Category: Reviews-HowTos

I’ve got some bad news: Those nice headphones and great speakers that you spent so much money on? They probably don’t sound as good as they could. You spent the time searching for the best audio gear for your computer, and no one wants to get less than what they paid for.

Not sure what I mean? Let me explain. Sound that you play on your computer starts out as a digitally-encoded stream. The built-in digital-to-analog converter (DAC) in your computer converts those bits of data into an electrical signal that is, in turn, fed to the amplifier that makes the drivers in your headphones or speakers move and produce sound.

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Apple’s Photo Stream aims to make it easier to share pictures between your various Apple devices, but using the feature on your Mac can be annoying: Doing so requires you to fire up iPhoto or Aperture just to see your pictures, and waiting for the hulks that those programs have become, just to see the photos you took on your iPhone, is overkill.

To simplify the process, Raffael Hannemann created the $4 MyPhotostream, a lightweight app that does just one thing: displays the pictures in your Photo Stream. Specifically, each time you launch the app, it checks your Photo Stream and shows a grid of thumbnails for those photos.

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Reader Delores Rice will soon be digging deeper into her Applications folder. She writes:

I need a program that will allow me to import a group of photos—maybe four to a page—type captions for each, and then print. Seems simple but I haven’t been able to use my existing programs. Can you advise on this?

There’s a good chance that you already have a copy of the application you seek: iPhoto ’11. Like so.

Import your images into iPhoto. Select the first one you wish to add a caption to and press Command-I. This produces the Info pane on the right side of the iPhoto window. Click where it reads Add a description… and do exactly as it asks—enter your caption. Repeat this process for each image you want to eventually print.

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Before you drop $300 on the latest high-end headphones to listen to music on your iOS device, check to see whether an equalization (EQ) app can make your current cans, or even earbuds, sound like a million bucks—or at least close enough to that figure to satisfy your tastes.

In an ideal listening environment, with perfect music files and perfect headphones, you wouldn’t need to boost bass or tweak treble—so you wouldn’t need an equalizer for your music on your iOS device.

But most of us spend time listening on the train, at the gym, or while walking along city streets—situations that from an aural perspective fall far shy of perfection—and with less-than-perfect headphones. That’s where EQ can make a big difference.

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Editor’s note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld U.K. Visit Macworld U.K. for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

You’ve played Cut The Rope, right? No? Have you been living on the planet Glong? For the six people and a cat who’ve not played it, Cut The Rope is one of the most successful iPhone games ever—a cheery, simple but perfectly crafted physics puzzle game where you have to feed a series of sweets to a cute monster called Om Nom.

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Dark Sky has long been one of my favorite weather apps for the iPhone, but it’s seen few updates this past year as its developers focused on growing their new project, Forecast.io, and their public weather API of the same name. 2014 is a new year, though, and the Dark Sky Company is starting it right, with a full redesign of Dark Sky for iOS 7.

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Reader Diane Williams has a recurring question:

I’m trying to schedule a recurring meeting that occurs each month on the first Thursday of the month. Could not manage to do this in Calendar. The repeat function for monthly meetings operates by date, not by day of the month. Am I missing something?

While users of Calendar (née iCal) have long had this capability, Diane’s not wrong: The ability to schedule recurring events by day of the week is missing in action on iOS. But there are a couple ways to work around this issue.

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Pixelmator 3.1 Marble (Mac App Store link) is the latest iteration of an image-editing app that’s often viewed as the hobbyist photographer’s alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Much attention has been focused on Pixelmator as enthusiasts seek to escape the confines of Photoshop CC subscriptions. Recently, Apple featured Pixelmator as part of its performance demos of the new Mac Pro, so it’s no accident that the Pixelmator Team has now released a fresh update of the program roughly in tandem with Apple’s new flagship desktop Mac. That said, version 3.1 follows closely on the heels of Pixelmator 3.0 FX, whose new features are included in this review.

