AddictiveTips » Mac OS X

Edit Images & View Them In Sync On Multiple PCs Over LAN With Nomacs

Waqas Ahmed — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:00:31 +0000

There has never been a shortage of image viewers on Windows as well as other major desktop platforms; hop on to any software repository on the internet and you will find plenty of options for viewing your photos. So, do we really need another one? Perhaps yes. Especially when image viewers like Nomacs come packaged with an umpteen number of features, the offer becomes even more enticing. On the surface, it looks exactly like any other image viewer, but deep down you will find a slew of handy tools that are likely to make Nomacs one of your favorite apps. The application supports almost all the major image formats out there (Including RAW), and lets you easily view and edit pictures in JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIF, XPM, PGM, CR2, NEF, RW2, PSD and DNG formats, among a handful of others. A rather unusual feature is Nomacs’ ability to sync the image view across multiple PCs over your local network, which really sets it apart from other similar tools.

Nomacs allows you to navigate images in the current folder via the mouse scroll wheel as well as the navigation buttons at the top. The viewing area looks simple, with most of the space being used to show the actual image. You can open an image by simple drag and drop as well, or you specify any directory to load images from by clicking the Open Folder button.

Nomacs boasts an intuitive Find & Filter feature that enables you to instantly jump to your desired image. You can either type the exact name of the file or use the Filter button to narrow down to a certain group of photos from the lot. So, for instance, if you have loads of cats images among other files in the folder, you can simply type cat to display only the related images matching the word cat, provided of course that they have ‘cat’ in the name.

The app provides basic editing options much like many major image viewers available for Windows. For example, you can crop, rotate and resize the image to your desired dimensions. Nomacs doesn’t even open a separate editing area, as all the editing can be done directly in the main viewer.

Apart from basic editing, you can also change saturation, brightness, contrast, hue and exposure etc. from the Image Manipulation Tools window that can be launched from the Tools menu. The available parameters can be adjusted via the sliders present below each option.

Another area where Nomacs really shines is its customizable UI. Click the View menu and you will notice a plethora of elements in there that you can enable or disable. There are also hotkeys available for pretty much every feature. You can choose to display metadata, histogram, slideshow player controls, thumbnails, file info, folder overview etc. Pictures can also be viewed in full screen at the click of a button. The application also has anti-aliasing enabled across all images out of the box so that you may view images without any jagged edges.

When it comes to the synchronization feature, it lets you replicate the image view across multiple computers on your network. This works in a way that when you, lets say, zoom or pan image on one display, the action is reflected on the synchronized instances on all other connected computers. This feature alone makes it a worthwhile tool for anyone in an environment with multiple computers where the users often need to show each other images from their computers.

Although it may look very simple, Nomacs is a feature-laden image viewer. It’s an open source app that works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Download Nomacs

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How To Send Video Messages To Your Offline Contacts In Skype

Fatima Wahab — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:00:34 +0000

Voicemail lets you deflect calls when you’re busy in order to be able to access the recorded messages later. If you’ve ever thought of having that very same feature in Skype - the leading app for making voice and video calls over the internet, we have some great news for you. Skype has just added the feature and you can now send video messages to your Skype contacts even when they’re offline. On free accounts, a video message can be 3 minutes long, but with a premium account, users can send video messages of any length. The video messages can be sent from both desktop and mobile apps of the service, and can be recorded by front facing or regular back cameras on mobile devices.

To send a video message, just right-click a contact from the contacts list in the column on the left and select ‘Send Video Message…’. If you do not have a webcam connected to your system, this option will appear to be inactive.

Start recording by clicking the record button in the middle. A timer counts down from 3 minutes so you can see how much recording time you have left. Click the same button to end your message.

You can preview the message and when you’re done, click the send button (the little envelope next to the record button) to send your message. Your message will start uploading to Skype’s server, with the time taken depending on how long your message is, and the speed of your internet connection. If your contact is on an older version of Skype, they will be given a link and a PIN code to enter in order to view your message. Those using the latest version will be able to view it within Skype.

To send a video message from your mobile device, open a contact card in Skype and tap the new ‘Video message’ button. By default, the app records with the front facing camera but if you tap the camera button next to the record one, you can switch it to the one the back. Tap the record button to start recording your message.

An on-screen timer counts down the time for you just like on the desktop app. Tapping the record button again will end the recording. You can preview the video you’ve just recorded, and add a title and description to it if you want by tapping the pencil button.

When your message is ready, tap the send button and watch as the video is uploaded and sent to your contact.

