Transparent iPhone and MacBook Picture Effect

While trolling through Flickr, I found this great picture. In it, the photographer created an effect that made his iPhone and MacBook screens look transparent. Pretty cool.

While trolling through Flickr, I found this great picture. In it, the photographer created an effect that made his iPhone and MacBook screens look transparent. Pretty cool.

  • Hot Future Tech Coming to Your Mac, iPhone and iPad

    Some seriously cutting-edge tech is cresting the horizon, ready to take your Apple devices and other gear to the next level of awesome. We’ve searched out the breakthroughs on the verge of becoming reality to discover how Macs, iDevices, and other tech are about to become even more impressive.Illustrations by ArtBombersIf you’re a regular reader of Mac|Life, you know that every January we look at the fanciful future of Apple, ranging from the prototype cars to the VR goggles that might emerge from Cupertino one not-so-soon day. This is not that story. This story is about real tech that genuinely works--it’s visible on the horizon, and it could be in your Apple gear in a year or three. Think of this story as a preview of the near future.Of course, we can’t say for sure that all this technology will end up in future products (we’re good, but we’re not psychic). Some of it may never leave the lab. What you can rely on is that old standards will hit their technical limits, and progress will march on. But for a reasonable-guess preview of how Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, and other tech will grow, evolve, and improve in the coming years, continue reading.The Display's the ThingSince the original Macintosh, our screens have been passive windodws into Apple's machines. That's about to change.3D in Your HomeThree-dimensional TV has been a glimmer in the eye of television and movie studios since House of Wax and other 3D features first popped out at audiences in the 1950s. But the gimmick never caught on, thanks in large part to clunky technology that sacrificed picture quality. As James Cameron would be happy to explain to you, times and tech have changed, and in 2010, 3D is making the jump from the big screen into our homes…and hands.Despite technological advances, the principles behind 3D haven’t changed much in 60 years. When a 3D image is displayed, two pictures of the same scene taken from different perspectives are shown. Those spiffy glasses make sure each is sent to only one eye, then our brain combines the two images into one, complete with the illusion of depth. A more mysterious part of the brain is responsible for deciding if it’s worth paying 10 bucks for popcorn at the multiplex.But really, we can’t picture Steve wearing those dorky glasses at the introduction of the iMac 3D (but when we do, it always puts us in a good mood). Simplicity is Apple’s mantra, and what’s simpler than 3D screens that do the filtering for you, providing a 3D picture while eliminating the need for special eyewear? Such screens--called autostereoscopic displays--exist today. Some are peppered by tiny lenses that direct images to each eye; others use a layer of fine slits to split the display’s light in two. One of these technologies is about to get a boost from Apple’s biggest mobile-gaming rival, Nintendo. Announced this March and due for release in spring 2011, the Nintendo 3DS will be nothing less than a shot from the House That Mario Built across Cupertino’s bow. This next-gen upgrade to the popular DS handheld will sport sophisticated dual touchscreens, motion control, and--mamma mia!--autostereoscopic 3D.Competition is another Apple mantra, and it’s no secret that Apple sees games as a big part of the success of its Multi Touch devices. Steve won’t sit still if competitors like Nintendo can gain an advantage that draws gamers away from Apple and back to the Mushroom Kingdom. If Cupertino can improve on the 3D experience offered by Nintendo’s next handheld, you can bet that App Store games--and maybe even the iPhone and iPad OS--will enter the third dimension too.OLEDs...So Pretty!Today we watch videos everywhere from the living room to the hotel room on our HD TVs, MacBooks, and iPads. As great as those devices are, couldn’t they all stand to have even thinner, brighter, and more energy efficient screens? Trick question--of course they could. The good news is they will, thanks to OLEDs, an acronym for organic light-emitting diodes.OLED screens aren’t grass-fed, free-range displays sold at Whole Foods, but they do use organic material (that is, material derived from the element carbon) to produce a picture. Unlike traditional LCD screens that require power-hogging backlights to project their images, OLEDs generate their own light when electricity passes through the organic polymers sandwiched between layers of film in the display. Because those layers are only about 500 nanometers thick (that’s even skinnier than a human hair) and don’t require much else besides a power source to work, OLED screens can be dramatically slimmer and lighter than conventional displays now on the market.Better still, large OLED displays are relatively easier to make than LCDs, and their gorgeous picture makes your spiffy plasma TV look like a 1950s Zenith. That’s because there’s no need to grow sheets of fragile crystals. Instead, organic molecules are sprayed onto film in a process much like inkjet printing, and that film can be transparent, flexible, or even foldable. An OLED screen’s flexibility and toughness make it suitable for use in a wide range of gadgets, most of which haven’t been invented yet. From giant HDTVs and miniaturized smartphones to futuristic heads-up displays in cars, OLEDs can potentially be incorporated into almost anything--potentially even woven into clothing. And because of their brightness, vibrant colors, and wide viewing angles, you’ll always look great in your 720p iSweatshirt Pro.But don’t camp out in front of your local Apple Store for certified-organic MacBooks or casual wear just yet. While OLED screens are popping up in more and more devices (perhaps most famously in Google’s Nexus One smartphone), the technology’s best days are yet to come. Manufacturing OLED screens is still an expensive proposition, leading to high prices and tepid consumer interest. But as OLED’s momentum builds and costs drop, expect to see a gradual shift in the computer and electronics world away from LCDs, much like the transition that phased out bulky, inefficient CRTs. And expect to see Apple jump on the OLED bandwagon when the time and money are right. With its combination of energy efficiency, size, and image quality, we think OLED has a bright future in Apple’s Macs and its growing line of sleek mobile devices.E-Papers, PleasePopularized by e-readers like the Kindle, e-paper has plenty to offer a company focused on mobile devices. Its slim design is durable, lightweight, and legible in bright sunlight. The secret lies between the sheets--plastic sheets holding tiny wells filled with black and white particles suspended in liquid. When the wells are charged, the particles move to the screen to appear as text. No backlight is required, and because electricity is only used once to draw the contents of each page, e-paper sips power compared to the LCDs in Apple’s portable lineup. Color e-paper is so hot, you gotta wear gloves. Metaphorically speaking, that is. Photo: LG.Phillips LCD., LTD.But while e-paper does monochrome well, most of today’s e-readers use filters to colorize their black and white text with pictures--and they simply can’t compare to LCDs. That will change. Philips is working on new technology using colored particles in a process much like blending ink dots in traditional print. The results should finally make good on e-paper’s promise, but they’re still years away.Even then, will Steve subscribe to e-paper? The iPad’s LCD screen would seem to be the last word on the subject, but Apple could always use multiple displays in its devices. For instance, e-paper battery monitors could offer much more information than the little green lights they use today.The Wireless WarIf you’re like us, your living room entertainment setup is the second most precious collection of gear in your home (next to your beloved Mac, of course). Every night, you’re on the couch with a bowl of popcorn in front of an HD screen complete with a Blu-Ray player and 7.1 sound. Trouble is, that sweet setup means fistfuls of wire to fuss with. But those knots may not stay tangled much longer.As home entertainment setups get more complex, something has to give. If two competing wireless standards--WirelessHD and Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI)--have anything to say about it, that something will be our HDMI, DVI, and other AV cables. Both standards promise something like Wi-Fi for multimedia. Compatible devices (laptops, game consoles, and mobile phones) will use them to find your HDTV automagically over the air in a system that “just works”--and the whole idea of ditching all those cords works in a big way for us.WirelessHD devices may be available from Panasonic, LG, Vizio, and other manufacturers by the time you read this. WirelessHD delivers uncompressed video up to 1080p, multichannel audio, and other data--including Hollywood-approved DRM--at speeds up to 4Gbps, with a theoretical ceiling of 25Gbps. That’s a lot of data, but WirelessHD will only carry it up to 33 feet. The WHDI standard will move your movies as far as 100 feet, but at only up to 3Gbps. You’ll be able to compare how the two standards fare against each other when WHDI devices hit stores late this summer or early fall. Only time will tell which of these standards will be a hit with consumers or whether Apple will adopt one or play a waiting game. Let’s hope we’re not kept waiting for the release of Avatar 2 before we can stream movies, games, and more from our iPads to our televisions.» Future Apple Devices: iPad 3, iMac 3D, Cinema Display» Expected Arrival Date: 2013» You'll Also See It In: HDTVs, handheld game consoles, displays» Future Awesomeness Rating: Deeply AwesomeNext page: Printers and Processors >>Powerful PrintsYes, print and printers have a future in our networked world. No, they won't be like anything you've seen before.Fab It YourselfTeleporters and matter replicators may be the stuff of science fiction, but with 3D printers, you can create physical objects with your Mac out of thin air (and a lot of plastic). Apple hasn’t sold printers since 1997, but if anything could get them back into the game, 3D printing is it.For decades, 3D printers have been used to create “rapid prototypes” for manufacturers and architects. The idea is much the same as conventional printing--you design something on your computer, and the printer produces a hard copy. But these hard copies need time to cool. 3D printers take designs built in 3D modeling programs and melt plastic to “print” them with thin strands built up layer by layer into a finished product. The idea is about to get a big boost from HP, which will begin selling 3D printers this year at “bargain” prices expected to start under $15,000. So much for 3D printing for the rest of us, right?The MakerBot prints...in 3D! Want.Not quite! If you have a techie DIY streak, 3D printing can be yours today for under $1,000. MakerBot’s compact Cupcake printer is available as a kit that, once assembled, lets you manufacture objects up to 4x4x6 inches using Lego-quality ABS plastic. The idea is catching on, and other low-cost 3D printers (like the RepRap and Desktop Factory) are poised to slowly do what HP’s high-end offerings probably won’t--make 3D printing the desktop publishing of the next decade.Of course, it will take a while for 3D printing to catch on, but if it does, expect Apple to take note. After all, our Macs have helped us make things since 1984. There’s no reason to stop now.An Inkless Job, But Someone Has to Do ItLet’s face it, next to Mafia Wars and Farmville, printing is one of the biggest energy hogs in an office. The paper and toner cartridges required by today’s printers consume a lot of energy to use and recycle. But greener workplaces may be one step closer to reality thanks to two new inkless, reusable printing technologies that are poised to send old-fashioned hard copies sailing on a one-way trip into the wastebasket of history.Late last year, Japan’s Sanwa Newtec company introduced the PrePeat 3100 II, a compact black-and-white printer that prints using heat instead of ink. The secret’s in the “paper”--flexible, waterproof, recycled plastic that reacts to the PrePeat’s thermal mechanism. Best of all, when you don’t need a page any longer, you can just feed it back into the PrePeat to erase it or print a new document as many as 1,000 times per page. Right now this green new world will cost you (the PrePeat retails for $5,600), but expect prices to drop if the technology becomes more widely adopted.Meanwhile, researchers at Xerox are using ultraviolet light to develop a technology called Erasable Paper. The process hits specially coated paper with a specific wavelength of UV rays to print your document to the page, and you can erase and reuse a sheet whenever you need to. If that sounds like a tanning bed for interoffice communications, you’re more right than you know. Like a tan, these printouts fade away over time, and within 24 hours, a UV-printed page will be blank again. While self-destructing Mission: Impossible documents are cool (and well-suited to sharing data with short lifespans), the limitation is one reason Erasable Paper is still being refined in Xerox laboratories.» Future Apple Devices: iLife '13» Expected Arrival Date: 2013» You'll Also See It In: iLife '13» Future Awesomeness Rating: Fit To PrintDueling ProcessorsCurrent technology can only take CPUs so far. But don't worry--tomorrow's breakthroughs are being designed today.More Cores for Your BuckSmaller processors offer greater speed and improved energy efficiency, but engineers racing to make the best chips possible are running afoul of the laws of physics. Conventional manufacturing methods can only make circuits so small, and even the power of Steve’s reality-distortion field can’t change that. But some amazing new technologies might.For years, multi-core technology has given us Apple chips that pack the power of multiple CPUs into a single chip. Intel’s Xeon, Core i7, and venerable Core 2 Duo processors deliver up to six cores, and eight-core machines are coming soon. We hate to break it to those processors, but a new prototype from Intel unveiled late last year promises that a lot more muscle is on the way to