Snapchat is insanely popular with the younger demographic, and it flourishes in areas like schools, where there is a community of individuals using the app who see each other face to face.
One of Snapchat’s greatest weaknesses, though, is that it lacks good discovery tools built inside the app. It’s why I believe that its growth, although impressive, has been bridled in some instances. It’s why an app like GhostCodes can provide a valuable bridge to user discovery on the platform. Expand Expanding Close
If you read our review of the ATH-M50x closed-back headphones, I made it pretty clear that I was a fan of what Audio-Technica was offering. The ATH-M50x’s are well-known for giving Beats By Dre headphones a run for their money, and at a much more affordable price.
I also had the opportunity to go hands-on with one of Audio-Technica’s newest offerings, the ATH-MSR7NC. These noise-cancelling cans differ in many ways from the company’s mainstream offering, and at more than double the price of the M50x’s, venture into more premium territory. Should you consider them? Expand Expanding Close
Yesterday, I bought a 12″ MacBook, and after playing with it for 10 minutes, I immediately knew that I made the right decision. 24 hours later, I’m convinced that this is the best laptop for me, and a much better portable workhorse than something like a 12.9″ iPad Pro. Here are 10 reasons why you should consider going with a MacBook if you’re in the market for something powerful, yet portable. Expand Expanding Close
OS X features several handy native trackpad gestures aimed at controlling your Mac, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to launch or open your favorite app with a simple trackpad gesture? In this post, we’ll show you how to easily wield BetterTouchTool in order to do just that. Expand Expanding Close
I like to think I’m pretty handy with a camera, but am definitely an amateur when it comes to video. Unlike some of the talented videographers we have here on the team, my idea of video editing is to throw a bunch of clips into iMovie, add cross-dissolves between them, drop in a music track and call it good.
But even that level of video editing can be surprisingly time-consuming, which creates something of a dilemma. I enjoy having a video record of things like fun bike rides, but don’t want to spend hours creating them. So for a group ride at the weekend, I tried a different approach that took hardly any time and seemed to work surprisingly well …
When you invoke Mission Control on OS X El Capitan using the typical gesture on your Mac’s trackpad or via a keyboard shortcut, you’ve probably noticed that the desktop bar at the top of the interface appears minimized. Although this yields additional real estate for the app windows below the desktop bar, it means that you no longer get to see the handy thumbnails that represent each desktop without moving your mouse to the desktop bar area.
There are some workarounds to defeating this OS X El Capitan change, including an open source utility called Force Full Desktop Bar. But for those of you who don’t wish to go through the trouble of installing a separate utility, which also requires you to disable El Capitan’s System Integrity Protection, try this handy Hot Corner shortcut instead. Expand Expanding Close
Is jailbreaking dead? No. A quick search on Twitter or on Reddit, and it’s obvious that the passion for jailbreaking continues to ebb and flow throughout the community. Jailbreaking isn’t dead as some may think, but no one can discount the fact that it’s entered a sustained lull. Expand Expanding Close
Mission Control is a tool that I use every day on my Mac to quickly locate open app windows. In my opinion, though, finding a specific window in the Mission Control view can be a challenge if you have many app windows open at once.
The good news is that it’s easy to group like applications while using Mission Control. More importantly, enabling grouping places the relevant app icon near groups and single windows. Having an app icon displayed makes it even easier to identify a particular app window while using Mission Control. Expand Expanding Close
Apple Music competitor Spotify today announced that it is greatly expanding its video offerings this year. As noted by Bloomberg, Spotify will launch 12 original video series with actors like Tim Robbins and Def Jam Records co-founder Russell Simmons. The series are said to each feature episodes ranging from a few minutes long to 15 minutes and will be available to free and paid users.
As someone keen on recording voiceovers and podcasts from an iPad, I needed a Lightning-enabled microphone that could handle such a task. While it’s true that Apple’s Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter allows iOS to interface with a variety of microphones that it wasn’t able to before, I like the idea of keeping my setup as minimal and as dongle-free as possible.
Enter the Shure MV5 Digital Condenser Microphone. This is a MFi-certified Lightning-enabled microphone that works with the iPad or iPhone using a single microUSB to Lightning cable. By switching out the Lightning cable for a traditional USB cable, you can use the same microphone with your Mac or PC.
This microphone is a digital condenser that can be powered via Lightning or USB. It doesn’t require any special adapters or power supplies to work, just plug it in, launch an app, and start recording.
For the last few months I’ve been using my Apple EarPods for nearly every application that requires in-ear audio. I use my EarPods for monitoring while recording voiceovers, for podcasting, and for everyday music listening.
Absurd as it is, the last pair of headphones I’d owned, a pair of Sony MDR-7506’s, ended up developing a short in the cable. I simply never got around to replacing them in a timely manner.
