Most photographers realise the importance of keywords, as they have thousands of shots to wade through in iPhoto. Keywords help them find photos in seconds rather than minutes. Now that many of us carry a camcorder around (courtesy of our iPhone), we may have hours of footage to wade through. As our iMovie Event Library grows, it makes sense to add keywords to our collection of video clips, so that we don’t have to waste time scrolling through events trying to remember when we shot a specific video. Luckily iMovie makes it a doddle to add keywords to bits of footage (or the entire clip) by ticking boxes.

If you are any kind of musician then you’ll know that practice makes perfect. It’s a universal rule and one that, if kept to, can improve your skills dramatically – even over a short period of time. As a Mac user you have a fantastic practice tool at your disposal in the form of GarageBand. The free music suite that comes pre-loaded on all new Macs is a total powerhouse, and one of the many unsung features is Magic GarageBand. Often regarded as a bit of a gimmick, Magic GarageBand actually has the power to be incredibly useful for musicians wishing to practice in a live situation without inviting the band or orchestra round to rehearse. It comes pre-loaded with nine styles for you to play along with and, as an added bonus, you can delve into any of these and edit them so they are tailored to suit your needs. As you would expect, the process is simplicity itself. Users of older Macs may find that Magic GarageBand takes a few minutes to load, but just be patient as the system is a little heavy on the processors.

Eye Candy 6 is the latest plug-in to come from Alien Skin Software, the manufacturers behind many creative extras for Photoshop and other image-editing applications. Eye Candy 6 is aimed mainly at graphic design users, but there are also plenty of ways that it can be used to benefit photographers.

The plug-in, which can be hosted by Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 and Fireworks, has a total of 30 filters and over 1,000 presets. It has also been tailored for more professional users by enabling CMYK colour mode use and support for 16- bit images. There are two key areas to this bundle. First up is Textures, which is accessed from the Filter menu. These textures can be applied to a whole image or a selection. The textures don’t look like much at the first viewing, but when you start to think outside the box you realise how handy they can be. For example, the Marble texture will quickly fill in a floor or table selection and look photo-realistic, and we found that when added to a whole photo with the opacity dropped down, it made a great weathered, old photo effect.

The other main area of the bundle is Text and Selections. These are more designer- focused, but if you need to create websites, logos or portfolio page headers to show off your photography then this offers a great range of effects that can be applied to text or selections (as the name would suggest) much more easily than trying to create the same ones from scratch. The interface is really easy to get to grips with and there are so many presets, it’s likely that you won’t have to do much tweaking with the sliders present – especially as the effects will adapt to your image’s size. One of the best things about this plug-in is that it exports the effects applied on a separate layer, so that you can reduce the opacity, change the blending mode or incorporate a mask to tailor the effect. The filters are also compatible with Photoshop’s Smart Filters for a non- destructive method of editing, making this a powerful option indeed. There’s even an option to take a ‘tour’ through a filter’s most interesting features by selecting the Settings Tour option.

Panning photos are a great way of conveying a sense of action, energy or motion and they’re easy to master once you have the basic technique nailed.

Join Andrew Newey in his weekly travel photography blog at http://news.dphotographer.co.uk/category/blog/ and bag yourself some must-have photography techniques.

Our very good friends over at the Studio of Dreams (ustwo™) have been locked away for the last few months creating a brand new iPhone app for fashion giant H&M. This new localised app offers a range of functionality for H&M customers throughout the world. With a rich, feature-filled user experience the app has been designed and developed to engage consumers and offer localised and relevant news and promotional incentives.

The app delivers the most up to date online content and stands apart from the competition on the App Store. The H&M Home Screen is a 3D fashion gallery-like interface that allows users to swipe through campaigns and access further areas of the application. Users can check out the latest styles & fashion videos and browse the selection of garments in each of the campaigns. “My Wishlist” allows users to save and share their favourite garments with their friends via Facebook or e-mail.

Other notable features include:
• Store locator including search based on positioning
• My H&M featuring “My Wishlist ” and offers
• Sharing functionality via Facebook and email
• In Stores Now
• Fashion News, updated every week with localised content
• Fashion Video
• Sign Up to receive first access to special offers and announcements

Fredrik Oscarson, co-founder and creative director of Mobiento, said: “It is an app that will be truly useful for H&M’s customers who can use it every day for inspiration, to plan shopping or to share styles with friends via social medias. Our aim was also to give users a great experience in terms of design, look and feel and I believe we managed to do just that!”

John Sinclair, co-founder of ustwo™, adds: “H&M’s brand power and its early adopter status in terms of embracing marketing initiatives and technology, means that this app will be in the hands of users throughout the world.  We look forward to implementing new features to keep the app relevant and highly useful for all.”

- Having just spent some time using the app, its clear that this could well be the future of shopping. The slick interface invites exploration, regardless of overwhelming interest in fashion. For those who really are keen on looking their best, then this app will no doubt become an essential part of the shopping ritual. The localisation adds significantly to the relevance of the app. It may sound like a no-brainer, but making sure that customers can actually buy the products they’re looking at, from the country they are in, is pretty important. So, once you’ve told the app where you live, you can flick your way through the collections, offers and other cool media and then go to a store and buy whatever you’ve seen that you like. This could make shopping trips far more efficient. More than anything its the way that this app is put together that will keep users coming back to it. Its simple, clear, fun and functional  – not to mention completely free. Download now from here

iPhoto is an indispensable hub for digital snapshots. Whether it’s photos taken with digital cameras or movies captured by iPhones, iPhoto houses them all. But the increasing load carried by the program leads to a problem: how to organise photos so you don’t mix all your duff shots with your best ones. This walkthrough shows you how to quickly apply ratings to images – even rating more than one image at a time – and how to use that information to sort your snapshots. You can use a mix of Smart Folder and filtered views to ensure that your favourite shots are always near to hand.

