If you use a Mac as your home computer (as I do) and if you take photographs (as I certainly do), you'll be interested in Apple's successor to iPhoto on the Mac, which will be called Photos. It won't be out for a few months, but Apple released a developer preview yesterday, so now we can start to see how it will work. While I'm a little nervous about losing the Events feature, there does seem to be a lot to like about it. One neat feature is that all photos are synced between your Mac, iPhone and iPad via iCloud — although if you have a lot of photos you will likely have to pay for extra iCloud storage space. Edit a photo on your Mac, and the edited version show up on all of your devices in a few seconds; delete a bad picture from your iPhone, and it goes away everyone else too. David Pogue of Yahoo Tech wrote a good article on the new app, as has Chris Breen of Macworld. Other good first impressions of the software come from Andrew Cunningham of Ars Technica and Josh Lowensohn and Nathan Ingraham of The Verge. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- I posted a formal review of GoodNotes back in 2012, but the app has changed a lot since then. In 2014, the app was updated to version 4, which was a brand new app. But I'm still a huge fan of the app, and it is what I use every time I use my iPad and stylus to take handwritten notes. A few months ago, the app added automatic handwritten recognition, so that you can later go back and search your notes for a specific word. I don't have the neatest handwriting, but it has worked great for me — although note that I write in print, not script, which may make it easier. A few days ago, the app was updated to version 4.5 which takes the searchable text feature and embeds it upon export. Thus, you can now take handwritten notes, then send the notes to your computer as a PDF file, and you can do a full text search on the notes. This makes it easy to take notes on your iPad but then find the right part of notes on your computer. And if you use a document management system, you should be able to find notes using full text searching. It's a nice improvement to an app that is already really good. Click here for GoodNotes ($6.99):
- A good alternative to GoodNotes is Notes Plus. As noted be South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn, Notes Plus was also recently updated to add handwriting recognition.
- Tim Baran of Rocket Matter recently asked me and a bunch of other attorneys how we use Dropbox.
- If you want an external keyboard for your iPad that fits in an iPad case, the Logitech Ultrathin has long been a favorite pick. Antonio Villas-Boas of PCMag reviews the latest version of that keyboard for the iPad Air 2.
- Rene Ritchie of iMore shares some tips for using the Mail app on the iPhone.
- Rob LeFebvre of Cult of Mac explains how to delete a large number of pictures at one time using the Photos app on the iPhone or iPad.
- And finally, I didn't run across anything too silly in the world of iPhone this week, so I dug back into the iPhone J.D. archives to find something to end today's post. Way back in October of 2011, Jonathan Mann recorded this music video of him and Siri singing a duet, and it is still fun to watch:
