How to Get SMS Alerts for Gmail via Twitter

How do you get SMS notifications on your mobile phone for important emails in your Gmail? Google doesn’t support text notifications for their email service but Twitter does. If we can figure out a way to connect our Twitter and Gmail accounts, the Gmail notifications can arrive as text on our mobile via Twitter. Let me explain:

Twitter allows you to follow any @user via a simple SMS. They provide short codes for all countries (see list) and if you text FOLLOW to this shortcode following by the  username, any tweets from that user will arrive in your phone as text notifications. For instance, if you are in the US, you can tweet FOLLOW labnol to 40404 to get my tweets as text messages. Similarly, users in India can text FOLLOW labnol to 9248948837 to get the tweets via SMS.

The short code service of Twitter can act as a Gmail SMS notifier. You create a new Twitter account, set the privacy to private and this account will send a tweet when you get a new email in Gmail. Follow this account via SMS from you main Twitter account and the SMS notifications will start pouring in.

Use Twitter as a Gmail Notifier with Google Scripts

Here’s a step by step guide on how you can use Twitter to get SMS notification for important email in your Gmail account. It will take a minute to setup and, internally, there’s a Google Apps Script that’s doing all the magic. It monitors your Gmail mailbox in the background and as soon as a new message arrives in your account, the script sends out a tweet.

1. Log out of your existing Twitter account and then go to twitter.com/signup to create a new Twitter account for your Gmail account.
2. Confirm your email address, then open the Twitter settings page and check the option “Protect My Tweets.” This will make your Gmail notifications private and neither search engines nor other Twitter users will be able to see tweets generated through Gmail.
3. Click here to copy the Google Sheet and choose Authorize under the Gmail to Twitter menu (near Help). Remember to authorize with your new Twitter account.
4. Once authorized, choose Start from the Gmail to Twitter menu and enter your Gmail search query. For instance you can say is:important is:unread in:inbox newer_than:1d to only receive notification for new, unread and important emails in your Gmail. Click OK.

That’s it. The Gmail notifier is running and it will tweet when a matching email is found. It runs every 10-15 minutes and will only work on incoming email, not the old message. The messages will also be logged in the Google Sheet so you know what’s happening behind the scene.

Get SMS Alerts for Emails at Gmail

Open a new browser session in Incognito mode, log in to your old Twitter account and send a follow request to your new Gmail account on Twitter. Approve the new follower request and you should now see tweets for new Gmail messages, as they arrive, in your main Twitter timeline.

Should you wish to receive SMS alerts on your mobile phone for new Gmail messages, just open the Twitter profile page of your Gmail bot and turn on Mobile Notifications. This will obviously work only if you have connected (and verified) your mobile phone with your main Twitter account.

Also see: How to Write a Twitter Bot

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The story, How to Get SMS Alerts for Gmail via Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 31/10/2015 under GMail, Sms, Twitter, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/ysZ3wy

How to Get Things Done with Trello

My work involves prioritizing, organizing and managing tasks, information and ideas. I have tried hundreds of todo lists and project management tools to get the job done but finally settled on using Trello. It is now my swiss knife where I do everything from collaborating with my wife on shopping lists to building products for my company to teaching students to writing a book.

Trello provides a very flexible way to do this all and it has a whole ecosystem of apps and extensions to make your life simpler. If you are new to Trello, here’s a getting started guide that will help you understand the basics of Trello and how you can use the service to manage work and get things done.

What is Trello and why I need it?

Trello is like a todo list on steroids. At the core of it is a card which is the fundamental unit of information and it can be around lists. Here is a simple Trello card. It has a title with something I plan to do in the near future.

What follows is more complex Trello card containing a title, description (optional), file attachments (you can even pull files from Dropbox or Google Drive), comments from other people and a variety of things including checklists and tags. Each card as a unique email address and you can add comments to the card by simply sending a message to that address.

Product Management with Trello

You can make a card as simple or as complex as you want. The cards are then organized into flexible lists. The lists show a preview of various cards and you can click on them to view details. The list stores all related cards.