Audio-Technica’s ATH-M50, and the updated ATH-M50x, have received rave reviews from tech sites, bloggers and YouTubers alike. The love that these headphones receive on a regular basis convinced me that the next pair of headphones that I tried needed to be these. Do they live up to the hype? Expand Expanding Close
I normally run my 15″ MacBook Pro at default resolution, which equates to a useable space of 1440-by-900. While this default resolution is great for reading and writing, I’ve found that it’s not always so good for editing with timeline-based apps, such as Final Cut Pro X.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your Mac automatically adjusted to a higher resolution when running a certain app, and automatically switched back to default resolution when closing said app? In this post, we’ll show you how to wield SwitchResX, a utility geared towards managing your Mac’s screen resolution, in such a way that makes that possible. Expand Expanding Close
Yesterday, we wrote a post about hiding the menu bar, and in the corresponding video tutorial, we used window snapping to highlight one of the benefits of a hidden menu bar. Afterwards, I received several tweets and emails asking how to perform window snapping, since this is not a feature that appears natively in OS X.
Window snapping allows you to position windows in specific areas of the screen, usually by dragging the window to the edge of the screen, causing the window to “snap” into place. This feature was first popularized by Microsoft’s Aero Snap on Windows. Even though Apple doesn’t natively support it, window snapping is available on the Mac via a variety of third-party apps. Expand Expanding Close
If you’re running OS X El Capitan, it’s possible to hide the menu bar on your primary display. Hiding the menu bar works very much like a hidden Dock in OS X, in that when you move your cursor to the edge of the screen, the menu bar reappears from its hidden state. In this post we’ll show you how to hide your menu bar, and why you might consider doing so. Expand Expanding Close
If you find that System Preferences in OS X contains too many options that you don’t regularly use, then you should considering hiding rarely used sections of the app. By using the Customize option in System Preferences, it’s easy to both show and hide specific sections with ease. Expand Expanding Close
VideoTweet is a new utility from the folks over at Arctic Whiteness that brings Twitter sharing to Final Cut Pro X. Appearing as a destination within Final Cut Pro X’s export options, it’s a quick way to get video from a project to your Twitter followers. Expand Expanding Close
Yesterday, we showed you how to create a custom service using Automator for easily resizing images via the Finder. Today, we’ll show you how to find the location of the custom services that you create in order to remove them. We’ll also show you how to enable or disable Services using System Preferences. Expand Expanding Close
Apple’s Campus 2 is expected to be completed by early next year and now we have some new video from within the spaceship ring itself. Courtesy of YouTuber MrWhitestew, a pair of new videos have emerged that take us for first-person walkthrough of Apple’s Campus 2 construction, offering one of the first looks from within the spaceship ring itself.
Every day I use a handy service created with Automator to resize images exported from 4K footage to a smaller size. It’s easy to resize images in an app like Preview or Pixelmator, but using a service works better for me since it can batch resize multiple images in seconds, and it’s directly accessible from the Finder. Here’s how you can create your own handy image resizing service using Automator. Expand Expanding Close
YouTube is rolling out a redesigned Home interface for the iOS and Android app. The new design is cleaner and simpler, but also takes advantage of deep neural networks to better recommend videos for users to watch.
As an owner of a Late 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display, it’s slowly beginning to show its age. However, I find that this machine, an i7-powered rig with 16GB of RAM, is still plenty powerful for the applications that I run on a day-to-day basis. For example, with Final Cut Pro X, it’s not the fastest machine in the world (it lacks dedicated graphics), but it’s still plenty competent when it comes to editing and exporting 4K videos.
The biggest bottleneck that I’ve encountered with this computer is its storage capabilities, and that’s something I’ve been trying to deal with since the day I purchased it. With only 256 GB of flash storage, space has been hard to come by since day one. That wouldn’t be so bad if there was a way to upgrade the amount of internal storage, but sadly there has been no upgrade solution…until now.
Back in early March, OWC made a splash by announcing the very first flash storage upgrade solution the MacBook Pro as far back as the Late-2013 product cycle, and the MacBook Air, as far back as the Mid-2013 product cycle. Yes, finally! MacBook Pro and MacBook Air owners with qualifying machines can come out of the storage dark ages with OWC’s new Aura PCIe flash storage upgrade. Expand Expanding Close
The Wall Street JournalreportsFacebook is working on a new camera app separate from its main offerings that the company hopes will encourage increased sharing of photos and videos. The still in-development app in its current form opens immediately to a camera mode and there are plans to offer live streaming video functionality as well, according to the report:
The KEF Egg digital wireless speaker system certainly lives up to its name. The shape of the speakers are a peculiar half-egg shape that make you question whether or not you should take them seriously.
A quick listen, and that question is answered with authority. Despite the peculiar look, these speakers mean business in the sound department.
Not only do these speakers sound good, but they also work well in a variety of different environments and with a variety of sources. KEF Egg is a Bluetooth speaker, a Hi-Fi USB speaker, and features traditional optical input as well. This means that the Egg works well in a bedroom, an office environment, or even in the living room.
Tomorrow is officially Earth Day and while it has already revealed some of its efforts, Apple this evening has uploaded a new video to its YouTube channel highlighting its green initiatives. The ad, entitled “iMessage – Renewable Energy,” highlights the company’s renewable energy efforts and encourages every one to “show some love for the earth.”
