Category listing for

Software

How To Copy Files And Settings Between Windows PCs With Easy Transfer

Moving from one computer to another or upgrading your present computer is a laborious task at best. Going through each file manually to make sure you have all your documents, music and photos is just the start. What about all those bookmarks you have? What about your settings that have your PC running just as you want it to?

Under a regular backup, even when using a program such as Cloudberry or Carbonite, these things would often be forgotten, but if you’re moving from one Windows computer to another then you can make use of Windows Easy Transfer instead.

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‘No Root Screenshot It’ Android App Review

Why would you want an Android app with a name such as ‘No Root Screenshot It’? Well, taking a screenshot on your computer is a fundamental principle. Everyone knows how to do it, most people take advantage of it, and the world keeps on spinning. For some reason, though, Google never quite grasped this concept of a ‘screenshot’. Android is getting pretty mature nowadays. It has a phone and tablet version, but there is still no way to take a screenshot without hooking your phone up to the SDK and using developer tools (really Google, really?!) or downloading a third party application.

Furthermore, such third party applications often require a rooted Android phone, which is a no-go for most regular human beings, and an additional step for willing nerds. Fortunately, I just came across an application in the Android Market that can take a screenshot on your phone without you having to root it first. There are, however, a couple of catches… 

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Lion In The Spotlight: iCloud

Our Lion in the Spotlight feature has been pretty comprehensive; we’ve talked you through no less than 14 features, all of which deserve to be spoken about, but I think we’ve saved the best service ’til last in this case. Strictly speaking, iCloud isn’t exactly a feature of Lion, but a separate cloud offering outside the realms of Mac OS X and iOS. It does, however, work very well with both.

Currently in limited beta to developers, iCloud is expected to be released to the public around the same time as iOS 5, and will be compatible with Mac OS X 10.7.2. We’ve been able to get a little sneak peak at the iCloud beta running in Lion, so let’s take a look!

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Lion In The Spotlight: AirDrop

Living in the supposedly wireless age that we do, you would think that it would be easy to do something as simple as transfer a file from one device to another without the need for a cable tethering the two together.

You’ve been able to share files wirelessly over a network for some time now, but only if you had access to the computer which you wanted to send those files to. That, and you need to be on the same wireless network as the computer you’re sharing with. Bag of hurt anyone? Just grab a pen drive and let us do this the old fashioned way.

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Lion In The Spotlight: Photo Booth

If apps were in the dictionary, Photo Booth would probably lie somewhere in between recreation and procrastination. It’s an Apple Store favourite, and its effects are pretty good at breaking the ice over a video call too when the situation arises.

Fans of the application will be glad to know, then, that it has been given a fresh lick of paint for its Lion debut, and it has some pretty cool new effects that you will want to goof around with as well.

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Lion In The Spotlight: Full Screen Applications

Full screen applications are one of the main selling points of Mac OS X Lion. That’s right, the full screen revolution has finally arrived! Wait.. what? Haven’t we been able to maximise windows since the 90′s? How is this any different to that?

Although Windows users may disagree here, full screen applications aren’t merely maximised like they would be in Windows or Linux. Oh no, you see when an application enters full screen mode, it gets rid of any distractions that you may still have with an application which is maximised. The dock hides itself beneath your screen, the menu bar disappears until you hover over the top of the screen, and all you’re left with is your application.

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PC Tools Spyware Doctor With Anti-Virus 2011 Review

Everyone running Windows needs an anti-virus program, but not everyone wants an entire Internet Security Suite running in the background and monitoring every website they visit and every email that they receive for fraud and spam. As good as some internet security packages are, they can get too intrusive for some people.

If you don’t want a full security suite slowing down your machine, but still want an effective malware barrier present, then PC Tools’ Spyware Doctor with Anti-Virus – priced £10 lower than it’s beefier cousin and a little lighter on the resources front – may be a good option.

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Lion In The Spotlight: Mail 5

I’ve never been a massive fan of Mail in Mac OS X. If I wasn’t having a technical issue with it, I’d be yearning for more advanced features such as conversation view that I needed a program such as Postbox to access, and more often than not I’d revert back to Postbox every time I chose a mail client on my computer.

With Mail 5 in Lion, however, Apple has made some major strides with its e-mail client, tweaking the UI to better fit widescreen layouts, offering full screen support and adding a host of other new features which make it one of the best mail clients available. In fact, I’ve been using it for a few months now and I haven’t even installed Postbox in Lion…

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Lion In The Spotlight: Versions

If you’re working on a long project or report, then it can become pretty difficult to keep track of all the content that you have to manage. Also, if you make a change that you don’t like, then it may be hard to remember what things were like originally a few days down the line when you look at it again.

Versions in Lion aims to solve this problem by keeping track of every change made in your document since you first started it, so that you’re less likely to lose content that you want, and you can feel more free to play around with content layouts and text without worrying about whether it will turn out worse than it was before.

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Amazon To Launch Game Download Store In The UK From October

In case you needed reminding, digital downloads are the future. I definitely subscribe to that vision, and clearly so does Amazon. In the wake of it launching its own Android app store, it’s come to the PC game distribution party in a bid to rival the likes of Steam, which has dominated the market for years now.

