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Wireless Workflow, Emphatically Redefined

Christopher Null — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:17:00 -0500

Apparently, you can secure venture-capital funding and launch a successful business all from an iPhone.

Case Study: Amos Winbush

Occupation: Founder and Chief Executive Officer, CyberSynchs

Gear: iPhone 3GS loaded with Citibank (to keep track of startup finances), Facebook (to keep track of CyberSynchs' fan page and connect with fellow entrepreneurs), and Twitter (to stay abreast of business news and keep followers informed)

Who knew that Pret A Manger at East 17th and Broadway could be such a locus of wheeling and dealing?

Listen, we know you love your MacBook. And we love ours. But consider what a hassle it can be when you’re working on the road. A MacBook has to be painstakingly removed from a messenger bag or backpack and plugged in regularly for power (good luck with finding that A/C adapter). And you can’t really use it unless you’re sitting down. And you have to manually connect to whatever Wi-Fi hotspot you can find. And then there are the interminable delays while you boot and launch applications. Plus your MacBook apparatus weighs you down mightily--five pounds or more, and that’s on a good day.

Yet for most professionals--especially at the executive level--getting work done without a computer is foolhardy at best, impossible at worst. The notebook is a necessary evil that represents a basic cost of doing business when you aren’t anchored to a desk.

Amos Winbush took that conventional wisdom and slapped it in the face. When he launched CyberSynchs, a company that makes data-synchronization software, in 2008, he did it with little more than the iPhone in his pocket. Apparently, computers are no longer necessary for entrepreneurs in the startup phase. As Winbush himself blogged on Under30CEO.com, “When CyberSynchs received Series A funding from Momos Capital, the entire deal was orchestrated--on my end--from my jacket pocket. Everything from conference calls to agreements were handled via smartphone.”

Winbush attends a meeting in Manhattan's Union Square Park.

Winbush is the kind of guy who’s always on the move, cruising the streets of New York City with little time for anything besides the occasional bagel. So how do you hire a CTO, track down programming talent, and put together distribution deals when you never stop for a breath, much less a lingering latte? Chalk it up to the hefty computing power of the iPhone, which let Winbush review and approve contracts, read spreadsheets, post ads on Craigslist, field responses via email, and read résumés and cover letters without having to resort to a full-blown computer. In fact, thanks to the iPhone’s simplicity, Winbush says managing his information was actually easier via the handset than it would have been on a laptop.

The other big advantage of an iPhone-based business? The bottom line. Office space in Manhattan isn’t exactly affordable, especially for a bootstrapped startup, and Winbush felt it made little sense to invest in even basic offices--and the IT infrastructure that goes along with it--until his company was well underway. “I really wanted to put the money where it mattered,” he says, “and that’s into the product.”

Of course, you can’t do quite everything via an iPhone, and Winbush estimates he still spent 10 percent of his working time on his computer at home. Editing spreadsheets, for example, isn’t a simple operation on an iPhone (though it is possible; see 5 Apps for Mobile Moguls, below). And then there’s the little issue of compatibility. Although CyberSynchs’ software is available for numerous mobile platforms, there’s one key device that still isn’t supported. Winbush says an iPhone version of his software is pending.

5 Apps for Mobile Moguls

Mac|Life recommends the following software for running a business from your phone:

iMargin

This simple, handy profit-margin calculator helps you reach critical pricing decisions. There are four open fields: unit cost, unit sell price, margin percentage, and gross margin. Enter numbers in any two fields, and iMargin completes the remaining two fields. Whether you’re chasing a magical margin percentage or simply trying to figure out what prices your market will bear, iMargin provides quick answers. ($.99, SUI Solutions, www.suisolutions.com/iphone)

Spreadsheet

Everyone knows you can display spreadsheets that have been emailed as attachments, but did you know you can edit spreadsheets on your iPhone? You can. Spreadsheet packs in amazing functionality--92 common spreadsheet functions are available, so it’s almost like working directly within Excel. We wouldn’t suggest using Spreadsheet for intense projects, but it gets the job done for simple tasks, and you can export your work as XLS files. ($5.99, Softalk Ltd, www.softalktd.com/products/spreadsheet)

Currency

Globe-trotting business folks need to know the dollar value of pork belly futures in Argentina and Japan--or so we’ve learned from watching cartoons and sitcoms. With Currency, global exchange rates are at your fingertips and are always up to date. The app provides conversion of more than 90 world currencies, quickly and easily. (free, Jeffery Grossman, www.currencyapp.com)

Free Translator

Okay, so you’ve decided to finally buy those Argentinean pork bellies. You don’t know Spanish, so how are you going to make the buy? Free Translator provides a slick app-wrapper for Google’s Translate program and provides near instantaneous translation of 39 different languages. Just choose your source and target languages, type in a phrase, and out comes a written translation. (free, Codesign, www.codesign.cz)

SitOrSquat

If you follow Winbush’s lead and forgo a physical office entirely, you might do well to know the locations of the cleanest bathrooms open to the public. SitOrSquat provides a good collection of user-generated, err, bathroom reviews--and it’s sponsored by those wacky Charmin bears to boot! (free, Densebrain, www.sitorsquat.com)

Kidding Around - The Best Software and Websites for Kids

Adam Berenstain and Peter Cohen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:34:31 -0500

Entertain and educate the most important members of your household with this family-friendly guide to the best Mac software, websites, and iPhone apps for kids. And don’t miss our step-by-step instructions for setting up parental controls on your Mac. Let’s play!

When they’re little, kids want to be just like you--pretending to drive the car, borrowing your shoes for dress-up, and yes, pulling up a booster seat to unwind with the family Mac after a hard day in the sandbox. As fun as some Mac staples are regardless of age (Photo Booth, anyone?), your kids deserve some special software just for them--to help them master basic computer skills, stretch their creative imaginations, reinforce educational concepts, and of course, just have a grand old time no matter how young they are. With that in mind, we test-drove 29 Mac and iPhone apps and 12 activity-packed websites just for kids. Some wound up being a little too dumbed down--on the verge of becoming, well, dumb--and our reviews separate the wheat from that chaff for you. Grab the mouse; it’s time to play!

Computer Skills

KidsMouse

KidsMouse teaches basic mouse skills with 18 learning games like ABC Puzzle, Color Ball, and Shape Puzzle. Each is operated using only the mouse or trackpad, and the brightly colored, charmingly illustrated graphics will delight little ones. Some of the games test your child’s sequencing (letters and numbers), shape recognition, and memory, while others just entertain--a bitmap paint program, for example, lets them draw colorful shapes. Really little kids might need prompting from Mom or Dad--ours had fun driving from our lap. We just wished KidsMouse would lock out keyboard input because those keys sure get banged on.

Click matching shapes to hear a sound. Mee-yow!

KidsMouse
COMPANY: WhiteRoom-Web
CONTACT: www.whiteroom-web.com
PRICE: $15
REQUIREMENTS: 500MHz or faster G3 or later processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later

Lots of different activities for little kids to master. Colorful and engaging.

Keyboard remains active, so keep little ones away from keys.

BumperCar

A web browser specifically for preschoolers and older kids, BumperCar has built-in safeguards to keep kids away from the unsavory stuff. Parents or teachers first define BumperCar’s safety settings, then kids can surf with the same WebKit technology behind Safari. You can block profanity, filter search engine results, prevent kids from entering personal data, and maintain a whitelist (approved sites) and a blacklist (forbidden ones). You can even limit surfing to specific hours of the day or a specific duration. A fun interface featuring a bumper car and a “tunnel of mystery” (a random selection) greets younger kids; older ones are gently directed to pick from a variety of categories. We found a few dead links, but there was still plenty for kids to explore.

Kids can bump around the web without getting hurt.

BumperCar
COMPANY: Freeverse
CONTACT: www.freeverse.com
PRICE: $29.95
REQUIREMENTS: G3 or better processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later

Safe web browsing for kids.

Some dead links.

Scratch

It’s one thing for kids to use software, but teaching them to produce it is another thing entirely. Scratch, developed by MIT’s world-famous Media Lab, introduces kids to computer programming. They can assemble their programs using scripts, each made up of individual building blocks that tell Scratch what to do. Examples include simple animations, simulations, games, and more--MIT even has a Scratch site where users have shared more than half a million of their own projects. Your kids can’t use Scratch to make the next Doom or World of Warcraft, but they’ll better understand the fundamentals of programming, and you won’t spend a dime. Built-in help screens and a reference guide will help young programmers get started, and the active online community will inspire them to strive for the next level. Our only gripe is the very un-Mac-like interface should be much better than it is.

Kids younger than 8 will probably need help--Scratch is aimed at 8- to 16-year-olds.

Scratch
COMPANY: MIT Media Lab
CONTACT: www.scratch.mit.edu
PRICE: Free
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later

Teaches fundamentals of programming. Big online community.

Un-Mac-like interface.

OK-Writer

Syndicomm’s OK-Writer replaces the all-business word processor with one aimed at kids. Complete with sound effects and a toolbar that wraps most of the way around the document, it gives young writers six fonts (including that typographical monstrosity Comic Sans) and simple formatting. They can also save, print, and open documents, or have them read aloud using Mac OS X’s text-to-speech feature.

The idea is that regular word processors are too difficult or intimidating for kids, and it’s true that Microsoft Word and even Apple’s Pages have tool palettes and options that can be bewildering to even an adult. And at $10, OK-Writer is cheaper than either. But most kids fare perfectly well with TextEdit, the basic text editor that comes with Mac OS X, which makes us think that OK-Writer is simply a solution in search of a problem.

That's a lot of buttons for not a lot of formatting options.

OK-Writer
COMPANY: Syndicomm
CONTACT: www.syndicomm.com
PRICE: $10
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3 or later

Simplified interface less daunting than a full word processor. Inexpensive.

A simplified text editor is already included with Mac OS X.

TuxType

The fun exercises in TuxType test kids’ ability to find keys on the keyboard by having them type words on the screen. In Fish Cascade, letter-adorned fish stream down the screen, and your goal is to type the letters before Tux the Penguin eats the fish (the letters give him a bellyache). Comet Zap is pretty much the same, but naturally, with comets.

On the downside, TuxType lacks a tutorial structure to help kids learn basic keyboarding techniques, such as home-row finger positioning. And while you can modify the word lists and other aspects of the app (it is, after all, open source), you have to know how to manipulate Mac OS X app package contents, which may be more trouble than it’s worth to less-techy parents and teachers.

Don't ask why this penguin's in the mountains; just type!

TuxType
COMPANY: Tux4Kids
CONTACT: www.tux4kids.alioth.debian.org
PRICE: Free
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later

Two different exercises. Can't beat the price!

No keyboarding tutorials.

Next Page: Creativity >>

Creativity

Doozla

Doozla makes drawing a snap, but we wish it offered more flexibility. Kids can pick from four art projects: a coloring-book, freehand sketching, and doodling on iSight pictures or built-in backdrops. Each offers a handful of drawing and file tools in a simple, stylish window. It’s not just the app that looks good--pen strokes are smoothed automatically, making even lines drawn with a mouse look natural.

Adults can password-protect printing (a handy feature given the price of ink), but unfortunately, printouts are the easiest way to share drawings with the world. Worse, Doozla saves pictures in its own file format only and won’t simply save over old files, forcing kids to manually type a file’s name to replace past versions. We’d love the option to simply export JPEGs. Despite these limitations, Doozla lets young artists get great-looking results.

Drawing's a blast in Doozla.

Doozla
COMPANY: Plasq
CONTACT: www.plasq.com
PRICE: $24.95
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4.6 or later

Simple, attractive interface. Smooths pen strokes to pleasing effect. Parental printing controls.

Awkward file-saving system. Can't export JPEGs.

Classroom Video Workshop Jr.

Classroom Video Workshop Jr. drops users into a cramped interface, offers no tutorial on how to use it to start editing videos, and tops things off with QuickTime-compatibility issues. If you have the right MOV file, Video Workshop can import it, trim its length, and add simple music and effects to export or play in the app. But in our testing, only MOV files exported from QuickTime Player or from other applications using QuickTime-specific options worked. Videos made with Photo Booth--the easiest way to make movies on a Mac--had errors that made them unwatchable if any of Video Workshop’s effects were applied.

Even when the app behaves, you’ll have to contend with its pokey performance and cramped, dated design. If you’re introducing youngsters to video editing, consider a supervised lesson in iMovie instead of this program. It looks and feels more than a decade out of date.

This app isn't ready for its close-up.

Classroom Video Workshop Jr.
COMPANY: APTE
CONTACT: www.apte.com
PRICE: $39.95
REQUIREMENTS: G4 or better processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later

Adds titles and simple effects to QuickTime clip.

No tutorial. Accepts only MOV files exported from QuickTime Player or equivalent settings. Cramped, dated interface. Sluggish performance.

Algodoo

Algodoo might sound like a toy, but it’s actually a sophisticated physics simulator that works like a 2D drawing program. A nonstandard interface and skimpy instructions may hinder some users, but those willing to learn Algodoo’s many features will be rewarded with serious fun.

Freehand and polygonal shapes can be animated to illustrate physical properties like mass and velocity. Just drag and draw, then add springs, hinges, gears, and motors to combine them into virtual machines controlled with keyboard commands. Algodoo’s many features, combined with a lack of familiar menus and help files, demand experimentation and too many trips to the Algodoo website for instructions. But turning your screen into a riot of colliding shapes is half the fun, and built-in example scenes help kids get into the swing of things--literally.

Screenshots can't show off Algodoo's realistic physics, but they're a click away.

Algodoo
COMPANY: Algoryx
CONTACT: algodoo.com
PRICE: $39
REQUIREMENTS: 1GHz or faster processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later, 96MB or faster video card

Turns your Mac into a virtual physics lab that works like a drawing program. Plenty of features.

Nonstandard menus and lack of tutorials make for a long learning curve.

Digital Photo Activity Kit

The Digital Photo Activity Kit’s six photocentric games and creative activities range from slideshows to calendars (though the app crashed anytime we tried to change a calendar’s date), and some can be modified with music. Each activity offers a template, but skimpy customization options and inflexible controls get in the way. For instance, newsletters can only be a few paragraphs long. But clear instructions keep things moving, and all activities and controls are available on every screen, making it easy to get around. The Kit needs a 21st-century update--iSight integration would be a good start--but there’s enough here to engage young children for a while. Older kids and adults, though, will grow bored quickly.

This Movie Maker could use a remake.

Digital Photo Activity Kit
COMPANY: APTE
CONTACT: apte.com
PRICE: $19.95 download, $39.95 CD
REQUIREMENTS: G3 or better processor, Mac OS 10.2.1 or later

Six creative activities for slightly older kids. Convenient, if dated, interface.

No iSight integration. Bug makes calendar activity useless.

TuxPaint

TuxPaint isn’t the prettiest app, but its price is right. Its single window is a canvas surrounded by brushes, colors, and drawing and file tools. But because Tux’s plentiful drawing tools are nested, kids have to cycle through them to see everything and don’t have access to all of them at once. It’s also too bad you can’t export pictures as JPEGs, but an optional (and free) collection of clip art broadens young artists’ creative horizons. A separate configuration application lets parents manage printing options and simplify controls. At the end of the day, a drawing app is about making pictures, and TuxPaint delivers, just with a decided lack of Mac-like flair.

TuxPaint's built-in layered backdrops help get the arty started.

TuxPaint
COMPANY: New Breed Software
CONTACT: tuxpaint.org
PRICE: Free download, $6.99 CD
REQUIREMENTS: G3 or better processor, Mac OS 10.3.9 or later

Plenty of tools for drawing. Parental printing controls Can't beat the price.

Navigating all drawing tools takes multiple clicks. Can't export JPEGs.

Next Page: Education >>

Education

Games of Math 4: Division and Fractions

Games of Math 4’s six minigames blend math drills with arcade action. From winning footraces by solving problems to writing a math-centric advice column, it’s hard to get bored. When the games are done, the two practice modes are almost as fun and are easily customized. Parents can select which numbers to work with, set quiz limits, and even turn on remainders and long division for advanced training. Missed questions can be retaken or printed to worksheets for further practice. Multiple children can be tested and tracked individually, and password protection lets adults block printing, access to student records, and more. We wish the minigames were as customizable as the practice sessions, but Games of Math 4’s features and polished design add up to a winner.

We knew math was important, but who knew it was fun?

Games of Math 4: Division and Fractions
COMPANY: Help Me 2 Learn Company
CONTACT: helpme2learn.com
PRICE: $19.95 for the downloadable home edition
REQUIREMENTS: 500MHz or faster processor, Mac OS 10.3 or later

Creative, dynamic games make math fun. Customizable, flexible practice modes. Password-protected controls for adults.

Games could benefit from greater customization.

GeoEdu

GeoEdu is a world atlas and customizable geography quiz, but neither is done well. Wading through the cramped, text-heavy, dated interface feels more like navigating a dry database than exploring an educational application. The atlas offers both too much and too little information, summarizing numerous international organizations in detail, but offering small, simplistic maps and little data about cities or languages. Quiz features offer extensive customization, however, and you can easily organize territory information in custom lists to cover specific topics, such as all countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean. But even these useful features are hampered by an interface that makes GeoEdu feel too much like homework.

GeoEdu's heart is in the right place, but its interface is in 1999.

GeoEdu
COMPANY: GeoEdu
CONTACT: geoedu.info
PRICE: $10
REQUIREMENTS: G4 or better processor, Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, 1024x768 display resolution

Flexible quiz customization lets you fine-tune geography drills.