the Mac.Intel calls it the single-chip cloud computer (SCC), and it boasts a whopping 48 cores on one processor…with room to grow to over 100. Computers derived from the SCC will bring the brawn of today’s massive data centers (the “cloud” of the chip’s name) to desktop-sized machines, paving the way for smaller, greener clusters. Initially, Intel is planning to build only 100 of these experimental chips so engineers can figure out what to do with all that power before it lands on the market. Intel is just one of the companies now developing “many core” processors, but given its relationship with Apple, it’s a good bet that the first Mac with the power of the cloud will have Intel inside.DNA ProcessorsMeanwhile, another company is taking a radically different approach to building tomorrow’s processors. Last year, researchers at IBM announced a chipmaking breakthrough that uses something called “DNA origami,” and it’s as cool as it sounds. The process arranges strands of DNA into shapes used as scaffolding for carbon nanotubes and silicon nanowires, the tiny structures that could one day move data through really, really small processors.DNA origami is a “bottom-up” approach to chipmaking that builds the chip’s circuits, as opposed to more conventional “top-down” methods that carve silicon away, and it has a promising future. DNA designs could potentially deliver chip circuits as small as 6 nanometers--that’s just dozens of atoms wide! So Apple has good reason to keep an eye on how its story unfolds. They’ll have to be patient. The technology is still evolving and likely won’t produce commercial chips for another five years at the soonest.» Future Apple Devices: MacPro Extreme» Expected Arrival Date: 2015» You'll Also See It In: Windows PCs, Skynet» Future Awesomeness Rating: Sheer GeniusNext page: New Wires and New Storage >>Magic BusesOur future gadgets will do more wirelessly than ever before. But they'll be able to do even more with wires.It's USB's World, We Just Live HereOnce an upstart newcomer, USB has become an elder statesman in the electronics world with a presence in almost every device on Earth. But USB’s data-transfer speeds, last boosted by USB 2.0’s introduction in 2001, haven’t aged gracefully. Thankfully, USB 3.0 is here to breathe new life into an old favorite.USB 3.0 cables definitely lose the beauty contest to Light Peak (below).At first glance, USB 3.0 (a.k.a. SuperSpeed USB) doesn’t seem like a radical departure from its predecessor, and that’s a good thing. It’s backward-compatible with USB 2.0 and even uses the same rectangular port we all know and love, so your old devices will work just fine with the new standard. So don’t worry, you won’t have to buy a new USB beverage warmer for your cubicle.But USB 3.0 brings two new tricks to the table. The first is speed--its transfer rates reach up to 5Gbps, or 10 times USB 2.0’s performance. The second is improved power management, which means reduced power consumption and more juice for devices that need it. USB 3.0 gear is already on the market, so it’s only a matter of time before Cupertino rolls out the first Macs with the SuperSpeed standard. We hope they come soon--we’ve got HD video to import!One Wire to Rule Them AllFiber optic cables, long used by telephone companies to connect landline phone calls, have numerous advantages over traditional copper wires. So why haven’t they made it to the desktop yet? Intel hopes to put that question to rest with a new technology called Light Peak.Light Peak is Intel’s answer to…well, just about every cable in use today. From HDMI to USB, if it carries data, Light Peak can replace it. That’s because Light Peak’s bandwidth starts at 10Gbps, and its theoretical ceiling is a whopping 100Gbps. And since Light Peak’s flexible fiber optic cables transmit light, not electricity, they can carry data up to 100 meters without a hitch. That’s plenty more meters than we need, but some room to grow can’t hurt, right?Light Peak brings fiber optic speed to computing. And pretty colors, too.However, despite a planned 2011 rollout, don’t expect to sync your 5G iPhone with Light Peak. Intel is still working out ways to combine power with Light Peak to charge devices while beaming data at warp speed. One thing’s for sure, though--when Light Peak finally strikes, it’ll be fast.» Future Apple Devices: Almost all of 'em» Expected Arrival Date: 2011» You'll Also See It In: Every gadget on Earth» Future Awesomeness Rating: Blazing HotReading, Writing, RevolutionarySay goodbye to your old drives. Say hello to a new world of speedy storage.It's RAM! It's a Hard Drive! It's Both!There’s nothing New Age about “universal memory,” but it could usher in a new age of computers and electronic devices. Universal memory is any next-gen storage that combines the speed and affordability of today’s DRAM with the permanence and capacity of flash memory. Two technologies are fighting to rewrite the rules, and the winner may be coming to the Mac sooner than you think.Phase-change memory (PCM) gets our vote, if only for its cool name, which is derived from the use of chalcogenide glass that changes from a crystalline to an amorphous state with heat. It’s the same material used to make rewritable optical discs, but in PCM, the two states represent different electrical charges, or a zero and a one. PCM represents a major leap in durability over flash memory, and can be written to up to 100 million times versus flash’s upper limit of just 100,000 read-write cycles. Samsung has already begun producing 512MB PCM modules for use in mobile phones, but 1GB modules are still on the way. Looks like phase-change doesn’t happen overnight.The race for better memory is run on a tiny field, though, and IBM’s racetrack memory may have the inside track. It uses something called spintronics--don’t you want to hear Steve say that at a keynote?--to manipulate electrons into moving magnetic bits down nanoscopic, U-shaped “racetracks” to read and write data at blazing speed. Yet racetrack memory’s biggest asset may be its scalability, theoretically allowing HDD-size capacity to be squeezed into a much smaller area than competing technologies allow. But until racetrack memory is ready to leave IBM’s labs, this dark-horse contender will be one to watch, not buy.Kind of BluSteve famously quipped that bringing Blu-Ray to the Mac was “a bag of hurt,” but Sony’s multimedia power-platter is still rolling along after years of Cupertino’s cold shoulder. Movie lovers--and anyone who wants to share giant files--can take comfort that when Blu-Ray finally arrives on Macs, it’ll be better than ever. Having long shed its 25GB limit, Blu now boasts capacities of up to 400GB, and 1TB discs are coming in just a few years. The promise of this year’s 3D Blu-Ray players is just one more feature that will keep Mac fans gazing longingly--sigh--at Big Blu’s bag of tricks.» Future Apple Devices: MacBook nano, Apple TV Blu» Expected Arrival Date: 2013» You'll Also See It In: Smartphones, PCs» Future Awesomeness Rating: Memorably CoolNext page: Networking, Power, and Interaction >>Network It OutTomorrow's wireless communications will be more important than ever. Good thing our networks will be able to keep up.4G or Not 4G?Poor AT&T. Just as it’s getting the hang of supporting the iPhone on its 3G network, 4G networks will begin popping up from Sprint this year and from archrival Verizon in 2011. What does that mean for us, besides catty PR fights among the carriers? A blazing fast mobile internet with enough bandwidth for HD movies, video chats, and--we hope--fewer dropped calls.Like 3G wireless networks, 4G isn’t a single new technology. It’s a blanket term for a range of technologies and specifications that add up to the same thing: speed. Current 3G offers downloads of roughly 1.4Mbps. Compare that to 4G’s promised bandwidth of at least 100Mbps, and you’ll see what the fuss is about. 4G works its magic in part by using MIMO (Multiple In Multiple Out) technology to broadcast using several antennas simultaneously on multiple frequencies.4G’s strengths make its eventual adoption by Apple a no-brainer, no matter which carrier has the iPhone next year. Apple is serious about establishing the iPad as a mobile media device, and it’ll want a big pipe to carry movies and music to cellular customers. That’s just what 4G provides. As for the iPhone, who knows? Steve may decide to stick with AT&T and its 4G network expected to roll out alongside Verizon’s in 2011.Crank Up the 802.11ACCloser to home, we’ll use 802.11n Wi-Fi, but at faster speeds than we’ve seen before. Apple has sold 802.11n devices since 2007, but the protocol’s final standard was only approved in 2009. Happily, that means the business of making Wi-Fi as fast as possible can begin in earnest. Like 4G, 802.11n uses MIMO to improve performance, but manufacturers couldn’t take full advantage of the technology before the protocol was complete. Now that it is, devices can officially support maximum speeds between 400 and 600Mbps…if your hardware has the antennas to deliver the boost. Expect that hardware to start arriving in stores later this year.But the Mac life is never a simple march of progress, and there’s always something new on the horizon. Sweet! Work drafting the next Wi-Fi protocol, 802.11ac, has already begun. Devices supporting the new standard aren’t expected until 2012 at the earliest, but they’ll boast speeds of up to 1Gbps when they’re available. At press time, Ethernet’s agent was unavailable for comment.» Future Apple Devices: 2G iPad, Airport Express Plus» Expected Arrival Date: 2011» You'll Also See It In: Smartphones, netbooks» Future Awesomeness Rating: Wildly WirelessMore Power to YouApple is going power mad. Its future devices will charge up almost anywhere.Powered by the SunSolar power is overdue for a makeover, and if anyone can do it, it’s Apple. In 2008, it applied for a patent to slip solar cells beneath a device’s LCD screen, and early this year, it applied for another patent to cover portable devices with solar collectors.Solar-powered MacBooks? Yes please!Wilder still, a March 2010 patent describes a MacBook with a solar panel that folds to collect sunlight or even to illuminate the LCD screen without drawing power from the battery. We’re still waiting for these designs to see the light of day--ha!--but it’s clear someone at Apple has spent a lot of time looking at the sun.Go WirelessBesides flying cars, wireless electricity is the ultimate in futuristic convenience. Today’s charging mats come close, but the magnetic induction they use keeps devices tethered to one spot. That’s why we hope Apple adopts WiTricity’s technology for truly wireless power up to several feet away from the base station. The science involved would baffle the DHARMA Initiative, but it involves something called sharply resonant strong coupling to generate an oscillating magnetic field that’s captured and converted to electricity by a sensor in your device. Or it will, anyway, when WiTricity-powered gear reaches stores sometime in the future.Wireless power? As in, electricity beamed through the air? Shocking.» Future Apple Devices: iPod solar, ElectroMagneto MacPro» Expected Arrival Date: 2015» You'll Also See It In: Nice weather, mad scientists' lairs» Future Awesomeness Rating: Simply ElectrifyingYour Valuable InputNo matter how cool Apple’s upcoming products are, they’ll only be as good as what we can do with them. Here’s how we’ll interact with the future.Touchier MiceThe mouse has plenty of life left, at least according to Microsoft. It’s produced some stellar mice over the years, but Redmond’s recent Multi Touch prototypes could be the best yet. The FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) Mouse’s high-res camera tracks finger gestures through a curved piece of clear acrylic so you can scroll, swipe, and pinch around on the acrylic in order to manipulate onscreen objects. The Orb Mouse works on much the same principle, but offers a whole hemisphere to interact with in your hand.The shrunken Side Mouse looks more like a wrist rest than a traditional rodent--its tiny camera tracks your fingers as they move across your desk or whatever surface you happen to be working on. Best of all, these mice incorporate the Multi Touch equivalent of keyboard shortcuts to perform zooms and other common commands quickly. Cupertino, start your copiers!Microsoft's FTIR Mouse makes magic out of a high-res camera and a piece of acrylic that together create Multi Touch-style input.But the coolest input technology on the horizon for Apple’s gear lies in--big surprise--touchscreens. Future Multi Touch devices will sport haptic feedback, or the sort of physical response you’ve gotten for years from vibrating gamepads and cell phones, to help make input feel more natural. In 2011, Artificial Muscle is bringing to market its EPAM (Electroactive Polymer Artificial Muscle) technology, which tenses and relaxes touchscreens in response to input. That sounds pretty fascinating all by its lonesome, but Apple’s recent patent applications show it has something more subtle in mind--a layer inside the touchscreen that delivers vibrating feedback localized to specific onscreen buttons and switches. That level of fine-tuned feedback would make typing on the iPad’s large screen even more satisfying and could pave the way for MacBooks without physical keyboards.» Future Apple Devices: Majestic Mouse, MacBook Touch» Expected Arrival Date: 2012» You'll Also See It In: Microsoft's mice» Future Awesomeness Rating: Terrifically TactileNext page: Too Wild for Apple? >>Too Wild for Apple?Some of these technologies may seem out there even for Apple, but yes--chuckles aside--they’re real. Besides, today’s head-scratchers could be tomorrow’s game-changers. Maybe.Huff and Puff into the MicYou’ve finally gotten your mind around Multi Touch, but are you ready for Multi Puff? Zyxio’s Sensawaft technology lets you control a mouse cursor, scroll through text, or do just about anything else with your electronic devices using only your breath. The assistive possibilities for disabled users are obvious and awesome, but breath control could have other, less practical uses, too. Imagine blowing into your earbuds’ microphone to control music playback, skipping an annoying voicemail with a hiss, or puffing on your iPhone to zoom in for a kill while playing your favorite shooter. Apple’s engineers could do so much with this, it’s breathtaking.Keep Your Finger on the PulseAn iPhone fingerprint scanner makes a lot of sense, especially considering that Apple has so many intriguing patents out on the idea. Sure, a fingerprint-savvy screen