Table of contents for July 2012 in Macworld

Go Outside and Play In this month’s iOS Central, I write about how to configure an old iPad for a child (see page 24). While I hope most readers will react positively to that story, I also expect a few of them will let me know that exposing a child to an iPad will lead to a machine-dependent future devoid of fresh air, firm muscle tone, and true human interaction. We can all agree that spending 18 hours a day glued to any one thing—a social network, an online game, a tavern, a racetrack, or a shopping channel—is the sign of a larger problem. But in my daughter’s case at least, I’d argue that iOS devices—and the experiences she and I have shared with them—have enhanced her life in a…

Apple’s Java update for OS X removes most common variants of the Flashback malware. The update also reconfigures the Java plug-in so that it disables automatic execution of Java applets by default. You can reenable automatic Java applet execution by running the Java Preferences app in /Applications/Utilities. However, if, after an indeterminate period of time, you haven’t run any Java applets, your Mac will automatically disable auto-execution again. Apple recommends the update to all Mac users who have Java installed. The update is available via Software Update. Go to macworld.com/7770 to download the update. Antivirus software companies have also released free Flashback-fighting tools. Kaspersky’s tool is available at flashbackcheck.com. Symantec’s app is at macworld.com/7771. F-Secure’s tool is at macworld.com/7772.…

About 100 peripherals based on the Thunderbolt connector technology will become available by the end of the year, if Intel meets its target, said Kirk Skaugen, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group. That would be a big jump from the slim selection of such devices available today, Thunderbolt, which was introduced more than a year ago, is a high-speed connector technology that moves data between computers and peripherals. Thunderbolt was codeveloped by Apple and Intel, and has data-transfer speeds of up to 10 gbps, which is faster than USB 3.0. Skaugen’s remarks came during an announcement of the new third-generation Intel Core processors code-named Ivy Bridge. There will be a higher level of Thunderbolt integration in computers with the new Core processors, Skaugen said. Intel…

The Latest on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and App Store HOW-TO With three generations of iPads now out in the wild, it’s becoming more usual to find multiple iPads in a home. And some of them are being passed along to kids. What can you do to make such an iPad useful (and safe) for your child? These six steps are a good place to start. Step 1: Remove Your Stuff When giving an iPad to another person—even your own kid—it’s imperative that you remove all of your data from it. Hook up your iPad to the computer you normally sync it with, and then back it up (because you may want to restore that data to a new tablet). Then select that iPad in iTunes’ Source list; in…

Microsoft may have ditched its Courier concept tablet device in 2010, but that didn’t stop developer Zanther from creating Taposé (macworld.com/7767), a $3 iPad app that draws heavily on Courier for its inspiration. Taposé lets you create virtual notebooks in which you can enter text; scribble freehand drawings; and drop images, video, recorded audio, clips from the Web or iOS’s Maps, and even virtual business cards of your contacts’ information. You can also highlight text, create lists, and make sticky notes. Microsoft’s original concept for Courier was a foldable notebook-like device with two separate displays. Obviously, the iPad only has one screen. So Zanther has adapted Courier’s “spine” into a bar that you can drag to create two separate panes. That dual-pane view is actually one of Taposé’s most useful…

Angry Birds Space 1.1.0 GAMES When you’ve dominated every mobile market on earth to the tune of 12 million downloads, there’s only one frontier left to conquer. So the Angry Birds franchise moves into space in a physics puzzle game that’s much more sophisticated, entertaining, and complex than its predecessors. Whether in its iPhone form or in a separate iPad-optimized version (macworld.com/7756), Angry Birds Space cleverly introduces space physics into the game. You’re not just launching a bird at a pig—you’re contending with the gravitational pull of nearby asteroids and planets. It makes the game much more open-ended and far more chaotic. This is everything a sequel should be. —CHRIS HOLT iPhone | 4.5/5.0; $1; Rovio MyPix Photo Watermarking and Sharing 1.4 PHOTOGRAPHY Photo-snapping iPhone users can easily leave their…

