Inhoudsopgave van November 2013 - Macworld

One Monday night not long ago, after I had fallen asleep, my Twitter timeline exploded briefly. Folks on the West Coast were unhappy that their iPhones had blasted to life with noisy notifications—alerts that had apparently ignored their Do Not Disturb settings. The reason: Authorities had issued an Amber Alert after discovering a horrific crime scene and evidence of a potential kidnapping. iOS and other smartphone operating systems have supported Amber Alerts for a while, but they also require carrier support; some carriers introduced support for the alerts only recently. The immediate reaction to an unexpected alert on your iPhone at 11 p.m. is understandably surprise, annoyance, and maybe even anger. But armed with a little knowledge about why the alerts exist, what they mean, and how you can control…

Apple has a long history of making tower computers that weren’t just tall, heavy-duty systems aimed only at power users. The design and style of its towers have always made them stand out from a skyline of beige PC towers. Here’s how those designs have evolved. Macintosh Quadra 700 1991 You might not consider the Quadra 700 to be a tower, since it was essentially a Mac IIcx case standing on its side. The Quadra 700 was released in October 1991, and had a 25MHz Motorola 68040 processor. It had two NuBus slots and a PDS (processordirect slot), and employed SCSI to connect to external hard drives. Macintosh Quadra 950 1992 The follow-up to the Quadra 900, the 950 is the machine that some people consider to be the first…

At a conference in May, Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned that the company had already acquired nine companies in 2013; this summer, it acquired a few more. Locationary The Toronto-based Locationary is a startup focused on improving data about local businesses. It pulls the location information from various sources, then aggregates and reconciles it, ensuring that the data provided to users is complete and up-to-date. Such efforts seem important to Apple, whose mapping service continues to suffer from incomplete or inaccurate local data. Interestingly, Locationary CEO and founder Grant Ritchie penned a piece last fall for tech-industry news site Tech-Crunch, detailing “5 Big Map App Issues Apple Must Solve.” That article may well have come to the attention of folks in Cupertino. It focused on the difficulty of handling point-of-interest…

At Apple’s September iPhone event, we managed to get our hands on both of the company’s new smartphone models. Here are our first impressions. iPhone 5s When the iPhone 5s was only a rumor, much was made about the anticipated gold color option. But it turns out not to be some crazy, Vegas-style iPhone. Instead, it’s a muted gold equivalent of the iPhone 5’s silver. The gold iPhone 5s has a white front and a gold metallic finish on the sides and back. The new “space gray” iPhone is basically the old black iPhone, with the slate metal shade changed to a dark gray. (Space, by the way, is black—not gray—but maybe someone in Apple’s brain trust objected to “matter gray.”) In briefly using the iPhone 5s, we found it…

In August, Apple snapped up Passif Semiconductor, a maker of low-energy computer chips. The deal underscores Apple’s interest in controlling key technologies—such as wireless tech—that go into its products. Connectivity between devices will become even more important with the rise of Bluetooth LE (low energy), which targets low-power devices such as those used for fitness, security, and healthcare. More and more, Apple’s mobile products are interacting with smartwatches, fitness devices, and the like. The forthcoming iOS 7 is expected to include iBeacons, a technology that allows devices to collect data such as location via Bluetooth LE. And users may soon be able to use Bluetooth to configure their Apple TV. The low-energy part of the spec is crucial, as Bluetooth iPhone accessories are notoriously demanding on battery life. With control…

StoryPress for iPad PRODUCTIVITY If you’ve ever wanted to craft your own biography—or to collect your parents’ or grandparents’ stories—GhostGear Labs’ free StoryPress (go.macworld.com/storypress) is the place to start. It helps you record oral histories that sound nearly as polished and professional as the StoryCorps pieces that run on NPR. After logging in to StoryPress with an email address or your Facebook account, you enter your name and the year of your birth, and then create a cover for your first book. The cover includes the title, an icon from a list provided by StoryPress, and a photo from your iPad library. Next you select a method to record your tale. Select Dictation if you know the story you want to tell—just tap a button in the app and start…

