Índex per February 2013 a Macworld

HOW-TO The Mac App Store is great for simple applications. But plenty of other apps—created by registered Apple developers, but not in the Store—are available for you to try. Apple vets every app in the Mac App Store, which gives them prominence and promotes safety. Unfortunately, Apple also restricts what the apps can and can’t do on your Mac. If you need an app that does more than Apple allows—one that cleans up the file system, say, or that records your Mac’s audio—you must venture elsewhere. Some outside apps may come from creators on Apple’s registered developer list: Apple signs but doesn’t review these developers’ apps, and can revoke an app’s license if it behaves maliciously. But many other apps have no Apple oversight. To find reputable apps, check Mac-focused…

SECURITY: Little Snitch 3.0.1 $35; Objective Development; go.macworld.com/littlesnitch Macs can be chatty: Apps, and even the OS itself, reach out to your network and to the Internet to probe, query, and blab. Little Snitch 3 presents these requests to you for inspection and approval. The latest update brings inbound-connection management, too, since Internet criminals and vandals are constantly probing for open connections. It’s a full-fledged firewall product with a friendly interface. The utility comes configured to allow common activities—for example, Safari requesting data from port 80 (standard webpages) and port 443 (https-secured pages)—to pass through without notice. Many OS X system daemons, autonomous bits of low-level software, also get a pass. But even these passes are explicitly allowed via rules. For unknown connections, Little Snitch shows the requesting app’s icon,…

I live in New Jersey, in an area hard hit by Hurricane Sandy. Before the storm struck, my family took the traditional steps to prepare for it: We bought nonperishable foods, stocked up on water, and so on. But we also prepped our electronics—chiefly, by charging up all the iPads, iPhones, and laptops. We lost power on Monday, October 29, and it wasn’t restored until the evening of Sunday, November 4. Seven days without electricity is a long time. Of course, the biggest problems we faced were the lack of heat and the food spoilage. But with the Internet out, we also lost our home phone service (which uses VoIP). Nearby cellphone towers took a beating, as well; early on, our iPhones lost service completely. Eventually, AT&T and T-Mobile started…

Apple rightly takes a lot of pride in the size of its App Store—more than 750,000 apps are available for the iPhone and iPad, according to the company’s last count. But the risk of having such a massive emporium for mobile software is that the sheer volume of not-so-hot apps pushes the truly great offerings out of the spotlight. Not to worry, though: Plenty of iOS apps still combine great design and must-have features to help you get even more out of your iPhone and iPad. We’ve discovered nearly two dozen apps in the past year that remind us how the App Store and the iOS universe are about quality, not just quantity. GAME: 10000000 Mash together two very different iOS gaming genres—the cascading-tile puzzle (ˆ la Bejeweled) and the…

Q& Between new-product reviews, tutorials for a timesaving trick, posts from your favorite blogs, updates from the sites you have to follow for work, and—because everyone needs a break, right?—the latest YouTube meme, it can be hard to keep up with everything that you want to read online. No wonder people clamor for a “TiVo for the Web.” Enter read-later services: When you see something important, click a browser button or email the link. Then, at the end or beginning of the day, open the read-later app on the device of your choice—typically a smartphone or a tablet—and download all the content you flagged earlier. Now you are set to read on your commute, during a plane trip, or just about anywhere, even if you don’t have an Internet connection…

Hardware: My Passport Edge $100; Western Digital; www.wd.com My Passport Edge for Mac is the newest member of Western Digital’s portable hard drive family. It’s not wildly different from previous models, but it does have USB 3.0 connectivity, and has slimmed down to an ultrathin enclosure. It is also preformatted using HFS+, is Time Machine compatible, and includes WD Security and WD Drive Utilities apps. It comes in a 500GB capacity and is backed by WD’s three-year warranty. My Passport Edge is a nice little drive that’s designed to complement the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. It’s incredibly easy to use right out of the box. When put through our lab tests, it posted middling scores comparable to the Seagate Backup Plus, and was only a bit faster than the…

