Google Earth Makes The Entire Planet Your Playground [iPad]

Are you looking for a way to go on a journey without spending all the money it costs to get a plane ticket? Maybe you just don’t have time to go on a trip, but you still want to see places all around the world. The Earth is a vast and interesting place, and there are so many enticing and exciting things to see. If you just can’t get out to see the world in real life, Google Earth on iPad is as close as you can get.

Google Earth is, without question, the best way to explore the world from the comfort of your home.Traveling is expensive, and the fact is, most of us have lives that prevent us from spending months seeing all the amazing things the world has to offer. Google Earth makes you feel like you are traveling, without the time and expense. Whether you need to see the Earth for a project, or you are just bored and looking to see some interesting places, Google Earth has you covered.

Google Earth for iPad

When you launch Google Earth for the first time, the app will guide you through a brief tutorial that will help you get used to navigating around the world with the touch interface. You can skip this at any time, but taking a few seconds to go through it will make using the app a more enjoyable experience, and that is always a good thing.

Once you get a feel for navigating around the map in Google Earth, you will probably want to play around for a bit, and look at the cool places you’ve only dreamed of visiting. Area 51? Sure you can check it out. Las Vegas? You can see the strip in all its colorful detail. There is plenty of fun to be had just cruising around the entirety of the Earth from above, but of course, the app does more than allow you to cruise around aimlessly.

To really take advantage of the application, you will want to click the “Layers” button on the top left of the screen. In here, you can easily control the kinds of information Google Earth overlays on the map. You can choose to see things like panoramic photos, businesses, places, borders, roads, oceans, and Wikipedia articles. Essentially, anything you want to see on the map is available in Google Earth, which is quite useful as you take your virtual journey.

On the bottom of the screen, you will see options for the area at which you are looking. You can see photos, videos, and plenty of other media that relate to the area. All of this cool stuff is tucked in a drawer, so if you don’t want to see it while looking at the map, you can simply slide down over the drawer and it will disappear from view. Personally, I prefer to leave the drawer open, as it allows you to see more about a place than just a satellite image, but it’s always good to have options.

As you would expect, you can zoom in as far as you want at any location. The detail is quite impressive, and as long as your Internet is decent, the app zooms and pans incredibly quickly, with little or no loading time. Once zoomed in, you can get a birds-eye view, or you can rotate to an isometric view to get a different feel for the area.

While using the app, you can have it jump to your location quickly using the arrow on the top of the screen. Of course, you will have to grant the app permission to get access to your location in order for this to work.

The app also has a search bar, so if you don’t feel like scrolling around the Earth to find a certain location, you can simply type it in and find it in seconds.

If you tap the wrench on the top of the screen, you will be able to see the settings for Google Earth. Here, you can sign in to your Google account and get access to your “My Maps” section. You can also adjust whether that application automatically tilts and more.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a way to explore the vastness of our Earth without ever leaving your home, look no further than Google Earth for iPad. It is a fantastic app that all iPad owners should have installed on their device. Even if you do not have a purpose for the app, it’s still fun just to fly around the world and see it in a way you just can’t in real life.

Echograph iPhone Review: Can This Cinemagraph App Steal The Throne From Cinemagram?

Cinemagraphs blend selective animation and a static image to create a unique looping scene,popularised using Photoshop to adapt famous film scenes into contemplative GIFs a few years ago. Since the concept is so promising, app developers have pounced on the idea after the original release of Cinemagram.

There’s now a new contender for the throne in the form of Echograph, an app which on first glance is remarkably similar. It’s new, and according to the attention it has received it’s noteworthy too, but can it topple Cinemagram, and how does it differ from other GIF authoring tools?

Looking Back 

Cinemagram was a long-awaited app when it finally arrived on the App Store. Initial versions were quite basic, allowing an animation of a few seconds with little in the way of image stabilisation or additional features. That’s changed a lot since I first reviewed Cinemagram back in May of last year. Despite nobody I follow on the service having used it for a good period of time (I’d not even opened the app for probably 6 months), Cinemagram has come a long way.

