Índex per May 2014 a Macworld

Despite all that it does well, the Apple TV has room for improvement, which is why I’ve been closely following the rumors of an Apple TV revision that have been circulating in recent months. What might Apple have up its sleeve for the newest version of its set-top box? The undisputed champions of the current video market are cable and satellite providers, which are trying to insert themselves into the video-watching process through on-demand streaming, customer authentication requirements, and even their own set-top platforms. So in revamping the Apple TV, does Apple want to work with those cable and satellite providers or work around them? One advantage of working with the cable companies is that Apple would need to negotiate with only a handful of businesses, rather than having to…

Continued strong iPhone and iPad sales, surprisingly good Mac results, and a rising Chinese market gave Apple a healthy start to its 2014 fiscal year. According to its late-January earnings report, Apple ended the first quarter with a $13.1 billion profit on revenue of $57.6 billion. That compares to $13.1 billion in profit on $54.5 billion in revenue for the same quarter last year. (To be precise, profits were down, from $13.078 billion in the first quarter of 2013 to $13.072 billion this time.) Analysts had predicted $14.09 per diluted share, but earnings per share actually rose 5 percent to $14.50. iPhone sales: With 51 million handsets sold (a new quarterly record), iPhone sales were up approximately 7 percent over last year’s first quarter. That result is no doubt thanks…

“There’s nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.” It sounds like the sort of thing a message-board troll might say. It is not what you would expect to hear from one of Apple’s cofounders. But that’s what Steve Wozniak said in a recent interview with Wired. To be fair, it was part of a larger point he was making about Samsung’s resistance to innovation. Still, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher that he’d go on to say, “People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings. We could play in two arenas at the same time.” Back the same platform that Steve Jobs hated? The one he considered a stolen…

THE SCANSNAP SV600 overhead scanner is must-see tech. The way it scans everything from delicate documents to objects as thick as 1.18 inches is simply cool to watch. Align an object on the provided black background cloth, press the scan button, and watch a bar of light travel hypnotically from back to front as it captures an image from photonic feedback. A user-definable delay after you press the button gives you time to move your hand away. If you’re scanning a multipage item, you can instead set the SV600 to initiate another scan after you turn the page. I found the user-definable timed scan to be more efficient, however because the scanner correctly recognized page turns only about 75 percent of the time. Scanning a 75-page magazine required less than…

YOU ARE A father who is also an octopus. And as the excellent theme song for Octodad: Dadliest Catch notes, “nobody suspects a thing.” Well, except for your archenemy, a crazed chef who is the only one who sees past your three-piece suit. Plug in a gamepad if you have one. By default the left analog stick moves one of your arms toward and away from your body, while the right stick raises and lowers the arm. When you pull the left or right trigger, the sticks take control of Octodad’s legs. It’s a lot harder—and a lot sillier—than it sounds. The writing is just as ludicrous. Octodad must navigate the perils of modern family life, working along with his human wife to raise his two human kids. Pour your…

MUCH LIKE ITS iOS counterpart, the new Simplenote for Mac offers a streamlined interface. You can apply tags (that you create) to your notes, and you can click any tag to display related notes. My favorite feature is Collaborate, which allows you to share a note: Choose the Collaborate option in Simplenote’s menu bar, and then enter the recipient’s email address. (The address also becomes a tag for that note.) The note is posted on Simplenote’s site—with a private URL—and an email goes to the recipient, who can then view and edit the note without having to create a Simplenote account. It’s a great way to get input on an informal document from a group of people. The History feature lets you see the previous eight versions of a note,…

Mac Pro Lock Bracket With Security Cable Lock The new Mac Pro is so small, so attractive, and so pricey. To prevent someone from giving in to the temptation of grabbing your Mac Pro and making a run for it, you can lock the computer down with Maclocks’ $90 device. Tether the Mac Pro to your desk for a little peace of mind (maclocks.com). —ROMAN LOYOLA BLINKY 2.0.3 Retro-graphics warning: Secret Geometry’s $5 Blinky is a text editor designed to resemble the computer displays of old—really old. Gimmicky? Maybe, but also a lot of fun. The app supports dozens of seriously old-school effects, such as curvature distortion and ghosting, all of which are sure to make typing your documents more enjoyable (secretgeometry.com). —MARCO TABINI NIFTY MINIDRIVE Does the SDXC slot…

