Tag: email

App of the Week: Gmail Archived Mail

What It Is and How to Use It?

 

Need to save that email? Try archiving it

By Scott Orgera of Lifewire.com

We live in a world of seemingly endless emails; many of us send and receive a ton of emails every day. Whether it be for professional or personal purposes, our inboxes can eventually become a cluttered repository of disarray.

While many of these emails are disposable, there are some you may want to keep for future reference. No matter the motive, storing everything in your inbox can become problematic for a number of reasons.

What is the Gmail Archive?

Rather than deleting an email and losing it for good, you can choose to archive it instead. As soon as a message is placed in the Gmail archive, it is removed from your inbox and tagged with the label “All Mail.” These messages remain within your Gmail account and can be easily retrieved at a later time, but for now they are out of sight and out of mind.

Note: If someone replies to an archived message, it’s automatically returned to your inbox.  

How to Archive Email

Sending a message to your Gmail archive is very easy, so much so that many people often mistakenly archive emails by clicking on or tapping the wrong option. For more information on how to retrieve archived messages, visit our step-by-step tutorial.

Archiving Emails on a Computer

  • 1 To archive a message on a computer, first access the Gmail interface via your preferred web browser (Google Chrome is recommended).
  • 2 Select the email or emails that you wish to archive by clicking on their accompanying checkbox(es) so that each of them becomes highlighted.
  • 3 Click the Archive button, represented by a folder with a down arrow in the foreground and circled in the accompanying screenshot above.
  • 4 Your message(s) will now be archived, and a confirmation message should appear along with a link labeled Undo – which will revert this change if clicked on.

 

Archiving Emails on an Android or iOS Device

 

Moving messages into your archive is even easier on smartphones or tablets when using the Gmail app. Simply swipe from right to left on a message in your inbox or other folder and it will instantly be archived, assuming that your swiping settings have not been previously modified.

To validate your Gmail swiping settings beforehand, take the steps below.

Android users: From the menu button, take the following path: Settings > General Settings > Gmail default action and ensure that Archive is selected.

iOS users: From the menu button, take the following path: Settings > “account name” > When removing messages, I prefer to…and ensure that Archive is selected.

Muting Gmail Messages

In addition to archiving individual emails, Google offers a similar feature with one key difference. While messages are still moved to the “All Mail” repository when muted, they are not automatically returned to your inbox when someone replies. To mute a message, take the following steps.

Muting Messages on a Computer

 

  • 1 To mute a message on a computer, first access the Gmail interface via your preferred web browser (Google Chrome is recommended).
  • 2 Select the email or emails that you wish to mute by clicking on their accompanying checkbox(es) so that each of them becomes highlighted.
  • 3 Click the More button, found in Gmail’s main toolbar.
  • 4 When the drop-down menu appears, select the Mute option.
  • 5 A confirmation message should now be displayed, letting you know that the conversation has been muted. Click the Undo button to revert this setting.

 

Muting Messages on Android or iOS Devices

  • 1 To mute a message within the Gmail app on a smartphone or tablet, first select the conversation in question.
  • 2 Next, tap the menu button – represented by three vertical dots and located in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
  • 3 When the pop-out menu appears, select Mute.

 

What best practices do you have for managing your email? Tell us in the comments below!

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App of the Week: OmniGraffle

 

A refresh of the long-time Mac drawing app from the Omni Group now pulls in images and text from other apps.

By Mike Wuerthele and William Gallagher of Apple Insider

Like its fellow Omni Group apps OmniFocus and OmniPlan, the drawing and charting software OmniGraffle 3.2 has been updated for iOS 11. All three now take advantage of the new operating system’s drag and drop features to change and improve how you work with the apps.

If you’re an AppleInsider reader, you’re already aware that The Omni Group’s software dates back to the dawn of the PowerPC era. More than 20 years later, the company is still updating its suite of software, with OmniGraffle getting a new iOS version for iOS 11.

It’s a drawing application but not for art or sketching. Rather, it’s for making illustrations specifically to explain things. So OmniGraffle is often used for organization charts or for floor plans. You can get very elaborate and detailed, so much so that app designers can mock up in OmniGraffle how their software will look.

OmniGraffle is also meant for just explaining things quickly so it has tools and features to make drawing fast. It’s also got an extremely dedicated following among its users who share and sell collections of templates called Stencils.

If you’ve used MacDraw II, or LucidChart, you’ve got a pretty good handle on what OmniGraffle can do for you. What it can do for you now with iOS 11 is speed up how you can compile a drawing from other people’s Stencils or your own previous documents.