In this example, each card in the Trello list corresponds to a feature I was building for a product. The lists are then grouped into boards. The board is effectively a project. If you take a look at my product board below, you’ll see lists like Backlog, In Implementation, QA, Questions and Finished.

I see this as an assembly line to make products. I create a Trello Card for each feature or idea and add to the Backlog list. The team would discuss and add further details to each card. Then the developers would drag individual cards to the In Implementation list and once the task is complete, it is shifted to the QA list. The testers would then move it to Finished once it has passed all the necessary checks.

Each of my projects would have a board like this and you can do a lot of cool things with that. For instance, I use the Pomello extension to pick up a task from Trello and start working on it. It will calculate the time taken and prompt me to take a break every, say, 25 minutes.

The cards work great in team settings and help the whole team to understand who is working on what and they can also keep a track of the status of tasks. Of course, there are more powerful project management tools out there, but none as simple and as extensible as Trello.

Getting Things Done with Trello

I’m a fan of the Getting Things Done method and here’s how I manage my time with Trello using GTD approach. You can download my Trello template for the GTD board here.

Whenever an email arrives, or there’s a task I need to complete or when an idea pops up in my mind, I create a new card in the “Inbox” list of my Trello board. Once a day, I “triage” them (decide the priority) to move into one of the 4 buckets.

• If it is something I’m waiting for someone else to do, I will move it to the “Waiting” list.
• If it is something that is not mandatory or urgent, say I want to read the new GRR Martin’s novel or call my uncle, I move it to the “Someday/Maybe” list.
• If there is a set time for a task, like tax filing or submitting a paper to an event, I move that card to “To Calendar” and assign a due data to the card. You can easily link Google Calendar to your Trello list using the iCal feed.
• If a card doesn’t fall in any of the above buckets and I really have to do it, I move it to the “Need to do” list.

Every morning, I take the most important cards from the “Need to do” list and move it to the “Today” list. These are the things I plan to get done today. If the “Need to do” list is clear, then I move a couple of pending cards from the “Someday/Maybe” list at the end of the day and handle those cards. Any unfinished task at the end of the day must be moved back to the respective lists.

If you can dump your mind into the “Inbox” list, you can have much better clarity in what you do.

Trello for Book Writing

Here is a partial view of my Trello board of my book on Indian history – “From Tryst to Tendulkar”. I use the board to organize my chapters, ideas, references and everything else.

Trello for Teaching a Class

I teach classes for entrepreneurs, product managers, business school aspirants and civil participants on various methods to study. Here is a screenshot of my Trello board for a class for business school aspirants.

Trello for Shopping

My wife and I share a Trello card with all the things to buy. Either one of us puts stuff there and when one of us goes shopping, the card becomes our shopping list. As I pick up stuff in the supermarket, I also check the item in the Trello card. When my wife needs that stuff again, she simply unchecks the checked item. Thus, we don’t need to keep adding existing stuff to the card.

Balaji Viswanathan is a product manager by profession, he writes a blog, created Be Limitless (a popular Chrome add-on), wrote a book on Indian history and is considered a rockstar on Quora. His favorite GTD tool is Trello.

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The story, How to Get Things Done with Trello, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 31/10/2015 under Productivity, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1Wpa7bW

OnePlus X Impressions: Super Budget!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zulLRv0GFhM
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How to Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results

Google Alerts, you probably know this, offer an easy way for you to create RSS feeds from the Google search results of any query. This is a good option if you are looking to monitor when new web pages are indexed by Google that match your search query.

If you have never created feeds with Google Alerts earlier, here’s a quick primer. Type your search keyword, expand options, choose “Automatic” for sources, choose “All Results” for “How Many” and set “RSS Feed” as the Delivery Method. Google will create an RSS feed of web search results that you can subscribe in Feedly or another RSS Reader.

Please see the Google Alerts tutorial to write more advanced search queries.

Better RSS Feeds for Google Search

A big limitation with feeds created using the “Google Alerts” approach is that you’ve limited control over the feed and it won’t include search results from all over the web. In fact, the first time you create a feed, it is likely to be empty and results would be added as Google discovers and indexes new content for that search query.