READER STEFFIE L IS concerned not about what her iOS device sees, but rather about what it hears. She writes: “With more and more apps listening in at all times on your iOS device, short of deleting the app, is there any way to control when this happens?” Under iOS 7, yes. One of the features introduced with this version of iOS is the ability to limit apps’ access to the device’s microphone. When you first launch an app that wants to use the microphone, you’ll see a dialog box asking whether to let the app do this. Tap OK to grant access. However, you can easily revoke this privilege at any time by going to Settings → Privacy → Microphone and toggling off the switches next to apps you…

Fintie The 360 Degrees Rotating Case Cover (iPad 2, 3, and 4; $30) is made from synthetic leather and features a dual layer with a cover that doubles as a stand in landscape orientation. The case, which is compatible with the iPad’s magnetic sleep/wake feature, comes in 25 color and pattern combinations (go.macworld.com/fintie360). TABLET2CASES The Cooper Postpad (iPad 2, 3, and 4; $50) is a folio-style case with a denim exterior and a microfiber interior for maximum protection and a unique look. It comes with a black or gray bezel. The case is compatible with the iPad’s magnetic sleep/wake feature, doubles as a stand in landscape orientation, and even includes a handy stylus loop (go.macworld.com/postpad). BUKCASE The Slims (iPad Air; about $50) is a collection of cases made in the…

CUT THE ROPE is one of the most successful iPhone games ever—a cheery, simple, well-crafted physics puzzle game in which you feed a series of sweets to a cute monster called Om Nom. He sits placidly but hungrily in one part of each level, and the sweet hangs in another. You maneuver the sweet to him by slicing through ropes, plumping air cushions, popping balloons, and generally harnessing the laws of physics via intuitive touchscreen gestures. ZeptoLab’s Cut the Rope 2 bears a resemblance to the original game, but includes a few new gameplay mechanics and cosmetic tweaks. The biggest change is the addition of helper monsters that vary according to the worlds you’ve completed. In the Sandy Dam world, you get a chubby lizard who sticks his tongue out…

YOU’RE A MASKED lord of Waterdeep, the legendary city of Dungeons & Dragons’ Forgotten Realms—a bustling metropolis run by secretive lords with political agendas. That’s the backdrop for Lords of Waterdeep, developed by Playdek and based on Wizards of the Coast’s popular tabletop board game. Don’t worry if you’re not a D&D aficionado—you don’t need any special knowledge of the classic role-playing game to play or enjoy Lords of Waterdeep. All you need is an interest in fantastical intrigue and a thirst for victory. Lords of Waterdeep is structured around quests in which you assume the identity of a lord (it’s hidden from your opponents). To complete quests, you amass resources, such as money and the four classic D&D adventurer types: fighters, wizards, clerics, and rogues. As you progress, you…

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” proclaimed Apple’s first marketing brochure. And that’s as true for the way you work as it is for the computer or phone you use: Just as Apple’s hardware eschews unnecessary add-ons and frills, you can benefit from paring what isn’t essential from your work style and focusing solely on what is. In that spirit, we offer a guide to ways in which you can simplify the nitty-gritty chores you handle every day: managing files and apps, dealing with email and social media, and arranging your physical workspace. In each case, simplifying means eliminating duplication and maximizing efficiency. It means that every app and file on your hard drive is there because it needs to be. It means not wasting time when managing messages, tweets, and…

If your email is completely under control—your Inbox is normally empty, filing new messages is a breeze, and you feel no anxiety at all about the number of email messages you receive every day or the number you’ve stored over the years—you can stop reading this article now. For everyone else, I have a few suggestions to help simplify your email experience. CONSOLIDATE YOUR ACCOUNTS Most email clients, such as Apple’s Mail (3.5/3.5 go.macworld.com/mail) and Microsoft Outlook (4.0/4.0 go.macworld.com/outlook), can handle as many accounts as you throw at them, and of course it’s often necessary to keep your work and personal accounts separate. But be honest: Do you really need email accounts from iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, your ISP, and so on? You can simplify your email by picking just…

How do you arrange your desktop? How do you manage the files on your Mac? How do you keep contacts and calendars organized? Every Mac user must answer these questions in his or her own way. But the big question is, are you doing all that stuff in the smartest, most efficient way possible? To help you answer that last question, we went to a handful of the smartest Mac users we know and asked them how they arrange their desktops, manage their files, and organize their contacts and calendars. Perhaps the answers they provide will help you reconsider the way you’ve been doing things—and find practical approaches to doing them smarter and more efficiently. Desktops • Marco Arment, Instapaper, The Magazine • Jim Dalrymple, The Loop • Faith Korpi,…

