How to Force Quit an App on Apple Watch | Dramel Notes

If an app on your Apple Watch stops responding, or you just want to fully quit an app, there is a way to force the app to quit rather than rebooting the entire watch. The procedure is pretty simple.

While you’re in the app you want to quit, press and hold the side button.

The screen or powering off your watch displays. Press and hold the side button again. You are returned briefly to the app, and then to the Home screen of your watch. The app is now closed.

NOTE: This procedure closes the app, but if the app has a screen in the Glances, that’s still running. The only way to stop an app in Glances is to remove it from the Glances.

If force quitting an app doesn’t solve the problem you’re having, you can always reboot your Apple Watch by pressing and holding the side button to get to the screen for powering off the watch. Slide the “Power Off” slider button to the right. Wait a few seconds and then press and hold the side button until you see the Apple Logo to turn on the watch again.

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Why it's a bad idea to leave Christmas lights up for too long | Dramel Notes

Alina Bradford/CNET

Since many smart lights can be programmed with an app to match the color motif of any holiday, it may seem like a good idea to keep your lights up year-round. Even though red, white and blue lights may sound festive for Independence Day and orange and black lights sound like the perfect addition to Halloween decorations, think twice.

Smart lights are not intended for year-round use. In fact, many, like the iTwinkle Lights by GE, were only intended for around 90 days of use, per year, max. Cords can dry out and crack when exposed, long-term, to the elements and can cause shorts in the wires or electrocutions when touched. Worn wires can also cause a fire hazard. Plus, using them more than the suggestion on the box can void the warranty.

If you really want to use lights throughout the year, there is a solution to make putting them up and taking them back down again a snap. Screw in cup hooks 4 inches apart on the trim along your roof line or on the trim around windows.

Whenever you want to throw up a strand of lights, all you need to do is hook the strand on the cup hooks. No need to spend hours installing light clips. To make the cup hooks invisible, spray paint them to match your trim before putting them along the roof line.

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How to Use the Reminders App on Your Mac or iPhone and Never Forget Something Again | Dramel Notes

Macs and iPhones (iPads too) come with a fantastic Reminders app that automatically syncs through iCloud. Here’s how to make the most of this app so you’re never likely to forget something important again.

The Reminders app is super simple to use and because it syncs across both OS X and iOS platforms, if you add a reminder on your Mac, you’ll be able to see it on your iPhone or iPad, and vice-versa. It seamlessly syncs everything to iCloud so you never need to replicate your efforts.

This is especially nice when you suddenly remember you need to buy milk or there’s an important meeting coming up and you’re sitting in front of your Mac or have your iPhone in hand. Simply add the reminder to the device and then it will be on everything that is connected to the same iCloud account.

Today, we want to take a look at Reminders on Mac and iPhone, show you how to add, edit, and share them, as well as make sure you’ve got everything set up so it all syncs properly.

Reminders on Mac

Reminders is already installed on your Mac so you just need to fire it up and add a few things to get started.

The Reminders app is laid out in two columns. The left column shows you your lists. Note that it says ‘iCloud” at the top of your lists, meaning that anything there will be synced to iCloud.

The right column contains the contents of your lists. To add anything to a list, simply click the “+” in the upper-right corner, or click on a new line.

To edit a reminder, click on the text so you get a cursor, and you can then fix it if it so appears as you want.

Click on the little “i” symbol to access things like when you want the reminder to alert you and when, or whether it should repeat, and when it should end. You can also set the priority, and add any notes you find pertinent.

If you right-click on a list, you can, among other things, rename it, delete it, and “complete” all the reminders within it.

To start a new list, simply click the “Add List” button at the bottom-left corner and then give it a name.

If you want to share a list, then you will need to click the little icon to the right of the list as shown in the screenshot below. Then you can add people with whom you want to share it. When you’ve added everyone, click “Done”.

As we mentioned, everything contained in these lists will then be synced to iCloud so you can then see them on your iPhone or iPad. Let’s now move on and discuss how Reminders works on the iPhone.

Reminders on iPhone

Usually when you open the Reminders app, you will probably see one of your lists. In order to access your other lists, you will need to tap at the bottom where you see them stacked (under where it says “Show Completed”).

When you see your lists, it will show how many reminders are in each one, whether there are any that are overdue, and so forth. If you want to rearrange the order or your lists, tap, hold, and drag it to the location you desire.

When you open a list, you’ll see it’s contents, and you can then add to it by tapping the “+”. When you tap the “Edit” button, you can change the list’s color and share it just as you can share in OS X.

The “Share with…” screen will show you who you are sharing a list with and their status. If you tap on a name, you will be able to see their contact info and you can also elect to stop sharing with them.

Finally, if you want to adjust how reminders sync and which list is the default, then you can open up the Reminders settings and change things.

In addition to getting reminders on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad, you may also get reminder notifications on your Apple Watch. Let us take a moment then to discuss how to change your reminder notification preferences.

Adjusting Reminders on Apple Watch

To adjust how Reminders notify you on Apple Watch, open the Watch app on your iPhone and tap open “Notifications”, then tap open “Reminders”.

Now you can select how Reminders will notify you, either by mirroring your iPhone or setting up a custom design.

If you elect to go the custom route, you can choose whether your Watch shows you alerts, have sounds, and if there’s any haptic feedback.