There’s an alternate method for creating RSS feeds for Google Search results and, though the initial setup takes few extra steps, you’ve enough options to fine tune the search query and have more meaniningful search results in the feed. You can even have RSS feeds for Google Images.

1. Go to Google Custom Search and create a new search engine. If you would like to search the entire web, just like Google search, put *.com as the site to search, edit your CSE and under Sites to Search section, select the option that says “Search the entire web but emphasize included sites.”
2. Make a note of the Google CSE id which will be something like xxxx:yyy – click the Search Engine ID button under Details to know your CSE ID.
3. Go to Google Developers Console, sign-in with your Google Account and create a new Project. Give your project any name – like Google Search RSS Feed – and click the Create Project button.
4. Next go to the API & Auth link in the sidebar and click on APIs. Here search for “Custom Search API” and enable the API.
5. Under the same API & Auth group, click Credentials – Add Creditials – Browser Key and click the Create button. You’ll get the API key now.

Now we have all the ingredients required to create our RSS feed for Google Search. The basic feed URL will be something like this:

http://ift.tt/1N7Lf7Wxxx:yyy&key=abc&q=query

Replace xxx:yy with the Search Engine ID, abc with the API key and query with the actual search query. If your query has multiple words, separate them with a + symbol (like Digital+Inspiration). There are tons of other search parameters to the Feed URL. For instance:

• googlehost=google.de (to return results from Google Germany)
• searchType=image (search images only, the default is web pages)
• safe=high (filter adult content from search results)
• dateRestrict = d10 (return results published in the last 10 days)

To give you an example, the following feed URL will fetch family safe pages from Google India, published in the last 2 weeks for a query “Make In India”

http://ift.tt/1KFnez6;cx=xxx:yyy&key=abc&q=Make+In+India&dateRestrict=w2&googlehost=google.in&safe=high

Advanced users can create simple web apps that use the Custom Search API to monitor search results by email or they can scrape Google search in a spreadsheet. The only limitation is that the Search API has a daily quota (100 requests per day) so you should not share the feed or the API key with other users. However, if you enable billing inside the Google API Console, the free limit will be upgraded to 200 search queries per day.

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The story, How to Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/10/2015 under Google, RSS, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/qSFDDN

Make your WordPress Website More Secure with Single Sign On

Your WordPress website has a public login page, often found at http://ift.tt/1FGSnly, and it is possible for someone to gain access to your site by guessing your password through repeated trial and error method. To harden your WordPress security, it is therefore recommended that you password-protect the WordPress admin folder and also use 2-factor authentication.

Secure WordPress with Single Sign On

WordPress Single Sign On offers an even more secure option for protecting your website from brute force attacks as you ‘outsource’ the authentication part to WordPress.com. Once enabled, the login screen on your WordPress website is disabled and you are required to sign in to your WordPress.com account in order to access the admin dashboard of your own self-hosted WordPress blog.

There are several advantages here:

1. Since WordPress.com accounts support 2-factor authentication, the the same level of security is now enabled for your blog as well without requiring another plugin.
2. All login requests on your site, including the malicious login attempts, are now automatically redirected to WordPress.com and thus it reduces the load on your server and database.
3. If you manage multiple sites, you can log into them all with a single WordPress.com account and no longer have to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

How to Implement WordPress Single Sign On with Jetpack

Here is a step-by-step guide that explains how you can enable Single Sign On for your WordPress website:

Step 1: Create an account on WordPress.com using this link. Skip this step if you already have an account. You may be required to create a dummy blog on wordpress.com as part of the registration process.

Step 2: Once your account is created, click here to enable two-factor authentication. Specify your phone number, WordPress will send a verification code via SMS and you need to type the same code to verify your number.

Step 3: Go to your WordPress blog, install the Jetpack plugin, activate the plugin and then click the green button that says “Connect to WordPress.com” to link your blog to  your WordPress account.

Step 4: Once the connection is established, go to Jetpack settings and activate the “Single Sign On” module.

