via osxdaily

It’s interesting and slightly creepy at the same time.

I had a hard time believing this was actually possible, and so I took my own pulse before using the app. The results were the same. Cardiio successfully reads your heart rate by watching the late reflected on your face. Once it has an accurate measurement it’ll show it to you, and you can save it for future reference. 

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Looks good…

OS X: Desktop clutter is a distraction, and Shade is a free Mac app that lets you hide it all with one click when it’s time to focus. When you need the files, click again to pull the shade up, and when you need room to think, click to pull the shade down and make them vanish. 

via life hacker

One of the great features of Omnifocus is the ability to have repeating tasks. Instead of ticking off a task and manually recreating the same one, as soon as you finish the task and tick it off, OmniFocus can be instructed to immediately recreate the same task for you. This is really useful for tasks you have to do repeatedly. Take the simple example of paying your rent – you can create a task each month that says “Pay rent” but this can be simplified by making the task once and setting it up to be a repeating task that shows up at the beginning of every month

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This is a rather aggressive looking desk….

People who multitask a lot are in fact a lot worse at filtering irrelevant information and also perform significantly worse at switching between task, compared to singletaskers.

Now most studies all point towards the fact that multitasking is very bad for us. We get less productive and skills like filtering out irrelevant information decline. Personally I had the same results without ever reading the above studies before. I put some things in place, especially with working online, to win my productivity back and ban multitasking from my workflow once and for all.

read the rest here

via lifehacker

Siri is magical and fun when it works…

If you’re on the go or just want an easier way to add events to your Calendar app, Siri will happily get the job done for you. Creating an event is super simple and only takes a few seconds.

1. Hold down the Home button to activate Siri.
2. Tell Siri what you’d like her to schedule. For example: “Schedule a conference call with Phil tomorrow at 9AM.”
3. Wait for Siri to show you the Calendar widget and ask for confirmation.

If there’s any ambiguity about what you said, or Siri is uncertain, it will ask you to clarify. For example, if you ask to set up an appointment “tomorrow”, and it’s near midnight, Siri will ask you to specify the date to make sure the appointment is set up properly.

For more helpful hints you can read the full article here.

via imore