Smart Home
Smart Stuff = Smart Home
It seems that everything these days is given the moniker "Smart" but what does it really mean?
Well, in a nutshell, its an easy way of saying that the device/object/thing is interactive, usually via WiFi or bluetooth and more than likely via a mobile app. The idea of the connected home has been a fantasy since the 60's, but now it is slowly becoming a reality.
Here I will run through a few of the most popular and some unusual smart devices available today.
1: Okidokeys Smart Locks
So some might hesitate at the idea of an electronic lock, but they have been around for a while and seem to pass muster. The new part here, however, is the ability to unlock with your mobile device. The advantage here is that you can grant temporary access to trusted parties, i.e friends, neighbours feeding the cat etc and revoke at any time - all remotely.
Price: between £110 - £163
More Info: https://www.okidokeys.com
2: Philips Hue Connected Lighting
Philips introduced the Hue system over a year ago and it has had an exclusive deal with the Apple Stores. This lighting system is very popular because it consists mainly of colour changing bulbs, meaning that you can use your existing light fittings and lamps to create beautiful atmospheric lighting. The boon of Hue is that you can control the overall design of a room - the bulbs are aware of each other and you can create schemes and gradients using the mobile app - even grabbing colours from your photos. There are also modes that assist with relaxation, concentration and sleep.
Recently, Philips also introduced two new members of the hue family, lightstrips - perfect for behind televisions, desks, kitchens etc and Bloom, a connected lamp that flood lights whole walls. All of the hue devices are connected via a little box that you plugin to your home router known as the bridge. Its very simply to set up and can create beautiful light-scapes.
Price: £49.95 - £179.95
More info: http://www.meethue.com/en-GB
3: Withings Body Analyzer
Withings create several health based devices that all have corresponding apps. The first one is the Withings Body Analyzer. This clever little scale is able to record your weight, body fat percentage and also your heart rate. Interestingly, the latest version, also checks your air quality, measuring CO2 readings and the temperature every 30 minutes.
Great for families, you can setup multiple profiles to track goals and measurements separately. Withings has its own tracking app but there are lots of apps that their devices are compatible with.
Price: £129.95
More info: http://www.withings.com/en/bodyanalyzer
4: Belkin Wemo Switch
The Wemo Switch by belkin is simply an adapter that you plug any electrical device into allowing you to remotely control the power from your mobile, wherever in the world you are. You can schedule switches to come on and off at set times. There is a version which comes with a motion sensor to trigger power based on movement and there is also a new version called "insight" that will allow you to track individual expenditure for each device you have connected to a wemo insight adapter. They work in tandem and you can use many throughout your home.
Price: Starts at £39.95
More info: http://www.belkin.com/uk/Products/home-automation/c/wemo-home-automation
5: Parrot AR Drone
Whilst not quite a domestic essential, the AR Drone from parrot is a boat load of fun. The quadrocopter is controlled via an app on your iOS or Android phone and has an on board camera to record video or take stills. Perfect for checking out which neighbours have swimming pools!
Price: £279.95
More info: http://ardrone2.parrot.com/
The Siri Enigma
Siri was perhaps the biggest and most "new feature" of an Apple device for quite some time. How many of us actually use it in day to day life? - I for one haven't been taking advantages of some of the cool things Siri can do and as of iOS 7 Siri has had a bit of an upgrade.
The trouble is, Siri's repertoire is growing and its sometimes hard to even recall what you can ask Him/Her/It to get stuff done.
Heres a great video that reminds us of some of the handy and cool things that the helper with 'tude can do!
Make Address Labels For Your Christmas Cards
Its a basic and very simple little thing, printing address labels. It happens to be something that many people miss on their Macs, however. You can customise the look and feel and add a logo or icon depending on the holiday.
Most label packs will have a Avery number or equivalent which means you do not need to layout etc just type in the number and away you go. 9-5 Mac has posted a nice brief article on how to nail this time saving task!
[button link="http://9to5mac.com/2013/12/07/how-to-print-customized-address-labels-for-holiday-card-envelopes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+%289+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence%29" size="medium" newtab="on"]Click Here To Read[/button]
Learn the basics of Colour Theory
Colour is manipulative, controlling, enchanting and beguiling. It follows, then, that it pays dividends to learn the basics of what makes colour work and how to effectively use it in your design and branding projects. Not everyone studies colour theory at school nor has had the pleasure of reading Kandinsky's work notes on its psychological and spiritual effectiveness.