For better or for worse, Microsoft Office is the de facto standard for business documents. But what do you do if your work requires you to work on Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations, yet you want to use an iPad as your portable business machine? Thanks to a variety of increasingly powerful apps, you can edit Office docs on Apple’s tablet. iWork One natural option is Apple’s iWork apps—Pages (4.0/5.0; $10; macworld.com/6129), Numbers (3.5/5.0; $10; macworld.com/6130), and Keynote (3.5/5.0; $10; macworld.com/6131). They can import and export documents in the corresponding Microsoft Office formats and offer powerful, easy-to-use tools for creating and editing files. However, it’s inconvenient at best to exchange files between a Mac (or PC) and an iPad when those files are in Microsoft Office formats. And…

Videoconferencing can be a great business tool. It lets you meet virtually with coworkers and clients no matter where you or they are. It can reduce travel costs while maintaining those all-important person-to-person connections. The iPad—especially the iPad 2 and the most recent model, with their front- and rear-facing cameras—has proven to be a great videoconferencing tool. The newest iPad raises the bar even higher with its high-quality Retina display, which makes video meetings seem that much more immediate. Many videoconferencing services also have iPad apps, but three in particular stand out: FuzeBox’s Fuze Meeting HD, Citrix Online’s GoToMeeting, and Cisco WebEx Meetings. All three deliver the same core functionality, enabling you to conduct and participate in meetings from your iPad. But beyond that basic concept, they differ significantly. FUZE…

With the demise of MobileMe, many Mac users are looking for new homes for their websites, particularly those created in iWeb. Picking just one from the thousands of hosting companies can be bewildering. Don’t panic. Here are a few tips to help you choose a new provider and move your site to its new home. What to Look For The type of hosting service most likely to appeal to MobileMe refugees is shared hosting, in which numerous sites and domains share the resources of each physical computer connected to the Internet. It’s inexpensive, and, except for high-traffic or mission-critical sites, it’s a good all-around choice for most consumers and small businesses. First, the good news: Finding a “Mac-compatible webhost” is like finding a “food-compatible restaurant.” Regardless of the server’s operating…

Traveling has gotten quite a bit less convenient over the past decade, especially if you’re packing gadgets. To ease the hassle, Incipio’s $130 Weekender Nylon Travel Bag (www.incipio.com) is designed with your MacBook, iPad, and phone in mind. You can use the Weekender as a briefcase-style bag, a messenger bag, or a backpack—but it has the soul of a piece of carry-on luggage. Its main compartment stores your clothes and other traveling needs, while a separate exterior compartment fits a padded removable sleeve designed to fit laptops up to 17 inches in size. A smaller zippered compartment on the top fits an iPad and other small items, and a media pocket near the handle welcomes your iPhone. Choose from royal blue, red, gunmetal, and basic black.…

HARDWARE: Epson WorkForce 845 The Epson WorkForce 845 color inkjet multifunction printer has a lot going for it. In particular, its above-average capacity and paper handling, top-notch performance, and very good output will nicely fulfill the needs of a small office or home office. In our tests, text at default settings printed at 11.3 ppm—far faster than the average. Printing letter-size glossy photos proceeded at a middling 0.4 ppm, and scan times were about average. At standard settings, text looks black and sharp. When you choose the slower fine mode, the results are nearly laserlike. Color graphics printed on plain paper are exceptionally accurate, and closer than usual to the quality of their glossy-paper counterparts. The WorkForce 845 ships with Epson’s extra-high-capacity ink cartridges (model 127); few inkjets come standard…

Q&A File compression—and what file types iTunes works with—can be confusing. In this installment, I answer your questions about lossless audio compression and file formats. Q: Sorry to be such a dummy, but can you define ‘lossless’ for me? A: Lossless file compression is a technique that reduces the amount of space a file occupies without changing any of its contents. If you create an Apple Lossless audio file from an uncompressed AIFF or WAV file (from a CD, for example), the song file is typically 50 percent to 60 percent the size of the original, yet when you play the song back, you enjoy every bit of data from the original. Lossy compression—including formats such as MP3 and AAC—actually removes musical data to save even more space. Q: Now…

FaceTime and Skype make it easier than ever to keep in touch with family, friends, and coworkers. However, video calling isn’t always convenient for everyone: Many folks still don’t have cameras connected to their computers, and many others don’t want to. In these cases, consider sending a short video message to your favorite people—you’ll find that 30 seconds of video can convey much more emotion and nuance than any amount of text. The steps below assume you are running Lion and have a Mac with a built-in iSight or FaceTime camera. (The sequence is very similar in Snow Leopard, though it offers fewer choices and certain menu items are different.) The video files you create are in the H.264 format and are designed to open on any Mac, iPhone, and…