Having been made available in the US over 2 years ago, the store has a sure foothold in the industry already, however it’s also been a long time coming to the UK, with many users still having to wait for the postman to arrive with the new title they’re itching to play. It’s a terrible period of waiting once you’ve ordered a game online to the actual delivery, so as long as your broadband has the clout, then this is a preferable method.

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Fantastical For Mac OS X Review

When I’m on Mac OS X, iCal is always my go-to calendar application. It does its job with no fuss, it’s lightweight, and it’s easy to use. Until Lion came about, it looked great too!

In Lion, iCal seems to be stuck in a Marmite-like situation with some of its users liking the new iOS inspired changes and others yearning for a nice metal theme instead. I myself could do without having a piece of leather on my virtual desktop, so I’ve decided to enlist the help of Fantastical: a calendar management app that interacts with iCal, Outlook or any other web based calendar you can use, and sits on your menu bar out of the way until it’s needed.

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Lion In The Spotlight: Resume

Please allow me to paint a picture for you. You’re having a ludicrously productive day, a rare occurrence in anyone’s life, and have are a couple of things on the go, a few windows on your desktop that you have open in various Spaces and a number of projects floating around. All of a sudden, you see a tweet about a new software update that’s available for your computer. You just can’t resist clicking that little Apple button and checking for updates, only to see that the update in question requires a restart.

All of a sudden, your productivity has disappeared, your windows disappear as you restart your Mac, and when you’re back on the desktop with everything installed and up to date, you have no idea where to start. In Lion, Apple has introduced a feature called ‘Resume’ to stop just that situation from happening…

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Lion In The Spotlight: FileVault

Government authorities and workers, please take note (I’m looking at you, tax people!): encryption protects your data, so that there isn’t a national outcry every time one of you spoons loses a bloody laptop or pen drive on the train. It exists to protect sensitive information, so USE IT!

With Lion, there’s no excuse not to enable FileVault. Not only is it more compatible with other features of Mac OS X now, such as Time Machine, it also protects the entire Mac OS X partition, not just your home folder.

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Lion In The Spotlight: Gestures

Gestures are a big part of Mac OS X Lion. In fact, they’re such a big part that you’re really missing out on a lot of features unless you have a Magic Trackpad for your desktop or a multitouch trackpad on your laptop.

With the introduction of the multitouch trackpad in Apple’s notebooks, more complex gestures were introduced with Leopard in 2007, but there are a whole host of new ones in Lion, so let’s check them out so that you’re well versed in using them!

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Lion In The Spotlight: How To Use Signature Capture In Preview

If you’re creating a document to send to a lot of recipients, signing it can be a huge hassle. You could scan in a piece of paper with your signature written on it but that never works too well, leaving you with the option of signing each copy of the letter or signing one copy and then making a photocopy from the original.

Here’s a better idea: why don’t you take advantage of that FaceTime HD camera sitting comfortably at the top of that new Mac of yours? You can now use Preview in Lion to ‘scan’ in your signature from a piece of paper just by holding it over your webcam, and it works pretty well!

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Lion In The Spotlight: Mission Control

One of the best features introduced with Mac OS X Leopard in 2007 was Spaces, which joined Exposé to make window management on the Mac an absolute dream. You could arrange all of your windows in separate spaces to keep different activities located on different desktops, and use Exposé to view all open windows at the tap of a button.

In Lion, these two features have been merged together under one program: Mission Control. Yes, the name’s somewhat gimmicky, but we don’t have the space shuttle anymore so we need something to nerd out about, right?

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Lion In The Spotlight: Launchpad

Many of the improvements that have come in the latest version of Mac OS X will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has used iOS in the past, particularly on an iPad. Launchpad is one such feature, and it comes straight from the home screen of every iOS device since first generation iPod Touch.

Launchpad is, put simply, a wall of application shortcuts, but it does a little bit more than just show you a collage of everything you have installed on your machine…

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Lion In The Spotlight: How To Perform A Clean Install Of Mac OS X Lion From A USB Flash Drive

Apple’s latest version of Mac OS X, Lion, was released on the App Store today where you can buy it for £25. For most people, this is a really convenient way to buy an operating system, providing you have a fast enough internet connection, as it saves you a trip to the Apple store to buy the boxed version, which can sometimes be a pain if there isn’t one near and you have to wait for it to arrive at your home.

For power users though, being restricted to an application for an OS install is somewhat restricting, as it means that you can’t install it on to a new hard drive without first installing Snow Leopard. Don’t you think that’s a bit… backwards? I did, so instead of upgrading I chose to find a way to install it without the need for any application file. Care to know how it’s done? Let’s check it out!

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Lion In The Spotlight: Preparing Your Mac For Lion

You’ve waited for months and months, seen leaks and teasers from official developers already using it, and spent hours gazing at its product page, but Lion is finally here and ready for you to install. You’re most definitely ready for it, but is your Mac? Here are a few things that you may want to make sure you’ve got before you get too excited about installing that brand new OS of yours…

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Welcome To Lion In The Spotlight!

Lion’s finally here! Better late than never, right? I know you’re all dying to get straight in and check out all of the great features it has to offer, but you’re bound to miss some along the way, so that’s why we’ve created Lion in the Spotlight.

Over the next few days, we will be posting a series of articles which take a look at all of the best features that Apple’s latest version of Mac OS X has to offer, and we’ll be keeping this post updated as we do so.

To make sure you catch all of the features, be sure to bookmark this page to see when the content is updated at a glance!

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