typo in the 2nd paragraph; of course, Repair Permissions changes permissions, not preferences.] [Via MacMinute]
Take Control eBooks 20% off via MacSanta today
Still looking for gifts for your friendly neighborhood switcher or new Leopard user? Nothing says "I love you, but I'm sadly incapable of planning ahead and getting organized enough to buy actual, physical presents" like the gift of eBooks. Well, maybe cash says that too. Anyway, if you were in the market for some topnotch Mac guides, you could take advantage of today's 20%-off MacSanta discount on the Take Control line from TidBITS.Your choices include classics like "Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner" and "Take Control of Your Domain Names..." not to mention plenty of Mac, iPod and Leopard help. At $8 for most titles with the discount, it's a steal.
Take Control books for Leopard help ease the transition
You haven't upgraded to Leopard yet -- what's the rush? -- but your friends and family are nudging you to make the move. Need reassurance, support and a helping hand to make the process easier and free of aggravation? The Take Control crew is there for you, with five ebooks aimed at Leopard upgrades and new users. Starting today you can also order print copies of the ebooks (a strange concept, but perhaps this "paper books" idea will catch on). If you buy the print book online you get the ebook version for free.There are Take Control titles on upgrading, customizing, users & accounts, file sharing and font management in Leopard, which should be more than enough Leopard goodness for any one mortal reader to bear. All titles are $10 in ebook format except for the font book ($15). If you prefer a physical bookstore and want to pick up a guide to Leopard, check out Maria Langer's Visual Quickstart Guide to Mac OS X 10.5.
