Quick App Review: WorldCard Mobile

App Reviews, iPod / iPhone / iPad 1 Response »
Mar 302011

Majority of us when given a business card exchange pleasantries then tuck the card away in our wallet or other form of business card holder never to be seen again. This is exactly what I do which I find a complete waist and not a smart way in todays times to file contact information. So, I thought I would try out a few business card scanner apps for the iPhone. The best I found after reviewing a number of different apps was WorldCard Mobile. The app is extremely easy to use and recognises the various aspects of the business card with great accuracy.

To scan a new card to your iPhone/iPods contacts is simple:

1. From the main screen press the icon

2. A listing of tips to increase the accuracy is displayed. Press OK to continue or Don’t Show Again to not be notified of these tips in future

3. At this point you can simply line up the business card within the guidelines and press the button to capture the card. However, a great feature included in this app is the Anti-Shake Mode capture. Line up the card within the guidelines, press the button and the app will wait until the camera is steady enough to take an accurate snapshot of the card.

4. Once a snapshot of the card has been taken, simply click the Recognize button and the app will scan the acquired image for contact information

5. A new contact record will be displayed containing the acquired information from the card snapshot. Add to or edit this information as required then press the Export button to create a new contact in your iPhone/iPods contact list

There are a number of business card scanner apps in the App Store but personally I found the speed and accuracy of WorldCard Mobile exceeded that of the other apps that I compared.

Posted by agreenlees at 9:26 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Handbrake - Open Source MP4 Video Transcoder

Apple TV, Audio/Visual, Linux, OS X (Mac), Open Source / Freeware, Video/Image, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP No Responses »
Dec 062010

I have been using Handbrake for quite sometime now but have recently increased my usage due to my acquisition of an Apple TV. The Apple TV is only capable of playing video files that are supported by iTunes. These supported video formats do not include AVI (well not without a Jailbreak and aTV Flash, but I will save that for another time) which is the current format of majority of my movies and TV shows. Due to this flaw in the Apple system I have been forced to convert all my unsupported videos to a format supported by iTunes. Enter Handbrake!

Handbrake is an open source video transcoder available for Windows, Mac and Linux and comes equipped with various conversion setting presets. Handbrake can convert a single video file, a queue of video files or a DVD video in a few simple steps:

  1. Select the source video file or DVD title/folder
  2. Select a destination for the converted file
  3. Select a conversion preset or configure the specific audio/video settings
  4. For a single file conversion click the Start button or click Add to Queue if you wish to convert multiple files. Click Start once you have added all videos to the queue
  5. The conversion process will start and notify you once all videos in the queue are complete

Note: For greater compatibility with iTunes, enable the ‘Use iPod/iTunes friendly (.m4v) file extension for MP4′ setting

Handbrake is by far the best free MP4 video transcoder that I have come across. Let me know your opinions or alternatives that you may use in the comments.

Posted by agreenlees at 8:41 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Open Apple iWork Pages Files in Windows

File Associations, Windows 7 No Responses »
Aug 152010

I was asked the other day by a staff member how he could open an Apple iWorks file for printing on his Windows 7 PC.
This process to do this is quite simple. The steps are as follows:

  1. Change the file extension of the Pages file from .pages to .zip
    (You must first show file extensions in windows explorer)

  2. Open the newly renamed zip file and browse to the QuickLook folder.
  3. The QuickLook folder will contain a PDF file named Preview.pdf. This file is a PDF version of the original Apple iWork Pages document.

Done!

Posted by agreenlees at 3:18 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Quick App Review: TouchMouse

App Reviews, OS X (Mac), Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, iPod / iPhone / iPad No Responses »
Feb 022010

There are a number excellent computer control iPhone/iPod Touch apps out there that come in various forms and have a multitude of amazing features. But… these apps all come at a price. For the user who simply wants to control their mouse and keyboard from there iPhone/iPod Touch for FREE, there is TouchMouse.

TouchMouse from Logitech allows you to control your computers mouse and keyboard in three easy steps:

1. Download and install the Logitech TouchMouse Server computer application (www.logitech.com/touchmouse)
- The server app is available for Windows XP/Vista/7 and OS X

2. Download the TouchMouse iPhone/iPod Touch app from the App Store.

3. Open TouchMouse on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The app will find any available computers on the same network that have the TouchMouse Server application installed.

Connect and enjoy!

