From The Tips Box: iOS 7 Alt Text, Gmail Archiving

Readers offer their best tips for seeing the alt text for images in iOS 7, archiving Gmail in Mavericks’ Apple Mail app and using the Raspberry Pi Piglow.

Every day we receive stacks of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using our [contact text=”contact form”].
View Alt Text for Images in iOS 7

Noah Carroll shares a great tip about viewing the alt text for images in iOS 7:

My @dinosaurcomics experience just got 200% awesomer. iOS 7 lets you see alt text when you hold down on an image.

Archive Gmail in Mavericks with Delete Key

Kent shares a workaround for getting the Delete key to archive Gmail messages in Mavericks:

Here’s a tip for Gmail users that have their accounts set up in Apple’s Mail app in OS X Mavericks. In old versions of Mail, hitting the Delete key would archive any selected messages, but in Mavericks the Delete key moves messages to the trash instead. To restore the old behaviour, I created a simple Mail plugin called Delete2Archive.

Use Piglow with Your Raspberry Pi XBMC

Falldeaf shares his own XBMC add-on that lets you use the Raspberry Pi Piglow attachement for something useful:

The Piglow attachment for the Raspberry Pi is a neat little device that adds a bunch of LEDs to your Pi. I was writing some code to see what I could do with it, but since it seems like a lot of people have a Raspberry Pi XBMC setup, I thought turning my code into an XBMC add-on might be useful.

My add-on allows you to view different XBMC functions like volume, playmarker (how much time is left in the video/song you’re watching/listening to), memory, temperature (and more) on the three LED spiral arms of the Piglow. The add-on’s setup will let you choose which function to attach to which arm and the overall brightness, too. I wrote up a post about how it works and how to get started with it.