It’s great to see this feature come to Skype, especially since it’s a video calling service and the popular free texting service WhatsApp has had this feature for a while now. We hope the same functionality also comes to Viber’s desktop apps for Mac and Windows when the service finally brings video calling to its mobile apps.

This update with video messages support is available for all major platforms except for Windows Phone, which is both strange and ironic since Skype is owned by Microsoft.

Download Skype

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Add Paoramic Camera Motion To Time-Lapse Videos With Panolapse

Waqas Ahmed — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:30:04 +0000

If you’ve ever seen those nature documentaries on Discovery Channel or National Geographic, you don’t really need any explanation about time-lapse videos. Just how they fast-forward time to capture all those plants growing and sun moving in and out of sight in seconds is simply jaw-dropping. With wide adoption of DSLR cameras, time-lapse photography has become quite famous over the past few years. Beside professional cameras specifically designed with this option, there’s a variety of smartphone and desktop apps developed to help all types of users with creating time-lapses. So, how about creating them using a bit of your time and a free desktop tool called Panolapse? It’s a free app available for Window as well as Mac OS X for creating time lapse videos with virtual camera motion.

The application uses perspective correction to create real world rotational panning through the scenes. In layman’s terms, you simply have to change the perspective of the photo in different time frames, and the output result appears as an actual motion in the scene. The developer has also provided a demo video on their website to show how this perspective correction works.

On its interface, you will find a few perspective control buttons at the bottom. Using these buttons allows you to adjust pitch, yaw and roll of the image. Alternatively, you can also use your mouse buttons for the purpose. For instance, you use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out, and the left and right clicks to control pan and tilt respectively.

The usage is quite simple. The first step is to insert the photos that you want to use for your time-lapse video by clicking ‘Import Image Sequence’ button at the top-left. Just make sure all the images in the folder carry a sequential naming scheme. Once selected, you need to specify a custom focal length and crop factor, as well as lens type. The application allows you to choose between normal (rectilinear) and fisheye lens types.

You can always click the Edit button at the top-right to make changes to the aforementioned settings any time you wish. The application also allows you to choose the aspect ratio from 16:9, 4:3 and 3:2. To save the output, you need to render the selected frames into a video file, basically stitching the frames together to create one continuous loop. To do this, click ‘Export Frames’ on the main interface and specify a few output parameters, such as resolution (width and height), Deflicker (can be manually enabled or disabled), file format (JPG, MP4 and MOV) and FPS (frames per second). The application allows you to render multiple tasks in batch. To add your current task, simply click ‘Queue for render’. Finally, click ‘Render all’ at the bottom-right to begin the rendering process.

In a nutshell, it’s quite a handy app for adding virtual camera motion to your existing photos. The application works on Windows and Mac OS X.

Download Panolapse

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Get A Presentation-Friendly Mouse Cursor With Zoom & Click Highlighting In OS X

Fatima Wahab — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:40:41 +0000

Good presentation assistance tools are often hard to find, and most of the ones available are expensive, to say the least. Many are often meant to work with a companion app that you originally created the presentation in, and are not standalone apps that can be used freely. Highlighter is a free Mac App that is a very basic presentation tool; it replaces the mouse cursor with a red hoop. Everything in the hoop is magnified 30% when you click anywhere, and the hoop turns blue for a split second to indicate the action. It’s best used for giving demos and perhaps for creating screencasts. While most feature-rich screencasting tools will will allow you to do this, Highlighter can be a very useful companion for those that don’t offer this feature.

While running, Highlighter appears as a very small window at the top-left of the screen, though you can freely move it anywhere. The window can be maximized, but we think it’s excessive that it’s there in the first place. The app should have simply had an icon in the Menu Bar, from where it could have been used just as comfortably.

Highlighter follows your mouse movements very accurately with no lag. The magnification is only there when you click, and there is a threshold just above the Dock where the hoop is cut off. The bit of the screen inside the hoop stays magnified for a second.

You can disable the magnification, and have the app exit automatically the second you click from it’s preferences.

It’s obvious that Highlighter is very basic in its functionality; users cannot control the level of magnification inside the hoop, its diameter, or its color. Though the default red is quite bright, it might not show up or have good visibility on certain backgrounds.

These three shortcomings, as they are, are manageable; you can still work with them. The real problem that we noticed with the app is that dragging windows and selection actions are slow; you can drag a window from one corner of your screen all the way to the other before the hoop follows you. It’s still useable for giving demos and presentations, but not as efficient for creating screencasts involving these actions. Hopefully, this will be ironed out soon in an update.