To start with it was a paid app back then – costing a small fee of $1.99 for the privilege of creating great-looking animations using the world around you. Now it’s free, a side-effect of the many apps which attempted to bring cinemagraphs to the masses by undercutting the competition. It’s highly unlikely apps like Instagram, Flipboard and the recently introduced Vine would have taken off quite in the same way with a nominal fee, which is probably what the developers were thinking.

Cinemagram has in fact added a bounty of new features, including Instagram-like filters, the ability to make shorts and control video speed. I can’t help but feel the addition of shorts detracts from the point of the app, and waters down the concept somewhat. Vine is a lot more capable if that’s what you want to do – and it’s bound to get some new features in a few months (fingers crossed).

The more I play with Cinemagram, the less appeal I see in it. The Explore tab forces me to choose a hashtag, when I just want to see what’s popular. My friends have stopped using it. The quality of the movies has remained the same – in short, the app seems to have added more features at the expense of its primary function, and so there exists a gap for a simple, high-quality cinemagraph creator – and that’s where Echograph comes in.

Landscape Ahoy!

The first thing I noticed about Echograph was that it forced me into using the app in landscape mode only – despite locking my phone in portrait mode. Browsing, shooting and editing your cinemagraph is all done via landscape, with cinemagraphs taking on a traditional widescreen video format. There is no option to use portrait, unlike Cinemagram which now gives you a choice.

This does make more of a difference than you first think. You have slightly more frame to play with, and resulting creations look more cinematic. Second of all, you now have to hold your phone in landscape mode, which I found didn’t do wonders for camera shake. These animations really do demand a steady hand, the more you move around the worse the resulting image looks as your animation warps back and forth. A tripod is recommended if you’re really going to use this app for anything other than a bit of fun.

The extra space on-screen is great for applying a mask, and allows you to be more careful with the placement. The controls provided are also more pleasing, there’s no Instagram-like filters available but the workflow seems smoother. First you outline your animation range, then you choose your static frame (i.e. what displays outside of the mask) and finally the mask. As you’re applying the mask, your animation loops in the background, as you’re choosing your range there is an onion-skin effect for lining up your start and end points – these are great features. Once you’ve finished you’ve got the option of saving a high or low quality cinemagraph and sharing it via the usual social channels.

Unfortunately despite the better workflow, a bigger frame and the high quality output you’re still likely to get better results from Cinemagram, rather than Echograph. This is down to one reason – image stabilization. Cinemagram’s image stabilization is unbeatable. It seems to smooth out some of the biggest jolts and most noticeable warps, whereas I’m not actually sure there’s any stabilisation included in Echograph.

Good results in Echograph demand a tripod, or at the very least a stable surface and something to prop your iPhone on. If you were shooting cinemagraphs for use in a project then this would be expected, but mobile apps are meant to be accessible and fun, and the majority of people using this app will not be using a tripod.

There’s also no way to browse all incoming submissions to Echograph, no favouriting, no following – though the staff picks section highlights some incredible talent. Is it bad I assumed that they were all shot on tripods?

Finally – here is a finished, exported GIF in low-resolution:

The difference between this and the version seen in the app and via Echograph’s website is considerably different. When you share via Twitter, the app posts this:

You can view the “proper” low-res Echograph cinemagraph here.

Conclusion 

They’re both free apps, and both are worth the effort of downloading. Echograph has the foundations for what could be the evolution of the artform. Higher quality, larger frames, better controls, smoother workflow – with one snag: poor or no image stabilisation. If you value high quality then you can do no better than Echograph, just don’t forget your tripod and a mount.

If you’re messing around and value the ability to colour-grade, follow friends and don’t have steady hands then stick with Cinemagram for now.

What do you think of Echograph? Prefer Cinemagram? Let us know what you think, below.

