Spring has sprung and sprung with a vengeance. Sunshine! Warm air! Being outdoors is once again a treat. Just as the vernal equinox passes us by and leads us to a bit more moving about, it'll soon be iPad launch day and we may find no good reasons to go back inside for quite some time.

Meanwhile, as we await that wonderful sidewalk cafe life with our reading and our data streaming right by our sides, here's this week's menu of the best stories from a week of Mac|Life. Order well.

Features:

- Kidding Around - The Best Software and Websites for Kids - You could let your kids spend all their time on Club Penguin or BuildaBearville or you could check out some of the best Mac games and sites we've found just for you and your little ones. Awwww, Penguins.

- Wireless Workflow, Emphatically Redefined - If you run a small business, a laptop is your baseline minimum for operations. You'd be crazy to think a whole enterprise could almost entirely operate out of your iPhone. Well, crazy sounds a whole lot more sane when you talk to Amos Winbush, founder of CyberSynchs, maker data-synchronization software.

- Cultured Code Talks About Bringing Things to the iPad - One of the biggest and most popular category of apps for the iPhone are task management software. Cultured Code did a great job porting their popular Things from the Mac to the iPhone. We sat down with Werner Jainek, co-owner of Cultured Code, and got the scoop on the next iteration for the iPad.


How-Tos:

- Replace the Battery in your iPhone - Consider yourself warned: this could totally mess up your iPhone. But there comes a day when you need to get that beat old battery out and a fresh one in there, and you don't want to drop the big bucks at the Apple Store. Again, consider yourself warned: not for amateurs.

- Automate Photoshop Tasks with Actions - Sometimes you find yourself with a metric buttload of vacation pictures and realize you're going have to spend half an hour just rotating aspects and brightening those indoor shots. Ugh. If only there were some way to automate Photoshop to do these jobs for you. Guess what? There is, and we show you how.


Reviews:

- Western Digital MyBook Studio - Sure, a terrabyte sounded like a lot of space at first, and you were certain you'd never fill it up. But with the proliferation of digital video and ever growing mp3 collections and a digital camera in every pocket, it might be time for a second (or third or fourth). Western Digital makes two flavors, 1TB and 2TB, and they're both elegant solutions with password protections and a small e-ink screen keeping tabs on how much space you have left.

- Hyperbolic Software Tidy Up - We don't know how often we've clicked on a link to download a PDF, forgot, clicked it again, then later in the day couldn't remember the document title, but pulled up the link and downloaded the PDF a third time. Our Mac is so crammed with duplicates that finding and dispatching them is a time-consuming process. Hyperbolic tries to make this an easy process of nabbing you a ton of space on your hard drive, but the huge array of options and functions make it a bit of a time consumer itself – at least in the beginning.


News:

The good news first. If you want to see one potential future for interactive magazine content, check out what Viv Magazine has put together as an iPad demo. This is some serious high quality stuff...then there's also Wired, who've brought the sweetness with their demo iPad version...oddly enough, online publishers think the iPad will have "absolutely no" impact on publishing; that kind of stellar thinking helps explain why publishing is in the toilet lately... NPR and the Wall Street Journal are at least using their brains regarding content and the effect of the iPad, streamlining their sites and making do without Flash in some places...of course, the bad news follows in that Apple's still working with magazine publishers to work out some kind of deal to bring just regular monthly content to the iPad; work together here, gang, realize it's in your best interests...speaking of hard worked out deals, consider the "Cone of Silence"  surrounding testing partners who've gotten their hands on an iPad: "blacked out windows," "tethered to a fixed object," "photographic evidence." Wow, we just hope everyone remembers their safe word....we kid, we kid, and speaking of kidding around, we wonder how game manufacturers like Ngomco, who are working on six games for the iPad, test those games' potential out...but if you were expecting Apple's accessories for your iPad on launch day, you may wish to check out third party vendors as Cupertino suggested there's a wee delay in those peripherals...and you definitely won't find clingy screen protectors either, as Apple mysteriously puts the kibosh on those third party products as well.

It's not all iPad all the time though in the news. Sometimes it's iPad and iPhone games and apps too. For instance, the new PayPal update lets you "bump" some money from your account to a friend's just by bringing your iPhones together (iPad version coming?)...while we're glad to see new stuff come to the App Store, the departure of Simplify Media, one of our have-to-have apps is a sad development; hopefully they're true to their word of returning with something even better...speaking of must-have apps, the great and wonderful Instapaper is putting some enhancements in that will make iPad reading on the go even more awesome... if you're a reading on your iPhone addict like some people say we are, then you'll definitely want to see the improvements Google's put into their mobile Reader; now if we could just get Blogger to work on our phones...and hopefully here's another rumor that may pan out for 2010, the long dreamed of, long-awaited third party multitasking on the iPhone; because, seriously, wouldn't the iPad be tons better with it too?

Hardware improvements are all around these days as well. Feast your eyes on this 27" LED Cinema display. Sexy plus, no? And there's also some added muscle to the new Mac Pro as well...speaking of muscle, looks like Google's decided that busting up the iPhone monopoly is just one part of their plans, like adding Google TV; now may Apple can put some hard work into Apple TV too; whattaya say?...of course between Google and Apple, it looks like there's not a lot of room for other folks in the digital sphere; it appears Blackberry users are dropping like flies....and while we love our Magic Mouse touchability, it does cramp the hand a bit; once again, third party solutions have us smiling and touching away...not so smiley? These Australian ads that suggest higher prices coming to Mac products in the relatively near future; guess someone's got to subsidize the low price of the iPad...for those without that kind of scratch, Dell's putting together a bigger than iPod touch, smaller than iPad device that might satisfy someone, somewhere...