The app has many options including; two finger scrolling, tracking and scrolling speeds and a nice settings for prohibiting your device to go into sleep mode.

Posted by agreenlees at 10:35 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,

OS X Leopard , two days in...

Main, OS, OS X (Mac), Outlook, Windows XP No Responses »
Jun 292008

Who would have thought that I would be posting so much Mac related content?!? Who knows I may be a convert yet!

I have been fortunate enough to have a MacBook Pro allocated to my department which I then keenly allocated to myself for some play time :-) Two days in and so far I am liking the latest OS X iteration.

The first thing i did was to setup and install Wndows XP using Boot Camp as I knew I would need some of the useful Windows only applications I use. This process was almost easier (if not easier) than installing Windows on a PC. Simply run the Boot Camp Assitant in OS X, set the Windows partitions size, insert a genuine Windows install CD and off you go. Your Mac will then boot initiating the usual initial Windows setup screens followed by the graphical Windows setup Wizard. Once the process is complete all that’s left to do is install the required drivers using the OS X Leopard install CD and your dual boot MAC-Windows computer is complete.

Boot Camp setup guide can be downloaded here.

Boot Camp is a great feature; however having to reboot each time to use your Windows apps is a bit of a pain. Enter VMware Fusion! VMware Fusion allows you do run a virtual OS machine under OS X much like Parallels or the archaic Virtual Desktop from Microsoft. VMware fusion was able to use my already setup Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine so setup was minimal. All that was needed was to install VMware tools once logged into Windows to allow the virtual machine to run alot smoother and use Macs inbuilt devices. VMware fusion can be run in Unity mode, which allows Windows applications to be run directly from the Dock or the VMware applications menu when the virtual machine is running (examples below).

Unity mode is nice however, I prefer full screen mode so I have allocated my Windows virtual machine to the second space in OS X. This means using the shortcut keys or Expose I can switch between full screen OS X and full screen Windows XP. Below are screen shots of OS X Leopard spaces with VMware assigned to the second space. The screen cap. looks a little odd as at the time I was also playing with multiple monitors with different screen resolutions.

I like the apple dock but I also like to organise it my way. OS X Leopard has introduced dock stacks, which allow you to sort applications, documents, downloads, etc. into folders in your dock and display them using the predefined fan, grid or list effects. I love this new feature however it looked a little plain. So over to my mate Google to find out how to pretty it up. I found a bunch of icons which the author has called Drawers which look awesome as stack icons. I will post a how to on this soon…

Other useful application I have installed which I will post about in the near future include:

- iAlertU
- iRed Lite
- WinClone

The next project, OS X Leopard on a PC… :-)

Posted by agreenlees at 9:51 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

The WinMac Relationship (part 1)

Network, OS, OS X (Mac) No Responses »
Jun 172008

Recently our OS X Server crashed and burned. A Mac tech. and I tried put our heads together and attempted to bring the system back life and restore its previous state. The file system and user data was all intact however, we could not consistently keep the network services (AFP, Open Directory, etc.) running. We even went as far as trying a complete rebuild on an alternative XServe then restoring the OD and Directory Services settings but this was also to no avail. Let me give you some background as to how our Mac network WAS setup;

We are primarily a Windows based domain. The only pocket of Macs we have are for our Photography and Visual Arts departments (and an odd Mac Book here and there). The original setup was conceived well before my time at my current company so up until I was thrown into the guts of the Mac network when the whole system went down my knowledge of the server setup was on a need to know basis. The XServe had a Directory Services LDAP connection to our Windows 2003 LDAP server and had a custom binding to pull user information from Active Directory. I never completely explored the custom mappings but from what I have been told it was a fairly intense setup to provide the out of the ordinary needs at the time.

This is my first job where I have had to support Macs so my knowledge was very limited but from the start I found the setup to be somewhat odd. The Macs would always take a considerable amount of time to startup (which I worked out later was due to Directory Services taking an age to authenticate), user accounts would randomly stop working or be denied access to applications. The main method behind the madness was to allow users to maintain their Windows based home folders, but also have a network mapped home folder on the Mac server when logged into a Mac computer. I had always wanted to reconfigure the server myself but without the necessary time or expertise I stopped myself from opening that can of worms. But with the server now down for the count I was forced to commission my plan…

More blabbering to come….

Posted by agreenlees at 11:44 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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