The PC market as a whole may be shrinking, but one segment of the market that isn’t declining is the Mac. Even as the Mac makes up an ever-diminishing portion of Apple’s overall revenues, the Mac’s popularity has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade. Mac Shipments Up In 2003, Apple shipped just more than 3 million Macs worldwide, the majority of which were desktop PCs. At the time, the Mac was the largest contributor to Apple’s bottom line, accounting for more than 72 percent of Apple revenue. Jump ahead to Apple’s 2012 financial year: The company sold more than 18 million Macs, and yet those Mac sales amounted to less than 15 percent of Apple’s bottom line. How does that happen? The most significant shift in Apple’s…

Though the iPod still generates billions of dollars in revenue for Apple each year, it’s clear that the portable digital music player’s heyday has passed—not that anyone in Cupertino is likely to be too concerned about that. When the iPod debuted on October 23, 2001, it didn’t start out as a smash hit. It was not the first portable digital music player, of course, and it then worked only with the Mac. It also earned scorn from some people for having no wireless capability and for offering less space than its competitors. Apple sold just 125,000 iPods in its first few months. But soon the iPod exploded in popularity. In 2002, Apple made PC-compatible iPods, added more storage capacity, and lowered the prices. And in October 2003, two years after…

If you have an Apple ID, then you have an iCloud email account. This free account gives you up to 5GB of storage for your messages, minus what you use for documents and other data you store in the cloud. It’s easy to work with your iCloud email in Apple’s Mail, either on the Mac or on an iOS device. Still, you may not know about the many options and features available if you log in to iCloud via the Web. Before you can take advantage of the following five tips, you need to turn on iCloud. Even if you have an Apple ID for use on the iTunes store, you may never have set up iCloud; for details on doing so, see go.macworld.com/icloudsetup. 1. Access Email Anywhere While you…

Hardware Buffalo DriveStation DDR 4.0/4.0; $180; Buffalo Technologies; www.buffalotech.com In the DriveStation DDR (HD-GD2.0U3), Buffalo offers the large storage capacity of a hard drive plus speeds rivaling those of a solid-state drive. It accomplishes this feat by pairing a 2TB hard drive with a 1GB DDR3 RAM cache. After Macworld Lab clocked the write speed at a swift 225.6 MBps, we removed the hard drive from the enclosure to test it without the cache, and got a speed of 178.1 MBps. This means the cache provided a 27 percent speed boost. In write speed, the DriveStation DDR outperformed comparable USB 3.0 drives such as CalDigit’s 3TB AV Pro and Seagate’s 1TB Backup Plus. However, in repeated tests file-read speeds slowed, from 180.4 MBps to 150.1 MBps, a decrease of nearly…

This month’s column deals with solutions to problems that use little-known features of iTunes or third-party software. The questions this time can be solved only with a workaround, or by using iTunes in a way it’s not designed to work Q: I have tracks on a CD that, when ripped with iTunes, have skips and clicks. Is there any way I can fix this? A: It’s possible that there’s a problem with the CD itself; you can test it by playing it on a CD player. If it plays correctly, then the CD is fine, and your computer is just having trouble ripping it. In that case, however, there’s an interesting workaround that may get you clean audio files. Insert the CD in your Mac’s drive, and double-click its icons…

Ilooked at four premium noise-canceling models to see if they live up to their hype (and price tags). Audio-Technica ATHANC9 QuietPoint Active A unique feature of the ATHANC9 QuietPoint Active headphones is that it offers three modes of noise-canceling operation. Mode 1 is meant for use during airplane, train, or bus travel. Mode 2 is intended for use in noisy offices or crowded environments; and Mode 3 aims to enhance quiet environments. I found the ANC9’s noise-canceling circuitry very effective in my tests, and the different modes of operation worked as claimed. The ANC9 offers good sound for a noise-canceling headphone set, and it’s light and comfortable. A single AAA battery powers the ANC9. You can use it without power, but then you lose the noise-canceling functionality. The bad news…