Step 5: Go to your WordPress installation folder via FTP or SSH, switch to the current theme folder (wp-content/themes/theme-name) and edit the functions.php file. Here copy-paste the following line of code after the first line:

 add_filter( 'jetpack_sso_bypass_login_forward_wpcom', '__return_true' );

Step 6: Go to Users – Your Profile and, at the bottom of the page, click the button that says “Log in with WordPress.com” – this will essentially link your WordPress.com account to the username that you’ve used to log into the site.

This will completely disable the login form of your WordPress site and instead forwards the user to the login screen on WordPress.com. Once you login through WordPress, you are immediately redirected to the admin dashboard of your self-hosted WordPress blog.

Also see: How to Improve WordPress Security

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The story, Make your WordPress Website More Secure with Single Sign On, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/10/2015 under WordPress, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1kQWTsX

Nexus 6P Review!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc5fFvp8le4
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Update 11.0: MKBHD.com!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv-RVkpQTWs
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How to Save Tweets for any Twitter Hashtag in a Google Sheet

Wouldn’t it be nice if Twitter had an Export button? You search for a trending #hashtag, or an old tweet, or your brand name, and all the matching tweets get saved in an Excel or Google spreadsheet. And this archive would just update itself in the background as new tweets arrive.

Meet Twitter Archiver, the simplest tool for saving tweets, forever It is a Google add-on that takes 5-minutes to setup (watch video tutorial) and will easily capture all tweets that match particular search terms in a Google Spreadsheet automatically. You can use the tool to monitor tweets around any conference hashtag, learn what people are saying about your brand, track popular search terms, save tweets from any geographic location and more.

Save all kinds of tweets with the Twitter Archiver

How to Save Tweets in a Google Spreadsheet

To get started, install the Twitter Archiver and it will create a new Google Spreadsheet. Go to the Add-on menu, choose Twitter Archiver and select the Authorize menu. Allow the Google Sheet to access Twitter on your behalf – the app needs this permission to only fetch tweets and will never post anything to your Twitter account.

Once your Twitter account is authorized, go to the Twitter Archiver menu again and create a new Search Rule. If you have every used the advanced search page on Twitter, this search rule screen will be very familiar. You can create rules that mention certain search terms, look for exact phrases, find tweets by #hashtags, tweets that @mention particular Twitter users and so on.

Now that you have created your Twitter search query, click “Start Tracking” button to initialize the Twitter Archiver. Internally, the sheet will connect to Twitter and pull in the historic tweets that match your search term(s). It writes these tweets in a separate sheet inside the Google Spreadsheet. After the initial set is pulled, the archiver will poll Twitter every hour and pull in the matching tweets that have been posted since the last run.

Video Tutorial – Twitter Archiver

In addition to tweets, the Twitter Archiver app will also import other data including the tweet’s retweet & favorite count, the tweeter’s friend & followers count and whether they are verified or not. This data will help you filter out the spam Twitter users or easily surface tweets from the most influential users.

If you would like to stop archiving tweets for a particular search term, go to the Twitter Archiver menu, choose Saved Searches menu and you’ll see a list of your exisitng saved searches. Select the one you wish to delete from the dropdown and hit the Delete button.

Install Twitter Archiver

Isn’t that simple? There’s no need to create any Twitter apps nor do you have to fiddle with Google Scripts.

Twitter Archiver – Frequently Asked Questions

How can I create complex search queries?
The archiver supports all Twitter search operators. For instance, you can put min_retweets:5 in the Advanced Rule box to surface the best tweets for a search term.

Why does Twitter Archiver access to various services?
The Archiver add-on connects to an external service (Twitter API) and saves the tweets to Google Spreadsheet. Also, should a problem arise, you can email the debug logs to the developer and hence it needs permissions to send mail.

What is your Privacy Policy?
The add-on runs inside your Google Account and directly connects to Twitter. It does not share even a single byte of data with anyone, including the developer.

