App of the Month – Skitch

App of the Month – Skitch

If a simple screenshot app is what you’re looking for, then Skitch is the answer. A big part of web design is getting the layout right.  Sometimes it’s easier to take a quick picture of a page and mark it up with the revisions to send to a client.  Using a Mac, taking screenshots and marking them up can be easily done right through Preview.  A lot of people don’t know that a quick Shift-CMD-3 will take a full screen snapshot or that Shift-CMD-4 will let you use crosshairs to select the part of the screen you want to capture.  If you didn’t know that, well now you do.  It’s quick and easy.  It will also litter your desktop with screenshots. Skitch is an amazing little program.  Once it’s installed a small heart shaped icon shows up in the menu bar.  Click the arrow to drop down the options menu.  The top two options are the ones I use the most. Crosshair Snapshot and Fullscreen Snapshot. Crosshair snapshot lets you draw a box around exactly what you want a screenshot of. Fullscreen snapshot does just what it says.  You get a snapshot of the entire screen. Other options include: Frame Snapshot – Allows you to select content in the Skitch frame while still being able to move the page or window behind it. Snap from link – Allows you to take a screenshot of a webpage with it’s url. Cam Snapshot – Allows you to take a picture with your computer’s webcam. Once you’ve taken a snapshot Skitch will open up a window with your screenshot and all of...
App of the Month – LastPass

App of the Month – LastPass

Do you know what the 3 most common passwords were in 2013? 123456 password 12345678 Why would anyone use a password that is so easily overcome by someone trying to hack into their account? Simple. We have too many passwords that we need to live in our online lives.  Websites, programs, computers, phones….  There are so many times a day we need passwords sometimes it’s just easier to put in something anyone can remember. Raise your hand if you have a pad of paper somewhere with a bunch of websites and passwords all written down, scratched out and re-written because you couldn’t remember a password and had to reset it.  Again. I started using LastPass years ago and have never looked back.  I don’t use it on my phone or iPad, but it is a vital part of my daily life so I think it makes a great App of the Month.  LastPass is a freeware password manager (there is a premium version too) that helps you keep track of all of your passwords.  It will even keep your passwords ready for you on multiple computers if you use more than one.   Once you’ve signed up for a LastPass account and installed the app, LastPass will ask you every time you log into a website if you would like it to remember your password.  Now, most browsers will do this already, but if you use more than one browser, or computer, LastPass will keep all of your passwords unified across all of them. LastPass keeps your passwords in your LastPass Vault and can automatically fill in your information the next time...
App of the Month – SwiftKey

App of the Month – SwiftKey

There are certain apps and programs that I use daily and can’t imagine living without, so I’ve decided to share some of my favorites.  For the first of my “App of the Month” posts I picked the keyboard app for Android phones and tablets called SwiftKey. Not everyone knows it but you can change keyboards in Android if you don’t like the stock keyboard.  In fact, you can customize almost every aspect of an Android phone to your liking. Having come from an iPhone (that I loved) this was a welcome change.  I still use my iPad daily but really dislike the stock keyboard. Especially since I came across SwiftKey. What makes SwiftKey so great? SwiftKey has an amazing word-prediction system at its core.  The more you use it, the more it learns the way you type. As you’re typing it constantly gives you 3 choices of what it thinks you are trying to type. If the word in the center is what you want simply hit the spacebar and it types it in for you.  This is where it gets good.  After the first word is in, it starts predicting what your next word might be.  If you see the word you want in the three choices just tap it and move on.  I’ve typed texts and emails where I’ve gone 10+ words without typing a key.  It’s like it knows what I’m thinking. It’s almost creepy how it works.  The app can even be set to analyze your sent Google email, Facebook posts, and sent tweets to determine commonly used words and phrases.  SwiftKey’s predictive abilities are my...