Busy, confounding interface. Simplistic maps.

TuxMath

Arithmetic and arcade games make for strange bedfellows unless you’re playing TuxMath, a free game featuring the lovable penguin mascot of Linux. TuxMath revolves around two main games--the first is modeled after Missile Command and has you saving penguins from a comet storm. Each comet is labeled with an arithmetic problem you must solve in order to blast it to dust. The other game, based on Asteroids, tests your ability to solve factors and simplify fractions while blasting asteroids in space--requiring a surprisingly challenging combination of coordination and math-solving abilities.

TuxMath includes a number of different exercises to test your skills in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and a fast-paced, two-player hot seat variation adds a competitive element. Where TuxMath comes up short, however, is in actually helping kids develop these arithmetic skills--it is better for reinforcing the lessons they’re already learning in school.

Fun gameplay and delightful graphics, for the low, low price of nothing.

TuxMath
COMPANY: Tux4Kids
CONTACT: tux4kids.alioth.debian.org
PRICE: Free
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later

One- and two-player games. Lots of different arithmetic skills to drill.

No tutorials, just lots of review.

Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom

In Crystal Kingdom, preschool kids guide Dora the Explorer and friends through seven light math, matching, and memory puzzles to defeat the greedy king, learning un poco de español in the process. The minigames reinforce listening, memorization, and basic math and language skills at multiple difficulty levels. Bright colors, peppy animation, and enthusiastic voice acting (including constant spoken instructions) carry kids through the game, and the inclusion of printable coloring book pages as prizes is a nice touch. An arcade mode lets kids revisit their favorite minigames any time, and six save slots let junior explorers help Dora without erasing each others’ achievements. There are no surprises here, but no gotchas, either.

One miffed monarch is no match for Dora.

Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom
COMPANY: Nova Development
CONTACT: novadevelopment.com
PRICE: $19.95
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later, 512MB RAM, 1GB free disk space

Fun educational games for kids ages 2 to 5. Bright, engaging art and animation. Encourages learning Spanish.

No major complaints.

Bob the Builder: Can-Do Zoo

Can-Do Zoo’s lengthy story mode takes preschool- and kindergarten-aged builders through seven minigames to help Bob build a zoo for the animals of Bobland Bay. Kids will match shapes and colors, put blueprints in sequential order, complete patterns, and perform other gently educational tasks. Each offers children three levels of difficulty and plenty of feedback and encouragement, even when their answers are wrong. Audio instructions accompany every activity, and three save slots mean multiple children can learn at their own paces. When the zoo is finished, a free-play mode lets kids enjoy their favorite minigames anytime. As a bonus, virtual stickers are awarded for completed tasks and can be arranged on colorful backdrops, but it’s too bad these scenes can’t be printed or saved to enjoy later.

Activities are controlled with just the mouse, and most don't require precise aiming.

Bob the Builder: Can-Do Zoo
COMPANY: Brighter Minds Media
CONTACT: brightermindsmedia.com
PRICE: $19.95
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later

Gentle, low-stress, educational games. Appealing, simple art and animation.

Sticker-album feature is too limited.

Next Page: Games >>

Games

Go, Diego, Go! 2-Game Set

Nick Jr.’s cartoon superstar Diego headlines this two-game collection, which includes Great Dinosaur Rescue and Safari Rescue. Kids will love helping Diego save wild animals in distress. In Great Dinosaur Rescue, Diego and Baby Jaguar hunt for dino eggs, while minigames teach kids about dinosaurs and reinforce skills like counting, shape recognition, and language.

The shorter Safari Rescue has Diego and Baby Jaguar join their friend Juma in the Serengeti. A magician has turned the elephants to stone, and the trio must find a magic drum to transform them back. Similar skill reinforcements are put to work in Safari Rescue’s minigames, but both titles are polished, and Diego is such a heartthrob with the under-6 set that they won’t mind the games’ glaring similarities.

Diego and dinosaurs go together like PB and J.

Go Diego, Go! 2-Game Set
COMPANY: Nova Development
CONTACT: novadevelopment.com
PRICE: $19.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later

Characters many preschoolers will be familiar with. Dinos and safari animals.

Similar skill reinforcements in both games. Safari Rescue has less content.

Captain Bumper

This side-scrolling arcade game evokes our childhoods--the days when Duran Duran was on the radio and games cost a quarter at the local arcade. In it, you play as Captain Bumper, a lantern-jawed hero who pilots his ship from an open cockpit, blasting bug-eyed aliens and collecting power ups and bonus multipliers. The violence level is cartoonish--explosions consist of animated dust clouds, and aliens get “zapped” but there’s no blood. It’s definitely family friendly.

The simple controls require just the arrow keys, space bar, and Control key, while the smooth graphics shine even on low-end machines--in fact, Captain Bumper even runs on pre-OS X Macs. We saw some graphical glitches on a Snow Leopard–equipped MacBook, however. And the $25 price is out of line for what amounts to some simple casual gaming.

Cute graphics and low system requirements make Captain Bumper fun for everyone.

Captain Bumper
COMPANY: MacRun Games
CONTACT: macrun.com
PRICE: $25
REQUIREMENTS: Any Mac running Mac OS 8.6 or later

Very low system requirements. Simple to master game mechanics.

Glitchy graphics.

FusionFall

FusionFall, Cartoon Network’s ambitious massively multiplayer online game (MMO) runs in a web browser, but don’t dismiss it as some simple Flash affair. Using the Unity plug-in, kids can get a compelling 3D online gaming experience with familiar TV characters. FusionFall emphasizes running, jumping, and climbing, but mixes in puzzle solving and combat. And since it’s an MMO for kids, interaction with other players is monitored to make sure nothing inappropriate goes on.

Conventional MMOs involve a lot of “grinding,” or rewarding players who spend hours gaining experience. FusionFall is designed for the more casual player who may only have 10 or 15 minutes to spend at a time. What’s more, you can play through the first four levels for free. The browser plug-in installation could be more graceful--it drops a webplayer-i386.dmg file onto your Mac that newbies may not know what to do with--but the download and installation are quick.

Before they're ready for World of Warcraft, FusionFall introduces kids to MMOs.

FusionFall
COMPANY: Cartoon Network
CONTACT: fusionfall.com
PRICE: Free for the first four levels, subscriptions start at $5.95 per month
REQUIREMENTS: Intel Mac with Mac OS 10.4 or later, Firefox 3 or later or Safari

Filtered chat to keep younger players away from inappropriate content.

Wonky plug-in installer.

Spore

Spore lets you guide the evolution of a life form--a heady mix that’s been enormously popular with kids and adults alike since its release. The game is most appealing to children during the creature-creation phase--in fact, EA spun that part off as the standalone Spore Creature Creator, available for $10.

The full game involves guiding your creature from its origins in a tidal pool all the way up to colonizing space. But for kids, the early stages are too easy, the later stages are too hard, and the whole fun but flawed experience becomes frustrating. We recommend parents try the less-expensive Spore Creature Creator to give their kids the best and most creative part of this game without bogging them down in the details.

Create whatever freaks of nature you can dream up.

Spore
COMPANY: Electronic Arts
CONTACT: gametreeonline.com
PRICE: $39.99
REQUIREMENTS: Intel processor, Mac OS 10.5.3 or later

Fun to create creatures and evolve them through stages of life.

Creating creatures doesn't affect game outcome.

Next Page: How to Use Parental Controls >>

How to Use Parental Controls

Use Leopard and Snow Leopard's built-in parental controls to custom-tailor your child's Mac experience for their safety--and your sanity.

System Preferences > Parental Controls lets parents set sensible limits.

1. Create an Account

Open System Preferences > Accounts, and click the plus-sign button. Choose Managed With Parental Controls from the dropdown, and set a name and password for your kid’s account. Don’t give him administrator privileges, or he’ll be able to do whatever he likes. The next screen will have a button for Open Parental Controls. Click that (or go to System Preferences > Parental Controls) to start setting limits.

2. The Simple Finder

Checking the Simple Finder box (under the System tab) will really strip down your kid’s Mac experience--they won’t be able to modify the Dock or monkey with system files or settings. They get a simple Applications window, a Documents folder, and that’s about it. For little kids, this is a good place to start, but older kids will feel too fenced in.

3. Select Applications

The System tab is also where you specify which applications your kid is allowed to use. But if he needs one later that you haven’t authorized, you can add it in a snap by typing in your administrator password. And remember, Junior can’t install new programs without that admin password either.

4. Filter Content

The Content tab lets you hide profanity in the Dictionary app and on Wikipedia in Safari. When setting the Website Restrictions, keep in mind that they only work in Safari--so remember to disable any other browsers (see Step 3). If you choose “Try to limit access to adult websites automatically,” you can still blacklist specific sites with the Customize button.

5. Mail and iChat

The Mail & iChat tab lets you make sure your kids can only email and chat with people you approve of. This only counts for Mail and iChat, so make sure you disable any other clients (Entourage, Thunderbird, Adium, etc.) in Step 3. If they try to communicate with people outside your approved list, you’ll see it in the Log (see Step 7).

6. Time Limits

Set limits on how long your kids can use the computer on weekdays and on weekends. Then set a bedtime, so they won’t be able to log on after they’re supposed to be asleep.

7. Logs

The Log tab is the ultimate tattletale: See what websites your kids visited and if they attempted to visit any blocked ones. Find out what applications they used and for how long, and see a transcript of their iChats. Big Brother’s got nothing on you!

8. Click the Lock

At the bottom of the System Preferences window, click the lock icon to prevent changes to your selections. Anyone who wants to make a change (yes, even you) needs to type in an administrator password to do so.

A+ Websites for Kids

The dirty secrets of kids’ software is this: High-quality, kid-friendly alternatives to most of it can be found for free online. Poke around these fabulous sites for hundreds of games, activities, recipes, educational diversions, and more.

>> kids.discovery.com

>> pbskids.org

>> kids.nationalgeographic.com

>> kids.yahoo.com

>> disney.go.com

>> americangirl.com/fun

>> nick.com and nickjr.com

>> kidshealth.org/kid

>> si.edu and smithsonianeducation.org/students

>> scholastic.com/kids

Next Page: iPhone Apps for Kids >>

Silly Rabbit, Apps Are for Kids!

10 iPhone apps that'll keep your munchkins occupied, entertained, and learning on the go.

We’re not suggesting you buy an iPhone or even an iPod touch for your 6-year-old. But your favorite sidekicks can still get in on the fun--and stay out of your hair--if you dedicate a home screen on your device to apps just for them. To help you fill it, we tracked down the best apps for toddlers and older kids. --Leslie Ayers

Age: 5 to 7 Years

1. Toddler Flashcards ($0.99, itotapps.com) This set of digital flash cards works for tots 18 months and up, but they’ll probably need to be at least 2 to be able to swipe through the flash cards themselves. Each card shows the picture and word for an item--animals, objects, food, shapes, colors, letters, numbers, and so on--and plays audio of a woman clearly saying the word.

2. Old MacDonald ($1.99, duckduckmoosedesign.com) Sure, you could torture yourself playing kiddie music on your car’s stereo. But instead, you should launch Old MacDonald and hand your iPhone back to Junior to listen to the jaunty tune and control this app’s charming touch-sensitive animation. Leaving you blessedly free to enjoy your own music in the front seat.

Many of the elements in Old MacDonald will move (or be moved) when your child taps or swipes parts of the picture.

3. AniMatch ($0.99, limasky.com) We called it Concentration when we were kids, but AniMatch kicks the card-matching game up a notch, challenging your little one to find the identical animal faces--complete with sound effects, of course--on a board of 20 face-down tiles.

4. ABC Animals ($1.99, criticalmatter.com) This app makes learning the alphabet a zoological adventure, assigning an animal to all 26 letters and naming each animal as the child swipes through the letters. Double-tapping turns a letter card over and challenges your child to write the letter in upper- and lowercase on the touchscreen.

5. Make a Martian (free, 3dal.com) No educational agenda here; it’s just fun to build your own many-eyed alien by tapping different body parts on the screen to the left and right of your creation.

6. Preschool Adventure ($0.99, 3dal.com) This app offers six activities to help your preschooler bone up on key pre-K concepts: colors, numbers, shapes, body parts, animal sounds, and the ability to match slices of a picture correctly to make a seamless whole.

Preschool Adventure's undersea scene demonstrates the colors blue, purple, green, orange, pink, and red as seen "in the wild."

Age: 5 to 7 Years

7. iPuzzle Words Transportation ($0.99, portegno-apps.com) Once your kindergartener starts asking you how to spell, well, everything, you can satisfy her thirst for knowledge and expand her vocabulary with this app, in which she’ll rearrange scrambled letters to spell modes of transportation.

8. Curious George Coloring Book ($2.99, pbskids.org) Having this app on your iPhone negates the need to tote coloring books and crayons whenever you eat out. Your little Van Gogh chooses his George pic, then “colors” it in using hues from the palette.

Yeah, George looks a little green here. Chalk it up to artistic license.

9. Glow Doodle ($0.99, oodot.com) With an interface simple enough for an early reader to master, Glow Doodle turns your kid’s idle scribbles into four-color neon masterworks.

Just hope your little scribbler doesn't know how to copy the Coors Light logo.

10. Scoops ($1.99, nimblebit.com) In this accelerometer-based game, your child tilts the device to the left and right to catch scoops of ice cream on a cone, avoiding icky veggies like tomatoes and garlic. The goal is to stack like ice cream flavors, catch rainbow (wild card) scoops, and ultimately get the scoop that’s purple with yellow stars--maybe it’s Star Wars flavor?

Scoops will keep them so occupied in the car they might not notice you're driving by Baskin Robbins.

Minibosses -- This Song Is for All the Geeks Out There

Chris Barylick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:10:35 -0600

Ever wanted to play Street Fighter on a guitar? Nintendo-music masters the Minibosses share the secrets to their success.

Case Study: The Minibosses

Occupation: Rock band specializing in remixed Nintendo music

Gear: Assorted Macs, iPod touch units running Bebot, Pro Tools, Tablature, and NES emulators like NESticle and iNES.

Friends, rockers, geeks: The Minibosses.

Take a great thing from your youth and run with it. This could be the motto of the Minibosses, a Phoenix-based rock band that for almost 10 years has taken original Nintendo videogame songs and strung them together with incredibly energetic riffs and long medleys in a standard four piece rock format (consisting of two guitars, bass and drums) to become one of the most popular touring acts for any geek event.

The band, which consists of Aaron Burke (guitar), Ben Baraldi (guitar), Robin Vining (bass), and Matt Wood (percussion), originally began back in Northampton, Massachussetts, as the Jenova Project, which toyed with the idea of throwing old Nintendo theme songs into the middle of other songs for the fun of it. When the Jenova Project broke up at the end of the ’90s and the Minibosses formed in 2000, the group had found its niche.

Getting to the Good Stuff

It’s one thing to love and adore the Nintendo music you grew up with. It’s another thing to get direct access to that music in order to learn how to play it with different instruments. This is where a series of free Nintendo Entertainment System emulators such as NESticle and iNes first came in. “Those are great because with most of them you can isolate the parts and only listen to the specific stuff you need to figure out,” says Burke.

This process became even easier as media players like Winamp and iTunes allowed for Nintendo Sound Files to be loaded in. Third-party extensions like Slow Me Down allow the band the slow down the tempo in order to take the songs apart and reassemble them as needed.

Enter the Mac

Before any kind of CD release, or even a live performance, editing and mixing becomes crucial. “We use a lot of stuff but most of the studios we deal with use Macs for hardware, and as far as software goes, it's usually Pro Tools or some other variant thereof,” says Burke. “A bunch of us have iPods as well that we want to incorporate into the performances. The Bebot app [a music synthesizer application for the iPhone and iPod touch] is amazing.”

“I've used Bebot for some home recording and once or twice live...I tend to crank up all the settings but it depends on what's going on. It's VERY easy to integrate into recordings as a real instrument,” says Burke.

Playing Nintendo, only with guitars instead of controllers.

Other chunks of shareware have made the process that much easier. A small Mac OS X and Windows application called Tablature creates virtual charts that tell musicians what position on a guitar string to play at what time became handy. Once installed, files can be sent back and forth, with Tablatures playing the music back to let the band know if they got it right.

“Not too long ago we recorded a secret song for an upcoming game on a Mac. That song was also edited and mastered on a Mac,” continued Burke. “As for performances, we haven't used them in a musical capacity, but when we played a show in Mexico a few years ago, we used Macs to play movies of Nintendo games over us while we played.”

Leveling Up Your Cred

For bands just starting out, the Minibosses advise putting the same energy into your relationships as you do your playing. “Make friends with the people who record you, if they're not your friends already,” says Burke. “Learn from someone who already knows the stuff, that's the easiest way. Don't be afraid to experiment, but also seek out whatever help you can get, and have an open mind. You don't have to record/mix/do anything the same time over and over again.”

Playing live is hard work--they could probably use a power-up mushroom right now.

And outside the studio, don’t forget to use social media to extend your band’s reach. The best method: Play the gig, record everything you can, drive home, and keep uploading those recordings until the sun comes up. “We do use social media like Facebook, MySpace, and our own website. It's generated a lot of traffic over the years, especially when we first started,” says Burke.

“We use them like most bands do, to let fans know when we're playing or have something new coming out. But we also like them for sharing photos or stories...those are things I think not enough bands spend that much time on.”