 

This is done by iOS 11’s drag and drop. It’s the same new drag and drop that has been added to the OmniFocus To Do app where it’s made a significant improvement. It’s the same feature that’s been added to OmniPlan and fixed an issue there that’s been dogging that project management software from the start.

Drag and drop doesn’t make as big a change to OmniGraffle, though. It’s a nice addition and one that when you’ve tried it, you won’t want to go back yet it doesn’t dramatically transform the app.

There are three aspects to how OmniGraffle exploits this new feature. You can now drag items in to your drawing, for instance, and you can drag elements between your drawings. Say you’ve got a floor plan for your house and are now doing one for your office: that sofa shape you spent ages drawing would work fine as a couch in the office plan so you just drag it over.

Similarly, if you’re planning out a bigger office with lots of cubicles then you can just draw one and duplicate it.

In theory you can also drag cubicles or pot plants in your drawings out of OmniGraffle and into other apps but currently that’s limited by how many other apps support this feature. This has long been an issue with OmniGraffle and really all such drawing apps like Lucidchart and Microsoft Visio: the way they play with other apps. You can get drawings from any of them into the rest but typically with some difficulty and actually OmniGraffle’s drag and drop may ultimately improve that. Once other apps are also updated to accept dragged and dropped items.

These most common uses for OmniGraffle —the floor plans, charts and app design —all tend to be jobs where you will reuse elements over and over again. So while everyone will be different, the odds are that you’re most likely to drag elements from one OmniGraffle drawing to another and we can see you building up a library of often-used elements.

Dragging these around is quick and handy, but only once you know how. You could spend the next week stabbing wildly at buttons and options without discovering how to drag an item across multiple documents. That’s really an aspect of iOS 11, however: OmniGraffle uses the same multi-finger approach that the system does.

 

Press and hold on an item you want to drag and then with a different finger, tap at the button to take you out of the current OmniGraffle document. That’s a Library icon which needs finding: rather than to the top left of the screen, OmniGraffle places it in the middle and just to the left the document title.

When you’re back in the Document Picker, as the Omni Group calls it, you can tap to open any other drawing. So long as you’re still holding that element you’ve dragged from the first document, you can now drop it anywhere in the new.

Once it’s in that new drawing, though, you can use exactly the same technique to drag it between different layers of the document.

We keep saying that you’re dragging elements of a drawing around but those elements can be text as well as shapes or re-used templates. You can drag text in from OmniFocus or OmniPlan, for instance. That’s not going to save you a lot of time unless you’re dragging a lot of text but it could be a way to make sure you’re consistent across many documents.

It’s the same process for dragging text or graphics out of OmniGraffle into other apps. We had most success doing it with the app’s stablemates OmniPlan and OmniFocus but even that success was limited.

When we drag to OmniPlan, any text in the item we’re dragging goes into that project management app’s list of tasks and a bar appears representing it in the Gantt chart. When we dragged the same item into OmniFocus, it was entered as a new task called “PDF document.pdf” with an attachment of that name which has the graphic item in it.

You’re not going to do that. Maybe you’d drag the elements from an org chart over to OmniPlan so that you had every member of staff listed but that’s a stretch. Project plans tend to start with what needs to be done rather than who you’ve got to give work to. So really the dragging out of OmniGraffle won’t become hugely useful until other drawing apps adopt iOS 11’s new features too.

OmniGraffle aims to be a complete drawing package. It also aims to make it quick for you to create detailed and technical drawings. So the ability to quickly re-use elements fits in perfectly with that.

It’s not the kind of update that you go wow at or that you know you will rush to use. What is, though, is the kind of update you’ll become so accustomed to that previous versions will seem slow. OmniGraffle is all about making clear, professional drawings with speed and without fuss, however. So this is an update that makes good use of the new iOS 11 features.

OmniGraffle 3.2 for iOS has a free trial version on the App Store and then costs $49.99 for the Standard version. A Pro version is a further $4.99 upgrade or you can go straight from the trial to Pro for $99.99.

 

Do you have a favorite technical drawing rule? Tell us about it in the comments below!

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App of the Week: LiquidText 3.0.11 changes how you annotate documents on the iPad

It’s hard to go back to an more ordinary PDF annotator after using LiquidText, but it is not the ultimate PDF tool for the iPad.

 

By Mike Wuerthele and William Gallagher of Apple Insider

We’d be doing you and LiquidText a disservice if we just called it a PDF editor but at its heart, that is what it is. It’s so much more than that, though, that the PDF element seems almost incidental. LiquidText 3.0.11 for iOS is about gathering ideas and making something useful out of them.

