Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

One feature of Siri is the ability to dictate text instead of typing on your iPhone. Siri recognizes words and needs no special training. You can also type punctation and special symbols and commands.

There's a lot you can do with the calendar creation feature in iPhoto 11. You can use your own photos and iCal calendars to order a printer calendar from Apple, or print it yourself. You can also export the pages from a calendar to a PDF or even create an image from it.

You can use Siri like a personal assistant by creating notes simply by speaking. You can create new notes, or even add to existing ones. Siri can also search your notes. In the Reminders app you can create different lists, and then use Siri to add items to that list.

Apple took iTunes Match live this week. The new service allows iTunes users to store their entire music collection on Apple servers and then access it from any desktop or iOS device. The service only uploads songs not available in the iTunes store, simply giving you access to the iTunes store versions of others. The result is all of your music appears to be “in the cloud” and accessible anywhere. It is only available in the U.S. for now, and costs $25 per year. You can find out more about iTunes match in this episode.

No doubt that Minecraft has a huge following among both casual and some hard-core gamers. It is amazing that it has taken this long for there to be a real Minecraft iPhone and iPad app. While the app is way behind the desktop application, it is still fun and worth the price. You get to basically just move around and build your own 3D environment in an extremely simply interface.

An elementary school in Bakersfield, California wants to get an iPad to help students learn how to read. The teacher already has several apps in mind that will help, they just need to get the iPad. Join MacMost in supporting this project.

“Hmmm. The iPhone Cards app. That’s way better than my idea of sending a handwritten card by mail that is scanned in and emailed to someone.”

If you are using iCloud and often need to get to parts of the iCloud web site, you can create bookmarks to skip the front page of iCloud and go right to various pages. Try: https://www.icloud.com/#mail, https://www.icloud.com/#contacts, https://www.icloud.com/#calendar, https://www.icloud.com/#iwork and https://www.icloud.com/#find.

The new iTunes Match service from Apple allows you to keep your entire music collection in the cloud. You can access all of your songs from any Mac or iOS devices you own. Find out what it does and how it works.

If your internal drive is getting full and you want to move your iTunes music to an external drive, you can do so by using functions built right into iTunes. Keep your iTunes Library on your internal drive, but move your music to an external drive. That way you move the bulk of your files to your external drive, but keep all of the primary functionality of your iTunes Library on your internal one.

On the iPhone 4S you can use Siri for a variety of time-based functions. You can create simple alarms in your Clock app with Siri and even change alarms. You can also start, pause and stop timers. You can also create more complex reminders that then sync across your devices with iCloud. Reminders can be location-based as well as time-based.

Apple updated its flagship New York store on 5th avenue with a new glass cube. The new structure uses only 15 panes of glass. The store is often seen on television worldwide during major product launches.
Every year Greenpeace ranks technology companies based on products and their manufacturing processes. Years ago Apple was as the back of the pack, but has made major strides forward. It now ranks fourth behind HP, Dell and Nokia. You can check out the full report.

“I’ll have my Siri contact your Siri and set up the meeting.”

A classroom for students with learning disabilities in Seattle, Washington is looking to get an iPod touch. This teacher wants to use apps to make learning fun for enthusiastic children who have extra challenges to overcome. Join MacMost in supporting this project.

Another CleverMedia that just got updated Something Fishy. The new HD version for the iPad and iPhone has a complete new control system with an on-screen joystick. This is a fun game, especially for kids. You float around and eat fish smaller than you while avoiding fish larger than you. There are also some bonus games.

If you often have to rename files in such a way that the extension needs to be changed, you are probably sick of that dialog box that appears warning you about changing the file extension. You can turn that off easily by going to Finder, Preferences and then the Advanced section. Uncheck “Show warning before changing an extension.”

There are many options for formatting cells in iWork Numbers. You can choose the number of decimal places, or use fractions. You can format as currency or choose a different base system. You can choose from a variety of date and time formats. You can also create steppers, sliders and pop-up menus to make it easy to change values to cells. Conditional formatting allows you to have cells that change color and style with certain values or ranges.

When you sync photos from your computer to your iPhone you will get an album named Photo Library in your Photos app. This isn't an album, but a complete list of all of the synced photos on your iPhone. It will include those in albums and events you have synced, but the photos are really only on your iPhone once. The Photo Library is just a way to view of list of all of these photos instead of viewing them by album or event.

Learn how to use keyframes to animate video in Final Cut Pro X. You can scale and reposition video clips between keyframes to create a variety of special effects. The example used is video shrinking to the center and then moving to a corner. You can also use keyframe animation to rotate, distort, color adjust or fade a clip.

A school in Pooler, Georgia is looking to use an Apple TV 2 to project its iPads and other things to the screen in the classroom. I think the Apple TV 2 has great potential in the classroom and I’m excited to see a teacher trying to use it there. Join MacMost in supporting this project.