It’s a real sign of the times that we expect to be able to access all of our files from any location. We can’t tell you the number of times we’ve forgotten a file and assumed there must be a simple way to grab it from our desktops, only to be stumped by a lack of a solution. Of course, there is the Back To My Mac service offered by Apple, but it’s not always a possibility on a networked work computer. And there’s MobileMe and iDisk, but that comes at the cost of a subscription which mounts up year on year. But another possibility is this clever product, the oddly named PogoPlug. It’s basically a base station that connects to your router and can be connected to up to four hard drives. These can then be accessed and written to from any computer with an internet connection.
There are a number of similar products to this available on the market but their success hinges on one major factor: ease of use. It was apparent from the moment of unboxing and logging into the PogoPlug website that it had totally nailed it. The system is simplicity itself. The website will guide you through the set-up process and then you can add a number of perks – like a dedicated desktop app and an iPhone app (but more about those later).

Once you’ve plugged in the very funky white and pink unit (it’s probably not to everyone’s taste, but it’s definitely a conversation starter) and connected it to your router the light will turn green, which means it has found the internet connection and is using it. You can then attach all the drives you want. We were a little disappointed that there was no FireWire option, but we consoled ourselves that – given the files are uploaded over the internet – speed isn’t going to be a massively attainable goal. There are enough connections for four hard drives, which means that as your storage needs grow you can just add more drives. Once that’s all sorted you can log into the system by creating a new account. All you need to do is provide an email address and create a password. You will then be sent a confirmation link to activate the account. Once activated you’ll be presented with a very pink but very MobileMe-esque interface. This allows you to navigate the connected drives to view pictures, and you can also upload to them and download from them via this interface too.

Much of the success or satisfaction you will get from this system, given that it works so well, is going to depend on your internet connection. It’s worth remembering that while uploads from your home connection, where you pay a premium for speed, may not translate into speedy access should you have to connect from a slower public computer elsewhere. We found that the actual service itself was flawless, but connection speeds greatly affected our satisfaction when accessing, uploading and manipulating files. The major benefit of this system over where the files are kept on the system’s servers is that there’s no limit to the amount of space used. If you have four 2TB hard drives connected you can view and access 8TB of data – granted it may not be speedy, but it’s doable

This system as it is would be more than worth the single payment of £99, but PogoPlug gets really serious by offering not only a desktop app for ease of use at home, but also an iPhone app so you can keep tabs on things wherever you are. We’ve no doubt that at some point an iPad app will also appear, but at the time of writing it’s just the iPhone app available (which could be run on an iPad anyway). It’s a simple app that has some incredible features. As long as the files are formatted correctly and you have a quick enough connection, you can listen to music, view pictures and even watch movies on your iPhone using the bundled app. This will be a killer feature on the iPad, which doesn’t have massive storage, so remote access to your files is a huge plus. The desktop app is a very simple drop-box system based around a Finder-like interface – it’s functional and intuitive, which is more than we can ask for.

We are incredibly impressed with the PogoPlug and think that, not only does it offer one of the most simplistic set-up systems available on the market, but the remote access from iPhone (and hopefully soon iPad) makes this base station exceptional value for money. We have no doubt that some people will instantly be put off by the pinkness of the unit, but we urge all of you with aversions to bright colours to see beyond it and try this product anyway. The PogoPlug makes remote access to files a breeze and can provide you with a way to access your entire movie library from a mobile device wherever you are. Awesome.

Now that you’ve finally got your hands on a shiny new iPad, one of the first things you’re going to want to do is add a contact to the sumptuous Contacts app. It works in much the same way as the app on the iPhone. It still has easy-to-find buttons and an intuitive natural feel, but rather than having the screen shunt to the right through each menu, you get nice pop-up boxes that make even more sense than the iPhone ever did. If you’re new to the whole touch concept then this process will be a revelation in simplicity. Not only can you add all the pertinent information you need, but there are cool little extras that make the system very slick and easy to use. The Contacts app will work in both landscape and horizontal mode, but we found that having all that screen real estate was suited better, in this instance, to the horizontal mode. The app is designed to look like an actual physical book and it gives the whole process a cool old-world feel. You can literally feel your way around all of the apps on the iPad, and the Contacts app is no different. Even if you make a mistake, you can go back and edit anything you like over and over again. You can also sync existing contacts from iTunes into the app.

As hard drives get older and more files are written to and from them, the information can become fragmented. This is where parts of a single file are split up and saved in different locations on the drive, so accessing them is slower than if they all existed together. This problem occurs regularly on Windows, but Mac OS X fairs much better because the system regulates itself – but that doesn’t mean that after a while fragmented disks can’t become a problem. Luckily, there are great tools like iDefrag that can perform the necessary repairs to your system. iDefrag has several powerful tools that are used offline and will completely compact and defrag the hard drive. We’ll be looking at the much simpler Quick (online) tool that you can use while your Mac is active. The system will identify fragmented files and free space, reorganising them so that the disk performs quicker.

Most of the time, when people create Keynote presentations, they are  silent. This doesn’t mean to say that you can’t add audio to one of your presentations, though. You can, in fact, add music and video clips with ease, but you could also have a little fun with your project by including sound effects when you trigger a specific action or build. This could be used for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the clip requires a particular snippet of music to set the scene or a well-placed sound effect to add emphasis. We’ll show you how to achieve this over the next two pages, although be aware that this will not work if you’re planning on creating an interactive project.