You can do regular PDF work in it. Just as you might with Adobe Acrobat or PDFpen, you can create PDFs and edit them to at least some degree. You can annotate them, too, and that’s where LiquidText starts to show its muscle.

It handles PDFs of course but also Word and PowerPoint files. Open one of these in LiquidText on your iPad and it first turns it into a PDF. So if you just wanted to convert that Word document into one, you’ve just done it.

By far the app’s most striking feature, though, is how you can pinch to collapse parts of your document. It makes a PDF act like an outline except rather than levels that you elect to see or hide, you pinch your fingers together and it squishes up everything in between.

 

Say you’re writing a screenplay and you feel a character isn’t working out. Find their first scene, excerpt that by just dragging the text to the work space, and keep referring to it as you read through their other scenes.

That workspace can as big as you want it to, and it shrinks as much as you care to pinch it. Collate lots of elements on it or just the one: whatever you need to get your ideas moving around in your head.

This pinching, this squeezing of lines is a little startling at first: it looks like there’s a problem with your iPad’s screen. Yet once you’ve found and used it, you keep coming back to it.

 

If you’re more of a corporate type and have to deal with pie charts, excerpt one the same way. Circle it, drag it out to the workspace and keep it there. Annotate it with handwritten notes. It’s easier to scribble a line over your document and then handwrite on the workspace but you can also choose to create text boxes that you then drag around.

Drag together two elements on your workspace and they connect. Drag three, four or as many as you like and they all connect into one blob-like element.

It’s like you’ve got a messy desk with notes strewn and random lines doodled between them —except it’s a regulated mess and the lines are never random. LiquidText makes you feel like you’ve got a paper document that you can crumple, tear bits out, doodle all over and in every other way fold, spindle, and mangle it while you work to make the best thing you can.

Yes, Adobe Acrobat and PDFpen can do the boring stuff but LiquidText can be engrossing. There’s just this irony that an exquisitely gorgeous app lets you make such horrible messes of your documents in the interest of data access and editing.

But, what you do with that document afterwards? LiquidText files are really intended just for you, and to be a working document rather than something you prepare to send on to other people. You can share your LiquidText work over email and what your recipient gets depends on whether they’ve got LiquidText too.

If they have, then they get your scribbles in all their glory. If they haven’t, they get a PDF with a range of options regarding how much get to see or your working notes.

Means to an end, not the end itself

 

It’d be good to see LiquidText accept more types of documents and it’d be handy to at least refer to them on your iPhone.

LiquidText is not meant to be a PDF editor per se, you won’t use it to create much. It’s really for reading and doing intensive annotations and edits. Nonetheless, the way it does that makes you wish every PDF reader app with annotation features worked the same way.

We talked about sharing documents. It may not be a major hassle, as the app as it’s free to download. If you’re only ever going to read someone else’s LiquidText documents, it’s all you need.

But, to work on documents of more than a single page, you can buy the $4.99 multi-document in-app purchase. To get that plus all of the editing features, there’s the Pro version which is a $19.99 in-app purchase.

Try out the free version but skip the multi-document edition and go straight to the full version of LiquidText 3.0.11.

It’s an iPad-only app and though it doesn’t require an Apple Pencil, you’ll want one to get the most out of LiquidText.

What’s your favorite App for PDF editing and annotation? Tell us about it in the comments below!

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How to: use iOS Mail’s auto unsubscribe feature

 

By Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac

If you find yourself on a mailing list that you either never signed up for, or just got sick of, then iOS Mail has you covered. The app has a built-in feature that detects emails from mailing lists, and offers to unsubscribe from them right there, without you having to visit the sender’s site and hunt for the unsubscribe option yourself, like some kind of spam-lackey.

Using Mail’s auto-unsubscribe feature

When Mail detects an email from a mailing list, it adds a banner at the top of the email offering to unsubscribe for you:

“This message is from a mailing list,” it says, with a blue Unsubscribe button underneath. Tap that, ands Mail goes to work:

 

It achieves this amazing feat by sending a reply to the sender. If everything works as planned, and the sender of the newsletter is a good internet citizen, you will be removed from their list.

As you can see from the various screenshots around this post, the trick works on both the iPhone and the iPad. It doesn’t currently work on the Mac, at least not on mine.

Manual and automatic alternatives to unsubscribe

Even if Mail fails to spot a mailing-list mail, you can often take care of it yourself. Just scroll to the very bottom of the email in question, and look for the word “unsubscribe,” usually written in teeny-tiny letters, and in pale gray on white (or an equally invisible color combo). Tap it, and you will usually be taken to a page which tells you that your attempt to unsubscribe was a success.