Not so long ago, people scrawled the names, numbers, and addresses of their contacts into personal phone books. Those were dark times. But in 2014, your Mac and iOS devices can sync your contacts for you, and store far more data than their paper predecessors could. Which of the many methods of dealing with contact information should you choose? I spoke with Apple experts Glenn Fleishman, John Moltz, Jaimee Newberry, David Sparks, and Marco Tabini about how they organize their contacts. The upshot: No one’s thrilled with how their current system organizes such data, but numerous approaches work “well enough.” How They Sync Contacts Making sure that you can access every address in your address book on all your devices is a top priority for contact management. Syncing contacts is…

You can cure the Twitter overload blues effortlessly by using lists to organize the accounts that you follow and to manage them more efficiently. MAKE A LIST WITH TWITTER.COM When you follow people on Twitter, their accounts get added to a single long list. Your timeline contains all the tweets (and retweets) from all those accounts. But you can create lists to organize the accounts you follow and view each list individually, unclogging your timeline. Create a list: To view and edit lists on the Twitter.com site, first log in, click the gear icon near the top, and choose Lists from the resulting pop-up menu. To start a new list, click the Create List button. Give the list a name, add a description, and decide whether to make it public…

Apple recently rolled out new versions of its productivity programs for OS X and iOS, introducing some features that the company promised last fall. Among the additions: iWork supports sharing password-protected documents via an iCloud link. Pages 5.1 adds vertical ruler and customizable alignment guides. And Numbers offers sorting for multiple columns or a subset of rows. Keynote 6.1 has “enhanced presenter display options,” but not Keynote ’09’s support for fully customizing a presenter display. It includes new transitions such as Droplet and Grid, better compatibility with Microsoft PowerPoint 2013, and preservation of custom number formats in charts imported from Keynote ’09 and PowerPoint. You can create charts with date, time, and duration values, too. Numbers 2.1 for iOS acquires the ability to display and permit editing of spreadsheets in…

Q&A This month, I answer questions about setting start and end times for tracks in the cloud, using smart playlists, and shunting iTunes media files to another location. Q: I bought an iPad Air, and I don’t plan on syncing it with my desktop computer because I download all of my iTunes music from the cloud. But as far as I can tell, I can’t edit the track length of songs on the iPad. Where is this simple feature? A: You’re describing a feature that lets you tell iTunes to start or end any track at a specific point. To access it, select a track, press 1-I, and click the Options tab. Next, enter a Start Time and/or Stop Time, and click OK. But as you say, this feature isn’t…

Batch-Rename Files for Free Q: For a couple of months I’ve been working on a project in which I created a few hundred files using the naming format ‘1.1 My File Name.txt’. I’ve just been told that I have to use a different naming format, ‘1_1_my_file_name.txt’, because of how the files are tracked in the company’s database. I don’t want to do this by hand. Do you have any tips for speeding up the process? via the Internet A: If you’re willing to cough up $20, Publicspace.net offers a great option in the form of A Better Finder Rename (see our review on page 16), as does Many Tricks with its $19 Name Mangler utility (manytricks.com/namemangler). Either tool is worth the money if you need to do this kind of…

For Macs, faster is always better, and you can try many things to get the most performance. But what can you rely on? We looked at some common claims. 1. More cores always means better performance. We ran benchmarks on two 2012 Mac Pros, one with 12 processing cores running at 2.4GHz and one with a quadcore processor at 3.2GHz. With an impressive MathematicaMark score of 5.70, the 12-core’s result was twice that of the quad-core. The 12-core Mac Pro also finished the Cinebench CPU test in half the time of the quad-core Mac Pro. In contrast, however, the 12-core Mac Pro posted slower times than the quadcore system did in our iTunes-encode, Aperture, and file-compression tests. While some pro apps can benefit from multiple processors, most consumer programs don’t…

Several weeks after Steve Jobs posed for the cover of the very first issue of Macworld, he changed his mind. He didn’t want to be on the cover anymore. So David Bunnell, the founder of Macworld, used one of the oldest tricks in publishing: He lied and claimed that the magazine was going to the presses. “I said, ‘Steve, it’s too late. The magazine is off to the printer; it’s on the presses as we talk. There’s nothing we can do about it,’” said Bunnell as he told the story to a crowd attending the Mac 30th Celebration (www.mac30th.com) on January 25 at the Flint Center (the site of the original Macintosh introduction) in Cupertino. In truth, the entire issue hadn’t yet shipped to the printer. The Mac isn’t the…

