Mini'app'les

the Minnesota Apple Computer Users' Group, Inc.

Article – 26 Crazy Facts You Never Knew About Google

by Tim Drenk

Think you’re a Google expert?

Maybe your Google-fu skills allow you to find any bit of information that’s ever graced the World Wide Web. You know all the right search tricks, which Boolean operators are allowed, the shortcuts, the easter eggs, the games. Your friends and family know you’re the go-to person for any trivia questions or obscure facts they’re burning to know. With Google at your fingertips, nothing can stop you from seeking out any truth.

But having Google search savvy doesn’t make you a Google expert. There’s a lot more to Google itself than even the savviest searchers know.

Google has grown and changed a lot since its founding in 1998, and there’s a lot of history packed in those years, some of which might surprise you.

Read the 26 Crazy Facts You Never Knew About Google.

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Apps that are on Sale

by Tim Drenk

A number of apps for OS X and iOS are on sale today. You can find more apps on sale at AppSanta.co.

Mac Apps

Day One (Journal / Notes / Diary): $7.99, normally $9.99 (4.5 stars)

Record life as you live it. From once-in-a-lifetime events to everyday moments, Day One’s elegant interface makes journaling your life a simple pleasure.

Better Rename 9: $1.99, normally $19.99 (4.5 stars)

Better Rename 9 is the most complete renaming solution available on the market today. That’s why, since 1996, tens of thousands of hobbyists, professionals and businesses depend on Better Rename to organize and maintain files. Better Rename’s user interface supports complex renaming tasks without sacrificing ease and speed of use. Simply drag the files you want to rename straight from the Finder into the large preview table or the application icon.. or use our Finder context menu and hot key.

Deliveries: a package tracker: $3.99, normally $4.99 (4.5 stars)

Deliveries helps you keep track of all your packages, so you always know when they’re going to arrive. Whether it’s the latest gadget you’ve preordered online, or a new graphic novel you can’t wait to dive into, Deliveries will keep tabs on it so you don’t miss the doorbell.

PCalc: $6.99, normally $9.99 (5 stars)

PCalc is the powerful choice for scientists, engineers, students, programmers, or indeed anybody looking for a feature rich calculator. It includes an optional RPN mode and multi-line display, a choice of button layouts, an extensive set of unit conversions and constants, a paper tape, multiple undo and redo, engineering and scientific notation, as well as support for hexadecimal, octal, and binary calculations.

Unibox: $1.99, normally $17.99 (4.5 stars)

Unibox is an email client that groups your messages by person. This way your emails are organized automatically and you always find what you are looking for.

NetSpot Wi-Fi Reporter: $1.99, normally $49.99 (unrated)

Installing a wireless network isn’t always easy. Interference from neighboring networks, and radio noise from electronic devices can cause serious connection problems. While you can overcome those by trial and error, there’s a much better solution: NetSpot is here to do the job for you!

Prizmo 3 – Scanning, OCR & Speech: $24.99, normally $49.99 (3 stars)

Prizmo 3 is a scanning application with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in over 40 languages with powerful editing capability, text-to-speech, and iCloud support. No matter what capture device’s at hand, Prizmo is the key for scanning and performing OCR. It works with pictures taken with your iPhone, iPad, or digital camera, with documents coming from connected or Wi-Fi scanners, even with screenshots! It will help you easily scan any documents (invoices, receipts, boards, giant advertisements…) of any sizes (US Letter, US Legal, A4, and custom)…

iOS Apps

Vert – Unit and Currency Converter: Free, normally $2.99 (5 stars)

Vert is the most amazing, efficient, elegant unit and currency iOS converter. You can personalise it to meet your requirements at its best. Let it be students, people of business, worldwide travellers, rock climbers, anyone who uses on-line recipes or shops on-line, etc. – they all appreciate Vert’s functionality. It blends in with your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad beautifully.

PCalc – The Best Calculator: $6.99, normally $9.99 (5 stars)

PCalc is the powerful choice for scientists, engineers, students, programmers, or indeed anybody looking for a feature rich calculator. It includes an optional RPN mode and multi-line display, a choice of button layouts, an extensive set of unit conversions and constants, a paper tape, multiple undo and redo, engineering and scientific notation, as well as support for hexadecimal, octal, and binary calculations.

Day One (Journal / Notes / Diary): $0.99, normally $4.99 (4.5 stars)

Record life as you live it. From once-in-a-lifetime events to everyday moments, Day One’s elegant interface makes journaling your life a simple pleasure.

Deliveries: a package tracker: $2.99, normally $4.99 (4.5 stars)

Deliveries helps you keep track of all your packages, so you always know when they’re going to arrive. Whether it’s the latest gadget you’ve preordered online, or a new graphic novel you can’t wait to dive into, Deliveries will keep tabs on it so you don’t miss the doorbell.

