Tech and fashion enthusiasts will help drive Apple Watch awareness, but the mainstream will determine its success.

How regular iPhone users approach the Apple Watch — how quickly they adopt it, how important it becomes to them for daily use, and what they get out of it — will not only be fascinating to see, but will be one of the best measures of how well it’s really doing in the market. Jim Dalrymple makes that very point on The Loop:

There will be growing pains with Apple Watch, as there are with any new technology. I don’t expect the watch to be flawless—no product ever is, but it’s up to Apple to make sure the value proposition is there for normal, everyday users.

From what I’ve seen so far of the Apple Watch and iPhone combination, Apple, with help from its developers can do it.

The more people you see wearing Apple Watch one, three, six months after purchasing the device, the more successful it will be. That is a measure of success that will take time, but it’s very important.

Anecdotally, neither my mother nor my sister had much interest in the iPhone or iPad at launch. My sister eventually took one of my older iPhones and my mom bought herself an iPhone 5c because it looked like pop art to her. Likewise, both waited for the iPad 2 before jumping onto the tablet. (They remain enormous iPad users, my mother with an Air and my sister with a Mini 2).

Both my sister and my mother want Apple Watches now. They have no intention of waiting. They have specific problems they think the Apple Watch can solve, and they want them solved as soon as possible. Waiting for a future generation, for them, is living with those problems for a year or years more than they need to.

Jim is absolutely right about the metric for Apple Watch success, and for which part of the customer base it’ll be most important.

Photo editing app Snapseed gets its first major update since 2013 with version 2.0, adding a number of new editing tools to help you get the most out of your photos.

The Google-owned Snapseed, which received its last major update in October 2013, is one of our favorite photo editing apps for iPhone. The latest update adds a new way to view your edits with Stacks. Stacks allow you to see a list of filters that you’ve applied to an image that can be re-edited or copied over to another image.

Snapseed 2.0 also includes new filters, brush and spot repair tools, and more. Check out the full list of additions below:

• Stacks allow you to re-edit any image
• Copy your edits from one image to another
• 5 new filters including Lens Blur, Tonal Contrast and Glamour Glow, previously a premium feature
• Lens blur that’s adjustable in all directions
• Brush tools to apply effects to sections of an image
• Spot Repair for detailed editing, healing, and retouching
• Transform adjusts perspective across vertical and horizontal axes, then fills in empty areas after rotations

Snapseed 2.0 is available now from the App Store as a universal app for iPhone and iPad.

• Free – Download Now

Today’s Daily Deal on eBay is a refurbished HTC One M7 for the low price of $149.

If yesterday’s technology doesn’t bother you, eBay is offering an amazing deal on the HTC One M7. For April 9 only, you can score a 32GB HTC One M7 for only $149.99. The deal is for refurbished, factory unlocked One M7’s in your choice of blue, black, or silver.

Pillars of Eternity, the recently-released RPG from Obsidian, is now available on the Mac App Store.

Recently released on the Mac through Steam, Pillars of Eternity is an old-school roleplaying game in the style of Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Like those classics, Pillars of Eternity utilizes an isometric camera, real-time combat, and extensive character customization.

You can create your character from multiple races and classes. You’re given a number of background details to choose from as well, such as your culture of origin, your home city, and more. As you progress, your character will gain new abilities to face the challenges that the world throws at you.

You can grab Pillars of Eternity from the Mac App Store now.

• $44.99 – Download Now

Unnecto’s latest smartphone isn’t the best or the prettiest, but it serves a purpose not many other US phones bother with.

The sub-$200 smartphone market has never been more interesting than it is right now. We’ve seen impressive offerings from manufacturers big and small over the past year, and news that Qualcomm will be partnering with Cyanogen for the next wave of QRD offerings means the software is about to get a lot less awful for a lot of these inexpensive devices.

That doesn’t mean the current offerings aren’t compelling, and there’s no greater example of this than the latest from Unnecto. The Air 5.5 is a surprisingly functional $169 smartphone built to be sold as a dual-SIM smartphone in the US, but it’s not totally clear whether or not that’s something useful here yet.

When you don’t have time to carefully line up and perfectly frame every photo, you just need to shoot first and fix it in post later.

That’s where straightening and cropping come in. Whether the horizon or a building looks oddly angled, or extra people or space are stealing focus from your subjects, Photos for OS X has just exactly those tools to help you line up what you want and cut out what you don’t, so that even if you didn’t frame the perfect photo, you can still end up with it. Also, if you need to rotate or flip a picture, you can do that too!

• How to automatically crop and straighten in Photos for OS X
• How to manually crop in Photos for OS X
• How to manually straighten in Photos for OS X
• How to rotate in Photos for OS X
• How to flip in Photos for OS X

How to automatically crop and straighten in Photos for OS X

1. Launch the Photos app on your Mac.
2. Find the photo you’d like to straighten and open it.
3. Click on Edit in at the top.
4. Click on Crop in the right hand navigation.
5. Click on Auto towards the bottom right of the screen.
6. Click on Done in the upper right hand corner.

How to manually crop in Photos for OS X

1. Launch the Photos app on your Mac.
2. Find the photo you’d like to straighten and open it.
3. Click on Edit in at the top.
4. Click on Crop in the right hand navigation.
5. Click on Aspect towards the bottom right.
6. Choose the aspect ratio you’d like.
7. Alternately, you can grab the corners of each photo and free crop if you’d like.
8. When you’re happy with the crop, click on Done in the upper right hand corner.

How to manually straighten in Photos for OS X

1. Launch the Photos app on your Mac.
2. Find the photo you’d like to straighten and open it.
3. Click on Edit in at the top.
4. Click on Crop in the right hand navigation.
5. Use the dial off to the right of your photo in order to straight it.
6. Click Done in the upper right hand corner when you’re finished editing.

How to rotate in Photos for OS X

1. Launch the Photos app on your Mac.
2. Find the photo you’d like to straighten and open it.
3. Go to Image > Rotate Counterclockwise (or Clockwise) from the menu to turn 90º.
4. Repeat to turn another 90º, for a total of 180º.

You can also use the keyboard shortcuts Command + R for counterclockwise or Option + Command + R for clockwise.

How to flip (mirror) in Photos for OS X

1. Launch the Photos app on your Mac.
2. Find the photo you’d like to straighten and open it.
3. Go to Image > Flip Horizontal (or Vertical) from the menu to mirror.

There’s also a button you can use in the crop and straighten toolbar to flip horizontally, but not vertically. (At least not yet.)

Popular alternative web browser UC Browser is now available as a beta for Windows desktop machines.

Long one of our favorite alternatives to Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, UC Browser has made the jump to Windows machines.

Adding to the small bevy of updates that were pushed out yesterday for several devices, TELUS has now started pushing out OS 10.3.1.2708 (Software version 10.3.1.1865) to multiple BlackBerry 10 devices such as the Passport, Z10, Q10, Z30 and Classic as well.

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A spill of drink or a nasty fall can mean the untimely end for your smartphone. Whether you work hard or play hard, your phone sometimes pay the price. So some of us need a little extra protection, even if it is for a budget device, like the Lumia 521.

Amzer, a well-known name in quality cases, has just the thing for those of you that need to shield your Lumia 521 from bumps and bruises. Their Hybrid kickstand case combines the shock-absorbing cushion of silicon with a rigid plastic outer shell, giving you a double layer of protection against most of what you can throw at it.