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A quick update on some of the new features in WatchOS 3.2 including the new "Theatre Mode", a new lock sound when unlocking your Mac and a peek at some new scrolling capabilities using the touchpad on the Apple TV remote.

Recently launched by Apple, Clips is a brand new way to capture and edit video on your iPhone or iPad.

iMovie is great, but sometimes you just want to assemble a short video to post quickly to your favourite social media service, share with iCloud Photo sharing or just email to someone.

Clips allows you to rapidly capture live video, photos, or video and photos in your iCloud Photo library and create a mini movie with just a few taps. You can annotate your movie with live titles, just by talking, as well as adding stickers, filters, emojis and more in a flash.

Despite seeming a very simple application, Clips actually has some hidden depths, and allows you to do much more than can you imagine.

This weekly tip video covers some of the updates in Apples recent iOS 10.3 release.

iOS 10.3 is the first iOS release to use Apple File System (APFS) - not a lot to see, but kudos to Apple on successfully migrating so many devices to the new file system.

Find my Airpods is a new addition to Find my Phone, and I also take a look at the new weather integration with Apple Maps.

The third and final part of the current series on setting up and using a Synology NAS (Network Attached Storage) device.

Once you've started to store lots of important data on your NAS, you'll want to be sure that your data is safely secured with an offsite backup.

Synology Cloud Station ShareSync allows you to sync your important files with another Synology NAS, or you can use Cloud Sync to backup your files to a third-party cloud service like DropBox, BackBlaze, Google Drive, Box and many other services. In this episode, we demonstrate setting up and using both of these important packages.

If your primary reason for wanting a NAS is for it to act as a media server, we also demonstrate the initial setup, configuration and ongoing maintenance of Plex Media Server - installed directly on your Synology NAS.

Finally, we take a look at the surprisingly powerful Synology Surveillance Station, a free suite of utilities that turn your Synology NAS into a video recording hub for home or business security.

We hope you've found these Synology NAS tutorials useful and we'll revisit the topic in the future. If you have any specific areas of configuring or using a Synology NAS you would like us to cover in future shows, please let us know.

Apple have rolled out updates to all of its platforms across the board in the past few weeks. In this week's tip video, we focus on Night Shift on the Mac, now available in mac OS Sierra 10.12.4.

Night Shift was originally introduced in iOS and is a screen technology designed to make it easier to work with your Mac during the evening hours. It changes your Mac display to overlay a "Sepia" layer which can assist in making it easier on the eyes.

Night Shift isn't for everyone, but it's worth giving it a try.

EagleFiler is a digital filing cabinet for your data. It includes a finder style layout that allows for a variety of ways to import and organize your information, add metadata, and quick and easy search methods for finding your information.

What makes EagleFiler unique is the way it stores your files and folders in the finder in an easily accessible way allowing you to use the database and finder side by side to navigate and access your files and folders.

This mini compendium of Apple TV tips includes...

• Renaming your Apple TV

• An easy way to change case using the on-screen keyboard

• Putting your Apple TV to sleep with a single key press

• How to review all the Apple TV Arial screen savers on your your Mac or iPad

Automation is key to productivity but iOS offers less options for automation than the Mac. This is mainly due to sandboxing, which limits what apps can do, and how they can interoperate. However, there are still some powerful automation tools available if you take time to understand how the basic building blocks of automation on iOS work.

In Part 1 of this iOS automation series, we introduce you to iOS automation via app extensions, and explain how URL schemes work. We also show you how to use URL schemes in some common iOS automation applications, to give you a solid knowledge base for automating your own iOS workflows.

In this tutorial we demonstrate:

• Examples of app extensions like the 1Password Touch ID extension and the TextExpander third-party keyboard

• How URL schemes are constructed on iOS

• How x-callback-url allows you to string actions together

• Adding actions to Drafts via the actions directory and carpeting them from scratch

• Creating Launch Center Pro actions using the Action Composer

• Building and launching workflows via the Workflow app, Notification Center widget, and app extension

Since the tutorial was recorded, Apple have now acquired the Workflow app and made it available for free on the App Store. Perhaps we'll see more Workflow like features built into future releases of iOS!

Following on in the occasional series about the fantastic Preview app on the Mac, this weekly tip video covers some of the "party tricks" built right into Preview, and exposes a surprise in iOS too.

Firstly, I demonstrate how to extract beautiful full sized Application Icons from your installed apps with a few simple keystrokes, and use Preview to resize and export them.

Then I move on to the really smart way of setting up signatures in Preview on the Mac - either using your trackpad, or using your camera to snap your signature to use in your PDF forms.

Unfortunately there is no separate Preview app for iOS, but did you know that you can actually access Preview functionality on your iOS device, even creating and applying signatures? Annotate, create Loupes, add Text - it's all available for free in iOS - even if slightly hidden away.

What's more, any annotations you make to your documents will sync between your Mac and iOS, but even your signature "Library" will sync too.

Watch this week's tip and all will be revealed!

Reminders is a surprisingly powerful application that comes with macOS, iOS and watchOS. With Reminders, you can bridge the gap between your calendar and a to do list. Reminders can be set for when you arrive or leave a location, they can be set for specific times and dates, they can repeat, and they can even be set to remind you to do something when you get into or out of your car.

