Table of contents for October 2012 in Macworld

June’s launch of the MacBook Pro with Retina display initially caught third-party software developers flat-footed. But now developers are beginning to catch up with the new screen. Updated titles that have been released include popular productivity apps such as Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder and The Iconfactory’s Twitteriffic. We’ve also seen a handful of Retina-ized games from vendors such as Aspyr, including titles from the popular Call of Duty and Star Wars franchises. And it looks like more Retina-ready apps are on the way. Macworld contacted two dozen app developers to check the status of their updating efforts. Most said they were on the verge of releasing Retina-enabled updates for their software. “Being a small company, we can’t devote the resources to update everything all at once,” said John Champlin, a spokesman…

Air Mail GAMES The flight simulator Air Mail is one of the few App Store games that truly offers entertainment for all ages. You’re a delivery pilot stationed on a chain of islands, carrying cargo, putting out fires, and helping with a freedom fight that takes place over several different landscapes. Core gameplay centers on simple aviation, and while Air Mail’s physics are on the cartoonish side, they’re forgiving enough to allow you to avoid most obstacles. The game lacks polish in a few areas, but overall Air Mail offers a charming and original ride.—CHRIS HOLT iPhone/iPad | ; $3; Chillingo Remarks 1.4 PRODUCTIVITY Another entry in the growing list of PDF reader and annotation apps for iOS, Remarks is a good tool for making quick notations on PDFs and…

ONE YEAR AND one week since it released OS X Lion (aka OS X 10.7), Apple has released its successor, OS X Mountain Lion. Like Lion, Mountain Lion adds numerous features that will be familiar to iOS users. This OS X release continues Apple’s strategy of bringing iOS features “back to the Mac.” Those features include iMessage, Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Twitter integration, Game Center, and AirPlay Mirroring. At the same time, other features that are making their debut in Mountain Lion will find their way into iOS 6 this fall. As the first OS X release since the debut of iCloud, Mountain Lion integrates tightly with Apple’s cloud-data service. It also provides new security options that allow you to specify the kinds of apps you feel comfortable installing. Mountain…

WHEN APPLE INTRODUCED iCloud at the 2011 Worldwide Developers Conference, the company touted the online service’s ability to seamlessly sync your contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, images, documents, and other data, along with a free mail account, remote access to other iCloud-enabled computers, and a locator for tracking down lost portable devices. While iOS 5 took early and extensive advantage of iCloud on both the iPhone and iPad, OS X Lion did less with it: You could sync your mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, and notes, and send images to your iPhoto library via Photo Stream, but you couldn’t use iCloud with your documents or program settings. With Mountain Lion, however, Apple has added new features to iCloud and integrated those sorely missing from its desktop OS. DOCUMENTS IN THE CLOUD…

THOUGH APPLE HAS long prided itself on the Mac’s safety record, recent events (such as the emergence of the Flashback Trojan horse) have proven that the company can’t take its operating systems’ security for granted. The security upgrades in Mountain Lion make it clear that Apple isn’t slacking off in this regard. THE GATEKEEPER The marquee new security feature is Gatekeeper. To see how it works, open the General tab in the Security & Privacy preference pane and (after providing your administrator credentials) check out the Allow Applications Downloaded From option. That’s Gatekeeper’s front end. You have three options: You can choose to run only those apps you downloaded from the Mac App Store, apps that came from the Mac App Store and identified developers, or apps from anywhere.…

SAFARI HAS been around forever, and you might not think Apple could do much to improve it in Mountain Lion. But the company has found some clever—and welcome—ways to update the app. TABS AND SEARCH One way Apple accomplished that positive result was by taking some inspiration from other browsers. The most obvious example is the new unified address and search bar. Like Google Chrome, Safari 6.0 has a single text box up top (instead of supplying one box for Web addresses and another for searching). Type a URL in the new box, and the browser goes to that site. Type some text in it, and Safari performs a search for that term. As you type, the browser shows you a drop-down list of possible hits. First comes a…

Electronic documents are becoming more and more popular: Instead of mailing paper documents or sending faxes, we can just email important files. But for many people, the biggest hurdle to going all-digital is signatures. How do you sign, say, a PDF document? You can electronically sign your PDF documents using tools you’ve already got on your Mac: a FaceTime or iSight camera, and OS X’s Preview application. The first step is to launch Preview and open its Preferences window. Click Signatures in the window toolbar, and then click Create Signature. Next, sign your name in black ink on a plain white piece of paper, and hold that signature a few inches in front of your Mac’s camera. When the on-screen image of the signature approximately fills the preview box and…