Whether you love or hate the books and movies that inspired this font, Twilight NewMoon is instantly recognizable. This font, from Paolo Vannucci at Alphabet & Type, has an impromptu lean to the ascenders and descenders—together with the curlicues at the apex of the lowercase letters G, J, and Y—that defines this font’s informality and youth. Yet the calligraphic look of all the letters betrays Twilight NewMoon’s decorous and ageless beginnings. Twilight NewMoon includes both lowercase and uppercase, plus numbers and common punctuation marks. The curlicues in the descenders make Twilight NewMoon a little difficult to read at sizes smaller than 18 point, so use this font for display purposes only. This TrueType outlines font is available free for personal and commercial use, and will have every teen in town…

Review RATING PRICE $598 COMPANY Sony URL sony.com The 16.1-megapixel, $598 Sony SLT-A57 digital SLT camera is aimed at a very discerning camera buyer: Goldilocks. Papa Bear might prefer the bigger, more complicated, and pricier A77; Mama Bear might pick the lighter, entry-level A37; but Goldilocks is going to think that the A57 is just right. Features Galore In the new Sony product lineup, the A57 replaces the original A55 SLT. But the A57 improves on its predecessor in almost every area. Like the A55, the A57 has a fixed translucent mirror rather than the reflex mirror found in most DSLR models; this design lets the A57 provide constant, swift phase-detect autofocus, as well as frames-per-second rates never seen in this class of camera (10 frames per second or…

As a longtime AT&T cellular customer, I was intrigued when the company announced its Mobile Share shared data plans last July (macworld.com/a/1167751). With two iPhones and a 4G iPad in active use at our house, having access to a pool of data along with unlimited texting (especially with the somewhat frequent iMessage outages these days) sounded pretty good. Getting iPhones onto a Mobile Share plan is an easy process. However, as our editorial director Jason Snell found out, adding an iPad is a bit trickier than that (macworld.com/a/1168284). Even with some better clarification, it’s still much more complicated than it should be to meld the iPad and AT&T’s Mobile Share plan. The problem has two components, one of which relates to the way you are enjoying cellular data on your…

Review RATING PRICE $200 COMPANY Barnes & Noble URL barnesandnoble.com Barnes & Noble isn’t trying to do everything with the Nook HD. Instead, the company’s 7-inch tablet focuses on delivering the best reading experience you can get on any tablet today. The Nook HD starts at $200 for the 8GB model. Though that makes it slightly pricier than the latest Amazon and Google tablets, the 16GB Nook HD costs $100 less than Apple’s iPad mini. And unlike any of the other three tablets, it has a MicroSD card slot, so you can add up to 64GB of storage. The Physical Package The stunning 1440-by-900-pixel display has the highest resolution of any 7-inch tablet, according to Barnes & Noble. This translates into 243 pixels per inch and makes a huge difference:…

PRODUCTIVITY: EVERNOTE Evernote has developed an avid following. Evernote devotees use it for everything from keeping to-do lists to preserving photos of favorite bottles of wine. This year, the iOS version got a needed face-lift. It’s still the do-it-all info-storage utility, able to store text, images, PDFs, and audio recordings, and it can still tag all that input for easier searching. But it now does all that with a friendlier design: Page-wide tabs organize notes by place, tag, and notebook, and search is more accessible. The app is also faster. Most anything you want to do is just a tap or two away. It’s easier to create new notes and to find old ones. And the lists of notes are easier to parse, thanks to a cleaner layout. Evernote has…

Leave it to a company that makes handbags and diaper bags to make a laptop bag that’s practical, comfortable, and attractive. Ju-Ju-Be’s $200 Giga Be Earth messenger-style laptop bag (go.macworld.com/be-earth) fit all of my daily essentials, was easy to carry, and stayed relatively compact, even when stuffed with a laptop, a windbreaker, and lots of toiletries and makeup. The bag fits 17-inch and smaller laptops and is made of a soft, faux leather (in black or brown) that is stain resistant and machine washable. The corners of the bag are reinforced with extra foam to absorb shock, and the interior is lined with BeCool Venting Technology—the company’s fancy name for perforated foam to keep your laptop cool. The shoulder strap sports a memory-foam pad. The black bag includes hot-pink lining…