 

Sometimes, you’ll need to check a box to actually unsubscribe, which is going to far in my opinion. Either way, be aware that if a genuine spam mail got through, then tapping an unsubscribe link might verify you as a live human to the spammer.

The other option is to use a third-party service to manage your mail for you.

SaneBox

If an email newsletter keeps coming back, or if you’re getting spammy mails from PR folks who refuse to let you unsubscribe, then you could try SaneBox or something similar. Sanebox automatically files your mails into sensible categories, and filters out the real crap. It also has a great feature called Sane Black Hole. It shows up as a regular mailbox in your email client, but when you add an email to that folder, SaneBox takes note and nukes any future email from that address. It’s a kind of email blacklist, and it’s 100% effective in my experience.

I get almost no spam these days, so unwanted newsletters are the biggest annoyance in my inbox. Or rather, in my Sane Later mailbox. Having a way to quickly unsubscribe is golden. Hopefully it’ll come to the Mac in a future version of macOS.

How do you manage your unwanted email? Tell us your best practices in the comments below!

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Tales From The Orchard: Apple Isn’t Building 3 Factories in the U.S., No Matter What Trump Says

 

 

ByJake Swearingen of New Yorker Magazine

Despite Donald Trump’s claims to The Wall Street Journal, Apple won’t be building three factories in the United States anytime soon. Why? Well, for starters, Apple doesn’t build factories anymore. In the entire world, Apple now owns exactly one manufacturing plant: its plant where it assembles iMacs in County Cork, Ireland.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Trump claimed that Tim Cook had promised that Apple would be building three manufacturing plants here in the U.S.

“I spoke to [Mr. Cook], he’s promised me three big plants — big, big, big,” said Trump. “I said, you know, Tim, unless you start building your plants in this country, I won’t consider my administration an economic success. He called me, and he said they are going forward.”

While it’s touching to think that Tim Cook would worry whether Trump considers his presidency an economic success, Apple, again, doesn’t build manufacturing plants. (In fact, before he was CEO of Apple, Cook was in charge of winding down Apple’s factories and warehouses in the U.S., closing Apple’s last American factory, based out of Elk Grove, California, in 2004.)

Apple manufactures its high-end Mac Pros, a tiny slice of its overall business, here in the U.S., but the work is done through a partnership with Taiwanese firm Flextronics — and that factory has struggled to keep up even with the tiny demand for Mac Pro towers, causing Apple to consider shifting production over to Asia. Apple has pledged to invest $1 billion in American manufacturing, but that money will filter to American companies like Corning, which produces the glass used in many Apple displays. It also uses many U.S.-based suppliers — including 3M, Caterpillar, and Lapmaster — to build various parts of its hardware, in the same way it uses many other suppliers not based in the U.S., most famously Foxconn.

So why would Trump brag about three new plants from Apple in the U.S.? It’s possible Trump is simply fabricating the story out of whole cloth. More generously, it’s possible that Cook talked to Trump about Apple’s reported efforts to get its Asian suppliers to manufacture some iPhones in the U.S. Indeed, Foxconn seems poised to open factories in the States, and Foxconn produces nearly a half million iPhones a day when in full swing. Apple’s rumored expanded lineup of iPhones could see that number go even higher in coming years.

The most likely scenario probably falls somewhere in between that. Realistically, it wouldn’t cost Apple a tremendous amount to bring a few jobs back to the U.S., mainly because foreign labor costs are starting to rise. The MIT Technology Review analyzed Apple’s supply chain in 2015 and determined that the retail price of an iPhone made entirely in the U.S. would be about $100 higher than it is now — a price jump, but not a catastrophic one.

We may see more jobs and new plants in the U.S. as Apple’s suppliers, from Foxconn to Samsung, continue to expand their manufacturing footstep here. But it won’t be Apple that will be building them, regardless of what Donald Trump claims Tim Cook told him.

What do you think Apple should tell the Trump administration about it’s manufacturing plans? Tell us in the comments below!

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T&T: Everyone uses Gmail, but not everyone knows these awesome tips and tricks

 


By Tyler Lacoma by digital trends

Between Labs, extensions, and settings, there’s a plethora of ways that you can customize your Gmail experience and tweak how emails are handled. Below of some of our favorite methods for managing time and giving Gmail an extra boost when it comes to organization.