Making Sure it Syncs

None of this syncing stuff does you any good if it isn’t actually working, which means that if you create a reminder list on your Mac and it doesn’t appear on your iPhone or vice-versa, then you might not have syncing correctly enabled.

To check your Mac’s sync settings, first open up the iCloud system preferences and make sure “Reminders” is checked.

On your iPhone or iPad, open the Settings, and then tap open “iCloud” and make sure “Reminders” is enabled.

The other thing you need to ensure is that your Mac and your iOS device are logged into the same iCloud account. Obviously, if you are syncing to separate accounts, then nothing will work as intended.

With that said, you should be able to start creating to-do, shopping, grocery, and other important reminder lists. Now, next time you’re out and about, you can whip out your iPhone and check to make sure you’re remembering everything.

Don’t forget, you can also have Siri add stuff to your reminders lists such as “Hey Siri, remind me tomorrow to pick up my dry cleaning” or “Hey Siri, add grapes to my grocery list.” Siri is helpful in that regard with a lot of things and it really pays to learn how to use it.

We hope you found this article helpful, if you have any questions or comments you might like to contribute, we hope you will leave them in our discussion forum.

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Google Maps For iOS Upgraded with Offline Navigation, Local Gas Prices, and More by @mattsouthern | Dramel Notes

Google is finally bringing some useful features from its Android app to iOS users. Among these new features are offline navigation, local gas price information, store busy times, and more.

While the addition of each of these features is noteworthy, the most significant of these updates is offline navigation. Now you can grab any section of a Google map and save it to your phone to access again whenever you’d like.

Download Maps for Offline Use

Saving a section of a map to your iOS device gives you all the functionality you’d expect from accessing Maps with an Internet connection. This includes the ability to search for locations within the area – from there you can get turn by turn directions to the location, retrieve store hour information, and everything else possible with a connection. Well, almost everything.

Omitted from downloaded maps is anything not related to traveling with your own vehicles. That means transit information, as well as walking and biking directions, are not available in offline maps

There’s no word on if those features will be available at some point, but as it stands offline maps take up a considerable amount of storage space, upwards of 100 MB per map. In an effort to preserve storage space on your device, downloaded maps will expire automatically after one month.

Downloading maps is easy. Here’s how to do it:

• Search for the map location you want to download
• Tap “Download” on the place sheet
• Alternatively, go to to “Offline Areas” in the main menu and tapping the “+” button.

If you have downloaded maps on your device, Google will revert to the saved versions automatically when it detects you’re on a sub-par connection.

Store Busy Times

In addition to offline maps, Google Maps for iOS now has a feature you’re likely familiar with from searching with from searching on Safari or Chrome – store busy times. Find out when stores are at their busiest so you can decide when is the most ideal time for you to go.

This information renders in the form of a bar graph, as shown below:

 

This information is automatically populated based on actual day-to-day foot traffic to the location.

Compare Gas Prices

Another new feature added to Google Maps is the ability to compare local gas prices simply by typing into the search bar: “gas prices in [your city]”.

A list of gas prices and locations will then be shown:

 

When it comes to comparing both the iOS and Android versions of Google Maps both are basically now on par, with each app including and omitting the same sets of features. All of these new features are available today by updating Google Maps from the App Store.

Screenshots taken on 14/12/2015 by author.
Featured Image Credit: Tsyhun / Shutterstock.com

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Reminders Make Google Calendar an Incredible To-Do List | Dramel Notes

Your calendar is meant for scheduling, your to-do app is meant for listing tasks, right? But given how interdependent these two activities are, that segregation just doesn’t make sense. Google is now integrating Google Calendar and to-do lists by introducing Reminders.

Reminders will start as a feature on the mobile app for Google Calendar, available for Android and iPhone, but will soon be available on the web version too. Either way, Google Calendar can be synced across every platform, so this shouldn’t be a big worry.

What Are Reminders?

While they’re called Reminders, this new feature presents a list of all your pending tasks. But they’re tasks on steroids!

Here’s how it works. When you tap the plus icon to create a new calendar event in the mobile app, you’ll now see another option for “Reminder”. Tap that to create a new reminder.

• Reminders use everything Google knows about you to assist you in creating better tasks. For example, if you want a reminder to call your mom, Google will get your mom’s phone number from your contacts and add it into the task.
• Calendar has preset templates for call, email, text, read, check in (flights), make reservations, meet, return, cancel reservation, and watch. Each of these is programmed to find information available on Google to provide further context to your tasks, which is a great way to dig out of your task backlog. Also, as you can see, it follows the principle of making each to-do list item start with an actionable verb.
• Reminders stay in your calendar until you mark them as done. So if you don’t finish that task today, it will carry forward into the next day. Simple and convenient, right?
• You can use non-Calendar Google apps to make new reminders. You can add a reminder using OK Google voice commands, rely on the awesome Google Inbox email app, or even Google Keep.

Packing a Productivity Punch

Google Calendar brings together several productivity methods through the introduction of Reminders. Foremost is a technique called backward scheduling, advocated by author Cal Newport of Study Hacks.

The idea is that you need to schedule your tasks into your calendar. When you have a long to-do list, you don’t know how or where those tasks will fit into your daily plan. And so they remain unattended with the usual “I’ll get to it later” attitude.

