Monthly Archives: March 2012

The Hidden Volume Bar

How many of us stumble upon things and get excited. It happens daily, doesn’t it? While reorganizing my iPhone yesterday I happen to discover something that I believe was a feature previously not available or at the very least, not well known. I haven’t heard anything about this anywhere online so I thought I’d share my discovery.

So here’s the tip …

When you double “tap” (more like press) the home button on your iPhone, you will pull up the multitask bar which will present you with all of the apps that are currently running. If you pull it right to left, the list will continue. (Side Tip: The more apps you run, the faster your battery will run out. It’s simple logic.) However if you do the opposite and pull left to right, you will be presented with play controls for your music as well as the lock rotation button. This is nothing new to most but now repeat the action, pull that same bar left to right one more time, and you get a more accurate volume controller. In addition, you can pull up a list of your Air Play devices if any exist on the network. Pretty helpful if you want to quickly share a song with friends or family.

Screenshots


Enjoy :)

Consolidating Multiple Email Accounts

This next post in a small unplanned series of posts related to emails and things related to email, is for a Twitter acquaintance who happened to mention on her talk show, @talkbackshow that she has multiple emails but she would prefer just one. This post is for you @ValTorontoGal!

Many of us over the years have acquired a few different emails. Partially because we liked a particular name string or we created multiple accounts for the various different areas that we partake in socially. As an example, I have a specific email for this blog and for my fitness journal that are separate from each other and my personal account as I do not want to contaminate any one with emails from thee other. Having multiple accounts however, can prove to be a challenge, especially if all the accounts are with the same webmail provider. So how do we go about tackling this?

There are a few different ways. We can link our desktop client with the various accounts, we can manage them on our smartphones and tablets. We can attempt to log into each account in a new and separate windows or consolidate them into a single webmail account that we use most often.

Linking our desktop mail clients, smartphones or tablets is a fairly simple task. Depending upon which device and software you use, will depend on how each handles the multiple accounts. We wont go into any detail regarding these as I think that there are plenty of walkthroughs available online for those who are interested in this option. The only drawback is that you are managing different accounts at the same time and it could become confusing when you attempt to email someone from a specific account but have a few to deal with.

Consolidating all of the accounts into one is how many choose to manage.

Email Forwarding
If the only reason you keep an old email account around is to make sure that you do not miss an email from an old friend or a communiqué from an organization which you left your email with, then email forwarding is the simplest way to consolidate. (For this mini tutorial I will be using my Gmail accounts, because I really only use it for email. These steps are generally universal for every email provider, however some may not offer the same tools. Googling “email forwarding” will most likely yield step-by-step instructions for your particular email provider.)

When logged in through the web portal into your account, head over to settings and locate the tab Forwarding and POP/IMAP.

From here you can setup your current account to forward to another account. Note: you must be logged into the account from which you want to forward emails from. When you click the button a pop up will show a field where you can input the email account to which you want to forward everything to. Once the email has been inputted, a verification email will go out to the email where you are forwarding to, to authorize the action. Once you have done that, that’s it. From this point forward you will be able to see the emails that the particular account sees. The original emails will remain on the account so you may review them when you wish. With this setup you will not be able to reply using the forwarding account but you will be able to through the account that the emails were forwarded to. This is a good way to also ensure that you can let friends and family know that you’ve switched email accounts, because when you reply you will be replying using the new account.

Sending Emails from Another Account
Once you have setup email forwarding, you can take it a step further and also setup to send emails from the account you are receiving emails from. What this allows you to do is to send emails from another email account, while logged into your primary account.

To accomplish this, return to settings but this time look for the Accounts tab. Here you will be able to setup as many accounts as you need. Once you have inputted the email, a confirmation email will be sent to that specific address to verify that you are the owner. Once this has been done, you can now begin composing using a different email address then the one you are using as your primary.

Note: remember to uncheck the option to use the email as an alias. This will eliminate confusion in the inbox on how to reply when replying to an email that was not sent to the primary account, as well it will not force a default to the primary. For further information regarding the difference, check out the link.

Hopefully this little walkthrough will help those who currently manage multiple accounts to do so with a bit of less stress and ease moving forward. Anyone that has any specific question related to this subject, or any others in this mini unplanned “email series” feel free to contact me at marcinsworld@gmail.com or leave a comment.

Cheers!