My Twitter Archiver is not pulling all the old tweets. Why?
The Twitter API does not provide all the historical tweets via the API. It will only return tweets that have been posted in the previous 5-7 days or last 1000 tweets. The archiver will however fetch future tweets for any terms that it is tracking.

Do I have to keep the sheet open to save the tweets?
The archiver runs on Google servers and will therefore work even while the Google Sheet is closed. You can close the sheet, turn off your computer and the archiver will continue to work.

What is the difference between free and premium editions?
The free edition of the Twitter add-on lets you track up to 2 search queries. You can track more queries in the same Google Sheet with premium. The free edition polls Twitter every hour while the premium edition pulls tweets every 15 minutes so it is more suitable for tracking terms that are generating lot of tweets (like a conference #hashtag or a live sports event).

How do I upgrade to the Premium Edition of Twitter Archiver
You can use this PayPal link to upgrade to premium. It is $39.99 one-time flat fee and you can use premium for life.

I need help. Who do I contact?
Support is only available with the premium edition. If you have gone premium, use the contact form at ctrlq.org or email amit@labnol.org with your request.

Why user Twitter Archiver when IFTTT or Zapier can also save tweets?
The Twitter Archiver save complete meta-data of the tweets in the spreadsheet, it fetches tweets at a much faster rate and you can visually create and manage search queries from inside a Google Sheet.

I am getting a message from Google saying “The service is using too much computer time for one day”
You can only make a limited number of connections to the Twitter API from your Google Account. If you are tracking too many search terms in the Google Sheet, you might get that error. However, Google will reset the limit every 24 hours so it will resume itself the next day.

How do I save my tweets in other formats like PDF?
Since the tweets are saved in a Google spreadsheet, you can easily export the search results in various formats including PDF, CSV or even publish your data set as an HTML web page (choose File -> Publish to Web inside Google Sheets). Advanced users may try this technique to create JSON or RSS Feeds from Twitter.

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The story, How to Save Tweets for any Twitter Hashtag in a Google Sheet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 21/10/2015 under Twitter, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1k75Reg

Nexus 6P Unboxing & Setup!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K3iMWgAQzI
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Find the Person Behind an Email Address

You have received an email from a person with whom you have never interacted earlier and thus, before you take the conversation forward, you would like to do some research on the Internet to know more about that person. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?

Google is the most obvious place for performing reverse email lookups (just Google for the email address) but if that person doesn’t have a website or if they have never used their email address on public forums, Google will be of little help.

No worries. If you only know the email address of a person and nothing more, here are some ways that may help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.

How to do Reverse Email Search

#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” and are followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the approximate location of the email sender.

#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has a billion users and the likelihood is therefore high that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.

Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the person into the search box and Facebook will instantly tell you if a profile exists with that email address or not.

If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download the profile picture and then upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon in the search box). This acts as a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.

#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

If the email address of the sender is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probability that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.

Gmail users can install the Rapportive add-on and find the Twitter and LinkedIn profiles associated with an email address, if any of them exist. For details, see this tutorial on how to guess someone’s email address.

#4. People Search

Finally, if none of the above tricks work, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

Also see: How to check if an Email address is valid & exists

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The story, Find the Person Behind an Email Address, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 16/10/2015 under Email, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/H9Eul8

Create a Beautiful Photography Website in Minutes

John is not a professional photographer, the day job keeps him busy, but he’s an enthusiast who loves photography. One fine evening, he got a call from someone in his friend’s network who was willing to hire John for a photo shoot but, before signing the contract, they wanted to see more of his work.

John has captured some stunning and impressive photographs over the years but they are clearly not sorted and arranged in a manner that can be easily shared with a client. His photographs can be found all over the social web – from Facebook to Instagram to Flickr – but, for lack of time and technical know-how, he never considered building a portfolio website to showcase his work.

How to Make a Photography Website

There are WYSIWYG website building tools, Squarespace and WordPress for example, that make it extremely easy for you to build beautiful photography websites but the little downside with these tools is that you’ve manually update them every few weeks or months.