would simplify security--and make “slide to unlock” really mean something--but we like to think about the possibilities for everyday iPhone control hinted at in Apple’s patents. With the iPhone of tomorrow, specific fingers could be used for certain functions, letting you change settings without even looking at the screen. You could use your thumbprint to play a song, your index-finger print to rewind, and your middle-finger print to...er…emphatically skip a song for those tunes so bad that a one-star rating just doesn’t cut it.You might not be able to remember a passcode that unlocks your iPhone, but we're betting you'll be able to remember your fingerprint.Project Your IdeasPico projectors--low-power, handheld projectors--are handy for quickie presentations or impromptu slideshows with the family. Some of them even project with RGB lasers instead of white light for a picture that’s always in focus. But the image of these mini projectors will really improve if Apple ever makes good on recent patents to integrate them into MacBooks and iPhones. Sure, you could strike up a Keynote presentation on the go with a MacBook Pico, but throwing up movies, music, iTunes visualizations, and photo albums anywhere sounds like a lot more fun.Wii Want Our Apple TVMotion control brought gamers flocking to the Nintendo Wii, but can it do the same for Apple TV? Someone in Cupertino must think so, judging by a patent for a Wii-like motion-controlled remote to go with Cupertino’s set-top box. Sounds good to us. Apple’s Remote iPhone app is great, but it’s always seemed very “un-Apple” to require another device to deliver a satisfying Apple TV experience. Motion control--especially with the enhanced precision and reliability brought by the floating magnetic compass noted in Apple’s patent--would be a slick solution, and not just for easier navigation. Apple’s patent also describes using the remote to draw on the screen and manipulate photos with the flick of a wrist. That could give Steve’s favorite hobby product some much-needed pizzazz to help it catch the public’s eye. After all, the day will come when Cupertino will update the Apple TV again, and when it finally does, you may not even recognize it. What can we say? We want to see the little guy make good.Next page: Patently Awesome >>Patently AwesomeApple’s patents are tea leaves that portend what technology’s cutting edge will look like for years to come. Here are some of tomorrow’s ideas Cupertino thinks are worth protecting today.Nine Lives, Three DimensionsOS X is the big cat that makes Cupertino’s products tick, but it’s Apple’s hardware that usually captures the public’s attention. That oversight will finally be corrected if a patent for 3D OS X becomes a reality.The 3D in question depends on parallax, the effect by which objects appear to change their position relative to each other as a viewer’s perspective changes. By keeping tabs on your position (likely with a head tracking iSight camera), this “OS parallaX” would alter the appearance of onscreen objects to form a simulated 3D space in which you could interact with files, study 3D objects, and more. While this could open up exciting new ways to use your Mac, it would also require complex new hardware and software, so don’t count on peeking behind alert boxes anytime soon.An iPhone GamepadJudging by a recent patent, the iPhone and iPod touch might have more than just high-tech improvements in their future. Thanks to a unique accessory, someday soon we may be gaming old-school--with a twist--on our Multi Touch devices.In a few years, near field communication will let your iPhone be the boss of your videogame console, TV, and even your sprinkler.We love playing games on the iPhone, but sometimes we pine for the 20th century simplicity of physical controls. Call Apple’s potential solution the “GameFrame,” a shell that fits around your iPhone to add a D-pad, buttons, and other handy moving parts to the iPhone experience. Too old-fashioned for you? The device could also communicate wirelessly with HDTVs, opening the door to big-screen App Store gaming on the go. Hero of Sparta 3 on a 40-inch flatscreen? We’re so there!"Home Screen" Gets a New MeaningThe iPhone’s superpowers seem to be growing by the day, but you haven’t seen anything yet. In the future, you won’t think twice about using it to lock the door, turn on the lights, and even water the lawn of your personal fortress of solitude.Apple’s recent home-control patent hinges on a technology called near field communication (NFC), a short-range wireless technology that’s slower than Bluetooth while offering a much quicker pairing time. That’s just the thing to control the Xbox, DVD player, and garden-sprinkler system shown in the patent application. Unfortunately, this remote-control magic requires NFC-enabled devices that are, like the iPhone that will interact with them, years away.Slice the Mac into PiecesTo create, sometimes you must destroy, and the most intriguing Apple patent we’ve come across yet takes apart the familiar Mac we’ve used for decades and scatters it into…well, something else. We’re not sure if what it describes is a portable computer, a desktop machine, or something in between, but we call it the “MultiMac.” And we want one.The "MultiMac" splits a Mac into its component parts, which live where you'll use them.If it was built today, MultiMac’s components--a projector display, input devices, and a CPU--would be separate components, each powered wirelessly and communicating with each other over the air from wherever you wanted them to be. You could tuck the CPU on a bookshelf, surf from the couch, and project a movie on the wall as if using one device. Apple’s focus (pardon the pun) seems to be on the projector, which would do more than just show vacation pictures. The patent describes it as a networked device with multiple sensors controlling focus, color, or even built-in cameras. What are the chances those cameras could power a 3D OS X? Hey, we can dream.Will MultiMac be a novel new computer that ties together exciting new technology, a sophisticated Keynote presentation system, or a hub to synchronize a home full of mobile devices? We’re not sure, but that’s half the fun of being a Mac fan. Only Apple knows what’s coming next, and they’re not telling…yet.

  • Customize Your Home with Your Mac

    You already use your computer to make your own music, edit your own photos, and create your own movies--so why pay someone else to decorate your home? Your Mac is the perfect tool for giving your interior space a dash of 21st-century modernism. Follow along and we'll show you how.Photography by Mark Madeo I’m not a thrifty man by nature, but after cobbling together enough money to buy my first single-family home, I wasn’t about to take out a second mortgage just to get the place decorated. In fact, the very concept of hiring an interior designer or color consultant strikes me as frivolous on an intestinal level. Color theory and design inspiration is free online, and at the end of the day, what looks right is right--because perfection in home decor is in the eye of the beholder. That last thing I need is some woman named Astrid telling me my walls would look better in “Butter Crème.”But that isn’t to say that even I, in all my brazen hubris, couldn’t do a better job with the help of my MacBook Pro. If the Mac can help me in other creative pursuits, why not put it to use in snazzing up Casa Philippe? I did my research, put in a bunch of nights at the keyboard, and came up with an interior design that suits me just perfectly. And now I’m going to show you how you can do the same for your own home.First we’ll look at how you can use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to make informed color decisions--by painting Pantone swatches directly on your walls. Next, we’ll explore photography. I’ll explain how inkjet technology can turn your shots into art prints and how to use photos to inspire digital illustration. From there, we’ll run through my favorite iPhone apps and websites that can streamline, enhance, and inform your design process. Finally, we end our tour with a look at Mac-oriented tchotkes and accessories that are interior-design elements all on their own. So even if you don’t want to use your Mac to create a living space with all the bold, iconographic simplicity that Apple is known for, you can still buy your way into Apple’s 21st-century modern aesthetic.Painting in Pantone ColorYou don’t have to be a print designer to play with Pantone colors--and we’re not just talking about leafing through those swatch books for kicks and giggles. Pantone’s Fashion+Home library contains 1,925 vibrant colors, and every color is available in different exterior and interior paints from Fine Paints of Europe (FPE). Whether you’re color-matching your walls to Pantone-spec’d furniture or simply using the Pantone system to make informed color choices, your final results will have the designy flair that richly pigmented Pantone reproduction is known for. The paint from FPE--imported from Holland--is relatively expensive, but as my independent painting contractor said, “You get what you pay for.” Completely unprompted, he said FPE paint lasts longer, requires fewer coats, and is probably the best paint available.To choose your Pantone paint, you can finger-swipe through the myPantone app (see page 4) or peruse a printed Fashion+Home swatch collection for absolute color accuracy. You can also create a close approximation of how your colors will look in (or on) your actual home by “painting” them onto your walls using the Color Replacement Tool in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. This tool lets you reskin a surface, all while retaining the shadows and highlights of your original photo content. Here’s how to do it:>> Load the Pantone swatches from Pantone’s Fashion+Home Digital Color Library CD (it retails for $50 MSRP).>> Load a photo of your interior into Photoshop or Elements, and use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to define an area of your walls that you want to paint over. In Image A, my “before” photo, I’ve lassoed over the middle sawtooth wall panel. Creating a lassoed selection isn’t absolutely necessary, but helps in confining your paint strokes to a specific area. Image A - Notice how the glass blocks shine natural light that's reflected on the walls. These highlights will be preserved by Photoshop's Color Replacement tool. >> Now choose a Pantone color from your Swatches palette, select the Color Replacement Tool, and begin painting the wall within your selected area. Create a new lassoed selection for every portion of wall you want to cover--it’s like using digital painters tape that keeps your brush strokes off of areas that shouldn’t be painted.>> To paint on unadorned walls that aren’t covered by any objects or obscured by furniture, I choose the largest brush diameter possible with the following tool settings: Mode: Color; Sampling: Continuous; Limits: Contiguous; Tolerance: 100%. Then I tap a single time inside the selected area, and the entire area becomes Pantonified.>> To paint in areas covered by other objects (like the sawtooth wall panel behind the tripod lamp in Image B), I use these settings: Mode: Color; Sampling: Continuous; Limits: Find Edges; Tolerance: 15%. With these settings and a small-diameter brush (about the size of the one pictured over the antique scale), you can paint between objects quite effectively, rarely painting over framed photos, furniture legs, or anything else that should remain unpainted. This process allows you to retain your original shadows and highlights--note the tripod shadow on the left sawtooth wall panel and the light shining through the glass blocks at the top of the middle panel. Image B - The Color Replacement tool does a very good job in automatically replacing only the color you've identified for substitution. Still, when painting over a wall with lots of objects on it, it helps to use a small brush diameter to prevent "paint" from going in the wrong places.Be aware that unless your monitor is perfectly calibrated, it won’t display the Pantone swatches with absolute accuracy. Also, it helps to use photos shot in flat lighting in order to reduce hot spots and reflections (in Image B, you can see how the white picture frames picked up a yellow cast from the original wall paint). Regardless, my Photoshop color replacement process, used in conjunction with real-world Pantone swatches, will give you a fantastic head start in making color choices.In Image C you can see my final color decisions. From left to right, I used 13-0002 (White Sand), 16-1406 (Atmosphere), 17-1506 (Cinder), 18-1306 (Iron) and 18-1434 (Etruscan Red). The hallway is also painted White Sand. The codes of my colors actually bear strong relevance to one another, and knowing the coding system can help you make color choices.Image C - Understanding Pantone's numerical codes helped me quickly choose warm gray tones based on reddish hues. The codes helped me choose three grays--Atmosphere, Cinder, and Iron--that would create a perfect graduated grayscale-branding effect.The two numbers before the hyphen refer to a color’s relative lightness on a scale from 11 (lightest) to 19 (darkest). The second pair of numbers specify different hues on a 64-step color wheel; 01 is yellow-green, 64 is green-yellow, and all the other colors of the rainbow are represented in between. The third pair of numbers represent the color’s chroma level--the intensity and saturation of the hue itself. The chroma scale is divided into 65 steps, with 00 being neutral and 64 being maximum saturation.Using Pantone’s system, I was able to make some informed decisions on paint. Notice that Iron and Etruscan Red, the two colors separated by my hallway entrance, share nearly the same code--only the saturation levels of their chroma differ dramatically. Also notice that the hues of my four main accent colors range from 13 to 15, putting each one squarely in the red portion of the color wheel. Finally, I deliberately chose one-step lightness increments for my sawtooth wall panels, creating a very graphic-designy grayscale-banding effect.There’s a method to Pantone’s numbering madness! So learn the system, and your paint choices will develop quickly and elegantly.The Pantone SystemNext Page: Fun with Photos >>Fun with Photos: Go Big, Go Historic, Go PopNow that you have paint on your walls, it’s time to put down a third layer--in the form of dazzling art photography. Fine-art photo printing is within the reach of most consumer-grade inkjet photo printers, and it becomes absolutely