Bringing It All Together

When it’s all said and done, the payoff is impressive. At larger venues, the band will find itself playing in front of hundreds or thousands of bouncing, energetic video game fans, each reliving part of their childhood through the music.

As the set wears on, the energy increases, the fans associating the music with the struggle and the joy of the video games they grew up on. After the show, the fans wander up to the stage, have autographs signed, snag a CD or t-shirt and talk about the games and the music.

“If you get a chance to see us, come say hi,” says Burke. “We're nice folks, and Robin will let you stroke his beard. Well, maybe.”

For more information as well as MP3s of their most recent album, Brass, check out www.minibosses.com.

Customize Your Home with Your Mac

Jon Phillips — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:10:46 -0600

You already use your computer to make your own music, edit your own photos, and create your own movies--so why pay someone else to decorate your home? Your Mac is the perfect tool for giving your interior space a dash of 21st-century modernism. Follow along and we'll show you how.

Photography by Mark Madeo

I’m not a thrifty man by nature, but after cobbling together enough money to buy my first single-family home, I wasn’t about to take out a second mortgage just to get the place decorated. In fact, the very concept of hiring an interior designer or color consultant strikes me as frivolous on an intestinal level. Color theory and design inspiration is free online, and at the end of the day, what looks right is right--because perfection in home decor is in the eye of the beholder. That last thing I need is some woman named Astrid telling me my walls would look better in “Butter Crème.”

But that isn’t to say that even I, in all my brazen hubris, couldn’t do a better job with the help of my MacBook Pro. If the Mac can help me in other creative pursuits, why not put it to use in snazzing up Casa Philippe? I did my research, put in a bunch of nights at the keyboard, and came up with an interior design that suits me just perfectly. And now I’m going to show you how you can do the same for your own home.

First we’ll look at how you can use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to make informed color decisions--by painting Pantone swatches directly on your walls. Next, we’ll explore photography. I’ll explain how inkjet technology can turn your shots into art prints and how to use photos to inspire digital illustration. From there, we’ll run through my favorite iPhone apps and websites that can streamline, enhance, and inform your design process. Finally, we end our tour with a look at Mac-oriented tchotkes and accessories that are interior-design elements all on their own. So even if you don’t want to use your Mac to create a living space with all the bold, iconographic simplicity that Apple is known for, you can still buy your way into Apple’s 21st-century modern aesthetic.

Painting in Pantone Color

You don’t have to be a print designer to play with Pantone colors--and we’re not just talking about leafing through those swatch books for kicks and giggles. Pantone’s Fashion+Home library contains 1,925 vibrant colors, and every color is available in different exterior and interior paints from Fine Paints of Europe (FPE). Whether you’re color-matching your walls to Pantone-spec’d furniture or simply using the Pantone system to make informed color choices, your final results will have the designy flair that richly pigmented Pantone reproduction is known for. The paint from FPE--imported from Holland--is relatively expensive, but as my independent painting contractor said, “You get what you pay for.” Completely unprompted, he said FPE paint lasts longer, requires fewer coats, and is probably the best paint available.

To choose your Pantone paint, you can finger-swipe through the myPantone app (see page 4) or peruse a printed Fashion+Home swatch collection for absolute color accuracy. You can also create a close approximation of how your colors will look in (or on) your actual home by “painting” them onto your walls using the Color Replacement Tool in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. This tool lets you reskin a surface, all while retaining the shadows and highlights of your original photo content. Here’s how to do it:

>> Load the Pantone swatches from Pantone’s Fashion+Home Digital Color Library CD (it retails for $50 MSRP).

>> Load a photo of your interior into Photoshop or Elements, and use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to define an area of your walls that you want to paint over. In Image A, my “before” photo, I’ve lassoed over the middle sawtooth wall panel. Creating a lassoed selection isn’t absolutely necessary, but helps in confining your paint strokes to a specific area.

Image A - Notice how the glass blocks shine natural light that's reflected on the walls. These highlights will be preserved by Photoshop's Color Replacement tool.

>> Now choose a Pantone color from your Swatches palette, select the Color Replacement Tool, and begin painting the wall within your selected area. Create a new lassoed selection for every portion of wall you want to cover--it’s like using digital painters tape that keeps your brush strokes off of areas that shouldn’t be painted.

>> To paint on unadorned walls that aren’t covered by any objects or obscured by furniture, I choose the largest brush diameter possible with the following tool settings: Mode: Color; Sampling: Continuous; Limits: Contiguous; Tolerance: 100%. Then I tap a single time inside the selected area, and the entire area becomes Pantonified.

>> To paint in areas covered by other objects (like the sawtooth wall panel behind the tripod lamp in Image B), I use these settings: Mode: Color; Sampling: Continuous; Limits: Find Edges; Tolerance: 15%. With these settings and a small-diameter brush (about the size of the one pictured over the antique scale), you can paint between objects quite effectively, rarely painting over framed photos, furniture legs, or anything else that should remain unpainted. This process allows you to retain your original shadows and highlights--note the tripod shadow on the left sawtooth wall panel and the light shining through the glass blocks at the top of the middle panel.

Image B - The Color Replacement tool does a very good job in automatically replacing only the color you've identified for substitution. Still, when painting over a wall with lots of objects on it, it helps to use a small brush diameter to prevent "paint" from going in the wrong places.

Be aware that unless your monitor is perfectly calibrated, it won’t display the Pantone swatches with absolute accuracy. Also, it helps to use photos shot in flat lighting in order to reduce hot spots and reflections (in Image B, you can see how the white picture frames picked up a yellow cast from the original wall paint). Regardless, my Photoshop color replacement process, used in conjunction with real-world Pantone swatches, will give you a fantastic head start in making color choices.

In Image C you can see my final color decisions. From left to right, I used 13-0002 (White Sand), 16-1406 (Atmosphere), 17-1506 (Cinder), 18-1306 (Iron) and 18-1434 (Etruscan Red). The hallway is also painted White Sand. The codes of my colors actually bear strong relevance to one another, and knowing the coding system can help you make color choices.

Image C - Understanding Pantone's numerical codes helped me quickly choose warm gray tones based on reddish hues. The codes helped me choose three grays--Atmosphere, Cinder, and Iron--that would create a perfect graduated grayscale-branding effect.

The two numbers before the hyphen refer to a color’s relative lightness on a scale from 11 (lightest) to 19 (darkest). The second pair of numbers specify different hues on a 64-step color wheel; 01 is yellow-green, 64 is green-yellow, and all the other colors of the rainbow are represented in between. The third pair of numbers represent the color’s chroma level--the intensity and saturation of the hue itself. The chroma scale is divided into 65 steps, with 00 being neutral and 64 being maximum saturation.

Using Pantone’s system, I was able to make some informed decisions on paint. Notice that Iron and Etruscan Red, the two colors separated by my hallway entrance, share nearly the same code--only the saturation levels of their chroma differ dramatically. Also notice that the hues of my four main accent colors range from 13 to 15, putting each one squarely in the red portion of the color wheel. Finally, I deliberately chose one-step lightness increments for my sawtooth wall panels, creating a very graphic-designy grayscale-banding effect.

There’s a method to Pantone’s numbering madness! So learn the system, and your paint choices will develop quickly and elegantly.

The Pantone System

Next Page: Fun with Photos >>

Fun with Photos: Go Big, Go Historic, Go Pop

Now that you have paint on your walls, it’s time to put down a third layer--in the form of dazzling art photography. Fine-art photo printing is within the reach of most consumer-grade inkjet photo printers, and it becomes absolutely spectacular when done by those printers’ professional-grade cousins.

The key to art photography is, of course, your photo’s contents. Your shot of the Brooklyn Bridge in twilight is artsy; the photo of cousin Jerry holding his Budweiser up to the camera is not. In a previous Maclife.com article, we delved into the secrets to great shooting and photo editing, but here we’ll focus on print media, which can unlock a photo’s final degree of finesse. For this article, I used Epson media, but Canon offers a comparable lineup in the prosumer desktop space.

Image A - Printed on canvas, this 3-foot giclée print of a Mark Madeo photograph has tricked a lot of people into thinking it's a photorealistic painting in the style of Richard Estes and Ralph Goings.

First off, throw glossy paper out the door. For most images, you’ll want to be printing on softer, nonreflective matte paper and even stretchable canvas. Lately, I’ve been using the Epson R2880 printer, which supports the full range of Epson’s fine art media in sheets up to 13 by 19 inches and rolls sized 13 inches by 20 feet. On the “low” end of Epson’s lineup, I like Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte and Watercolor Paper Radiant White. The first one is bright white with a flat matte finish, providing great highlight and shadow detail without any reflections. I love it for black-and-white prints produced in the R2880’s special Advanced B&W Photo mode. The second option (despite its name) isn’t quite as radiantly white, but it has a textured surface that imbues your photo with a more artistic, painterly appearance.

On the ultra high end, you can opt for Epson’s Velvet Fine Art Paper, which is 100 percent cotton rag, features a luxurious textured grain, and purports to offer the densest blacks of any cotton-based inkjet paper around. This is beautiful media, and I have found its blacks to be superior as advertised, so don’t hide it behind a piece of glass unless longevity is a big concern. Finally, you might consider Premium Canvas Matte, a polyester/cotton blend with a pronounced woven texture. Because it can be stretched on wooden frames and has exactly the same canvas grain you’d see on hand-brushed paintings, this material is ideal for not just photos but also giclée prints of digital illustrations and painting reproductions (“giclée” is just a fancy term for inkjet-based fine-art printing).

Image B - These three prints represent just a fraction of the wonderful (and insanely high-res) images I've downloaded from the Library of Congress. Once you start sifting through the archives, you won't be able to stop.

The R2880 supports Premium Canvas Matte, but with a maximum roll width of 13 inches, you can’t output anything of breathtaking size. You can, however, send your digital files to a production house that has one of Epson’s (or Canon’s) wide-format inkjet printers. The photo you see in Image A (a piece by Mac|Life staff photographer Mark Madeo) was printed on the Epson Stylus Pro 9880, which supports media of widths up to 44 inches. Mark’s photo is 36x24 inches wide, and a piece this size--printed and stretched on a wooden frame--would run you about $220. This isn’t inexpensive, but the results are spectacular and elevate your photography hobby--and home decor--to a new level. For more info on pricing and how to prepare your digital files, check out www.photoworkssf.com.

Image C - Unlike photographic images, vector-based art files are very, very small. The 54x36-inch print you see here was generated from a 1MB file--and could have been blown up to the size of a building if I had the printer to do that.

If 13x19-inch prints suit you fine, a printer like the Epson R2880 or Canon Pro9500 Mark II is all you need to create wall-ready, museum-quality artwork at home. There are various ways to mount and display your prints, but one of the easiest (and most durable) methods is to use preassembled, UV-protected glass frames. All the photos shown in Image B were downloaded from the Library of Congress website (see page 3) and mounted in Artcare “archival protection systems” (www.nielsen-bainbridge.com). These framing kits include 4-ply, precut beveled mats and UV-protected glass and come in a wide variety of sizes supporting print areas up to 10.5 by 13.5 inches. If you can’t find prefab frames in the right sizes or don’t want frames at all, you can mount your images on acid-free foam core with 3M Photo Mount spray, which is also acid free. Finish off these projects (especially canvas prints) with a protective spray like PremierArt Print Shield to protect against UV rays and scuffs.

Image D - For a thorough explanation of using Illustrator's Pen tool, go to Youtube.com/watch?v=5DzpT8POAME.

If you want to take your photography into another dimension entirely, you can use it as the source material for digital illustration. The Roy Lichtenstein–style pieces shown on page 32 and in Image C were created by tracing over photos of my living room using the Pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. After outlining all key elements using Bézier curves (Image D), finishing the drawing is a simple matter of filling objects with solid colors, slanted lines, and Ben-Day dots, which can be found in Illustrator’s Swatch library under Patterns > Basic Graphics. I went the pop art Lichtenstein route, but remember that any digital illustration can be printed on fine-art media, and vector-based line art reproduces particularly well. And if you use Premium Canvas Matte, you can even paint directly on top of your inkjet prints with acrylics to create a mixed-media masterpiece (Image E).

Image E - If you want to paint in colors yourself, make sure to use Canvas Matte, not Canvas Satin. (NOTE: That's Flo's hand--not Jon's!)

Next Page: Design Online >>

Design Online: Linking Your Way to a Stylish Home

18 websites for incredible high-res photos, supercool interior products, and daily design inspiration.

Photography

Your tax dollars help pay for maintaining the amazing bank of photo archives at the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), so consider making a few withdrawals. Many (if not most) of the photos in our national archive can be freely downloaded and printed out for display in your home. Just look for restrictions, if any, under “Rights Information” in each photo’s bibliographic details. You’ll find B&W shots of cityscapes, rural life, historical figures, and other photographic expressions of the American experience. Many images are huge high-res TIFF files ranging from 20 to 150MB, and some date back to the very earliest days of photography--like the 1851 panoramic photo of San Francisco Bay shown here.

(click to enlarge) This 10MB TIFF from the Library of Congress is one of the archive's smaller files.

To get a clear idea of the archive’s best material, go to Shorpy.com, a vintage photography blog that seems to pull its finest entries from the Library of Congress. Also check out Stockvault.net and Morguefile.com, which keep searchable archives of modern high-res photography that can be used for personal, noncommercial use. Much of the material is quite wall-worthy.

Products

A storefront for some 800 antique and mid-century modern dealers, 1stdibs.com will blow your mind with its range of furniture, lighting, artwork, and curios. It’s the first place to look if you need a George Nakashima end table, a Cold War–era naval searchlight, or a circa-1920s beekeeper’s helmet. Prices on 1stdibs run quite steep, so if you’re looking for mid-century industrial chic at relatively affordable prices, go to AmericanFurnishings.com, which is where I picked up my antique red metal shop wheelbarrow (illustrated on the previous page). For much more contemporary (and Mac-y) design elements, check out the thoroughly groovy-modern Nova68.com, as well as lighting from Lumens.com and Ylighting.com.

Captivating art or antique beekeeper's helmet? It's both, courtesy of Radio Guy, which sells its curios via 1stdibs.com.

Daily Inspiration

The web is lousy with blog-style sites that showcase slick interiors, hip new products, and one-of-a-kind curios. Here’s a list of my favorites in alphabetical order:

Apartmenttherapy.com: Aesthetic is thoroughly hip with a slant toward affordable and modern. Includes a technology section.

ApartmentTherapy.com brought Matthew Borgatti's cosmonaut lamp to the attention of the hipster masses.

Betterlivingthroughdesign.com: Lots of blogs showcase cool decor elements, but this one organizes better than most. Love the dropdown menus.

Design-milk.com: Extends its savvy design eye from architecture to art to interiors to technology. Lots of cool
stuff here.

Dezeen.com: A bold, simple architecture and interiors blog with a well-trained eye for cool.

Inhabitat.com: Neato architecture and products geared toward environmentally friendly lifestyles.

Mocoloco.com: Confusing page interface, but whoever runs this blog has an eye for incredibly unique architecture, interiors, lighting, furniture, and more.

If not for Mocoloco.com, we never would have discovered the decidedly Apple-like Andrea Air Purifier.

Remodelista.com: The bloggers have a sophisticated eye for classic modernism. Nothing too wild here. They find stuff that would actually work in most homes.

Trendir.com: New home products galore. Focuses on stuff you can buy and leaves all the art and architecture posts for the other blogs.

Yankodesign.com: With the tagline “Form Beyond Function,” the folks at Yanko showcase some of the most modern, futuristic interiors and lifestyle products you’ll ever find. A very slick and well-executed design site.

Next Page: Pocket-Size Design Consultants >>

Pocket-Size Design Consultants

Six iPhone apps succeed in the world of design--but two Mac applications fail.

When I began my research in Mac-assisted home design, I fully expected to review two applications that claim to help one quickly and easily create 3D models of home interiors--rooms, surface materials, furniture and all. But after three vexing hours spent with Microspot Interiors and Punch Home & Landscape Design Studio, I decided it would be a poor use of magazine pages to review either package. Both applications are extremely frustrating to use, particularly Home & Landscape Design Studio, which has an awful, non-intuitive interface (and I’m someone who jumped right into Adobe Illustrator, an application that leaves many confused).

If you’re already comfortable with 3D modeling software, these interior design apps might have something to offer. But if you’re looking for a genuinely easy-to-use room layout program, consider Home Interior Layout Designer, detailed below. It’s one of six iPhone apps that has something worthwhile to offer the DIY decorator.

Colorsnap

This free app lets you grab an iPhone photo, extract color info from any portion of it and then find the closest Sherwin-Williams paint match, along with two complementary colors. Sadly, you can’t see the full swatch collection in one fell swoop, but if you’re committed to the paints offered by Messrs. Sherwin and Williams, this app is an invaluable tool.

Ben Color Capture

Benjamin Moore’s free app includes color extraction tools that trump Sherwin-Williams’, and you can also swipe your finger across a color wheel to view the full Benjamin Moore swatch collection. Pick a swatch to see harmony groupings and graded saturations of the color you’ve chosen. It’s a must-download pocket partner for anyone investing in Benjie Moore color.

myPantone

Pantone’s app costs $9.99, but you get nine virtual Pantone swatch collections, nifty color-extraction tools, and the largest selection of color-harmony options we’ve seen on the iPhone. The Fashion+Home collection maps directly to Pantone wall paint colors, and I used the app to email my final palette (see page 35, Image C EDIT THIS LINK) to friends. Search Maclife.com for “myPantone” to read the full review.

mySurface

Message to all major paint, tile, countertop and window covering manufacturers: Distribute a free app that lets prospective customers quickly peel through your catalog. With mySurface, Dupont does just that for its Corian and Zodiaq lines of kitchen and bath countertops. Search via a color slider, tap a swatch for a larger image, then call an 800 number for a sample.

