There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.
Bluetooth speakers are everywhere, and I love their wireless connectivity—with so much else in my tech life going wireless, having to dock or otherwise physically connect my iPhone or iPad to speakers seems increasingly anachronistic. But with a few exceptions, I haven’t been especially impressed by the sound quality or features of Bluetooth speakers. IK Multimedia’s $300 iLoud, on the other hand, is a portable Bluetooth speaker done right.
If someone finds your lost iPhone or iPad, the first thing they’ll do is turn it on. If you’re in an accident, or you have a medical emergency, first responders often look for your phone or tablet to identify you and learn important information such as allergies and blood type. In this video tip, we show you how to easily create a custom lock-screen image that can save your device—or you.
Transcript
I’m Macworld senior editor Dan Frakes.
iCloud’s Find My iPhone or iPad feature is handy for tracking down your device if it’s lost; for sending a message to someone who might have it; or even for wiping its contents if you decide it’s unrecoverable. But what if a Good Samaritan finds your device before you even realize it’s missing? Or what if you’re in an accident, or have a medical emergency, and you want to make it easy for emergency personnel to discover vital information about you?
A frequent question we receive about OS X is “How do I change my short username?” While it’s easy to change your full username—an easily-accessible setting in the Users & Groups pane of System Preferences—there’s no obvious way to change the short username, which is also the name of your home folder in the Finder.
Prior to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, changing your short username was a complicated, risky procedure. In fact, it was so complex that even Apple’s own instructions weren’t exhaustive. Because of this, a colleague and I wrote a special utility for pre-Leopard versions of OS X, ChangeShortName, that did the job right.
The basic Calculator app that comes with iOS is good for simple calculations, and if you rotate your phone into landscape orientation, it even provides some rudimentary scientific-calculator functions. But if it’s a full-featured scientific calculator you seek—or if you’d just like a great calculator for your iPad, which inexplicably doesn’t include one—you’ll want to look elsewhere.
My personal favorite remains TLA Systems’s $10 PCalc (App Store link). It’s overflowing with features, including scientific operations, conversions, constants, and even user-defined functions. And you get it all in an interface that can look as simple or complete, and as modern or retro, as you prefer.
Nearly four years ago, I reviewed Tom Bihn’s Synapse, a fantastic and versatile compact backpack for those times when you don’t need to carry everything but the kitchen sink. I liked it so much that I bought the review sample. The Synapse remains my everyday backpack, and apart from looking a little worn, it’s in nearly as good condition today as when I reviewed it.
The Synapse is now called the Synapse 19, because Tom Bihn has since introduced a version with 30 percent more volume for all those people who loved the original’s design but complained that they needed more space (or—true story—felt that the 19 simply looked too small on them). The result, the $170 Synapse 25, maintains the Synapse 19’s versatility and clever design touches, but adds the company’s popular “rail” feature (more on that in a bit), making the Synapse 25 perfect for those who want a larger bag that they can use all day, every day—whether they’re carrying a laptop, an iPad, both, or neither.
As the end of the calendar year nears, Macworld editors have been busy picking our favorite products of 2013. A couple weeks ago, we presented our Macworld Editors’ Choice awards to the best overall Mac- and Apple-focused products. But here in the Mac Gems department, we also like to separately recognize the best inexpensive Mac apps we’ve reviewed over the past year.
As the editor who coordinates the Mac Gems section, and who spends lots of time searching for great, inexpensive Mac software, I see a lot of Mac apps each year. While our Eddy-award winners are anointed after a weeks-long process of deliberation involved the entire Macworld editorial staff, the Gems of the year are my personal picks. These aren’t necessarily the highest-rated Gems of the past year—they’re the apps we’ve covered in Mac Gems that either did something especially innovative; offered exceptional value; or simply earned a place in my (or another editor’s) daily workflows. Here are 13 apps you should take a look at to see if they’ll fit in—and improve—your routines.
Every year, one or more Gems is so good that my fellow editors and I choose these apps for our highest honor: an Editors’ Choice award. This year, an unprecedented five Mac Gems also earned Eddy awards.
Back in June, when Apple gave us a preview of the new Mac Pro, the company said it would ship “later this year.” Here we are, just a few days shy of 2014, and the new Mac Pro has arrived. Apple calls it the Mac Pro (Late 2013); a snarky reviewer might call it the Mac Pro (Almost 2014). Whatever you call it, it’s the company’s new flagship computer—its halo car, if you will—and we’ve been putting it through its paces. Does it live up to its name as a professional’s Mac?
The short answer is, “It depends.” When the new Mac Pro was announced this past summer, the initial reactions were, to put it mildly, polarized. Some people thought the new computer was a brilliant design that embraced current trends in high-end computing. Others thought it was a slap in the face of “real” pro users. Both sides can make a good case: Depending on your particular uses and needs, the new Mac Pro may be exactly what you want (a state-of-the-art, multi-core-processor, workstation-GPU computer that doesn’t waste space and resources on expandability you may never use), or nothing like what you need (a workhorse tower with tons of bays and slots for expansion).
I’m not here to tell you which view is right or wrong, because real people with real jobs and real needs hold each. The best I can do is tell you what the new Mac Pro is, what it does, and how well it does those things. You’ll have to decide if Apple’s new approach is right for you.
Small and Space Gray
If you’re reading this, chances are you know all about the new Mac Pro’s design, but here’s a refresher. Apple has done away with the massive enclosure of the 2012-and-earlier Mac Pro: The new Mac Pro is instead a small cylinder with a beautiful, unibody exterior made from a single block of aluminum. As we noted in our first impressions, while Apple’s PR videos and images make the new Mac Pro look like a dark, metallic gray—almost black—it’s really closer in color to the new Space Gray finish of Apple’s current iPhone and iPad models. It even looks somewhat silvery in bright light.
We’ve all heard that Apple’s new Mac Pro is smaller than the old one. But to really get just how small it is, you need to see it in person—or at least next to something familiar. Here are a dozen household objects that will give you some perspective.
As longtime Mac Gems readers know, I rarely cover bundles or promotions—only when a particular sale offers readers a great deal on a number of great Mac apps.
That’s the case with the current ProductiveMacs bundle, which includes seven quali…
OS X 10.9 Mavericks promises more than 200 new features, but many of those aren’t the kinds of things you’ll see plastered across Apple’s website. Some instead are found in subtle changes to application and system settings. As part of our co…
Inside your home folder is a Library folder—commonly written in Unix syntax as ~/Library, which means “a folder named Library at the root level of your home folder.” This folder is accessible only to you, and it’s used to store your perso…
The end of summer means cooler weather, more-colorful trees, and new Apple products. But here at Mac Gems HQ, it also means the end of GemFest (a.k.a., the Summer of Gems). We started the 2013 edition way back on July 22 and continued through Septe…