Hands-On Though Shutterfly has long turned digital files into photo prints—and novelty items from mugs to fleece blankets to photo books—none of those items could talk. Now, an iPad app called Shutterfly Photo Story (go.macworld.com/photostory) lets you create online and hard-copy photo books on your tablet, complete with audio narration. To use the free Shutterfly app to produce a stylish photo book, just follow the prompts. A manual is there if you need it, but I didn’t. Photo Story hard-copy books are available in three sizes and three cover types (soft, hard, and padded). Decide and Conquer Shutterfly Photo Story uses images stored on your iPad to compose your book. The opening screen has settings and help icons that walk you through the process. In the Create panel, you decide…

Some scenes are simply too epic to fit into an ordinary picture frame. Consider this: Your usual field of vision is about 200 degrees, but a typical digital camera can see only about a quarter of that—which is why a photo of a breathtaking vista can look a lot less impressive than the actual view you remember. In the old days, people sometimes made massive panoramas by arduously combining multiple photos, using a razor and tape. These days, whether you have a camera or a smartphone, technology makes the task easier: With just a few clicks, you can capture a large vista in an impressively oversize panoramic photo. Panoramas by Phone When it comes to making panoramas, most iPhone owners have it easy: They just turn on panorama mode (available…

Disable Caps Lock (or at Least Get a Warning) Few of us ever really want Caps Lock turned on; when we do hit that dreaded keyboard toggle, we do so accidentally. One workaround is to disable Caps Lock. Go to System Preferences, and select the Keyboard preference pane. Under the Keyboard tab, click the Modifier Keys button. Finally, using the drop-down menu, set Caps Lock to No Action (or have it pull side duty as a bonus 1, <Control>, or <Option> key). But what about folks who want the option to quickly enter a mode for NONSTOP CAPITALIZATION, yet still wish to avoid triggering said mode by mistake? For those troubled typists, the answer is the free utility CapSee (www.threemagination.com). Install it, and your Mac displays an unmissable on-screen indicator…

Who are you, and what do you do? I’m Mike Monteiro. I’m a designer by trade, and the design director at Mule Design (muledesign.com). I suppose I’m also a writer. Both are accidental. What hardware do you use? I just got a new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, so I’m still in the honeymoon phase. I spend a lot of time staring at the screen and saying, “Wow, that’s nice.” I also have an iMac at work that’s getting a little long in the tooth; it’ll probably be put out to pasture as soon as Apple revs their displays and I get one to hook up to the MBP. But that’s all boring. My secret hardware weapon sits on the corner of my desk. It’s a phone. Plugged in to the…

iPhone-a-Palooza THE JOBS MOVIE: NOT SO SPECIAL For all Jobs did for the entertainment industry, it’s a travesty that Zuckerberg got a biopic directed by David Fincher and that this film is directed by that guy who directed that other movie no one’s ever heard of. Even worse, it ends in 2001! nonlinearmind3o8n, via Macworld.com THE LOW-COST iPHONE Many companies have approached the features vs. price problem by introducing a new, lower-price brand. If the marketing is well executed, customers for the lower-price line will feel good knowing they’re “really” getting an Apple phone, while high-end customers won’t feel their brand’s status has been cheapened. RobLewis, via Macworld.com Apple makes most of the profit in the industry, despite selling less than half the phones (and probably selling only in the…