Reminders even lets you share lists with other Apple users so you can collaborate on tasks. You can use Siri to set up Reminders on your Mac, but Siri on iOS and the Apple Watch, makes Reminders the best tool for when you're on the run.

This week's tip is all about using iTunes views to access your music.

The main views all look very pretty, but they aren't very information dense, at least, not enough for my liking.

In this tip, I cover the main views, but focus mainly on the Song view, and take a look at using the Column Browser. The Column Browser allows you to display more information on screen, and allows you to filter your music with a greater degree of control.

Using Genres is a bit of a blunt instrument to organise and categorise your music. What if you have a ton of Rock tracks but many many different "sub genres"? Well it's possible to create your own "sub genres" using the "Groupings" feature.

All is revealed in this week's tip show.

In the second part of this occasional series, we take a look at using the Synology NAS to provide centralised storage.

At the core of your Synology NAS is DSM (Disk Station Manager) - a fully featured, server based operating system, optimised to manage your storage.

In this episode, we take a look at configuring DSM to share files and folders and set up user accounts.

As well as the more traditional file sharing capabilities, Synology provide a suite of applications called "Cloud Station Suite" - a range of free applications which allow you to create your own private sync services and in effect, set up your own private Cloud. We demonstrate how to set up the syncing services between your Mac, your NAS and your iOS devices - all for free and with no ongoing costs.

To learn more about the initial setup of a Synology NAS, be sure to check out episode SCOM0611 - Synology NAS - Part 1

In this week's tip video we take a look at managing your WiFi connections on both the Mac and iOS.

If you're an iCloud user and switch on iCloud Keychain Sync, the details of all WiFi hotspots you connect to will be synchronised across all your devices - including the WiFi passwords too.

This can be extremely useful, but after a while you'll most likely end up with a huge list of WiFi networks on your devices, many of which, you'll never visit again.

Watch this week's tip video to learn how to manage your ever increasing list of WiFi networks.

As promised, this week we start the first in an occasional service covering the setup, configuration and usage of a Networked Storage device (NAS) in your home or small business environment.

Whether it be for local file storage, for local backup, to act as media server, to act as an email server and more, a NAS can provide you with amazing levels of functionality and resiliance for much less than the cost of a dedicated PC or Mac server.

In this episode I take a look at selecting a NAS and the initial setup and configuration in a home enviroment. The episode is based on the Synology DS216+II, an inexpensive, yet very capable Network Attached Storage device.

As well as the initial setup and configuration, I also demonstrate accessing the NAS using DS Finder - an iOS app that allows you to access the NAS locally over across the internet.

Tip Video - We have covered Apple Photos in depth on ScreenCastsOnline, but in this short tip video, I want to revisit how to create and manage metadata with your iCloud Photo Library.

On both the Mac and iOS, Apple Photos is getting smarter by applying machine learning technology on the device, to automatically categorise photos. However, there are still instances when you want to add your own personal metadata in the form of titles, descriptions, keywords or location information.

In this tip video, I focus on adding title and keyword metadata via the Info Panel and the Keyword Manager.

Curio 11 is a freeform notebook with just about every tool you can think of to help you take notes, brainstorm ideas, collect research, and organize your tasks and documents. Curio is a powerful tool that includes the functions of many stand alone applications, allowing you to focus on the task at hand, without having to worry about switching applications for different aspects of your project.

Curio is available in three versions Core, Standard, and Professional with each adding a few more features than the previous version. In this screencast, Todd Olthoff walks us through the Professional version to give you an overview of all of the features packed into Curio 11.

Tip Video - We looked at filtering your Twitter timeline with Mute filters a couple of weeks ago in episode SCOM0604.

Another option to take control of Twitter is to create and subscribe to Twitter lists. Twitter lists allow you to create multiple timelines based on specific people, it's a great way to organise the Twitter firehose into something more manageable.

In this short tip video, I take you through the mechanisms built into Tweetbot on the Mac and iOS to allow you to setup and subscribe to Twitter lists.

The Mac offers some really powerful automation options, especially when you apply a systems mindset to your work and learn to string automations together to automate common tasks.

In Part 2 of this Mac automation series, we dive deep with several more powerful automation workflows. We show you what typical automation chains look like, and explain how to use the building blocks of Mac automation to solve complex problems on your Mac.

Tip Video - Following on from our recent tutorials on Bear & Ulysses, I take a look at previewing Markdown formatted files with Marked 2.

Bear is the new kid on the block as far as plain text editing on the Mac, iPad and iPhone is concerned.

Despite being a committed Ulyssess and Scrivener user, my interest was piqued by the glowing reviews and the fact that Bear was selected as "App of the Year" 2016 by Apple.

After using Bear for a couple of weeks (and the fact that I received many requests), I decided that it would be remiss of me not to cover Bear on ScreenCastsOnline - it really is a beautiful app!

However, there is one aspect of the app that may not sit well with some people, and that's to enable syncing between devices (and to switch on some other functionality), you need to upgrade to Bear Pro, which just happens to be a subscription service.

Consequently, in this tutorial, I focus mainly on the features in the free version, but still take a look at the Bear Pro options.

Well worth taking a look!