spectacular when done by those printers’ professional-grade cousins. The key to art photography is, of course, your photo’s contents. Your shot of the Brooklyn Bridge in twilight is artsy; the photo of cousin Jerry holding his Budweiser up to the camera is not. In a previous Maclife.com article, we delved into the secrets to great shooting and photo editing, but here we’ll focus on print media, which can unlock a photo’s final degree of finesse. For this article, I used Epson media, but Canon offers a comparable lineup in the prosumer desktop space. Image A - Printed on canvas, this 3-foot giclée print of a Mark Madeo photograph has tricked a lot of people into thinking it's a photorealistic painting in the style of Richard Estes and Ralph Goings.First off, throw glossy paper out the door. For most images, you’ll want to be printing on softer, nonreflective matte paper and even stretchable canvas. Lately, I’ve been using the Epson R2880 printer, which supports the full range of Epson’s fine art media in sheets up to 13 by 19 inches and rolls sized 13 inches by 20 feet. On the “low” end of Epson’s lineup, I like Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte and Watercolor Paper Radiant White. The first one is bright white with a flat matte finish, providing great highlight and shadow detail without any reflections. I love it for black-and-white prints produced in the R2880’s special Advanced B&W Photo mode. The second option (despite its name) isn’t quite as radiantly white, but it has a textured surface that imbues your photo with a more artistic, painterly appearance.On the ultra high end, you can opt for Epson’s Velvet Fine Art Paper, which is 100 percent cotton rag, features a luxurious textured grain, and purports to offer the densest blacks of any cotton-based inkjet paper around. This is beautiful media, and I have found its blacks to be superior as advertised, so don’t hide it behind a piece of glass unless longevity is a big concern. Finally, you might consider Premium Canvas Matte, a polyester/cotton blend with a pronounced woven texture. Because it can be stretched on wooden frames and has exactly the same canvas grain you’d see on hand-brushed paintings, this material is ideal for not just photos but also giclée prints of digital illustrations and painting reproductions (“giclée” is just a fancy term for inkjet-based fine-art printing).Image B - These three prints represent just a fraction of the wonderful (and insanely high-res) images I've downloaded from the Library of Congress. Once you start sifting through the archives, you won't be able to stop.The R2880 supports Premium Canvas Matte, but with a maximum roll width of 13 inches, you can’t output anything of breathtaking size. You can, however, send your digital files to a production house that has one of Epson’s (or Canon’s) wide-format inkjet printers. The photo you see in Image A (a piece by Mac|Life staff photographer Mark Madeo) was printed on the Epson Stylus Pro 9880, which supports media of widths up to 44 inches. Mark’s photo is 36x24 inches wide, and a piece this size--printed and stretched on a wooden frame--would run you about $220. This isn’t inexpensive, but the results are spectacular and elevate your photography hobby--and home decor--to a new level. For more info on pricing and how to prepare your digital files, check out www.photoworkssf.com.Image C - Unlike photographic images, vector-based art files are very, very small. The 54x36-inch print you see here was generated from a 1MB file--and could have been blown up to the size of a building if I had the printer to do that.If 13x19-inch prints suit you fine, a printer like the Epson R2880 or Canon Pro9500 Mark II is all you need to create wall-ready, museum-quality artwork at home. There are various ways to mount and display your prints, but one of the easiest (and most durable) methods is to use preassembled, UV-protected glass frames. All the photos shown in Image B were downloaded from the Library of Congress website (see page 3) and mounted in Artcare “archival protection systems” (www.nielsen-bainbridge.com). These framing kits include 4-ply, precut beveled mats and UV-protected glass and come in a wide variety of sizes supporting print areas up to 10.5 by 13.5 inches. If you can’t find prefab frames in the right sizes or don’t want frames at all, you can mount your images on acid-free foam core with 3M Photo Mount spray, which is also acid free. Finish off these projects (especially canvas prints) with a protective spray like PremierArt Print Shield to protect against UV rays and scuffs.Image D - For a thorough explanation of using Illustrator's Pen tool, go to Youtube.com/watch?v=5DzpT8POAME.If you want to take your photography into another dimension entirely, you can use it as the source material for digital illustration. The Roy Lichtenstein–style pieces shown on page 32 and in Image C were created by tracing over photos of my living room using the Pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. After outlining all key elements using Bézier curves (Image D), finishing the drawing is a simple matter of filling objects with solid colors, slanted lines, and Ben-Day dots, which can be found in Illustrator’s Swatch library under Patterns > Basic Graphics. I went the pop art Lichtenstein route, but remember that any digital illustration can be printed on fine-art media, and vector-based line art reproduces particularly well. And if you use Premium Canvas Matte, you can even paint directly on top of your inkjet prints with acrylics to create a mixed-media masterpiece (Image E).Image E - If you want to paint in colors yourself, make sure to use Canvas Matte, not Canvas Satin. (NOTE: That's Flo's hand--not Jon's!) Next Page: Design Online >>Design Online: Linking Your Way to a Stylish Home18 websites for incredible high-res photos, supercool interior products, and daily design inspiration.PhotographyYour tax dollars help pay for maintaining the amazing bank of photo archives at the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), so consider making a few withdrawals. Many (if not most) of the photos in our national archive can be freely downloaded and printed out for display in your home. Just look for restrictions, if any, under “Rights Information” in each photo’s bibliographic details. You’ll find B&W shots of cityscapes, rural life, historical figures, and other photographic expressions of the American experience. Many images are huge high-res TIFF files ranging from 20 to 150MB, and some date back to the very earliest days of photography--like the 1851 panoramic photo of San Francisco Bay shown here.(click to enlarge) This 10MB TIFF from the Library of Congress is one of the archive's smaller files.To get a clear idea of the archive’s best material, go to Shorpy.com, a vintage photography blog that seems to pull its finest entries from the Library of Congress. Also check out Stockvault.net and Morguefile.com, which keep searchable archives of modern high-res photography that can be used for personal, noncommercial use. Much of the material is quite wall-worthy.ProductsA storefront for some 800 antique and mid-century modern dealers, 1stdibs.com will blow your mind with its range of furniture, lighting, artwork, and curios. It’s the first place to look if you need a George Nakashima end table, a Cold War–era naval searchlight, or a circa-1920s beekeeper’s helmet. Prices on 1stdibs run quite steep, so if you’re looking for mid-century industrial chic at relatively affordable prices, go to AmericanFurnishings.com, which is where I picked up my antique red metal shop wheelbarrow (illustrated on the previous page). For much more contemporary (and Mac-y) design elements, check out the thoroughly groovy-modern Nova68.com, as well as lighting from Lumens.com and Ylighting.com.Captivating art or antique beekeeper's helmet? It's both, courtesy of Radio Guy, which sells its curios via 1stdibs.com.Daily InspirationThe web is lousy with blog-style sites that showcase slick interiors, hip new products, and one-of-a-kind curios. Here’s a list of my favorites in alphabetical order:Apartmenttherapy.com: Aesthetic is thoroughly hip with a slant toward affordable and modern. Includes a technology section.ApartmentTherapy.com brought Matthew Borgatti's cosmonaut lamp to the attention of the hipster masses.Betterlivingthroughdesign.com: Lots of blogs showcase cool decor elements, but this one organizes better than most. Love the dropdown menus.Design-milk.com: Extends its savvy design eye from architecture to art to interiors to technology. Lots of cool stuff here.Dezeen.com: A bold, simple architecture and interiors blog with a well-trained eye for cool.Inhabitat.com: Neato architecture and products geared toward environmentally friendly lifestyles.Mocoloco.com: Confusing page interface, but whoever runs this blog has an eye for incredibly unique architecture, interiors, lighting, furniture, and more.If not for Mocoloco.com, we never would have discovered the decidedly Apple-like Andrea Air Purifier.Remodelista.com: The bloggers have a sophisticated eye for classic modernism. Nothing too wild here. They find stuff that would actually work in most homes.Trendir.com: New home products galore. Focuses on stuff you can buy and leaves all the art and architecture posts for the other blogs.Yankodesign.com: With the tagline “Form Beyond Function,” the folks at Yanko showcase some of the most modern, futuristic interiors and lifestyle products you’ll ever find. A very slick and well-executed design site.Next Page: Pocket-Size Design Consultants >>Pocket-Size Design ConsultantsSix iPhone apps succeed in the world of design--but two Mac applications fail. When I began my research in Mac-assisted home design, I fully expected to review two applications that claim to help one quickly and easily create 3D models of home interiors--rooms, surface materials, furniture and all. But after three vexing hours spent with Microspot Interiors and Punch Home & Landscape Design Studio, I decided it would be a poor use of magazine pages to review either package. Both applications are extremely frustrating to use, particularly Home & Landscape Design Studio, which has an awful, non-intuitive interface (and I’m someone who jumped right into Adobe Illustrator, an application that leaves many confused).If you’re already comfortable with 3D modeling software, these interior design apps might have something to offer. But if you’re looking for a genuinely easy-to-use room layout program, consider Home Interior Layout Designer, detailed below. It’s one of six iPhone apps that has something worthwhile to offer the DIY decorator.Colorsnap This free app lets you grab an iPhone photo, extract color info from any portion of it and then find the closest Sherwin-Williams paint match, along with two complementary colors. Sadly, you can’t see the full swatch collection in one fell swoop, but if you’re committed to the paints offered by Messrs. Sherwin and Williams, this app is an invaluable tool.Ben Color CaptureBenjamin Moore’s free app includes color extraction tools that trump Sherwin-Williams’, and you can also swipe your finger across a color wheel to view the full Benjamin Moore swatch collection. Pick a swatch to see harmony groupings and graded saturations of the color you’ve chosen. It’s a must-download pocket partner for anyone investing in Benjie Moore color.myPantone Pantone’s app costs $9.99, but you get nine virtual Pantone swatch collections, nifty color-extraction tools, and the largest selection of color-harmony options we’ve seen on the iPhone. The Fashion+Home collection maps directly to Pantone wall paint colors, and I used the app to email my final palette (see page 35, Image C EDIT THIS LINK) to friends. Search Maclife.com for “myPantone” to read the full review.mySurface Message to all major paint, tile, countertop and window covering manufacturers: Distribute a free app that lets prospective customers quickly peel through your catalog. With mySurface, Dupont does just that for its Corian and Zodiaq lines of kitchen and bath countertops. Search via a color slider, tap a swatch for a larger image, then call an 800 number for a sample.Home Interior Layout Designer This $2.99 app may not let you design in 3D, but it’s easy to use, and provides most everything you’ll need for deciding “what goes where” in an empty room. Just define your room size and shape, and then begin tapping to add furniture, appliances, and architectural elements from various menus. Includes nifty measuring tools for accurate room planning. We’ll do a full review in a future issue.Art Envi Deluxe This $3.99 app turns your iPhone into a handheld art gallery, helping you decide which reprints of timeless classics might look best in your home. Browse by periods or by specific artists in alphabetical order, then create a thumbnail gallery of their pieces. Works can be viewed individually or in slideshows. Includes biographical info, and images can be saved to your Camera Roll!Geek ChicWhen it's time to accessorize your home, think different with Mac-inspired decor and high-tech, high-style iPod docks.A. These iSteam Mac and iSteam iPhone posters ($15, www.isteammac.com) by artist Kevin Tong are inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and HG Wells–style steampunk. Also available as T-shirts! B. Graphic artist Susan Kare designed icons and interface elements for the early Macintosh, as well as these removable wall graphics from LTL Prints ($39.95 and up, www.ltlprints.com).C. The Icon Collection of pillows by Throwboy ($29 each, $149 for the set of six, www.throwboy.com) includes handcrafted, fleece pillows shaped like the icons for Photo Booth, the Finder, Dashboard, iChat, iTunes, and iPhoto (not pictured).D. These handmade fleece pillows by MySuiteStuff ($15 each, $80 for six, $130 for 10, www.mysuitestuff.com) are right out of an art director’s Creative Suite dreams.E. Roth’s Music Cocoon MC4 tube amp (£395, $629 at press time, www.rothaudio.co.uk) warms the sound from your iPod, iPhone, CD player, or other device, and looks good doing it. Just BYO speakers. F. The limited-edition Pantone Flight Stools ($549, www.pantone.com) were designed and made by London design team Barber Osgerby.G. The Multipot ($199, www.multipot.com/en/) is a multiuse charging station and lamp. You can plug up to five devices into sockets under the lid, and the cords are neatly hidden by the pot. H. Rotaliana’s Diva lamp (360 Euros, $515 at press time, www.rotaliana.it/en/) has an extendible iPod dock, a pop-up arm with LED lamp, built-in speakers, FM radio, audio inputs, and a remote.

