Indice dei contenuti per August 2013 in Macworld

PRODUCTIVITY: Delineato Pro 1.1 $7; Fapptory; delineato.com An endless array of text editors can capture your notes. But collecting thoughts that are more visual and free-form is trick-ier. Enter Delineato Pro, a new diagramming and mind-mapping Mac app with a clean design and a lack of visual clutter. Each Delineato Pro document starts with a limitless gray canvas. To add an item to the canvas, you either double-or right-click to bring up a palette of shapes and lines, and then drag the desired object to the canvas. The program lets you connect shapes in two ways: You can drop a line out of the palette, and then drag each end to connect it to a shape; or you can click a shape, and then drag one of the pop-up arrows…

In May, Apple announced that Brandon Ashmore of Mentor, Ohio, had downloaded the 50 billionth app from the App Store. As part of Apple’s promotion for the historic download, Ashmore was the lucky winner of an iTunes gift card worth $10,000. The app Ashmore downloaded to win the prize was Space Inch’s Say the Same Thing, a free game for the iPhone in which two players collaborate to find common words by free association—like the old “think of a word” game you might have played as a kid, but with smartphones. Apple has quite a lot to celebrate, of course, as the App Store now counts some 850,000 apps—almost half of which work natively on the iPad—and has paid out some $9 billion in royalties to developers. If 50 billion…

Robot Unicorn Attack 2 GAMES The first Robot Unicorn Attack married an ironic novelty premise to an addictive endless platformer. The sequel isn’t as hard, but you certainly can’t say it’s subtler. Full of rainbows, dolphins, space whales, and other leftovers from a seven-year-old’s fever dreams, the initial level lets you frolic away until your poor unicorn is decapitated in an explosion of failure. Thus ends one of your three “wishes.” You can retry a wish, or obtain a fourth one, by spending in-game currency. You can also unlock abilities and upgrades that may make the game easier but also give you an incentive to play longer (a welcome trade-off). Erasure’s “Always” is not the default soundtrack this time; instead, you can buy songs after you reach a certain level.…

Odds are good that you already use Dropbox on your Mac for syncing and sharing files. (If you don’t, you should; get started at dropbox.com.) Dropbox on the iPad isn’t quite as full-featured as the Mac version, largely because the iPad eschews a traditional Finder-style file system. Even so, Dropbox represents the best way to sync files between your desktop and your iPad, as well as the best way to share files from your iPad with other people. First, even if you use your iPad for work, you—or your colleagues—likely still use other computers, too. And since you save and sync so much business material via Dropbox already, it only makes sense to rely on the Dropbox iOS app as well. You can find plenty of alternatives to Dropbox (see…

Since iOS supports many common file types, nearly any iOS app can display graphics, videos, PDFs, and Office and iWork documents. But beyond the top 20 or so formats, your iPad may have no idea what to do. You can easily get a file onto your iPad (by syncing it in iTunes or by emailing it to yourself, for example), but opening and editing it is another story. Sure, you can use a conversion program on a computer, but what if you have only your iPad? For the vast majority of file types, you can find at least one app—and sometimes dozens—that can open the file. It’s a matter of figuring out which one will best serve your needs. That task isn’t always easy, though. Sometimes a file’s extension alone…

The iPad is a fantastic tool for making live presentations. In the App Store, you can find hundreds of apps designed to create, control, and facilitate presentations. If you rely on your iPad for such tasks, you’ll want to collect some hardware, software, and know-how to make the process smooth and flexible. HARDWARE If you’re giving a presentation to one or two people, you can show it on the iPad’s screen. For larger groups, you probably want to use a projector, a TV, or some other external display, so you need a way to get your presentation onto the screen. The most reliable method (if you have an iPad 2 or later) is to use an adapter that connects to the display’s input. Most projectors still use VGA inputs, so…