IF YOU DEAL with lots of files, you’ve likely had a few problems with naming. Say you have images titled IMG00001.jpg, IMG00002.jpg, and so on, and you’d like to give them descriptive names—without doing so one at a time. A batch-renaming utility simplifies the chore. One advanced tool is the nicely designed A Better Finder Rename (aka Better Rename 9 in the Mac App Store). ABFR arranges options in groups, letting you base the renaming on, say, adding or inserting text at a specific spot, or truncating names to a certain number of characters. It also allows you to create “droplets”—mini-apps that perform sets of renaming actions whenever you drop files on them—as well as to create sequences of actions. More critically, the app lets you use regular expressions to…

MANAGEMENT GURU David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy, in simple terms, encourages people to finish tasks they can do easily, and to put aside thornier jobs until they have ample time. Mail Pilot, which seems inspired by that concept, reshapes your email workflow, turning your inbox into a to-do list. You can check off a message and send it to your archive, postpone it, add it to similar messages for later review, or set it aside until you can give it more attention. The client supports only IMAP. Setting up my Gmail account was a snap, but an Office 365 work account gave me a little trouble; Mail Pilot’s thorough help files revealed the solution. Messages from both accounts then appeared in a unified stream. You can drill into accounts…

PIXELMATOR 3.1 Marble is the newest iteration of an image editor that’s often regarded as the hobbyist’s alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Following on the heels of Pixelmator 3.0 FX, this refresh was timed to coincide with Apple’s release of the new Mac Pro. This full-service image editor has an extensive, Photoshop-like toolbar that offers traditional controls for editing, compositing, and enhancing images, as well as for drawing and painting. The program also supplies a wide range of special effects. Layer styles, liquify tools, and a revised editing engine highlighted the features introduced in 3.0 FX, which was tailored to Apple’s Mavericks operating system. With version 3.1, Pixelmator adds 16-bit performance, so you can open and edit highbit-depth files—saving and converting to 16-bit, however, are reserved for the Mac Pro. Overall,…

FOUR YEARS AGO I reviewed the Synapse, a fantastic compact backpack. I liked it so much, I bought the review sample. Now Tom Bihn has a model with 30 percent more volume, the Synapse 25. Like the original (renamed the Synapse 19), the Synapse 25 uses exceptionally sturdy nylon. The straps are comfortable. Inside is a quarter-inch of closed-cell foam padding. Empty, the bag weighs a fairly light 1.7 pounds. You can pick from ten color combinations. Its 25-liter (1526-cubic-inch) capacity is split across a large main compartment and five exterior pockets. But the big addition is the incorporation of two sets of webbing loops for Tom Bihn’s clever "rails" system. This design allows the backpack to accommodate two Cache sleeves ($35 each with a pair of clips), which offer…

Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels: Lately, it seems not a week goes by without some major retailer informing customers that its payment systems have been compromised, potentially affecting millions of cardholders (go.macworld.com/cardfraud). That’s on top of the myriad scams that happen every day on a much smaller scale, costing consumers and businesses billions annually. As plastic has increasingly replaced cash over the years, the financial industry has worked hard to tighten its grip over payment networks in an effort to curtail fraud—with mixed results. That’s due largely to the fact that the weakest links in the long chain of providers involved in a credit card charge lie outside the industry’s control. The best solution to this problem may already reside in your pocket: Your phone could be the key to a…

A new proposal for a mandatory kill switch on mobile devices in California figures to have ramifications far beyond the borders of the Golden State should it pass. The bill, introduced by State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), would require any mobile device sold in the state to come with a digital kill switch that would render it useless if a thief ever nabbed it. The idea is to put a dent in the rising incidence of smartphone thefts. That sounds great for California—but what if you live in another state? By virtue of its size, California has enough pull to make kill switches a standard feature on mobile devices. The bill proposes fines ranging from $500 to $2500 per device for retailers who sell a device without kill-switch technology…

I SPEND A LOT of time listening to music on my iPhone, and I’m always looking to improve the quality of my device’s audio. GoodHertz’s $1 CanOpener for Headphones tackles a problem inherent to listening to music through headphones (or “cans”). External speakers blend the left and right signals to make music sound full and natural. Headphones can’t produce that cross-feed effect, instead isolating left and right signals. CanOpener addresses the issue by mixing a bit of one channel into the other and letting you adjust the crossfeed amount and angle. It also provides customizable EQ options and contains a database of headphones and earbuds with built-in tweaks. (It works with other models minus those enhancements; you can add your headphones to the database if you know their sensitivity and…