  • 10 Great iPhone Camera Apps

    By now, you've probably launched the Camera app and taken a few pictures. Maybe you've even shared these pictures with other people. Though the built-in camera doesn't do everything your point-and-shoot does, and it will never have the optical abilities of a DSLR, it has a major advantage over dedicated cameras: the iPhone OS lets you install apps that take your pictures and video to another level.Here are 10 great apps that let you create, modify and share your images. You probably don't need all ten, as there's some feature overlap among these apps. Try a few of these to see if your creative mind enjoys using a variety of tools. CameraBagPublisher: Nevercenter Ltd. Co.Price: $1.99Imagine that your iPhone is a bag full of different film cameras, and you're on your way to understanding Camerabag. This app lets you play with different "looks" for your photos. Choosing the "Instant" style lets you make pictures reminiscent of the kind that came from old instant cameras. Another style, "Helga," gives your photos saturated, darker colors and simulated vignetting in the corners. "Fisheye" lets you pretend you've mounted a fisheye lens onto your iPhone. All told, there are 12 filters in the newest version. The Helga style: vignetted corners, rich hues Though the end results may feel like you're using different cameras, the app is really a set of filters that modify images after they've been made. You can use it on pictures you've already taken, or you can create new pictures using the app.When you use the app to take pictures, you won't see the filter applied in real time. That makes it even more like the old-school cameras, where you didn't know what the picture looked like until you developed it. Luckily, if you don't like what one filter did to the image, you can easily switch to another filter until you get the look you want.You can also run an image through multiple filters, to combine them. Just save a filtered image, open it, apply another filter, and save it again.ShakeItPhotoPublisher: Nick CampbellPrice: $0.99Maybe you long for the days of old, when a bulky camera's click followed by a sustained motorized whirr meant a picture was coming in a few minutes. Or maybe you're too young to remember those days, but have heard OutKast sing that you should "shake it like a Polaroid picture," and you want to know what that's about. ShakeItPhoto lets you do both.This model airplane looks more contrasty, thanks to ShakeItPhoto This app copies the squarish aspect ratio of the old-school camera, as well as its saturated hues. After you take your shot, you can click the "Use" button, and hear those ancient gears push a white-bordered photo down onto your iPhone's screen. You can watch the images develop slowly, or shake your phone to speed up the process.Sure, shaking to develop the picture may be a waste of computing resources (since it takes more calculations to fade the image in slowly rather than just process it to get the final result). Sometimes you have to be inefficient to have a little fun.GorillacamPublisher: Joby Inc.Price: freeIf you wish the Camera app had more camera-like features, try Gorillacam. It's free, though it may make you want to spend money on hardware.While taking pictures, Gorillacam can display a grid on the screen, letting you easily compose a photo using the "rule of thirds," which can make many photos more interesting. It can also display a bubble level along the top, so you can be confident your horizon is straight. Gorillacam also lets you save smaller pictures, and includes a digital zoom slider, a camera shake indicator, and three-shot burst, which some users may find useful. Grid lines made it easy to set up the shot for rule of thirds composition. The bubble level is visible at the top.Where Gorillacam really shines is in its time lapse and self-timer features. You can use those to take multiple pictures over time, or to take pictures of yourself. But how will you set up your phone to take such a picture? The publisher, Joby, hopes you'll drop $40 on its Gorillamobile case and stand, which has three bendable legs that you can wrap around things to hold the iPhone in place. The legs can also stand the iPhone on a table. And, what do you know? That bubble level and composing grid can come in handy when you're setting up the stand to take pictures.It's as if Joby had it all planned out.Camera GeniusPublisher: CodeGooPrice: now on sale, $1.99Not content to just improve on the Camera app, Camera Genius wants to improve your photography.Just because the iPhone doesn't have a "real" camera doesn't mean you can't make great photos with it. Hidden inside the app is something called the "Camera Manual," which is chock full of pointers that will make you a genius with the iPhone's camera. It's like a class in aesthetics, and it even comes with examples. It takes only a few seconds to study all of the topics.The grid lines let us align the Chemung River and a bridge along the top third easily. At top left is a counter that says how many photos we've taken, and on the right is a time and location stamp (which you can turn off). The camera side of Camera Genius features multiple guide line patterns, a shake indicator, burst shooting, capturing by sound (say "Cheese!"), a timer, zoom, and a bigger button for taking pictures. It also lets you visibly stamp your location and the time onto photos when you take them. (You can also change the location to any text).Camera Genius also makes it easy to share images by e-mail or by copying, for paste into another app.Photoshop.com MobilePublisher: Adobe Systems Inc.Price: freeIt's easy to say that photographers use tools like Photoshop as a crutch, but the fact is, many images can be improved with a few tweaks. Most professional photographers spend some time editing photos before they're ready.Photoshop.com Mobile's crop and straighten tools can give photos tighter composition and fix crooked horizons. Rotating the image helps if the iPhone got confused about which side of the image should be topmost. You can also flip the image. It's easy to adjust exposure, saturation, contrast and tint, or quickly convert the photo to black and white.Exotic money looks more exotic-er, thanks to the Tint filter! Beyond that, there are sketch, soft focus and sharpen filters, as well as a handful of interesting and tasteful effects that you can experiment with. Borders let you frame up the image, for even more variety. The app supports multiple levels of undo, so you can experiment until you're happy with the resulting image.Photoshop.com Mobile is integrated with Photoshop.com, which offers similar editing tools and also acts as a photo sharing service. Like the app, that website is free, though you'll need to sign in with an Adobe ID.FX Photo StudioPublisher: MacPhun LLCPrice: now on sale, $0.99If you prefer more extreme manipulations to your photos, check out FX Photo Studio. In addition to letting you crop and rotate images, and adjust brightness, it comes with some 125 different effects. You can make it look like the picture was taken through water or snow, in a lightning storm, or through a fun house mirror. You can surround your image with butterflies, cupids, or hearts.It took a few swipes to give this sailor suit the rainbow treatmentYou can do all sorts of color transformations on your image, or make it look like it was taken with old film, or with a vignetting lens. Or make it look like it was so cold the lens got frosted. Or so rainy, your image is wet. You can even overlay fire, scary faces, a skull and a ghost, all of which are great if you're angry at someone. Post the finished images to Facebook or Twitter, or e-mail the photos right from the app.Photographers debate each other over whether they should call the gadgets and apps they use to help them make images "tools" or "toys." FX Photo Studio can be used as a tool, but it can also be used as a toy, depending on your creative preference. If you like putting wacky things into your photos, you'll be happy with this. But if you're more conservative about photography, you probably won't find a use for most of the effects.ColorSplashPublisher: Pocket Pixels Inc.Price: $1.99If you've ever exclaimed, "Gosh, I wish there were a way to easily make most of my photo appear in grayscale, while coloring the part I want people to see the most," you'll be happy to know that yes, there's indeed an app for that. ColorSplash converts any image to grayscale, and lets you use your finger as a brush to paint the color back in. Choose from opaque or transparent brushes with soft or hard edges, and paint away. If you mess up, you can always undo, or just switch to painting with gray.Why yes, I do like my pizza with clams. By coloring only the pizza, you may not notice that the plate is on a hotel bedspread If the process seems intimidating, the app includes a helpful tutorial video that shows you how easy it is. Once you get into it, it just feels natural: using your fingers to paint, scroll and zoom really leverages the power of the touch interface. Best of all, it's so easy, it makes you look like you did it on a more conventional computer, with expensive photo editing software.You can e-mail the finished images, or post them to Facebook, Flickr or Twitter from inside the app. You can tell your friends you used ColorSplash, or keep them in the dark and make them think you're a god of image manipulation.CinqPublisher: Tunaverse MediaPrice: $0.99If you take a lot of photos on your iPhone but don't connect it to your computer once in a while, you'll have some photos in one place and other photos in other places. Cinq tackles that problem by letting you transfer pictures to your home computer over 3G or Wi-Fi. It also lets you look at your photo library from your iPhone, which is great if you aren't already carrying all of your photos with you.If you've only been to Niagara falls when it's warm outside, you're missing out. All of these JPEGs are sitting on my Mac at home.Cinq works by turning your Mac or Windows computer into a server that listens for requests from the iPhone app. The Cinq server software is a free download. For security, Cinq will only send or receive images if the phone and computer are both logged in to the same Tunaverse.com account. Those accounts are free.Even if you used iTunes to put your entire photo library on your iPhone, you can still get some use out of Cinq. The pictures on your iPhone are probably shrunken versions of the original photos on your computer, so many of the fine details may be missing. Cinq lets you zoom way in on details of the larger photos on your computer, letting you look closely without hogging up space on your phone. The server resizes the image on the fly and decides how much it needs to send you with each swipe, so it's reasonably quick even over a 3G network.TwinShot3DPublisher: Amalgamated Coders Inc.Price: $1.99Stereoscopic photography -- the art of taking pictures that give an illusion of depth when viewed with the right equipment -- is an ancient art. TwinShot3D lets you make three-dimensional photos with your iPhone.3D images look better if you have a distant background, which in this case is my bookshelf. The tower at the bottom left of the photo is made from hotel soap. If you've still got your 3D glasses from two Superbowls ago (or any amber/blue 3D glasses on hand), try them on now. There are, of course, some limitations. You need 3D glasses for the app to work at all. Knowing this, the publishers support three different kinds of 3D glasses. (If you've still got your Intel 3D glasses from the Superbowl in 2009, tell TwinShot3D you've got amber and blue glasses.)Real 3D images are made by capturing images from two perspectives simultaneously, to simulate the gap between each eye. Since there's no way to do that on the iPhone, the app prompts you to take one photo, then move the phone a few inches and take another. It's best if your subject doesn't move while you're taking the pictures.After that, line up the images and tell TwinShot3D to process them to make one 3D image. If it worked, you just might get hooked on making 3D images.iVideoCameraPublisher: Laan LabsPrice: $0.99Most of the apps in this article focus on still photos, but let's not forget that the iPhone's camera can also make video. iVideoCamera takes video recording to the next level, by letting you use effects.Meowy McMeowerson gets the scoop on what matters to viewers like you! You can add film scratches, or make it look like you're on television news. A snow globe filter makes light fluffy flakes fall downward, and if you rotate the iPhone, the flakes will change direction, so they'll keep going down. You can make text scroll, pretend you have night vision, or go for a trippy infinte zoom effect. Other effects packs are unlockable for $.99.Once you're done with your movie, you can post it to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, or TwelveSeconds. You can also FTP it, e-mail it, send a link to it by SMS, or save it to your camera roll. It even turns the iPhone into a web server for sharing movies on the Wi-Fi network, and gives you an address for friends to type into their browsers.On top of that, it works on any iPhone, even the ones that don't ordinarily have video capability including the original iPhone and iPhone 3G.Got a favorite camera app we missed? Drop it in the comments below.