Make this the year that you finally recycle all the ancient MP3 players, toner cartridges, ethernet cables, and bulky monitors out of the closets, garages, and spare rooms where they’ve been lurking. Your home will feel more modern, and you’ll be doing your part to boost the low 27 percent rate for electronics recycling in the United States. Sure, it would be easier just to dump all your old, unwanted electronics in the trash. However, old computers and their related peripherals contain a lot of heavy metals—lead, cadmium, mercury—that are bad for people’s health when they get into the soil and water. In addition, when old electronics hit the trash heap, they’re out of a recycling stream that can cut energy costs for future electronics production. But if the environmental…

Whether you need to know what a word means or just how to spell it, the days of leafing through hefty paper dictionaries are gone. But few Mac users know how to make the most of OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Here are some tricks for doing just that. Use pop-up definitions: Systemwide pop-up definitions are a useful but chronically underused OS X feature. In most Mac applications—including Safari, Mail, Pages, TextEdit, and Twitter, among others—just position your cursor over the word you want to define and press command-<Control>-D. A pop-up window appears containing the word’s definition, synonyms, and any relevant Wikipedia entry. Few Mac users know how to make the most of OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Here are some tricks for doing just that. Click the header…

Although iPhoto for iOS isn’t quite as robust as its OS X counterpart, it’s a capable image editor–and it can do a few cool tricks you simply can’t replicate on your Mac. Straighten Your Photos iPhoto for iOS allows you to straighten your photos in a few smart ways. The first is by auto-detecting a strong horizon line. Open iPhoto, choose a photo, and then tap Edit. Now tap the Crop & Straighten icon in the bottom left. If the photo displays a white line across it with icons at either end, that means the software has detected a horizon line. To proceed with straightening, simply tap the arrow icon at the right. Unfortunately, iPhoto can’t always detect a horizon line, and that means you’ll have to make the adjustment…

Based on a new fourth-generation Core processor called Haswell ULT, the new MacBook Air features significantly longer battery life, faster graphics performance, improved wireless networking, and greater energy efficiency. Designed for power savings, with more energy-efficient Intel Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, the new MacBook Airs have a slower clock speed while still delivering 40 percent faster graphics performance, Apple says. The 11-inch MacBook Air improves from 5 hours of battery life to 9 hours, with a standby time of up to 30 days. The 13-inch MacBook Air model goes from 7 hours to 12 hours of battery life. The MacBook Air’s new Intel HD Graphics 5000 hardware offers up to 40 percent faster performance for games and for graphics-intensive programs, while the new flash storage offers speeds up…

If you’ve never heard that noise before, you’re bound to hear it someday: that dull crunch as your Mac slips out of your hands or off a desk and makes a date with the ground. Here’s how to make the best of a terrible situation, get as much of your data back as possible, and avoid a similar disaster. Pick It Up, Clean It Off Survey the damage, and clean up whatever dirt and detritus you can. Make sure your Mac is turned off, and then weigh your options. If you feel comfortable opening the machine, find a wrist strap and tools, touch a metal object to discharge any static your body may be carrying, and carefully open the Mac to check inside for fragments, damaged parts, or debris. Don’t…

Apple has taken the wraps off iOS 7, revealing a dramatic new design that sheds six-year-old interface elements and replaces them with a cleaner, more modern aesthetic. From top to bottom, Apple has renovated the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch for both looks and usability. “It’s the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of iPhone,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the Worldwide Developers Conference in early June. The OS and the stock apps gain a notably different, flat look. The typography and icons have been revamped. Translucent textures let you see what’s in the background. When you move your device, the backgrounds change in a parallax effect, shifting ever so slightly behind the frontmost elements. Animations have received an overhaul, too. At WWDC,…

If you type frequently—or if you just can’t seem to get the hang of the iPad’s on-screen keyboard—try an external keyboard, which offers the tactile advantages of real, physical keys without forcing you to sacrifice the iPad’s portability and touchscreen features. The iPad supports almost any Bluetooth keyboard, but you can find many keyboards that are made for use with the iPad and (often) include dedicated iPadfunction keys. Most iPad keyboards are part of a protective case, although a few are stand-alone; all use rechargeable batteries that last for weeks or months. With the exception of stand-alone models, however, iPad keyboards make some usability trade-offs. The thinner the keyboard, the worse the feel of the keys. The smaller the keyboard is, the more crowded the keys are, or the likelier…

