Author: Michael Simon

For all intents and purposes, there are but two names in the desktop-presentation app business: Keynote and PowerPoint. Apple’s version might have a bit more gloss than Microsoft’s, but for the most part, it’s an either/or scenario. Each offers an attractive set of themes with an easy drag-and-drop interface that contains everything you need to make professional, engaging presentations.

Deckset wants you to consider a third option. With a stripped-down interface that stays far out of the way as you work, Deckset puts a fresh spin on the standard formula that skips the fancy graphics and hypnotizing animations, and focuses on what really matters: what you want to say.

As soon as you launch, it’s clear that Deckset is different. Where its heavyweight contemporaries dazzle us with floating pallets and sophisticated tools, Deckset doesn’t offer a single element to help with your design. There aren’t any text boxes, cropping handles, animations, or transitions to speak of — in fact, it’s so minimal you barely need to use your mouse at all.

Instead of fiddling with borders and rotating shapes, Deckset takes all of its instructions from a simple text file. Not unlike the lines of inelegant code that are transformed into pretty websites by our browsers, the app interprets the syntax within the file to create a seamless presentation, giving you the flexibility to quickly edit your document whenever and wherever inspiration strikes. 

The secret is Markdown. Deckset uses the popular text-to-HTML conversion tool to turn your unformatted files into attractive slides. Consequently, fonts and colors are unable to be truly personalized, but the seven available themes do well to give your work its own character. Without worrying about the design, slides come together more quickly than when using Keynote, but since there isn’t a text editor built into the app itself, we ran into some issues with updating. 

While there’s a certain liberation in working with plain text, Deckset’s biggest strength is also its weakness. Markdown might be one of the easiest programming languages to grasp, but mastering the most rudimentary of commands still requires a basic understanding of code. As it stands, its trial-and-error method is a great tool if you’re looking to learn the syntax (and the sample presentation certainly helps), but the app is limiting its usefulness to a rather small segment of the population without any auto-formatting tools or shortcuts.

The bottom line. Watching Deckset turn text into slides is quite magical, but unless you’re already a Markdown pro, the learning curve might be too steep.

Privacy is one of the most important words in tech today. It seems like we hear about new threats to our identities almost daily, whether someone’s hacking into our credit card company’s files or the government is peeking into our emails and messages. 

But it’s not just our personal information that’s vulnerable. The files on our Macs that we never see — cookies, caches, download histories, recent items, even icons — can be used to track our digital fingerprints and compromise our privacy without us ever realizing it. Browsers and certain apps are constantly keeping track of what we’re doing and storing it for easy access later. If you don’t want all of this data to come back and haunt you, you should get rid of it.

Of course, there’s a fairly easy way to do it built right into OS X. At the end of each day, you can dutifully head to the menu and clear out all of the offending files on an app-by-app basis until everything is wiped clean. But it’s a tedious process — and even if you can remember to do it on a regular basis, there’s no way to know if you’ve gotten them all.

PrivacyScan simplifies the whole process by taking the guesswork out of it. Right from the start, the app does most of the work for you, scanning your Mac to find any supported apps. The main window lists every app available for cleaning — ours included Safari, Chrome, Preview, QuickTime, Flash, and the Finder — and there are individual settings within that give you full control over which files to delete. Pressing the run button unleashes PrivacyScan on your Mac’s most vulnerable folders, and within seconds it returns a batch of files to be scrubbed. You need only press the trash button to instantly delete them — or, if you’re particularly paranoid, eradicate them with Department of Defense–level shredding.

It’s all very fast and simple, and PrivacyScan certainly made us feel less exposed when it had finished. It might not stop any malicious attacks or viruses, but there’s something to be said for covering our tracks, especially for those who travel a lot with their MacBook Pros. A spot check of the folders confirmed that files were indeed jettisoned, but we experienced occasional issues with its handling of the Google Chrome browser, which triggered a few crashes and hang-ups. 

We’re not sure how regularly we would run PrivacyScan, but the ability to set a schedule and forget about it might help, as would an option to securely delete the files in our trash.