Although every biopic takes its share of liberties with the facts, Jobs doesn’t wander too far from the historical record in its big-screen retelling of the Apple cofounder’s life. Still, some people and institutions may have a beef with the movie. Jef Raskin: Jef Raskin appears in two scenes in Jobs, the first as the bumbling head of the faltering Macintosh team and the second as he cleans out his desk, having been given the bum’s rush. That hardly seems a fair depiction of a man sometimes dubbed the Father of the Macintosh. Raskin’s influence on user interfaces, particularly when it came to the Mac’s legendary ease of use, is undisputed. He also kept the Mac project going in the early days. Arthur Rock: Every movie needs a villain, and…

Yojimbo 4.0 Bare Bones Software’s $30 ($20 upgrade) information organizer now has a $3-per-month Mac-to-Mac sync subscription through Wasabi Sync. You can still use any one of your Macs to sync with Yojimbo for iPad through Wi-Fi. Yojimbo 4.0 is being released directly through Bare Bones’ website only. Bare Bones says it will offer its assistance for users who previously bought Yojimbo in the Mac App Store and want to transition to a license for the new version (barebones.com).—LEX FRIEDMAN Satechi Desk Mat & Mate The $35 Satechi Desk Mat & Mate is less a Mac accessory and more a desk accessory, but it ensures that your desk’s surfaces remain protected against scratches from your computer. It’s made of synthetic leather, it’s easy to wipe down, and it comes in…

Lose 50 pounds, the doctor told me, and then we can start to talk about taking the kinds of steps that’ll make you happy and healthy for the long term. Maybe, he added, you should think about bariatric surgery. I thought about it...for about 5 seconds. Then I rejected the idea. After a lifetime of poor and inconsistent eating and exercise habits, I’d arrived at age 40 desperately out of shape—a weight that measured (ahem) somewhere in the upper 200s—with some preliminary warning signs that the remainder of my life might be a) unpleasant and b) not all that lengthy if I didn’t turn things around. No shortcuts out of that, I decided. It was time to revamp my entire lifestyle. Two months later, I’ve made a good start. I’m…

Amazon’s Kindle iOS app (go.macworld.com/kindleiosrev) is great for reading, but it doesn’t let you search for or buy books directly from Amazon. The fault lies with Apple’s rule: Anything sold in the App Store must render unto Apple a 30 percent cut. For most ebooks at its store, Amazon allows you to download a free sample and then buy the full version if you decide you want it. Because the samples are free, they’re not subject to Apple’s 30 percent rule. Now Amazon has added the ability to search for and download free samples inside its Kindle iOS app: Tap the magnifying-glass icon and enter a name or a title. Earlier versions of the app gave search results only from your own library; now the results also list Kindle Free…

Hardware Belkin Grip Power Battery Case; $100; Belkin; belkin.com Packing a 2000mAh battery, the Grip Power Battery Case consists of a main battery portion that plugs into your iPhone 5 and a thin frame that snaps around the front. The attractive backing plastic on the case felt a little cheap in my hand. The Grip Power intentionally protrudes beyond the screen, for a bit of extra protection if you ever drop the phone and it lands screen-side down. The Micro-USB port is on the side of the case, which works fine. Instead of a little groove for you to use in prying apart and removing the case, a tiny tab protrudes from the unit’s right side. This is the case’s best feature—it’s easy to grip, and it makes shucking off…

The iPhone is not only Apple’s most prominent and iconic product at present, it’s also the most important to the company’s bottom line. But that significance also means that competitors have painted a big bull’s-eye on the iPhone’s back—and uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. The Apple of Apple’s Eye Right now, no arena is more contentious for Apple—with more and more competition—than the smartphone market. Although the company isn’t yet in the position of living or dying by the iPhone’s sales figures, it’s impossible to dispute that the iPhone is the crown jewel of Apple’s product line. In 2012, Apple sold 125 million iPhones, which accounted for more than half of the company’s revenue that year. Were the bottom to fall out of the smartphone market tomorrow,…

