Author: Emily Dolloff

  • It’s been a busy few weeks in our South Burlington service department. We’ve added two new team members in the last few weeks, “Justin Pryce”:http://blog.smalldog.com/authors/justinpryce and “Jordan Hoekstra”:http://blog.smalldog.com/authors/justinpryce. Justin is working on his certifications for Apple and Jordan is one of our front-line service employees working at at the service counter. We are very excited to have these two new members on our team. As I’ve mentioned in previous issues of Tech Tails, we spend a lot of time working with our new hires on trainings and certifications. These two team members have a lot of work ahead but they are taking on the challenges with ease.

    In addition to our regular staff trainings, communication is also a key component to our service department. We have weekly meetings and e-mails within the service department. It’s important to us that the entire team is kept up to date on any changes to Apple service guidelines as well as our own internal processes. A lot of effort goes on behind the scenes everyday to ensure customers and staff have a seamless and cohesive experience when entering our service department.

    I hope that everyone is getting their spring projects wrapped up. Spring is in full bloom around my house and the list of chores both inside and outside seems never ending this time of year. I’m determined to keep up my momentum this year. It seems each spring we start two or three too many projects before summer hits and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that unfinished spring projects quickly become last minute fall projects. I’m hopeful and optimistic that this year I’ll break the cycle.

    Thank you for reading!
    Emily Dolloff
    “emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

  • Notes!

    I have been a fan of Notes for years! I started out using the Notes program on my mac and used it for…

  • We Don't Need No Stinking Badges

    But stickers are sorta cool. iOS 10 brought stickers to Messages. With your iPhone or your iPad you can embed stickers in a…

  • Teleporting Web Links Between Devices

    Many of us use multiple Apple devices throughout the day and I am most definitely one of those people. I had one sad little tear this morning when I arrived at the office as I realized I left my iPad on my nightstand and had to actually take my MacBook Air into my morning meeting. I’ve grown very accustomed to preparing for meetings on my MacBook Air and then just grabbing my iPad or iPhone to bring the necessary notes and files while on the move around the office. I’ve talked a lot about sharing of files from device to device, but what about web pages? Many users rely on bookmarks and that works smoothly, but there are other options as well.

    With the release of Yosemite Apple introduced hand off. For some users it might have been something utilized all the time and then fell off their habits list, but it’s super handy! If you’re researching an issue on your Mac and after digging through several forums you need to need leave for an appointment but you want to keep the research going, in comes handoff.

    Handoff allows you to immediately move a webpage ( and other Apps like Mail ) instantly to another Mac or iOS device. On your Mac, to the very left of your dock if you have Safari open you will see a Safari icon with a shadow image of an iOS device. You can simply click on that and boom, the webpage that was on your iPad or iPhone is now on your Mac screen. If you’re going from your Mac to your iOS device you will see the Safari icon in your lock screen and you simply swipe up. You can also double press your home button as well to access the information.

    Another cool feature that you might have found by accident is via tabs in safari on either you Mac or iOS device. When you open a page in Safari a tab opens. You can see this easily on your Mac in the Tab Bar ( select View > Tab Bar if you don’t see it). It gets just a little bit cooler when you view all the open tabs on all your Apple devices. You can do this by tapping or clicking the tabs button. This button is a double square image on the top right of your Safari tab bar or the lower right corner on your iOS device. In this view you will see first all the tabs from the device that you are using. Beneath them as you scroll down you will see the tabs from your other Apple devices.

    Lastly, you can designate a site as a reading list. Safari can store a list of pages that you want to read later in the reading list. This is great for longer articles or just tagging an interesting recipe you found at lunch. To add the current page to your reading list on the Mac choose Bookmarks > Add to Reading List. On your iPhone or iPad, tap the share button and them tap Add to Reading List. To later access your reading list on your Mac choose View > Show Reading List Sidebar. In Safari on your iOS device, tap the book icon and then tap on the eyeglasses icon.