Download Highlighter for Mac

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Open OS X Preference Panes From Shortcuts In The Dock Or Launchpad

Fatima Wahab — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:30:31 +0000

The System Preferences in OS X, the equivalent of the Control Panel on Windows, is accessed quite frequently in general, where some preference panes are used more often than others. To access a preference pane, you have to either open System Preferences, or use Spotlight. Spotlight is, by far, the shortest way to get straight to a pref pane, but for that, you must remember its name correctly. Mactuts has come up with a much faster and exponentially better way to access these panes: accessing them as one would an app. Built using AppleScripts, these app-like shortcuts, collectively called Preferences Quick Launch are similar in appearance to the pane they represent and can be pinned to the Dock. The two preference panes that have been left out are the iCloud and Accessibility panes. This group of shortcuts has been developed for Mountain Lion only, and may or may not work on older versions of OS X.

Using Preferences Quick Launch is simple; download the zipped file, extract it, and add the extracted folder to your Applications directory. You’ll need to bypass Gatekeeper the first time you run one of the shortcuts within. If there are some panes that you rarely use, you can delete them, or simply add the ones you do use to the Applications folder, as you would with any other app.

What an app does is open System Preferences for you, and select the relevant pane. This means that launching two different pane shortcuts will not open them in separate ‘windows’, rather, the same System Preferences window will simply switch to the last one you’ve opened. To add a pane to the Dock or Launchpad, simply drag & drop it there.

If you’re wondering what’s happening under the hood, it’s this little AppleScript that’s running:

tell application "System Preferences"  
    activate  
    set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.dock"  
end tell

We wouldn’t really recommend using this script to create your own shortcuts since the group of apps that Mactuts have created are already packaged perfectly. When using these apps, the only disadvantage is that you forgo using the search feature that can look inside a pref pane as well. If that’s too much of a sacrifice for you to make, you can just hide a System preference pane that you don’t use very often to reduce clutter and make browsing System Preferences easier.

Download Preferences Quick Launch for Mac

[via Mactuts]

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MagicanRest Forces You To Rest Your Eyes For Custom Time Periods

Fatima Wahab — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:00:04 +0000

You’ve no doubt come across many apps that remind you to rest your eyes if you sit in front of the screen all day long. These apps regulate how long you work, and ensure you rest eyes for a certain number of minutes after spending a certain amount of time working. That’s simple enough, except most of these apps like to decide for themselves how long you should work and how long you should rest, and no one has the time to stop and take that many frequent breaks. MagicanRest is a free app available in the Mac App Store that reminds you to rest your eyes, but you get to choose when and how long to rest. The rest periods can be set at regular intervals of your choice, but can also be paused and disabled for a particular day. The rest screen, which prevents you from accessing our system, has an emergency button that lets you get back into your system should the need arise.

MagicanRest runs in the Menu Bar and from there, you can access its preferences, pause or resume the app, and also see how much time is left until the next rest period.

To set the length of the rest period, and your work period, go to MagicanRest’s preferences and define how long you want to rest, and how long you want to work, in minutes. Next, specify a time range when the app should run. For example; you might want it to run from 9AM – 6PM while you’re working, but not after that when you’re relaxing. Select the day when you want to disable the app altogether, e.g. on particularly busy days perhaps. The ‘Rest Screen’ that you see when the app locks you out of your system can be selected from four available options. Lastly, there’s the option to set a password for making changes to MagicanRest’s preferences. This is helpful if you’ve decided to install the app on a Mac that your whole family shares, and you want to ensure that no one sits in front of too long.

MagicanRest’s rest screen gives you tips for healthy eyes and shows a timer so you can see how much of your rest period is left. There is a ‘For Emergency’ button at the bottom-right that gives you instant access to your Mac, and there seems to be no way disable it.

MagicanRest only makes it so you can’t see the screen, but any and all processes that you might have running will continue to work, and your keyboard will still be responsive.

Download MagicanRest for Mac

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Use Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets On The Desktop With WidgetRunner

Fatima Wahab — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:00:35 +0000

If you dismissed the Dashboard on your Mac because it was useless, annoying to have to shift to, or too much of a distraction that would take you away from your other work spaces, you also – perhaps inadvertently – stopped using widgets for the most part. There are some who argue that Widgets are useless, while others think they could just as easily have been apps and the whole ‘Dashboard’ been avoided altogether. WidgetRunner is a free Mac app that lets you run widgets, both stock and custom-installed, as apps on a regular desktop space. The widgets behave much as any other app window, though they do not appear as windows under their own name and have to be added by selecting WidgetRunner.