By assigning a fixed time to a task, you are more likely to follow up and start on it then, Newport says. He isn’t the only one. Several productivity writers like Art Meisel also recommend thinking about “when” a task needs to be done and scheduling it in your calendar.

Google Calendar’s new feature is putting this productivity method into action by encouraging you to schedule your tasks rather than endlessly adding them to a list. When you’re creating a new reminder, Calendar will prompt you to add a date and time so that it can alert you when the clock strikes.

Perhaps more importantly, by keeping your to-do list and your calendar in the same visual space, you are more likely to start scheduling those tasks, or even knock off the small tasks when you notice a window in time. When you see that your next task is scheduled for at least 5 minutes later, you can take care of one of the small items that you see in your recurring reminders, like paying off your credit card bill.

Why Use Calendar Over To-Do Apps

Yes, Google Keep handles your tasks already, so why should you use Calendar for this purpose? The big reason, in my opinion, is that Calendar is making it easy to add tasks from anywhere, while giving you one place to plan your day and actions.

Add From Anywhere: A big reason many of us don’t end up using a to-do list app regularly is because of the friction involved—the number of steps it takes to add a task is so high, that we just don’t add a task. Since Calendar Reminders can be added from most Google apps and voice commands, that friction is reduced.

Keep Reviewing: One of the principles of David Allen’s GTD productivity method is to constantly review your list of tasks and re-prioritize them. By putting your scheduled tasks and unscheduled tasks in one place, it is easier for you to review and reassess what you should do next.

Be Flexible: When it comes to accomplishing those tasks, Calendar can work similar to how Trello can be a vision board for goals. By giving you a visual glance of everything you need to accomplish today, along with the unscheduled tasks that you need to take care of at some point, Calendar becomes a single interface to get an overview of your full day.

Is Google Calendar the To-Do App for You?

Productivity methods are subjective. What works for me might not work for you, so it’s impossible to answer whether Google Calendar is the perfect fit for you to get things done. But Reminders does go a long way in making it great for people who…

1. prefer to work based on a schedule or based on deadlines,
2. aren’t great at time management and hence end up missing out on small tasks often, and
3. forget about pending tasks from previous days when they start a new day.

As with any productivity app or method, give this a shot. Remember the 3-strike rule of to-do systems, and change if it doesn’t work for you.

I’d guess Google Calendar with Reminders will get a much better system once it’s also available on the web version of Calendar, so you are using it across every gadget.

Is Reminders What Google Calendar Needed?

Will Reminders make you switch to Google Calendar? Are you already using GCal and love this new feature? Is this simply not enough and you’re going to stick with your current calendar and to-do apps? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Image Credits:Reminder string by Andrei Simonenko via Shutterstock

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How to Reply to Emails on Your Apple Watch | Dramel Notes

Until watchOS 2, the “Mail” app could only show notifications for and display incoming emails. Now, you can reply to emails messages in Mail using your Apple Watch the same way that you can reply to text messages on your watch.

There are three ways to reply to emails using your Apple Watch. You can choose among several default replies, speak your reply, or reply with an emoji.

When you get a notification on your watch that you received an email (as pictured above), tap on the notification to open the message.

NOTE: Your Apple Watch can’t display the full content if rich-text and other complex media was used in the message. It will only display text. Read the email message on your phone to view the full content.

If you want to reply to the email after you’ve dismissed the notification, or reply to a different email, you can open the Mail app on your watch. To do so, press the digital crown until the Home screen displays. Tap the “Mail” icon.

The emails in your Inbox display. Tap on the email to which you want to reply.

Tap the “Reply” button at the bottom of the email.

You can also force touch the Apple Watch screen while viewing an email message to access actions you can take on the message you’re currently viewing.

Once you’ve tapped “Reply”, a list of default responses display, such as “Let me get back to you”, “Can I call you later”, and “Got it, thanks”. Scroll through the list to see if there’s an appropriate response for the current email. If so, tap on it to insert it into your message.

If you don’t find a response you want to use, you can speak your reply. To do so, tap the microphone button.

Speak your reply to the watch. It types out what you say on the screen, including punctuation marks, like “question mark”, “exclamation point”, “comma”, or “period”. Tap “Done” when you’re finished speaking your reply.

The message you spoke displays in your reply. Tap “Send” to send your reply.

At the top of the screen, a “Sending…” message displays with a progress bar. Once your message is sent, press the digital crown to return to the Home screen and again to return to the clock face.

You can also choose to send an emoji as a reply to an email. Once you’ve opened the email to which you want to reply on your watch and tapped the “Reply” button, tap the emoji button at the bottom of the screen.

Emojis display in several categories, such as “Frequently Used”, “People”, “Activity”, and “Objects & Symbols”.

Swipe or turn the digital crown to scroll through the emojis. When you find one you want to use, tap on it. For example, we’ll reply with a thumbs up emoji.

The emoji you selected displays in your reply. Tap “Send”.

NOTE: If your Apple Watch is connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot, it has enough Internet connectivity to send replies to existing emails, even if the watch is not currently connected to your phone. However, your watch must be connected to your phone through Bluetooth in order to be able to receive new mails.

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How to Change the Default City for the Weather Complication on Apple Watch | Dramel Notes

Complications on the Apple Watch allow you to display various types of information and quickly access apps on the watch. The Weather app on your iPhone provides a complication for watch faces that can be customized, such as the Modular, Utility, and Simple watch faces.