DARK SKY HAS long been one of my favorite weather apps for the iPhone, and I’m excited to see it fully redesigned for iOS 7. The app has ditched its dark textures for a gray-andblack palette reminiscent of The Dark Sky Company’s Web-based weather service, Forecast.io. Dark Sky opens to an overview of the current location’s weather, with a blurred radar map in the background. The initial screen offers the next hour’s predictions, the current temperature and whether it’s heading up or down, the feels-like temperature, and the nearest storm. Tap the temperature to get wind, humidity and dew point, atmospheric pressure, and visibility. A rain and snow notification can buzz your phone with an alert. Dark Sky holds its own with other full-featured iOS weather apps, but the new…

I CAN DO A LOT on my iOS devices, but sometimes I need to access my Mac from my iPad or iPhone. That’s when I turn to Edovia’s Screens 3. It’s as close as you can get to sitting in front of your Mac when you’re not there. It even works for Windows and Linux users. Screens is speedy, its interface gets out of the way when you don’t need it, and it’s good-looking. It also has many advanced features: You can use your Bluetooth keyboard paired with your iOS device to control the Mac, for instance, and you can display the Mac’s screen on an Apple TV via AirPlay. One feature I rely on is Screens’ secure connections. If you enable Remote Login on your Mac, Screens can tunnel…

My Mac is home to well over a million files. To be sure, a few hundred thousand of those are components of OS X itself or of the many applications I’ve installed. Nevertheless, the number of user-generated files I have accumulated over the years astonishes me. Most of the time, those files just sit there minding their own business. But sometimes—for example, when I do a Spotlight search for a document and thousands of potential matches pop up—I start thinking that a bit of file simplification is in order. Now in this context, simplify could mean delete—but it doesn’t have to. I might need a certain file only once in a span of several years, but that doesn’t necessarily make it safe to delete. Depending on the situation, simplification might…

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can serve many worthwhile purposes, both personal and professional. They can also turn into a huge time sink—not only distracting you from more useful pursuits, but also dragging you down psychologically, what with all the snarky remarks, intolerant posts, and general insanity the medium seems to induce. I’m not suggesting that you give up on social media altogether, but I do recommend taking steps to increase its ratio of signal (worthwhile opinions and comments) to noise (anything you consider a waste of time). While you’re at it, you might apply similar principles to one-way media such as RSS feeds and Webbased newsreaders. SIMPLIFY TWITTER I choose the people I follow on Twitter very carefully, and I try to keep the total number…

These days I work on a 13-inch MacBook Air. On workdays I connect it to a second display—a 17-inch ViewSonic monitor. My laptop serves as the primary screen, with my Dock at the bottom, and windows arranged somewhat haphazardly: Almost all apps live on the right (laptop) display, with extra Safari windows offloaded to the second monitor. This approach feels completely normal to me, but other people have other desktop setups—and it’s interesting to look at how other folks use their Macs, because their approach might influence how you choose to arrange your system. One thing I learned from talking to several people about how they use their Macs is that a lot of them (like me) don’t use Spaces, Mission Control, or Full Screen apps. But what do they…

Many years ago, I managed my calendar by keeping a Post-it note scrawled with details about important upcoming meetings. That strategy hasn’t worked since the late 1990s, though. Today, I rely on Google Calendar to keep my appointments synced between my Mac and my iOS devices. In addition, I use Fantastical (go.macworld.com/fantasticalmac) and Apple’s Calendar on my Mac, Fantastical on the iPhone, and Calendar on the iPad. I’m okay with my approach, but some Apple power users I spoke to use alternative methods that are worth considering. Jacqui Cheng Jacqui Cheng is the editor-in-chief of The Wirecutter (thewirecutter.com). Like me, she uses Google Calendar as the “main hub” for all her calendar syncing. “This started back when I still had an office job and was using a Windows PC to…

Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer and CEO Tim Cook touched on a range of topics during the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call (see page 12), but one theme surfaced repeatedly: the rise of iOS devices in enterprise environments. Though Apple has traditionally reminded investors that more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use its products in some form, it hasn’t raised the point multiple times in a call, as Oppenheimer and Cook did this time. Early in the call, when discussing the iPhone and iOS 7, Oppenheimer said that iOS 7 has received the federal government’s FIPS 140-2 certification, which allows various federal agencies to use the mobile operating system. Notably, government contractors and companies in tightly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare tend to view FIPS certification…