• March 6, 2013
• By Ryan Dube

If you work in a typical office environment, the odds are pretty good that the mail system is an Exchange sever and that the mail client of choice is Outlook. We’ve covered Outlook here at MUO from a few angles, including Outlook Journal and backing up your Outlook data. We even covered some cool VBA scripting in Outlook where you could export your tasks into an Excel spreadsheet.

In this article, I’m going to take a closer look at the Outlook client itself and a few of the common Outlook mistakes that people often fall victim to. Luckily, there are a few built in tools that you can use to try and safeguard yourself from making one of those mistakes at work that’ll take you a long time to live down.

What are some of those mistakes? How about hitting “reply all” to one of those mass emails and making a complete fool out of yourself? How about writing something quickly in the heat of passion to your boss that you completely regret the moment you click on “send“? There are so many situations that people out there that can relate to these sort of situations, and lots of people have their own email horror stories. So, it makes sense that Microsoft would embed a few important tools to help guard against those common Outlook mistakes.

The Dangers Of Email

There are three email dangers that I’m going to cover in this article – sending out that email that you regret the moment you send it, sending an email to the wrong person, and finally that old reply-all mistake that so many people are guilty of.

The Email You Regret Sending

You know what, we all have those days. You get yet another email from a boss or colleague that just rubs you the wrong way. You’ve had a bad morning, or you didn’t finish your first cup of coffee yet, and so you hit reply and just unleash all of your frustration and anger in one, horrible email.

5 minutes and several curse-words later, you finish that email and with barely a pause, you click on “Send“. Then, after sitting in smug satisfaction for about three or four seconds, it begins to dawn on you exactly what you’ve just done – and the potential consequences. You realize, with a sinking feeling your stomach, that you really shouldn’t have sent it.

Have no fear, Outlook comes with a very cool tool just for this sort of thing – except you have to do it on your client before you make this emotional mistake, not after. I call it the “email-delay insurance”. To enable it, just click on “File”, “Info” and click on “Manage Rules & Alerts“.

Basically, what you’re going to do here is create a rule that delays all of your outgoing emails for 5 minutes. This gives you a little bit of “cool-down” insurance, so that you can prevent those mistakes from happening before they happen.

On the E-mail rules screen, click on “New Rule…”

Then click on “Apply rule on messages I send“. This will apply the delay to every single email you send the moment you click on the “Send” button.

On the next step in the Rules Wizard, you have the option to limit the number of outgoing messages this applies to. For example, it can be only important messages, or with certain words in the body of your message (maybe checking for certain choice curse words you like to use?)

In this example, I’m going to just apply it to all outgoing messages, so you click next, and then just click on “Yes” for the warning message.

Finally, select “defer delivery by a number of minutes“, click on the “a number” link, and set the delay period to whatever amount of time you think it’ll take you to cool off and cancel the message before it actually gets sent.

On the final step, you can apply exceptions to this rule so that it won’t delay messages sent to certain people (as one example). For example, I know that I can pretty much write anything at all that I want to my buddy John, and he won’t get angry with me. We’re best buddies after all – so I’m going to make an exception for those messages with his email address in the “recipient” field.

Name your delay rule, and you’re good to go (don’t forget to turn on the rule).

Now, every time you send out an email, it’ll sit in the outbox for 5 minutes. So, if you decide after a minute or so that sending the email was actually a huge mistake, you can go into your outbox and delete the message – and avoid  a major crisis.

Verify Who Your Message is Going To

There’s a common mistake people make when quickly sending emails out to people – you’ve probably experienced it yourself. You go to send an email to a friend named, say, Ryan Dube for example. So you type in “ry” and three matching names from the Exchange server global contact list or from your personal contact list come up.