Saving Important Emails

As the digital era has evolved, the form of communication for many has also changed. It seems that more and more, despite advances, email seems to still be the primary form of communications when it comes to important or sensitive information. Email is a great form of communicating, when done right, but it also leaves people open to a very big problem. How to store those critical emails so that they are there when they are truly needed.

Depending upon where you receive your email, there are different solutions for you to store and backup your critical information. Corporations use servers which are scheduled to backup the exchange accounts. This helps when someone’s computer crashes and needs to rebuilt. This is great, however the end user cannot actually access those backups.

When it comes to personal backups there really is only 1 truly successful way to backup digitally, through the use of a desktop client. A desktop client usually has built in backup or export feature which allows a user to save an email or group of emails to a location outside of where the mail client normally stores information. For Apple users who use Mail, this feature is called Export Mailbox and places a copy of the folder or mailbox in a location specified by the user. In Outlook, for those Microsoft users, this feature is called Auto Archive.

Mail’s “Export Mailbox”
Mail unfortunately has not had much of an improvement to the “archiving” department as I would like to have seen. Particularly it is missing the option to allow the client to automate this process, although I am sure with some fancy coding in AppleScript this is possible. (I am certain that someone may have already done this, however I have not gone out and rigorously looked.) In order to save any important emails you must first sort them into a folder of your choosing and then export the folder.

This of course will only save the individual folder or mailbox you have selected. If however you decide you need to save all of your folders because they are all important, then group all the folders/mailboxes together and proceed with the same steps.

What needs to be noted here however, is that the archives are not as clean as they are for example utilizing Microsoft Outlooks Auto Archive feature. Each individual folder/mailbox will be output separately. This is somewhat of a benefit as well though, because instead of having to import the entire archived file back into the client, you can select those that are of interest to you.

Microsoft Outlook Auto Archive
I wish Apple would take note of this from Microsoft. Yes you Apple fan boys, Apple could learn something here from the big bad wolf. Enabling the client to perform archiving automatically without the need for you to do anything outside of the initial setup, is a relief. The setup is very simple. When you are in the mail portion of Outlook, find the Auto Archive option and select one of the three settings. (Depending upon which version of Outlook you are using, will depend where you can find it. If you are using Outlook 2010, this can be found under the “Folders” tab.) You can default all the settings or customize where the archive file will be placed on your computer and which emails specifically to backup dependent upon how old they are. There is also an option to just completely get rid of the emails. Be cautious though, Outlooks Auto Archive will take ALL of the emails that are older then then set duration and place them into the folder, disregarding folder structures and sorting.

That said, a combination of the two, Mails ability to individually select folders/mailboxes and Outlooks Auto Archive tool, would be a combination that I believe would be difficult to top. However for now it is what it is, and we have no other option as of now.

Web Based Email
Web based emails are great and many offer the same functionality as a desktop client. With the ability to sync in many cases back and forth between mobile devices, webmail becomes a powerful tool. However, when looking into my own webmail client, Gmail, I was unable to find any indication of a “archiving and exporting” feature which would take my emails offline and off the servers. If anyone does discover something direct, meaning not utilizing a desktop email client, please feel free to leave a comment explaining where I and others can find this feature.

Backup the Backup
The very last tip and recommendation I have for everyone, is to backup the backup. Simply put, offload the backup of your important emails to another location aside from your computers internal hard drive. If the hard drive crashes and it becomes unreadable, then all of your archiving and saving will have gone to waste. A nice and easy way to do this is to use a combination of different tools. For myself, I output my mail archives to Dropbox to make available when ever I need it from any computer, as well as copying the archives to an external hard drive I keep safe at home. Redundant backups will ensure that your files are stored away safely in the event that a disaster of any sorts hits.

Happy saving!

Copy a Photo in iOS

As a dedicated iOS user, there are a few things that frustrate me. One of these things was that in order to email a photo from any iOS device, you first needed to go into the Photos app, select the photo you wanted to send and select the option to email it. That’s tedious and it does not help if you are already in the middle of typing the email or perhaps adding already to a conversation.

There is a workaround however. For those that don’t know already, if you press and hold your finger on a photo, the option to copy will prompt. Hit that little button and return to your email. Tap where you would like to insert the photo and a list of option will pop up. One of course being paste. Select it and voilà! Your photo has now been inserted mid paragraph without you having to start a brand new email chain, or sending the photo via iMessage or text.

This tip can be utilized on all iOS devices.

Picture references available for visual learners here:
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