The portability and light weight of in-ear headphones are great when you’re running or working out at the gym—they effectively block out the sounds of the outside world. But the earbuds are so close to your eardrums that any sudden spike in volume will make you jump, and the cord tends to create noise as it swings around. The five models I tried recently—from Beats, Bose, Bowers & Wilkins, Harman/Kardon, and Shure—balance the pros and cons of in-ears in different ways. I found something to like in all of them. SHURE SE215 Shure’s years of experience making in-ear headphones shine through in some userfriendly touches that the Shure SE215 ($100; go.macworld.com/se215) includes. For example, the last 3 inches of the SE215’s cables are wrapped in a bendable plastic covering that…

If you’ve invested in high-quality headphones or speakers, you can use an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to help those components reach their full potential. Many external DACs also offer significantly better headphone amplification than you’d get through your computer unaided, with tighter and stronger bass, increased clarity and detail, better separation of instruments and notes, and other subtle improvements. These changes bring you closer to your music. INCONSPICUOUS OFFERINGS The best values for computer-focused DACs are the size of a deck of cards or smaller, and receive audio and power from your computer’s USB port. Some time ago I reviewed (go.macworld.com/arcamrev) Arcam’s rPAC ($249; 4.0/4.0 go.macworld.com/arcam); it impressed me with its build and sound quality. But a number of rival models offer strong competition to the Arcam in price, size,…

Founder, Belle Helmets WHAT DO YOU DO? I specialize in designing hand-painted helmets for cyclists in hopes of making safety more fashionable (bellehelmets.com). I’m also a freelance art director. WHAT HARDWARE DO YOU USE? My computer, a 21.5-inch iMac, lives in my studio. Its portable companion, the iPhone 5s, lives a busy life in an OtterBox. Both devices communicate with my HP Laser-Jet Pro 200, which excels at both mundane and elaborate tasks. I’ve had a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet since eighth grade; and I still use it for drawing in Photoshop, but I prefer to draw on paper. My sketchbooks are just sheets of loose printer paper arranged in folders. That way, they’re easier to photograph: I can lay them flat, sort them easily, and view them together as…

Combatting worries that Apple’s days of innovation might be behind it, CEO Tim Cook recently spoke to the Wall Street Journal and reiterated that Apple isn’t sitting on its hands. While the early-February Journal article focused on Apple’s repurchasing $14 billion of its own stock in the span of two weeks, Cook also teased that something mysterious is in the pipeline. “There will be new categories. We’re not ready to talk about it, but we’re working on some really great stuff,” Cook said. This isn’t his first time promising new products. In April 2013, during Apple’s second-quarter financial conference call, he mentioned “the strength of our incredible ecosystem, which we plan to continue to augment with services, our plans for expanded distribution, and the potential of exciting new product categories.”…

IF IMITATION IS the sincerest form of flattery, might the folks in Cupertino be pleased with the latest version of North Korea’s homegrown operating system? Version 3.0 of Red Star Linux boasts a radical refresh of its desktop design, one that closely resembles Mac OS X. The Korea Computer Center, based in Pyongyang, began developing Red Star about a decade ago. Version 3 appears to have been released in the middle of last year. The world has gotten its first look at version 3 thanks to Will Scott, a computer scientist who recently taught at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, North Korea’s first foreignfunded university. Scott said that he bought the operating system at a KCC dealer in the capital city. Most North Koreans are unable to access…

AS ITS NAME implies, Duplicate Detective exists solely to locate duplicate files on your Mac and then, if you wish, fling them into the Trash. Launch it and drag a folder or volume into its window. It seeks out exact duplicates by comparing files’ hash strings. If the strings match, it deems the files duplicates; if not (if one file is a PNG image and the other is a JPEG, for example), it excludes the files from its tally. If you have hundreds of thousands of files, the process can take ages. Scan a folder rather than a volume for faster results. (During long scans, the program shows humorous messages such as “So, how’s your day going?” to indicate that it hasn’t locked up.) When the job is done, you…

THE HP COLOR LaserJet Pro M177fw offers impressive output, but its low price tag means compromises in speed, features, and toner costs. The 3-inch touchscreen makes the MFP simple to operate. Paper capacity is limited on this low-volume unit: It comes equipped with a 150-page, open-faced input tray, a 50-page output tray, and a 35-page automatic document feeder (which was noisy on our test model). The MFP offers assistance for manual-duplex printing. For a laser printer, it renders photos exceptionally well, generating little graininess and a rather cool but attractive palette. Text and mono-chrome graphics are equally outstanding, appearing sharp and black. Its econo-mode saves a lot of toner but still produces legible text. The M177fw suffers from the slow performance that typically afflicts low-cost color lasers. Text and monochrome…