Because you’re in such a hurry, you accidentally select “Bryan Dube“, and proceed to write about your weekend escapade in Vegas. You carefully detail all of the things you did there – you know, all of the things that were supposed to stay in Vegas? You click “Send“, open your “Sent” box to make sure it went to  your buddy okay, and then it dawns on you that you sent it to the wrong person. Even worse – Bryan Dube happens to be the Company President that had sent you some mass email last week (that’s why he showed up as a drop-down contact).

Yeah, that’s called being screwed.

Instead, make use of a little pro-tip known as Control-K right after you type the first couple of letters of your  friend’s name. This opens up the “Check Names” tool and lets you actually select the person’s name from the official contact list. 

This may feel like an extra step at first, but for those particularly sensitive messages, it’s a very important extra step. It lets you confirm and ensure that the message your writing is going to the correct person.

Let MailTips Alert You of Common Outlook Mistakes

Personally, I think MailTips is one of the greatest inventions ever built into Outlook. MailTips protects you from a long list of issues by warning you about things like whether the recipient you’re sending an email to is actually a group with a large number of recipients (which will protect you from the reply-all mistake), whether you’re sending an email to someone outside of the company, and similar informational tips.

To enable MailTips, just go into Outlook Options, select “Mail” and then scroll down until you see the “MailTips Options” button. 

You’ll see all of the things that MailTips does for you in this Options box. If you like everything you see, confirm that “Display automatically” is selected and then click on OK.

MailTips can really be a lifesaver. When critical emails roll in, you’ll get tipped that this is one you may want to respond to. It also tells you if it has come from an automated system that auto-forwarded the email to you – a nice feature for IT folks that have set up auto-forward rules from different scripts that monitor computer systems and servers.

MailTips will also advise you when you’re trying to send an email to an invalid email address, or to an address that contains a huge number of recipients. MailTips can save you from making common email mistakes in far too many ways to list here.

Just using these three important pro-tools in Outlook could save your life – or at least your pride. Enable them and use them, and save yourself the headache of making these common Outlook mistakes. It might even save your career!

Have you ever made any embarrassing email mistakes where tips like these would have saved you? Share your experiences in the comments section below!

Become a Pro Outlook User By Avoiding Common Mistakes

If you work in a typical office environment, the odds are pretty good that the mail system is an Exchange sever and that the mail client of choice is Outlook. We’ve covered Outlook here at MUO from a few angles, including Outlook Journal and backing up your Outlook data. We even covered some cool VBA scripting in Outlook where you could export your tasks into an Excel spreadsheet.

In this article, I’m going to take a closer look at the Outlook client itself and a few of the common Outlook mistakes that people often fall victim to. Luckily, there are a few built in tools that you can use to try and safeguard yourself from making one of those mistakes at work that’ll take you a long time to live down.

What are some of those mistakes? How about hitting “reply all” to one of those mass emails and making a complete fool out of yourself? How about writing something quickly in the heat of passion to your boss that you completely regret the moment you click on “send“? There are so many situations that people out there that can relate to these sort of situations, and lots of people have their own email horror stories. So, it makes sense that Microsoft would embed a few important tools to help guard against those common Outlook mistakes.

The Dangers Of Email

There are three email dangers that I’m going to cover in this article – sending out that email that you regret the moment you send it, sending an email to the wrong person, and finally that old reply-all mistake that so many people are guilty of.

The Email You Regret Sending

You know what, we all have those days. You get yet another email from a boss or colleague that just rubs you the wrong way. You’ve had a bad morning, or you didn’t finish your first cup of coffee yet, and so you hit reply and just unleash all of your frustration and anger in one, horrible email.

5 minutes and several curse-words later, you finish that email and with barely a pause, you click on “Send“. Then, after sitting in smug satisfaction for about three or four seconds, it begins to dawn on you exactly what you’ve just done – and the potential consequences. You realize, with a sinking feeling your stomach, that you really shouldn’t have sent it.

Have no fear, Outlook comes with a very cool tool just for this sort of thing – except you have to do it on your client before you make this emotional mistake, not after. I call it the “email-delay insurance”. To enable it, just click on “File”, “Info” and click on “Manage Rules & Alerts“.