Siftr is a new web app that is trying to tackle the same problem but with a “build it, forget it” approach. The app, created by ex-Adobe employees, monitors your Instagram and other social networks, and automatically makes a portfolio website by pulling your ‘best’ photographs. Unlike other website builders that require you to manually upload photographs, Siftr syncs pictures from your social accounts, where you are actively posting pictures anyway, and puts them in your portfolio website.

Here’s a sample photography website that Siftr created using my Instagram page. It created the website and curated the photos automatically and the total time I spent in the entire exercise is 0 minutes. The website is responsive and looks great on a mobile too. Here are better examples.

Smart Categories, like Google Photos

You may be wondering why would anyone need such a tool when similar functionality can be emulated in WordPress using services like IFTTT. For instance, you can have an IFTTT recipe that will automatically cross-post your pictures to WordPress as soon you put them on Facebook or Flickr.

Well, there’s more to Siftr than just syncing your photos from social networks. The tool uses object recognition techniques to automatically classify your photos in categories. For instance, there are categories like “Nature”, “Buildings”, “People”, etc. and the photos are tagged automatically based on the pixels. So if a prospective client is only interested in the landscape photographs, you can directly point him to the relevant tag.

Siftr offers a host of layout templates and you also have the option to remove pictures that you do not wish to show in your portfolio website. At the time of writing this, Siftr can import your photos from Instagram, Flickr and Facebook but there’re adding support for 500px too, all the popular destinations where you’re more likely to upload photographs.

Siftr.co is completely free at though some of the upcoming features, like custom domains, templates, etc. could only be available to premium users.

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The story, Create a Beautiful Photography Website in Minutes, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 17/10/2015 under Instagram, Photography, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1LU9nMi

iPhone 6s #Chipgate: Explained!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1fUil7QLNI
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How to Tell if Apple Magic TrackPad 2 will work with your Mac

Apple’s Magic Trackpad 2 is a new and redesigned multi-touch trackpad that has a larger surface area than the previous trackpad, includes rechargable batteries and supports Force Touch, a technology that lets you do more with a single touch. For instance, you can press the trackpad to select a word on a web page, apply more pressure and it will pop-up the word definition.

Apple Magic Trackpad 2 costs $129 but it isn’t just expensive, it may not be compatible with your older iMac or Macbook. The Apple website suggests that the new Magic Trackpad 2 requires Bluetooth 4.0-enabled Mac running El Capitan (OS X v10.11 or later) and thus it may not work with MacBooks and iMac that are older than 3-4 years.

If you are looking to buy the Trackpad but are not too sure if it will work with your Mac, here’s how you can perform a quick check.

Does your Mac have Bluetooth 4 for Magic Trackpad 2

Click the Apple logo in the menu bar, select “About this Mac” and check for the version number. If it says 10.11, you’ve El Capitan. Next click on “System Report,” select “Hardware” underneath Bluetooth and look for the “LMP Version” in the report. If it says 0x6, it means you’ve Bluetooth 4 on your Mac and the Trackpad 2 will work without issues.

If you prefer the command line approach, open terminal on your Mac and enter the following command to know your Bluetooth version.

system_profiler -detailLevel full | grep “LMP Version”

The LMP (Link Manager Protocol) Version will be 0x6 if your Mac is equipped with Bluetooth 4 or 0x4 if it has an older version of Bluetooth. You should have also upgraded your Mac to OS X 10.11 (El Capitan).

There are inexpensive Bluetooth USB adopters, like the ones from GHS2 and IOGEAR, that will plug into the USB port of your Mac and bring Bluetooth 4 connectivity to even older models but they are not ‘officially’ supported.

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The story, How to Tell if Apple Magic TrackPad 2 will work with your Mac, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/10/2015 under Apple Mac, Software. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1Rc2SSZ

The Extremely Shitty Way One Man Learned He'd Been Fired From Twitter

This morning, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced he’s laying off 336 employees, but would do so “with the utmost respect for each and every person.” Also this morning, Twitter engineer Bart Teeuwisse woke up, checked his phone, and learned that he’d been laid off through iOS notifications.

Read more...