The Weather complication displays the weather for one default city, but you can change which city is the default city using your phone. To do this, tap the “Watch” app on the Home screen.

Make sure the “My Watch” screen is active. If not, tap the “My Watch” icon at the bottom of the screen.

On the “My Watch” screen, tap “Weather”.

Tap “Default City” on the “Weather” screen.

NOTE: The city currently displaying as the default city on the Weather complication is listed next to “Default City”.

Scroll through the list on the “Default City” screen and tap the city you want to make the default. If you don’t see the city you want, you can add cities to the Weather app on your phone. We’ll explain how to do this.

Tap the “Weather” app icon on your phone’s Home screen.

In the “Weather” app, tap the list button in the lower-right corner of the screen.

A list of all cities available in the app displays. Tap the plus icon in the lower-right corner of the screen.

Start typing the name of the city you want to add in the edit box. Cities that match what you’re typing start displaying in a list below the edit box. When you see the city you want in the list, tap on it.

The city is added to the list.

The city you added is now available to choose as the default city for the “Weather” complication.

Even though you can only view the weather for one city at a time on your Apple Watch, you can easily view the weather for all the cities you’ve added in the Weather app simply by swiping right and left. The row of dots at the bottom of the screen indicate the cities you’ve added as well as the arrow indicating your current location.

You can also add third-party complications from other weather apps you can find through the “Watch” app.

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8 Effective Evernote Apps for Painless Productivity | Dramel Notes

Evernote helps you increase your productivity with only a little effort.

One of the best things about Evernote is being able to integrate it with other web apps. So apart from it being an excellent note-taking app, Evernote can do an IFTTT manoeuvre and sync up with your favorite web app (assuming it is supported).

Bear in mind though that these apps obviously do need you to grant them access to your Evernote account.

 

You do not need to fall back on IFTTT always. After taking a wander through the Web Apps section of the Evernote App Center, I have found 8 good useful apps which integrate well with Evernote.

Go forth and be amazed.

MapClipper

If you are taking a trip somewhere, you may not have continual access to WiFi (I know, scary thought). This means that if you need Google Maps to navigate, then you are a wee bit stuck.

MapClipper aims to help solve that problem by enabling you to choose a certain area of a Google Map within a fixed size of square. When you have this, then click the “Save to Evernote” button, and the clipped portion of the map will be sent to your Evernote account.

Blinkist

Blinkist is an interesting service which takes works of non-fiction, and distills the main facts of each book into 15 minutes. This saves you the time of reading the entire book which could take hours, days, or even weeks, depending on your schedule.

Blinkist decides what the most important facts are in the book and presents them to you so you can learn them. You can highlight important passages, and send them to your Twitter or Facebook account.

The only downside to the service is that it is mostly not free. After only 3 days paid trial, if you want to get the most out of the service, the prices start at 50 Euros a year. The free plan gives you only one pre-selected book per day.

With each 15 minute distilled summary, you can have them sent to your Evernote account. However to do this, you need to have a paid plan.

Voice2Note

One of the great things about Evernote is that you can speak to the service to leave voice notes. This is great for those spontaneous thoughts of genius, the ones that will ultimately shake the world to its foundations.

But the big snag is that voice notes are not searchable (yet). Evernote boasts of its OCR technology which reads written text, and the search engine takes care of digital text. So how do we search the voice notes?

Voice2Note takes your voice notes and transcribes them into searchable text. But, it will only transcribe the first 30 seconds, so this is only suitable for short snappy notes. Not the next audiobook adaptation of “War and Peace”.

The free plan will give you up to 5 notes per month, and according to Voice2Note, the “transcription frequency is low”. The paid plan is $29.99 a year or $2.99 a month. This unleashes all the bells and whistles – unlimited notes, tagging and a “high transcription frequency”.

Sush.io

Running a busy business is a hectic affair. You have so much to think about, and forgetting just one thing has the potential to put a spanner in the works.

Sush.io gives you a chance to automate some of those essential tasks. It collects your recurring bills and statements, and all of your other online bills. It then also sends them all to an Evernote notebook (you can also choose from a huge amount of other cloud services. This page showcases just a small sample of them.

The first 100 transactions are free but you must pay a minimum of $25 a month for the service. But there are two things to consider here – the amount of billable time this app saves you, and the fact you can offset the charges against your tax bill.

StudyBlue

StudyBlue touts itself as “the leading crowdsourced learning app providing intelligent learning tools“. What does that mean in simple English? It means that everyone’s notes for a particular class are uploaded and made available for everyone to read and use. StudyBlue claims that they have more than 250 million pieces of user-generated content available.

Any class notes that you make in Evernote can be imported into StudyBlue and automatically turned into flashcards. So you can make your notes in Evernote, and later you can lie in bed and learn that day’s course content via the newly made flashcards. The flashcards are also sent back to the Evernote account so you have a copy of everything.

StartUp Tracker

Another day, another startup. Keeping up with which 15 year old entrepreneur has started what in their bedroom can perhaps be an overwhelming affair. That’s why I have totally fallen in love with StartUp Tracker.

StartUp Tracker is a browser extension for either Chrome or Safari (one for Firefox is apparently in the works). Once installed, if you see a name of a new startup, just highlight it and click the browser button. Alternatively, StartUp Tracker has embedded itself in the right-click menu.