  • ★ The iPad

    Back in December, here’s how I concluded my piece on what I expected from Apple’s then-still-unannounced tablet: If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing. After the iPad was announced, I got two types of emails from readers. The first group saying they were disappointed, because they had been hoping I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing. The second group wrote to tell me how excited they were because I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing. Count me in with the second group. Apple hasn’t thought of everything with iPad, but what they’ve thought about, they’ve thought about very deeply. I got mine Saturday morning, and I’ve been using it since — or at least as often as I could get it away from my son. Here are my thoughts. The Big Picture The whole thing feels fast fast fast. The only thing that feels slow overall, so far, is web page rendering. Not because it’s slower than the iPhone — it’s not, it’s definitely much faster — but because it’s so much slower than my MacBook Pro. It’s easy to forget on modern PC-class hardware just how computationally expensive HTML rendering is. The funny thing is, the iPad, in raw CPU terms, is a far slower machine than a modern Mac. But the iPad is running a lightweight OS and lightweight apps. It’s like a slower runner with a lighter backpack who can win a race against a faster runner wearing a heavier backpack. Thus, many of the things you do are faster, or at least feel faster (which is what matters), on the iPad than the Mac. Like, for example, launching applications. The built-in apps, and many of the third-party apps I’ve been using the most, are ready to use within a moment of launching them. (Games tend not to load instantly, but that’s true on high-power consoles like Xbox and PS3, too.) There’s something fundamentally strange about how fast the iPad feels considering how underpowered it is versus a modern PC or Mac. How can a computer with so much less CPU speed feel faster? What Apple has done is re-think several fundamental aspects. The iPad was designed from the ground up with a different set of priorities. I think Tim Bray summarizes it well: For a 1Ghz device with limited memory, the iPad is unreasonably fast. I suspect this accounts for a whole bunch of the “Wow!” reaction the iPad obviously provokes. Since there’s no free lunch, I think it’s really important that we understand what they sacrificed to get that performance. My bet would be on some combination of windowing and virtual memory. I tend to work on lots of things at once, but in fact I look at things in rapid succession, my eyes can really only focus on one thing at one time. Given sufficiently fast switching, maybe we all ought to be getting less WIMPy. The iPad (and iPhone OS across all devices) does indeed lack virtual memory. The only memory is honest-to-god RAM. RAM is fast, virtual memory is slow. The tradeoff is that without virtual memory, the iPad can do far less at once, but what it does do is never going to require hitting virtual memory. Without a windowing system, drawing is simpler and faster. Apple has made other significantly different tradeoffs as well. Battery life on the iPad is simply stunning. Reviewers across the board are getting real-life results that beat Apple’s promise of 10 hours of battery life. This is a function both of software (which does less and works hard to keep the CPU from drawing power while the iPad is being used) and hardware — iFixit’s teardown shows that, internally, the iPad looks more like a battery with a computer than a computer with a battery. The iPad, so far, never gets warm. Browse a bunch of web sites. Play some video. Play a game. It still feels as cool to the touch as when it’s turned off. It is also dead quiet — no fan, no humming, nada. This is the future of computing. The iPad was designed with an entirely different set of priorities than Macs or PCs. Someone may well produce a worthy iPad rival in the next year, but it’s not going to be something like HP’s Slate that runs Windows 7, an operating system that epitomizes the traditional set of computer design priorities. The iPad is also eminently affordable. $500 for this thing seems hard to believe. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it at double the price. But clearly there were tradeoffs involved to hit this price point. Build quality is not one — the thing feels perfect in hand. But it only has 256 MB of RAM — perhaps the single biggest hardware weakness of the device (see the section on Safari below). It is super high-quality, but clearly designed for the mass market. Anyone who thinks Apple only makes high-priced products has completely lost sense of reality. “Affordable luxury” is the sweet spot for mass market success today, and Apple keeps shooting bulls eyes. In fact, the only thing that makes my heart ache regarding the iPad is when I start imagining a hypothetical Pro model — imagine what Apple could put in an iPad that cost as much as a MacBook Pro. (My dream iPad Pro: double the display’s pixel resolution and include a gigabyte or two of RAM.) Affordability presents itself in other ways, too. Nothing is included in the box other than the power adaptor. The dock and case are separate SKUs, and it doesn’t even come with headphones. It’s like buying a Honda, not an Acura — the base model is not “well-equipped”. $500 is affordable but not cheap, and the iPad does not feel cheap in any regard. The build quality is outstanding. The brushed aluminum back makes my plastic iPhone 3GS feel cheap. The iPad takes more cues from the current iMacs than it does from the iPhone. The seam between the glass and the aluminum is nearly perfect. It’s just one piece of aluminum and a piece of glass — there is no superfluous chrome bezel between the glass and the backing as there is on all iPhones and iPod Touches to date. Even without turning it on it looks and feels a step beyond the iPhones and iPod Touches we’ve seen to date. The Killer App One thing that’s making it hard for some people to grasp the purpose of the iPad is that no one has an answer to what precisely it is for. This was not so for the iPhone. The answer to the question of what the original 2007 iPhone was meant for was right there at the bottom of the iPhone home screen, in the “dock”: phone, email, web, music and video. The other apps were icing on the cake. The four apps in the dock were what Apple designed the iPhone to do. The iPad also has a “dock” on the home screen, and the default apps in that dock are clearly important: Safari, Mail, Photos, iPod (which, on the iPad, is only for audio). But some are treating the iPad as, fundamentally, an e-reader. Others as a gaming device. Others as a movie player. None of those things are represented in the iPad’s default dock apps. The truth is that the App Store is the killer app. The iPad is meant for anything that can be represented on a 10-inch color touchscreen. Back in January when we were playing the “What’s Apple going to name the tablet?” game, my favorite, by far, was “Canvas”. I’m not saying here that Canvas would have been a better name than iPad, but the word conveys perfectly what the iPad is. Adam Engst captured this: The iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated - it’s just a screen, really - and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. As did Cultured Code’s Jürgen Schweizer: Steve Jobs said about the iPod that “it is all about the music”. With the iPad, Apple has done the same for personal computing as it has done before with the iPod: it made technology go away. But if the device is gone, and the operating system is gone, what is left? The iPad is an empty canvas that invites us to imagine what is possible. It inspires our imagination and it makes us want to create, because never before were we able to create software that was so close to the user. The iPad hardware and OS are profoundly humble — they put all the focus on whatever app it is that is open. Out of Box Experience One thing that is very iPhone-like about iPad is that when you first take it out of the box, it wants to be plugged into your Mac or PC via USB and sync with iTunes. In some ways, that’s understandable. USB syncing is how you load your iPad with music and videos and transfer over stuff like your email accounts, and, if you’re not using MobileMe, your contacts and calendars. But, on the whole, it feels retrograde. It’s creates an impression that the iPad does not stand on its own. It’s a child that still needs a parent. But it’s not a young child. It’s more like a teenager. It’s close. So close that it feels like it ought to be able to stand on its own. Android devices do not have this problem. You can sync an Android device with a desktop computer via USB, for transferring things like music and videos, but you don’t have to. Out of the box, a Nexus One is ready to go. Google’s big advantage here is that they’re using online services as primary data stores. The Google Way is to use Gmail for email and contacts, and Google Calendar for events. You just tell your Android device your Google ID and password, and your email, contacts, and calendars start syncing over the air. Apple has MobileMe, but because it’s a paid service, they can’t (or at least won’t) assume that all iPad owners are going to use it. But then even those of us who do use MobileMe get stuck with a first-run iPad experience that involves a tethered USB connection to a computer. The Apple Way is to assume that your primary data stores for these things are locally stored on your Mac or PC — Address Book, iCal. At the very least, these things ought to be able to sync between iTunes (on your Mac or PC) and your iPad over your Wi-Fi network. Third-party iPhone OS apps like Things do a great job with this — there’s no reason iTunes and the iPhone OS shouldn’t too. Those Heart-Stopping ‘Scratches’ On the iPhone (and iPod Touch; assume from here out that when I say “iPhone” I’m referring to both), app icons on the home screen sit atop a plain black background. On the iPad, they’re spaced further apart, which is why I think Apple has added wallpaper — making the iPad home screen look a lot more like a Mac or Windows desktop. The default wallpaper shows a sunset skyline of a mountain range in front of a like. There’s a meteor shower in the sky. And the streaking meteors look, at a glance, like a series of severe scratches on the display. It’s a curious choice. The Touchscreen Keyboard It’s a lot like the iPhone’s, but, it’s different. Because it’s bigger, there are no pop-up indicators showing which key you hit as you type. They’re not necessary. The feel, overall, is pretty much like typing on a really big iPhone. If you’re in a position where you can set the iPad down on your lap or a table top, it’s not too hard at all to type with all your fingers when the iPad is in landscape (horizontal) orientation. Now, to me, it’s nowhere near as good as even the worst full- or nearly-full-size hardware keyboard I’ve ever used. You can’t just rest all eight of your fingers on the home row keys, and you can’t feel where the key cap edges are. You have to look at the keyboard a fair amount as you type. On a hardware keyboard, I hardly ever look at the keys. But for a touchscreen, it’s good. In portrait (vertical) orientation, I can type on the iPad using just my two thumbs, as I do on my iPhone. I have relatively large hands, though — I don’t think most people can do it. The keyboard in this layout is way too small for me to type with all of my fingers, though. In portrait orientation most people will type using one finger, I expect. Now, the funny thing is, in general, bigger keyboards are easier to type on than smaller ones. That’s why big laptops are easier to type on than compact ones, and, indeed, that’s why the landscape iPad keyboard on the iPad is easier to type on than the portrait one. But at a certain point, the curve flips around and smaller becomes faster. I type much faster on my iPhone using the smaller portrait orientation keyboard than the wider landscape keyboard. In both modes, I use just my two thumbs. With the smaller iPhone keyboard, my thumbs have to travel less from one key to the next. People who aren’t very proficient at the iPhone keyboard, or who have very large thumbs and therefore have trouble precisely tapping the smaller keys, may well prefer the iPhone’s wider landscape keyboard. But for me it’s not even close. I never type in landscape on my iPhone. And in fact (and this is the aforereferenced “funny part”), I type faster on my iPhone than I do on the iPad. That’s especially true for when the iPad is in portrait mode, which puts the keyboard size in a no-man’s land — too small to eight-finger-type, too big to thumb-type. But it’s also true for when the iPad is in landscape mode. I’m hopeful that this is just a factor of experience and muscle memory — I have nearly three years of experience typing on the iPhone, and only two days experience with the iPad. Last Friday I watched Andy Ihnatko eight-finger-type on his iPad — which he’d been using for over a week — and he was typing pretty goddamn fast. One problem I’ve run into is that Apple has subtly changed the layout of the keyboard from the iPhone’s. On the iPhone, the Delete key is on the lower right, above the Return key. On the iPad, it’s in the upper right corner, and the Return key is next to the L key. The iPad adds a right-side Shift key. The iPad layout makes perfect sense — both these keys are now where they reside on traditional hardware keyboards. Their weird positions on the iPhone are a compromise forced by the extreme lack of space on the iPhone display. Apple has also added a new key to the iPad keyboard’s numeric/punctuation mode: Undo. It’s a good idea — I have the feeling most iPhone users don’t know about the system-wide shake-to-undo gesture, and even for users who do, the iPad is harder to shake (and, when docked, downright silly to shake). But this new Undo key moves the period and comma keys over to the right by two positions. The iPhone keyboard layout is so firmly ingrained in my mind that these changes are problems for me — I keep hitting the (new to the iPad) right-side Shift key when I mean to hit Delete, and I keep hitting Undo when I mean to type a period. I’ll get used to it soon, I’m sure, but I find it interesting that my iPad typing muscle memory is based on the iPhone keyboard, not regular keyboards. I think this is because, overall, it really does feel like a big iPhone keyboard. Hardware Keyboard Support I don’t have (and did not order) the iPad keyboard dock, but I have been using an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, I’m using it to type this entire review. It works great. Pairing (via the iPad Settings app) is easy and quick. And it works great. Several essential text-editing shortcuts from the Mac OS work system-wide on the iPad: Command-Z, -X, -C, and -V work for Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste. Command-A works for Select All. You can use the arrow keys to move the insertion point. Option-Arrow keys work to move the insertion point one word at a time. Command-Left/Right moves the insertion point the beginning/end of the current line; Command-Up/Down moves the insertion point the start/end of the current text field — which, in the case of something like Pages, is the beginning/end of the entire document. Holding down Shift extends the selection range, and works in conjunction with the Option and Command keys as expected. (Certain of Cocoa’s long-standing Emacs-style text editing shortcuts work too: like Control-K (kill) and Control-H (backspace).) Certain of the function keys on the Bluetooth keyboard are useful on the iPad. The brightness keys control the iPad’s display brightness. The volume (and mute) keys work. The playback buttons — play/pause, next, previous — all work to control the iPod app. By default, once you’ve started using a hardware keyboard, the on-screen keyboard no longer appears, which is great, because the full display is now available for displaying content. But if you want to use the on-screen keyboard while a hardware keyboard is active, you can toggle it using the hardware keyboard’s Eject key. The Esc key dismisses the auto-complete suggestion — it’s like tapping the little “x” next to the suggestion under the current word you’re typing. While a keyboard is connected, you can wake up the iPad by hitting any key — completely bypassing the iPad’s slide-to-unlock screen. Very nice. The iPad is fundamentally a touchscreen device. You absolutely do not need a hardware keyboard for it. But if you’re hoping to do any amount of serious writing with it (and, for obvious vocational reasons, I plan to), you’re going to want one. There