There are a million or so books about photography on the shelves of your local bookstore. But you don’t need to remember a book’s worth of tips and tricks to improve your photography. When you get right down to it, a handful of easy techniques can dramatically improve your photos. Rule of Thirds Want to improve your photographic composition? Stop putting your subject in the center of the frame. The “rule of thirds” tells us that photos (and video) look better when the subject is off-center, aligned about a third of the way from the right or left side. A slew of rules can help you compose eye-catching and engaging photos, but this one rule is perhaps the single most important. To be precise, draw two lines through a photo,…

Understand the Apple TV, Mirroring, and Aspect Ratio Q: I have a new iPad and the most recent Apple TV. It seems like with the resolution the iPad is putting out, I should be able to get 16:9 1080p mirroring from the Apple TV to my television, yet that isn’t happening. I still see black bars on each side of my TV when mirroring the iPad. Tim Rosenthal A: Although the third-generation iPad packs a load more pixels than the previous model, the display’s native 4:3 aspect ratio hasn’t changed. So when you pull up the multitasking bar, swipe to the right until you see the iPad’s play controls, tap on the AirPlay icon, and choose your Apple TV as the destination, it projects that very same aspect ratio to…

On Making Your Mac Your Own I was installing a new Gmail client on my three-year-old MacBook Pro when I idly glanced at the guy sitting next to me at the cafe. He was beavering away on his own Pro, a top-of-the-line model, much newer than mine. I took him for a well-paid tech professional—until I snuck a peek at his Dock. Finder, Launchpad, Mission Control, iChat, iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, Photo Booth: There they were, all lined up, just like they are the day you first turn on your computer—you know, before you customize your Dock to get rid of the applications you don’t use and add the ones you do. When I indignantly tweeted about it, my online pals argued for the tech equivalent of a citizen’s arrest. Why…

End of an Era MISSING FROM iCLOUD I’m a big .Mac Gallery user who’s looking for an alternative. From what I’ve seen, SmugMug galleries and templates really look great, and they do a fantastic job of showing off your photos. One of the big reasons I paid for .Mac was Gallery, so I’d be saving $40 per year by going to SmugMug. But one feature that seems to be missing is the ability to let your friends or family members upload additional photos to a gallery—that’s something .Mac Gallery lets you do. It’s not a deal-breaker feature, but nice to have. nulzilla, via the Macworld.com forums Maybe I was one of the few that actually benefited from iWeb, iDisk, and Gallery and used them every day. iDisk was convenient, built…

April marked the 20th anniversary of the esteemed Mac text-editing app BBEdit. There are other apps not published by a huge company that have lasted as long, but I’m not sure any app has remained as relevant as BBEdit. As someone who has written thousands (if not millions) of words in Bare Bones Software’s flagship product, let me take this opportunity to praise and reminisce. BBEdit began with a Usenet post by Rich Siegel, who 20 years later is still the lead developer. The post on April 12, 1992, heralded the arrival of a free text editor. I realize that many Macworld readers weren’t around 20 years ago, so as someone who was a college student back then and had only recently discovered the Mac, let me translate. BBEdit used…

OFFLINE ARTICLE READER: Read Later 2.0.3 3.0/5.0; FREE; MICHAEL SCHNEIDER; MISCHNEIDER.NET Instapaper and Pocket (formerly Read It Later) are useful Web services that let you save Web articles for later reading. Read Later is a Mac client for both services that offers a better reading experience than their websites do. Read Later downloads the full text of the articles you’ve saved, as well as any folders (for Instapaper) or tags (for Pocket). Click a folder or tag, or your main read-later queue, and you see a list of its saved articles. Click an article to display it—sans ads and messy layout—in the pane to the right. A full-screen mode lets you read without distractions, and you can even toggle the visibility of the folder and article lists, leaving nothing but…