A box will then appear on the screen with all pertinent information, and if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see a “Save To Evernote” button. Clicking on that will send the startup information to your Evernote account.

Using the app is completely free, but the one snag is that you cannot assign these notes to a specific notebook. It will just send it to your Evernote account, without putting it in a notebook for you. On the plus side, it DOES automatically tag each note for you.

Cronofy

If you are a knowledgeable Evernote user, you will know all about reminders. These can be added to a note to remind you to give it some attention on a particular day and time. Extremely useful if you deal with a lot of notes containing time-sensitive information.

Cronofy links up with the calendar of your choice (iCloud, Google, Office 365, Exchange, and Outlook.com). Then when a reminder is posted on Evernote, it posts the reminder on your calendar as well. This not only gives you a backup alert, but it also gives you a very good overview of all your different reminders coming up in the future.

NYT Cooking

Finally, one of my favorite destinations on the web. The cooking section of the New York Times! Whenever I want to fantasy cook, or find something to ask my wife to make, I head over to the New York Times. They have 17,000 recipes, and one visit to the page is enough to make me extremely hungry.

Now Evernote has partnered up with the Times to enable you to save recipes in your account. When you see something you like in the recipes, just click the Save button. That will save it in your NYT account, but it will also send a copy to your Evernote account. No tagging, but well, that’s a minor gripe.

It also goes the other way. Save recipes from other websites in Evernote, and scan any handwritten recipes you have. Then you can send those straight to your NYT recipes list.

Which Apps Do YOU Integrate Into Your Evernote Account?

Evernote is becoming more robust and useful as time goes on. As more and more apps become integrated, Evernote truly will become your second brain, as it scoops up all the information it can get its hands on.

Let us know what apps you use in conjunction with Evernote. Do you have a must-have that I missed out? Do you wish there was a web app integration someone would build?

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How to Stream Local Movies and TV Shows to Your Apple TV | Dramel Notes

The new Apple TV is pretty cool on its own and we believe that it’s a good purchase if you’re looking to buy or upgrade to a new streaming device, but you still can’t play anything you want on it right out of the box.

The good news is, with a simple $5 ($4.99 to be exact) app and a computer, you can turn your Apple TV into a very capable video streaming device that will play virtually any TV shows or movies you have secreted away on your computer hard drives.

Install Air Video HD on Your Apple TV

The first thing you will need to do is install the Air Video HD app on your Apple TV. To do this, first open the app store and search for it. The Siri Remote might make this a little annoying, but you should be able to find it with just a few letters.

As we mentioned, the app itself will set you back $4.99 but considering what it can do, we think it’s well worth it.

When you first open Air Video HD, you will almost certainly get an error telling you no computers were found.

This is because you need to install the Air Video HD Server on one or more of your computers. In the next section, we’ll show you how to install it on a typical Windows-based PC.

Install Air Video Server HD on Your Computers

In order to stream video content to your Apple TV, you will first need to install the Air Video Server HD application on your PC and/or Macs (Linux support is coming soon).

Note, in the following section we show you screenshots for the Windows version of the Air Video Server HD application. The Mac version is nearly identical, having no notable differences between the two.

Once you download the application, you will obviously need to install it like any other app.

Once installed, start the application and the server will start running automatically.

You will immediately see a bunch of options and settings but you can probably safely ignore everything for the time being. Right now, we’re most concerned about adding a location or locations to get things started.

Click the “Add” button and you will be prompted to select a directory. Browse to the location where your media is stored on your PC or Mac, choose the folder(s) you want to add and click “OK”.

Now, you will see your locations in the “Shared Folders”. In our example, we’ve only added one location for the sake of simplicity, but you can obviously add as many as you want.

At this point, you can close the server application and it will continue to run in the background. If you need to access it in the future, you can do so by clicking the icon in the system tray on Windows or in the Menu Bar on OS X.

Adding a Server on Your Apple TV

With the server up and running and our locations added, it’s time to go back to the Apple TV and access our content. Remember earlier when it told us it couldn’t find any computers? You should now be able to see your server(s) on the Air Video HD’s connections screen.

Go ahead and click on one of them (if you have more than one running) and browse to the content you want to view. Of course, if you have more than one location added, you will see all of them. As we said earlier, we only added one to keep things simple.

That then is all there is to it really, when you click on a title, it will begin playing and you can operate in the same way you do other video content using the Siri Remote’s play/pause button as well as the touch pad surface to fast forward and rewind.

Just remember, you can only access this content so long as the host computer is on and the Air Video Server application is running.

If you don’t see your shared folder(s) when you open the Air Video HD application on your Apple TV, then you should first check to make sure the computer from where you’re streaming your files is on or hasn’t gone to sleep.

What’s Up With All Those Settings?

Before we conclude today, we want to take just a few minutes to run through the various configuration settings you will see when you start the server software.

First, at the top of the server screen you will see two options: one to stop the server (if it is running) or start it (if it is stopped), and a button to check the server status.

The server status will show you three tabs. The Network tab will display important information such as the local IP address, port, as well as external port and IP if you want to allow your server to be accessed from the Internet.

The Session tab will show you any connected users and playback sessions, and finally the Conversion tab will display information on any files that are currently being converted.

Below the top section are the Remote Access options. If your server is accessible from the Internet, you can enable or disable it here.