We’re all interested in saving energy. Maybe you conserve to be a better global citizen or to save money on your utility bills. Maybe you use your laptop on the go and want to squeeze every possible minute of battery life out of it. But what if the daily computing practices you follow to save energy end up wasting it instead? What if your assumptions about Mac power usage are wrong? To investigate this possibility, Macworld’s lab compiled a list of eight widely held opinions about energy consumption and conservation, grabbed our trusty power meters, and started logging power usage. We employed three systems for our measurements: a 21-inch iMac and a 15-inch MacBook Pro, both of 2011 vintage; the third was a 2012 Mac Pro tower system. We connected…

If you enjoy finding new ways to tweak OS X, as I do, you have to be prepared to look for them in some rather out-of-the-way places. For example, the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, which houses a number of features to help users who have limited seeing, hearing, and mobility, contains some nifty adjustment options that all users should know about. Here are five tricks for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion that involve settings in the Accessibility pane. Note that you’ll find the same features (with some differences in labeling) in OS X 10.7 Lion, under the Universal Access preferences pane. 1. Change the Cursor Size If you mirror your Mac’s display to a large-screen TV or use a large (or especially high-resolution) monitor, you may discover that the…

See Finder History The Finder toolbar, by default, has Pre-vious and Next arrow buttons that allow you to navigate back and forth in folders. If you click the Previous button, you go back, one window at a time, to all of the folders you’ve visited in that Finder window in a given session. But if you click and hold the Previous button, you’ll see a list of all the folders you’ve visited; you can then jump to any of them by selecting it. This is a good way to quickly get to a folder that you’ve used, but that’s far from where you are in the file system. Create ‘Sticky’ Time Machine Exclusions You probably know that you can exclude certain files and folders from your Time Machine backups via…

Blurring Objects in iMovie ’11 Q: I’m working on a just-for-fun movie in iMovie ’11 that I’m going to put on YouTube. In one scene, you can see a car’s license plate in the background. Is there some way I can cover it up? Fred Hendricks A: As long as the camera and the car don’t move, yes. Launch iMovie, select →iMovie →Preferences, choose the General preference, and enable Show Advanced Tools. Close iMovie’s preferences. Select the clip that shows the license plate so that it appears in iMovie’s viewer. Press command-<Shift>-4 to engage the screenshot selection tool and draw a selection around the license plate. Let go of the mouse or trackpad, and a shutter sound will tell you that the screenshot has been saved to the desktop. Open…

Apple’s new OS X Mavericks– unveiled in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference, shipping to users this fall, and named after the famous surfing spot in Northern California–offers a host of improvements. Here are several that we’re looking forward to the most: Finder Tabs If you use tabs in Safari, Finder tabs will feel very similar; Apple has applied the same basic window structure, allowing you to combine multiple Finder windows into a single window with tabs along the top. You can even move files from one tab to another by dragging and dropping. Tags Tags are OS X Mavericks’s answer to the Labels options of yore; you can tag files that are both stored in iCloud and on your local machine. You can also add tags when saving documents:…

Windows remains the dominant desktop operating system in terms of market share. So it’s especially entertaining to look back at venerable software applications that originated outside of the Windows biosphere (say, on the Mac) and then moved over to thrive in Microsoft’s domain. A number of the most-famous apps to make the Mac-Windows jump began as graphical user interface-based reinterpretations of older software ideas, while others began as programs that could have originated only in a bitmapped computing environment like that of the Mac. We take a look at a handful here. Microsoft Excel Windows users may be surprised to learn that Excel made its debut in September 1985 as a stand-alone Mac program. At the time, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the spreadsheet market on the IBM PC platform, and as…

MacBook Keyboard Super Hero Skin If you are seriously into superhero comics, the $12 Super Hero Skin for your MacBook keyboard should furnish you with no end of delight, referencing Batman, Thor, the Punisher, Iron Man, and dozens of other heroes to create a busy, frenetic, and indisputably super keyboard (killerduckdecals.com). —JOEL MATHIS USB 3.0 Dual Docking Station Kensington’s $200 USB 3.0 Docking Station (sd3500v) with Dual DVI/HDMI/VGA Video is designed to be used with MacBooks, and offers a gigabit ethernet connection and six USB 3.0 ports. The slim unit also features a Kensington security lock so that you can secure it to your desk (kensington.com). —ROMAN LOYOLA Neutrino Thunderbolt Edition Akitio’s $340 256GB solid-state drive is bus powered, so you don’t need to plug it into a power outlet.…