Review RATING PRICE Free COMPANY Apple URL apple.com iTunes 11 sports the most radical changes to the program’s interface since its inception. Previous updates added features and tweaked the interface, but iTunes 11 gives the software a new face. Also, iTunes 11 seems to favor playing music over organizing it—an unexpected preference in an era of portable devices. Seeing Your Music Whereas iTunes 10 was mostly monochromatic, color is back in iTunes 11, both in the sidebar and in the Library pop-up menu at the top left of the iTunes window. Text in playlists is larger and bolder, with lighter backgrounds for better contrast. The program’s Helvetica font has less space between letters, so iTunes can display more text in short spaces. Various elements of iTunes 11 suggest that it…

Numark iDJ Pro Where it’s at, you got two turntables and an iPad dock...with the $700 iDJ Pro, which doesn’t require any vinyl in order to create one of the better iOS-based clubbing experiences around. The iDJ Pro works in conjunction with Algoriddim’s Djay for iPad app, letting you incorporate the iPad’s touchscreen into your music-making process. It taps into your music library and offers a range of options to make beats, adjust for pitch, and keep people dancing all night long (www.numark.com). —JOEL MATHIS JBL Lightning Speaker Docks Audio giant Harman has announced the addition of two Lightning-friendly speaker systems to its lineup of JBL-brand components. First up is the highly portable OnBeat Micro ($100), which can operate on either an external power adapter or four AAA batteries. If…

Photographers often talk about framing a photo when they compose a shot in the viewfinder, and for good reason. Think of the act of taking a photo this way: You’re hanging an empty picture frame in the air to capture a slice of reality. The decisions you make about what to include in the frame add up to the difference between a memorable photo and a throwaway snapshot. Want to improve your photos? With a little practice, you can easily take advantage of some of the established rules of composition that photographers have relied on for well over a century. The Rule of Thirds is simply this: For a more interesting image, put the subject of your photo almost anywhere except in dead center. Get Familiar With the Rules Even…

Quickly Find .plist Files Finding the .plist preference file for a given app isn’t always easy, because the name of the .plist file may not be remotely similar to the app’s name. But there’s an easy way to make such files reveal them-selves. First, open the app itself and make a change to its preferences. (You can undo that alteration later.) Next, open your user account’s/Library/Preferences folder in the Finder. (In Lion or later, if you haven’t set that folder to be permanently visible, hold down the <Option> key, and select Go →Library.) Set the Finder window to List view, and click the top of the Date Modified column so the most recently modified files appear highest in the list. The .plist file for the app whose preferences you just…

Review RATING PRICE $599 (2.5GHz Core i5); $799 (2.3GHz Core i7) COMPANY Apple URL apple.com Last year’s Mac mini model brought a number of drastic changes to the compact desktop computer—namely, Intel Core i5 processors (in place of aging Core 2 Duo CPUs), Thunderbolt ports, and the discontinuation of a built-in SuperDrive. The new Mac mini version may not be quite as revolutionary as the 2011 edition was, but its updates are still significant. For starters, the 2012 Mac mini introduces USB 3.0 in place of the tired, old USB 2.0 ports found in the previous model. The new Mac mini also carries faster integrated graphics technology and, for the first time, quad-core processors. You Look Familiar This Mac mini update maintains many of the physical characteristics that the mid-2010…

Angry Birds Star Wars GAME In a nod to the original Star Wars film, you start the game with little red birds with blond hair. These are meant to represent Luke Skywalker, and your first battles are with little Sandpeople-themed pigs. Luke will later develop the ability to use a lightsaber. You’ll also unlock a force-using Obi-Wan bird, a gun-slinging Han Solo bird, and a hulking, growling Chewbacca bird. While adorable, Angry Birds Star Wars rarely approaches levels beyond mere gimmick. Aside from different backgrounds and costumery, the levels themselves feel stale. It’s only when you utilize Obi-Wan’s force powers, take on Darth Vader, or utilize Han’s blaster that it really explores new game mechanics. Given the promise of the Star Wars universe, it’s hard not to be a little…