Home Interior Layout Designer

This $2.99 app may not let you design in 3D, but it’s easy to use, and provides most everything you’ll need for deciding “what goes where” in an empty room. Just define your room size and shape, and then begin tapping to add furniture, appliances, and architectural elements from various menus. Includes nifty measuring tools for accurate room planning. We’ll do a full review in a future issue.

Art Envi Deluxe

This $3.99 app turns your iPhone into a handheld art gallery, helping you decide which reprints of timeless classics might look best in your home. Browse by periods or by specific artists in alphabetical order, then create a thumbnail gallery of their pieces. Works can be viewed individually or in slideshows. Includes biographical info, and images can be saved to your Camera Roll!

Geek Chic

When it's time to accessorize your home, think different with Mac-inspired decor and high-tech, high-style iPod docks.

A. These iSteam Mac and iSteam iPhone posters ($15, www.isteammac.com) by artist Kevin Tong are inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and HG Wells–style steampunk. Also available as T-shirts!

B. Graphic artist Susan Kare designed icons and interface elements for the early Macintosh, as well as these removable wall graphics from LTL Prints ($39.95 and up, www.ltlprints.com).

C. The Icon Collection of pillows by Throwboy ($29 each, $149 for the set of six, www.throwboy.com) includes handcrafted, fleece pillows shaped like the icons for Photo Booth, the Finder, Dashboard, iChat, iTunes, and iPhoto (not pictured).

D. These handmade fleece pillows by MySuiteStuff ($15 each, $80 for six, $130 for 10, www.mysuitestuff.com) are right out of an art director’s Creative Suite dreams.

E. Roth’s Music Cocoon MC4 tube amp (£395, $629 at press time, www.rothaudio.co.uk) warms the sound from your iPod, iPhone, CD player, or other device, and looks good doing it. Just BYO speakers.

F. The limited-edition Pantone Flight Stools ($549, www.pantone.com) were designed and made by London design team Barber Osgerby.

G. The Multipot ($199, www.multipot.com/en/) is a multiuse charging station and lamp. You can plug up to five devices into sockets under the lid, and the cords are neatly hidden by the pot.

H. Rotaliana’s Diva lamp (360 Euros, $515 at press time, www.rotaliana.it/en/) has an extendible iPod dock, a pop-up arm with LED lamp, built-in speakers, FM radio, audio inputs, and a remote.

50 Common Mac Problems Solved

The Mac|Life Staff & Scott Rose — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:39:33 -0600

We present the Ultimate Mac Troubleshooting Guide, so you can banish the peskiest problems once and for all.

Mac problems? Isn’t that an oxymoron? If you just switched to the Mac from Windows, you might be thinking that you accidentally picked up one of your old PC magazines--and, by the way, we’ve got solutions to the seven most common problems switchers encounter, too. If you’re a longtime Mac user, you could even be wondering where we get off accusing the Mac platform of being problematic.

Using a Mac is generally painless and trouble free, but things can go wrong. Usually they’re not catastrophic (for solutions to true Mac disasters, click here). Sometimes the things that go wrong are those little annoying things that you just shrug off--over and over, until you finally have to deal with them.

We’re here to help you tackle the 50 most common problems in eight different categories, once and for all. If your problem isn’t covered here, email us at ask@maclife.com, and we’ll try to solve it in a future issue.

General Mac Problems

The Mac OS is, fundamentally, as trouble-free as operating systems get. But nothing's perfect. Here's what to do when you hit a snag.

1. I want a tabbed finder.

Download the incredibly versatile Path Finder ($40, www.cocoatech.com), which gives you all sorts of features that are missing from the Finder, such as tabs, stacks, bookmarks, and panes. Sounds like fun to us!

Now THIS is the Finder we've always dreamed of. Thanks, Path Finder!

2. I can't print anymore.

This could be caused by a variety of different issues relating to your printer hardware or printer drivers, so you may need to contact the printer manufacturer for more help. But if your Mac is causing the problem, it’s always a good idea to reset your entire printing system by going into your Print & Fax System Preference, right-clicking in the printer list, and choosing Reset Printing System.

3. I travel all over town with my MacBook, and I’m sick of reconfiguring my settings every time I show up at a location I’ve been to before. Why can’t my Mac remember various location settings for me--my default printer, mounted servers, iChat screen name, Bluetooth settings, everything?

Try NetworkLocation ($29, www.networklocationapp.com), which can perform dozens of actions on your Mac whenever you switch to a new location. Best of all, its AutoLocate feature will determine where you are, using the same SkyHook Wireless Wi-Fi Positioning System that your iPhone uses, and it will automatically change all of your settings for you.

If you frequently switch physical locations, NetworkLocation can save you both time and headaches changing your Mac's settings.

4. I forgot my OS X password.

After retyping your password very carefully at least twice to make sure you just didn’t mistype it, you’ll need to haul out your OS X install disk, insert it into your Mac and restart holding down the C button. After selecting your language of choice, in the menubar, select Utilities > Reset Password. Follow the directions and there you go. Just try not to get a lobotomy after resetting it!

5. My CD or DVD is stuck in the optical drive and won’t come out when I press Eject.

After holding down the eject button for several seconds to no avail, restart your Mac and hold down the primary button on your mouse--the trackpad button will work as well if you’re on a MacBook--and during startup the disk should eject.

6. My Mac is not recognizing devices plugged in to one of my USB ports.

First, make sure your Mac’s firmware is up to date--check Software Update and the Apple Support Downloads page (support.apple.com/downloads/) and install any firmware updates you find for your machine.

If nothing happens, turn off your Mac, unplug the power cable, disconnect all peripherals, and let it sit for five minutes. Plug it back in, reconnect the keyboard and mouse, turn it back on, and try the USB ports again.

Check the Support Downloads page for firmware updates for your Mac.

If they’re still unresponsive, you will need to reset the PRAM (parameter RAM) and NVRAM (nonvolatile RAM), which stores some system and device settings that your Mac accesses on startup. Shut your Mac down. Then position your fingers above the Command, Option, P, and R keys on your keyboard. Turn the Mac on, then immediately press and hold those four keys before you see the gray screen. Keep them pressed until the Mac restarts again and you hear the startup chime for the second time. Then let ’em go. When your Mac is finished starting up, check those pesky USB ports.

If they’re still not behaving, there’s one more thing you can try before making a Genius Bar appointment: resetting the SMC, or system management controller. Directions for resetting the SMC on your MacBook Pro are found at support.apple.com/kb/HT1411. Instructions for all other Macs are linked from support.apple.com/kb/HT1894.

In Search Of...Search Solutions

Leopard makes finding files and data on your Mac relatively trouble-free, but when it comes to search, there are improvements and tricks you can apply to make it even better. Here are two solutions to common search problems we hear about from a fair number of Mac users.

7. My Spotlight results have stopped working reliably.

If it’s a single non-Apple program that isn’t showing up properly in your Spotlight results, try turning off and on the Spotlight indexing in that particular app.

If you’re still getting Spotlight results for an app that you got rid of a while ago, you may not have completely deleted all of the data or databases that are associated with that program.

Spotless gives you a nice GUI for managing, deleting, and rebuilding your Spotlight indexes.

If it’s an Apple program--or your entire Mac--that isn’t working properly in Spotlight, try re-indexing your whole hard drive by going into the Spotlight System Preference, clicking on the Privacy tab, then dragging your hard drive into the list. Wait a moment, and then remove your hard drive from the list again.

If you’re still having problems, you may need to bring out the big guns by using Spotless ($17, www.fixamac.net), a Spotlight index-management tool that can help fix most Spotlight problems.

8. I need more power, flexibility, and customizability with my Spotlight searches and Spotlight results.

Get HoudahSpot ($25, www.houdah.com), which lets you create extremely detailed search requests and customize the results to your liking.

HoudahSpot handles Spotlight searches with much more flexability than Apple's built-in Spotlight search.

3 Essential Utilities

Three more Mac problems solved--before they happen!

9. Disk Warrior

($100, www.alsoft.com) This is a great preventative maintenance tool for rebuilding your Mac's directory and keeping your mac running quickly and smoothly. It's also a great emergency tool for repairing disks that have missing files or will no longer mount.

10. Cocktail

($15, www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php). This general all-purpose utility will clean the caches on your machine, run the UNIX maintenance scripts, unlock hidden features of your Mac, and much more.

11. SuperDuper

($28, www.shirt-pocket.com). This disk cloning utility is great for backing up or transferring all the data on your entire computer to a fully bootable state.

Next Page: Email and Web Problems...

Email and Web Problems

We know you spend most of your time in front of a Mac online or pounding out email. Here's how to answer when trouble comes knocking.

12. I use a webmail client to check email, but every time I click on an email link, it launches Apple Mail instead.

You can set up Apple Mail to access your webmail account using IMAP or POP (check with your webmail provider for instructions on how to do this; some charge a fee for this service), or you can install the program Webmailer (free, www.belkadan.com/webmailer), which lets you set any webmail site as your default email program.

We set up Webmailer to take us to Yahoo's webmail system whenever we click on an email link.

If you use Gmail, you have a few additional choices: You can install Google Notifier (free, toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper) and set that to your default email client in Mail’s preferences. Or you can use the outstanding Mailplane ($25, www.mailplaneapp.com), which provides many more features than the Gmail website.

13. I can receive but not send email messages.

Outgoing email messages are typically sent over the Internet using TCP port numbers 25, 465, or 587. However, in an effort to reduce spam, some ISPs and firewalls are set up to severely restrict the use of those ports. For example, AT&T is notorious for blocking port 25 for its DSL customers, unless you’re sending email with the AT&T email address assigned to your DSL modem. If you’re using AT&T (or another service provider that has similar restrictions), call the technical support number and request that they unblock port 25 for you. If you don’t control the Internet access where you are located, contact your email host to see if they have an alternate port that you can send email on. You can specify alternate port numbers in your email app’s account settings. If all else fails, you should be able to send email through your webmail system until you can physically get yourself to a different location that has no restrictions.

Our Web-hosting company, hostbaby.com, allows us to send email messages over alternate port 2525, which typically bypasses any firewall restrictions that have been put in place.

14. When I reply to or forward an email, the original message isn't entirely quoted in my reply--sometimes just the header and a few characters are quoted.

If you used your mouse to highlight some text in the original email, and then you clicked on forward or reply, only the words that you selected will be quoted in your new email. To override this behavior in Mail (it can’t be overridden in Entourage), go into Mail’s Preferences, click on the Composing button, and you can set it to include all of the original message. If the problem still happens after this, your Mail preferences might be corrupt. Quit Mail, and trash the file located at yourhomefolder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist. Also try upgrading to Snow Leopard, which makes Mail more reliable in general.

The Composing preference in Mail ensures that your replies and forwards will always quote the original email message in their entirety.

15. I want to send an email later, not now.

Each email client handles this slightly differently.

In Entourage, choose Message > Send Message Later or click on the Send Later button. (In Entourage 2008, you’ll need to add the Send Later button to your toolbar by choosing View > Customize Toolbar from any outgoing message.) Your messages will queue up in your outbox, and then you can send them all at once by creating an Entourage schedule (Tools > Schedules) or by clicking the Send & Receive button.

In Thunderbird, choose File > Send Later. Your messages will queue up in the Unsent folder until you choose File > Send Unsent Messages.

The Send Later Extension lets you schedule your outgoing messages in Thunderbird.

The Send Later Extension for Thunderbird (free, www.unsignedbyte.com/?page_id=4) lets you schedule an exact date and time in the future to send your message.

Surprisingly, Mail provides no ability to send messages later. You could take all your accounts offline (Mailbox > Take All Accounts Offline) before clicking on the Send button, in which case your messages disappear until you quit and relaunch Mail to find a temporary outbox with your messages sitting in them. Or, to schedule emails for a later delivery time that you specify, install the Schedule Delivery script which is a part of Mail Scripts (donations requested, homepage.mac.com/aamann/).

Finally, LetterMeLater (free, www.lettermelater.com) offers another way to schedule emails to be sent at a later time.

16. I have multiple folders entitled Drafts, Sent, Junk, or Trash for my IMAP email account.

Setting up an IMAP account can be a little tricky. After typing your valid account settings into your email program, there are two additional steps:

First, you’ll need to set the proper IMAP path prefix (sometimes called the “root folder” or IMAP server directory) in your account settings. For example, Gmail’s IMAP Path Prefix is [Gmail].

Defining your IMAP server's root folder is an often-forgotten step when setting up an IMAP email account.

In Entourage, you set this on the Options tab of your IMAP’s account settings. In Thunderbird, click the Advanced button on the Server Settings tab. In Mail, this is on the Advanced tab of your IMAP’s account settings.

Then you’ll need to designate which folders on the server should be used for storing your drafts, sent messages, trash, and junk. In Entourage, you set this on the Advanced tab of your IMAP’s account settings. In Thunderbird, this is done in the Copies & Folders section of your account settings. In Mail, go out to your main viewer window and select a folder on the server (in the left-hand margin, underneath the IMAP account name), then choose Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For.

17. Whenever I address an outgoing email, I get unwanted email addresses for people who aren't in my address book.

Most email clients keep track of addresses that you’ve emailed to in the past and will suggest those addresses to you in the future when you start to type the same characters. You can turn off this feature in Entourage and Thunderbird by going into their preferences. In Entourage, this is found on the Compose tab. In Thunderbird, this is on the Composition > Addressing tab. You can’t turn off this feature in Mail, but you can clear the list from time-to-time by selecting Window > Previous Recipients, selecting the names and clicking Remove from List.

In Mail, you have complete control over your Previous Recipients list.

18. When I email long Web links to others, they sometimes get broken up onto multiple lines and don't work correctly.

Try putting angle brackets (<>) around long URLs to help them travel safely across the Internet without “breaking.” Or you turn to TinyURL (free, www.tinyurl.com), which will turn those long URLs into, well, tiny URLs!

19. I wish Safari's built-in search field worked with more websites than just Google.

You may want to switch to Firefox, which has the built-in ability to customize its search field with any number of search engines that you specify. Otherwise, check out the Safari plug-ins Saft ($12, haoli.dnsalias.com) or Glims (free, machangout.com), both of which let you customize Safari’s Google search field. And one of our favorite utilities, iSeek ($15, www.ambrosiasw.com) lets you add a global customizable search field to your Mac’s menubar that works with any Web browser.

iSeek places a fully customizable search field in our menubar at all times.

20. I want to filter inappropriate websites so my kids can't access them.

Although Mac OS X has built-in parental controls that you can turn on for individual accounts, you can gain more control by purchasing software like ContentBarrier ($50, www.intego.com) or Net Nanny ($39.99 a year, www.netnanny.com). Even better, we’ve discovered that one of the quickest, easiest, and most effective ways of filtering all the computers in your entire household is to switch your DNS servers to the free OpenDNS servers (free, www.opendns.com).

ContentBarrier is one of many options you have for blocking websites on your Mac.

21. My Internet connection is slow.

That’s a tricky one. A sluggish Net connection could be caused by any number of things, so here are a few troubleshooting tips to start with:

Try resetting Safari (Safari > Reset Safari). Then, try a different Web browser to see if the problem happens there as well. You may also want to uninstall any Internet plug-ins that you have installed recently.

Next, check your upload and download speeds at www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and see if you’re getting the speeds you’re paying for. If not, try power cycling both your modem and router, such as your Airport Extreme. Turn off or unplug the device, let it sit powered off for several minutes, then plug it in or switch it on again.

Our latest speed test from Speakeasy.net shows us that we're not currently getting the full upload speeds for which we've been paying the big bucks!

If these methods don’t address the slowdown, try plugging your modem directly into your Mac using an Ethernet cable to see if the problem goes away. If so, your router may be the problem. If you’re using an Airport Extreme or Airport Express, launch Airport Utility to see if there is a firmware upgrade available. If so, install the firmware upgrade and see if that helps.

If not, your Mac could be the problem--you may need to perform an Archive and Install of your operating system, which is one of your options on the Mac OS X Leopard Installation DVD.

And it’s always possible that your modem or Internet line is the problem too, in which case you should call your ISP’s technical support number.

Next Page: Photo and Office/iWork Problems...

Photo Problems

These solutions to common photo issues will make you want to say "cheese."

22. I need to quickly resize an image and make some color corrections to it, but I can't afford Photoshop and don't really want to learn how to use it.

Preview has the built-in ability to resize images and adjust colors. Open up your image in Preview and select Tools > Adjust Size or Adjust Color.

This image-size adjustment dialog box is from Preview, not Photoshop!

23. I want to email photos from iPhoto through my webmail account by clicking on iPhoto's Email button.

Even if you’ve installed Webmailer, as mentioned in problem #12, the email button in iPhoto will only work with four email clients: AOL, Eudora, Entourage, and Mail.

However, if you use Gmail, you’re in luck because Mailplane ($25, www.mailplaneapp.com) installs an iPhoto plug-in that lets you click on iPhoto’s Email button and send your messages through your Gmail account.

