On a daily basis, iTandCoffee scours the online world to find all the best articles about iPads, iPhones, Macs and other topics that we know will be of interested to iTandCoffee clients and subscribers.  

(Our full list of articles for December can be found here, for those of you who are iTandCoffee Club members.  Not yet a member?  Join the club here.)

For those of you who unwrapped a brand new iPad or iPhone for Christmas 2014, below are some great articles that will help to get you started!  

Why not book yourself in for some classes or assistance from iTandCoffee in 2015?  

Check out the list of classes that have been scheduled for the start of 2015.

Gift vouchers are available all year round - why not buy one for yourself?!  Purchase an iTandCoffee gift voucher during the rest of December 2014, you will receive free membership of the iTandCoffee Club, as well as a coupon code to download any 3 iTandCoffee digital guides!

Each day, iTandCoffee scours the online world for articles that are of interest to iTandCoffee clients and subscribers.  Some of these topics and articles feature in iTandCoffee fortnightly newsletters, but there is so much more other useful information available online - too much to include in any newsletter!

Starting December 2014, iTandCoffee Club members will be able to view all of the wonderful articles articles gathered up by iTandCoffee during the month - providing information on all sorts of tips, tricks, accessories, new technology, security matters, travel, photos and so much more.   

While the focus of these articles is Apple technology, there are also lots of articles of a more general nature as well.

We hope you like this new service for Club member!  

And don't forget, those of you who are not members can join today to gain access to this great list, and to so much more useful and informative content from iTandCoffee.

Use the list of topics shown below to go directly to articles for that topic.

• General iPhone Tips and Tricks
  
• General Technology Articles
  
• Accessories & Gift Ideas
  
• Apple vs Others
  
• Apps
  
• Brain Training
  
• Buying Guide & Gift Ideas
  
• Education
  
• Facebook
  
• iCloud
  
• Internet / Telcos / Internet Plans
  
• iOS 8
  
• iPad and iPhone Purchasing Guide
  
• iTunes
  
• Kids & Technology
  
• Mac
  
• New Technology
  
• Passwords
  
• Photography on iOS
  
• Piracy & Online Government reforms
  
• Security / Online safety / Privacy
  
• Seniors and Technology
  
• Siri
  
• Technical / Advanced / 'Geeky'(!)
  
• Travel
  
• Yosemite
  

If you receive a video in an email on your iPad or iPhone, it is very easy to save it to your device for future viewing.   (Note that the same process applies when you want to save a photo to your device.)

There are two methods you can use to save the attached video.

Method 1:  Touch and Hold Method

Step 1. Touch and hold on the video attachment in your email

Step 2. From the list of options that appears, choose 'Save Video'

From the 'Share' option

Step 1: Tap the Share option (curved arrow)

Step 2:  Tap on Save Video

Using either of these methods, your video will be saved to the Photos app.  

To find it, tap the Photos app, go to your Albums, and tap on Videos.

If you need more information, leave a comment below.

Big sigh.  All those years of tracking Santa's journey are, sadly, now over in this household, with my children all too old to be interested.  

I even had to threaten to take 4 advent calendars hostage to get my children to show any interest in putting up the Christmas tree!  Only the potential loss of those poor quality daily chocolates rallied their enthusiasm and got our Christmas tree in place.

In saying that, my youngest (at 11) is still saying he is a believer in the fat, jolly man - I suspect just so that he can still receive a 'Santa' present in his stocking!

But I doubt that a Santa Tracker app will feature in the set of apps on his iPad.

Anyway, for those of you who still have the magic of Christmas in your home, with little ones super-excited about Santa's arrival next week, here are some gorgeous iPad and iPhone apps that will allow you to track Santa's preparations and global journey this Christmas.  

Merry Christmas!

Here's another scam email that I received today, one that has a different 'flavour'.  

Instead of asking me to click a link or open a file, it is 'simply' asking me to provide some identity documentation for an 'order' that I have placed.

The main reason I looked twice at this one is that I had very recently visited the Kogan website looking at online gift ideas, and at first glance thought that one of the orders I placed may have been with Kogan.

Of course, this is absolutely a scam - probably looking to get drivers license and utility identity papers for something like bank fraud or to arrange mobile phones contracts.

