Tag Archives: weather

What to do when you have more content than room on your iOS device

Posted on May 17, 2013 by admin

This week, I take an in-depth look at just one question. I get a lot of emails about syncing music to an iOS device, and many people find it difficult to sync when their music library is larger than the space available on their iOS device. So here’s a question about checked tracks, playing albums, and syncing. Q: I have a lot of music and an iPod. I can’t fit all the music onto the iPod, so I uncheck the tracks I don’t want to sync. This works fine, except when I want to listen to an album in iTunes on my Mac. I might have the three best songs checked so they get synced to my iPod, and when I go to play the full album in iTunes, it will only play those three songs, unless I check the others. If I do that, however, the next time I sync the iPod, those other tracks will get copied. Even if I create a playlist, it will skip the unchecked songs, so the only way to listen to music that I don’t want on my iPod is to check the boxes and hope to remember to uncheck them again. How can I get around this problem? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apple Rumors, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, Inside Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac News, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Creative Cloud and iPhoto improvements

Posted on May 15, 2013 by admin

This week we offer you a double-header—one where we start with Jackie Dove speaking with Adobe’s Senior Marketing Director, Scott Morris, about the company’s recent announcement that it was ending perpetual licenses for upcoming versions of Adobe Creative Suite applications. Chris Breen then talks with Jeff Carlson about ways Jeff believes iPhoto could be improved. Download Episode #355 Show Notes Jackie writes about Adobe’s changes in Adobe Scraps Creative Suite Software Licenses In Favor Of Cloud Subscriptions . Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer suggests that not everyone is thrilled with Adobe’s plans in Backlash Rises Against Adobe’s Subscription-Only Creative Suite Plan . And Jeff puts his thoughts about iPhoto into words in Four Things Apple Could Do To Improve Iphoto Right Now . You can subscribe to the Macworld Podcast by clicking here . Or you can point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader at: http://www.macworld.com/column/mwpodcast/index.rss You can find previous episodes of our audio podcasts at Macworld’s podcasting page . To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, iCloud, Inside Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac News, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Robot Unicorn Attack 2 is every bit ridiculous as it sounds

Posted on May 15, 2013 by admin

No longer are rainbows, sparkly dolphins, and synth-pop ballads limited to acid trips in your high school buddy’s Astro Van. With Adult Swim’s original Robot Unicorn Attack , an ironic novelty premise was married to a seriously addictive endless platformer, which then gave birth to a phenomenon that has spawned imitators, sequels, and pop-culture status. And now, several years later, we have a sequel to what was perhaps a semi-joke game that has a devoted following. The challenge for Adult Swim was following up a game known for its over-the-top premise and difficulty. Fans may be disappointed that the universal  Robot Unicorn Attack 2  for iOS isn’t as difficult, but they certainly can’t say the game is subtler. The Robot Unicorn Attack world is as strange as ever. Full of rainbows, dolphins, floating space whales, and other leftovers of a seven-year-old’s fever dreams, the opening level of the game is everything that fans of the series would hope for. You get to frolic in a heavenly dreamscape until you violently die, your poor robot unicorn decapitated in an explosion of failure. Thus, ends your “wish,” or one of your three lives that you’re given during each run. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apps, Camera, CES, Extras, Features, Inside Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac News, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: For charting data, Chartsmith is capable but outdated