Additionally, you can configure whether you want to set up single or multi user mode. If you choose the latter, then you can assign user accounts to persons in your household.

Below these options is a button to “invalidate passwords saved on devices”. All this basically means is that if you give a user access and later need to revoke it, you can quickly do so by clicking that button.

Finally, if you have file formats that first need to be converted before they can be streamed, then you can see where the conversion folder information is, and if necessary, you can change its location.

The remaining “Other Options” give you the ability to start the server software when you log into your account, as well as set the server to listen on a custom port.

More than likely, you will not have to mess with this last option, the remaining two “experimental” items, or any of the three buttons located on the right side of the server window.

As you can see, turning your Apple TV into a video streaming powerhouse is dead simple and cheap, so if you have a bunch of files residing on your trusty old PC or Mac, then you no longer need to futz with attaching it directly to your TV via an HDMI cable.

Now, all you need to do is fire up your Apple TV and pick the title you want to view with the Air Video HD app. With that said, please let us know if you found this article helpful by leaving your feedback in our discussion forum.

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Tweak Email Notifications to Your Liking on Windows. It’s Easy! | Dramel Notes

Customizing alerts for the Mail app on Windows 10 is straightforward. You can take care of it in just a couple of minutes.

Open up the app and click on the gear icon at the bottom right in the sidebar to open the fly-out Settings panel. Clicking on Options in this panel displays the settings for email accounts.

To customize alerts for an email account, select it from the dropdown at the top and scroll down to the Notifications section. There you’ll find the controls to turn notification banners, sounds, and Action Center updates for email on or off:

Want to tweak the default behavior for marking emails as read or to change how Mail looks? Go back to the Settings panel by clicking on the Back button next to Options. The Accounts, Personalization, and Reading sections there give you a few more useful controls.

Do you customize alerts for each email account? Or you do prefer to activate the quiet hours feature to silence notifications altogether?

Image Credit: illustration of a laptop by joingate via Shutterstock

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Google Releases ‘Trial Runs’ Streaming App Ads by @dantosz | Dramel Notes

Over the past few months, Google has been making it easier for internet users to access in-app content – even if they do not have the app installed. Last month, Google announced search results would allow you to stream app information from the cloud.

Today, the company confirmed a new streaming mobile ad feature. This new feature will allow users to access a short 60-second or less version of an app that will respond to taps just like the full app.

According to Sissie Hsiao, Google’s new head of product for mobile ads, the goal of this new feature is to help app developers find the right users. In a statement to TechCrunch she said,

“You can buy ads, you can get apps installed. But a lot of apps are used once or they’re never used, even after they’re installed. We found that 1 in 4 apps is never even used, and there’s often this ‘try once’ experience, and then [the app is] never used again,” 

The new streaming mobile ads, called “Trial Runs,” will allow users to actually try the app before downloading it, which should limit the number of ‘download it and forget it’ users. Instead, developers will be able to focus on finding a more targeted audience who will download, play, and, hopefully, spend more money in-app.

This new feature is currently available to a limited number of testers.

Featured Image: Shutterstock | Georgejmclittle

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How to Make the App Icons on the Apple Watch Home Screen All the Same Size | Dramel Notes

The Home screen on the Apple Watch is a large, fluid grid of app icons. As you move them around, icons on the outside rim get smaller than the icons in the middle. This can make it hard to tap the icon you want.

However, this is easily solved. There is a setting, called “Reduce Motion”, that disables the resizing of the app icons, making all the icons on the Home screen all the same size. We’ll show you how to change this setting, which can be changed on your watch or phone.

To change the setting on your watch, press the digital crown until you see the Home screen. Then, tap the “Settings” icon.

On the “Settings” screen, tap “General”.

Tap “Accessibility” on the “General” screen.

In the “Vision” section of the “Accessibility” screen, tap “Reduce Motion”.

Tap the slider button to turn the “Reduce Motion” setting on. The slider button turns green and white.

Press the digital crown to return to the Home screen. The icons are all the same size now, even as you move them around.

You can also change the “Reduce Motion” setting on your phone. To do so, tap the “Watch” icon on the Home screen.

Make sure the “My Watch” screen is active. If not, tap the “My Watch” icon at the bottom of the screen.

On the “My Watch” screen, tap “General”.

Scroll down and tap “Accessibility” on the “General” screen.

On the “Accessibility” screen, tap “Reduce Motion”.

Tap the slider button to turn on the “Reduce Motion” setting.

Enabling the “Reduce Motion” setting on the watch, also enables it on the phone, and vice versa. The icons on the watch’s Home screen will not dynamically change size as you move them now. Enabling the “Reduce Motion” setting will also slightly improve battery life because the watch will not be expending battery power to animate the Home screen icons.

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6 New WhatsApp Features You Should Know About | Dramel Notes

When you’re using an app day in and day out, it’s easy to miss out on new features that get added. You get a notification for an update, you update, and you continue using it as you always did. But what did you get in all those updates? With WhatsApp, quite a bit.

The best social network or instant messenger app is the one which all of your friends and family use. WhatsApp has an incredible user base now, and after becoming one of the fastest growing social networks, it’s now adding features to make it a solid, robust app.

Whether you know it or not, recent updates have brought some cool new features, from starring messages to backing up your chat logs to Google Drive. Most of these changes are reflected in the new WhatsApp for Android, but they should be available on iPhone soon enough. If you use WhatsApp, you need to know this.

‘Star’ Messages to Find Them Later

When someone sends an important message on WhatsApp, you can’t save it. Finding it later can be a pain, despite the robust search engine in WhatsApp. One of our workarounds was to use hashtags to mark important messages. But now, there’s a cool new tool.

WhatsApp now lets you ‘star’ messages. Long-press any message, choose the Star in the top menu bar, and move on. It’s exactly like a bookmark or a favorite.

Later, when you want to look up any bookmarked message, go to Menu > Starred Messages and you’ll see them all, listed chronologically.

The starred messages can also be searched, so you can find all the important stuff you marked by some person. You can also ‘unstar’ a message later, so that the Starred Messages can be cleaned up easily.

Back Up Chats to Google Drive

If you accidentally delete your WhatsApp chat history, you can restore it in a few steps. But what if you lost your phone, or got a new one, or had to reset your existing storage? While WhatsApp backs up chat history regularly, there’s now an easier (and better) way: Google Drive.

The new version of WhatsApp for Android lets you automatically backup your chat logs to Google Drive. Go to Menu > Settings > Chats and Calls > Chat Backup > Google Drive Settings and set it up. I’d recommend backing up daily (you can choose weekly, monthly, or manual), over Wi-Fi only (thus saving data costs), and including videos.

Remember, you can get 1 TB of Google Drive storage for free, so as far as WhatsApp backups go, you should be fine even if you upload all of the videos and photos.

Easier Way to Clear Chats

If you’re already backing up those chats, there’s no reason for you to keep really old messages, is there? It’s time to clear things up, and WhatsApp has made it simpler than ever.

Go to Menu > Settings > Chats and Calls > Chat History > Clear All Chats and you’ll see three options: all messages, messages older than 30 days, or messages older than 6 months. Choose what you want and WhatsApp will do the rest.

You can do this same action with specific chats too, whether with individuals or groups. In any chat, tap Menu > More > Clear Chat and you’ll see the same three options. Simple, eh?

Mark Messages as Read or Unread

You can now hide your WhatsApp status or when you were last seen, which is great. But for your own personal usage, sometimes, you might want to mark a message as unread.

Think about it in email. The ability to right-click and mark as unread is a great way to remind yourself that you haven’t fully registered an email, that you need to reply to it, or that it’s important in some way.

You can now do that in WhatsApp too. Choose a chat with any contact or group, long-press on it, and tap “Mark as Unread”—yup, as simple as that. You can do the opposite too—long-press a chat you haven’t read and you’ll see an option to “Mark as Read”, so it seems like you’ve read the message without ever opening the chat.

Do note that this doesn’t mean change the message’s status for your recipient. The recipient still sees that you have read the message. It only reflects as unread in your own phone.

Mark as read/unread has also made its way to WhatsApp Web on your desktop.

Use Custom Notifications for People and Groups

Some contacts and chat groups are more important than others, right? Well, then set a different type of notification alert for them. WhatsApp has rolled out custom notifications.

One of the cornerstones of blocking mobile distractions is to allow the right people through and cut off everyone else, and that’s what this feature does. Open any chat, tap the title bar, and you’ll find an option for Custom Notifications.

In it, you can set the notification tone, vibration effect, popup notification, and the color of the LED light for new messages. For Whatsapp voice calls, you’ll only get custom ringtones and vibrations.

Link Previews

This is a neat new feature that doesn’t really make you do anything special, but just adds to the overall experience.

Now even @WhatsApp allows link previews. Good stuff. pic.twitter.com/Y9ZbslSBX9

— Sohini (@Mittermaniac) November 25, 2015

When a link is pasted into a WhatsApp chat, you will now see a link preview with an image from the article, the headline, and the base URL—much like what you see on Facebook or Twitter.

If you’re the one sharing a link, you have the option to not include that preview, too.

What WhatsApp Feature Do You Want?

WhatsApp has come a long way from being a simple instant messaging app, but they can always do better. So if you could request the WhatsApp developers to add a new feature, what would it be?

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Help Feed Hungry Children With This Easy-to-Use Mobile App | Dramel Notes

Did you know that smartphone users outnumber hungry children by 20-to-1? That makes one wonder: if there was something that all smartphone users could do to help feed the hungry children of the world, wouldn’t that be great?

As it turns out, there is in the form of an app called ShareTheMeal. This app allows users to tap a button on their screen and donate as little as $0.50 to help feed a single child for a day. And it’s run by the United Nations, so you know you can trust that your donation won’t be snatched by a scammer.

To use the app, download it from Google Play or the App Store. From there, you can choose to connect it with Facebook (entirely optional) or you can just click Done on the top of the screen.

In the middle of the screen, you’ll see a button labeled Share The Meal. Click that and you’ll be taken to a screen where you can choose how much you want to donate and enter your payment info (PayPal is a valid option).

Presumably, the UN does this to avoid a portion of the donations going to Apple or Google through in-app purchases, thus allowing more money to actually go towards feeding the kids in need.

Outside of actually making donations, you’ll also find info on how many meals have been provided with the app, the goal, and some info about the organization and what they do. It’s all super easy to use, and it’ll make you feel good to know you did something nice around the holidays, even if a single $0.50 donation is all you can afford.