The bottom line. Even if you haven’t fashioned a tinfoil hat, PrivacyScan’s system of deletion will make you sleep just a little better at night.

If there’s one complaint we have with our iPhones, it’s battery life. Ten hours might seem like more than enough to get through the day, but when you factor in a constant stream of phone calls, downloads, and playlists, more often than not we find ourselves staring at a red battery indicator before the sun goes down.

Until Apple figures out a way to charge our iPhones by motion or sunlight, the options are limited. For our money, the best choice has always been to carry around an external USB charger for a quick power boost whenever we need it. We’ve used dozens of them. Most are inexpensive, no-frills affairs that take forever to charge and barely last a few months. But even the high-priced premium models still rely on a system of vague LED indicators that have us continuously plugging them in to be certain we’ll have enough juice.

Legion is a battery pack that’s finally worthy of the device it’s charging. Designed around a sleek, compact package somewhat reminiscent of the iPhone 4, PLX Devices has built a charger that’s as light and attractive as the iPhone itself, with sleek lines and a rugged exterior that stands up to abuse. But what really makes Legion stand out from the crowd is its tiny microprocessor.

You might even call it a smart charger. Available in standard 5,500mAh and 11,000mAh capacities, Legion is anything but ordinary, displaying a wealth of information about itself on its tiny OLED screen, including its remaining capacity, battery charge percentage, time until discharge, and temperature. You can use Legion’s sole navigation button to quickly cycle through each screen and get live updates as your iPhone regains its strength.

Even without the brilliant display, Legion is a top-notch external battery. We tested the lower-capacity model and it provided enough juice for two full charges of an iPhone 5 (with a few sips left over for an iPad mini). To get from zero to 99 percent took about three hours (since the screen draws a small amount of power, Legion never quite reached maximum capacity), but we were safely in the green after just 45 minutes. It charged equally fast via the always-annoying micro USB standard, though we didn’t need to plug it in very often; in real-world use we were able to go most of the week without needing a refill. The only troubling hiccups we experienced were with our iPad Air running the iOS 7.1 beta, which consistently returned a “Not charging” message, even after swapping out cables.

The bottom line. Legion’s smart, innovative design makes it the iPhone of battery packs.

Thanks to our ever-growing libraries of music, movies, photos, games, productivity apps, and everything else, the internal memory of our iOS devices doesn’t go quite as far as it used to. That’s where LaCie’s new Fuel drive comes in. With the ability to hold more than 500 full-length films, 160,000 songs, or 190,000 photos, Fuel’s full terabyte of storage gives our iOS devices all the extra space you need, and its light, rugged enclosure won’t add too much extra weight to your rig. Unfortunately, it comes with a few setup and security issues you’ll have to work around.

To beam your media, the drive creates its own Wi-Fi network, so all of your devices need to connect to the specialized Fuel network once it starts transmitting; the process ought to be painless, but it didn’t always appear in our network list, a problem that was remedied by joining manually. The first time you link up you’ll need to download the Seagate Media app for the final part of the setup process, where a PC-stye wizard will guide you through the remaining steps.

It’s here where things go slightly awry. One of the options is to implement “concurrent mode,” which allows your local network to pass through the Fuel so you can still use Internet while connected. It’s an essential feature, but we were troubled to learn that the option to secure the network is turned off by default, giving anyone within range the ability to access your drive through a simple web portal (even if the main network is encrypted). There’s also the ability to add a password to lock down your Fuel, but since Seagate doesn’t prompt you, you’ll need to head over to the network settings on each device to set one up.

The app itself isn’t much to look at — the algae-tinted interface would have been outdated in iOS 4 — but once you select something to watch, it jumps to a new Safari tab. We experienced a few DRM-related hiccups, but for the most part streaming movies was fast and responsive, even when watching on multiple devices. Music and photos are handled right in the app, but the interface is so ugly and unintuitive, you probably won’t be using it for anything other than videos; to that end, it lasted long enough to play three fairly lengthy flicks, falling in line with Seagate’s eight-hour claims. 