are a few places in the iPad UI where I really wish the keyboard was useful but it isn’t. For example, Safari location field suggestions. On the Mac, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move through the list of suggestions. On the iPad, you must use touch to select from the list. Since you’re already typing if you’re entering a URL, this is just begging for arrow key support. (Ditto for suggested results from the Google search field in Safari.) The Esc key does not dismiss popovers, but that’s probably OK. It’s only possible to invoke popovers via touch, so it seems OK that you must dismiss them via touch as well. The Tab key can be used to switch between text fields; Shift-Tab goes in reverse order. (When using the hardware keyboard, I do find myself hitting Command-Tab, without thinking about it, when I want to switch to another app; it does nothing on the iPad.) Display The iPad display is, overall, wonderful. Colors are bright and (unlike the Nexus One’s OLED display) accurate. Photos and videos looks great. Touches seem precisely accurate. The glass feels good. Viewing angles are shockingly good. You can lay the iPad flat on a table while you eat or drink and it looks just fine at a decidedly skew angle — far more so than with the iPhone. This IPS stuff is the real deal; here’s to hoping for an IPS display in this year’s new iPhones. The only complaint I have about the display is that the pixel resolution isn’t all that dense. The iPad’s 1024  768 display has a resolution of 132 pixels per inch. The iPhone’s 640  320 display has a resolution of 163 pixels per inch. The difference isn’t huge, but it’s definitely noticeable. Type looks crisper on the iPhone than the iPad, and type rendering falls far short of even newspaper-caliber resolution, let alone glossy-magazine caliber. (Those of you who doubt that the pixels-per-inch resolution isn’t high enough, just wait until you see the type rendering on this summer’s new iPhones.) Safari The iPad is so good as a web reader, that, if you’re a web junkie, everything else the iPad does is just gravy. It’s good. I’m so used to Safari on the iPhone, though, where the toolbar is at the bottom, that I’m having a hard time getting adjusted to the toolbar at the top. I’m not saying it’s a bad decision on Apple’s part. In fact, the iPad HIG is quite explicit that iPad toolbars should go at the top, not bottom — which makes me think Apple thought about and tested this and has concluded that the top works better for the iPad form factor. It’s just that I use Safari on my iPhone a lot, and I am really used to the button placement. When you create a new page in Safari on iPad, text focus goes to the Google search field by default, rather than the URL location field. That’s a change from both desktop and iPhone Safari. I’m finding this hard to get used to, but I can see how this might be a better design for typical users. It makes the default search engine all the more essential to the web browsing experience, though. Zooming and flicking are essential to the experience, just like on the iPhone. Flicking is how you scroll, no surprise. The zooming, though, may come as a surprise. It wasn’t too long ago when 1024  768 was considered a large display for full-size web browsing. But: what matters on the iPad (and iPhone) is not the pixel count of the display, but the physical size. 9.7 inches diagonally is a bit small for non-zoomed web browser. But the action of zooming — whether through double-tapping or pinching — is so smooth, fast, and natural that it feels better, not worse, than old-school desktop web browsing. There’s one severe problem in Safari for iPad, though: memory crapping out. MobileSafari for iPhone has always allowed you to open up to eight pages at a time. It tries to keep them all truly open, in RAM, so that you can quickly switch between them. But when it runs out of memory it starts flushing some of the pages. It doesn’t forget the URL for those pages, and, in recent versions, it saves a static thumbnail image of the rendered page, but when you switch back to those purged pages, MobileSafari must reload the page — thus, you must wait both for the contents of the page to download and for the page to actually render (which — the rendering — often takes longer than the downloading). It’s very noticeable. Switching between unpurged Safari pages is instantaneous. Switching to a purged page takes as long as opening it from scratch. Wolf Rentzsch, linking to this complaint from Peter-Paul Koch, wrote a brief technical overview of why Apple might have designed MobileSafari this way. (Keep in mind that iPhone OS does not use virtual memory; thus RAM is severely constrained.) This purging problem got a lot better with the iPhone 3GS. The original iPhone and iPhone 3G only had 128 MB of RAM. The 3GS has 256. MobileSafari’s ability to keep more pages in memory is probably my single favorite aspect of the 3GS. The iPad also has 256 MB of RAM. But, in my use, iPad’s Safari isn’t able to keep nearly as many pages open as I can on my 3GS. In fact, sometimes it seems I can only have one, and every page I switch to gets completely reloaded. This is more than just annoying — it can lead to data loss if you have unsubmitted form data sitting in an “open” iPad Safari page. I’ve run into this posting items to DF from the iPad — my posting interface is a web page form. When I want to link to the current page, I invoke a bookmarklet which opens a new page with the title and URL fields of the posting form set to the title and URL of the page from which I invoked the bookmarklet. Often, though, I want to switch back to the page I’m linking to copy another URL or a bit of text to quote. Twice so far, when going back to the posting form, it’s been purged and must reload from scratch — in which case I lose anything I’ve already written. I never run into this problem on my iPhone 3GS when switching between just two open Safari pages. The problem is also severe for AJAX web apps, which tend not to be designed with full page refreshes in mind. I hope this can be improved significantly in an iPad software update, but I worry that it’s endemic — that because the iPad screen is so much larger than the iPhone’s, that MobileSafari must allocate significantly more memory per page for the framebuffers. 256 MB of RAM simply may not be enough for MobileSafari to keep more than two or three pages in memory. If so, Apple really needs to consider some sort of caching or serialization scheme rather than completely flushing away purged pages. Pages I wrote the entire 4,828-word first draft of this piece on my iPad using Pages.1 I didn’t use any of the formatting or layout tools — I used it as a text editor rather than a word processor. It’s quite serviceable. What I like best is that it opens very quickly. Switching between, say, Pages and Safari and back to copy-and-paste a URL feels more like switching than quitting, launching, quitting, relaunching. You don’t need to (and can’t) save manually. Whatever you do in a document simply persists automatically. When you go back to the list of documents, they’re presented as big thumbnails — very much like the list of open web pages in Safari. Pages’s toolbar and ruler are only visible when in portrait mode. In landscape mode, all of the chrome disappears. It’s just a full-screen editing view, a la WriteRoom. I’m writing this piece in this full-screen (landscape) mode, with my iPad propped up on a table in Apple’s iPad case. It’s a nice setup, and I can genuinely imagine leaving my MacBook at home for trips in the future, with the addition of few missing iPad apps (like, say, a good SFTP client). But when I say there’s no chrome in the landscape mode, I mean none. Pages has a decent simple little find and replace feature, but it’s only possible to invoke it in portrait mode. (I must have hit Command-F a dozen times so far, to no avail.) There are already complaints piling up that the iWork apps don’t support the complete feature set of their current Mac counterparts — open a file created in a Mac version of Pages/Numbers/Keynote on your iPad and certain document features may be removed. (The iPad apps prompt you with an alert telling you which aspects of the document have been changed or removed.) Another way of looking at it though, is that the iPad iWork apps are to their Mac counterparts what the iPad as a whole is to the Mac — simpler, more focused, but in some ways faster. Pages launches and is ready for input far quicker on my iPad than on my MacBook Pro. Writing this review, I’ve been switching back and forth between Pages and Safari. It doesn’t feel like quitting Pages, launching Safari, copying a URL, quitting Safari, and re-launching Pages. It feels more like switching — it only takes a moment after tapping the Pages icon on the home screen to be back where I was in my open document. (My only complaint is that you lose the insertion point when leaving and coming back to Pages — the document re-opens to where you left off, but you must tap the screen to place the insertion point. When switching several times, that becomes slightly tedious.) This is obviously not even close to a full review of Pages, but I can say without hesitation that it’s easily worth $10. Syncing There is, however, a severe shortcoming inherent to the iWork suite of iPad apps: document syncing between Mac and iPad. It’s a convoluted mess. In short, the only way to edit a document on your iPad that was created on your Mac, or vice versa, is to go through a convoluted multi-step process of exporting, copying, syncing or downloading, and importing. Ted Landau has copiously documented the entire situation in this article at The Mac Observer. Read it and weep. What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really. Real syncing is something like IMAP for email, or the way MobileMe handles calendars and contacts. When I read a bunch of new email messages using my iPad or iPhone, when I next sit down at my Mac, those messages are marked as read in my inbox. I don’t have to do anything on the Mac for that to happen. That’s just how IMAP works. I can add a new calendar event on my Mac, then walk away from my computer, take my iPhone out of my pocket, and the event is there. I can add a note to that event using my iPhone and a few moments later the note will be synced to the event on my Mac. Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients. The data flow with these iWork apps isn’t like that at all, and needs to be for them to be truly useful. It doesn’t matter how good the user interface for viewing and editing spreadsheets is in Numbers for iPad if my spreadsheets aren’t there. Here’s an example. I keep the schedule for Daring Fireball RSS sponsorships in a Numbers document. What I’d like to be able to do on my iPad is launch Numbers and access the current version of that spreadsheet. But the only way I could possibly do that today would be if I went through the following steps every single time I made a change to the document on my Mac: Before opening the current version of the file on my Mac, check to make sure there isn’t a more recent version of it on my iPad. Open the file on my Mac and make changes. Save. Dock my iPad to my Mac via USB. Switch to iTunes and go to the Apps tab for my iPad. Add the newly-saved revision of the document to the file sharing list for the iPad’s Numbers app. Sync. Even after going through all of this, when I do want to open this file on my iPad, I have to remember not to open the last revision of it listed in the iPad Numbers app’s “My Documents” list, but instead remember first to import the latest revision from Numbers’s file sharing list to Numbers’ “My Documents”. And, again, it’s effectively up to me to keep track of which machine, Mac or iPad, has the most recent revision of the file. To say the least, this is a recipe for disaster, and even if you don’t make a mistake and inadvertantly make significant changes to an out-of-date version of the document on one of the two machines, you’re stuck with a preposterously, mind-bogglingly convoluted workflow each and every time you make a change to the document. The bottom line, obviously, is that there is no way that anyone is going to use these iPad apps in the way I describe above. As-is they’re only useful to me in two ways. First, I can imagine using Pages on the iPad to compose original new documents — posts for Daring Fireball — while I’m using my iPad. I’ll either finish them there and then copy-and-paste the result into the web-based posting interface for DF, or, I’ll send the draft to my Mac for further editing (which is what I did for the piece you’re reading right now). I can also imagine creating finished Keynote decks on my Mac and then moving them, once, to my iPad, and taking only my iPad with me to the presentation — i.e. using Keynote, Numbers, and Pages on the iPad as viewers for finished documents. (And, conveniently, they’re viewers that can make edits if you notice a mistake or want to make a last-minute change or addition.) But there’s no possible way to use these apps as clients alongside their Mac counterparts on an ongoing basis. The sort of over-the-air syncing I’m imagining for iWork is, admittedly, a difficult problem to solve. But the bad news for Apple is that their top competitor in this space has a solution: Google Documents. With Google Documents, there’s no making copies, importing/exporting, manually invoked syncing, or USB tethering involved if you want to edit a single instance of a spreadsheet from multiple machines. You just make changes on one machine, and when you next look at that document from another machine the changes are there. The workflow for iWork is downright antediluvian. It’s not just pre-Cloud, it’s pre-network. It’s effectively the “Who’s got the latest revision of this file?” workflow of the days when we moved files from one machine to another via floppy disks. What in the world is iWork.com for if not for solving this problem? At least iWork.com lets you avoid having to physically tether the two machines via USB to get a document from the Mac to the iPad (or vice versa), but it’s no better than file sharing through iTunes conceptually. When you send a file to iWork.com (from either Mac or iPad) you’re pushing a copy, a snapshot of the document from that moment. After making subsequent changes, you’ve got to push those changes to iWork.com all over again. And to get them on the other device, you must manually import — making just another copy. What you ought to be able to do is specify iWork.com as the canonical shared storage location for an iWork document. iWork.com doesn’t serve as any such purpose today. iPhone Apps I predicted it’d be crummy to run non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps on the iPad — like Classic apps running on Mac OS X — and I was right. It’s OK for games — they look jaggy, but jaggy games aren’t that uncommon. But regular (non-game) apps just look and feel weird. When you run them pixel-doubled text doesn’t scale dynamically — everything is pixel doubled. It’s a good way of proving that the iPad is not “just a big iPhone”, though. The only iPhone app I find myself using on my iPad is Simplenote, for copying and pasting bits of text to and from my Mac and iPhone. Needless to say, I’d love an iPad-optimized version of Simplenote. iBooks and Kindle The iBooks app is free, but doesn’t ship with the iPad by default — you have to download it from the App Store. Apple hasn’t explained why this is so, but there are several reasons I can think of. For one thing, e-book rights are managed on a country-by-country basis — it seems likely that the iBooks store won’t be available in every country where the iPad will soon be sold. Making it an App Store app will also allow Apple to update the app on its own schedule — built-in system apps only get updates along with the entire system. So in some ways, the iBooks app is on equal footing with other e-book readers available in the App Store, particularly Amazon’s Kindle app. But iBooks does get some special treatment — the first time I launched the App Store app on my iPad, it prompted me with a dialog box asking if I’d like to down the free iBooks app. It’s impossible to miss. The iBooks app also has display brightness controls that are not availble through public APIs. Winnie the Pooh is included as a free sample, and the choice is genius — it’s a beloved story, a good read, and best of all (from Apple’s perspective) it can’t be read properly on the Kindle because the color illustrations are a big part of the experience. No book on the Kindle will ever look this good. The Kindle has its own advantages — its books are generally cheaper, its selection bigger, and e-ink works better in bright sunlight — but Winnie the