We’re all very familiar with the concept of “all you can eat,” from the artery-clogging Vegas buffet to less-literal digital equivalents such as Netflix or digital music subscription services. In April, Next Issue Media launched with a similar idea for magazines (www.nextissue.com): Pay a monthly fee and get access to many titles from Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc. on some Android tablets. Now iPad users can join in the fun with a catalog of nearly 40 magazines, and the promise of more to come. What You Get For $10 a month, you get the Unlimited Basic plan, which includes 34 magazines such as Bon Appetit, Car and Driver, Cooking Light, Fortune, GQ, and Wired—basically the monthly and biweekly magazines on offer. For $15 a month, the…

Depending on the view, Tangle, a free experimental display font by designer Claire Mitchell, is either lovely or freakish (macworld.com/7911). Recognizable sans serif letterforms emerge within a wild swirl of lines mimicking the floating action of dandelion fluff or a heart-stopping dervish made from bioengineered cells waiting to go berserk. Despite the chaotic ornamentation, Tangle’s characters read loud and clear. Tangle emerged during Mitchell’s coursework at the University of the West of England. Students developed a 26-character font around a single word. Mitchell chose chaos. The result is a bold set of lowercase characters composed of atmospheric motion lines. It’s a beautiful feat of engineering, but the emotional range is limited. Tangle’s characters are easily recognizable, although they are best teased apart with letterspacing. The action surrounding each letter is…

REVIEW The Mac App Store has changed how we access and update software. A perfect example is the latest release of Aperture. While the version number—3.3.2—suggests a minor, incremental release of software that’s more than two years old, in fact this update includes enhancements and features that in the past might well have been considered a major upgrade. And there’s no charge to update to this version, which is essentially a rewritten app. The headline changes in Aperture 3.3 include Retina display support for the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, a substantial performance boost, and a unified library structure for both iPhoto and Aperture. Retina Display Support Retina display support does not remove or diminish features for users of non-Retina computers; it just enhances the experience of using Aperture. When you…

BACK TO THE MAC It doesn’t matter what the iPad or iMac does “better” (“iPad vs. iMac,” August 2012). It’s about cultural shift. Users under 50 want their computers with them everywhere and all the time. Tweeting, browsing, shopping, gaming, and streaming now go on 24/7, even in the presence of other people. If doing real work is klutzier on an iPad, it’s a small price to pay. I’m a geezer. I use my iMac for writing, editing videos, and managing college courses. I don’t play games, tweet, or stream. I can only hope that iMacs will still be made for professionals, so I can keep being a Mac user. Richard Posner, via email I wholeheartedly agree with Stephen Hackett’s comments in the August issue with regard to his…

ONE OF THE many features that Mountain Lion has borrowed from iOS is the idea of system-wide sharing. In many apps you’ll see a Share button (an arrow popping out of a box), which makes it easy to disseminate whatever you’re viewing—files in the Finder, websites in Safari, and the like. While in the past you might have copied and pasted a URL into your Twitter client, now you can share that link right from your browser. SOCIAL SHARING By default, Mountain Lion lets you share items through built-in OS X apps and services, such as Mail or iMessage. But sharing is extensible in a couple of different ways. For one thing, you can add accounts for Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, and (later this year) Facebook in the Mail, Contacts…

When iOS 4.2 debuted, Apple changed the name of AirTunes—the feature that let you stream music from iTunes to an AirPort Express—to AirPlay, and in the process upgraded it considerably. In addition to streaming audio from iTunes on your computer, you could stream from any AirPlay-enabled iOS app—you could even stream video to any Apple TV. As of iOS 5, you could actually mirror the screen of an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2 (or later): Whatever was on that screen could appear on the display connected to your Apple TV. AirPlay mirroring was so great that people wanted it for their Macs. And in Mountain Lion, Apple has delivered. MIRROR YOUR MAC You can now send your Mac’s screen to any second-or third-generation Apple TV on the same…