To take full advantage of the new iPad’s 2048-by-1536-pixel display, apps need new versions of their graphics. That means bigger file sizes, even on older iOS devices. Soon, your 16GB iPhone or iPad may start complaining that it’s out of storage space. Here are some ways to free up room on your app- and data-packed device. Turn to iTunes Match If you store a lot of music on your iOS device, and you can spare $25 per year, consider signing up for iTunes Match. With that service, Apple stores your music in iCloud; your entire music library appears on your iOS device without taking up storage space there. Once you’ve signed up for the service in iTunes on your Mac, you can remove music from your iOS device as needed…

Adobe Reader Adds Signature, Annotation Features Adobe has overhauled Adobe Reader with new features that let users of the iPhone and iPad app sign, annotate, and comment on documents (macworld.com/7524). Earlier versions of the free app only allowed users to view, bookmark, and search documents, not modify them. Now you can sign documents using your finger or a stylus; annotation tools allow you to highlight, underline, and strike through text. —JOEL MATHIS Calendar Integration Comes to Hipmunk Travel App Your busy schedule can now be front and center when you’re looking for flights and hotel rooms with the free Hipmunk Flight & Hotel Search app for iPhone and iPad (macworld.com/7766). Version 2.2 integrates with calendar data stored on your iOS device. Appointments show up in flight search results, so you…

HARDWARE: Annex Products Opena Case Combining a hard-shell case with an integrated slide-out bottle opener, the Opena Case is more than just a gimmick: The double-duty iPhone 4 and 4S case provides the sturdy protection you’d expect from a hard-shell offering, but in a slim profile. The opener doesn’t always slide out smoothly, but the case functions perfectly when it comes to protecting your phone. 4.0/5.0; $40; Annex Products; www.openacase.com The Joy Factory Monet Stylus Resembling an elongated cotton swab, the Monet Stylus is nearly 7 inches long, with an 8mm rubber tip that’s nearly a quarter-inch long in its own right. That design actually makes the Monet a good tool for digital painting: Unlike a traditional nib stylus, you can use the Monet at almost any angle. Line work…

In addition to iWork, Google Docs, and third-party office suites, you have another option when it comes to editing Office docs on the iPad: You can connect to a remote Windows server from your iPad and run the Windows version of Office remotely. Three services in particular (all with companion iOS apps) enable you to do this: CloudOn (site.cloudon.com), Nivio (us.nivio.com), and OnLive Desktop (desktop.onlive.com). Here’s how they compare. CLOUDON CloudOn (which is completely free) doesn’t connect you to a remote Windows desktop, as Nivio and OnLive Desktop do. Instead, it opens a file browser that shows you your Dropbox or Box account. Above that list are three icons: One is for selecting the view (list, icon, or a view that looks like Cover Flow). The middle one provides access…

It seems like ancient history, but it was just six years ago—Macworld Expo 2006, to be precise—that Apple launched what many hailed as the linchpin of its iLife suite: A Web design tool called iWeb joined iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and iDVD. As the newest member of the digital hub, iWeb was the missing link that bound all iLife apps into a single organic unit. Paired with Apple’s networked sharing tools—first .Mac and later MobileMe—this ecosystem provided a quick, painless way to create captivating and complex websites incorporating iLife app elements like text, photos and albums, videos, music, blogs, and podcasts. With a few mouse clicks and some simple configuration, MobileMe put your iWeb site online. Of course, that’s not all MobileMe did. The service provided ad-free, private, and cloud-based access…

If you use MobileMe, you’ve no doubt been put on notice that your files, folders, and MobileMe account data are about to vanish into the ether. While you probably know what to do with your personal files and folders, you may not know exactly what to do with the sites hosted on your MobileMe account. One simple alternative is to move those files to a free Dropbox account. Thanks to Dropbox’s ability to let you easily share files online, you can use it to host webpages. While this may not be the most elegant solution, it will work until you find a permanent Web design tool or webhost. If you used iWeb to create your site, don’t just drag and drop your files from your iDisk to your desktop. Instead,…

Q&A The world can be a tedious place, but it doesn’t always have to be. Take adding multiple recipients to a single email message, for example. Of course you can add each recipient, one address at a time. But doing so is about as interesting (and necessary) as watching paint dry. With the power of address groups, you can quickly add many recipients in one go. Q: I don’t see a groups feature in Mail. Where can I find it? A: Apple’s Mail doesn’t contain its own contact manager. When working with groups, you start with Apple’s Address Book (in /Applications). By default, in Lion’s version of Address Book, you see an All Contacts page to the left and all your contacts listed to the right. To create a group,…