SEND AND ARCHIVE IN ONE STEP

 

Here’s a trick to save a lot of time. First, click the gear icon and choose Settings from the resulting drop-down menu. Find the Send and Archive section and check the box beside Show “Send & Archive” button in reply. This adds a new button when you’re replying to an email. Clicking it will allow you to send your response and automatically archive the email, thus removing it from your inbox. It’s a godsend for those who receive endless amounts of email, and one that keeps your inbox free of clutter.

ENABLE AND DISABLE TABS

Gmail has three tabs — Primary, Social, and Promotion — and organizes your emails for you automatically. But did you know you can customize these tabs? If you want to do so, click the gear icon in the upper-right corner and choose Configure inbox from the drop-down menu. This allows you to add new tabs, such as Updates and Forums, or remove any tabs that you don’t like or want. It’s a handy bit of auto-organization for when you’re feeling overwhelmed.

SEE MORE WITH THE COMPACT SETTING

When you click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of Gmail, one of the first things you’ll see in the resulting drop-down menu is an option to switch between Cozy, Comfortable, and Compact viewing modes. Switching to Compact eradicates a good deal of space, allowing you to see more email information on each line. It’s a good setting to go with if you want to maximize your efficiency and see as much information as possible in a single glance.

TAKE BACK AN UNFORTUNATE EMAIL

Whenever you send an email in Gmail, you’ll notice a yellow box that says the email was sent. If you catch it fast enough, however, you can actually cancel the email while it’s in the process of being sent. If it has already been sent, this option turns in Undo Send, which allows you to correct your mistake with a couple clicks. If you don’t see the feature, click the gear icon in the upper-right corner and select Settings from the drop-down menu. Then, check the box beside Enable Undo Send in the Undo Send section. Here, you can also set a 5-, 10-, 20-, or 30-second cancellation period.

SEND MONEY INSTANTLY

Whenever you start to compose an email in Gmail, you can hit the dollar sign — or the pound sign, if you’re located in the United Kingdom — to use that email as a vehicle for sending money. It allows you to set an amount and input, or choose a payment method. When the recipient gets the email, they can “activate” the payment and the transaction will occur. Could you just use PayPal? Yes, but this option is just as useful when it comes to making quick, small payments.

USE SMART REPLY TO SAVE TIME ON RESPONSES

In the mobile version of Gmail, there is currently a feature called Smart Reply. It uses some of Google’s AI tech to automatically create a few quick responses (somewhat modeled after your email behavior) that you can immediately send. These range from a basic “thanks!” to more complex questions based on the email you are responding to. It doesn’t always work, but for simple responses, it can help you save a lot of time on your mobile device.

SAVE SPACE WITH DRIVE

If you can’t fit a file on an email or prefer not mess around with attachments, use Google Drive instead. Every Compose window comes equipped with a Drive icon, which allows you to quickly attach Drive files from within your browser. It’s also handy if you need to share files that aren’t stored on the device you’re using… as long as Drive is one of the common storage options.

SYNERGIZE WITH LINKEDIN

One of the great extensions to use in the business world is Rapportive, a Gmail extension that links the sender’s contact information with social media, specifically LinkedIn. Open an email from someone with a LinkedIn account and the tool will immediately show their profile information in a sidebar, along with links to their various social media accounts. It’s one of the best networking tools available if you regularly use Gmail.

USE CANNED RESPONSES TO SAVE EVEN MORE TIME

Gmail Labs are experimental extensions that you can enable for free. Labs don’t always stick around, but Canned Responses has been on the block for years, so we feel confident recommending it. Head over to the gear icon, choose Settings, and click the Labs tab. One of the labs should say Canned Responses. Enable it, and you can create email templates that you can immediately copy into an email and tweak as needed. It’s ideal for customer service or tracking down leads.

DELEGATE SOME OF YOUR EMAILS

Gmail offers a service that allows you to set up a series of delegates. These delegates have the ability to read and respond to your emails, and even manage your contacts, although they can’t chat or change your settings. Setting up delegates is useful if you are a busy professional and need an employee or team member to step in and check the latest responses when you simply don’t have enough time.

TRY IFTTT CONFIGURATIONS

IFTTT or “If This Then That” is a smart device platform that allows you to customize a variety of responses and scenes for your smart home. It also works with a lot of other things, including Gmail. Here are some examples of the IFTTT ideas already created by people and ready to be used. With the right recipe, you can save files directly to Drive, automatically sync Evernote and Todoist, trigger notifications, and carry out a bunch of other useful actions. Find the options that are best for your life, and you can transform your Gmail experience into something twice as useful.

Which email service do you prefer? Any cool hacks you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments below!

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