Loading media onto the drive is quick and easy with a supplied USB 3 cable, though you can opt to send files wirelessly or over the web (which obviously takes a good deal longer). 

The bottom line. Fuel powers up your iOS device with a terabyte of storage, but its security flaws might have you playing with fire.

When Paper by 53 first appeared in the App Store, its beauty was in its simplicity. Unlike other iOS drawing apps, it didn’t try to emulate a desktop workspace by cramming a bunch of features onto a small screen; with an elegant set of digital tools, it redefined our expectations of art in the Multitouch era.

In many ways, Pencil is the perfect complement to Paper’s singular style. Designed to mimic the look and feel of a high-quality carpenter’s pencil, it doesn’t succumb to the usual stubby stylus pitfalls. When gripped like a normal pen, its soft, cushioned tip gives it a spongy, almost brush-like, quality that belies its precision, while a touch of weight adds just the right amount of leverage.

Pairing is as easy as pressing Pencil’s point against a small circle in the toolbar, but if you leave Paper for more than a minute or two, you’ll need to repeat the process. Once connected, the full power of the app will be at your fingertips — including all brushes and the color mixer — along with nifty palm-rejecting technology that lets you rest your hand comfortably on the screen while you work (though you’ll still want to use your fingers to blend and undo).

Pencil responded well to our movements, and we only experienced the slightest bit of occasional lag, particularly when using the color brush. Building the eraser into the top of the stylus is a stroke of genius, as is the concealed magnet that firmly attached our walnut review model to the iPad Smart Cover while traveling.

The bottom line. Whether you’re a painter or a doodler, Pencil will help you get a grip on your creativity.

To read Apple’s description on its website, Photo Stream is a flawless cross-platform service that “just works” across all of our devices. Snap a picture with your iPhone and the photo will be magically beamed to all of your iCloud-enabled Macs and iPads, ready to be touched up in Photoshop or emailed to friends.

But while Photo Stream works as advertised across our iOS devices, it’s not quite as seamless on our Macs. Depending on the age of your machine, a trip to iPhoto can bring up the dreaded pinwheel of death, crippling your workflow while you watch it spin. Even on our 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina display, loading our stream is far from instantaneous, often taking several minutes to populate the window with just a few days’ worth of new snapshots. MyPhotostream simplifies the process to the point of enjoyment. By taking Photo Stream out of iPhoto, this lightweight app strips away the bloat that slows things to a crawl and boils the iCloud service down to its two most basic steps: drag and drop.

The entirety of the interface consists of a single window. Each time it’s launched, MyPhotostream scans the iLifeAssetManagement folder in your user library directory to find the latest pictures in your stream and displays them chronologically. Photos are initially shown in batches of 50, but that’s a one-time nuisance; the number of photos displayed at launch is customizable, and we saw no discernible difference in load time between “Few” and “All,” even with a maxed-out Photo Stream of 1,000 pics.

Double-clicking a photo expands it to fill the window and offers a basic set of controls and options. The same menu is more readily available by right-clicking on a photo (or photos) in the main window, but either way presents a number of options: email, Facebook, Flickr, Messages, and Airdrop sharing, along with shortcuts to any editing apps you may have installed. But for our money, the best part of MyPhotostream is the ability to quickly drag a photo right out of the window and drop it on our desktop.

Notification alerts inform you of any new photos that have been snapped or saved on another device, but unfortunately, you cannot add photos directly into your stream without opening iPhoto or Aperture. A similar quibble was the inability to delete photos using MyPhotostream. Both issues are due to Apple’s strict file-system permissions and are unlikely to change. And its speed had us wishing there were ways to automatically filter out photos by source or screenshot.

The bottom line. MyPhotostream is a one-trick pony, but it’s a darn good trick.