In any dialog box, you can activate QuickLook when browsing your iPhoto Library by selecting a photo and pressing the spacebar.

Otherwise, go into your webmail program, and attach photos using the standard method. Leopard’s dialog boxes give you the ability to browse through your iPhoto library, and they even let you use QuickLook by clicking on a photo and pressing the spacebar.

24. I want to use iPhoto '09 to export photos to Facebook, but there are too many problems with it.

Forget about using iPhoto ’09’s poorly implemented Facebook “integration.” Instead, use the outstanding Facebook Exporter for iPhoto (free, developers.facebook.com/iphoto).

Use Facebook Exporter for iPhoto to tag, add captions to, and upload your Facebook photos right from within iPhoto.

25. I created a PDF file with lots of embedded photos in it, but now the file is way too large to email.

Open up the large PDF file in Preview and select File > Save As. Where it says Quartz Filter, choose Reduce File Size, then click Save. Voilà! You’ve now saved a much smaller version of your PDF file, which will be easier to email.

Choose this Quartz Filter in Preview to reduce the size (and quality) of large PDF files so you can email them without choking your email server.

For even more control over the resulting quality of PDF size reduction--and to batch-process multiple PDF files at once--try PDFshrink ($35, www.apago.com).

If you still can’t get the file small enough for your needs, try a file-sending service such as YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com).

26. Somebody emailed me a PDF file with lots of embedded photos in it, and I need to extract the photos from the file.

File Juicer ($18, www.echoone.com) will extract images, sounds, and more from any filetype.

File Juicer can extract all these types of files out of other files.

Office/iWork Problems

Work smarter not harder with these troubleshooting tips for common productivity apps.

27. I created an awesome slide show in Keynote, but I have to present it on a PC. I tried exporting it to Microsoft PowerPoint format, but I lost my transitions, effects, transparencies, gradients, and more--basically, all the cool stuff.

Export your Keynote file to a QuickTime movie instead. As long as the PC has QuickTime installed on it (which it should, if it has iTunes installed), you’ll be able to play back your presentation with all of its awesomeness intact. If the PC doesn’t have QuickTime, download it for free from www.apple.com/quicktime.

With the "Fixed Timing" option, we can set our QuickTime movie to automatically advance to the next slide on a regular interval.

When you export your movie, you have several options for how it should advance from one slide to the next. For example, if you set it to manually advance, you simply have to press the spacebar on the PC to move to the next slide.

28. I’ve included presenter notes (View > Show Presenter Notes) in a Keynote slide show, but when I play or rehearse the slide show, the notes don’t show up onscreen.

In Keynote’s preferences, click on the Presenter Display button, and check the boxes for Notes and “Use alternate display to view presenter information.” Now your notes will show up when you play or rehearse your slide show.

This checkbox lets you toggle between mirrored displays and dual displays.

However, if you start seeing your notes on both your computer screen and the projector’s screen, your computer is set to mirrored (instead of dual) displays. You can toggle these display modes while the projector is connected to your Mac by launching System Preferences, choosing Display > Arrangement, and deselecting the Mirror Displays checkbox.

29. I use Office 2008 to create Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files, but my Mac-using colleagues can’t open the files because they’re using Office 2004.

TextEdit can open and edit Word 2008 files. And if your colleagues have iWork ’09 installed, they can work with all of your Office 2008 files in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote.

Otherwise, you’ll need to save the file in an earlier file format. Choose File > Save As and select the format that corresponds to Office 97–2004. You can also set this older format as the default in your preferences for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Choose the .doc format to avoid compatibility issues with people using earlier versions of Microsoft Word.

Alternatively, your colleagues can install Microsoft’s Open XML File Format Converter (free, www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads), which will convert your Office 2008 files into a format that Office 2004 can read.

Next Page: Syncing Problems...

Syncing Problems

Data syncing can be particularly stressful since we need access to info anywhere these days. We've got solutions.

30. I want to sync some--but not all--of my iCal calendars across my Macs.

Don’t use MobileMe to sync, which always synchronizes all of your calendars. Instead, use BusySync ($25, www.busymac.com) or BusyCal ($40, www.busymac.com), which both give you an incredible amount of syncing options.

BusyMac's products are true champions when it comes to publishing and subscribing selected calendars without any dedicated servers.

31. I want to synchronize my iCal calendars and Address Book on my Mac to Outlook on a PC.

Sign up for MobileMe ($99 a year, www.apple.com), which will keep all of your Macs and PCs (and iPhones!) in sync with each other.

Spanning Sync effortlessly syncs your calendars and contacts to Google.

Or, you can use Google Calendar and Google Contacts as a conduit. On the Mac side, you’ll need Spanning Sync ($25/year or $65/one-time purchase, spanningsync.com). On the PC side, you’ll need Google Apps Sync ($50/year, tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync).

32. I keep getting duplicate entries on my iCal calendar.

Sounds like you’re trying to sync your Entourage calendar with iCal. There’s a known bug with Entourage that causes repeating events to multiply out of control in iCal. We don’t know of any long-term solution at this time except to ditch Entourage’s calendar and stick to iCal for your calendaring needs. To do this, uncheck the box for syncing events in Entourage’s Preferences (on the Sync Services pane). To erase iCal dupes, try iCal Cleaner (free, www.busymac.com).

33. I’m getting two of each calendar entry on my iPhone.

You may be trying to sync your calendars through both iTunes and MobileMe. You’ll need to choose one method or the other, not both. If you’re syncing wirelessly through MobileMe, then go into your iPhone settings within iTunes and uncheck all of your calendars there.

The exception to this rule is iCal’s Birthdays calendar (enabled in iCal’s preferences, this calendar pulls birthdays from your Address Book), which can only be synced through iTunes, so it must remain checked in iTunes.

34. My U.S. Holidays and other Internet-subscribed iCal calendars are not syncing between my Mac and my iPhone.

Any Internet-subscribed calendars must be resubscribed to directly from your iPhone. You can manually set up the server on your iPhone by going to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account > Other > Calendars.

You must resubscribe to your iCal holiday calendars on your iPhone all over again.

Or, you can automatically subscribe to a calendar by using Safari on your iPhone to choose from Apple’s extensive selection of calendars at www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars.

35. iTunes no longer launches automatically when I attach my iPod or iPhone to my computer.

If your iPhone or iPod is very low on power or if the battery is fully depleted, it can take up to 10 minutes to appear under Devices in iTunes.

Otherwise, you may have unchecked the box in iTunes for your device that says “Automatically sync when this iPhone/iPod is connected” or “Open iTunes when this iPod is attached.”

You may have also removed the iTunesHelper application from your Login Items in your Account System Preferences, which is required to automatically launch iTunes. You can get this back by reinstalling iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes) or by manually dragging iTunesHelper into the Login Items. iTunesHelper can be found by right-clicking on iTunes in the Finder and choosing Show Package Contents, then going to Contents > Resources.

36. I want to synchronize files between two computers.

There are many different programs available to help you with this task, but our favorite is ChronoSync ($40, www.econtechnologies.com). ChronoSync can automatically mount remote servers, wake your local Mac from sleep, schedule your synchronizations, archive backup copies of your files before syncing, and even give you a list of proposed changes before it makes any of them.

Synchronizing files between two different computers is as simple as drag-and-drop with ChronoSync.

While you can use ChronoSync to synchronize to any type of volume or folder, if you specifically want to sync to another computer, you may want to additionally purchase ChronoAgent for an extra $10. ChronoAgent lets you communicate directly with a remote Mac faster than using AFP or SMB, and you gain full root access, so you can copy anything without any restrictions.

37. I turned on MobileMe syncing on my iPhone, but nothing is syncing to my Mac or Me.com.

It’s possible that the MobileMe servers aren’t communicating properly with your iPhone. An Apple support rep recently admitted to us that this is an extremely common problem that MobileMe users may experience every few months until Apple increases the reliability of its MobileMe syncing servers. So you may want to keep these instructions handy for future reference.

First, find out if MobileMe sees your iPhone at all. Activate Find My iPhone on your iPhone (Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > your me.com account > Find My iPhone). Then, from a computer (not your iPhone), go to your MobileMe account page at https://secure.me.com/yourusername. Click on Find My iPhone to see if the MobileMe website sees your phone. If not, try turning off your iPhone and turning it back on again. If the MobileMe site still doesn’t see your phone, try deleting your MobileMe account on your iPhone and re-creating it again.

We feel like Big Brother is watching us with Find My iPhone's crosshairs centered directly on our house!

Once Me.com sees your iPhone, try adding an event or a contact to your phone and see if the change shows up on your MobileMe calendar (www.me.com/calendar) or address book (www.me.com/contacts) within a few minutes.

If not, you will probably have to reset all of your sync data on Me.com with information from your Mac’s iCal and Address Book. Make a mental note of any recent unsynced changes you’ve made on your iPhone, because you’re going to lose them in this process. Also, sign out of Me.com. Go into the MobileMe System Preference on your Mac, select the Sync tab, click on Advanced, and then click Reset Sync Data. Click on the right arrow so that you are replacing all sync info on MobileMe with “info from this computer.”

Log back into Me.com and verify that it now has your current information for contacts and calendars. If not, you will have to reset the SyncServices database on your Mac. Apple has instructions on this process at support.apple.com/kb/TS1627.

But before following those instructions, be sure to do two things on your Mac: First, repair your permissions using Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities), and, second, repair your keychain using Keychain Access (in Disk Utility, pull down from the Keychain Access menu and select Keychain First Aid). After that, try syncing again from the MobileMe System Preference pane.

This is how it should look when you're about to overwrite information on the MobileMe website with information from your Mac.

Once Me.com has your current information, you are ready to go back to your iPhone. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data. Turn Push off, then completely turn off your phone for 30 seconds. Turn your phone back on and re-enable push. Then, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > your Me.com account and turn off and on each one of the sliders for the information that you’re trying to sync (Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, etc).

Wait several minutes, and hopefully all your current information will reappear in your calendar and contacts on your iPhone.

If not, you will probably need to have a live chat with a MobileMe support agent. Go to www.apple.com/support/mobileme. Choose any of the troubleshooting options underneath Syncing with MobileMe in the left-hand margin, and a Chat Now button will appear.

Next Page: Video, Music, and Backup Problems...

Video Problems

These tips address problems you might encounter trying to play video files on your Mac.

38. I’m trying to use my Apple Remote on my Mac to watch movies through Front Row, but the other computers in the room--along with my Apple TV--are inadvertently responding to my remote’s button presses.

You need to pair each one of your Apple Remotes to a particular device. Apple has instructions on how to do this at support.apple.com/kb/HT1619.

39. Sometimes I can't play Web videos.

Out of the box, your Mac can only play Flash and QuickTime videos. To play other video formats, you’ll need to install one or more of the following free apps:

>> Flip4Mac Windows Media Components for QuickTime (www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx)

>> Perian (www.perian.org)

>> Microsoft Silverlight (www.microsoft.com/silverlight/)

>> RealPlayer (www.real.com)

>> VLC (www.videolan.org)

40. I want to convert video files to other formats, particularly those that will work on my iPod or iPhone.

To convert your video files into many different formats--including iPhone and iPod compatible formats--try Video Monkey (free, videomonkey.org), VideoDrive (7.99 euros, www.aroona.net), or CosmoPod (8.90 euros, www.cocoamug.com). To convert DVDs, try HandBrake (free, www.handbrake.fr).

41. I want to download a Flash video from the Web.

There’s a little-known trick in Safari that lets you download Flash videos that are embedded in webpages. Bring up the Activity Viewer (Window > Activity) and look for a file that appears that it may be your video file, perhaps based on its large size or the fact that it is so large that it is still loading. When it‘s finished loading, hold down the Option key and double-click on the video file. Safari will download the file into your Downloads folder for you, and you can monitor the progress through the Downloads window.

Little-known Safari secret: You can download Flash vids, like Funny or Die's famous "The Landlord" starring Will Ferrell, to your Desktop to watch at your leisure.

If you’d like an easier way to download Flash videos, try TubeTV (donations requested, www.chimoosoft.com), Videobox ($15, www.tastyapps.com), or TubeSock ($15, www.stinkbot.com).

42. I want to download a QuickTime video from the Web to my Mac, so I can watch it later.

If you’ve purchased QuickTime Pro ($30, www.apple.com/quicktime), you can download many QuickTime videos right from the Web by clicking on the triangle in the lower right-hand corner of the video and choosing Save As QuickTime Movie.

However, some QuickTime videos, including those on Apple’s website, don’t let you download them directly. To download these devious videos--with or without QuickTime Pro--view the source of the webpage in Safari (View > View Source) or Firefox (View > Page Source). Do a search for .mov (the file extension for QuickTime videos) to find the full URL of the video file. When you find it, copy the entire URL of the video file. Then, launch QuickTime Player on your Mac and select File > Open URL and paste in the URL. Now you can save the video file onto your computer.

43. I bought an external USB webcam, but my Mac laptop isn’t recognizing it.

If your Mac is running Mac OS 10.4.11 or later, it can recognize almost any USB webcam on the market, usually without installing any drivers.

If you’re running the latest version of OS X but still having problems, the iUSBCam (www.ecamm.com/mac/iusbcam) and macam (webcam-osx.sourceforge.net) websites provide helpful tips and driver downloads.

Note that Mac programs like iChat and Skype will first try to use your built-in internal camera before using any external webcams. To change this, you’ll need to go into the preferences of those programs to change your video input source.

If you’re unsuccessfully trying to use your external webcam in Photo Booth, you have to switch back to the internal camera in iChat’s preferences before launching Photo Booth.

Music Problems

How to keep rocking in the free world.

44. I want to make iPhone ringtones from a song that I didn’t purchase (or isn’t available for purchase) from the iTunes Store.

If you have a track in iTunes that you own on CD and that you’ve ripped to iTunes, you can make a ringtone from it for free in GarageBand ’09. Click here for instructions and scroll down to “Roll Your Own iPhone Ringtones,” which also provides instructions for doing the same thing in QuickTime Pro).

45. My iTunes library is full of duplicates.

For smaller libraries, use iTunes’ Show Duplicates feature (File > Show Duplicates) and manually remove the extra files. iTunes only matches on Artist and Title information though, so be careful not to delete legit alternate versions of tracks--live versions, for example. For better duplicate control, try Dupin or some of the iTunes scripts available at www.dougscripts.com.

46. One of the rubber tips from a pair of third-party earbuds got stuck in my ear--help!

Believe it or not, this has happened to us too--more than once. We recommend keeping a pair of tweezers handy, just in case a tip come off in your ear canal, which can sometimes happen if you pull the ’bud out too quickly. It’s happened to two Mac|Life editors, both of whom agree that having something small and unreachable lodged in your ear can be pretty traumatic.

47. My iTunes library is spread across multiple Macs. How can I keep two iTunes libraries synchronized?

If all you want to do is listen to iTunes music housed on another local Mac (i.e. connected to the local network), just turn on iTunes’ sharing feature (Preferences > Sharing and check “Look for shared libraries”). To share your own tracks, also check “Share my library on my local network.” You can also store libraries on a network drive that supports iTunes sharing, to share tunes without needing another Mac up and running all the time. To keep two libraries in step for syncing iPods, use a utility like TuneRanger ($29.99, my.smithmicro.com) or SuperSync ($29, www.supersync.com).

You don't have to share all your iTunes content--and you can password-protect it if you want, too.

Backup Problems

Don't tell us you don't back up--especially since Time Machine makes it so easy! Here's what to do when you run into problems.

48. I want to restore a file from a Time Machine backup of a different Mac or an older backup of my main Mac that Time Machine no longer recognizes (due to a new backup drive, a new logic board, or a new internal hard drive).

You can restore any Time Machine backup onto any Mac, if you know a few tricks involved with restoring.

The first one is related to an odd decision by Apple: You can only browse other Time Machine volumes by adding the Time Machine icon to your dock, then right-clicking on the icon and selecting Browse Other Time Machine Disks.

There's our hidden option to browse other Time Machine disks!

But even if you do that, it won’t see your Time Capsule or other external Time Machine drives, even if they’re mounted on your Desktop. In Finder, you actually have to manually choose the .sparsebundle file that represents the computer that was backed up, double-click on this file, let it mount on your Desktop, and then Time Machine will let you choose the resulting mounted disk image to restore from.

49. Time Machine is giving me an error message that’s too vague for me to interpret.

The programs TM Error Logger (donations requested, www.carnationsoftware.com) and Time Machine Buddy (free, www.bluedog.com.au) can help you interpret what has gone wrong with your Time Machine backup.

50. I’d like Time Machine to back up to multiple external hard drives, so I can keep one backup drive offsite and one backup drive onsite.

Time Machine can correctly keep track of backups on multiple external hard drives. Just give your hard drives different names, and whenever you connect the other drive, you’ll need to manually make a trip to Time Machine’s System Preference and change the disk there.

Odd Jobs: Sing Out Loud with Skype

Leslie Ayers — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:50:18 -0500

How a jazz singer and voice coach uses her Mac to help students master their vocal range, in person and over Skype.

Case Study: Sandy Cressman

Occupation: Singer and voice teacher

Gear: MacBook Air loaded with iLife, MakeMusic Finale (for musical notation), CD burner, MIDI keyboard, Zoom H2 digital audio recorder, preamp

Cressman and student Demetri Skentzos warm up with scales during a lesson at her studio.

