Evernote 5 for Mac beta is now available, offers 100+ new features

A few days ago, Evernote announced the upcoming beta release for Evernote 5 for Mac. This feature brings with it over 100 new features, as well as an updated user interface. Now the application is available for download, with Evernote cautioning users to remember that it is still in beta and might be buggy at times.

Says the announcement, “BETA software is not final, which means that using it comes with some risks. These can range from corruption of your notes to data loss. If you’re not comfortable using beta software, we recommend waiting a bit for the general update to go live.” If you’re willing to take the plunge, however, you’ll find a variety of new features.

New features include an improved Notes List, which offers a single list containing both personal and joined notebooks. There’s a Snippets view for seeing a note’s notebook, as well as its shared status. Also added is a Cards view for browsing notes in the form of nifty little cards. Tossed in, among the myriad of other features, are a handful of shortcuts and changes to increase efficiency.

To get the new Evernote 5 for Mac beta, launch the application, then select “Software Update” from Preferences. In the window that opens, check “Update to beta versions when available.” Follow this up by clicking “Check for Updates Now” in the Evernote menu, then sit back and let the magic happen. Evernote lists a few troubleshooting tips as well, so if you experience problems, hit the link below to check them out.

[via Evernote]

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Sceptre Speaker Sound Bar offers bang for your buck

by Edwin - on August 16th, 2012

Most of us are willing to spend good money on a spanking new TV set, where the larger it is, the better. Well, having said that, it is no surprise that a fair number of us do neglect taking into consideration the audio aspect – and most standard issue speakers that accompany most TV sets are not exactly prime examples to be proud of. The Sceptre Speaker Sound Bar, however, intends to change this perspective by offering you great sounding audio without breaking the bank.

For starters, the Sceptre Speaker Sound Bar will feature a versatile speaker that comes with built-in high efficiency amplifier technology which is touted to add crystal clear 3D surround sound to any TV or connected music player. The dual speakers that come with it can deliver up to 20 Watts each, which would double the sound capabilities of traditional TV sets. Apart from that, it will also boast of High Efficiency Amplifier Technology that allows it to pump out rich 3D crystal clear Surround Sound, making it the ideal addition to any TV set or living room.

Cathy Chou, vice president of operations, Sceptre, said, “Sceptre’s new Speaker Sound Bar gives users the ability to enjoy high quality sound without the hassle and need of purchasing and installing expensive entertainment systems. The unveiling of the Sound Bar reinforces our commitment to providing quality home entertainment solutions with the perfect balance between performance and affordability.”

Each purchase of the Spectre Speaker Sound Bar will be accompanied by a wall mounting kit and an infrared remote control that will play nice with other Sceptre TVs in your home, doing away with the need for multiple remote controls. Not only that, it will also boast of an auto fading LED light display panel that will help reduce brightness and glare whenever you watch a movie or do so at night.

The list of goodies do not stop there though, as a quartet of preset sound modes that are individually tuned will be able to provide the best audio quality whenever you sit down to relax, watching your favorite movies or news, while listening in to music or playing games. The asking price for the Sceptre Speaker Sound Bar? We are looking at $169.99 that frankly, ain’t too shabby not to consider.

Product Page

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TiVo Premiere 4 offers quad tuners, 500GB for $249.99

Perhaps you’re not quite ready to cut the cord just yet, ever reliant on multiple tuners to get your television fix. The latest set-top box from TiVo should go a long way to helping you watch and archive everything, today introducing the Premiere 4. The box shares similarities between the Premiere XL4 that was announced earlier this year, with a shared design, quad-tuners, and the same connection ports.

Thanks to 500GB of storage, TiVo says around 75 hours of HD programming will be able to be recorded to the box before it fills up, and the company’s custom user interface helps customers find programmes with relative ease. When searching for a particular show, the box not only checks cable listings, but also online services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Instant Video.

The box is compatible with digital cable (QAM) and Verizon FIOS, with ports including HDMI, Component, Composite, and optical plus analogue audio. CableCARD support is onboard, and other inputs include Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, eSATA, and MoCA. A TiVo Wireless N or G wireless adapter can also be plugged into the box if you don’t fancy running an Ethernet cable through your living room.

The Premiere 4 costs $249.99 outright, but comes with a one-year contract and a $14.99 monthly fee. TiVo says the box should be available starting from today online, with the device also heading to various home theater and Magnolia stores across the country in the near future.

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Mixed blessings: A smaller Gulf dead zone offers less to celebrate than you’d think

By Twilight Greenaway

You know how hot weather makes more people believe in climate change? Well, let’s hope that this year’s smaller-than-average Gulf Dead Zone — due to climate-related drought, no less – doesn’t keep people from seeing the urgency of agricultural runoff.