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When we reviewed Simplenote for iOS nearly four years ago, we found it to be a standout note-taking app. But while the company soon added Android and Kindle versions, for the longest time it didn’t provide an OS X counterpart—Mac users who wanted to access and edit their notes on their Macs had to turn to Simplenote’s Web app. So last fall’s release of the free Mac version of Simplenote (Mac App Store link) was welcome.

Simplenote for Mac is very much like the iOS version, with a streamlined interface that doesn’t fill the screen with lots of icons or buttons. You can apply tags (that you create) to notes, and you can click any tag to display related notes. The app also uses white space well, making your lists of tags and notes easy to browse.

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In this week’s column, I examine two related questions about moving podcasts and music from one Mac to another while retaining metadata. I also look at a question about smart playlists built around specific words, and explain an easy way to create a text file with a list of all your playlists.

Q: Can you tell me how to move podcasts from an old Mac to a new Mac without losing all of the important metadata: played status, time remaining, and so on?

While I have an answer to this question, I’ll couch it in multiple caveats. iTunes’ podcast management is close to being disastrous since iTunes 11. It is hard to understand—even for the iTunes Guy—and it’s unreliable. Some users find it works just as they want; others want to pull their hair out and switch to other apps to manage podcasts.

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In a recent Mac 911 entry I explained how to turn two hard drive partitions into one. And while words are great, sometimes it’s more helpful to see something like this in action. And so was this week’s Macworld video conceived.

Note that in the video I state that you can’t partition the drive you’ve booted from. This is incorrect. You can create an additional partition from the free space the drive holds. It’s not cogent to this particular exercise but I regret the error.

Transcript

I have a smallish hard drive here that I’ll split into two partitions. To do that I select the drive, click on the Partition tab, and choose 2 Partitions from the Partition Layout pop-up menu. To make sure I’ll be able to reclaim one of the partitions later I click on the Options button and ensure that either GUID or Apple Partition Map is selected and click OK. (I always choose GUID partition table as that’s the format that works with today’s Intel-based Macs.)

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In the past few weeks we’ve covered features of GarageBand that are helpful to nonmusicians—GarageBand’s interface, creating ringtones, and creating grooves using the application’s loops. In this lesson I’d like to address those people who, at one time in their life, were plunked down in front of a piano keyboard and forced to play “Bone Sweet Bone.”

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If you deal with lots of files (and who doesn’t?), chances are you’ve occasionally run into problems with their names. Say you’ve got a series of image files with less-than-descriptive titles (such as IMG00001.jpg, IMG00002.jpg, and so on)—you’d like to rename them in a more useful, more descriptive, manner. The trick is to find a way to do so without manually renaming each file, one at a time.

There are a bunch of batch-renaming utilities out there that make such chores simpler: You give the app a selection of files, and then tell it to rename all of them at once, using some kind of pattern (for example, “Add Summer vacation photos 2013 to the beginning of each file’s name”). Many of these utilities are relatively inexpensive apps, such as File Rename Pro ($7), Rename ($4), and Rename It ($3), that provide relatively basic services. But there are also a few more-advanced (and more-expensive) tools designed for those who need power beyond what such basic apps provide.

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Are you following too many people on Twitter, or finding your timeline unruly and hard to keep up with? If so, you may have the Twitter overload blues. This happens to many Twitter users, but there’s a way to cure this problem: Use lists both to organize the accounts you follow and to use Twitter more efficiently.

Create a list with Twitter.com

When you follow people on Twitter, they get added to one long list of accounts. 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, cutting down the density of your timeline.

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Reader Andrew Locke has no lack of bad luck with unwanted Web content to look at. He’d like to lock out some of it. He writes:

Over the years I’ve found that webpages get more junked up with pop-up ads, pop-over windows, and redirects to pages I don’t want to see. Is there some way to keep this stuff from happening?

As someone who makes a goodly portion of his living from Web-based advertising, I’ll put in a plug for sites that do this kind of thing: Ads and your clicks are what keep many of these companies in business. In lieu of visits from nattily attired executives rattling a tin cup and shouting “Give us money if you want to look at our pages!” ads become the de facto price for viewing online content.

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