Tag: Software

How to Combine Videos on Your Mac Without Additional Software Using QuickTime X

If you have followed my writing over at DavidJMoore.com then you will know my passion for Taking the Straight Line – getting from A to B as quickly and as simply as possible. I also have a passion for achieving great results using the base apps on both iOS and OS X. This isn’t always possible, but when combining videos it is.

QuickTime X comes pre-installed on all Macs and makes it very simple to combine a set of video files. To do this all you need to do is open the video you want first in the sequence then select the rest of the files in a finder window and drag them onto the video that’s open in QuickTime X. When you do so, you will notice some yellow film placeholders appear where you can drop the files you are dragging onto. You can then rearrange them as you see fit and once done hit File -> Export and you are done.

Do you have any other tips we should share with the wider community? If so let us know HERE or via Twitter.

Create PDFs of Web Pages on iOS

Have you ever needed or wanted to create a PDF version of a webpage? Well now you can using the Workflow app and this post shows you how.

Have you ever found an interesting web article and you wanted to create a PDF of the webpage that you could save for later? Unfortunately Apple has yet to enable ‘Print to PDF’ yet and the most popular method so far has been to send the page to iBooks which will make you a lovely PDF, but then the only way to get it out of iBooks is via Messages or Mail.

However, there is another way using the app ‘Workflow‘ and this article will outline the simple steps needed to create a workflow in ‘Workflow‘ to create a PDF from a webpage on iOS.

  1. Get ‘Workflow‘ from the Apple App Store
  2. Open the app and click the ‘+’ to add a new workflow. You want to create an ‘Action Extension’ in which the three steps you need in your work flow are:
    1. ‘Get Article from Web Page’
    2. ‘Make PDF’
    3. ‘Quick Look’ though this could be substituted with something else like ‘Save to Dropbox’
  3. Save the workflow with whatever name you like
  4. When you are in Safari at the page you want to make into a PDF, you hit the share sheet button (square box with the up arrow) and select ‘Run Workflow’. When ‘Workflow’ opens you tap on the workflow you just created and a PDF will be created!
  5. If you used ‘Quick Look’ as your final step you can then use the share sheet at this point to send the PDF to another app of your choice in iOS.

iOS 9.3 Beta

Find out about Apple’s iOS 9.3 Beta.

Apple has announced iOS 9.3 Beta which is available to public beta testers and developers. iOS 9.3 has several new great features and updates:

  • Night Shift – Uses your location and phone time to turn down the blue light on your screen after sunset and putting it back to normal at sunrise. I’ve used this for a few nights now and it works well.
  • Notes – Ability to finger print protect your notes.
  • News – Improved selection of personal recommendations, landscape mode and a much needed speed boost in new article fetching.
  • Health – General enhancements and improvement in finding apps that report data to the health app.
  • CarPlay – Improved Apple Music with enhanced recommendations. Also ‘nearby’ finds local things like gas stations. 
  • Education Preview – Many new enhancements for education.