Whether you prefer a laptop or an iPad as your mobile workstation, you can’t use it alone—you need to bring along other stuff to make it truly useful and to protect it from road hazards. You don’t need to spend a bundle, though: There are plenty of affordable options. Here’s the budget-priced gear we recommend you take on your next road trip. GRIFFIN TECHNOLOGY ELEVATOR, LOGITECH K760 A laptop stand and an external keyboard can make using your laptop a lot more comfortable when you are back at your desk. The Elevator (griffintechnology.com) is a solid stand with a budget price of $40. Logitech’s $80 Wireless Solar Keyboard K760 (logitech.com) offers great, Mac-focused keys in a compact package. Ambient light charges its battery, and the K760 can link (via Bluetooth)…

You can use Apple’s Disk Utility to convert a folder into an encrypted disk image—a protected archive that you unlock with a password. Such images are particularly helpful when you’re working on confidential company documents away from the office or when your business card reads “International Person of Mystery.” But the truth is that creating encrypted disk images with Disk Utility is cumbersome. Thankfully, with a simple Automator workflow, you can secure documents in an instant. Create the Workflow Launch Automator. In the template chooser, select Application and click Choose. Next, select the Utilities library, and from it drag Set Value of Variable into the workflow area over on the right side. Now select the Files & Folders library; from its list of actions, drag New Disk Image into the…

If you use iTunes regularly, you’ve probably experienced a litany of frustrations with the software—and accumulated a list of “I wish it did this” items. Here are five tools that will help you bend iTunes to your will. 1. TuneSpan When it consisted of music albums encoded as 128-kbps MP3 files, your iTunes library was probably a manageable size. But add in TV shows, movies, home videos, and Apple Lossless CD rips, and even the mightiest of hard drives can start to get cramped. My iTunes library, for example, has ballooned to 400GB. So what’s the solution? You could buy a big external drive and move your entire iTunes folder to it, to handle current and future content. But that can be a complicated process, and you might not want…

For scofflaws, there are innumerable places to illegally download music. But free music is available from a number of legitimate sources, too, if you know where to look Online Music Stores Apple and Amazon will sell you any of their millions of songs or albums at the click of a button. But they also offer various freebies. iTunes, for example, prominently features a free single of the week on the main and music sections of the iTunes Store. Apple also has a page on the iTunes Store with all free iTunes content at any given moment, including music. If you install the free Starbucks iOS app, you can download a free Pick of the Week directly from your mobile device. And iTunes’ trove of music podcasts provides daily or weekly…

Hardware Chromecast 4.0/4.0; $35; Google; google.com The Chromecast is a dongle that plugs into an HDMI port, receives power from USB, and acts like a Chrome browser, which allows it to play movies, music, and photos on your HDTV. You control it from any Android or iOS device, a Mac or Windows PC, or a Chromebook. The Chromecast costs $35, compared with $99 for Apple TV. To get Chromecast’s 1080p playback, however, you need to buy, at a minimum, the $80 Roku 2 XD. The software you use to control the Chromecast consists of familiar names: Chrome, Netflix, YouTube, and the Google Play Movies & TV and Play Music. “Casting” a tab from Chrome requires a Google Cast extension, which adds the Chromecast button to your toolbar. Once you tell…

Here are some of the coolest items we’ve found to help you help others see the world through your lens, whether you’re taking aim with your smartphone or your DSLR. Cotton Carrier Hand Strap: Is your camera so heavy that it makes your hand hurt? Cotton Carrier’s Hand Strap ($20, go.macworld.com/cottoncar) offers a secure, adjustable grip on your DSLR. The heavy-duty Velcro strap lets you tighten or loosen your hand against the camera body, making heavy cameras and lenses more comfortable to hold. The Hand Strap attaches to the camera’s base with an Arca-Swiss–style plate. LensPen DSLR Pro Kit: Fight dust and fingerprints with the three-piece Lens-Pen DSLR Pro Kit ($35, go.macworld.com/lenspen). The LensPen works on full-size DSLR lenses; the MicroPro is ideal for tiny camera eyepieces; and the FilterKlear…