First, the good news: As we mentioned quickly in our latest drought roundup, the only bright side to the fact that there has been much less rainfall in the Midwest this year is the added fact that less of it is flowing into the Mississippi River and out into the Gulf. According to a Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMC) press release, “nutrient output into the Gulf this spring approached near the 80-year record low.”

This is a) crazy scary in its own right, and b) it means fewer nutrients in the water, fewer algae blooms, and a much smaller lifeless, oxygen-deprived area. (It’s less than half the size of last year’s dead zone.) So fish and other aquatic life have much more room to breathe, so to say. And that’s good(ish) news. Except that the source of the problem hasn’t gone anywhere.

An in-depth article that ran in Scientific American last month reminds us that the trend in the dead zone’s overall size is still going up. And industrial farms are still an enormous contributor to the problem. As the SciAm piece mentions:

Farmers use many methods to reduce runoff: planting cover crops, adjusting the amount of fertilizer and when it’s applied. Such conservation practices in the Upper Mississippi River basin reduce nitrogen loss by an average of 18 percent per acre, according to a USDA report.

But the same report found that only 14 percent of cropland consistently had good nitrogen management.

“What we are showing is how bad the problem would be if there were no conservation,” said Lee Norfleet, a USDA soil scientist. “If there is an uptick, it would be a lot worse if a lot of (conservation) practices had not occurred.

While some commodity farmers may have become more careful with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer — using smaller quantities more often for better absorption, for instance — they have also been planting more corn. So the overall quantity in use has remained roughly the same for the last several decades.

There’s also evidence that once nitrates from fertilizer leak into aquifers, they can remain in groundwater for years if not decades (this effect was recently documented in California’s Tulare Lake Basin, where it was found that “most nitrate in drinking water wells today was applied to the surface decades ago”). That groundwater can also often drain into the rivers, where the nitrates — a form of nitrogen that algae and other organisms can take in directly — wreak their havoc.

As the scientists from LUMC put it: “Although the size of the hypoxic area was small … this is not because sufficient actions have been taken within the watershed’s landscape to reduce nutrient pollution.”

And it’s possible that a wet 2013 could just add this year’s residual nutrients to next year’s, resulting in a flood of nitrogen and phosphorous that would send even more “fish, shrimp and crabs fleeing the low oxygen waters and animals that remain in the sediments dying off.”

Twilight is the food editor at Grist. Follow her on twitter.var OB_langJS = 'http://widgets.outbrain.com/lang_en.js'; var OBITm = '1322003100161';var OB_raterMode = 'none';var OB_recMode = 'strip';var OutbrainPermaLink='http://www.grist.org//food/mixed-blessings-a-smaller-gulf-dead-zone-offers-less-to-celebrate-than-youd-think/';if ( typeof(OB_Script)!='undefined' )OutbrainStart(); else { var OB_Script = true; var str = unescape("%3Cscript src=\'http://widgets.outbrain.com/OutbrainRater.js\' type=\'text/javascript\'%3E%3C/script%3E"); document.write(str); }

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Google Chrome Web App Store Now Offers Suggestions From Friends

Now you can get recommendations on what apps, games, and add-ons to download from the Chrome Web App Store from your friends -– at least your friends on Google+.

Tuesday Google announced it was integrating Google+ into its Web App Store. The integration allows anyone to share their favorite Chrome Web Store items with people in their Google+ circles by clicking the +1 button beside those items in the store.

If you’re looking for things to buy, you can review theme, extension, and app suggestions from people in your Google+ circles by clicking the “From your circles” link in the left category menu of the Chrome Web Store. Suggestions are also available from people from the Chrome team.

SEE ALSO: Chrome Set To Eclipse Firefox as World’s No. 2 Browser

While you’re just browsing the store, apps that your friends have +1’d will also be highlighted as such, so you can easily see at a glance what your friends enjoy.

Facebook recently launched a similar service last month for Android and iPhone apps. Called App Center, Facebook’s service lets you see at a glance what apps are popular as well as what apps your friends are using for both mobile devices as well as Facebook’s Timeline.

How do you currently find the apps that you choose to download? Can you see Google+ integration being useful when it comes to shopping in the Chrome Web Store? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Apple offers employees big discounts on Macs and iPads

If you have acquaintances who happen to work at your local Apple Store, it’s time to become better friends with them. Apple has announced a new employee discount program that knocks a significant amount of money off the purchase price of popular Apple gadgets. The new discount program is valid for Macs and iPads.

