Subject: "Take Control of iCloud" ebook updated to cover Apple's many changes

Time for a pop quiz! 

Is iCloud (a) packed with useful features, (b) more complex than Apple lets on, (c) almost essential for Mac and iOS use, (d) thoroughly documented by Joe Kissell in "Take Control of iCloud," or (e) all of the above? 

The answer, as you veteran quiz takers know when faced with an "all of the above" option, is (e). iCloud really is helpful, deceptively complicated, integrated deeply into the Mac and iOS experience, and, frankly, sometimes a royal pain in the posterior. But no one does a better job of explaining iCloud's features and quirks than Joe Kissell, and you can come up to speed with everything iCloud can do for only $10.50 with the 30% MUG discount:

http://tid.bl.it/icloud-mug-discount  

If you're pulling out your hair in frustration as you try to connect your Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Windows PC to the many digital pipes that iCloud offers, Joe's 155-page "Take Control of iCloud" will answer your questions and preserve your hairstyle. And, if you're trying to help your mother, sister, uncle, co-worker, fellow Rotarian, or Game Center buddy sync contacts between devices, create a shared calendar, filter email before it hits the iPhone, and so forth, Joe has ferreted out the details you need to solve their problems.

iCloud is no longer new, and the dreaded transition from MobileMe is long past, but updates and ongoing issues have made "Take Control of iCloud" our top-selling book of the past few years. Keeping it fresh and accurate - this is our fourth free update! - is like playing Whack-a-Mole. Sometimes it seemed that nearly every page had some detail that needed checking and tweaking. Even though Apple doesn't share inside information with us about what's happening in iCloud's troposphere, things Joe has had to track down and explain since just the last version of this book include iOS 6, iTunes 11, the Notes and Reminders Web apps, Shared Photo Streams, numerous tiny changes to iCloud's Web interface, and more. 

As always, thank you for supporting the Take Control series!

cheers... -Adam & Tonya Engst, Take Control publishers

Mac troubleshooting: How to handle freezes & 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 andAdobePDFViewerNPAPI.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

Now You Can Take Your iPad Where You Used to Take Your Newspaper

Do you take your iPad everywhere? Even the bathroom? You have to have your reading material right? The Pedestal Stand will make it convenient for you to bring your iPad into the bathroom with you.

The Pedestal Stand for iPad from CTA Digital was specially designed so that you can use your tablet with you are on the throne. It is made of chrome, with a heavy base to make sure it stays still and has a 10-inch bendable gooseneck stand to keep your iPad in place.

Never be without your iPad again. Oh and it also holds your toilet paper.

Source Ubergizmo

Tablets and E-Readers Easier on Eyes for Older Individuals

MASHABLE.COM 14 Hours Ago
Reading on Tablets Easier for Older Eyes
by Leslie Meredith

People young and old prefer reading paper books to tablets and e-readers, but older individuals could find themselves reading faster and with less effort on a tablet. The news came from a small study released this week in PLOS ONE from researchers at the historic epicenter of the printed word — Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Among 360 readers ages 21 to 34, no difference in reading speed or brain effort was detected between reading via a book, a Kindle e-reader and an iPad. But big differences were recorded among 21 users ages 60 to 77 when they read the same text on paper instead of the devices. In fact, using an iPad improved speed and reduced effort compared to paper and e-readers. Researchers measured eye movements and brain activity from EEG readings to determine ease of reading.

Traditional ereaders were no help: Reading a short page of text on a Kindle took the older group about 28 seconds, the longest of the three. Switching to the printed book shaved 1.5 seconds off the time. But reading on an iPad took just 24 seconds, that's 2.5 seconds faster than reading on paper. While that may not represent a big timesaver when skimming news headlines, it could save hours reading "War and Peace."

The researchers concluded that the iPad's backlighting, which was adjusted to the brightest setting, made the difference. All tablets use backlighting, while e-readers use what's called an E Ink display that provides less contrast than a brighter tablet (although it allows people to read in bright sunlight).

But despite the physical findings, older adults and their younger counterparts said they got more pleasure reading from a paper book. The researchers said this was evidence of a cultural bias against digital books rather than a cognitive phenomenon.

It seems that for older individuals, at least, tradition trumps ease of use.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Gavin St. Ours

This article originally published at TechNewsDaily here

Limited Time -- Box Cloud Storage

25GB of Free Cloud Storage Is Your Deal of the Day
Kif Leswing
Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage when you sign up. iCloud offers 5GB. While there are plenty of reasons to prefer those services, the storage space they offer is way less than what you can get with Box today. Usually Box only gives you 5GB of storage for free, but if you sign up with a new email address, Box will give you 25GB of cloud storage for life (or until the end of the Box enterprise.)

Box has run offers like this in the past, notably giving users 50GB of free storage if you signed up with an iOS or an Android device. But those promotions are over and they require you to own a specific gadget. The beauty of today's promotion is that anyone with a web browser and email address can get it. It's only for new signups, so if you've already got an account, you'll have to make a new one. Still — free's a damn good price for a large storage locker up in the clouds. [Box.net]


Box has run offers like this in the past, notably giving users 50GB of free storage if you signed up with an iOS or an Android device. But those promotions are over and they require you to own a specific gadget. The beauty of today's promotion is that anyone with a web browser and email address can get it. It's only for new signups, so if you've already got an account, you'll have to make a new one. Still — free's a damn good price for a large storage locker up in the clouds. [Box.net]

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