Mobile Devices

Videos taken from your iphone or ipad are imported into iPhoto when you sync your device to iTunes, but it's not very clear how to get those videos out of iPhoto. You can't use the Share -- Email option, because iPhoto only lets you share photos via email.

To share videos over email, export the video as if it were a photo, and iPhoto will convert it to a Quicktime movie format that you can attach to an email or upload to YouTube.

First, sync your iphone or ipad with iTunes, so that your photos and videos are in iPhoto. Open iPhoto and find the video you want to export.

Click the File -- Export menu option and then press the Export button.

iPhoto will recognize that the file you're exporting is actually a video, and will ask you where you want to save the video.

Notice that iPhoto automatically added the .mov file extension? That's the file extension for Quicktime movies, which are viewable on both Mac and PC operating systems.

Once the file has been exported, you can attach it to an email just like you would any other type of file. Quicktime movie files can also be uploaded to YouTube.

It seems like every app I install has the need to notify me about something every day, and those alerts are always popping up on my iphone. Even when it's just in lock mode, I get scrolling reminders that someone has snap-chatted me, or connected to me on LinkedIn, or that it's time to try my luck again at the Zynga poker tables.

Fortunately you can turn off these pesky notifications, by following these easy steps:

First, go into Settings on your iphone and tap "Notifications".

Each app that can post alerts to your phone will be listed here. You'll need to tap each app, and set the Alert Style to "None", and View in Lock Screen to "Off".

Unfortunately there's no global or "Select All" setting, so you'll have to do this for each app that's listed.

The iPad's built-in keyboard automatically switches from large keys when you're holding it the wide way (landscape) and small keys when you're holding it vertically, but did you know there's a third keyboard option that's even better?

It's called Split Keyboard, and it literally splits your iPad keyboard into two separate keyboards. One located on the bottom left of the screen, and the other on the bottom right of the screen - right where your thumbs are when you're holding your iPad.

Once Split Keyboard has been turned on, you can split your iPad keyboard just by tapping with two fingers in the middle of the keyboard area, and spreading it apart. It's the same movement you'd make to zoom in to view a close-up of a web page. You can use this trick anywhere you'd normally see your iPad keyboard, such as composing email or posting on your Facebook wall.

Here's a screenshot of split keyboard mode in Facebook, while holding my iPad horizaontally:

It takes a little getting used to, but I find I move my thumbs much less with split keyboard, because the keys are closer to where my thumb naturally rests on the screen. That means you'll be able to type (or rather "tap") more without wearing out your thumbs!

To take advantage of this feature, make sure you download the latest version of iOS on your iPad. Then enable split keyboard mode by tapping Settings -- General -- Keyboard and turning on Split Keyboard.