Are you going to donate through this app, or do you have any other awesome charities to recommend? Share in the comments!

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How to Add More Remote File Systems to Your Chromebook’s Files App | Dramel Notes

By default, the Files app on Chrome OS provides access to your Google Drive storage online and the Downloads folder, which is your Chromebook’s local storage. But Google’s made it possible to extend the Files app with more cloud storage services and remote file servers, including Windows file shares.

Set this up and you’ll have easy access to other remote file systems. They’ll appear in the Files app and in your Chromebook’s standard “Open” and “Save” dialogs. You can drag-and-drop files between them, too.

How It Works

You’ll need to find new types of file systems in the Chrome Web Store. These are Chrome apps that use the “chrome.fileSystemProvider” API to integrate with the operating system, just like Google Drive does by default. This was introduced with Chrome OS 40.

How to Find More File System Providers

To find more file system providers, first open the “Files” app on your Chromebook. You’ll find it under the launcher menu — just tap the “Search” button on the keyboard and search for “Files” or click “All Apps” and look for the icon.

Google has made this more obvious now with a quick link in the Files app. Click “Add  new services” in the sidebar and select “Install new from the webstore” to go directly to the Chrome Web Store.

You’ll see a list of available services, and you can install them by clicking the “Install” button. Currently, you can install providers that provide access to Dropbox, OneDrive, Windows local network file shares (SMB), Secure FTP (SFTP), WebDAV, Google Cloud Storage, and a few other protocols.

File system providers like SMB, SFTP, and WebDAV are particularly useful, allowing you to access types of remote file systems that wouldn’t normally be accessible with a web browser. It’s now possible to access those shared Windows folders on a Chromebook, although it didn’t used to be.

It doesn’t appear in this list, but there’s also an official “Box for Chrome OS Beta” app that integrates Box.com storage with Chrome OS’s Files app. Another proof-of-concept app will provide a list of TED talks in your Files app. You may find others by searching the Web Store, too.

After you install the app, you’ll need to launch it and provide your credentials. After you authenticate, that file system will be integrated with your Chromebook’s Files app.

The Problem With This Feature: Developers Are Still Neglecting Chrome Apps

You’ll notice one big problem with this feature. Google has done the hard work of extending Chrome OS and its app APIs to make this possible, but most of the apps here — aside from Box.com’s beta app — are unofficial. Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive haven’t gone out of their way to create apps that integrate their storage services with Chrome OS’s Files app, so they may not work as well as official apps would.

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This lack of attention to apps isn’t anything new for Chrome OS. While Chrome OS works well at providing a powerful browser you can use to access the web, developers haven’t really jumped into Google’s Chrome app ecosystem. Rather than making Chrome-specific apps and integrating with your Chromebook’s Files app, they’d rather just work on their full websites and encourage you to open Dropbox or OneDrive in your web browser instead.

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4 Ways To Stop Your Kids From Making Mobile In-App Purchases | Dramel Notes

4 Ways To Stop Your Kids From Making Mobile In-App Purchases

 

Balancing security against convenience is challenging. Some parents were faced with large bills as their children has unwittingly downloaded apps and made in-app purchases without their consent. Just last December, Google has signed off on a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to refund $19 million to families over unauthorized in-app purchases performed by their children who did not have permission to make those purchases.

 

There are ways that you can prevent your children from unintentionally perform purchases on your mobile device. Here are the ways to prevent the mishap from reoccurring in the future.

 

1. One device per child.

If you can afford it, getting your child their own device is the safest option. By not having a “family tablet” for everyone, you will save yourself a lot of headaches in the future. Nowadays, your phone and tablet would have all your accounts’ information in it. When you hand your device to your child, they have a very strong tendency to be tempted by in-app purchases.

 

If you can’t afford to adopt the one device per child policy, all is not lost. There are other methods which you can adopt as a countermeasure.

 

2. Create a new ID.

If you have a kid above 13, both Apple and Google recommends that you should create an individual Apple ID or Google account for them. The obvious benefit is that there won’t be any credit card linked to their own ID so there will be no risk of them spending on anything.

 

3. Don’t give your child your credit card number.

Your child might be trustworthy and all grown-up, but by handing over your credit card number and its security code, you open up yourself for the risk. If there’s anything that your child need, buy for them. With your financial information, there is a possibility that they can make in-app purchases in your name. It is not a matter of trust, it is a matter of risk. If you do not want to take that risk, the best solution is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

 

4. Enforce better restrictions.

The reason why there are so many unauthorized in-app purchases by kids without their parents’ consent is mainly because there are no restrictions to prevent them from doing so. For instance, if your credit card account was added to your Google Wallet, they can make in-app purchases easily with just a few taps on the screen. To prevent this from happening, activate password protection for any purchases. Here is how you can do it.

 

• iOS devices

For iOS devices, you have to be aware that when you have entered a password, the password will not have to be entered for another 15 minutes. During this period, your children may accidentally make in-app purchases without you realizing. To prevent this, go to Settings, and select General, then Restrictions. Change the Require Password setting to immediately. This will ensure that a password is required for any purchases made on your iOS device.

 

• Android devices

To activate password protection on an Android devices, open Google Play, then tap on the menu icon to enter into Settings, and select Require Authentication For Purchases. Then select All Purchases so that a password is required for every purchase made on your Android device.

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