Posted on May 14, 2013 by admin

Chartsmith is a Mac app designed to do one thing, and only one thing: make charts. If your charting needs are casual and infrequent, this is not the app for you; you’ll be more than happy using Numbers, Excel, or any other spreadsheet to create the occasional chart. Conversely, you’d assume that if your chart needs are serious and frequent, Chartsmith would be the app to use, right? The answer to that question, unfortunately, isn’t an automatic yes. Launching Chartsmith is a bit like stepping into a time machine: Chartsmith’s interface seems dated, with a two-window setup (plus a nearly-required Inspector window), a drawer for chart notes, and an odd toolbar-like thing that floats next to the chart window, yet is attached (with a delay) when you move the chart window around. Although everything works, there is a learning curve, and there’s this general feeling that the interface is out of date. The flashback extends to the tutorials, too. Remember Aqua’s stripes and bright blue 3D-esque tab buttons? You’ll find them alive and well in the screenshots in the tutorials. (Thankfully, the app itself doesn’t share the appearance of the tutorial’s screenshots.) The whole thing just feels somewhat dated and dusty, though everything works. Using Chartsmith is unlike using a spreadsheet to create charts. Once I learned the interface, though, Chartsmith was relatively easy to use. The aforementioned two windows contain the chart viewer (which holds the charts) and the data viewer (for entering/editing data), and the inspector is used to customize every element of your charts. The chart viewer window shows real-time changes as you make edits in the data viewer window, and you can change text (but not values) directly on the charts, if you prefer. Creating a chart is as simple as adding rows and columns in the data viewer, entering your data, and choosing a chart type. Want to change one bar of a three-bar chart to line? One click of a button in the data viewer window, and that task is done. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apple News, Apple Rumors, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac News, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses, Tutorials | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Five overlooked OS X system tweaks

Posted on May 13, 2013 by admin

If you like to find new ways to tweak OS X, you sometimes need to look in unexpected places. For example, the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, which houses a number of features to help users who have limited seeing, hearing, and mobility, contains some nifty features that all users should know about. Here are five system tweaks that you might want to try on your Mac. 1. Change the cursor size If you mirror your Mac’s display to a large-screen TV or use a large (or especially high-resolution) monitor, you may find that the cursor on your screen is too small. You can change the size of the cursor, and make it anywhere from big to huge. Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences , click Accessibility , and then click Display . Drag the Cursor Size slider from Normal (smallest) toward Large , settling on the size you want to use; the cursor changes size as you drag the slider. This setting will change the standard mouse pointer, as well as other cursors (the text input cursor, for example), though it won’t work in all applications. It will even make the hand pointer, which displays when you hover over a link in Safari, much larger. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apple News, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, iCloud, Inside Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hands on: Pixelmator launches smart, significant new upgrade

Posted on May 9, 2013 by admin

Pixelmator on Thursday released version 2.2 of its $15 Mac App Store-only image editing app. “Don’t be confused by versioning numbers,” the developers wrote on their blog , because “it’s a major upgrade.” Among the new features are a slew of new shape tools, a Smart Move tool, a clever Paint Selection tool, a Light Leak Effect, and plenty more. Pixelmator 2.2 offers 40 new shapes to work with. Pixelmator 2.2 includes 40 shapes you can easily insert into your images, and they’re all customizable: You can give them solid or gradient fills, shadows, inner shadows, adjustable stroke styles, and a host of visual effects. The shapes include basic geometric objects, along with cameras, people, ghosts, clocks, and more. And, of course, you can create your own shapes and share them with other Pixelmator users. There’s another new option that lets you treat text layers as shapes, too. That essentially lets you warp text in all the same ways, with all the same sorts of effects. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apple Rumors, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, Inside Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac News, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mac Gems: The Unarchiver is a free, robust file-extraction utility

Posted on May 8, 2013 by admin

Back in the days of 56-kbps modems and 1.44MB floppies, compressing files was a necessity. These days, bandwidth and storage are less of a concern, but there are still reasons to package files into neat little bundles. A zip archive, for example, lets you attach a single “file” to an email message instead of tacking on multiple items. The zip file is smaller than the sum of those separate files—and it’s an industry standard that works across platforms. OS X has long been able to uncompress zip files and some other archive types, using its built-in Archive Utility, but I’ve switched to The Unarchiver ( Mac App Store link ) because it supports more formats and offers easier customization options—and it’s just as free as Archive Utility. When you launch The Unarchiver, its preferences window automatically opens to the Archive Formats tab. There you can see the software’s extensive format support, comprising 58 different file formats . Some, such as rar, are widely used, but you’ve probably never heard of some of the others—and are just as unlikely to encounter them. This list is where you choose which formats you want The Unarchiver to handle. By default, zip and the other dozen or so other formats that OS X’s Archive Utility normally handles are unchecked, but by checking the box next to any of these, you can choose to have The Unarchiver deal with them instead. Handy ‘Select All’ and ‘Deselect All’ buttons let you make changes en masse. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apple News, Apple TV, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, Inside Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac News, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Illustrator and InDesign get makeover, move to the cloud

Posted on May 6, 2013 by admin

With the announcement of fresh updates to its flagship publishing applications—InDesign and Illustrator—Adobe redirects its attention to its roots in the print and graphic design arena. Today, at its own Adobe Max Creativity Conference, the company is revealing more details about the new version of its desktop nonlinear editing and motion graphics programs. Here are some of the highlights. In a departure from the intense focus on the mobile market that marked last year’s CS6 release, Adobe says that at least 75 percent of all program updates to the debut release of Creative Cloud desktop apps were devoted to its traditional image editing and publishing software. Both InDesign and Illustrator—part of the original Creative Suite—will receive a series of upgrades, including a dark interface, support for Mac Retina displays, and signature Creative Cloud features like Sync Fonts, Sync Colors, and Sync Settings that let you sync and customize your software environment. Muse, the new visual Web program targeted to designers, builds standards-based sites using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript without users having to hand code. In Adobe’s transition from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud, the familiar apps get an upgrade while subscribers get a slate of extra services for their $50 monthly subscription. Access to Sync services, 20GB of online storage, the Behance community hub, automatic cross-platform downloading and updates to all programs in the suite, and training are some of the benefits built into subscriptions. Illustrator CC Working with display text is a huge part of working with Illustrator, and Illustrator CC introduces a Touch Type tool that provides expanded control over type. With it, you can move, scale, and rotate individual characters and change fonts or copy at any time. In addition, you can now use multitouch devices as well as a mouse or stylus. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, Inside Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hands on: Instacast for OS X beta is a good listener

Posted on May 3, 2013 by admin

If you love to listen to podcasts on your iPhone or iPad, you’re probably familiar with Vemedio’s Instacast , a $5 app that lets you consume your favorite shows through an elegant and well-thought-out user interface. Despite all its great features, Instacast was an iOS-only affair—until now. The folks behind it have now released a public beta of Instacast for OS X, and we’ve taken the Mac version for a spin to see how it holds up. Podcasts a-go-go Like its mobile cousin, Instacast for Mac revolves around a simple and intuitive user interface that emphasizes your content, organized according to your tastes. Instacast is all about the content. The interface features Mail’s familiar three-pane configuration, with subscriptions, shows, and show notes readily available. When you first launch the app, you’ll probably start by building your own library of podcasts; Instacast offers a convenient panel for this purpose, letting you pick favorites from a large catalog that’s divided up by podcast type—audio, video, enhanced content, and so forth—as well as by genre and language. You can also search for a specific title, or enter a feed URL directly if you so choose. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apple Rumors, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, iCloud, Inside Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Macs, Other, Reports, Speakers, Styluses | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

My top five TextExpander snippets

Posted on May 3, 2013 by admin

My favorite TextExpander snippets If you asked Macworld editors to name their favorite utilities, many of us would mention TextExpander . If you type for a living, as we do, TextExpander—or a similar app such as TypeIt4Me or QuicKeys —quickly becomes indispensable. As you probably know, TextExpander and utilities like it enable you to insert fixed bits of text—which TextExpander calls snippets—by typing in short abbreviations. So, for example, you could create a snippet called Date that inserts the current date whenever you type in an abbreviation (I use .date ) followed by a designated delimiter (I use the backslash key ). Once you start building a library of snippets, they quickly become an integral part of your workflow. If you are already using TextExpander, I’m sure you already have an extensive library of snippets. But if you aren’t, or if you just got started, I thought I’d try to give you some idea of what you can do with the app, by showing you some of the snippets I use the most. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Apple News, Apple Rumors, Apps, Camera, Cases, CES, Features, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac News, Mac Rumors, Macs, Other, Reports, Styluses, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment