How to share reminders in OS X

In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple included a few of its iOS applications, one of which is the Reminders app for setting up and organizing to-do lists. Reminders used to be part of Apple's iCal feature, but has migrated to a separate app that interfaces with the Calendar for all your Apple devices and with Apple's iCloud service. This unified setup not only makes sharing reminders among devices easy, but also offers a platform for sharing reminders among different iCloud users.

While a little redundant with standard calendar events, reminders are convenient alternatives since they are maintained in relevant lists and do not allocate a section of time for the event to take place. In addition, unlike events, reminders offer a notice in which the reminder will turn red when its due date has expired.

Sharing reminders

Hover your mouse to the left of the list name and click the share button that appears, followed by adding various contacts to share the list with.

(Credit: Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNET)

Not only are reminders convenient for an individual, but they can also be shared among different people, which can be beneficial for organizing collaborative projects. Unfortunately you cannot share individual reminders with people, but you can set up a shared list that will automatically sync among people's iCloud accounts.

Sharing a reminder list
The process for sharing a reminder list is relatively simple.

  1. Open Reminders and create or select your list to be shared.
  2. Hover your mouse to the right of the list's name and a small Sharing icon will appear.
  3. Click the icon and add a contact's name or e-mail.
  4. Click Done and wait for the reminders to sync.
Raminders invite

Recipients will get an invitation similar to this in their e-mail.

(Credit: Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNET)

On the other end, the person receiving the invitation will get an e-mail with a link to iCloud (they will be required to create an Apple ID and an iCloud account to do this). If they have multiple devices linked to their iCloud account, then the reminders will be automatically synchronized with all of them.

While the Reminders application in Mountain Lion makes this relatively easy to set up from within OS X, if you have a prior version of OS X, then you will need to use the iCloud Web interface or an iOS device to set up the shared list.


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Good tip

Apple Has Approved 1 Million Apps for the App Store

As of Monday, Apple has now approved more than 1 million apps for the App Store, according to data from Appsfire, a mobile app discovery platform.

Appsfire announced the news in a tweet early Monday:

Breaking: today will mark the day the App store has seen 1 million apps ever created since launch (iOS)

— Appsfire (@appsfire) November 19, 2012

Appsfire’s co-founder Ouriel Ohayon told The Next Web that 493,298 of these app submissions were paid apps and 158,848 were gaming apps. In total, just more than 736,000 of these app submissions are now live for iPhone or iPad, due to the fact that many apps were later taken down for copyright reasons or removed by their creators for other reasons.

Apple frequently touts the number of apps in its App Store, but it’s unlikely the company will put out a press release anytime soon including the number of apps that have been approved and then removed. Still, it’s an impressive feat, and one that speaks to the incredible growth in the app market overall.

The company released the original iPhone in 2007 and created the App Store the following year. It took Apple more than a year to hit 100,000 apps, but since then the selection has grown by leaps and bounds and there are now more than 700,000 apps, 250,000 of which are specifically for iPad.

For years, Apple has had a tremendous lead on competitors, but Google Play passed 700,000 apps last month, putting it roughly on par with Apple’s App Store.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Cristiano Betta

N.O. braces for prostitution, human trafficking during Super Bowl

Tania Dall / Eyewitness News
Email: tdall@wwltv.com | Twitter: @taniadall

Indianapolis was the last city to host the Super Bowl. In just a matter of weeks, New Orleans will have that same honor.

Security experts say when the big game comes to town so will criminals connected to illegal activities like prostitution and human trafficking.

"The city is well aware of the potential for crime," said Mike Cahn, president of the security network for the Greater New Orleans Hotel Lodging Association.

Like other Super Bowl host cities the local tourism industry is working with law enforcement agencies to curtail crime.

"We're having several meetings, two subcommittees that meet with the FBI regularly in reference to what's going on with the Super Bowl in the city," said Cahn.

Cahn says criminal activities like prostitution and human trafficking are on the Department of Homeland Security and FBI's radars. Cahn also confirms a program called "see something, say something" is already underway in the Crescent City ahead of the big game.

"Where we're educating everyone in the hotel industry about if they see something peculiar if they see something different to report it and notify the right people," said Cahn.

An NOPD spokesperson tells Eyewitness News that the police department is part of a multi-agency group with a plan in place to combat human-trafficking and prostitution.

NOPD says it can't release specific details but did confirm that its 8th District Station will play a key role with help from the FBI. Louisiana State Police says it is also on-board.

"We're going to be extra vigilant. Even extra cautious to make sure these types of people aren't preying on citizens, tourists or even people who are just visiting our area," said La State Police Spokesman Trooper Nick Manale.

That message is also echoed by those who want to make sure Super Bowl 2013 goes off without a hitch.