THE PEGASUS2 R6 12TB RAID box is the first Thunderbolt 2 peripheral to reach the Macworld Lab. Loaded with six 7200-rpm hard drives and preconfigured as a RAID 5 array, the box lets you convert it to RAID 0, 1, 10, or JBOD using the included software. Its two Thunderbolt 2 ports permit you to daisy-chain up to six compatible devices. We tested it using a Mac Pro with Thunderbolt 2, keeping the Pegasus2 in its RAID 5 configuration. We also ran the tests on a first-gen Pegasus R6 with the same drives as the Pegasus2 has. The Pegasus2 achieved a rate of nearly 900 megabytes per second when reading and writing in our 6GB files-and-folders test, finishing about 20 percent faster than the earlier Pegasus. In our 6GB large-file…

AS A TOOL FOR writing, Writer Pro represents a new concept. Whether it’s right for you depends on whether your workflow and your writing philosophy match those of the developers. It functions in four modes: Note, Write, Edit, and Read. Your document starts in Note mode. When you switch to Write, you see your notes, but they’re in a different font. This structure is jarring—the only differences among the modes are the fonts and the cursor colors, and they’re hard-coded. For instance, though a monospace font is available in Write, it isn’t in Edit, where I would need it most (to confirm that my code is correct). And I don’t see the point of Read mode: It’s the same as Edit, except that you can’t change anything. Read mode would…

Apple will continue to rely on chip designer Imagination Technologies for multimedia rendering technologies included in its iPhones and iPads. Imagination, which designs graphics cores, recently announced the extension of a multiyear licensing deal giving Apple access to Imagination’s graphics and video intellectual property. Apple will be able to tweak the graphics cores to fit in the A-series chips it uses in its mobile devices. Apple has touted the strong graphics capabilities of the iPhone and iPad, and Imagination’s technology underlies that strength. Apple is an investor in the company, which may have triggered the decision to extend the agreement, says Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research. Graphics technology can also be difficult to develop, so the extension could indicate that Apple prefers to rely on outside providers in…

HUM Sensitive singer-songwriters might appreciate Hum (go.macworld.com/hum), a $2 iPhone app that helps musical folks create new songs. They can keep notes on lyrics, sing and record ideas for tunes, and share the results easily with fellow musicians. A recent update increases the clarity of text notes and fixes some minor bugs in the software.—JOEL MATHIS TOCOMAIL The developers of Tocomail (go.macworld.com/tocomail) bill it as “safe email for kids.” The free iOS app and service lets kids have their own email address, but offers parents the safety of being able to supervise their child’s contact lists: Tocomail quarantines email messages coming from people outside the list until the parent gives approval to that particular contact. Some of the features are available only in the $3-a-month premium version.—JOEL MATHIS ESSENTIAL ANATOMY…

I REALLY WANTED to like Natural Motion’s Clumsy Ninja, but after a few hours of level grinding with no payoff, the game felt more like a chore than a diversion. Initially, you can find a lot to like in Clumsy Ninja. The ninja you train is cute and likeable, and he moves very naturally, whether he’s bumbling on the training grounds or spinning in circles in midair. And the gorgeous renderings of training areas and devices make the game a pleasure to look at. To transform your clumsy ninja into more of a master, you train him with devices: trampolines, punching bags, battle dummies, and more. To move through levels, you must earn points by completing training sessions with these devices. For the first couple of hours, the sessions are…

IT’S HARD TO GET too excited about a smartphone mount. It sticks to something and holds your phone. But I’ve been using iMagnet’s $25 iMagnet Mount for Smartphone for a while, and I’m impressed. Instead of the standard rubbery suction cup, the iMagnet Mount uses a sticky, silicone-gel cup that stays on remarkably well. The mount doesn’t leave a mark when you remove it, and you can wash the gel surface if it gets dirty to restore its Dyson-like suction power. The mount worked well on my car’s windshield and dashboard, as well as on my kitchen counter and cabinets. The iMagnet Mount gets itsname from the magnetic slab on the mount end—so you need to put some metal on your phone to make it stick. The smartphone mount kit…

IT TAKES A LOT TO hook me on an iOS game. I stare at screens for most of my workday, and social networks and the occasional TV show are just about the only thing I can make leisure time for. But recently I’ve been obsessed with a tiny little numbercrunching game: Threes. Math-phobic folks, don’t let the name and the numberfilled gameplay scare you off: Threes is much more about spatial awareness than it is about complicated mathematics. The goal boils down to adding ones and twos together to make threes, and then combining those threes with other threes to make sixes, sixes to make 12s, 12s to make 24s, and so on. The mechanics for doing so are clever and unique: The number tiles live on a four-by-four grid,…