Basically, what you’re going to do here is create a rule that delays all of your outgoing emails for 5 minutes. This gives you a little bit of “cool-down” insurance, so that you can prevent those mistakes from happening before they happen.

On the E-mail rules screen, click on “New Rule…”

Then click on “Apply rule on messages I send“. This will apply the delay to every single email you send the moment you click on the “Send” button.

On the next step in the Rules Wizard, you have the option to limit the number of outgoing messages this applies to. For example, it can be only important messages, or with certain words in the body of your message (maybe checking for certain choice curse words you like to use?)

In this example, I’m going to just apply it to all outgoing messages, so you click next, and then just click on “Yes” for the warning message.

Finally, select “defer delivery by a number of minutes“, click on the “a number” link, and set the delay period to whatever amount of time you think it’ll take you to cool off and cancel the message before it actually gets sent.

On the final step, you can apply exceptions to this rule so that it won’t delay messages sent to certain people (as one example). For example, I know that I can pretty much write anything at all that I want to my buddy John, and he won’t get angry with me. We’re best buddies after all – so I’m going to make an exception for those messages with his email address in the “recipient” field.

Name your delay rule, and you’re good to go (don’t forget to turn on the rule).

Now, every time you send out an email, it’ll sit in the outbox for 5 minutes. So, if you decide after a minute or so that sending the email was actually a huge mistake, you can go into your outbox and delete the message – and avoid  a major crisis.

Verify Who Your Message is Going To

There’s a common mistake people make when quickly sending emails out to people – you’ve probably experienced it yourself. You go to send an email to a friend named, say, Ryan Dube for example. So you type in “ry” and three matching names from the Exchange server global contact list or from your personal contact list come up.

Because you’re in such a hurry, you accidentally select “Bryan Dube“, and proceed to write about your weekend escapade in Vegas. You carefully detail all of the things you did there – you know, all of the things that were supposed to stay in Vegas? You click “Send“, open your “Sent” box to make sure it went to  your buddy okay, and then it dawns on you that you sent it to the wrong person. Even worse – Bryan Dube happens to be the Company President that had sent you some mass email last week (that’s why he showed up as a drop-down contact).

Yeah, that’s called being screwed.

Instead, make use of a little pro-tip known as Control-K right after you type the first couple of letters of your  friend’s name. This opens up the “Check Names” tool and lets you actually select the person’s name from the official contact list. 

This may feel like an extra step at first, but for those particularly sensitive messages, it’s a very important extra step. It lets you confirm and ensure that the message your writing is going to the correct person.

Let MailTips Alert You of Common Outlook Mistakes

Personally, I think MailTips is one of the greatest inventions ever built into Outlook. MailTips protects you from a long list of issues by warning you about things like whether the recipient you’re sending an email to is actually a group with a large number of recipients (which will protect you from the reply-all mistake), whether you’re sending an email to someone outside of the company, and similar informational tips.

To enable MailTips, just go into Outlook Options, select “Mail” and then scroll down until you see the “MailTips Options” button. 

You’ll see all of the things that MailTips does for you in this Options box. If you like everything you see, confirm that “Display automatically” is selected and then click on OK.

MailTips can really be a lifesaver. When critical emails roll in, you’ll get tipped that this is one you may want to respond to. It also tells you if it has come from an automated system that auto-forwarded the email to you – a nice feature for IT folks that have set up auto-forward rules from different scripts that monitor computer systems and servers.

MailTips will also advise you when you’re trying to send an email to an invalid email address, or to an address that contains a huge number of recipients. MailTips can save you from making common email mistakes in far too many ways to list here.

Just using these three important pro-tools in Outlook could save your life – or at least your pride. Enable them and use them, and save yourself the headache of making these common Outlook mistakes. It might even save your career!

Have you ever made any embarrassing email mistakes where tips like these would have saved you? Share your experiences in the comments section below!