Found this great little app on the Mac app store, if you use stickies then you will find this a great update. You can create, print and email your nootes you can also password protect any of the nootes you create. I have already switched my Stickies to Nootes.

Open Nootes in the Mac app Store

Or visit there site for more apps, although at the time of writing I couldn’t actually find Nootes on there site?

http://bloop.info/

www.moleskineus.com

macsynology.wordpress.com

Last weekend we went to see David Hockneys exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, he had these large prints in one room from work he had created on an iPad, so when we got back found out he had used an app called Brushes. Brushes has much more than paper but it still doesn’t have the water colour brush of Paper’s, which I love for quick mockups and colouring nor does it have a full colour pallete; something I’m sure they will add in coming updates.

You can find links below to other drawing apps for the iPad.

www.fiftythree.com/paper

www.brushesapp.com

www.cocoabox.com

Fantastical is great app for your mac, it’s a calendar app that works out from your menu bar. You can add and edit calendars items straight from the menu bar. It also works out what your trying to add as you type, so typing the day and time and name of event all gets added automatically.

This has for me been a game changer, you can quickly add events using it’s natural language engine,  it’s expressive and intelligent so you can write in your own style. Fantastical also automatically recognizes the location of your event and can even invite people from your Address Book to the event.

It comes with a 14 day free trial which I would try as I bought my license after about two days of using it!

flexibits.com/fantastical

I have numerous blogs running WordPress and with the latest release it stated I needed to be running PHP5.0 or better and my current dedicated server was running 4.99, or at least that’s what WordPress was telling me when trying to update. WordPress actually wouldn’t update until I had a newer version of PHP running.

So here is what I had to do to get the latest version of WordPress to self update to 3.2.1.

1. You need to update or add an htaccess file to the folder of your site (main root, not wordpress installation)
2. Using textedit/notepad create a blank file and add this to it or open your file “AddType x-mapp-php5 .php” name the file “.htaccess”
3. upload this to the root folder of your site, it will also work for any subfolders within your site so you only have to upload it once.
4.  I used Transmit to upload but any FTP program will do, if you can’t see the file once you have created it (or can’t see this file to begin with as you might already have one on your server/folder) you will need to find the option “to show hidden files”. You will then be able to see the file.
5. go to your Admin in WordPress and try updating again, and it should work.

I found that after initially changing my htaccess file and updating wordpress I only got the homepage of my blog to work, all the other pages brought up an error. It seemed to clear itself after about five minutes and then all the links worked correctly.

You can find out more from 1and1 here.

taptaptap.com

1. Download the Screenstagram screensaver from here, then Double click the icon once you have unzipped the file

2. Install the screensaver

3. Enter your Instagram details when it asks you

4. Browse to the screensaver within your settings and alter them if you need to.

It was developed by the Barbarian Group and you can find out more about it by going to there site www.barbariangroup.com

I was having some issues ripping some DVD’s for my AppleTV, namely kids films by a very well known film company. My children love these films and because they keep getting the DVD’s out and scratching them I wasn’t going to purchase them for the third time. I usually use handbrake for this task but for some reason this disc would copy it in the wrong order, only a few of the chapters would be back to front. If you have this problem then read on to find out how this handy little program has helped.

I use ripit to rip the entire disc  which creates the usual video and audio ts folders, which are in the right order but the file size is to large for what I want. You could burn it to DVD from there but I only want it on my AppleTV or other IOS device. I then use HandBrake to convert these files for my AppleTV, I also have the added bonus now that I can run it back through handbrake again setting the size of the file I want so that I can put more than a few films on my iPad or iPhone for the children to watch.

Ripit also seems to work very fast even ripping the movie at full size, although it has an option to compress the movie for iTunes and your AppleTV much like what you get just using handbrake. It’s a great value liitle app for the mac from the people at the LittleAppFactory.

www.littleappfactory.com

Transferring photos over wifi and for free couldn’t be easier with this free app.

You start it up and just input the IP address in your browser and you can browse the photos from your iPhone on your iPad or Mac using a web browser.

Download for your iPhone or iPad – itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-photo-transfer