Category: Reviews-HowTos

As I’ve traveled around the world giving presentations, I’ve seen Murphy’s Law in action, up close, many times. Much as I might prepare ahead of time, things still go wrong all the time. And every time something does go wrong, I add another item or two to my emergency toolkit, the better to be prepared for next time.

Here are some of the things that have ended up in that toolkit. If you have a big presentation—especially if it’s out of town, where you won’t have access to your usual resources—consider putting together a similar toolkit of your own.

Gadgets and software

First, let’s talk about the gadgets and software in your toolkit.

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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.

Though texting and driving is dangerous—and in many places illegal—you do want your phone to be accessible and visible for tasks such as in-car navigation. Which means that you need a good car mount. A few months back, I wrote about Kenu’s Airframe, a compact iPhone car mount that’s perfect for tossing in your pocket or bag (say, for use in a rental car). But I mentioned in that article that when I’m in my own car—in other words, when portability isn’t a concern—I have a sturdier mount that I prefer. That mount, from Mountek, is this week’s Gear We Love.

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Apple’s own Network Utility is pretty handy for basic network troubleshooting, but if you need to go above and beyond what it offers, Daniel Diener’s $20 Network Radar (Mac App Store link) is a powerful step up.

Last week, Apple updated its Retina MacBook Pro line, and while the new models are identical on the outside to their 13- and 15-inch predecessors, released late last year, the “Mid 2014” models feature processors that are just a little bit faster. As modest as these internal improvements are, they do provide more performance bang for the buck.

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Contexts 1.4 supplements—and can even replace—OS X’s window management tools, and it does so in a way that is legitimately useful, especially if you rely on keyboard shortcuts to navigate your Mac.

On first glance, Contexts has a nearly nonexistent interface: The only sign that it’s running is a narrow window-picker sidebar that runs along the edge of your screen. But its real power lies in its keyboard shortcuts.

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Modern presentation apps like Keynote and PowerPoint still encourage you to think in terms of “slides”: discrete, isolated objects to be presented one after the other, as though we were still using those old slide projectors to show film-in-square-frames slides. Our audiences may even expect to receive printed or PDF copies of our slides, one tidy image per page.

But that metaphor is a relic of an earlier time. Technology has moved on, and you can create far more interesting and appealing presentations if you move beyond the idea of “slides” and adopt a more fluid, seamless approach.

The best-known tool for presentations-that-are-not-slides is Prezi (4.0 mice), which gives you a huge canvas on which you place individual elements; you then pan, zoom, and rotate the view to highlight specific items. It’s a neat effect, but I prefer to downplay animations and transitions, not to call extra attention to them.

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iOS apps are, for me, a lot like cable channels: No matter how many I have on my iPad or my iPod touch, I only use a dozen or so on a regular basis. The others I don’t delete because they give me some feeling of comfort, as in, “I may need this one day.”

The iPad has become an incredible tool for musicians who wish to quickly and confidently record and produce live music on their tablet. Recently, I had the opportunity to produce and record a session for Ella Joy Meir, using just my iPad, software, and recording accessories. Last week, I covered when you might want to use an iPad and what you need to get started; now, let’s talk about the actual recording and post-production process.

Recording, editing, and mixing

There are two versions of the Auria app: one that allows you to record up to 24 tracks (Auria LE, $25) and a more powerful version that can record up to 48 audio tracks (Auria, $50). Auria’s touch interface is excellent: I really believe that using your fingers to trim, fade, cut, copy, and paste the audio regions is the easiest way to edit audio; it removes most of the layers (keyboard, mouse, and control surface) that stand between me and the music when I use more traditional computer-based recording systems. In my experience, the touch interface also makes editing a much speedier task. Another big advantage of Auria is that it offers many of the mixing features usually available only on a computer-based platform, including plug-ins (available via in-app purchase).

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Reader Anthony Lanier wishes to have a cordial conversation with his IT department. He writes:

The division I work in uses Macs but we’ve recently been told that our computers and devices will soon be run by the company IT department, which is very Microsoft and Windows-centric. They’ve solicited our feedback before proceeding but I honestly don’t know what to suggest. Any ideas?

Before I embark on what may appear to be attacks on IT, let me say from the outset that working in IT is a thankless job. They hear from the people they’re trying to help only when those people have a problem, and much of the time they’re approached in anger. So first, be sympathetic to their work and next, be grateful that they care enough to ask for feedback. I’d suggest something along these lines.

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As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words—and that’s why creative professionals of all stripes like to communicate their ideas in the form of an image. As it turns out, however, a thousand words can be a few too many when you’re trying to draw attention to a small detail.

Light Up 1.0.3 solves this problem by allowing you to load up an image from a file and blocking it out with a mask whose darkness you can customize to your heart’s content. You can then selectively “carve” sections out of the mask, allowing specific portions of the underlying image to be highlighted. The carving tool supports three different shapes: rectangles, rounded rects, and ovals; you can have as many as you like in your image, and are free to resize and move them around.

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For most of us, Wi-Fi has become our preferred way to connect our Macs to other networked devices and the Internet. However, most of us also have times when those connections slow down or fail altogether. When that happens, however, there are several things you can do to diagnose and (ideally) fix the problem.

Signal and noise

The thing to remember about Wi-Fi is that it’s a form of radio: Signals are passed to and from your Mac and your router (and any other networked devices) by transmitters and receivers at both ends tuned to the same frequency. While the information being sent might be digital in nature, the medium it rides on is analog. As such, the ability to transmit and receive data via Wi-Fi is dependent on two things: the strength of the signal between those transmitters and receivers; and the volume of interference—unusable “noise”—from other devices using that same frequency.

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Adobe continues to refine its flagship illustration tool with Illustrator CC 2014, a minor update with just a handful of feature additions. Interestingly, many more new features were introduced to the vector app with the mid-cycle Illustrator CC 17.1 update in January. A number of these earlier additions merit discussion, and combined with the enhancements in CC 2014, they address one of the longest-standing complaints I’ve had with the application.

Better tools

In my past Illustrator reviews, I have consistently lamented the application’s anemic object tools. Select the rounded rectangle tool, click the artboard and you’d be asked to specify the corner radius; once the radius was determined, it was locked in and uneditable. Stretch the object in one direction, and the corners would stretch and distort, too. Similarly, the star and polygon tools provided little in the way of settings, and those too were locked in once set. Creating a star with rounded corners or a polygon in the shape of gear was a logistical nightmare for even the most hardened Illustrator veterans.

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Since the introduction of the iPad in 2010, I have dreamed of the day when I could walk into a studio and record, produce, and mix a live band using just my tablet. Recently, that dream became reality: I had the opportunity to produce and record a session for Ella Joy Meir—a very talented up-and-coming songwriter and composer based in the Boston/New York area. The plan was to record “You’ll Return,” an original song that she co-wrote with Michal Weiner, using a band made up of drums, acoustic and electric guitars, bass, vocals and piano.

For this project, I decided to try and use the iPad for each stage of production—from recording and mixing all the way to mastering and SoundCloud distribution. The recording session was split in two days and took place in the new Berklee Production suites in Boston; the assistant engineer was the talented Vince Espi. (I’ve posted videos of the sessions and some of the things that went on behind the scenes.)

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