I’m trying to think of something fun to do this weekend. I should probably do something that helps make me feel like I’m making good use of the remaining summer. Alternatively, I could just stay home and relax in the sun. My deck used to get oppressively hot in the summers. It’s nice and has a great view, but it’s not shaded at all. This year I decided to try to fix it by getting a sun shade sail. They generally come in triangle shapes (either equilateral or right) and after I spent an hour measuring and doing the trigonometry, a custom-sized sail was on its way to me. It does a great job of reducing the temperature, and now I can sit out on my deck and read and get some fresh air.

Don and Emily will be back in action at the Kibbles helm next week. Thanks for reading!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily, Amy & Hadley_

When I used to visit my brother at the University of Vermont in Burlington, I’d always pride myself on knowing where the good cheap (or free) parking was in the city. There isn’t much, and most of it necessitates kind of a long walk. It’s not that I’m trying to save the 2-3 dollars on parking. It’s just inconvenient to have to have that much change in my car and then to remember how much time is left on the meter. When I finished college, I remember cleaning out my car and finding over $40 worth of change scattered in all the compartments (a graduation gift to myself?). I’m far neater these days, and don’t have that much change lying around in my car.

A few months ago, I was in Burlington for a doctor appointment and noticed a sticker on the meter where I had parked. It was a number and a little bit of information about an app, “**Parkmobile**”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parkmobile-paid-parking-made/id365399299?mt=8. I was a little skeptical at first but figured I’d give it a try. Here’s how it works…

Once you download the app, you’ll need to make a quick account. This is so you can have a payment method on file. You can use a credit card or PayPal. You’ll also need to enter your car’s plate number. At this point, all you have to do is enter the number on the meter, and choose how much time you’d like to add to your parking session in the app. The numbers on the meters aren’t individual, they represent a parking “zone”. If a meter attendant comes by, they’ll look up to see if your car’s plate number is registered in the app to be parked in that zone, and how much time you have.

The thing I ??really?? like about the app and this system is that I can see exactly how much time remains by just opening the Parkmobile app on my phone. The app will also send you alerts if your time is getting low. The best part is that you can add time to the meter no matter where you are. I was once a few blocks away with my brother and got an alert that my time was low. I fired up the app and added another hour. Easy! I should note that because they’re using credit cards there is a 35-cent surcharge that gets added on to cover the card processing fees. For the convenience of the app though, I’m more than happy to pay it.

So far in Vermont, Burlington is the only city that offers Parkmobile parking, but other cities in the region that offer it are Keene, NH, and a number of areas around Boston. Of course, the NYC area and cities in Connecticut offer it as well. So the next time you’re parking, don’t stress about keeping the meter fed. Give the Parkmobile app a try to help eliminate those parking tickets!

Did you ever want to capture what’s on your screen, or at least a part of it? Screenshots aren’t just for technical writers trying to document app behavior–you might also use them to provide feedback on a photo, to document an error message for someone who helps you with your Mac, or to record a particularly funny auto-correct fail in Messages on your iPhone.

OS X and iOS have both long included built-in screenshot features that make it easy to take a high-resolution picture of what you see onscreen. You can, of course, use a camera to take a photo of your screen, but that will never look as good.

Taking a screenshot in iOS is super simple, and it works the same on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Just press the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons simultaneously. You’ll see the screen flash, and iOS saves the screenshot to your Photos app–look at the bottom of the Camera Roll or, if you’ve turned on iCloud Photo Library, the All Photos album. The same technique works on the Apple Watch, where you press both the digital crown and the side button simultaneously. Accidental presses of those buttons explains why random Apple Watch screenshots might appear in Photos.

On the Mac, you can take your pick from three built-in methods of taking screenshots: (If you take a lot of screenshots, consider memorizing OS X’s keyboard shortcuts.)

# For a full-screen screenshot, press Command-Shift-3.
# For a screenshot of an arbitrary size, press Command-Shift-4 and drag out a rectangle.
# To capture just an object like a window, press Command-Shift-4, hover the pointer over the window, press the Space bar to show the camera cursor over the highlighted object, and then click to take the screenshot. (The Command-Shift-4 shortcut is the only way to capture a menu. All screenshots are saved as PNG files on your Desktop and automatically named with the date.)

If that sounds geeky and hard to remember, try Apple’s Grab app, which is hidden away in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder. It’s a simple app, but it can take full-screen, window, and selection screenshots, and it walks you through the process. You can also use Grab to capture a full-screen screenshot with a timer, which is handy if what you want to record appears only while you’re dragging an icon or other object, for instance. Captured screenshots appear in Grab as Untitled TIFF documents that you can close, copy, save, or print.

Whatever method you choose, remember that a picture is worth a thousand words, and the right screenshot can be even more valuable.

I’m in Tiffin, Ohio heading back to Vermont and I promised Emily that I would write about Apple’s financial results for Kibbles & Bytes. We have had an awesome trip so far and it was even better on Tuesday when I saw Apple’s quarterly results.

The analysts were pretty much gloom and doom and expected Apple to struggle to even meet their guidance for the quarter. But Apple once again beat the street by posting revenue of $42.4 billion and net quarterly profit of $7.8 billion, or $1.42 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $49.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $10.7 billion, or $1.85 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Although the drop in revenues was expected and predicted by Apple, Apple posted both top line and bottom line revenues that exceeded their guidance and analysts’ expectations.

Their guidance for the 4th quarter (July to September) was also stronger than expected with revenue between $45.5 billion and $47.5 billion and gross margin between 37.5 percent and 38 percent. In addition, the Apple board of directors declared a cash dividend of $0.57 per share of Apple’s common stock.

While iPhone and Mac sales continued to slump, mostly due to the lack of new models, iPhone sales were strong, with the iPhone 5se leading the way. iPad revenue took a positive turn up 7% driven by the iPad Pro although unit sales were down. Services revenue was the highest ever and a bright star in the report at just about $6 billion which is up 19% year over year. Services revenue is growing and Tim Cook said he expected services revenue alone to be the size of a Fortune 100 company. Caterpillar, Coca-Cola and Archer Daniels Midland are all at the bottom of that list and if Apple sustains the pace at $6 billion a quarter they will easily make it.

Apple invested $1 billion in Didi Chuxing during the quarter and has cash on-hand of $231.5 billion. The market reacted favorably and pushed Apple up by 7% and they closed today over $104 a share. It was a great quarter for Apple that really shut down the doomsayers. Yesterday, Tim Cook announced that Apple had shipped its 1 Billionth iPhone – an accomplishment that is simply astounding. How many other products can you think of that have sold a billion? I did a little research and well it isn’t even close. The iPhone is the best selling product of all time!

Congratulations to the Apple team for a great quarter!