I just discovered, however, a rather spiffy website that goes far in visually explaining the basic fundamentals of colour theory as well as providing some links to some very useful tools.
[button link="http://www.rocket-design.fr/color-template/" size="medium" newtab="on"]Click Here to Visit[/button]
Sapphire to make your tech sparkle!
So according to reports it looks like Apple may be looking to replace the Gorilla Glass on its devices with Sapphire. At the moment Sapphire glass is 10-30 times more expensive than Gorilla Glass from Corning, however, it appears that Apple has invested heavily in the development of the production process of Sapphire glass (which is already used for the home button on the iPhone 5s).
Apple has made a deal with the manufacturer, GT Advanced Technologies, and together with a Solar Panel Company Apple acquired to access its Ion Particle Accelerator technology, it will be able to manufacture the thin slices of sapphire at a much lower price. This may mean that before long the entire screens of our devices will be super hard waring.
Personally, I look forward to the day that I don't have to apply one of those awful bubble blighted screen protectors.
Going Paperless
My office is far from spacious and as such the paper mountain is just simply not an option. Despite most of the world going digital, so much of our lives is still paper based.
Until companies, governments and our employers get with the programme we still have to battle against the accumulation of dead trees.
This is where technology can really play its part in simplifying your life and streamlining how you handle your paper work.
The first thing you should think about is investing in a really powerful scanner. Not the kind for scanning photos but the kind that can scan quickly and two sides at the same time. The Fuji Scan Snap range of scanners are pretty flawless.
The Scan Snap ix500 is the latest from Fuji and packs many brilliant features but the most interesting is the ability to scan straight to you ios devices.
It is certainly not cheap but its super speed double side scanning and the fact it handles all different sizes of paper at once means you can fill it with invoices, bills, business cards and receipts and in a couple of seconds the whole lot is digitised.
There are lots of services and software out there for the storage of your docs. Here are some links to some that you might find useful.
Evernote - The ever useful and ever free evernote is superb for scanning to and is often integrated into the scanners software.[/one_half_last]
Paperless - I use this software as its very similar to the Finder you have on your mac and it has basic OCR (optical character recognition what this means, in a teeny tiny nutshell, is that the documents you scan are converted into searchable pdfs, saving time in tagging and naming files as all the text is searchable.
Yep - This little gem is great for those of you that like to use tags to organise your world. You can download a demo from their website.
One of the other elements of my near paperless life is the ability to make reasonable scans with my iPhone. I only have an iPhone 4 and yet the camera is more than suitable enough to scan documents. There is an app that makes things very simple and that is Genius Scan.
There are hundreds of scanning apps for iPhones and I have tried many of them and this one is heads and shoulders above the rest.
The main trick for me is its ability to auto crop and size your snaps as well as converting to High Contrast black and white which means that those wrinkled up thermal printed receipts that are normally so difficult to capture are made super clear and easy to read.
Genius Scan - An iPhone app I simply can't be without!
What do you use? do you have any gems to share? If so please leave a comment below :)
Open Brand: Amazing storage of your company Brand Assets.
Web apps pop up and disappear all the time, mostly over promising and under delivering.
Open Brand, however, is very different.
When one begins the arduous task of building a company brand, it can be a messy undertaking. You end up with PDF, Illustrator, Photoshop & InDesign files all over the place. This does no favours for the streamlining and improvement of your brand over time. Open Brand provides a neat little spot to put all of these files as well as buildings a digital style guide to your companies image.
The great thing about Open Brand is it allows you to make your assets public, so if you require that the press or partnering companies use the exacting standards that you have used yourself, there really is no excuse for them to mistype a tag line or get the spacing wrong on a logo.
Best of all its free for up to 15 assets (which is more than enough for the vast majority of companies).
I can see this being very useful for designers who create brands for other companies (a la me!) and looks like they are constantly improving things.
Do take a look!
www.openbrand.com
Cheat Sheet
Who doesn't like a little helping hand now and then?
With the tons of apps we all seem to have installed on our macs these days its no surprise that its no shortcut learning keyboard shortcuts, especially for those apps you do not use all the time.
This is where the beautifully simple cheat sheet comes in.
Simply install and then whenever you need a prod/reminder of the keyboard shortcuts just press and hold the command key et voila!
http://www.grandtotal.biz/CheatSheet
Easy Business Plan Production