The latest version of Adobe’s pro-level video-editing application, Premiere Pro CC (go.macworld.com/premprocc) gets a slew of modest tweaks as it joins its Creative Cloud suitemates online. These tweaks indicate that Premiere Pro is adding features as Adobe develops them, rather than saving them for monolithic annual releases. SpeedGrade Gets Good Grades One new item is the Lumetri color engine—from Adobe SpeedGrade (go.macworld.com/speedgrade6)—a GPU-accelerated color grading and correction application. You can drag a Lumetri look (Cine matic, Desaturation, Style, or Temperature) onto a clip in the timeline, or onto an adjustment layer covering multiple clips. Another cool new toy, the Loudness Radar, displays a visual representation of your timeline’s loudness over time, with peaks and valleys on a circular graph. You can then use other controls to keep your volume within…

Get the Best Amazon Deal While discussing movies with a friend, I realized that I didn’t own copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films. Hoping to remedy that, I dashed to Amazon and found Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection. The Blu-ray set looked great, but the price—about $175—did not. Reviews indicated that the collection has been available for as little as $120, a more palatable price. But how was I to know when it reached such a discount? I turned to Twitter for answers. Follower John Coxon (@johncoxon) told me about the Web-based service Camel-camelcamel (camelcamelcamel.com), which allows you to enter the URL for an item you wish to track. You can view a history of the item’s price to get a ballpark idea of how low it has been in…

For a long time, Mac Pro users have asked themselves, “When will Apple update its professional desktop line?” The wait is nearly over. Apple says that a brand-new Mac Pro will be available before the end of 2013. But the new Mac Pro is not the hulking beast we’re familiar with; rather, it’s a model of compactness (see page 15). The main concern about it is the lack of internal expansion and customization options. Instead of four internal hard-drive bays, the new Mac Pro uses built-in flash storage. Users must connect any additional drives or PCI cards externally. That means some tough decisions: Buy the new Mac Pro and purchase external drives and an expansion chassis? Or stick it out a few more years with the current Mac Pro and…

In recent months, Apple CEO Tim Cook has had to deal with an increasingly indifferent press and a hostile stock market. Enter this story’s unlikely white knight: takeover tycoon and activist investor Carl Icahn, who, with just one tweet in August, single-handedly managed to raise the company’s stock by nearly 5 percent in less than 24 hours. The 77-year-old billionaire isn’t exactly known for his cozy relationships with CEOs. He has been involved in some of the most contentious takeovers of the past four decades, and has picked fights with a who’s who of corporate giants—Blockbuster, Time Warner, U.S. Steel, and Yahoo. His company has just dropped a lawsuit to prevent entrepreneur Michael Dell from taking private the computer manufacturer that bears his name. Yet, here Icahn is, announcing that…

NEWS/ENTERTAINMENT: Instacast 1.0.1 4.5/5.0; $20; Vemedio; vemedio.com Apple offers a couple of apps that should make it easy to listen to podcasts: iTunes on the desktop, and Podcasts on iOS. But just try making them work in tandem. For listening on my iOS devices, I use Vemedio’s Instacast for iOS. The software is now on OS X as Instacast for Mac. Its main interface takes a cue from Apple’s Mail, dividing the screen into three vertical panes: On the left is a list of the podcasts you subscribe to, in the middle is a list of available episodes for the selected show, and on the right is information about the selected episode. Instacast lets you organize episodes in a couple of interesting ways. The first is to create playlists of…

If you love the culinary arts, the folks at Tastemade (go.macworld.com/tastemade) want to help you put your insights on the small screen. Tastemade lets you create a TV show dedicated to your favorite restaurants. First you select an establishment through the built-in Foursquare-powered search; then you choose one of several video templates that the app provides. From there, Tastemade helps you record your masterpiece, suggesting what to shoot and for how long. (Some fairly detailed guidelines apply.) Once you’ve captured your raw footage, the app edits it into a professional-quality clip, which runs about a minute long and has its own soundtrack and titles automatically provided. The app’s professionally designed templates enable just about anyone to produce excellent video material with a minimum of equipment and know-how. Tastemade isn’t geared…