Hundreds and hundreds of products are released for the Mac each year. A few products truly stand out as impressive examples of quality, value, and innovation. These are the products that we recognize with an Editors’ Choice Award. When it comes to the Eddys (as we affectionately call them), Macworld editors start with a list of candidates; this year, the list included well over 200 products (eligible products must have been released between November 1, 2011, and November 1, 2012). We take a close look at all of the candidates, debate the pros and cons of each, and determine whether a product meets our stringent standards for quality, utility, innovation, value, and excellence. After weeks of deliberation, we assembled a final list. Ladies and gentlemen, Macworld presents the winners of…

Preview is Apple’s top-secret tool for viewing and manipula-ting PDF files, graphics, and more. The secret, however, is not that it exists (just look in your Applications folder) but that this seemingly simple program harbors tons of advanced features. You can use Preview to annotate PDFs, delete or rearrange PDF pages, crop images, and more. Here are some of the most useful features, as of Mountain Lion. Delete or Rearrange PDF Pages It’s easy to delete or move pages within a PDF once you’re in Thumbnails view (View → Thumbnails). To delete a page, click a thumbnail, and then press <Delete>. Save the document, and that page disappears. To move a page, just click a thumbnail and drag it to the location in the sidebar where you want it to…

The first step to staying in touch with others is having some notion of how to contact them—through email, snail mail, phone, chat, or social networking. Mountain Lion’s Contacts app (formerly known as Address Book) handles this vital information. And though it’s often overlooked as many people think that the job it does is mundane, Contacts offers many useful, new features. Automatically Connect Twitter Accounts to Contacts You can easily add Twitter handles to contacts when running Mountain Lion. Launch System Preferences, select Mail, Contacts & Calendars, click the plus (+) button, and select Twitter. In the sheet that appears, add your Twitter account by entering your username and password, and then clicking Sign In. Now, select your account and click Update Contacts. A dialog box appears asking if you…

If your home entertainment setup uses a second-or third-generation Apple TV, you have a fairly capable media streamer at your command. Here are six ways to get the most from it. 1. Update your software: Apple TV has added many features over the past year via software updates. To confirm that you have the latest version of the software, navigate to Settings →General →Update Software, and follow the instructions. Apple TV Software Update 5.1.1 is currently the latest version. 2. Move icons around: Apple TV now displays about 20 icons on your set’s screen from its main menu. To re-arrange the icons, use your Apple Remote to highlight an icon; then press and hold the round button until the icon begins to shimmy like a poodle-skirt-wearing teen on American Bandstand.…

HOW-TO Perhaps you or a musician friend have recorded a song, and you need a music video to help promote it and your band. Or maybe your son or daughter wants to create a video for a song he or she wrote. You don’t need a megabudget: All you require is some creativity, a high-quality camera, family and friends (as extras), and iMovie ’11 for editing. Story You have a multitude of story options when it comes to music videos—this is where you can allow your creativity to run wild. Some of these options include “live on stage,” where you have the band play in front of friends; a solo video of the singer on the beach or in a park; the band performing in a studio; and many more.…

HANDS-ON PhotoDirector 4, a previously Windows-only photo management and editing tool from CyberLink, has debuted on the Mac. This newcomer offers a wide range of consumer-and hobbyist-oriented features and special effects, but it’s also designed to appeal to professional photographers. It provides a spectrum of nondestructive adjustment tools and editing controls, and a photo showcase. Editing and Management PhotoDirector 4 operates from a single window—or full screen—and lets you import images from any folder on your hard drive. Its window is chock-full of tabs and controls, but the interface remains coherent and simple to navigate. The main menu has five major sections: Library, Adjustment, Edit, Slideshow, and Print. Some sections have tabbed subsections on the left side with easy-to-use controls. The Library section gives you access to the project and…