Every time I read about a new Mac or iOS app in a category of software I use, I think to myself, “Oh, cool—that might save me some time and effort.” I download the app and test it out, but more often than not, I quickly conclude that my previous solution was just as good, and I leave the new app sitting on my Mac unused and soon to be forgotten. From then on, whenever I see the app, I feel a vague, low-level anxiety. But still I accumulate more apps, and the cycle repeats. No longer. Now I’m on a mission to simplify my selection of apps by choosing fewer, better tools; learning them well; and deleting the rest. REDUCE DECISION-MAKING Why should it matter that I have so…

The closets, shelves, and drawers in my office are full of aging technology, from old Macs and iPhones to keyboards, cables, and adapters of every description. I’ve accumulated a lifetime’s worth of office supplies. Unneeded (or seldom-used) objects have a way of interposing themselves between me and the Useful Object I Need Right Now. So I’m working to simplify my home office—not only by purging stuff but also by rearranging furniture and electronics to reduce the time I waste searching for things instead of doing productive work. If your office could do with some simplification too, these ideas might help nudge you in the right direction. OPTIMIZE YOUR OFFICE LAYOUT Your office may or may not afford you much flexibility when it comes to the placement of things like desks…

Computers are the ultimate file cabinets. My Mac stores my photos, my music, and thousands of text and Word documents. But the stack of papers in my home office’s To Be Filed box could make a grown man cry, and I’m afraid the files on my Mac aren’t organized any better. They’re in a single folder, with no other taxonomy in place. The point of organizing your files is to make them easy to find the next time you need them. People have devised a multitude of approaches to organizing and then locating files. I set out to discover how experts tackle both tasks. John Siracusa Macworld senior contributor, podcaster, and OS X reviewer John Siracusa (hypercritical.co) organizes his files “by category, from general to specific.” Mostly. “I tend to…

My new home—a converted barn—is located in the English countryside, on the edge of small village a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. Cellular service from my provider (EE) is very poor there. Sometimes I get a single bar of 3G service, at other times I am stuck with slower EDGE or GPRS, and at still others I get no service at all. As for Internet access, my neighbors warned me that the best I could expect was about 2 megabits per second. Since my work often involves downloading extremely large files, I needed better speed—and I needed it right away. My only viable option for fast Internet service was satellite broadband from Tooway. Satellite Internet service boasts high speeds but has many drawbacks. My satellite provider claims to offer download speeds…

After more than 13 years of public use, my email address gets a ton of spam—typically between 50 and 150 pieces each day. When I’m working on my computer at home, my mail host spots the offending messages, and Mail’s rules move them out of my inbox. As a result, the messages don’t clutter up my inbox. THE SPAM PROBLEM When I’m away from my home Mac, however, spam messages get delivered to my local device. At some hotels, such delivery can mean a long wait (followed by a lot of manual mail management) before I get to my important messages. The obvious solution is to filter spam on the server side into a special folder, so that it never gets delivered. You use a Web-based tool to review flagged…

Ian ideal listening environment, with perfect music files and perfect headphones, you wouldn’t need to boost bass or tweak treble—so your iOS device wouldn’t need an equalizer. But most of us spend time listening through less-than-perfect headphones on the train, at the gym, on city streets, and in other situations that from an aural perspective are less than ideal. That’s where EQ can make a big difference. EQ adjusts audio signals at particular frequencies, relative to other frequencies. A person with fairly good ears has a hearing range of 20Hz–20kHz (20,000Hz), with bass residing in the lower frequencies and treble tones at the higher end of the range. When you apply EQ to music, you can raise or lower specific frequencies. iOS’S BUILT-IN EQ Go to Settings → Music in…

SHARE TEXT SHORTCUTS BETWEEN iOS AND OS X Hints reader EPunisher1 came across a nifty feature in OS X and iOS by pure accident: Any keyboard text shortcuts you create in iOS (under Settings → General → Keyboard → Shortcuts) are shared via iCloud with OS X. In his case, he was in Messages on his Mac when he accidentally typed ‘eag’—a shortcut he had created in iOS so that he could quickly insert his work email address. But when he typed that shortcut on his Mac and pressed <Space>, the shortcut autofilled his email address into the message. He then tried typing some of his other iOS shortcuts, and they all autocompleted. Opening the Text tab in the System Preferences Keyboard pane, he found all of his iOS shortcuts…