From the moment the App Store launched, The New York Times has been at the forefront of the digital newspaper revolution. There’s been a constant stream of apps and subscriptions, but for the most part, its initiatives have revolved around an unimaginative repackaging of the paper. With NYT Now, the Gray Lady seems to have figured out a formula that may pay off. Rather than delivering a rich stew teeming with every subject it has to offer, the app serves as sort of a greatest hits package, aimed at casual readers who might not have such a ravenous news appetite.

The app does well to keep the general look and feel of the Times website intact, but everything is presented in a more traditional mobile fashion, which has its drawbacks. The main page consists of an occasional daily briefing—where you can quickly scan a smattering of stories across a variety of topics—along with a current list of articles handpicked by the Times’ editors.

Navigation is mostly accomplished by scrolling, but there’s not a whole lot to distinguish the importance of one story over another; on the web, there’s a clear hierarchy of news that isn’t quite as obvious in the app, despite its top-to-bottom layout. Articles can be easily bookmarked and shared, but any related videos and galleries that appear on the main page strangely aren’t packaged in the story view.

With such a stripped-down interface, we expected to get a condensed summary when clicking on a story, but that’s not the case—subscribers get access to the full stories as they appear on the Times’ site, reformatted in a neat Instapaper-like presentation. So while the content may be limited, the $7.99 monthly subscription presents a decent value based on word count alone. However, its target audience probably doesn’t want to scroll through a thousand words on the Korean ferry crash, so we’d like to see a cheaper (or free) version that lifts the 10-article limit and offers edited versions of stories.

The bottom line. NYT Now is the Times’ best effort to date to reach the mobile generation, but it’s still a bit more iterative than innovative.

No matter how many different scanners we’ve tested over the years, we’ve still yet to find a truly elegant solution. Whether we’re making digital reproductions with our all-in-one desktop printers or copying paper with the massive units in our offices, we’re constantly stymied by jams, blurry images, and slow, clunky interfaces. Even the simple, camera-based apps on our iPhones have their shortcomings, and we often find ourselves retaking and cropping images until we get them right.

With a gorgeous interface and a good developer pedigree, we had high hopes for Scanbot. There’s a clean, simple aesthetic that runs through every screen, helping you capture and organize your documents with ease. The priority here is speed, as Scanbot’s foolproof interface can attest to, but it doesn’t come at the expense of professional features, including high-resolution output, a low-light indicator, and automatic edge detection. Our final products weren’t always perfect, but the powerful cropping tool and one-touch enhancer fine-tuned things nicely.

Scanbot is the first app from the creators of the now-defunct doo storage service, so we were hardly surprised to see a tight integration with the cloud—but we weren’t expecting such comprehensive synergy. Nearly every major service is represented, and you can set your image to automatically upload to your favorite. It’s a much better method than the standard save-and-email strategy most of the other scanner apps use, though you can still clutter up your Camera Roll if you so desire.

The app’s interface does a nice job of prompting you with tips on how to take better scans, but we would have liked a little more control over our documents, most notably a perspective or skew tool to straighten crooked scans and flatten folds. Also, we wish we were able to organize our scan into folders instead of rushing off to the cloud every time, and we had some issues with moving and resizing the digital signature.

The bottom line. Scanbot certainly isn’t the first scanning app for the iPhone, but it might be the first one we actually use regularly.

We don’t have fond memories of our college math courses. Learning the intricacies of geometry or figuring out the infiniteness of pi weren’t exactly recreational activities, and it was all we could do to keep our eyes open while studying for midterms. But if we had something as cool as Incredible Numbers in our backpacks, things might have been different.

Despite a plethora of fun and colorful interactive elements and engaging animations, Incredible Numbers isn’t a dumbed-down app for the digital generation. Rather, Professor Ian Stewart uses the iPad’s boundless teaching tools to take the mystery out of some of mathematics’ most difficult concepts, including factorials, Fibonacci numbers, and heptadecagons. An attractive menu of eight circles—plus a bonus section dedicated to brainteasers—guides you to your chosen lesson, but the simple one-word headings hardly prepare you for the wealth of information inside.