It takes a lot of power to light up an iPad’s 9.7-inch screen—and even more to power the fourth-generation model’s Retina display. That’s why the device is packed full of battery capacity—an impressive 11,560 milliampere-hours’ worth for the latest model. But although our battery tests have shown that, under heavy use, the fourth-gen iPad can last for more than 9 hours on a single charge, sometimes you need even more juice. Whether you’re exploring the great outdoors or enduring a power outage, a portable charging device—in other words, a big battery—can come in handy. Portable batteries can also charge your smartphones, media players, and other mobile gear that draw electricity over USB. We recently put nine such devices through their paces and found that although all could help in a…

Talk about Apple’s environmental impact usually focuses on the materials that compose the company’s products and on the manufacturing processes it uses. But we should also pay attention to the downstream impact of those products–what we do with them. We turn them on, consuming energy. And we eventually throw them away. Here, we’ve assembled tips for disposing of your old Apple gear responsibly. We’ve also put received wisdom about Mac energy consumption to the test. Finally, our tips will help you save money.…

When you’re working in a deeply nested folder (that is, a folder within a folder within...), the Finder in OS X offers you several options for moving back up through the hierarchy of folders toward your starting point. But only one of those options manages to provide both at-a-glance information and a number of powerful shortcuts for working with files: the path bar. Open a Finder window (Finder → New Finder Window) and then choose View → Show Path Bar. The path bar, which appears at the bottom of all of your Finder windows, shows the complete path from your computer to the current folder. (A path consists of the entire series of subfolders that leads you to a specific folder or file.) This is the only way you can…

Cambridge Audio Minx Air This famous British audio company’s Minx Air is a wireless music-streaming system that comes in two flavors: the $449 Minx 100 and the $599 Minx 200. Both support Apple’s AirPlay technology and Bluetooth for streaming music, letting you crank your tunes from pretty much any device without having to plug in. Both also feature Internet-radio presets, which make it easy to listen to your favorite station with one button press (www.cambridgeaudio.com).–JOEL MATHIS Samson Expedition Express The $200 Expedition Express offers a nifty twist on the classic public-address system: You can stream music and other audio to it via Bluetooth from your iOS device. The system weighs 10 pounds and produces great sound for up to 8 hours between charges. It also features a three-channel mixer (www.samsontech.com).–JOEL…

Adobe used its recent Max conference to reveal its first foray into making creative hardware, Project Mighty and Project Napoleon–a digital pen and ruler for iOS devices. Since the accessories are still in the experimental stage, there’s no word yet about when Mighty and Napoleon will hit the shelves, but we got our hands on working prototypes. Project Mighty is a cloud-connected stylus pen that currently works with unreleased Adobe apps that have been designed specifically for the hardware. Adobe chose a twisted, three-sided design for the Mighty, which we found was comfortable to hold and gave us precise control over the movement of the pen while we were drawing. The prototype we tested had a soft, rubberized tip, but Geoff Dowd, senior experience design lead for Adobe, told us…

Review RATING PRICE $50 COMPANY Flying Meat URL flyingmeat.com At its traditional price of $50, Acorn has never aimed to be a Photoshop replacement. Instead, it’s a Photoshop alternative. Though Photoshop offers far more features, Acorn is no slouch: The program supports layers, masks, alphas, and multistop gradients; it can import and export files in PSD (Photoshop) format; and it’s also fully optimized for Retina displays. With the release of Acorn 4, the app gains nondestructive filters; faster and smoother drawing tools; new shapes like curves, arrows, and stars; and some 150 other performance improvements and features. These additions have the interesting, double-faceted effect of making the app both impressively more powerful and decidedly simpler. The Basics Acorn’s interface gets an overhaul in version 4. No longer are the drawing…