The new discount plan was announced back in January by Tim Cook and was set to kick off in June. Since June is here, the discount program has now started. Apple employees can purchase a new Mac computer with a $500 discount. The employee can also get a $250 discount on the iPad. To get either of the discounts the purchase has to be made through Apple’s internal employee portal.

The most impressive part of these new discounts is that they come on top of the existing 25% discount employees are eligible for. The only caveat in the discount program is that the $500 off on a Mac is not good on the Mac mini or the new retina display MacBook Pro models. It’s possible that once there’s a better supply of the new retina display MacBook Pro notebooks that those machines will go on the discount list as well.

[via 9to5mac]

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iPhone users get official Google Offers app

Google has been running its Google Offers service for a while where you can find discounts for all sorts of things, such as food, locally. The service specifically tunes the offers to your location be it at home or while traveling. The goal is to get you to go into these local establishments and try things out, and hopefully make money for retailers advertising with Google Offers.

Google has had an app for Android users available for a while. The app was updated to version 1.3 earlier this week for Android. Google has now announced that it is offering its Google Offers app on the iPhone. The app has the same functionality for iPhone users as Android users have been enjoying. That is to say, you can use the app to discover offers near you in a map view and view the details of offers by category if you desire.

The iPhone app tracks all the offers the user purchased and offers the user saved in a “My Offers” tab for easy access. The app also allows users to redeem offers using the iPhone alone with no need to print vouchers. Users can also get notifications of purchased or saved deals that are about to expire from the app to remind you to take advantage of the deal. The app is available on the App Store right now.

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Arcadie for iPhone offers 8-bit gaming in a miniature form factor

Do you have a penchant for 8-bit gaming? If you have answered in the affirmative, then you might want to check out just what the £14.99 Arcadie for iPhone is able to offer. Since we are living in a world of 3D graphics, and have been doing so for the longest time already, how about turning back the clock and have some 2D gaming goodness instead? The Arcadie for iPhone is just the home entertainment system for you, where all you need to do is slide your iPhone or iPod touch into the rear of the Arcadie, where it will click when closed. Followed by powering up one of the half dozen free Apps, and you can more or less get started gaming there and then.

With such a simple setup process, it is not a Bluetooth connection that helps it remain connected, so there is no need to worry about having it drain the battery. Apart from that, the capacitive material paves the way for the controls to provide a realistic arcade feel without resulting in any marks on your display. Any takers so far, or do you prefer something more expensive and comprehensive like the PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS? Old is gold, after all.

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BMW Offers $300 Mobile Voucher On New 3 Series…But There’s A Catch

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Fancy getting into a new 2012 BMW 3 Series and still want a little extra cash as a motivator? The German automaker is offering a $300 mobile voucher good toward the purchase or lease of a new 3 Series, but only if you’re a current customer of BMW Financial Services.

BMW Ultimate Drive app

Still, for those who qualify, getting an extra $300 toward the first payment on a 2012 BMW 3 Series is a good deal. Here’s how it works.

Go to the BMW Ultimate Drive App site or to BMW Financial Services pages on Facebook. Download The Ultimate Drive for your smartphone (available on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android devices).Next, launch The Ultimate Drive, tap “Desir3 A Test Drive” and then schedule a test drive of the all-new 3 Series.Complete your test drive, enter your client advisor’s name for confirmation and claim your $300 voucher.Redeem your $300 voucher when you purchase or lease a 2012 BMW 3 Series through BMW Financial Services – but be sure to take delivery by June 30, 2012.

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iPad mini offers small price not small screen tips analyst

Here we go, the furor over the iPhone 4S isn’t yet done and already the next round of Apple rumors are floating by. The latest rumor isn’t of the next iPhone, but of a future iPad that is supposedly coming to fight the Kindle Fire and its $199 price point. According to this rumor there is an iPad mini coming in 2012. The source is specific on the “mini” though.


According to Brian white, an analyst with Ticonderoga securities who has been touring Chinese manufacturing faculties and talking with component suppliers there are rumblings of a cheaper, not smaller, iPad mini for 2012. White expects that the cheaper iPad will land during the first few months of 2012 and be followed later by a feature rich iPad 3.

White has stated that the expectation is that the iPad mini would come in somewhere in the mid to high $200 range. We wonder if the iPad mini may be something like an iPad 2 with 8GB of storage with the iPad 3 coming for the high market. This is what Apple does with the iPhone 4 and 4S for instance. That said, the original iPad didn’t stay around after the iPad 2 surfaced any longer than it took to clear stock.

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