    In order for these features to work seamlessly on your Mac and iOS devices there’s a few important tips. First you need to be running 10.10 Yosemite or newer and at least iOS 8 on your iPad or iPhone. Lastly all of your devices need to be logged into iCloud. It’s also important that you have Bluetooth turned on as well, since handoff uses that specifically.

  • “!http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5045.jpg!”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002669/congratulations-class-of-2017?

    It’s hard to believe that graduation season is upon us! Whether you want to get a gift for that special grad on your list, or just something for yourself, we’ve got some great deals! The best part? You don’t have to be a student, a graduate or have a diploma in hand. These specials are for everyone and we have “special financing”:http://www.smalldog.com/finance/affordable-financing-options options both in store and online.

    p{text-align: center;}. “**Get a FREE Hyper drive with the purchase of a Space Gray MacBook 12in 1.2GHz 8GB/512GB and AppleCare**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002660/get-a-free-hyper-drive-with-the-purchase-of-any-in-stock-macbook-with-applecare

    p{text-align: center;}. “**Get a FREE Hyper drive with the purchase of a Silver MacBook 12in 1.2GHz m5 8GB/512GB and AppleCare**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002662/get-a-free-hyper-drive-with-the-purchase-of-any-in-stock-macbook-with-applecare

    p{text-align: center;}. “**Free charging cable and wall charger with iPad Pro 9.7in and AppleCare+**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002667

    p{text-align: center;}. “**Free charging cable and wall charger with iPad and AppleCare+**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002664

    “See all of our deals”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002669/congratulations-class-of-2017? to order online or visit one of our “stores”:http://www.smalldog.com/retail/visit-us-in-store-at-any-of-our-locations

    “!http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5044.jpg!”:http://www.smalldog.com/retail/visit-us-in-store-at-any-of-our-location

  • There’s a lot of behind the scenes effort and training that goes into our service department. Small Dog Electronics is an authorized service provider for Apple computers, and this authorization comes with a lot of training and safety measures within our service department. Every computer that is checked into our service department goes through a checklist of Apple diagnostics and processes to accurately determine how to best resolve the issue that the machine is experiencing. Additionally all of our technicians go through a fairly intense and lengthy training processes before they begin working on customer machines. Even once a technician is certified as a Apple Certified Mac Technician their training does not end. With each new computer release technicians are required to take exams and training sessions on any new machine prior to working on that unit. We’ve recently had two new members join our South Burlington service team and they are currently going through our training process and certification steps. They begin their training at our service counter doing check in and check out of computers coming through our service department. We’re looking forward to having two more members in our service department trained and ready to help keep our service department running smoothly and efficiently.

    As a customer one of the most frustrating repairs that computers can need are battery replacements. To try and help customers get their computers back as efficiently as possible we’ve set up new processes and procedures within our service department over the last few weeks to get these machines back as quickly as possible. We know that down time for computer repair is a huge inconvenience for many users so we do our best to get machines back to our customers. If you feel that your computer is in need of a battery replacement and you want to find out more about pricing and turn-around time send an e-mail to “support@smalldog.com”:mailto:support@smalldog.com

    Our first flower bloomed this week at our main office in Waitsfield and the grass has begun to turn green. It’s really starting to look and feel like spring in Vermont.

    Thank you for reading!
    Emily Dolloff
    “emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

  • Notes!

    I have been a fan of Notes for years! I started out using the Notes program on my mac and used it for everything, and sadly, I mean ??everything?? including usernames and passwords. Thankfully I learned many years ago safer means of account login storage and abandoned my sticky note ways on my Mac.

    What I missed most about my sticky notes was a quick and all in one location for things I needed to jot down, hello and welcome notes! Notes has been out for many years and it’s certainly nothing new on iOS or macOS. Notes is an incredibly versatile program and one that I rely on heavily as another tool for keeping me organized and in order. I’ve written in the past about reminders, but I admit, try as I might I just can’t get away from Notes and find its versatility in features to be something that reminders just can’t compete with. There are several features within the notes program that go beyond just taking a simple note, and I want to share some of my favorite features.

