PRIVACY

You don’t necessarily want your personal data accessible to every app that asks, and iOS is here to give you the kind of fine-grained control that you crave. Under the Privacy section of Settings you can not only adjust which apps have access to your location, but also prevent them from accessing your contacts, calendars, reminders, photos, and Bluetooth sharing. Plus, if you use Twitter or Facebook, you can decide which of your apps can log in with your credentials. Just tap the appropriate section for any of these and slide the switch for the selected app to Off.

Restrictions. Go to General and then to Restrictions. You’ll be prompted to enter a passcode. You can then select which features you would like to lock down on your iOS device. If you’re planning to hand the iPhone off to Junior, and Junior has a habit of unintentionally deleting your apps, you can specifically disable that capability from the Restrictions screen. You can also prevent access to the iTunes Store, the iBookstore, Safari, Camera, FaceTime, and more.

Siri can help you post to your favorite social network.

 If you use Facebook and/or Twitter, Siri offers a bunch of helpful options. You can say “Post to Facebook I love reading Lex and Dan’s stuff at Macworld.com,” or “Write on my Wall I love Siri,” or even, “Post I’m an over-sharer to Facebook.” With Twitter, you can say “Tweet I’m eating breakfast” or “Post I’m still eating breakfast to Twitter,” along with other, similar variations.

Digital newsletter

Macwidgets Digital Newsletter can now be found in our sidebar.
Check it regularly for current articles about technology and the mac or idevices.

It is curated on the Scoop.it! platform.
It works on both the computer, iPhone, and iPad.
Check it out. It is a great way to do a newsletter.

YOUR OWN PRIVATE IMDb

You probably already know that you can use Siri to get information about what’s playing at movie theaters near you. But Siri’s also in expert in pretty much every motion picture ever made. That means you can ask questions about your favorite films, but you can also make Siri do more of the legwork for you when, say, you’re curious about which films specific actors have appeared in together. You might ask, “What movies star both Susan Sarandon and Tim Curry?” And Siri will, in turn, reply with both The Rocky Horror Picture Showand Rugrats In Paris.

SIRI AUTO OUTPUT

 If your car has a built-in speakerphone, or if you have a Bluetooth accessory that has a microphone and speakers, you can choose which one Siri listens to for commands. When you click and hold the iPhone’s Home button, you’ll see a speaker icon to the right of the main Siri button. Tap it, and you’ll get a menu of all the various sound inputs your iPhone can use; select the one you want, and Siri will listen using that microphone and, if possible, give its feedback via those speakers.

Documents App for iPad by Readdle -- A Swiss Army Knife of DocumentReaders

Documents is a powerful document and image reading and annotation app for the ipad developed by Readdle the authors of Good Reader. In fact Documents, which is currently free on the Apple App Store, will be replacing Good Reader (currently a Pay app).

Documents can open and display text, PDFs, convert Word and Pages documents to a readable form, open slides from Keynote and PowerPoint, graphics, video and music files can be opened and played within the app as well.

You can create a text file, markup (in multiple colors) documents as highlight, underline, strike through and more. The only action it doesn't appear to be able to do, which Good Reader and some other apps can do, is write comments in a PDF document.

Documents supports a large list of Cloud Services such as DropBox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box Net, SugarSync, and more. You can also allow you to email, upload your documents to other applications such as notebook apps, utilities such as Zip+ and cloud services. With Documents you can create folders using Its internal file system. View in list or icon formats.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FeWhyGNgUGI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Take a look at this short video to see what Documents can do.

Mac troubleshooting: How to handle freezes and crashes

Joe Kissell@joekissell

• Feb 13, 2013 3:30 AM
• print

Crashes and freezes in OS X are mercifully rare, but they do occur. Fortunately, most of them can be resolved readily; and even though a crash or freeze may have any of numerous causes or symptoms, the same procedure works for troubleshooting most of them.

Crashing apps

Your first step should be to determine the scope of a problem. Is just one application having difficulties, or is the whole system affected?

Send a report, or not: If an app quits unexpectedly, you know that it's at least part of the problem. App crashes are usually accompanied by an error message. If you see one of these, click Reopen to send Apple a report with details about your system configuration and what went wrong, and then relaunch the app. Or clickOK to send the report without relaunching the app.

With OS X's default settings, a dialog box like this appears after most app crashes. Click Reopen to send a report to Apple and relaunch the app.

If you don’t want to send Apple information about crashes automatically, go to theSecurity & Privacy pane of System Preferences, click the lock icon, and enter your username and password to unlock it. Then click Privacy, select Diagnostics & Usage, and uncheck Send diagnostic & usage data to Apple. After you do that, the options in the crash dialog box change to Ignore, Report, and Reopen; only if you click Report is information sent to Apple.