"All of the hotels and networks are talking to each other via e-mail and keeping up to date on what's going one. The whole city is working as a network to prevent those types of things from happening," said Cahn.

Two years ago, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimated that 10,000 prostitutes were brought to the Super Bowl in Miami. In 2011, more than 100 people were arrested for prostitution in Dallas during Super Bowl weekend.

 

N.O. braces for prostitution, human trafficking during Super Bowl | wwltv.com New Orleans

Tania Dall / Eyewitness News
Email: tdall@wwltv.com | Twitter: @taniadall

Indianapolis was the last city to host the Super Bowl. In just a matter of weeks, New Orleans will have that same honor.

Security experts say when the big game comes to town so will criminals connected to illegal activities like prostitution and human trafficking.

"The city is well aware of the potential for crime," said Mike Cahn, president of the security network for the Greater New Orleans Hotel Lodging Association.

Like other Super Bowl host cities the local tourism industry is working with law enforcement agencies to curtail crime.

"We're having several meetings, two subcommittees that meet with the FBI regularly in reference to what's going on with the Super Bowl in the city," said Cahn.

Cahn says criminal activities like prostitution and human trafficking are on the Department of Homeland Security and FBI's radars. Cahn also confirms a program called "see something, say something" is already underway in the Crescent City ahead of the big game.

"Where we're educating everyone in the hotel industry about if they see something peculiar if they see something different to report it and notify the right people," said Cahn.

An NOPD spokesperson tells Eyewitness News that the police department is part of a multi-agency group with a plan in place to combat human-trafficking and prostitution.

NOPD says it can't release specific details but did confirm that its 8th District Station will play a key role with help from the FBI. Louisiana State Police says it is also on-board.

"We're going to be extra vigilant. Even extra cautious to make sure these types of people aren't preying on citizens, tourists or even people who are just visiting our area," said La State Police Spokesman Trooper Nick Manale.

That message is also echoed by those who want to make sure Super Bowl 2013 goes off without a hitch.

"All of the hotels and networks are talking to each other via e-mail and keeping up to date on what's going one. The whole city is working as a network to prevent those types of things from happening," said Cahn.

Two years ago, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimated that 10,000 prostitutes were brought to the Super Bowl in Miami. In 2011, more than 100 people were arrested for prostitution in Dallas during Super Bowl weekend.

 

'Perfect' INVISIBLE SHED stuns boffinry world

Invisibility cloaks - or, more correctly, sheds - inched a little closer to reality this week with the revelation that scientists have made an object flawlessly invisible.

Previous attempts to make objects invisible had succeeded in bending light around their edges, but left a dark shadow behind the object because of some light reflecting off it. This time, there was no reflection, no shadow and the object was perfectly invisible.

Unfortunately the object was a static 1cm tall cylinder, it was only invisible to microwaves (not visible light) and the invisibility effect only worked from one angle. Boffins have not yet succeeded in making invisibility cloaks for large moving objects in visible light. As and when they do, we have on the authority of top invisibility boffin John Pendry that the result will not be anything cloak-like.

"This isn't anything that flaps around in the breeze; it's more like a shed," he commented in 2006.

Measured electric field data for free space, the cloak and a copper cylinder at the optimum cloaking frequency of 10.2 GHz, credit, paper authors Nathan Landy & David R. Smith Nature Journal

Cloaking a copper cylinder from microwaves with a diamond shaped shield, Nathan Landy, published Nature Journal

However the boffins' work now published marks a big advance in the field of transformation optics and is a milestone in a huge area of research that could transform computers.

According to the BBC, the trick was to use a diamond-shaped cloak, with properties carefully matched at the diamond's corners, to shuttle light perfectly around a cylinder 7.5cm in diameter and 1cm tall.

It only worked from one direction.

"It's like the card people in Alice in Wonderland," lead researcher Professor David Smith from Duke University, told the BBC. "If they turn on their sides you can't see them but they're obviously visible if you look from the other direction."

Scientists told the BBC it would be very hard to implement the same effect with visible light.

Either the object has to be really tiny or else the type of radiation being used has to be long - with say microwaves 1mm-1m, or radio waves 1mm to 100km. Optical lightwaves are just a few hundred billionths of a metre.

While invisibility cloaks seem far off, the uses in other fields are manifold: from heat-cloaking processors in computers, to using optics as an alternative to electronics in computers to multiple military and telecoms uses including cloaking ships from detection and ramping up the speed of the internet.

As Professor Smith and grad researcher David Landy write in their abstract:

In 2006, invisibility became a practical matter for the scientific community as well, with the suggestion that artificially structured metamaterials could enable a new electromagnetic design paradigm, now termed transformation optics.

®

Research paper 'A full-parameter unidirectional metamaterial cloak for microwaves'by Nathan Landy and David R Smith was published in Nature on 11th November 2012

Wow!