    **Syncing**

    I think the ability to sync my notes across all of my devices is hands down the number one reason I use and just can’t break away from this handy little app. I can write a note on my computer and it automatically sends the note to my iPad and iPhone. With iCloud turned on and note syncing your notes update across all devices that are logged into your iCloud account. There is one catch to the auto syncing that is new in the last year or so. In order for your iOS devices and your Mac to get your notes you do need to make sure that in addition to to iCloud being turned on, all of your devices need to be running the latest OS. Last week I had an issue where my notes were syncing from my iOS devices to my Mac, but not from my Mac to my iOS devices. A quick look at my devices revealed I hadn’t run my most recent software updates.

    **Drawing**

    Did you know that you can draw within the notes program? Notes allows you to actually write a note in your own handwriting, but also allows you to draw and there is even a handy ruler so you can draw straight lines. There are a variety of colors to choose from to put a pop of color in and you have a choice of a pencil, and two marker options. The details aren’t as responsive or detailed as that of say the iPad Pro. But this little feature allows for handy on-the-go creations. You can easily and quickly sketch out an idea via e-mail, text and even social media. This feature only really works on the iOS, you can do some similar actions on the Mac via Mark Up.

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    **Mark Up**

    Within notes you can insert a pictures from your photo library (on the Mac you can just drag and drop the image into your note) and then you can mark it up! You can draw over the image, add text, shapes and more. I recently used this feature specifically when I was working to re-model and paint a room in my house. We took pictures of the room and used the mark up feature to finalize what colors and changes we were going to make in the room.

    **Locking Notes**

    Another cool feature with the notes program is that you can lock the notes. The only information that is viewable in the note is the title. A passcode must be entered on the computer or iOS device in order to see what is in the note. This is a great way to keep things just a little bit more secure on your devices. While you should keep things like passwords and account information securely stored in your keychain, this is another option. Admittedly if you’re given a code or access to something and need the information temporarily, it’s more practical to jot it in Notes and lock it. Likewise if your a busy mom or spouse and you find yourself making notes about a special event or gifts it’s nice to know you can keep wondering eyes away from your information and keep the surprise.

    Notes, the little app that does so much!

  • Reviewing The New iPad

    I’ll start this article by saying some of this information might come as a bit of a surprise to some of our readers, but I’ve passed up multiple iPad revisions and releases and have been using outdated technology for years! Normally when something new comes out from Apple, that product lands in my hands fairly quickly after the release. But for various reasons, I’ve stuck with my **original 16GB iPad mini** and passed up several generations of upgrades.

    We just started getting shipments in small batches of the 9.7″ iPad and I got to thinking that it’s time to upgrade my old faithful mini and officially pass it along to my youngest daughter. I’m a huge fan of the size of the iPad Mini and debated for several days if I wanted the iPad Mini 4 or the iPad with 128GB of storage. Ultimately I decided to go back to the larger screen and upgraded to the new iPad 9.7″ as I’m now using my iPad more for video watching.

    The reviews of the new iPad are mixed, it’s heavier than the iPad Air 2 it replaced and is slower than the iPad Pro. When I first took mine out of the box the weight was the first thing that I noticed; it does feel heavy. I held it up against the iPad Air 2 and it’s amazing that such a small difference seems so significant. Coming from a background of using a mini for the last several years it’s no surprise the weight was a temporary negative for me when I was unboxing the iPad.

    My reasons for upgrading were primarily speed of the iPad in everyday use and storage. With more and more streaming options and the ability to download and view content offline I found the battle of storage to be never ending. My first big test of the iPad was using Safari, running different apps and accessing my iCloud drive. Knowing this release was in some regards just a minor bump and refresh of the mid-range iPad family lineup this was an important trial for me. For someone going from an older and outdated iPad to this unit, there is a huge difference! Where I saw delays in just the apps themselves opening or just opening a new browser window on my old mini I experience none of that with the new iPad. Even something that seemed insignificant like how fast the screen rotates from portrait to landscape suddenly seems lightning fast, I actually debated turning off that feature while playing around with the iPad.