If you change your preferences to prevent crash reports being sent to Apple automatically, a dialog box like this appears when an app crashes.

Skip reopening windows: If the app crashes again after you relaunch it, you’ll see a message asking whether you want to reopen the windows that were open the last time. I suggest clicking Don’t Reopen, on the theory that something in one of the open windows may have caused the crash. Either way, as long as the app functions correctly from then on, you can go about your business. (If it continues to crash, follow the steps below, beginning with “Restart.”)

When an application crashes a second time after you relaunch it, OS X asks if you want to reopen its windows. Most likely you don't.

Spinning beach balls and other bad signs

Sometimes, however, an app freezes but doesn’t quit. If your symptom is an unresponsive Mac—perhaps featuring the dreaded spinning wait cursor, sometimes refered to as the "spinning beach ball" or as I like to call it, the “spinning pizza of death” (SPOD)—you’ll need to narrow down the cause.

Switch to another app: Try switching to another app—for example, by clicking its Dock icon or pressing Command-Tab. If other apps respond, and especially if the SPOD appears only when you hover the pointer over a window or menu belonging to the app that was in the foreground when your Mac stopped responding, try force-quitting that app. One way to do this is to press Command-Option-Esc, select the app in the list that appears, and then click Force Quit. (Sometimes you may need to repeat this once or twice to get the app to quit.) If this force-quitting succeeds, try relaunching the app. More often than not, that will be enough to bring the app back to life.

If relaunching (or force-quitting and then relaunching) an app doesn’t do the trick, if none of your apps respond, or if your mouse pointer is frozen, move on to the following steps—try each one, in order, until the problem goes away.

Restart: If you can choose Restart from the Apple menu, do so. If not, press Command-Control-Eject (the Eject key looks like an upwards-pointing arrow with a line underneath it) to force an immediate restart. If even that doesn’t work, press and hold the Power button until your Mac shuts down, then press the Power button again to turn your Mac back on.

Check disk space: A startup disk that’s extremely low on disk space (10GB or less) can lead to slowdowns and worse. Delete some files (or move them to another disk) to make more space. For help, see “Seven ways to free up drive space.”

Try another document: If an app always misbehaves when a particular document is open, try closing it and opening a different document. A damaged or corrupted file could be the source of the problem.

Update your software: Make sure OS X itself, and any apps you use regularly, are up to date, because a software update may have fixed a crash-producing bug. Choose Software Update from the Apple menu to update Apple software and anything downloaded from the Mac App Store; for anything else, use the app’s built-in software update feature or download the latest version.

Disconnect peripherals: If you attached any new devices recently—especially USB devices—try disconnecting them. Restart and see if the problem recurs. If not, the device may be faulty or, more likely, it may require updated software or firmware. Contact the device’s manufacturer for assistance.

Disable plug-ins: If the app that’s crashing includes any extensions, plug-ins, or other extras, try disabling or removing them to rule out the possibility that the add-on software is the culprit.

Try a safe boot: To disable certain software that loads at startup and to run cleanup processes that may resolve random gremlins in your system, try a safe boot: Restart your Mac, and, immediately after you hear the startup sound, press and hold the Shift key until the gray Apple logo appears on the screen. If the problem goes away, restart again normally and try again.

Repair your disk: Disk errors can lead to all sorts of problems, crashes included. Try using OS X Recovery and using Disk Utility’s Repair Disk feature to look for and fix common disk errors.

Run Apple Hardware Test: Apple Hardware Test is a special utility you can run to test your Mac’s logic board, RAM, graphics board, and other components for errors that could lead to crashes and worse. Apple’s support site has complete instructions for using this tool.

Add RAM: If your Mac has a small amount of RAM (say, 4GB or less) and has available slots to add more, try increasing your RAM. Extra RAM can speed up many operations on your Mac and can reduce the likelihood of crashes and hangs related to running out of memory.

If you try all those things and continue to have crashes or freezes, contact the app’s developer (if it’s a single app) or Apple (if the problem is system-wide) for further advice and assistance.

USE "IN TRANSIT" CUE

Use the “in transit” cue. Ask Siri to help you find an address with a couple extra words at the end, as in: “give me directions to San Francisco International Airport via transit.” iOS will open up the Maps app and display the routing pane, which lets you choose which third-party app you’d like to supply your directions.

Attentive readers will know that Google Maps is included among these routing apps, which means that you can actually use this trick to get directions via Google Maps using Siri.

Bugs & Fixes: PDF's fail to open by Ted Landau

Recently, I tried something that had always worked before. This time, it didn’t.