A musician who loves her Mac--what’s so groundbreaking about that? Nothing, on the surface. But Sandy Cressman, a San Francisco singer and voice coach who specializes in Brazilian jazz and travels the world to perform and teach workshops, simply couldn’t ply her art--or her trade--without her MacBook Air and a slew of other digital tools.

Going the Distance

Cressman’s voice students sign on with her to improve their technique singing rock, jazz, and pop. “Some of my younger students definitely come in with American Idol in their minds,“ she says. But beyond that, goals run the gamut, from improvement for the sheer joy of it to prepping for live or recorded performances. Cressman primarily teaches from her home studio and at workshops, but a handful of her students take virtual lessons via Skype.

Finding the right voice teacher is a lot like finding a therapist, contractor, or hair stylist. Once you click with someone, you want to do what it takes to keep working with him or her.

When a German student asked if she taught over Skype, Cressman hadn’t tried it before, but she soon saw the advantages. “I realized if we have that connection and she feels comfortable with me, then that’s an important part of her being able to progress.”

Cressman records her voice and piano playing using a pro mic and preamp, ultimately sharing MP3 files with students or collaborators on disc or via YouSendIt.

Cressman had ruled out the idea of teaching over the phone, but the popularity of voice and video over IP made it practical for her to work with students from virtually anywhere. “Pitch and voice have a lot to do with observing muscles on the outside--whether there’s extra tension or not,” she says. “There’s so much you could be missing if you can’t see the students. It wasn’t until videoconferencing became easy that I could do that.”

One drawback to the method, however, is the split-second time delay that’s unavoidable with Skype or other VOIP solutions.

“We have a body of exercise scales and chords that they’re familiar with so that I can play to them and say, ‘Sing this scale on this syllable,’ and they sing it back to me. Unfortunately, we can’t play and sing together in live time.” To alleviate this, Cressman records the entire Skype session as well as any accompanying practice tracks and sends students the audio files via YouSendIt.com.

During Skype lessons, Cressman (shown) can see her student's face, jaw, and neck and hear their voice from thousands of miles away. The VOIP time delay poses a challenge, but Cressman gets the live-action view of the student she needs to coach them successfully.

For live lessons, Cressman sends students home with a CD of the exercises they worked on, so they can practice for the next time. She and the student sing directly into her studio mic, which goes into a preamp, then to the MacBook Air, then directly to her CD burner. GarageBand is her audio editor of choice.

Garageband Trumps Pro Tools

Cressman is familiar with industry-standard music editor Pro Tools, but for her needs, GarageBand is much more useful. “For getting down arrangement ideas quickly and for composing, it’s more than adequate.”

Cressman’s Intel MacBook Air replaced a 15-inch PowerBook G4. She occasionally misses the chunkier Mac’s built-in optical drive and larger storage capacity, but says the Air is much easier for her to schlep to and fro.

Besides heavy use of GarageBand, Cressman uses iPhoto to manage her personal photo library, which includes a collection of images of Brazilian percussion instruments.

“I can’t carry all of the instruments around with me,” she says. So she shows an iPhoto slide show accompanied by Brazilian jazz “to stress that my singers understand the rhythmic groove underneath samba and bossa nova.” Photos and audio of each instrument give workshop attendees a better understanding of how they work together in a Brazilian jazz percussion ensemble, or batucada.

Though she sometimes misses the power of her PowerBook G4, the Air's slim profile better fits Cressman's itinerant lifestyle and petite physique.

Cressman is also the lead singer in a group called Homenagem Brasileira. The group released two CDs, Homenagem Brasileira and Brasil - Sempre no Coração (Brazil, Forever in My Heart).

Cressman’s digital arsenal makes it possible for her to perform live with ensembles she doesn’t collaborate with regularly. “Jazz musicians typically have a much easier time saying, ‘OK we’re going to do a gig, play this and this, and choose from a common repertoire.’”

But when it’s Brazilian music, that’s not necessarily the case. “It’s not like I go and sing ‘Take the A Train’ or other jazz standards,” she says. The ability to get the musical notation down in Finale, record her vocals and piano backing in GarageBand, convert the tracks to MP3s, and share everything with fellow musicians as digital files via YouSendIt “makes it possible for us to do a nice concert and sound rehearsed, even though we haven’t rehearsed.”

How To Become a Level 80 Twitter Ninja

Susie Ochs — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:54:55 -0500

Whether you're a grizzled Twitter veteran looking for some fresh ways to use the service, or you're still not on board and need a better reason than "Oprah and Shaq seem to like it," we'll show you how to tweet like a butterfly, twitter like a bee.

In the two years since we first ran a feature on Twitter (“Your Mac: The Great Communicator,” Oct/07), the service’s popularity has exploded. If you joined the Twitter conga line long ago, its usefulness and flexibility are no news to you. But even if you’ve never Twittered in your life, the service still probably isn’t news to you--it seems you can’t turn around without a reporter, columnist, commentator, or comedian hauling out the tired old “What’s the deal with Twitter?” line.

We’re not going to bother rehashing the lame questions about whether Twitter is dumbing us all down 140 characters at a time, why so many people care what Ashton Kutcher thinks, whether members of Congress should tweet, or if the alleged egomaniacs who use Twitter were given enough attention as kids.

Instead we offer Twitter newbies some reasons to join the club, arm veterans with answers for those pesky newb questions, and give every user the skills to push Twitter to the max. It’s time to rise above the hype and wield Twitter like a 140-character katana sword. It’s time to become a Twitter ninja.

Twitter Newbs are Just Ninjas in Training

Twitter is incredibly useful, but it doesn’t hit you over the head with what you’re supposed to do with it. How you use it depends on your needs. But that flexibility also means that neophytes tend to have a lot of questions. Twitter has a great, detailed FAQ (help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/13920), so we won’t reinvent the wheel here. But this is how we at Mac|Life answer certain questions that just keep coming up.

Q. What the heck is Twitter?

What you're doing, in 140 characters. But it's more than just that...

A. It’s a microblogging service to which users post 140-character text blurbs, or tweets. Your feed, or timeline, shows the tweets of everyone you’re following, and everyone who’s following you sees your tweets in their timeline.

Q. How do you find people to follow?

A. Most people start by finding people they already know. Click the Find People link (twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter) to search your IM and email contacts for people. If they post too much about their dietary habits, you can always unfollow them later. Click their names to check out their profiles, and you’ll see their following/followers numbers on the right side of the page. Click the following number to see the list of who that person follows--maybe you’ll be interested in those people too. Click their names to open those profiles and read their tweets, and if you like ’em, click the Follow link to add them to your list.

Sites like WhoShouldIFollow.com can suggest Twitter users to follow.

We're checking out who Ray (@raguilera) follows, to see if we should be following them too.

Q. So I post to it and read it on my Mac, at Twitter.com?

A. Yes. You can also read and post from a wide variety of Twitter clients, which are applications that run on your Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, or BlackBerry. (See our roundup of Twitter clients for Mac users at http://www.maclife.com/article/feature/8_essential_twitter_apps_mac_users.) And anyone can post to Twitter from a cell phone by texting their tweet to 40404. Just tell Twitter your phone number first in Settings > Devices. You can get notifications sent to your phone too.

TweetDeck is one of our favorite Twitter clients for the Mac and the iPhone.

NEXT: Q and A continued...

Q. So it's kind of like Facebook--a bunch of status updates about what people had for breakfast?

A. It can be, if you follow people who use it like Facebook to post status-y updates about everyday minutiae. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But Twitter can also be used to share links, track trends, follow breaking news, share images, get customer service, ask for advice, market yourself or your business, and a lot more. If all you’re getting is breakfast posts, you need to follow some more interesting users.

Q. How am I supposed to keep up with all these tweets?

A. You’re not. Depending on how many people you follow and how often you check Twitter, your timeline could have hundreds of posts. Luckily, 140 characters don’t take long to read. And since the stream is active all the time, you can drop in and out at your leisure and not worry about what you missed. Don’t think of your Twitter timeline like an RSS reader or an email inbox, where items stack up in a pile until you get to them. Think of it as a stream that’s always flowing, and go sit by it when you get a minute.

Q. My friends don't tweet anything good. Where are the people discussing my interests?

A. If you want to find people talking about a specific topic right now, check out search.twitter.com, or use an application like TweetDeck to search for all new tweets on a keyword. If someone’s tweet catches your eye, click their name to read their other tweets and check out their profile. Or go to WeFollow.com to find people by topic or NearbyTweets.com to find people near your location.

TweetDeck can run a search on any keyword--great for finding new friends or tracking mentions of your brand.

Q. What's that star at the end of tweets?

A. That lets you mark the tweet as one of your favorites. Star a funny or poignant tweet to remember it later, or star a tweet containing a link that you don’t have time to read at the moment.

Click Favorites in your sidebar to see all the tweets you've starred.

Q. What's with all the gibberish, like RT and @ and # everywhere?

A. RT means retweet, so RT @MacLife signals that someone’s reposting a tweet originally made by MacLife. If you see @MacLife at the beginning of a tweet, it’s probably a reply to a tweet from MacLife. If @MacLife is in the middle of a tweet, that’s usually a mention, like a shout-out. Twitter.com and Twitter apps let users see their replies and mentions, so it’s an easy way to have a conversation or find out when people are talking about you. The # is a hashtag, used for trends or memes like #followfriday (when users suggest other users for people to follow, every Friday). You can click a word that starts with a hashtag to see all the tweets that include it.

San Diego Comic-Con attendees used the #sdcc hashtag.

Q. If I reply to a tweet, can anyone see it?

A. Not anymore. You’ll see replies (posts starting with @username) to you from your followers in your main timeline. If someone you don’t follow replies to one of your tweets, it shows up in the @username tab of your sidebar on Twitter.com and in Twitter apps. If someone you follow replies to a tweet by another person you follow, you’ll see that reply in your timeline. But if they reply to a tweet by someone you don’t follow, Twitter assumes you’re not interested, and you won’t see that. (You used to be able to see all replies by anyone you’re following with an option in Settings > Notices, but that option was disabled in May.)

So to summarize, your timeline will contain replies to you from those you’re following and replies to others, if you’re following both people.

Q. How do I share links or photos?

A. You can just type links into a new post, but you’ll need to include the full URL (including html://) for it to be clickable. Since Twitter caps updates at 140 characters, most people use a service like Bit.ly or TinyURL.com to shorten long links. Each of those sites offers a “bookmarklet” you can drag to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar for one-click shortening. Then when the page you want to share is open in your browser, just click the bookmarklet to launch a new tab containing your shortened link, which you can copy and paste into your Twitter update.

Upload an image to TwitPic.com, and you'll get a link you can post to Twitter.

Photos aren’t supported directly by Twitter, but you can upload them to a site like TwitPic.com or YFrog.com and post links to them directly to Twitter. Most Twitter apps include a way to upload pictures via TwitPic or YFrog, saving you the step of needing to visit one of those sites.

NEXT: Unlock Twitter's Hidden Powers and Uses

Unlock Twitter's Hidden Powers & Uses

True ninjas make Twitter tackle extra duties! Indeed, it turns out that firing off a quick tweet is a great way to use a variety of online services without logging in to their websites. Even better, you can tweet from any cell phone that can send text messages.

Cell-Phone Ninja

To use these services from your cell phone, first you need to pair your phone and your Twitter account. Log in to Twitter.com, then click Settings, and add your phone number under the Devices tab. Then you can text-message any tweet to 40404, and it’ll be posted to your account. A lot of the services mentioned here reply to you via direct message, so it’s helpful to have Twitter send those to your phone too--under the dropdown for Device Updates, select Direct Messages.

Tell Twitter your phone number.

Keep Yourself Motivated

The state of Florida set up a service called Qwitter to help citizens quit smoking, and you can interact with it via its Twitter account @iquit. You post updates containing @iquit and the number of cigarettes you just smoked. (If you protect your Twitter updates, you have to follow @iquit first, so it can follow you back and see your tweets.) All the numbers you tweet to @iquit are added up, and your daily total is graphed at qwitter.tobaccofreeflorida.com/qwitters/Twitter-name, where Twitter-name is your own Twitter user name. Anything else you tweet to @iquit--like “Wow, this is hard”--is added to the same page for an automatic “Qwitter journal” that will hopefully motivate you to stick with it.

Graphing our Diet Coke habit...we're trying to stop, we swear!

Pro tip: You don’t have to be quitting cigarettes to use this service. Smokeless tobacco, Diet Cokes, donuts, using the F word…everyone’s got a bad habit to shake.

Get Your Flight Status

This is a godsend on cell phones with no Web access. You have to be following @myflightinfo (just type follow myflightinfo as a tweet to do this from any client, or cell phone). The account will automatically follow you back, and now you can direct-message (DM or just d) each other. Type d myflightinfo, the word status, and the flight number (sw 208 for Southwest flight 208, for example), and the service will direct-message you back with the flight’s on-time status and other details.

This direct message was also texted to our phone.

Track Your Spending

TweetWhatYouSpend.com is an easy place to keep a spending journal powered by Twitter. Just follow @twys (type follow twys), which will auto-follow you back. Then send a direct message with where you dropped cash and how much you spent, for example: d twys Taco Bell $9.44. The listing is added to your journal and time-stamped automatically. When you’re back at your computer, just log in to TweetWhatYouSpend.com, where you can categorize your entries, add new ones, and export the list as a comma-separated file (CSV) for using with other financial software.

You journal, built via tweets, is kept at TweetWhatYouSpend.com.

Get a Quick Reminder

No timer on that clunky cell phone of yours? No problem. Follow @timer on Twitter and it’ll follow you back. Then direct-message it a number of minutes (minimum 5) and a reminder message, for example d timer 30 Feed the parking meter. It’ll direct-message you the reminder when the time is up. In our tests, it was never to the second--don’t use this to time a soft-boiled egg!--but always hit us back within 2 minutes of our requested time.

Update Your To-Do List

Popular to-do services Remember the Milk (see our review here) and Toodledo both let you update them via Twitter. Pro or free Remember the Milk users can log on to RemembertheMilk.com and connect a Twitter account. Then follow @rtm and you can direct-message the service a number of commands. For a new task, simply type d rtm Pick up the milk, but you can also get a list of tasks due, delegate tasks to other Twitter/RTM users, and more. The full list of commands is at rememberthemilk.com/services/twitter.

Toodledo's symbols give you lots of control when adding new to-dos.

If you use Toodledo, you can connect it to your Twitter account by logging in at Toodledo.com, then clicking Import/Export/Sync in the sidebar and clicking Twitter. (Or go to www.toodledo.com/connect_twitter.php.) Follow @toodledo on Twitter, and you can DM it new tasks, fetch tasks, and set up reminders, with a robust system of codes to denote your to-do list’s folders, contexts, due dates, priorities, and tags. A simple tweet like d toodledo Pick up the milk adds the task with normal priority and no context, due date, or tags, to your Inbox folder. But a tweet like d toodledo Pick up birthday cake !! #tomorrow =6pm *Party @Car would add the high-priority (!!) task to your Party folder (*Party) with a due date of tomorrow at 6pm (# for date and = for time) with the context of Car (@Car). Find a full list of commands at www.toodledo.com/info/help_twitter.php.

Track a Package

TrackThis (www.usetrackthis.com) lets you enter your package’s tracking number and get updates by email, SMS, or RSS. But you can also use the service with Twitter. Follow @trackthis and it’ll follow you back. Then direct-message it a UPS, FedEx, DHL, or USPS tracking number and a nickname for the package, for example: d trackthis 1ZFAKE440351490210 Celia’s gift. You’ll get a direct message back every time the package changes locations.

We had Twitter send TrackThis's messages to our phone as SMS texts.

Update Facebook

If more of your friends use Facebook than Twitter, it’s easy to keep everyone updated at once. We prefer using a Facebook app called Selective Twitter Status, because sending all your Twitter updates to Facebook (retweets and replies and all) can be annoying. Search Facebook for Selective Twitter Status, install the app to your Facebook page, tell it your Twitter name, and you’re all set. Then just end any tweet with #fb to send it to Facebook as well as Twitter. (The #fb part doesn’t show up on Facebook, by the way.)

End a tweet with #fb and Selective Twitter Status will update your Facebook page too.

Take a Note, Evernote

If you’re retweeting a link, it’s because you like it. Might as well send it to note-taking wonder service Evernote, too. (See “Digitize Your Mental Notes with Evernote,” Jul/09) You’ll need a free or Pro account at Evernote.com, then follow @myen on Twitter. It’ll follow you back and direct-message you a link. Click it and log in to Evernote to link the two accounts. Then you can add @myen to any tweet you want to send to Evernote. Or direct-message (d myen) the service any notes you want to keep private.

Adding @myen to a tweet sends a copy to evernote.

NEXT: Ninja Stars: Quick Tips

Ninja Stars: Quick Tips

>> SNOOZE a verbose follower temporarily at TwitterSnooze.com. Great for someone who's at Comic-Con or WWDC and posting way, way, way too much about it.

Shhh, quiet you.

>> MEET Twitter users in real life! Head to search.twitter.com and search for tweetup near:"Your City" within:15mi to find tweets about meet-ups happening near you.

Ron Jeremy, really? Wow.

>> LOVE music-streaming site Last.fm? Link up your Twitter account at lastfmlovetweet.com to automatically tweet a link to any song you mark as loved on Last.fm.

Share the love.