Tap on the red Music circle, for example, and you’ll learn about vibrations and patterns, watching as sound affects sine curves and experimenting with how complex waveforms are split into harmonics. It’s all very elegant and relatively easy to follow, and we quickly became engrossed in the numerous interactive theories and activities. Each lesson is more stunning than the last, and there’s even a breathtaking beauty in doing something as simple as sorting a list of prime numbers.

Incredible Numbers has a bright, animated interface that seems like it would educate and entertain a school-aged child for hours, but make no mistake: it’s not an app for young minds (at least not average ones). While there’s a certain face-value enjoyment in manipulating the various charts and graphs that are sprinkled throughout each chapter, many of the lessons are extremely advanced, and we found ourselves wanting a bit of an elementary discussion of some topics before we dove into the harder stuff.

The bottom line. Incredible Numbers is a beautiful tool for learning mathematics, but you’d better be wearing your thinking cap.

Of all the things our iOS devices have made obsolete, we’re least nostalgic about our checkbooks. With fast, secure apps for each of our banks and robust spending trackers like Mint and BillGuard, we’ve ditched the pencil-and-paper method for good and become more fiscally responsible as a result.

As an iPhone app, Next took the checkbook model and turned it on its head, collecting your transactions and displaying them as a gorgeous picture of your financial trends. Now, developer noidentity has brought the spending tracker to the iPad as its own paid companion, and while the minimal concept works well enough on the larger screen, we have a tough time recommending a double-dip here.

Like the iPhone version, Next for iPad has a simple, clean aesthetic. Adding a new expense is as easy as tapping the plus button that appears in the top-right corner of every screen, which brings up a grid of 27 identifiable icons to denote the transaction type. The different symbols cover a lot of ground, but we wouldn’t mind a bit of customization.

Next is currency-agnostic, so its main focus is on numbers, not conversions. There are no budgeting tools, per se, but the app arranges purchases in ways that naturally highlight areas that may be draining your wallet. The data is presented differently and proves somewhat less useful at a glance than in the iPhone version—we particularly missed the handy week view—but the two apps work very well as companion pieces, updating quickly and effortlessly via iCloud. Next’s unique interface uses the iPad’s larger screen mostly to its advantage, but the inability to use it in portrait mode is a bit of an annoyance, as is the complete lack of automation, including simple shortcuts like recurring payments.

The bottom line. Much as we like Next for iPad, it’s a tougher recommendation as a standalone purchase than the handier and more robust iPhone version.

At some point in the ‘90s, every college dorm had a Magnetic Poetry set stuck to the front of someone’s mini-fridge. Verses might have been limited to the few dozen tiles that hadn’t fallen behind the vent cover, but the fun wasn’t in creating Walt Whitman-worthy masterpieces—it was in seeing how your creation was twisted by other people. Magnetic Poetry eventually went out of fashion, but FridgePoems looks to bring it back. However, while there may be a certain sense of nostalgia evoked here, the digital representation loses quite a bit of the fun without the kitsch and collaboration of the original.

True to its name, FridgePoems’ canvas is a customizable refrigerator door. The relatively small workspace is dwarfed by the giant pasteboard that holds all of the unused words, and finding a specific tile requires a good deal of scrolling and swiping. When we found a word we wanted, however, it instantly responded to our touches, making it easy to cobble phrases together on the screen.

There are several packs of words available to choose from: two are available upon download, four others are unlockable, and the final six are available for purchase. Each time you select a new set, your current project is erased and the words are shuffled, which can be frustrating if you want to build upon what you’ve already created. Part of the fun is in sorting through the various packs, but it quickly gets tedious—a problem that could be remedied by adding the ability to create custom groupings.

FridgePoems encourages sharing snapshots via Twitter or Facebook, but we couldn’t help but wish we could invite our friends to add to our work rather than just reading it. We tried passing our iPad around the office, but it just wasn’t the same without the spontaneous inspiration that struck whenever we had the craving for a midnight snack.

The bottom line. FridgePoems tries to emulate the appeal of Magnetic Poetry, but it just doesn’t have the attractive personality of the original.