November 21, 2024

Author: Lex Friedman

Reviews-HowTos

iHome DL100 review: Speaker dock charges three devices, but falls short as an alarm clock

iHome’s $150 DL100 (which the company describes as a “Triple Charging Stereo FM Clock Radio with Two Lightning Docks and USB Charge/Play for iPad/iPhone and iPod”) is cooler in concept than in practice. It’s a fine clock, a fine charging station, and a decent speaker. But it’s a lackluster alarm clock, and alarm-clock features have always been what makes iHome’s products stand out from the crowd.

The DL100’s standout feature is the capability to charge three devices simultaneously. The top surface hosts two Lightning-connector docks—one for an iPhone or iPod, and the other, with a sturdy back support, for an iPad (full size or mini). On the back of the DL100 is a USB port for charging a third device. You can use the DL100’s speakers to listen to an iOS device connected to any of the three connectors.

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Reviews-HowTos

How Mac experts deal with their contacts

Used to be, people  maintained literal personal phonebooks. Books into which they scrawled the names, numbers, and addresses of their friends and family members. Those were dark times.

In 2014, there’s no need for such old-fashioned foofaraw. Your Mac and iOS devices can sync all your contacts for you, and store more data than those books of yore could have handled even if you wrote with the sharpest of number two pencils. There are plenty of ways to deal with your contacts’ information, so which method do 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 they organize that Rolodexical data, but there are numerous approaches that work “well enough.”

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Our panel of experts, clockwise from top left: David Sparks, Glenn Fleishman, Jaimee Newberry, Marco Tabini, Lex Friedman (yours truly), and John Moltz.

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News

Apple acknowledges developer portal hack

Apple on Sunday addressed a multi-day outage afflicting its developer site, acknowledging that its systems were hacked.

In an email to developers, Apple wrote:

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registe…