Efexi Do your vacation videos suffer from a lack of dragons? Efexio (go.macworld.com/efexio)—which sounds like a Harry Potter spell—offers “Hollywood-style” effects to add to videos on the iPhone and iPad. The app is free, as are a couple of the effects, but users must pay $2 apiece for effects like “Zombie Walk” and “T-Rex Attack.”—JOEL MATHIS Work Market Experts say that, increasingly, freelance work drives the economy. Work Market (go.macworld.com/workmarket) is a free iOS app that lets workers connect with employers for short-term gigs, negotiate terms, and accept work. Users post work profiles through the app, and then employ it to manage their workflow remotely—checking in and out, messaging, and more.—JOEL MATHIS Djay 2 Algoriddim’s $5 Djay 2 for iPad (go.macworld.com/djay2) has a new user interface that lets you rotate…

Keeping track of how Apple is doing as a company is hard. The stock price goes up, the stock price goes down—often without any apparent reason. We hear one set of marketshare numbers for smartphones, tablets, and computers one day, and an entirely different set the next. Apple is doing great, says one group of analysts, while another says Apple is doomed. So how is Apple doing, really? To get some sense of the company’s health, we asked four writers to dig into four different sets of numbers: the ones that Apple itself publishes every quarter, as part of its required financial reporting, regarding the sales of its four principal product lines—Macs, iPhones, iPads, and (yes, still) iPods. We asked those writers to look at those numbers over as long…

In three short years, Apple’s tablet revolutionized the PC industry. With that work done, the iPad is taking a breather. Although it was once the fastest-selling electronic device of all time, sales have slowed considerably over the last year, and they actually declined year-over-year in the third quarter of 2013. Here’s how Apple got to this point, and what the slowing sales mean for the company going forward. iPad Impact on Apple When Apple introduced the iPad in January 2010, the rest of the industry was miles behind. Despite many months of rumors about an imminent Apple tablet, no other tech company was prepared to match Apple’s sleek, $500 app-consumption machine. Early Android tablets like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Motorola’s Xoom were flops, critically and commercially. When Google finally released…

Our iPads and iPhones make great travel companions. These devices offer quick access to step-by-step directions, public-transit information, restaurant recommendations, and email on the go—and as a result, they tend to spend more time in our hands than in our pockets or bags. But how can you avoid running out of power? We’ve heard a lot of conventional wisdom about how to keep iOS devices charged and ready. To separate fact from fiction, Macworld Lab grabbed a fourth-generation iPad and an iPhone 5 and started charging them, draining them, and timing different tasks and scenarios. Here’s what we discovered. ‘Screen brightness affects battery life.’ Heck yeah, it does. Screen brightness was the single most significant contributor to battery depletion that we found. At full brightness and in Airplane mode, our…

STM’s $78 Velo 2 (www.stmbags.com) is an exceptional messenger bag with all the regular stuff (durable materials, plenty of padding), plus clever features that make it stand out. Take, for example, the shoulder strap, which is attached to the bag with a 360-degree swivel joint so it never gets tangled. The back of the Velo 2 features stabilizing waist straps and a small loop near the top handle, while the bottom includes a loop for bike lights—a nice touch. There is zero wasted space. Both side straps are actually long zippered compartments that expand slightly to hold umbrellas or water bottles. Behind the left shoulder strap, you’ll notice a zipper where the laptop compartment is tucked away. It’s extremely well padded and lined with a soft fleece, and it has…