    I also spent some time both taking pictures and transferring some photos from my iPhone 7 plus. I was very impressed with both the image quality of the photos that I took and the viewing quality of photos that I moved from my iPhone. For an iPad and comparing it against some older models there’s a significant improvement with the photo quality. I then spent a little bit of time comparing sound quality from the iPhone 7 plus and the iPad and that one is a tough call. In our unofficial testing here at the office there was slight disagreement over which sounded better, so I’ll leave that final decision as undecided.

    Ultimately I went with the new iPad and my only regret is that I couldn’t get it in Rose Gold to match my watch and iPhone. This revision is not meant to compete with the iPad Pro in my opinion, but it’s a huge upgrade and an impressive unit for hold outs like myself. Apple has reduced the pricing and increased the storage capacities of their mid level iPads and I think that’s huge for the everyday iPad user like myself.

  • Track Down Rogue Apps That Are Slowing Your Mac

    Does it seem like your Mac is running slowly? It’s always possible that you need more RAM, a speedy SSD to replace a slow spinning drive or even a new Mac. But you might just have a rouge app that’s hogging your Mac’s CPU. Here’s how to figure out if that’s the problem.

    The key is in your Activity monitor bundled right into every Mac. Open your Applications folder and scroll down until you see the Utilities folder. Open that to find and double-click Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor can seem a bit hectic because it lists every “process” running on your Mac. You’ll see processes for activities like Mail and Safari, some apps use multiple processes and macOS itself relies on a ton of processes at once as well.

    Notice in the picture below, at the top of the Activity Monitor there are buttons that provide access to different views: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk and Network. Those views show the impact each process has on those aspects of the Mac. For now, I’ll focus on the CPU view that’s the default, but if you were trying to figure out why your MacBook Pro’s battery was draining so quickly, you’d look in the energy view for example.

    At the bottom of the CPU view is a graph of CPU load, and numbers that correspond to how much of that load comes from the system and much from the (apps you’ve launched). As long as the sum of those numbers stays under 100% most of the time, you’re probably fine. But if you’re near or at 100%, you’ll want to hunt for rogue processes.

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    To identify them, click the % CPU column header to sort the process list by CPU power. If necessary, click again to change the direction of the sort so the arrow next to % CPU is pointing down, so those processes using the most CPU power are at the top. Be aware that the percentages in this column are by core (unlike the graph and numbers at the bottom), so a runaway app on a 4-core iMac could claim to be using as much as 400%in the % CPU column.

    Now watch the list for a while. If one of the processes is sucking CPU power, you’ll see it at the top of the list. If it matches an app you’ve launched, quit that app to give other apps a chance at the CPU. That often solves your problem quickly. In the most extreme case, the process name will be in red, which means it’s not responding, at which point you can force quit it by selecting it and then clicking the X button at the left of Activity Monitor’s toolbar.

    Equally likely, though, is that the top process will be one you don’t recognize immediately, like backupd (Time Machine). mds or mdworker (spotlight), photolibraryd or photoanalysisd (Photos), or kernel_task_ or WindowServer (core mac OS functionality). You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) quit these processes manually, but at least you’ll know that things are slow due to a Time Machine backup running, Spotlight indexing new files etc. If one of these processes has gone nuts, the best solution is to restart your Mac.

    If you can’t identify a single rogue app, or if the slowdown doesn’t seem to be related to any app, you might just need to have your Mac evaluated by a service technician or it just might be time to upgrade to a new Mac.

  • I’ve always been a gadget girl and I’ve always been attracted to technology and what it can do. I remember the day I got my first stereo system. It was the whole package and I’d waited a long time for it. Dolby surround sound with speakers as big as a small child, dual tape deck, 6-disk CD changer, VCR AND an equalizer. I completed the package with a 19″ CRT television that fit just right on top of my stereo cabinet. I watched movies and listened to CDs in all my stereo’s glory as it shook the walls of my 150sq ft bedroom. My friends and I even figured out how to win a radio contest while being in class at the same time through the stereo. We rigged the VCR and the radio together and programed the VCR to record the radio show at specific times. You had to listen to the station 3 times a day, write down the song they play at the specific time and at the end of 30 days whoever had the most correct answers won 100 CDs. To this day still the only radio contest I’ve won.