NEXT: How to Post to Twitter by Voice

How to Post to Twitter by Voice

If you’re already using super-versatile reminder service reQall for to-dos, your shopping list, or other reminders, having it post to your Twitter account is a bad idea. But if you’re not using the service at all, here’s how to set up a reQall account to transcribe your voice memos into tweets.

1. SIGN UP FOR REQALL

Go to www.reqall.com and sign up for a free account. Click Settings in the upper-right. Click Phone Access in the sidebar. Enter your phone number and click Save.

2. TURN ON YOUR RSS FEED

Click Feed in the sidebar, and check the box to enable an RSS feed of your reQall items. Then click the RSS button to open a window of the RSS feed. Save the URL of this feed; we’ll need it in step 3.

3. GO TO TWITTERFEED.COM

Sign up for a free account. Follow the prompts to set up a new feed to Twitter and link your Twitter account. Enter the URL from step 2 into the RSS Feed URL box. Under Advanced Settings, change the update frequency to 30 minutes--your tweets should be up within the hour. For post content, include the title only, and uncheck the box for Post Link. Click the Save Feed button.

4. ENTER REQALL AS A CONTACT

Enter reQall on your phone with these two numbers, if you’re in the United States: 888-9-REQALL (888-973-7255) is the toll-free option, and 408-715-7572 is the backup. (Look up numbers for the U.K. and Canada at www.reqall.com/about/faq.)

5. CALL REQALL

When prompted, say, “Add.” Then say something, pause for acknowledgement, and hang up. reQall will transcribe your speech and add the new item to your reQall list, which posts it to the RSS feed, which is pushed to Twitter by Twitterfeed.com. Some of your messages might be a bit garbled, but it’s a free no-hands tweet. Not bad.

Must-Follow People

Geeky Celebs

@rainnwilson (Rainn Wilson of The Office)
@ThatKevinSmith (director Kevin Smith)
@alyankovic ("Weird Al" Yankovic)
@donttrythis (Adam Savage, co-host of Mythbusters)
@wilw (author, blogger, actor Wil Wheaton)
@hodgman (author, humorist, and "PC" John Hodgman)

Companies

@JetBlueCheeps (posts links to crazy-low--$9?!--fares every Monday)
@Zappos (written by CEO, Tony Hseih)
@comcastcares (Frank Eliason, Director of Digital Care, provides actual customer service)
@southwestair (answers questions and tweets about deals)
@hrblock (trolls Twitter offering help to people tweeting their tax freakouts)
@amazonmp3 (offers daily deals and sales from the Amazon MP3 store)

Geeks

@stevewoz (Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak)
@pogue (David Pogue of the New York Times)
@ginatrapani (Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani)
@Inhatko (tech journalist Andy Ihnatko)
@gruber (Daring Fireball's John Gruber)
@hotdogsladies (Merlin Mann of 43folders.com)

News Sites

@MacLife (us, of course!)
@MacFormat (our sister magazine in the UK, MacFormat)
@engadget (gadget gurus Engadget.com)
@macrumors (rumor site extraordinaire MacRumors.com)
@BoingBoing (posts links to its "directory of wonderful things")
@cnnbrk (CNN's breaking news feed)

It's an iPhone World -- We Just Live In It

The Mac|Life Staff — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:33:10 -0500

Together, the iPhone 3.0 OS update and iPhone 3GS offer faster Web surfing, gaming, and Twittering than ever. Here's what's new in the iPhone OS and accessible to all iPhone users. We also review the 3GS, the fastest, slickest most fun iPhone yet.

The release of the iPhone OS 3.0 update in the same week in June that Apple launched the iPhone 3GS created a lot of buzz in the tech media, not to mention mainstream media that cover tech closely. Living and breathing Apple tech as we do, it was a big week, but once the lines at Apple Stores died down, and iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone 3GS were no longer the most popular Twitter and Digg topics, we wondered if average iPhone users even noticed that their smartphone’s OS had changed. We’re here to tell you that, yes, 3.0 brought changes--most of them positive, some of them puzzling, and others, like multimedia messaging, promising. (Although thanks to AT&T, the feature wasn’t even available for us to test at press time.)

As far as the new iPhone goes, it is the best iPhone yet--and when you factor in the OS 3.0 update, there’s not a single smartphone that can beat it. We conclude our guided tour of OS 3.0 with a review of the 3GS, complete with the scoop on how fast it really is compared to the 3G and the unvarnished truth about whether you really need to upgrade.

3.0's a Charm

Even if you can’t afford it, aren’t yet eligible to upgrade, or simply refuse on principle to buy a new iPhone a mere year after the 3G came out, updating your iPhone OS to 3.0 shouldn’t be a choice--it’s a requirement. All iPhone owners will enjoy the new features the OS update brings, with the one exception of original iPhone owners who want to use MMS (which stands for multimedia messaging service, see below), though at press time AT&T hadn’t rolled out that feature yet anyway. Here, we take you on a rollicking tour of the additions and improvements in iPhone OS 3.0, pointing out highlights--and ticking through our wish list for 3.1--along the way.

Cut, Copy, and Paste--Finally!

Yes, it's here--and it's pretty great--but we have a few key suggestions for how Apple could make it even better.

Since the iPhone’s launch two years ago, BlackBerry users have been gloating about the iPhone’s lack of this functionality. As much as we hated to, we secretly agreed that releasing two iPhone models without one of the most basic functions of the modern GUI seemed like a huge mistake. There were no doubt a few hurdles to jump over to get cut, copy, and paste implemented on a touchscreen device, but we were confident that Apple would eventually give us CC&P, which it finally did in iPhone OS 3.0.

Context-sensitive pop-up menus offer controls for 3.0's new copy and paste functions.

If you haven’t seen it in action yet, the CC&P commands are fairly intuitive. Since they’re baked into the OS, they function similarly in third-party apps. Tapping and holding brings up CC&P controls when you release your finger. In Safari, you’ll end up highlighting a block of text, which you can adjust for accuracy as needed. In Mail and other text-specific apps, the same gesture will highlight a specific word, with movable handles on either side to adjust your selection. A context-sensitive balloon pops up, offering up tappable Copy, Cut, and Paste buttons as appropriate--the phone is smart enough to know that you can’t paste unless you’re in an editable text field. Thankfully, the iPhone’s clipboard maintains formatting when pasting, making it easy to copy part of a webpage into an email with formatting and links intact. The feature also works with images, and copying and pasting multiple images into an email ends up being much faster than adding them one by one the “old-fashioned” way. As a bonus, pasting a photo into an email lets you send a full-resolution copy (1200x1600 on the iPhone 3G, 1536x2048 on the 3GS), rather than the 600x800 version you get if you use the Email Photo option in the Photos app.

So, yes, overall CC&P is a win, but what’s the problem? The way the feature works in some apps is extremely annoying and requires way more taps than it should. Possibly the most common-use case for CC&P is looking up contact information and pasting it into an email. But in Contacts, you cannot simply find a contact and tap-and-hold to select their phone number or email address. Touching either of those will instantly initiate a phone call or create a new email message to that person. So instead of quickly grabbing someone’s contact info, you have to tap Edit, then tap a telephone number or email address, then finally tap and hold in the edit field, just to copy the information. Grabbing a simple email address requires several extra taps, and it puts you into editing mode, making it that much easier to accidentally bork your contact’s information. Trying to copy event info from Calendar also requires entering edit mode--an unnecessary pain when you’re trying to quickly move bits of data from between apps.

Copying and pasting a picture into an email allows you to send it at full resolution.

A better, and far more elegant, solution would have been to use a small icon to the left of contact info, for example, to instantly invoke CC&P controls, similar to the blue arrows in your Recents list that take you to a particular caller’s details. And if Apple didn’t want to clutter up the interface, the OS could be tweaked a bit to differentiate better between a tap and a tap-and-hold. We were also annoyed that in Messages, you can’t select a portion of a text message for copying, it’s all or nothing (and at press time, AT&T still hadn’t activated MMS, so we don’t know how that will come into play with messages that contain media and text content).

Let Your Spotlight Shine

It's still got a ways to go before it's as powerful as Spotlight on your Mac, but the new device-wide search added to iPhone OS 3.0 makes quick work of locating email, contact info, calendar appointments, apps, and more.

We never thought we’d say this, but now that Spotlight search is part of the iPhone OS, we actually prefer checking email on our iPhone to checking it on our Mac. Not that Spotlight’s usefulness ends with Mail, of course. By sliding left from your first home screen, or tapping the tiny magnifying glass icon to the far left of the dots at the bottom of any home screen, you bring up the Spotlight window. Typing a term into the field sends your iPhone scouring all its contents for instances of that word--in Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Notes, your iPod library, and, of course, Apps. (For more on enhanced search and other features in iPod mode, see “King of the iPods,” below.)

Can't find an email by scrolling? Use Mail's Search function instead.

To access items shown in the search results--read an email, launch an app, or play an audio or video track--just tap it. For people with enough apps on their iPhones to fill up nine or more home screens with icons, Spotlight is a way faster way to find an app that’s on your eleventh home screen. So instead of swiping 11 times then tapping an app’s icon, just launch Spotlight, type in the first couple letters of the app’s name, and there you are. You just saved yourself 3 seconds! If you really want to shave seconds off searches--and especially if your large fingers have a hard time tapping the teeny-tiny magnifying glass on the home screen, or swiping left through screen after screen makes you dizzy--you can set the phone so double-clicking the Home button opens Spotlight: Choose Settings > General > Home > Search.

If you don't find the email you're looking for among downloaded messages, tap Continue Search On Server.

Back to Mail for a moment, there’s also a separate search feature within Mail that lets you refine your results by narrowing which part of the email it searches: sender, recipient, subject line, or the entire message. You also get the option to search messages that are still on your email server. Of course, if you want to search across more than one email account at once, the solution is to use Spotlight. Any results that are found in emails will appear in a list next to the Mail icon. When you tap the result, you’ll see which account it belongs to by tapping the left-facing arrow to go back to the inbox. It’s too bad the results list can’t display this detail for you, but we can also imagine how cluttered it could make the list.

Finding apps, emails, and notes with the same keyword or letter combo is so cinchy now. Thanks, Spotlight!

LoJack for Your iPhone

Find My iPhone is an awesome feature, but we think it's slimy of Apple to require a MobileMe subscription for it to work.

There really is no such thing as a free lunch. While Apple added Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe features to OS 3.0, it requires a MobileMe subscription ($99 a year, www.me.com) to use. So if you’re a cheapskate like some of us at Mac|Life--we answered with a decisive, “No thanks,” when asked by the friendly Apple salesperson if we wanted to purchase AppleCare for our iPhone 3GS, only to grit our teeth and open our wallets a few days later to shell out $99 for MobileMe--you’ll be peeved to learn that Find My iPhone is going to cost you.

Still, the ability to remotely locate and control your phone--and even wipe the data on it if need be--is probably worth the 100 bucks, especially since, despite MobileMe’s limitations, it’s still a handy service.

Make sure you mean it when you choose to wipe your iPhone. You can restore your data afterward, but it takes a while to really wipe it clean.

Activating Find My iPhone is easy. On your iPhone tap Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap the slider next to “Push” to “On.” Then head to your Mac and open a Web browser. Log in to your MobileMe account and click the Settings icon. It will probably ask you to re-enter your password, and once you do, your account settings will appear. In the bottom-left of the left-hand pane, Find My iPhone appears as an option. After you click the button to locate the phone, you’ll see a map with the phone’s location on it.

To display a message on the screen, and/or make it play a sound (even if the ringer is turned off), click Display A Message. If you also want it to play an alert sound--a not unpleasant echoing ding--check “Play a sound for 2 minutes with this message.” After you click Send, the phone does its thing. But if you’re hard of hearing, be warned: The alert sound is not very loud, and even though it overrides the silent mode switch, it only plays at the ringer volume the phone was set to before you turned off the ringer. So if you normally keep the volume on the low side, it might be hard to hear the phone if it’s in another room or even--as in our tests--in a metal file drawer inches away from where we sit.

Once you tell MobileMe that you want to wipe your phone, it becomes impossible to locate or use.

If it turns out that your phone has in fact been stolen or lost, Remote Wipe can erase the phone’s contents--including apps, contact data, email account settings, all of it--to prevent whoever has it from accessing your info. If the phone is just missing temporarily, you can restore the data on it from your last backup. Initiating Remote Wipe negates Find My iPhone’s ability to locate the phone, however, so be sure to locate the phone before you wipe it.

Reason #87 it's important to back up your iPhone regularly.

If you physically find your phone after it’s been wiped, you can restore its contents. Wait for the Remote Wipe to complete--it took a couple hours to wipe our 8GB iPhone 3G. During the wipe, you’ll see an Apple logo on the iPhone’s screen, and if you’re in MobileMe, a message saying “Location Not Available: Find My iPhone has been disabled because a wipe request is pending.” After the wipe is complete, you’ll need to restore your data from a recent backup in iTunes: Connect your phone to your Mac. You’ll see a box asking you to set up a new phone or restore a previously synced phone. Choose the latter and click OK.

Speedier Surfing

We can't help you if you're stuck in the boonies with no Wi-Fi or 3G service, but when you've got your cellular Internet workin', Safari snaps to your taps just a little faster than before.

The big news for Safari is speed. Even if you haven’t stepped up to an iPhone 3GS--a lot of 3G users still aren’t eligible for upgrades, and given the economy, we can see why even if you were eligible, you’d hesitate--the version of mobile Safari that comes as part of iPhone OS 3.0 is considerably faster than its predecessor. When we tested Apple’s speed claims with an iPod touch before and after updating to 3.0, we got results of 2 to 16 times faster, depending on the specific test we were running. Overall, our results came back 3.36 times faster completing the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests (www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html), which is right in line with the Safari speed bump Apple touted.

Safari's new Autofill feature can keep track of your website log-ins.

Not all the improvements took place under the hood. Apple also added some key features that make mobile Safari easier to use. Autofill is the big one. Instead of retyping log-in information into Web forms, your iPhone running OS 3.0 can now remember log-in credentials for you. The feature is disabled by default--probably a good idea, given the potential for disaster with a lost iPhone that can automatically log in to your bank, Amazon, or eBay accounts. To turn it on, tap Settings > Safari. Here you can also specify a contact to be used to autofill your name, email address, and other personal info where appropriate. Using Autofill is an all-or-nothing proposition: Your iPhone will either remember every log-in and password, or it will remember none. And unfortunately, there’s no way to selectively delete saved info--although you can clear everything with a single tap if need be. While an iPhone thief taking control of your MacLife.com user account might not be a big deal, you might feel differently when they start using your Twitter account, or making “adjustments” to your 401(k) allocations. If you do decide to use Autofill, you should definitely enable the passcode lock on your phone.

Safari’s got a couple of new tricks up its sleeve when it comes to dealing with links too. Tapping and holding on a link now brings up a new pane offering buttons to Open, Open In New Page, and Copy. Open In New Page is handy if you’re working from search results, or if you want to open a link, but aren’t quite finished with the referring page. Taking advantage of the new CC&P goodness, you can also easily grab a URL for pasting into an email, IM, or text message to share with a friend.

Now you can open links in new pages or copy them to use elsewhere.

Safari’s also good to go with the next wave of Web development. Apple built this version to be compatible with HTML 5, an ongoing revision of the programming language that underlies the Web. There’s support for HTTP streaming audio and video, making it easier than ever to take advantage of media-rich websites from your iPhone (and which also might explain why Apple has been dragging its feet when it comes to support for Flash). Your iPhone can now pick a stream based on your current connection speed, whether you’re connected via Wi-Fi, 3G, or the pokey EDGE--resulting in smoother video and more reliable playback. And since it transmits via a standard HTTP connection, like the rest of the Internet, streaming media can easily pass through network firewalls, which is good news for slackers employed by companies with strict policies toward time-wasting websites like YouTube.

King of the iPods

iPhone OS 3.0 adds more bells and whistles to Apple's most full-featured music player.

Apple didn’t forget that its flashy smartphone is an iPod too. And iPhone OS 3.0 makes it easier to navigate content you already own--as well as to easily buy more, of course, as Steve Jobs intended.

As we’ve said, Spotlight lets you search for and play songs and videos without even launching the iPod app. This works well, but Spotlight’s search results don’t include the names of playlists. And if you type the name of an album, you get a list of the album’s tracks in random order. Luckily, the enhanced search function within the iPod application offers finer control. You can search for playlists, and if you search for an album title, you’ll see the entire album up top, followed by an alphabetical list of its tracks.

The iTunes Store lets you redeem iTunes gift cards right from the phone.

Once a track is playing, skipping to the exact part you want is a snap, thanks to the new scrubber bar. To use it, hold your finger down on the playhead that appears on the song’s progress bar. While you’re holding the playhead, the words “High-Speed Scrubbing” appear above the progress bar, and you can slide your finger left or right to scrub through the track quickly. For slower scrubbing, slide your finger down the screen and watch the words change to Half-Speed Scrubbing, Quarter-Speed Scrubbing, and Fine Scrubbing, which is second-by-second control. Once you see the option you want, slide your finger left or right to scrub through the track. This is awesome for podcasts and audiobooks, but works on any selection, audio or video.

You can buy or rent movies from your iPhone, but the selection is much smaller than what's offered on your Mac.

The Now Playing screen has extra buttons when you’re listening to a podcast or audiobook. Tap the button on the right to set the playback speed to 2X (which is technically closer to 1.5X, but doesn’t change the pitch or make the people speaking sound like Chipmunks), slower 1/2X, or real-time 1X. The super-handy center button jumps back 30 seconds--we call it the “Say What?!” button. And over to the left is a button to email a link to the podcast to a friend, but the button only appears when you’re listening to a podcast, not an audiobook.