Using WidgetRunner is simple enough; launch the app and from it’s menu, select ‘New Widget’. You’ll have to do this each time you want to add a new widget but the app will remember your added widgets if you close and relaunch it.

WidgetRunner will run both stock and custom-installed widgets, and the only difference will be that you will have to navigate to different folders to add the two different types of installed widgets. The stock widgets can be found at /Library/Widgets, while the third-party ones you’ve installed reside in Users/YourUserName/Library/Widget. Once added, a widget can be used as if it were running in the Dashboard.

Repeat the process to add a different widget. To remove a widget, right-click it and select ‘Close widget’. You can select how the widget will behave by choosing one of three options from this menu under ‘Widget Position’. If you select ‘Desktop’, you will be able to select a widget simply by clicking and dragging it. If you select ‘Normal’, you will have to first select WidgetRunner before you can select and interact with a widget. Lastly, selecting ‘Top’ will keep the widget on top of all other app windows. The small ‘i’ button at a corner of the widget will allow you to access its settings.

One very common notion about these desktop widgets is that they are memory hogs and if you’re running any sort of MacBook, they will tax your battery life. While WidgetRunner lets you run widgets as desktop apps, it makes no claims whatsoever about whether or not your battery life will be effected; you will have to check that for yourself. If you’re not interested in using widgets and would much rather disable the Dashboard altogether, you can do so by visiting Missions Control’s settings.

Download WidgetRunner For Mac

[via Lifehacker]

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KillerKeys VR Teaches Hotkeys For Mac Apps Using A Virtual Keyboard

Fatima Wahab — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:55:34 +0000

If I find an app that works well, does something I really need it to do and has a reasonable price tag but lacks keyboard shortcuts, I am left disappointed. To me, keyboard shortcuts are specially essential in apps that one might use frequently. Though there is a difference between using shortcuts for simple and complex apps: it’s easier to learn them all when the app is simple and performs few functions, but can be challenging when it comes to feature-filled apps. KillerKeys VR for OS X is a free learning tool for app shortcuts that adds an on-screen keyboard to your desktop that shows available shortcuts and what they do. The keys are color-coded and change if you’re holding down a modifier key such as Command or Control. The app can show on-screen shortcuts for OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Lion, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and iTunes. You can buy shortcut indicators for more apps like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Final CutPro 7, etc. The price for the shortcuts of an app varies between $0.99 and $4.99.

Open the app and wait for the first keyboard to appear. It offers a compact view and an expanded one; the latter also shows the navigation keys and the numeric keypad. The keyboard supports both QWERTY and AZERTY layouts, and its opacity can be customized. You can set a keyboard shortcut to hide/unhide the keyboard, and also pin it on top of all windows.

KillerKeys VR is not context sensitive; it won’t change which shortcuts are being displayed if you switch to a different app. To change the shortcuts that you see, click the menu at the top-left and select a different app; the keys will change to reflect the shortcuts for the selected app. You will notice that if you press and hold different modifier keys – be it just one or in a combination – the keyboard will change to reflect any and all shortcuts that are available with that combination.

The QWERTY and AZERTY buttons at the top allow you to change the layout of the keyboard. The slider right next to it lets you manage the opacity of the keyboard. The keyboard button itself lets you record a shortcut for calling the app, and the two squares allow you to toggle its pinned state. To view the expanded version of the keyboard, click the arrow at the far-right.

The app is pretty good but given that it’s a learning tool that will soon be discarded once a user has learnt the shortcuts, its price tags for each app’s shortcut are bit high. It might be a good idea to give users a package or allow them to buy a certain number of shortcuts for a fixed price.

Download KillerKeys VR For Mac

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‘Get Mac Apps’ Allows Easy Batch-Download & Installation Of Popular OS X Programs

Fatima Wahab — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 09:30:34 +0000

Installing apps on a Mac is not the same closed and fenced-in deal that installing apps on an iOS device is. True, you have to sidestep Gatekeeper if you’re running Lion or Mountain Lion, but you can still download and install Mac apps from just about any source. Though, finding and then installing these apps – whether from the Mac App Store or the developer’s site – can be a bit tedious, which is something Get Mac Apps can help you out with. It’s a simple web service that allows users to select the apps they want to install, and gives them a single command to run in Terminal to get them all in one go. The apps are then downloaded without so much as asking you to enter your system’s password or sign in with your Apple ID. The best part is that Gatekeeper lets you run the apps without having to sidestep them, and any DMG files that are downloaded are automatically removed after installation. The result is one of the cleanest and most convenient ways to download and install Mac Apps.

The app list on Get Mac Apps is categorized by app type and includes a few of the most popular apps available for the platform. Select the ones you want to install, scroll to the very bottom of the page, and hit ‘Install These!’.

Get Mac Apps gives you a command to run in Terminal. If you’re suspicious as to what this command will do, click the link below it to see what’s going on under the hood.

Open Terminal, paste the command and hit Enter. You can watch as the apps download in the Terminal. When the downloads complete, open Launchpad and you will see icons for the respective apps that you’ve installed.

Apart from being a convenient way to install lots of apps at once, Get Mac Apps is great for when you’re setting up a brand new Mac and want to install some of your commonly used apps with little effort. If you’ve ever needed to set up several Macs for an office, this is a failsafe way to do it – something that you can direct a user to do themselves too by providing them with the command.

The shortcomings of this service are that not all developers host the latest versions of their apps on their own website. Many rely on nothing more than the Mac App Store, which is a great platform in itself but wouldn’t work with this method. Fortunately, Get Mac Apps has the basics covered as we stated earlier, and the clean install that leaves you with no drives to eject or disk images to delete is just too good to pass on for all the apps that are available through the service.

Looking for similar solutions for Windows? Check out Ninite and DDownloads.

Visit Get Mac Apps

[via Lifehacker]

Read ‘Get Mac Apps’ Allows Easy Batch-Download & Installation Of Popular OS X Programs by Fatima Wahab on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Adobe Presenter Video Express For Mac Lets You Capture, Combine & Upload Videos And Screencasts

Fatima Wahab — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:00:24 +0000

We’ve reviewed a few screencasting tools for Mac, of which the free Ripcorder Screen is a favorite. Users can turn to QuickTime, a stock Mac app, that lets you create screencasts as well. New on the screencasting front is Adobe Presenter Video Express, a free Mac app from Adobe that lets you record both screencasts and videos. You can edit videos, add closed captions, and view screencasts and recordings side by side. The final project can be uploaded to both YouTube and Dropbox, though it cannot be saved to your local drive; however, if you go for Dropbox, it’ll get synced to your computer anyway.

Launch the app and click the green film reel button at the bottom. You can either record your screen or use the webcam to record a video. By default, the app records your webcam’s input; to switch to screencast recording mode, click the little camera button next to the mic button and hit record.

An on-screen timer counts down from 5 seconds and displays shortcuts for ending and pausing a recording. Clicking the app’s Menu Bar icon will also stop the recording.

Once you’ve recorded a video or screencast, Adobe Presenter Video Express will process and open it for editing. The editing tools are fairly basic; there is a ‘Branding’ tool that allows you to select one of the many preset themes for starting and ending a video. In addition, you can add your very own icon or logo to the screen, and display the video title on the video itself.

To trim a part of the video, click the scissors button and then drag out the trim markers on the seek bar to select the part to trim out of the video.

Click the CC button on the video player to add closed captions. The app automatically lists the proper time slots for adding a caption, so you need only type in the captions. The captions preview live as you type them.

When you record a video instead of a screencast, the editing options you see will be slightly different; you will see four new buttons on the bottom bar that allow you to view both the recorded video and screencast side by side, or only one of the two. The advantage here is that any voiceover you’ve done for the video will be added to your screencast. Click ‘Publish’ when you’re done, and you will be asked to sign in to either YouTube or Dropbox in order to upload the video.

Once signed in, your video will be uploaded to the service you selected. When uploading to Dropbox, you are limited to uploading videos of up to one minute for free, and will be required to pay for longer ones. The app is rather slow at times, but it’s basic enough that a lot of users will be able to look past its occasional slow responses.

Download Adobe Presenter Video Express For Mac

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Picturelife Offers Dropbox-Like Cross-Platform Sync & Easy Sharing For Photos & Videos

Waqas Ahmed — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 13:15:16 +0000

When you think ‘cloud computing’, what comes to mind are services designed to let you upload and access all sorts of content from the cloud. And that is apparently true, as most of the cloud services out there these days are designed with the same purpose in mind, though how about a cloud solution exclusively made to store your photos and videos, and present them in a captivating way? Picturelife is a fine-looking photo and video backup service with apps for Windows, Mac OS X, iOS and Android that lets you store your content on the cloud and access it across all these devices. Read past the break for further details.

The Windows version that I took for a spin is basically a Dropbox-esque desktop client used to sync media files with your cloud storage, and worked flawlessly as it should. First of all, download and install the app from the Picturelife webpage. You will also need a Picturelife account, which you can easily create during first run of the app. Simply select ‘I don’t have a Picturelife account yet’ and click continue. The startup wizard will ask you for your credentials like email, password and full name for signing up for the service.

After specifying the required details, you’ll also be required to select your default image and video folder(s) that you want to use. Simply make use of the Add Folder button for the purpose and click Continue after specifying the required location(s) to complete this setup. The application automatically pulls images and videos stored in the specified location.

The app then resides in the system tray, closely monitoring the files you drop into your Picturelife folder(s). In short, if you’ve already used a cloud storage service like SkyDrive or Dropbox, you will quickly get the inner workings of Picturelife. You may right click the context menu and perform a few actions from there on like accessing Preferences for making a few application-specific changes, pause/resume sync, and open Picturelife’s web-based dashboard.

Speaking of the dashboard, it looks fairly neat and elegant. You can view your photos, create albums and set viewing restrictions to public or your Picturelife contacts. You may also resize image thumbnails view according to your liking via the zoom in/out slider at the top right. The navigation bar on the left gives you access to Home, Timeline, All Pictures, Albums, Places, Picture Mail, Family Stream and Friends Stream. Friends and family streams carry media shared by your contacts so you can easily view them directly from your dashboard.

Creating albums is a nice way to keep your photos organized. Picturelife lets you specify custom title and description for your albums, and you may additionally select the contacts with whom you want to share the photos in that album.

Picturelife also supports geotagging and allows you to view location-tagged photos in a separate section called Places. Places uses Google Maps API to let you fly over the geotagged locations. It’s a great way to revisit your memories about places that you spent during vacations and those business trips, in addition to simply discovering new and interested places based on the photos taken there.

Picturelife currently sports multiple pricing plans. The free plan provides 5GB of cloud storage, with upgrade options to 100GB and 300GB available for $7 and $15 per month respectively.

Visit Picturelife

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Dashlane Gets Improved Desktop App UI, Two-Step Authentication & Built-In Browser On Android

Fatima Wahab — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 12:00:31 +0000

Dashlane is one of the most popular password managers and security vaults for sensitive information that you enter in your browser. The service and its apps work with your browsers to save and auto-fill important information, eliminating your dependence on your browser’s own password manager and auto-fill feature, which isn’t the most secure place for important data and doesn’t work across different browsers. Dashlane updated both its Mac and PC apps a while back, as well as its Android app. Both Mac and PC apps have had a design overhaul as well as the addition of a ‘Security dashboard’ that finds security loopholes or possible flaws on your system and tells you how to fix them. It’s also adds 2-factor authentication via Google Authenticator. The Android app has also received two-factor authentication and in addition, now offers an in-app browser that you can sign into easily with the account information you’ve saved in Dashlane, and supports both portrait and landscape orientation.

The security dashboard will tell you what security problems currently exist in your system with a solution and a ‘Replace now’ button to quickly rectify them. It will detect weak passwords, passwords that have been in use too long, any information that isn’t stored securely, and email addresses stored in your browsers, among other things. The data, once rectified or removed through the app, cannot be recovered. Needless to say, this information will be pulled only from the browsers that Dashlane is connected to.

From Dashlane’s settings, you can now enable two-factor authentication, provided you have a smartphone with the Google Authenticator app (available free of cost for both iOS and Android) installed on it. To set up two-factor authentication, go to the app’s settings and under the ‘Security’ tab, enable Google Authenticator. Scan the QR code that it gives you using the Google Authenticator app on your smartphone, and enter the resulting code into the text field to complete the two-factor authentication setup. From now onward, you will need to enter a code from your Google Authenticator app to sign in to Dashlane from any computer.

The Android app now has a browser, which you can access from the navigation drawer. It loads Google by default, though you can use it for pretty much anything, like any regular mobile browser. You’re logged in automatically when the app detects a login page that you have login information saved for.

Besides this, tablets will be pleased to know that the app supports both portrait and landscape orientation.

To sum it up, this update brings some major security features as well as interface improvements to the already impressive service, making it even more useful for users to keep their sensitive information safe and secure.

Visit Dashlane

Download Dashlane For Android

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