    My old stereo is now down to the two speakers and old receiver being used in my brother’s garage. The VHS and cassette tapes are long gone and a few CDs kick around collecting dust around my house. I tried to explain how complicated it was to make a playlist once to my kids. A moment met with limited success as I put together a dance mix for them in about 15 minutes on my computer which automatically synced to my daughter’s iPod and played wirelessly to my Sonos speakers.

    Now my focus has switched from how loud of a stereo can I have in my house to how cool of a house can I have! I tell Siri to turn on my bedroom light, I tell Alexa to turn on my living room and I can check on the air quality in my bedroom from anywhere. I couldn’t impress my kids with my cassette tape mix stories, but I sure can impress them by turning the lights off on Dad while he’s home and we’re at the grocery store.

    It’s no surprise that I have quickly become attached to and am slowly working on “home automation”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/Home_Automation in my home. We continue to expand our offerings at Small Dog Electronics both online and in our stores. Naturally it’s tough to troubleshoot customer issues without trying these products first hand, so I test as much product as I can!

    Thank you for reading Tech Tails!

    Emily Dolloff
    “emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

  • iPhones Panorama Mode

    I’m lucky enough to be in Key West this week work on some improvements at our store here. The temperatures are a bit…

  • iPhone's Panorama Mode

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    I’m lucky enough to be in Key West this week work on some improvements at our store here. The temperatures are a bit cool for Key West this week, but at least I wasn’t around for the blizzard that hit Vermont earlier in the week.

    While I’ve been down in Key West I’ve been mixing up work and play, and have been taking advantage once again of some amazing features on my iPhone. I continue to be amazed with the quality of photos I can take with this phone. As I’ve been using my phones camera feature more than usual over the last month with my travels I thought now is a great time to talk about panorama mode in the iPhone. This feature has been around for several generations of phones so it’s not new, but until you try to fit in a photo of a breathtaking sunset or try to capture in a photo of just how vast the water around you is you probably haven’t needed to capture on camera more than what’s just directly in front of you.

    Since iOS 6 phones have been able to use panorama, so I’ll start with a few tips. First you’ll want to hold your iPhone in portrait orientation. Open the Camera app and swipe left three times on the viewfinder to switch to panoramic mode. This is same process you use to switch from photo to portrait. You’ll want to start with the left side of the image in the view finder, hit the round start button (same button you hit to take a photo) and move the iPhone smoothly and slowly continuously to the right to capture the scene. If you move your hands too fast you will get a blurred image, alternatively if you happen to bounce your hand or wiggle your hands too much you will also get a distorted image. If you move up and down too much during the shot you will get black jagged lines in the image. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get the image right, so hang in there!

    Here are a few tips. Your iPhone will stop taking the panorama automatically when the arrow reaches the end of the line, but you can stop taking the panorama photo at any time before then. So if you don’t want an unsightly tree or the group of people taking photos next to you in your shot you can easily cut them out.

    While we generally think of panoramas as wide vistas, you can also use the iPhone’s panorama mode to capture vertical panoramas as well like a large tree, skyscrapers and more. You can take the photo the same way you did with the phone in portrait mode, the only difference is that you simply hold the phone horizontally.

    Panorama mode works by combining a lot of separate photos into a single image. You can take advantage of that fact by creating some interesting effects:

    You can have someone appear in both the left and right sides of a panorama. After you have panned past the person on the left side, have them run around behind you and have them jump to the right side of the scene! If your in the passenger sear of a car, try capturing a panorama of an interesting screen by taking advantage of the cars motion… the photos come out pretty cool!

    Not every panorama photo comes out the way you might envision, sometimes that’s the fun and frustration of photos! I’ve gotten some pretty silly photos just from accidentally jostling my phone unexpectedly or having someone or something suddenly jump into a photo.