Roku has moved a step closer to Apple’s AirPlay abilities with a cool new trick in the latest version of its iOS app. The 2.3 update expands on the “Play on Roku” feature that the company introduced back in September 2012. That feature enabled users to stream music and display photos from their iOS or Android device on their TV via a Roku device. Now, the company has added video to the mix, making it possible to stream videos in your iOS device’s Camera Roll. That means you can play anything you’ve shot with your iOS device—family ballet recitals and 15-second Instagram video masterpieces, say—but not TV shows or movies you’ve synced with your iPhone. Which makes it somewhat less useful than the Apple TV’s AirPlay streaming, but still a…

These ten movies, streaming on Netflix, deal with aging, generation gaps, or looking forward or backward in time. 56 Up Filmmaker Michael Apted worked on the 1964 production 7 Up, which interviewed seven-year-old kids about life. In 1970 he interviewed them again—and in 1977, 1984, 1991, 1998, and 2005. Most recently (in 2012), 56 Up arrived, the newest entry in a most extraordinary documentary series. The Expendables 2 In its own explosive way, The Expendables 2 (2012) tackles themes of aging. It presupposes that viewers are familiar with the screen personalities of the actors, as it plays around with them, making jokes about their ages and experiences. It’s a vast improvement on the lame first movie. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame Detective Dee is based on…

If you’re already a Photoshop user, then you’re halfway to making Adobe’s Photoshop Touch (go.macworld.com/pstouch) part of your mobile arsenal. But if you’re interested in Photoshop Touch primarily for sharing images on social networks, a simpler image-editing app—such as Camera Awesome, Instagram, Snapseed, or Adobe’s Photoshop Express—may be a better fit. Available for the iPhone and iPad, Photoshop Touch is a full-service photo-editing app. It’s most useful when you need to do heavy lifting on one of those devices. Two Versions, Both Solid The $10 tablet version and the $5 phone version have the same mobile controls, though finding them on the latter can take a while. The versions differ mainly in their use of available screen real estate. The interface and performance of the app on my iPhone 5…

With Painter X3 (the 13th version of the natural-media software) for Mac and Windows, Corel seeks to augment Painter’s position as a leading inspirational tool for work in photographic and traditional art, illustration, manga and comic art, conceptual art, and design. Painter X3 offers an enhanced user experience, workflow optimization, and new technologies for brush characteristics and controls, painting and visual aids, and inspirational details and customization options. With this release, digital paint grows ever closer to actual paint in look and behavior. At the same time, Painter’s major features have become easier to find and use. Brush Improvements Painter X3’s Jitter brush enhancements introduce greater randomness to strokes, by adding universal Jitter properties to any available brush or in the form of one of the 25 new Jitter brushes.…

Enhancements to Adobe’s After Effects CC (go.macworld.com/aftereffcc) make it a must-have partner for animators and video editors working with Premiere Pro CC. Features such as a live 3D workflow with Cinema 4D Lite (go. macworld.com/4dlite), now included with Creative Cloud, give motion-graphics artists and compositors integration with true 3D object animation. In addition, some tool upgrades make the CC version better for compositors and animators. Also new are the enhanced 3D Camera Tracker, bicubic sampling for layers (similar to scaling in Photoshop), and the ability to send a comp to render through the Adobe Media Encoder, so you can work in After Effects while your project renders in the background. Two primary benefits of Creative Cloud are continuous upgrades and the software license’s accessibility and flexibility. New features or tool…

Safari, Heal Thyself! Overall, Safari admirably meets my requirements for a Web browser. Plus, as it is an Apple product, I appreciate its tight integration with OS X and iOS. But then there’s Safari’s “dark side.” All too often, something goes haywire. Webpages fail to load, or the program crashes. For example, using my Mac Pro recently, I had a Safari window with eight tabs. Inexplicably, the content of every tab no longer appeared if I started scrolling down the page—that is, as soon as I scrolled, all I saw was a blank white space. Copying a URL and pasting it into another Safari window did not help. Reloading a page often made the situation worse, resulting in a totally blank page with the URL now “lost” as it was…