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Twitter CEO Offers Employees a Bold Peek Into Their Jobless Futures

Moto 360 V2 Review!

from Marques Brownlee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IIUHleexIk
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How to Create Photorealistic Screenshots of your Mobile Phone

Capturing screenshots on a mobile phone is easy. If you have an iPhone, press the Home & Sleep buttons and the screenshot image will be saved in the Photos app. Android users can press the Volume Down & Power button simultaneously to capture the screen. And in the case of Windows Phone, press and hold the Start and Power buttons at the same time to take a screenshot.

That’s a raw screenshot saved in your camera roll but if you would like to use that image in your website, a presentation or even in your Apps Store listing, consider adding device frames. This is important because people should be able to figure out whether a screenshot was captured on an iPhone or a Microsoft Lumia or a Google Nexus phone. The device frames can be actual photographs so your screenshot images appear gorgeous and more realistic.

Realistic Device Mockups for Beautiful App Screenshots

A layered photo editing tool like Adobe Photoshop (Win/Mac) or Pixelmator (Mac) makes it really easy for you to add hardware device frames to any screenshot image. Go to Dribbble and search for “freebies PSD <mobile name>” and you’ll find beautiful mockups for any mobile device. The Facebook design team too provides Handskit – photos of hands holding devices that you can use without restrictions.

Download and import the PSD file into Photoshop and then use the File -> Place command to place the screenshot image as a new layer over the device mockup. Then use the Save for Web option to export the image in JPEG format.

[*] Dribbble users usually add the tag “freebies” or “free” to indicate that others can reuse their design(s) for personal and commercial use. Other than Dribbble, Deviant Art and Behance are also good places to discover high-quality hardware mockups for all popular mobile devices.

If you don’t have Photoshop, you can use web apps like Magic Mockups, Dunnnk and Frame to add photorealistic device frames to your mobile screenshots.

These tools offers a collection of professional-quality photographs of mobile phones, tablets and computers placed in realistic settings. You need to drag your app’s screenshot image on to a photograph and it will automatically get placed in the screen area of the mobile device perfectly aligned with the hardware frame pixel by pixel.

Google’s own Device Art Generator lets you quickly add vector device frames around screenshots of Android phones and tablets. Device Art Generator includes templates for Android Wear and all Google Nexus devices. Drag the mobile screenshot image on to a device frame and it will quickly wrap that frame around your image. You also have the option to add screen glare and depth (for perspective) to the generated screenshots.

MockuPhone is another useful web app for adding device frames to your mobile screenshots with a unique feature. You pick a device frame, upload the mobile screenshot image and the tool will generate multiple screenshot images of the same device but at different angles.

The tool produces very high-resolution screenshots and they offer device frames for the iPhone, iPad & iPad Mini, Windows Phone, TV screenshots and Android.

PlaceIt and Mockerie are other good services for adding device mockups to your screenshots but they requires a subscription.

Scenery is a free Mac App that will helps you convert your app screenshots into professional looking and real-life photographs. Launch the app, drag the screenshot and you can instantly preview it inside gorgeous device photos. The starter pack includes a couple of free images of the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phone.

You can also add realistic device frames to your mobile screenshots via email. Just send the raw screenshot image as an email attachment to smartphones@mailchimp.com and, within in a minute or two, they will send you the processed screenshot with the device frame. You can also attach multiple screenshots in the same email message.

The service will automatically detects the mobile device name and the image orientation (portrait or landscape) using the EXIF data in the image and adds the appropriate hardware frame. It supports iPhone, iPad, Galaxy Tab, Nexus and a bunch of mobile device – send an email with the subject “help” to the same address for a complete list.

Finally, if you know a bit of HTML and CSS, you’ll love devices.css. They have created realistic mockups of iPhone, Android, Lumia, iPads and Macbooks using pure CSS and you can add image screenshots and text captions inside the mockups by editing the HTML. The big advantage here is that your text can be read by search engines too.

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The story, How to Create Photorealistic Screenshots of your Mobile Phone, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/10/2015 under Mobile, Screen Capture, Internet. via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog http://ift.tt/1cfoI84