MESSAGES IS NOT just iChat with a new skin. Sure, the interface looks different. But in addition to its updated interface, Messages introduces a big change to the way instant messaging works on the Mac. That’s because, unlike iChat, it works with the iMessage platform that Apple introduced with iOS 5. It still works with standard IM networks such as AIM and Jabber, and it can still send SMS texts to non-iOS phones. But iMessage isn’t just another messaging platform like all the others. Rather, it ties your Mac and iOS devices into a single unified ecosystem. You can—in theory—start a conversation on your Mac and then pick it up later on your phone. You can—again, in theory—see your entire chat history with a contact, regardless of the devices…

WE CAN’T COVER all of the new features in Mountain Lion (Apple claims there are more than 200) in depth. Here are a few additional highlights. MAIL Mountain Lion makes it easier to keep track of messages from the people who matter most to you, by letting you designate them as VIPs. Once you do so (by clicking the star icon next to the name in a message), every message to or from that person is flagged with a star. Each VIP receives an entry in the new VIPs section of the Mailboxes sidebar, where you can see all messages to or from that person. Also, Mail uses Notification Center to alert you to new messages (you can customize which ones). It gains a Safari-like inline find feature, too:…

One of the great things about OS X is that it’s like the real world. You store your files in folders; when you don’t want something, you put it in the Trash. But on your Mac, a folder isn’t really just a folder, and that’s not a bad thing. Take, for example, Folder Actions. With this handy feature, you can attach AppleScripts to specific folders; these scripts run whenever someone adds files to the folders. That means the scripts can trigger an alert whenever new files are added to a specific folder, change the Finder labels when you put files in a folder, and automatically unzip file archives. Here’s how Folder Actions work. Turn On Folder Actions Globally To use Folder Actions, you must first turn this feature on globally.…

Matt & Nat’s $185 cognac Fujiya messenger bag (mattandnat.com) makes cotton, PVC, and recycled bottles look and feel chic, high-end, and—yes—worth the price. The bag sports a leather look, accented with a checkered design that’s fashionable and appropriate for men and women alike. The Fujiya messenger is well constructed, with perfectly sized pockets and sleeves. Both your 11-inch MacBook Air and your iPad are well protected in padded compartments, and you can store smaller devices in the front zipper pocket, which features three smaller pouches for iPhones and iPods. That’s not all that fits, though: I had no problem carrying my clutch wallet, DSLR camera (equipped with a 35mm lens), notebooks, and cardigan in the Fujiya messenger as well. This is a well-built and handsome bag. Most important, thanks to…

Artists seeking to create comic books or graphic novels on their desktop computers have a new app to look forward to. Smith Micro—maker of Poser, Anime Studio, and Manga Studio—has launched a free public beta of MotionArtist, an animated comic-authoring program that lets you create HTML-based interactive comics and graphic novels. The company released the beta in conjunction with International Comic-Con 2012. MotionArtist will be available online until the first quarter of 2013, during which time artists can download and use the program for free. Due in mid-February 2013, the full release of MotionArtist will cost about $50. “Motion Artist is designed as a bridge between traditional comic creators and getting those comics digitized and out into the wild,” says Steve Yatson, Smith Micro’s senior director of productivity and graphics.…

Apple usually offers optional upgrades that allow you to tailor a standard-configuration system to suit your individual needs. Macworld Lab ran performance benchmarks on two MacBook Air build-to-order (BTO) models, and the results show that while both custom systems are faster than the high-end stock MacBook Airs, the upgrades to the 11-inch model offer a bigger performance bang for the buck. 11-Inch BTO MacBook Air You can customize the stock $1099 11-inch 1.7GHz dual-core Core i5 MacBook Air with a 2.0GHz dual-core Core i7 processor for an extra $150. We gave our custom system 8GB of RAM rather than the standard 4GB, for an extra $100. Finally, we upgraded the flash storage from the standard 128GB to 256GB for an additional $300. The total price for this BTO MacBook Air…

A little over a year ago, Apple released OS X Lion (10.7). Since then, the company has also released one new generation of its operating system for tablets and phones (iOS 5) and previewed the next (iOS 6), and expanded its online syncing service, iCloud. Now, with the release of OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), it’s bringing those three product lines closer together than ever. Mountain Lion extends and improves features introduced in Lion. It inherits ideas and even apps from iOS. And it integrates tightly with iCloud. So while the changes in Mountain Lion might not seem dramatic, this update is still a significant step in the evolution of the Mac OS. Here’s our take on the new version of OS X, along with a deeper look at its…