Printer Pro – print documents, photos, web pages and email attachments: $2.99, normally $6.99 (4.5 stars)

Print attachments, documents, web pages and more right from the iPad on any Wi-Fi or USB printer. Printer Pro lets you wirelessly print from the iPad. It can print directly to many Wi-Fi printers or any printer attached to your Mac or PC via helper application installed on your computer.

Mileage Log+: $4.99, normally $9.99 (4 stars)

Mileage Log+ is an essential app for anyone who needs to track mileage for tax deduction or reimbursement. With predictive input, auto-entry, auto-calculation, and quick access to frequent trips, Mileage Log+ does the hard work for you. A few quick taps will create useful data ready to search, sort, and generate email reports.

Prizmo – Scanning, OCR, and Speech: $4.99, normally $9.99 (3.5 stars)

Prizmo is a universal photo-based scanner app that lets you scan and recognize text documents, business cards, and images, and then export them as PDF/Text, vCard, or JPEG/PNG. Prizmo relies on state-of-the-art technologies, like a highly accurate OCR, real-time page detection, and beautiful image cleanup. Using iCloud, you can even shoot the picture on your iPhone, and finish editing on your iPad or Mac. All of this in an elegant and intuitive user experience.

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Mini’app’les Meeting, Tuesday Dec. 16 at 7:00 p.m., Q&A at 6:30 p.m.

by Tim Drenk

The next Mini’app’les meeting is Tuesday, December 16th, the third Tuesday of the month, at the Hackfactory (3119 E. 26th Street Minneapolis, MN 55406). At 6:30 p.m., members of the board and other knowledgable people will be available if you have specific questions you would like answered. We will do our best to address your question and help you troubleshoot the issue.

At 7:00 p.m., we will first take a brief look at some of the news and happenings over the past month. We will then look at some best practices for setting up email accounts and some tips for troubleshooting email accounts when things don’t seem to be working right. While we are on best practices, we will also look at some of the recent changes to Facebook’s privacy settings. 

We look forward to seeing you there.

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Where’s your Recovery Key to your AppleID with two-factor authentication?

by Tim Drenk

If you have enabled two-factor authentication for your Apple ID (and you really should if you haven’t), you were given a Recovery Key. It was 14 characters, all capital letters, and probably something you didn’t think much about. You need to find it right now and save it in a safe location such as 1Password or, if it’s on paper, somewhere not near your computer. If someone tries to get into your account and locks it, the only way for you to get back in is to use that Recovery Key. You read that correctly, the only way to get back into your account is to enter your Recovery Key. You can read the experience of Owen Williams at TNW who thought he had lost his recovery key after someone tried to get into his Apple account.

If everything is ok with your AppleID, you can login and generate a new Recovery key. You can go to Apple’s site, https://appleid.apple.com, go to “Manage your Apple ID” and after entering your ID, password, and code, you can select “Replace your Recovery Key” which will generate a new code for you.

appleid image

 

Other services use similar Recovery Keys as well, such as GMail, and you will want to make sure you have those Recovery Keys as well.

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Two OS X 10.10 Yosemite issues and fixes

by Tim Drenk

After upgrading my MacBook Pro to 10.10 (and then to 10.10.1), I experienced 2 problems.

First, when I used certain programs, the save dialog box would continually get bigger. So each time I saved something in Safari or BBEdit, the dialog box would get longer by a line of text or so until the bottom was off the screen. I use Default Folder so at first I thought it was a problem with that, but after completely uninstalling it, the problem remained. I figured out some workarounds, like making sure I made the dialog box smaller after a few saves, but I couldn’t resolve it. Jon Gotow, the developer behind Default Folder figured out the problem. He found that Apple changed the file dialogs so that the title bar is now considered to be part of the window—and changed the math everywhere except in save sheets. Yesterday, Gotow released a beta version of Default Folder that fixes the problem. It is a beta release but I haven’t had any problems with it. If you are affected by this bug and don’t use Default Folder, you could use Default Folder’s 30 day trial and maybe Apple will fix this in 10.10.2.

sheetbug-small

 

My second problem was I was no longer able to connect to the VPN service, PrivateInternatAccess.com. I could connect using PIA’s own VPN app, but I couldn’t use built-in app for L2TP VPN. I figured out that my static IP that I set for my local network broke the VPN app, both for wireless and wired connections. I was able to change the setting to “DHCP with manual address” and the built-in VPN worked. Hopefully, this will be another issue that 10.10.2 fixes. I’m sure this affects a pretty limited number of people, but it was very annoying.

 

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