HandBrake is a great app for ripping your DVD collection as well as converting other files on your hard drive to, say, iOS-friendly formats (handbrake.fr). And to make things easier for users, the software offers a number of built-in presets, including a bunch for Apple devices. However, when new devices come out, it can take quite a while for new presets to appear. The third-generation iPad and third-generation Apple TV, for example, now support 1080p video playback, but HandBrake’s current iPad and Apple TV presets were designed for older models, and therefore won’t produce the best-quality video for your new devices. Luckily, creating your own presets in HandBrake is easy if you know a few simple tricks. In this example, I’ll show you how to create one for encoding at…

HARDWARE: Behringer U-Phono UFO202 If you’re still hanging on to your old LPs and you want to digitize those records, Behringer offers an inexpensive way to do it—the U-Phono UFO202 USB audio interface. The U-Phono is a compact plastic USB audio converter that contains a phono preamp for digitizing LPs (which means it’ll work with any record player) and supports 44.1- and 48-kHz stereo audio at 16-bit resolution. It can also capture line-level signals—from a cassette deck or recorder, for example. The U-Phono is powered via your computer’s USB port, so no external power supply is necessary. In addition to working with your Mac, it can work with an iPad 2 and a third-generation iPad via Apple’s $29 iPad Camera Connection Kit. The U-Phono by itself is OK but not…

Communicating with maximum impact is easy to do when you’re using HulkSmash by IronManic designer Gene Buban. Lurking within this font is a group of uppercase heavies set to rumble in homage to the silver screen’s most misunderstood humanoid, Marvel Comics’ Incredible Hulk. We predict you’ll have everyone’s attention from the moment you type @YOU. Don’t let the crumbling facade fool you—the 70 characters of HulkSmash have in common rock-solid design. Buban has stretched the latest incarnation of Rob Meek’s FontStruct application to the limit. Hours of patient editing within the set’s DNA allows this Jekyll-and-Hyde offspring of traditional wood type to stomp straight into the 21st century, bringing with it a limited range of punctuation in both solid and smashed forms. Users can type a quotation mark (") for…

Photo Measures, a $5 app from Big Blue Pixel, lets users record measurements and dimensions directly onto photos from their iOS devices (4.0/5.0; www.bigbluepixel.com). The app’s clean interface makes it well suited to professionals—contractors or real estate agents—who need to quickly record, save, and share measurements on a regular basis. But it’s also convenient for homeowners and apartment dwellers, who can carry around the dimensions of their homes and always know if that bookshelf or picture frame will fit in the space they’re thinking of. Here’s how it works: Snap a photo of the room or object for which you want to record measurements (or grab a photo from your camera roll). Once the photo opens, swipe along the part you want to measure with your fingertip. As you draw…

Troubleshoot Journals in iPhoto for iOS iPhoto for iOS’s Journals feature is a spanking-new option, not yet available in the Mac version of iPhoto, which allows you to create and publish photo albums. In essence, it replaces (and improves upon) MobileMe’s Gallery. But it’s not without its problems. For example, exporting a journal to your Mac can be problematic. To export a journal, open the desired journal in iPhoto and tap the Share icon. From the choices that appear, tap the iTunes icon. To access the folder on your Mac, connect your iOS device to your Mac and launch iTunes. Select the device from the Devices section. From here, click the Apps tab and scroll down to the File Sharing section. Locate iPhoto. Your journal should be listed in the…

News and Analysis about Macs, OS X, and Apple Q&A In April, Russian antivirus vendor Dr. Web published strong evidence that more than 500,000 Macs have been infected by the latest variant of the Flashback Trojan horse. Flashback appears to be the most widespread Mac malware we’ve seen since the days when viruses were spread on infected floppy disks. It could be the single most significant malware infection to ever hit the Mac community. Here’s what you need to know about Flashback, what you can do, and what it means for the future of Mac security. Q: First things first: What is the Flashback Trojan horse? A: Flashback is a malicious software program, discovered in September 2011, that masqueraded as an installer for Adobe Flash. The original version of Flashback…

For the quarter that ended March 31, 2012, Apple reported an $11.6 billion net profit, an increase of 94 percent over the same quarter in 2011. That profit was based on revenue of $39.2 billion, which was a 59 percent increase compared to the 2011 second quarter. Apple’s profit translates to earnings of $12.30 per share, up from $6.40 a share last year; analysts were expecting to see earnings of $10.06 a share for the quarter. Apple sold 11.8 million iPads during the quarter, an increase of 151 percent from the year-ago period. The company sold 35.1 million phones between January and March, an 88 percent jump from year-ago iPhone sales and a record for the March quarter. The iPad and iPhone combined produced $29.2 billion in revenue—that’s three-quarters of…

OWC Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD Card Think of a solid-state drive (SSD), and you might picture a boxy device like a hard drive, but with flash memory instead of hard-drive platters. OWC’s Mercury Accelsior is a different animal. It’s an SSD, but in the form of a bootable PCIe card designed to give your Mac Pro a speed boost. By fitting into a Mac Pro’s PCIe slot, the Mercury Accelsior utilizes the fastest interface available to produce maximum speeds. The company boasts that the Mercury Accelsior offers performance that is five times faster than an internal SATA-connected hard drive—up to 780 MBps read and 763 MBps write performance. If you use the Mercury Accelsior as your Mac Pro’s boot drive, you’ll see nearly instant startup and app launching. And if…

Good news for anyone with a GSM-based iPhone: AT&T customers who have fulfilled their two-year contract can now unlock their iPhone for use on any GSM network. AT&T made the change in April, bringing its iPhone unlocking policy closer to that for other devices: In the past, subscribers could unlock a non-Apple phone after their contract had expired, but the company refused to unlock the iPhone except in special circumstances. Now, customers who wish to use AT&T’s network can buy an iPhone at a subsidized price and have it unlocked after their contract term is up, rather than having to purchase an unlocked phone at full price directly from Apple. AT&T says the only requirements are that a customer’s account must be in good standing and that the device can’t…

The iPad is good for many things, but can you play “Axel F.” on it? You’ll be able to, with the help of any model from the microKey series of iPad-compatible keyboards made by musical instrument company Korg (www.korg.com). The number on each model—the $70 microKey25, the $80 microKey37, and the $180 microKey61—refers to the number of keyboard keys. You can connect your iPad to the keyboards with the help of an Apple Camera Connection Kit or a powered USB hub. The keyboards hit the market in May, so you’ll be tickling the ivories in no time.…

It’s not a question of whether you can get real work done on an iPad. After doing so ourselves, and talking to readers who do likewise, we know that’s happening already. The question is what kind of work you can get done. Email, Web browsing—that sort of thing we know we can do. But what about the heavier office chores, like editing Microsoft Office documents? And how efficient is the iPad-to-Mac-and-back workflow? How easy is it to keep all those work documents truly in sync, no matter which device you use to work on them? Those were the kinds of questions we sought to answer when we asked a few of our contributors to look at business apps for the iPad. We tasked Joe Kissell with surveying the various alternatives…

Accessing the same set of files from an iPad and a Mac is commonplace now, thanks to file-syncing services. Dropbox and iCloud may be the best known, but they are just two of a growing range of options. Here’s my take on some of the better-known alternatives. Keep in mind that as I was doing the comparison, even more options were surfacing. Among the newest are Google Drive, an updated version of Microsoft’s SkyDrive app, Quickoffice Connect, and Cubby. DROPBOX When you first install Dropbox on your Mac, it creates a Dropbox folder with 2GB of free storage (5.0/5.0; macworld.com/a/1156705). Files and folders you drag into the Dropbox folder are automatically uploaded to Dropbox and stored on your Mac. Connect other computers to your Dropbox account, and your files automatically…

It’s sad. But it’s a fact. With the departure of Apple’s MobileMe online service, it’s time to think not only of moving your site to a different webhost, but of eventually moving away from Apple’s iWeb website builder altogether. All indications point to iWeb’s future demise as the Mac OS advances and iWeb doesn’t get any upgrades. During this transition period, remember that switching design tools is not urgent. You don’t have to make a radical change right away. All you have to do when MobileMe goes away is save your website to a folder and move it to another webhost. Sites should be redesigned periodically to leverage new technologies and to enhance visual and contextual interest. However, now is the time to check out other options. There are many…