Once again, NEVER give out any of your personal, identity, account, password of financial information based on an email you have received.

iTandCoffee is very excited to see an article published this week about the business that appears in over 30 Leader newspaper publications across Melbourne.  Thanks so much to Edgar D'Souza for writing and placing this article.  

The below article comes from Macworld UK.

The 21 best iPad board games for Christmas 

Can't say I've tried any of these games, but what a great idea some multi-player fun involving the iPad.

Let me know if you end up getting any, and what you think of them.                                                               

My family LOVES our Apple TV.  In fact, we have two!  

I use one when running my iTandCoffee classes, to project my iPad's screen up onto a big TV screen.

Just last night we rented the movie 'Guardians of the Galaxy' using our Apple TV, and watched that together on our family room TV.

But just before we did that, I showed my family a video that I had seen on Facebook, that shows how to really, really easily put a quilt cover onto your quilt.  

From my iPhone, I 'airplayed' the Facebook video (via our Wi-Fi network) to the TV screen for us all to watch.

(Check out that amazing video here!  I can't believe I had never seen this before!)

Are you wondering if the Apple TV has a place in your home?  For me, the relatively low price tag of only $109 (sometimes less on sale) made that decision easy. Here are a couple of articles that might help you decide for yourself.

• How Airplay makes Apple TV a great gift idea for Mac and iOS fans
• The Ultimate Apple TV Guide: Tips, Tricks and How-To

This post is totally unrelated to technology.  But it is very relevant to mummies (and others, of course)!

How come I never knew this before.  I have struggled all my life to put quilt covers back onto quilts, and could have been following this amazingly easily procedure instead!

Watch here and be amazed!  Just click the below image to see the Facebook clip.

A rather large squeal of excitement on a Sunday morning!
(Sad, I know. My husband is looking at me with that 'oh dear, you are a such geek' look!)  

I have just downloaded and tried out a brand new app called Workflow that makes use of the great new features of iOS 8.

I know it will come in sooooo handy for all sorts of things I haven't even imagined yet!  If you are a geek like me, check it out.  It is discounted by 40% for a limited time a a launch special ($3.29 currently).

Workflow allows you to create 'workflows' on your iOS device to perform a series of actions/steps with just one touch.  You can set these workflows up as apps on your home screen, or as 'extensions' to other apps.  (Check out this iTandCoffee article about some great App Extensions for the Photos app.)

For example, you can create a 'mail merge' (select a group of contacts and send them individual emails personally addressed to each individual), save all the photos from a web page, edit multiple images, make animated gifs (this one is the one I am sure I will use the most), and so, so much more.  

Here is the article that I read about Workflow this morning:  Workflow for iOS aims to simplify automation of complex multi-step tasks                                                                

And, here is how Workflow is described in the App Store (click here to see Workflow in the App Store).

You may not yet have heard of App Extensions in iOS 8 and, in particular, extensions for the Photos app.

On you iPhone and iPad, App extensions allow you, while using features of a particular standard app (such as Safari, Photos, Camera), to access additional features provided by another app - usually to give you some addtional features that are not otherwise available in the standard app.

You download an App that provides the extension and, when you open that new app, you give it permission to use a particular data or features on you i-Device.

For example, today I downloaded the iOS 8 App called DateStamper (which is free for both iPad and iPhone).  This app allows you, when editing a photo in the Photos apps, to add a date stamp to the photo.

Another free iPhone App called Quick allows you to quickly and easily add some text to a photo while you are editing it in the Photos app.

Below is an article describing ten of the best iOS 8 extensions for the Photos app - just click on the image to view the article.

If you are wondering how to the use extensions from, say, the Photos App, look out for an upcoming Handy Hint on this topic.

Yet another scam email has been doing the rounds recently, and hit my email inbox this week.  It seems to be offering me a free Woolworths voucher just for answering a single question.

At first glance it looks legitimate - with the Woolworths name and logo.

First indication that it is a scam is that there it doesn't read quite right - with a comma and a hyphen after the $150, and it seems to have the incorrect word in the sentence after that ('price' instead of 'prize').

