Year: 2012

RSS Sponsor: Snapheal, One of 2012 Mac App Store ‘Best Apps’ Winners →

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Snapheal is the photo editor for Mac that first showed up on the App Store in December 2011. It was updated few days ago to version 2.1, bringing the brand new look, noticeable performance boost and the whole set of new handy tools. Mashable called Snapheal “Inexpensive alternative to Photoshop” and just recently Apple named it one of “2012 Best Mac App Store Apps”. So what’s this app about?

Snapheal is incredibly simple, yet powerful tool for removing extra objects from images, getting rid of skin imperfections and performing other complex edits with no special knowledge required. It does quite an amazing job in erasing unwanted stuff from pictures, like stones, wires, people, signs, text and more. Just highlight the extra object with a brush or lasso; click “Erase” button and seconds later imperfection disappears. There is a very handy “Clone & Stamp” tool to enhance the fixed area, but usually its not required.

Here’s a video comparing healing tools in Snapheal and Photoshop. As you can see both apps bring similar results, but Snapheal is much faster

It’s fair to mention that Photoshop is not just about spot healing. But Snapheal is not just about erasing objects, either. The app features retouching and photo adjustment tools that let you enhance the whole image at once or pick individual areas to improve. Editing tools include gamma, hue, saturation adjustments; controls for shadows, highlights, exposure; clarity tool and more. Snapheal has all the tools an average photographer would need to fix and enhance pictures taken. But as we mentioned, doesn’t require any special learning or massive amounts of time to perform edits.

Snapheal is usually priced $20, but is currently available for just $9.99 on Mac App Store. For this price, the app’s simplicity and high quality image processing is available an absolute steal and definitely gives more expensive photo editors run for their money.

Brightcove CEO, on Apple TV →

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I felt really weird reading Jeremy Allaire’s dream diary on All Things D.

Also, this is how his company is described:

Jeremy Allaire is the founder, chairman and CEO of Brightcove, a leading provider of cloud platforms for distributing media and apps, with a suite of platform APIs, SDKs and Web services aimed at Web and app developers and the businesses they help to drive.

I’m not all that sure I understand what he does for a living.

Facebook Gets in Instagram’s Pants →

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Jordan Crook at TechCrunch:

It would seem that the real difference lies in what Instagram does with your personal data. The company promises that you’ll still have complete control over who can see your content and where it is shared, but Facebook and Instagram will certainly be getting a bit more comfortable with one another where user information is concerned.

Blerg.

On Quitting Twitter →

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Adam Brault:

I’ve realized how Twitter has made me break up my thoughts into tiny, incomplete, pieces—lots of hanging ideas, lots of incomplete relationships, punctuated by all manner of hanging threads and half-forked paths. I am perfectly fine with unfinished work—in fact, I doubt I’ll ever be a better finisher than I am a starter. But I’ve found that my greatest joy, deepest peace, and most valuable contributions come from intentionally choosing where to let my focus rest.

As a result of this experiment, I choose to intentionally put more uninterrupted thought into things one relationship, one idea, one piece of writing at a time.

via Rob Wensing

How to Setup Contacts.app to Sync With Google via CardDAV

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Google recently enabled CardDAV syncing with Google Contacts, and has a nice support document on how to set this up with an iOS device.

While this is quite easy to configure (and works really well in my experience), the same thing can be done on the Mac, bringing your Google contacts to your computer.

Update: Here’s how you can set this up on iOS devices.

There are several different ways to add a Google Contacts to Contacts.app, but I’ve found this to the most reliable.

Here’s how you do it:

After opening Contacts,[1] go to the app’s preferences pane. Navigate to the “Accounts” section:

Hit the plus sign to add an account. Here are the required settings:

  • Account type: CardDAV:
  • Username: Your Gmail Account
  • Your password
  • Server address: google.com

Hit the “Create” button:

Contacts.app will then ask if you want use these credentials for other types of information. Select what you wish and press the “Create” button again.

Once the account is listed in Contact.app’s preferences, go to the “General” section and set your Google account to be the default account:

By default, the application defaults to saving vCards locally on the Mac, which means information added from other programs won’t end up in the Google cloud.

By using CardDAV, IMAP and CalDAV, I now have my Google-based information on my Mac and iPad mini, always in-sync. With Google dropping ActiveSync support for new users in early 2013, this is totally the way to go.

  1. I’ve only tested this on Mountain Lion — not with Address Book on previous versions of OS X.  ↩

A Net Loss →

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David Zax at MIT Technology Review has been without an iPhone for a week:

That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed some benefits from being iPhone-less. It’s true that “spare change” time–the time waiting in line to order, or waiting for the subway to come–now gets funneled into thinking about projects I’d rather be thinking about than yet another compulsive check of my inbox. There’s undoubtedly something to be said for that. But so far, the brief bliss of moments like these is mostly overshadowed by the dozen other ways I’ve inconvenienced myself. I’m obviously and unequivocally at a net loss.

I am a month in to my iPhoneless experiment, and I couldn’t disagree with David Zax more. It’s been a net gain for me, for sure.

via Ben Brooks

Google Sync: End of Life →

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Google:

Starting January 30, 2013, consumers won’t be able to set up new devices using Google Sync, however, existing Google Sync connections will continue to function. Google Sync will continue to be fully supported for Google Apps for Business, Government and Education users who are unaffected by this announcement.

In short, if you’re using Google Sync now, you’re good, for now. That said, this method is a great alternative to Exchange.