For most of the past decade, many people had more drive space than they knew what to do with. Hard drives got bigger and bigger while prices went lower and lower. So it probably comes as a surprise to realize that your drive may be getting full. The popularity of digital media means that many people are storing huge video files and thousands of photos and music tracks. Also, a growing number of computers are using solid-state drives (SSDs), which, while speedy, offer considerably less capacity than traditional hard drives. Here are four tips that Macworld editors use to slim down our own drives. 1: Clear Out Your Downloads Every time you view a photo or open a PDF in an email message in Apple’s Mail, that file gets saved…

REVIEW FileMaker extends its dominance in the realm of Mac OS and iOS databases by offering improvements that every type of FileMaker user will appreciate. Themes Include iOS Integration The most obvious improvement to FileMaker Pro 12 is its new library containing 40 fresh layout themes. A theme controls the appearance of objects on a layout: the color scheme, the shape and style of buttons, and the text formatting and borders of data fields. Not only are the new themes attractive, but you can now also switch themes after the fact—a quick way to perform a face-lift on your databases. Unfortunately, you can’t define and save custom themes. Interoperability with FileMaker Go, FileMaker’s database app for the iPad and iPhone, is also an exciting part of the release, and with…

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently blasted Comcast, alleging unfair implementation of Net neutrality principles when it comes to bandwidth caps for its Xfinity Internet service. The Netflix CEO’s attack came after he said he spent a weekend using video-streaming apps, namely Netflix, HBO Go, Xfinity, and Hulu, when he noticed something: “When I watch video on my Xbox from three of these four apps, it counts against my Comcast Internet [bandwidth] cap. When I watch through Comcast’s Xfinity app, however, it does not count against my Comcast Internet cap.” Hastings posted his beef on Facebook to his 120,000 subscribers (macworld.com/7768). Hastings called for Comcast to “apply caps equally, or not at all.” He detailed that “if I watch last night’s SNL [Saturday Night Live] episode on my Xbox through the…

Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight With its $139 Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, Barnes & Noble steps up to the plate with one of the very few features that standard E Ink e-readers have lacked for too long. The new version of the reader gains an LED light so you can easily read the E Ink screen in dark environments, like a darkened bedroom or airplane, without needing an annoying overhead light. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an integrated light in an e-reader: Sony tried it four years ago, with its Reader PRS-700; but even at its brightest setting, the light on that model barely reached the center of the page. The LED here is inside the Nook’s bezel, at the top of the 600-by-800-pixel…

I hope we can all agree it’s a good thing that video cameras no longer burn the date and time into footage the way they used to. If you missed this particular piece of video history, cameras used to have an option to include the date and time on every frame of the video. (Many cameras still do this.) The feature has a couple of problems: You can never remove the mark, because it’s recorded to the film. And all too often the camera’s internal clock wasn’t set correctly, so that potentially helpful date and time wasn’t even accurate. And yet, sometimes you may want to display that information for documentary purposes or to establish, briefly, when the footage was taken. All cameras encode date and time data to the…

Answering Your Questions and Sharing Your Tips about Getting the Most from Your Mac Customize Shortcuts for Mission Control and Dashboard You probably know that you can choose keyboard shortcuts for Mission Control and Dashboard in the Mission Control pane of System Preferences. But the default shortcuts listed in that preference pane are limited. For Mission Control, for example, you can choose function keys from F1 to F13, but you can’t select, say, F14 or F15; you also have a few other options, such as the right and left Shift and Control keys. You can do the same for Dashboard, though you’re limited to the same range of function keys. Fortunately, one Mac OS X Hints reader realized that there’s another, more flexible way to assign keyboard shortcuts for these…

Quickly Print Files from the Finder Q: Is there some way to quickly print a single copy of a file without having to go through a print dialog box? Warren Lane A: Open System Preferences, choose the Print & Scan (Lion) or Print & Fax (Snow Leopard) preference pane, select your default printer, and drag it to the desktop. Do this and you create a desktop printer. To print a quick copy, just drag a file (or multiple files, if you like) on top of the desktop printer icon, and your printer then prints a single copy of your file or files. Regrettably, there’s no systemwide command for quickly printing one copy of a document from within an application without invoking the print dialog box. A few applications support such…