Of course, the other dead giveaway is that the email address is not a Woolworths email address.

Woolworths has a posted the following alert on their website about this scam (click here to see the Woolworths web page).

For those of you on Facebook, please ignore - and certainly don't share or re-post - a warning that appears from time to time, about entering your PIN in reverse order to notify the police that you are in the process of being robbed at the ATM.

It has been around for a while, and 'rears its head' every now and then, and does the rounds again.

The information that it provides is false.  If you are in the situation it describes, it could be downright dangerous to try what it suggests, since your PIN will be rejected, which could aggravate your attacker.

Whenever I see a post such as this one, I immediately go to either the Snopes or Hoaxslayer website to check if it is known as a hoax.   Before re-posting or sharing such a hoax, it is a good idea to do the same thing - otherwise these hoaxes continue to proliferate.

See below links to the pages describing this particular hoax.

• Snope
  
• Hoax-slayer
  

Published fortnightly, the first iTandCoffee newsletter for December 2014 is now available.  Click on the image on the right to view this newsletter now*.  

Not only does this newsletter include great handy hints, tips and articles, it also includes a great FREE OFFER - iTandCoffee Digital Guides available for free download, available to all iTandCoffee Club members.

Join The iTandCoffee Club today!

* Access to this newsletter will be unlimited until 19th Dec 14.  After that date, an iTandCoffee Club membership is required to view it.

I will add a better digital version of the page once it is available online!

One of the mums who attended the iTandCoffee free morning tea this week found herself in an all too common situation.  

She could not get into the 'Parental Controls' area of her family iPad because no-one in the family could remember the passcode to that area that has already been put in place some time ago.

A forgotten Restrictions passcode makes it impossible to look at and set up/change the parental controls that have already been set.  

Depending on what restrictions are in place, inability to access and change restrictions can also greatly limit some capabilities of the iPad.  

When there have already been multiple failed attempts to guess the Restrictions passcode, each new guess that failed then sets a longer and longer delay on when the passcode can be re-attempted.

Even a normal reset of the device is disabled until the Restrictions passcode is entered.

Of course, an important message here is that it is essential that, before you set up any Restrictions on an Apple device, you must be sure that you are not going to forget the passcode that you use.

A forgotten Restrictions password is a real problem as the only way to clear it is to perform a 'factory reset' using iTunes on a computer - which will wipe its contents.   

Even if you have a backup of your device, you cannot just re-instate the device from backup if the backup itself also had the Restrictions passcode set at the time the backup was done!  

If you only just set up the Restrictions passcode and have a backup from before that passcode was set, you can restore that backup after the factory reset  (which will mean losing whatever was new in the time since that backup was done).

If you don't have a backup that is free of the Restrictions passcode, you have to do the factory reset and the set up your device again - re-download all of your apps and re-do all your settings.  

Any photos that you had on the device will be wiped when you do a factory reset, so make sure you import them to a computer before wiping the device.  After the reset, you could sync back any photos you want to put onto the device using iTunes (or perhaps the Photo Transfer app).  Any music would also need to be re-downloaded and re-sync'd.

Definitely not what most people will want to do - very drastic action to have to take when all you want to do is reset the Restrictions passcode!

If you find yourself in the situation where you don't know the Restrictions passcode (or perhaps where a child in your family might have set it and then forgotten the code), iTandCoffee has a tool that should be able to extract the restrictions passcode from an iTunes backup of the device.

In the case of the mum who attended the iTandCoffee morning tea this week, this solved the problem - to the great relief of the children in the family, who were at risk of losing some of their precious games data!

Contact iTandCoffee for more information if you find yourself in this situation and need to retrieve your Restrictions passcode - 1300 885 420.

If you are looking for a great Christmas gift for kids who love their iPads - but one that you can feel good about them spending time on - check out a great new toy called Osmo.

Osmo provides a combination of accessories (a stand for the iPad and physical puzzle/game pieces) and iPad apps that are both educational and fun - that even parents and older kids will have fun playing.

Here are a couple of articles about Osmo, for those of you interested in exploring it further.

• Osmo review – child’s play with finesse
  
• Ingenious New Toy Turns Physical Objects Into iPad Games