Using Safari, I clicked a link to a PDF file. After the PDF opened in a browser window, I selected the Save As... command from Safari’s File menu. So far, so good. Next, I double-clicked the saved file sitting on my Mac’s desktop. Normally, this opens the file in Preview. This time, however, I was greeted with

the following error:

A similar message appeared if I tried to open the file in Adobe Reader, rather than in Preview. I next tried saving the file from Firefox

instead of Safari. It made no difference.

Returning to Safari, I selected the Print command. From the Print dialog, I selected to save the file as a PDF. This too failed to save a viable copy.

I finally discovered a route to success. If I clicked my trackpad when the pointer was over a PDF page in Safari, a toolbar overlay appeared. One icon in the toolbar was a floppy disk (really!). Clicking this icon saved a copy of the file that (at last!) opened in Preview with no errors.

The problem was not restricted to a particular PDF file saved from the web. It happened with any one I now attempted to save. PDFs that did not originate from a web page continued to open just fine.

I wasn’t certain why the problem had first popped up when it did, nor why one particular method of saving worked while other similar ones did not. However, I was fairly certain as to the culprit: I suspected the Adobe .plugin files used for PDF viewing. Two such files resided in my /Library/Internet Plug-Ins folder: AdobePDFViewer.plugin and AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin. If I removed this pair from the this folder, Safari reverted to its built-in (not Adobe-based) method of viewing PDF files. After I did this, problems with saving PDFs from Safari vanished.

To be clear, removing these plug-ins did not eradicate problems with previously saved files. It just prevented symptoms going forward.

My next step was to check if there was a more recent version of these plug-in files that fixed this problem. At first, the answer appeared to be no. As I knew these files get installed as part of Adobe Reader, I launched the app and selected Check for Updates. It said I was already using the latest version (10.1.5).

Not ready to give up, I also checked Adobe’s website. Contradicting the Reader app, the site listed a newer (11.0.01) version as available. After I updated to this newer version, the PDF saving bug was gone!

Unfortunately, the update introduced a new bug. Now, when I select to save a PDF file from Safari, I have to save twice. At the second instance, I am asked if I want to replace the file I just created a moment before. While a minor irritation, it’s been enough to get me thinking that I would be better off giving up on Adobe’s plug-ins altogether.

Normally, I wouldn’t devote a column to a bug that is resolved merely by updating software. However, I suspected that many users would not realize that the Adobe plug-ins were the culprit. Even if they did, they might not realize that these files originate with Adobe Reader. Even then, they would likely be stopped by Reader’s erroneous update message. Not to worry. If you have this bug, you now know what to do.

ENABLE EMOJI KEYBOARD

Perhaps you’ve seen these iconographic symbols in emails, iMessages, and tweets, and wondered how the heck people managed to type them. Maybe you’ve mistakenly assumed that you need to purchase a third-party app to gain access to those special symbols.

You don't: Apple treats those symbols, called Emoji, as an international keyboard. Launch Settings, and tapGeneral, International, Keyboards. Then tap Add New Keyboard and find Emoji. Now open an app where you can type some text.

Next to the spacebar, you’ll see a little globe icon. Tap it to switch between your regular keyboard and the Emoji one, which contains many tabs full of different characters. Tap on those characters to insert them wherever you’d like. (If you have many international keyboards, tap and hold the globe to bring up a menu of all your options.)

Spoken Emoji. For real fun, type in a bunch of Emoji symbols, select them all, and then tap the Speak button. You’ll hear the often-entertaining names of each symbol read in sequence.

SPEAK TEXT

Your iPhone or iPad can read to you. Enabling the Speak option makes it possible for your iOS device to read aloud any selectable text. Launch the Settings app, tap on General, and then choose Accessibility. Scroll down to Speak Selection, and tap to turn it on.

Now, go into any app where you can highlight text. Your options include Mail, Safari, Notes, and many others. Select some text, and you’ll see a new option appear in the contextual menu (you may have to tap the right arrow to view more options). Tap the Speak command, and your iOS device will start reading the text aloud.

Quick Correct

When typing you may find that you enter a word incorrectly or that auto-correct changes it when you tap the space bar. Instead of deleting the whole word just tap the backspace key once to see the replacement options, then select the word you want to change it to.

Where's Hold?

If you're using an iPhone 4 or 4S, you’ve probably noticed that when making a call, the hold button has been replaced by the FaceTime button. You can still place a call on hold though.

To do so, tap and hold the mute button until it turns into hold. To resume the call, tap the hold button again.

Stream video to Apple TV

Beamer’ Can Stream Video In Any Format To Your Apple TV
http://www.razorianfly.com/2013/01/15/beamer-can-stream-video-in-any-format-to-your-apple-tv/

IPHONE TIP

Good Video on iPad/iPhone Accessories for Road Warriors

Must--Have iPad Accessories for the Road 

(Productive! Magazine Show #47)

Apple, Business, Travel, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iTouch, Accessories, Gadget, Technology

A good overview from Michael Silwinski on what accessories he takes for his iPad when traveling and a good method for packing them up.