New parental controls let you limit what kinds of content can be brought and viewed.

OS 3.0 finally enables Stereo Bluetooth (aka A2DP), letting you pair a set of Bluetooth headphones to the phone and listen to your music in stereo, without wires. We tested this with Wi-Gear’s iMuffs MB220 and enjoyed clear stereo sound without needing the iMuffs’ included dongle. Stereo Bluetooth isn’t supported on the first-gen iPhone or the first-gen iPod touch, which is lame.

The iPod app's search function will find playlists, but the iPhone's Spotlight search won't.

Oh, and now you can shake your iPhone to turn on Shuffle, but it requires quite a violent and sustained shake on an iPhone 3G, rendering the feature more gimmicky than useful. The iPhone 3GS, on the other hand (see our review below), is highly susceptible to very slight movement, to the point where being jostled on the subway by another passenger while holding your phone could shuffle the playlist you’re listening to.

Three new buttons for podcasts: Email the podcast's link, jump back 30 seconds, and change the playback speed.

The iTunes Store app no longer needs Wi-Fi--you can browse using a 3G or EDGE connection and download purchases of less than 10MB (think songs, not videos). The store now includes movies to buy or rent, plus TV shows to buy, although with a much smaller selection than what’s available on your Mac. You can grab college lectures from iTunes U too (see “What I Learned at iTunes U”). Additional parental-control options found in Settings > General > Restrictions let parents limit what kind of content kids can buy or view on the phone.

Far more shows are available in the main iTunes Store on your Mac than in the smaller iTunes Store on your iPhone.

What’s still missing? We’d love it if our podcasts auto-updated on the phone the same way they do in iTunes on our Mac. We want the option to delete music and videos right from the phone, in case we want to rent a movie on the go and need to free up a little space. Taking the podcast-recommendation function a step further, how about the ability to email playlists? And in the iTunes Store, a Save For Later button would rock, for tagging interesting-looking content without purchasing it right away.

iPhone, Take a Memo...

As (mostly) easy as 3.0 makes it to capture and share voice memos and sync notes, you really don't have an excuse for forgetting to pick up that gallon of milk.

If you don’t mind the sound of your own voice, OS 3.0’s Voice Memos feature is a welcome substitute for calling your home or work voicemail to leave yourself verbal reminders.

The audio quality is actually quite good--possibly even good enough to record audio for a podcast, though you’d surely want to invest in an external microphone. But for personal use--and recording fun stuff, like, for example, your toddler definitively declaring that Daddy is indeed her favorite parent, Voice Memos get our enthusiastic approval. Your voice memos are saved as M4A (Apple Lossless) files, which can be played back in iTunes, QuickTime, of course, and Windows Media Player, which comes in handy when you want to share audio recordings with Windows users. Sharing is a simple matter of tapping the Voice Memos list icon, selecting the memo you want to hear or share, then tapping Share. This opens an email window and attaches the file so your recipients can listen to it at their leisure.

You can use the built-in mic or your earphones' inline mic to record memos, just don't use the built-in mic when the iPhone is docked, since the 30-pin connector blocks it and your voice won't register.

The ability to send voice memos via email highlights a feature we wish Apple would add, however--the ability to do the same thing with voicemail messages. That way, busy people could take even fuller advantage of apps like QTech’s reQall (free in the App Store), which integrates info from email, IM, and text messages in a single command center for helping you stay organized and on top of personal and professional deadlines and to-dos.

Email a voice memo instantly by tapping Share from the List view.

Turning to a slightly lower-tech form of keeping track of things, the ability to sync the iPhone’s Notes app with Apple Mail is new--and we certainly like being able to access notes from our iPhone on our Mac, as well as create new notes on our Mac using its full-size keyboard (in Mail, on the left-hand pane under Reminders, select Notes). To make sure Notes syncing is set up in iTunes, connect your iPhone to your Mac, select the phone under Devices, and on the Info tab, scroll down to Notes and check “Sync notes.”

Though it's not as straightforward as it should be, you can now sync notes you create on your Mac in Mail to your iPhone.

Now here’s where the typical Apple ease- of-use flies out the window. You’d think that by checking “Sync notes,” this would indicate that you want the info synchronized in both places--your Mac and your iPhone. In a bizarre twist, however, you have to take an additional step to transfer any notes you create in Mail on your Mac to your iPhone. With the phone connected, in iTunes, select the phone under Devices. On the Info tab, scroll down to Advanced. Under “Replace information in this iPhone,” check Notes. Notice the fine print underneath, however, which informs you that this preference will apply to the next sync only. WTF? This left us scratching our heads...and sending out a little prayer to the iPhone update gods that Apple will see the error of its ways and repent with a less kludgy process for syncing notes created on your Mac to your iPhone with the next iPhone software update.

iPhone Users Get MMS--Or Do They?

Multimedia messaging wasn't available at press time, but we're looking forward to testing it once AT&T gets its act together.

At the June 2009 WWDC keynote address announcing 3.0’s imminent release, nothing was more groan-inducing than the announcement that AT&T wasn’t ready to roll out long-overdue MMS messaging to iPhone users. Try as he might, Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iPhone software, simply couldn’t put a positive spin on AT&T dropping the ball when it came to MMS, and the crowd at Moscone West certainly let their displeasure be known. And really--can you blame them? Either AT&T consists of the only people in the known universe who didn’t know 3.0 was launching in June, or they never read anything on the Internet and were just unaware that we’ve been waiting for MMS since--well, since June 29, 2007, the day the original iPhone launched.

MMS allows users to send photos, audio, and video content to mobile phones, similar to the way that text messages (SMS, or simple messaging service) work. AT&T has supported MMS on its other handsets for years now, and given that the iPhone is kind of a big deal, we’ve always been at a loss trying to come up with the reasons AT&T is shutting out iPhone users. Sure, AT&T attempted to make up for the lack of native support for MMS with that “View my message” site (score one for unintuitive, hard-to-remember URLs), but you couldn’t save content through that website, and thanks to incomprehensible message URLs and AT&T’s passwords that used both the number one and the lowercase letter L’s, as well as lowercase O’s and zeros--which aren’t exactly easy to tell apart--most iPhone users just ignored MMS messages because of the difficulties accessing the content via the Web.

AT&T claimed that delayed MMS rollout had to do not with the network itself, but with needing to remove an “MMS opt-out” block on everyone’s accounts, which automatically got placed on iPhone accounts when the phones were activated (“MMS Opt Out” was even listed on your AT&T bill, as if it were a feature). We can only guess at what sort of convoluted account management software AT&T is using, but whatever it is, modifying everybody’s accounts took a while. At press time, MMS hadn’t launched, but by the time you read this, hopefully AT&T’s “late summer” launch date will have come and gone, although first-gen iPhone owners who haven’t upgraded to at least a 3G model are still out of luck.

Aside from amusing photos of cats, babies, and other family members, MMS on the iPhone promises to let you send audio, contacts, and locations as MMS messages. Noticeably absent for iPhone 3GS owners, however, was support for sending video clips via MMS. The ability to quickly zap contact info to a friend or colleague reminds us of the old Beam feature on Palm Pilots, partially negating some of our complaints about the difficulty of using copy-and-paste in Contacts. And we love the idea of being able to quickly send location information to another user, handy at outdoor festivals, sporting events, college campuses, or anywhere you need to quickly gather your crew. Gone are the days of trying to yell driving directions to a friend over the din of a good party--now you’ll be able to use your iPhone to quickly fire off your location via an MMS message.

iPhone 3.0: A Developer's Dream

Here's why 3.0's phat SDK matters to consumers.

iPhone OS 3.0 comes with tons of new tools for developers. What does that mean for us humble consumers? More sophisticated behavior from your iPhone or iPod touch, that’s what.

Push notifications allow developers to send alerts to your device even if the apps in question aren’t running. AIM, an early example, can notify you of new IMs with a sound, a pop-up message, and a number badge on the AIM icon--or any combination of those. Better yet, users can configure these notifications on an app-by-app basis in Settings > Notifications. Using push notifications does drain your battery faster than leaving them turned off, however.

In-app purchasing is a new revenue model that allows developers to offer a basic paid app and then sell additional add-on content to users from right inside the application. For example, Freeverse’s popular Flick Fishing lets users pay for a new fish, an extra fishing spot, and multiplayer mode. Pangea’s Enigmo 3.0 offers two level packs aimed at kids for 99 cents each. Developers aren’t allowed to sell add-on content for a free application, though, so don’t worry about falling in love with a free app only to be nickle-and-dimed later on.

Developers can even write iPhone apps that control a separate accessory connected to the iPhone’s dock port or paired with the phone via Bluetooth. At press time, no accessories had yet hit the market, but both iPhone 3.0 preview events (in Cupertino this past March, and again at WWDC in June) showed glimpses of some of the cool things we can expect.

LifeScan demoed an app that logs data from a connected glucose meter and includes tools to help diabetics track and manage their disease. Line 6’s MIDI Mobilizer app will let guitarists control their attached Variax guitar, switching between instrument models, amplifier profiles, and effects on the phone to radically change the sound of the connected, physical guitar.

Peer-to-peer connectivity allows developers to write apps so that multiple iPhones can interact with each other over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. It’s seamless for the user--automatic discovery, no pairing required. This will allow us to play multiplayer games without the benefit of a Wi-Fi hotspot. Smule’s Leaf Trombone: World Stage uses peer-to-peer to facilitate trombone duets, for example, and Flight Control includes a cooperative two-player mode. First-gen iPhones and iPod touches can use peer-to-peer apps over Wi-Fi, but not Bluetooth.

Developers can use a lot of iPhone 3.0’s other bells and whistles in their applications too, including the landscape keyboard, the cut-and-paste function, and the same Google maps already found in Apple’s native Maps application. Apps written for iPhone 3.0 can access the iPod app’s music library, so users can enjoy (and control) their own music while using a third-party app. Apps can even use the proximity sensor--an early example of this is reminder app reQall (more on this app in “iPhone, Take a Memo,” above), which automatically starts recording your voice memo when you hold the iPhone to your ear.

All in all, Apple added more than 1,000 new APIs (application programming interfaces) to the iPhone 3.0 SDK, giving third-party developers access to the same tools Apple’s own programmers use to build the company’s native iPhone apps. What sorts of magic the developers will come up with remains to be seen, but if the early examples are any indication, we’re in for a wild ride.

Smarter Apps

Some early examples of iPhone 3.0 features in third-party apps--watch the App Store for more.

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

You have to authorize push notifications for each app individually, if that app supports them.

Leaf Trombone: World Stage pushes these notifications to recruit you for judging.

Customize push notification settings for each app in Settings > Notifications.

PEER-TO-PEER CONNECTIVITY

Peer-to-peer connectivity in Leaf Trombone: World Stage lets you play duets with a friend.

IN-APP PURCHASES

Flick Fishing uses in-app purchasing to sell you new content.

iPhone 3GS: Speed Thrills

It's more evolution than revolution, but it's the best iPhone yet.

In 10 years, we’ll all sit around our 50-inch Apple TV entertainment/computing center and remember the good old days, when we stood in line every summer to buy the latest and greatest iPhone. While the Apple robot upgrades our iPhone 9GSSV with the new welding feature (welding will be huge in the future--just you wait), we’ll remember the exact moment when the iPhone went from being a smartphone to a computer with a phone feature. That moment was this June 19, 2009, when the iPhone 3GS made its way into our lives.

Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS emphasizing that the S stood for Speed. A marketing ploy? Sure. But, unlike that hatchback you bought in the ’90s with the S badge, this S actually delivers.

Go, Speed iPhone, go!

As soon as you start launching applications, you’ll notice the difference between the iPhone 3GS and its predecessor, the iPhone 3G. Games that had slight stutters on the 3G now blaze along with nary a hiccup. One of the biggest complaints about the iPhone’s camera--that it took forever to launch and by the time it was ready to snap a shot, Bigfoot was already on his way to terrorize another group of campers--is gone. (For proof, check out these speed test results below.)

The Need for Speed

Real-world usage should be your first consideration if you’re thinking of upgrading to the 3GS. Combined with iPhone 3.0 OS and its landscape keyboard option, the 3GS will help you shed that netbook envy you may have been experiencing over the past year. Gone is the typing latency that would occasionally plague the first two iPhones. And zippier Safari loads mean you’ll spend less time reaching for your MacBook and more time on the couch looking up random Simpsons trivia. It’s this speed that gives the iPhone 3GS the ability to make all the other features possible.

(click to enlarge)

You Ought to be in Pictures. The Camera app delivers higher-resolution images thanks to the 3GS’s 3-megapixel camera. The 2-megapixel camera in the previous iPhones was serviceable, but nothing to cheer about. If the lighting was right and your subjects stood still, you could get some nice shots. The new camera--while still not the best camera phone out there--is a huge improvement, and you can tell in side-by-side images taken by the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. Partly responsible for the improved quality is the new Camera app, which auto-focuses, auto-exposes, and auto-white-balances with the tap of a finger. We tested the camera in different lighting settings. We still experienced a slight blueing of images during especially bright days. Auto-focus brought a depth to our photos that we weren’t able to produce with the iPhone 3G. The added macro focus means we’ll finally be able to take decent photos of our GI Joe collection.

The 3GS offers in-phone video "editing" via the Trim feature, but once a frame is trimmed, it's gone for good. We hear Apple may fix this in OS 3.1.

For the filmmakers out there, the updated Camera app also shoots video and allows you to trim the video and upload it to YouTube or your MobileMe account or send via email. The video quality doesn’t measure up to the quality of the Flip Mino and is a little soft in comparison with other portable video cameras on the market, but it can do what those can’t: trim and upload directly to YouTube or email while on the go. Sadly, trimming video is a destructive affair. In other words, make sure you don’t want those last few seconds of video before you trim it. Because once it’s trimmed, it’s gone forever, unless you’ve synced with your computer or you’ve emailed yourself the file, which doesn’t work with videos that are too long anyway (the longest video clip we were able to email was 47 seconds). Once uploaded, you’re presented with the ability to view your “films” within iPhoto or share them with your friends and family. With today’s throngs of citizen journalists on the loose, this could be the feature that sells the iPhone 3GS.

Voice Your Concerns. While iPhone sour-grapes-eaters complained about its lack of voice control, those who have actually used voice dialing on other phones know that voice control is never without glitches. Often, after failed attempts telling a phone to “Call Aunt Ruth,” you give up and find her phone number in your contact list by hand. Apple brought voice control not only to the 3GS’s phone function, but also to iTunes (through the OS 3.0 update), with better results than we remember on old-school cell phones. But the feature is still far from perfect. We were impressed with Voice Control’s ability to recognize the difference between the names Michael and Micah, while we walked outside on a windy day using the included headset. We had less luck with song and artist selection, though, only successfully playing certain songs or artists using Voice Control about 70 percent of the time. That rate jumped to about 95 percent inside in a quiet room. While driving, though, the whole process becomes comical. Repeated requests for TV on the Radio yielded Radiohead, and, for some reason, asking for the Bellrays got us Suede. Phone calls were slightly better while driving, but the technology still requires some work for when you need it most--outside in noisy environs or in the car, especially now that many states require hands-free cell phone use.

The nice Voice Control robot tells you when you have multiple phone numbers for the same contact so you can reach them at the right number.

Hide and Seek. OK, so a compass isn’t what we were clamoring for when we thought about a new iPhone. A compass is what you give to your wacky mountain-man cousin or a kid who’s just joined the scouts; it’s not something you look for on a piece of electronics. The app itself does exactly what you would expect: It points north. You can choose between magnetic north and true north. If you don’t know the difference, you better hope your high school earth-sciences teacher has retired by now. The Compass app’s killer feature is when you tap the locate button in the lower-left corner. It opens the Maps app and displays your location. Tap the locate button a second time, and the map orients to show which direction you’re facing. As you turn, it turns. Suddenly the compass is the greatest thing ever for finding the best taqueria in town.

Oil Slick. No one wants to admit that they have greasy skin. The 3GS’s fingerprint-resistant oleophobic display helps displace the greasy fingerprints you’ve been leaving on your iPhone’s screen. It doesn’t completely eliminate fingerprints, of course, but it does a good job minimizing the finger- and faceprint goo as compared to the 3G. The 3GS’s screen does feel a tad bit more slick than those of previous iPhone models, but we quickly got used to it and enjoyed our less oily iPhone screens. The new screen coating means it’s easier to clean with a vigorous rub against the leg of your jeans too.

The bottom line. The newest iPhone is a must-have upgrade for owners of the first-gen iPhone and those new to the iPhone world. For iPhone 3G owners, its new features, while exciting, don’t feel substantial enough for anyone beyond the Apple fanatic (namely us and our readers) to upgrade. Just be sure to give us a heads up when you post that video on YouTube of you dancing to Thriller. --Roberto Baldwin

iPhone 3GS
COMPANY: Apple
CONTACT: www.apple.com
PRICE: 16GB, $199*, 32GB, $299* (*new AT&T customers and eligible current customers)
REQUIREMENTS: iTunes 8.2

FAST!!! Video shooting, editing, and uploading means you'll see more videos of stupid people doing stupid things. Hooray!
Longer battery life doesn't extend to 3G data/voice usage. New features may not be compelling enough to upgrade to 3G owners.