Guides

Mindfulness is the very simple concept of focusing one's attention on the present moment, which can be achieved through a number of meditative techniques. Derived from Buddhist practices, it is far from a fringe belief - in fact, it is now widely used in many clinical settings to alleviate symptoms associated with depression, anxiety and stress, and is employed in some behavioral and cognitive therapies.

Apple's recently announced News+ service gives subscribers access to over 300 magazines and several newspapers including popular titles such as National Geographic, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Popular Science and The Wall Street Journal to name a few - for $9.99 per month. Depending on how many magazines you currently subscribe to à la carte, this could be a very deep discount.

One of the best features of Apple's iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) is the ability to easily collaborate with friends and coworkers. Rather than simply sharing your documents for others to view or critique or go off on their own tangent with, collaborating allows all parties involved to edit the document, and everybody will see the edits. It is an incredibly useful feature whether you are working on a Keynote presentation with coworkers or simply sharing a spreadsheet among friends to keep track of expenses on a trip.

The "out-of-office" reply is a commonly used automatic email reply that lets people know you will be away from your email for an amount of time, so they won't think you are ignoring them. Just about every email client has this tool, including one of the most popular - Gmail. Apple Mail and other email managers sometimes don't let you set up out-of-office responses. For Apple Mail you'd have to do it in a roundabout way, setting up rules on your desktop Mail app. It's a better idea to set it up at the source.

Judging from the number and magnitude of incidents involving Facebook over the past few years, that the social media giant is playing fast and loose with user data is probably an understatement. While it is now putting extra effort into user privacy, it has a long way to go, and you should do everything in your power to protect your data. One of the easiest paths for your private information to leak out is through third-party apps that have permissions to your account.