You might find duplicating or utilizing many of his tips will make traveling with your iDevice more productive and encounter less hassles. 
[Click on the title above to see the video on what he takes with him on the road and how he organizes his accessories] 

Virtualization Software for Intel Macs -- Parallels Desktop 8 vs. VMware Fusion 5

From MacObserver

 Pitting Parallels Desktop 8 Against VMware Fusion 5

1:45 PM EST, Jan. 31st, 2013 · John Martellaro · John Martellaro's Blog

For many users, virtualization is an important capability on their Macs that allows them to run other OSes, for example, Windows or Linux, right along side OS X. The two leaders are Parallels Desktop and VMware's Fusion. MacTech Magazine has extensively benchmarked the two over the years and has consistently found a winner. Here some details on their latest report.

_____________________

MacTech Magazine has just released an extensive report, a continuation of a series launched several years ago, to pit these two major virtualization products against each other in a variety of tests that include:

• Top level results
• Launch and CPU tests
• Footprint and battery tests
• File and Network I/O
• Games
• Retina Support

The most recent report, for January 2013, has just been published, and it's a tour de force analysis. The scale of the project is described in the section that explains why some other virtualization products were not included.

This benchmark project is already huge with thousands of collected data points crossing four guest OSes (Windows 7, Windows 8, OS X Lion, and OS X Mountain Lion), five models of computers with mechanical hard drives and SSDs, and over 60 tests each run 3-5 times for most of the environments. There were several thousand tests to be completed, many with a stopwatch."

Top Level Results
Those users who have specific needs will want to look through report to see which product is best for them, but the 30,000 ft view from MacTech is that, once again, Parallels Desktop was the clear winner, especially in 3D graphics. The report states: "If you look at all the tests, including the 3DMark06 detailed tests, Parallels won over 68% by 5% or more, 56.9% of the tests by 10% or more, and 31.7% by 25% or more.
VMware Fusion won 7% of these tests by 5% or more, 3.7% by 10% or more, and 0.2% by 25% or more. In 24% of the tests, the two products were within 5% of each other (i.e., they tied)."
Here it is in a pie chart format.

Source: MacTech Magazine (with permission)

There is much more in the report, so I will just quote from the conclusion.

In the vast majority of our overall tests, Parallels Desktop 8 won. Again, if you count up the general tests (including the top 3D graphics scores), Parallels won 56% of the tests by 10% or more. If you include all the tests where Parallels was at least 5% faster, as well as the balance of the 3DMark06 graphics tests, Parallels increased the lead further."
If you are a traveler, Parallels Desktop has power management features that stretch your battery life. On the MacBook Pro, we saw about 40% more battery time on an idling virtual machine (a couple of hours of additional use in Windows 7) than we did on VMware Fusion in the same test."

TMO's Own Tests
In September of 2012, TMO's Jim Tanous conducted his own extensive benchmark analysis of these two products. Shown there were extensive comparison charts of performance in various tests, and Parallels Desktop 8 consistently outperformed VMware Fusion 5.
Mr. Tanous wrote: "From a purely performance-based perspective, Parallels has won this year’s competition of virtualization software on OS X. The good news for consumers, however, is that Fusion is not far behind in most categories and, while Parallels is indeed faster, Fusion is often fast enough for common tasks."

 

                                                               From TMO, September 4, 2012.

From my experience, virtualization is a very important technology for many Mac users, whether for personal or business use. If Apple were to contemplate, at some point, switching to the ARM architecture for Macs to take advantage of ARM's low-power capabilities, that will likely mean a modification of the ARM hardware architecture to support virtualization and a major rewrite in store for these two front runners. Time will tell.

John Martellaro

John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include skiing, chess, science fiction and astronomy. You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

RADIO BUY BUTTON

Radio Buy Buttons’ found in iOS 6.1 via newly jailbroken iPads, could mean new functionality coming.

Read More: 9to5

Smartphones May Be the Key to Bettr Health Care

January 30, 2013

The best tool to improve and keep track of your health may be in your pocket, says Dr. Eric Topol, a pioneering figure in “wireless medicine” — the practice of using apps and devices in health care. An article from NBC News describes how new apps for iPhone and other devices can measure vital signs and even detect whether someone is having a heart attack. “These days, I’m prescribing a lot more apps than I am medications,” says Dr. Topol. “The smartphone will be the hub of the future of medicine.” Read more:rock center

Why You Need Twitter for Your Business

This is an interesting article presenting why businesses need Twitter.
Why You Need Twitter In Your Business
http://wideinfo.org/why-you-need-twitter-in-your-business/