IOS USERS WILL immediately recognize Mountain Lion’s new notification system—it’s more or less the same one that debuted on iOS 5 last year. The idea is certainly the same: Lots of things happen on your Mac—email, IMs, alarms, even Twitter updates. Notification Center gathers them in a single location, so you can see everything at a glance. Clicking a notification in Notification Center launches the app associated with that alert. THE CENTER Like its iOS counterpart, OS X’s notification system actually has two parts. The first is Notification Center itself, a repository of all the notifications you’ve received. To activate it, simply click the notifications icon in the top right corner of the menu bar, or swipe with two fingers from the right edge of your trackpad toward the…

THOUGH IT FALLS short of full Siri integration, Mountain Lion’s systemwide Dictation support does bring iOS’s transcription features to the Mac. SPEAK YOUR MIND Anywhere you can type text on your Mac, Mountain Lion lets you dictate it, too. On iOS, the on-screen virtual keyboard provides a little microphone key that you can use to trigger Dictation mode. Because your Mac can’t update your hardware keyboard dynamically, Mountain Lion requires you to use a keyboard shortcut instead. By default, that shortcut is tapping the Fn key twice. (You’ll also find a new Start Dictation item at the bottom of the Edit menu.) You can customize that shortcut in the Dictation & Speech preference pane. There, you can also turn Dictation on or off, choose the microphone, and specify the…

AUTO SAVE—the feature introduced with OS X Lion that allowed you to browse back through previously saved versions of a document—gains some nice new capabilities in Mountain Lion. In the Lion version of Auto Save, you could click the title of a document and choose to lock, duplicate, revert to the last saved version, or browse all versions of the file. Mountain Lion adds new options: Now you have commands for renaming and moving files, as well as for retrieving the last saved version of the file. Which of those commands you see depends on whether you’ve saved the file and where you saved it. For example, if you create a TextEdit document and type something in it, the file’s title bar will read Untitled — Edited. The Edited…

TWO FAMILIAR OS X apps get new names in Mountain Lion: Address Book becomes Contacts, and iCal is transformed into Calendars. But the changes in both apps are more than name-deep. CONTACTS Contacts marks the return of the beloved three-column view found in Snow Leopard’s Address Book. In Lion, Address Book offered a two-column view: It either showed groups on the left page and a list of contacts within that group on the right, or—if you clicked the bookmark at the top of the page—a group’s contact list on the left and a selected contact on the right. Mountain Lion’s Contacts puts the list of groups on the left, a list of contacts in the middle, and a specific contact’s card on the right—the same arrangement Snow Leopard used. You…

Admit it: Your carry-on bag is stuffed full of digital gear you can’t bear to leave at home. Keeping all of these devices charged when you’re constantly on the go or stuck on a plane can be a challenge. Here are a few things you can do to extend battery life and save power. Invest in a Battery Case A battery case for your iPhone is a great accessory to keep in your carry-on. These cases add extra battery life to your iPhone while also keeping it safe from the occasional drop and bump. Most sport dock-connector plugs that pair up with the iPhone’s 30-pin port, which is how they deliver the juice. The only downside is that you can’t use any dock-cradle accessories without removing the iPhone from the…

Over the years, my iTunes library has grown in size from manageable to humongous. And as I continue to add more content—music files, videos, podcasts, and more—that library sure isn’t getting any smaller. So I, like many iTunes users, have been looking for an easy solution for putting some of my iTunes content on another drive while keeping it accessible. Enter TuneSpan (www.tunespan.com). This $10 app from Random Applications is designed to move, or span, some or all of your iTunes library to another drive. (Note that the developer lists $10 as a limited-time sale price, and says he may raise the price to $15 in the future.) You can even move part of your library to one drive and another part to a different drive. When you launch TuneSpan,…

Share a Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Q: I have an iMac and a MacBook Pro. I control the iMac with a wireless keyboard and mouse, and I want to use these devices to control my MacBook Pro as well. Is there a Bluetooth KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch I could use to share my keyboard and mouse with my laptop? Alan Lynch A: KVM switches require a wired connection between the mouse and keyboard, and that presents a difficulty for you, as your input devices are wireless. I’m not aware of any intermediary switch that you can pair to your Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and then use to switch between computers. But you have other ways. One is the open-source Synergy project (synergy-foss.org). This software allows you to share a…