Pooh epitomizes the iPad’s advantages. iBooks’s page-turning animation is delightful — it doesn’t just track your finger-swipe precisely, but even renders the type faintly in reverse on the other side of the “sheet”. The practical minded can simply tap the right and left edges of the screen to turn pages. Amazon’s iPad-native Kindle app is good, too. Oddly, to my mind, it is superior to their recent Mac app in every way. It looks better, feels better, renders text better, and has more features. I say this is odd because the iPad was announced just two months ago; Mac OS X was announced over a decade ago. I suspect part of the reason the Mac version is so crippled is that they were more worried about keeping Mac users from un-DRMing Kindle content than they were about making the Mac app an actual good-to-use app. The Kindle doesn’t do animated page-turning, but that’s not a big deal. Reading is great. And the Kindle’s ace-in-the-hole, of course, is the far larger selection of e-books in its store — hundreds of thousands versus Apple’s tens of thousands. I bought When the Game Was Ours, a new book by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. It is not available in the iBooks store. So Kindle’s advantage is library size (and, secondarily, price per title). iBooks’s advantage is the color display. I’d be shocked if every single piece of advertising Apple produces for iBooks doesn’t focus entirely on screenshots of books with color illustrations, photos, and video. I think it’s going to be easier for Apple to improve the iBooks store library than it will be for Amazon to create a Kindle hardware model with a color display. I think Amazon would do well to add color support to Kindle e-books for use on iPads and iPhones. Kindle has a better chance of long-term success as a software platform than a hardware one. Third-Party Apps in General Given that most iPad-native apps in the store right now were developed using only the simulator by developers without access to actual iPads, you might expect apps to be buggy and UIs to be awkward. I’ve found the bugginess to be true, but the UIs are actually good. I think the physical prototypes developers jury-rigged for themselves paid off, design-wise. There’s no question that UIs are going change rapidly in the coming weeks now that developers have the real deal to measure the feel of their apps against, but for the apps I’ve been using the most, they’re pretty damn good already. As for the bugginess, I’m not saying it’s inexcusable or even surprising — the SDK simulator is not a perfect simulation. Several of the bugs I’ve reported are only present when the apps are running on actual iPad hardware. On the whole, though, the quality of iPad apps on day one is better, by far, than I had expected considering that developers had to build them in the dark, as it were. Prices, so far, are significantly higher than for iPhone apps — but still far cheaper than category equivalent Mac apps. For example, NetNewsWire is $10 (and going to $15 in May); Things is $20; and OmniGraffle is $50. No doubt there are going to be wildly popular 99-cent iPad apps, but it’s also shaping up as serious platform for serious tools. Games are a bit more expensive, too, but, to me, reasonably so. The final word count is just short of 7,300, so admittedly I wound up writing quite a good chunk of it in BBEdit on my Mac.↩

  • 6 Pro Photographers Share Their Most Guarded Digital Secrets

    Great photos are made, not taken. Creating the perfect image requires a skill set that includes a deep understanding of one’s gear, the light, and the ability to think about what story you want the photo to tell and how to communicate that story through a captured moment in time. Tremendous patience, physical flexibility (a photographer spends a lot of time pretzeled into odd positions to capture the perfect angle), and an ability to think lucidly before dawn (can’t miss that golden light) are also essential.Most photographers would now agree that proficiency with photo-editing software is also a critical skill. So we asked six photographers to tell us about their favorite image processing applications and add-ons as well as share their best tips for making and digitally refining images. Lucas Gilman travels the world in search of untouched places and wild experiences, capturing images ranging from kayaking in India to backcountry skiing in South America. His work is often seen in National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, ESPN Magazine,  ESPN.com, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside Magazine, Men’s Fitness, Maxim Germany, FHM Australia, USA TODAY and the New York Times. Lucas recently won the “2008 American Photo Emerging Photographer Award” sponsored by Apple Inc.Preferred Post Processing Applications: The majority of my post processing work is done in Adobe Lightroom 2. I use Adobe Photoshop CS4 for small detail work and Nikon Capture NX for certain images.Click to embiggenFavorite plug-in filters/scripts/actions/etc:Nik Viveza: Amazing color and contrast control without the need for masks. It helps make even a day with the worst light look good with just a few sliders and a couple of clicks.Nik Silver Efex Pro: The best black and white conversions in the industry, allowing total control and creativity without layers, masks and hours of tedious Photoshop work.Nik Color Efex Pro: Amazing ability to enhance and correct colors without masks.OnOne Software Genuine Fractals: Allows me to deliver perfect images that have been resized on demand to epic proportions.Which filters do you use the most in the Nik collections? In Nik Color Efex I really like the "Brilliance and Warmth" filter. It allows me to add saturation and warmth in a natural way to produce really pleasing images. I also really like the "Tonal Contrast" filter, it allows me to accurately adjust contrast in many areas of the image without masking. In NIK Silver Efex Pro I like being able to click through all the film type options within the black and white conversion filter, being able to control grain and contrast to show every detail that I want is really cool! Click to embiggenGeneral Filter Tips: Take your time, play around and check out what each filter can do for you. You will be amazed at all the variations you have the ability to produce with some creative thinking.Favorite Photography Tips: Find your background and then wait for your action to come into the frame. Shoot early and shoot late when the light is good. And take hand sanitizer to Third World Countries -- you will make better photos if you are not sick in bed.Where do you print your work? Printroom.com Click to embiggenPreferred Gear:Photography: Nikon D3X, Nikon D3, Nikon D700, Nikon 14-24mm AFS f/2.8 G ED, Nikon  24-70/2.8G Autofocus-S, Nikon 70-200 mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Lens, NIKON 300mm AF-S VR  f/2.8G IF-ED, Nikon AF-S Teleconverter TC-17E II, Nikon 400mm AF-S VR f/2.8 IF-ED, Nikon SB900 speedlights, Honl professional Light Modifiers (grids, snoots, gobos for  Nikon SB900’s).Backup and image storage: 16GB Lexar Professional UDMA 300x CompactFlash, Lexar Professional UDMA FireWire 800 Readers, DroboPro (Studio), Western Digital MyPassport Studio Edition 500 GB DRIVES (travel)Computer: Mac Pro 8-core 3.0GHz Intel Xeon + 8GB Crucial RAM (Studio), MacBook Pro 2.4GHz  4GB Crucial RAM (travel).To see more of Lucas’ work, visit his website. David Schloss is the director of the Aperture Users Network and MacCreate.com. A photographer for more than two decades, David specializes in adventure sports, travel, lifestyle and hyper-macro photography. He is the author of two books on photography and teaches workshops internationally. Preferred Post Processing Applications: I do about 95 percent of my work in Aperture, with occasional work in Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS 4 and Painter. Favorite plug-in filters/scripts/actions/etc:NIK Silver Efex Pro: This is by far the best black and white conversion tool ever made.Imagenomic Portraiture: After spending countless hours retouching portraits for commercial use Portraiture has been a godsend. It selectively retouches images without having to create complicated masks, it can tell the difference between facial texture and things like hair and makeup.Picture Code’s Noise Ninja: The industry standard for noise reduction. Getting rid of noise from a high ISO or low light shot doesn’t get any easier--or better--than this.Which filters do you use the most in the Nik Silver Efex collection?: I tend to be drawn to the filters that provide the grainy black-and-white experience I used to get from darkroom techniques. The film simulations for things classic 1600 ISO film stock are great. While it doesn’t feel exactly the same to me (there’s just a quality of black and white high-ISO film that’s hard to duplicate) it brings back much of that quality of playfulness and artistic expression of the darkroom.Click to embiggenGeneral Filter Tips: Digital filters are best used like a spice. A little bit can transform a creation from mundane to extraordinary, but used too heavily it will overwhelm the creation. And there’s no filter that’s going to save an out of focus image so work to get the image right in the camera first.What tips can you share with us about working in Aperture: In the 90's there was almost a mandate that "artistic" photos had to be processed and highly-filtered. A lot of simulated cross processing work and bleach tones. For many photographers the image in-camera was simply a jumping-off point for a creative journey. That's fine and it produced a lot of great looking images, but it can only go so far. With the advent of Apple's Aperture, and the focus (pardon the pun) on bringing out the best of an image, I've really rededicated myself to shooting the best possible image in the camera and just bringing it back to the way I saw it in my mind when I shot it. So filters for me are largely about bringing images back to reality, or at least the reality that I had envisioned.Click to embiggenThe really powerful adjustments in Aperture allow me to do a lot of things I used to do in filters -- adjust levels, saturation, vibrancy, sharpness. I take my images and round-trip to a plug-in when I need to make that final little creative tweak to make an image mine. Take the black-and-white conversions possible with Silver Efex Pro -- Aperture is not designed to simulate a film stock, but the ability to take an image and go right into a plug-in and still manage it in Aperture allows me to make a version that replicates the techniques I used to use, with today's tools.Favorite Photography Tips: The best thing I’ve ever heard about photography came from photographer Jay Maisel. Taking the expletives out it boils down to "you can’t take a picture if you don’t have a camera." One thing I learned from my father, a commercial shooter, was to forget about the automatic settings and spend days walking around with camera in manual mode, changing the f/stop and shutter speed by feel. Meter once in the morning and see if you can tell how many stops lighter or darker your subjects move from there. As a result, I often think of things in terms of stops of light. I’ll turn on a bedside lamp and think of how many stops lighter the room got. It’s really a great way to become one with your camera. Do you still shoot with film? I have not shot a piece of film since 2002. The convenience, speed and ecological benefits of working with digital have outstripped all the reasons I shot film. Where do you print your work? At home, on my HP B9180 and a HP Z3100. I’ve also used the site ImageKind.com when I want to get output printed, framed and shipped. They do great work.Click to embiggenPreferred Gear:Photography: Canon 1Ds Mark III, 5D Mark II, Nikon D3x. A mix of lenses, favorites are the Canon 50mm 1.4, Canon 65 1x-5x macro, and the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8.Computer: My main Mac is an 8-core Mac Pro with 16GB of RAM, connected to a Drobo Pro, HP B9180 printer, dual 30-inch Cinema Displays and a Wacom Intuos drawing tablet.To see more of David’s work, visit his website.Tony Sweet decided to redirect his creative energies towards nature photography after 20 years of working as a professional jazz artist. His images are published on calendars, post cards, posters, annual reports, greeting cards and catalogs. Tony conducts Visual Artistry photography location workshops and speaks to photography organizations and "Professional Photographers of America" schools throughout the continental United States and Canada. He is a staff writer for Nikon World magazine and has authored four books on the art of photography. Tony has been honored as a "Nikon Legend Behind the Lens" and is represented by The Getty Picture Agency.Preferred Post-Processing Applications:  Aperture for processing and cataloging, also Photoshop CS4.Click to embiggen Favorite plug-in filters/scripts/actions/etc:Nik Color Efex Pro: Particularly the “Darken/Lighten Center” filter to add depth to the image.Nik Silver Efex Pro: For black and white conversions.LucisPro: I use it on every HDR image to enhance detail and add depth.AlienSkin Snap Art: To add watercolor, oil paint and other artistic effects.Topaz Adjust: to affect exposure and region on specific images.Click to embiggenWhat tips can you share with us about working with filters in general? Play often to learn the capabilities of the software. It’s impossible to pre-visualize a filter effect on an image if you are not familiar with the filter. And always place the filter effect on a separate layer and blend it with the original -- this works especially well when you are blending a black and white converted image with the color original. Work in layers, leaving the original untouched. Practice using your software. The more familiar you are with software usage, the more options you have to bring your creativity to fruition.Favorite Photography Tip: Isolate and simplify the subject.Do you still shoot with film? No more film for me. I have no need for it.Where do you print your work? I use an Epson 7900.Click to embiggen Preferred Gear:Photography: Nikon D3X, 14-24mm, 24-70mm, 70-200mm, 105mm macro, Lensbaby.Computer: MacBook Pro, 8G RAM, 320GB HD, 4TB external storage, Epson 7900 printer.To see more of Tony’s work, visit his website. Mike Sweeney started his visual career by drawing incessantly from the time he was old enough to be trusted with a box of crayons. By the time he was his early twenties he had bought a Canon 35mm camera and was learning the finer points of photography. Now Mike blends his photography skills with his extensive knowledge of technology to produce images that are both classic and state of the art. Mike is an active member is the "Strobist" and other social groups on Flickr, as well as the PPA (Professional Photographers of America), ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) and NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals). He specializes in wedding photography, portraiture and fine art photography.Preferred post-processing applications: Adobe Suite CS3 (primarily Photoshop, InDesign) for advanced editing, Lightroom 2 for the majority of workflow management and light editing, PainterX for live media effects, LumaPIX to create albums, calendars, cards etc, VMwareFusion for running Windows XP and LumaPIX, and Fundy SOS album builder which is Photoshop application for creating wedding albums.Click to embiggenFavorite plug-in filters/scripts/actions/etc:Imagenomic Portraiture: The best and fastest tool I have found  for smoothing and evening out skin surfaces and skin tones.Imagenomic Noiseware: The best noise reduction software.OnOne Pro Tools: The best overall photo editing tool box on the planet. I especially like the Photo Tools Bleach Bypass and High Pass Sharpening filters.A Neutral Density Gradient: I use a gradient more than any other processing tool aside from sharpening to dial in localized exposures of sky, water, windows etc.Click to embiggenWhat tips can you share with us about working with filters in general? Apply any filter effect at the level that you think it should be and then dial it down a notch. Educate yourself about sharpening your images. It's not as simple as you may think and it can make or break an image. Highpass sharpening is your friend. Learn about using sharpening masking in Lightroom, you will be amazed at the details it can bring out. When you’re sharpening don’t forget to zoom in to 100%. Invest 17 bucks in a monthly pass for kelbytraining.org, some of the best information I’ve seen for Lightroom comes from Matt Kloskowski on kelbytraining.Favorite Photography Tip: Read the manual for your camera even if you have been shooting for years, you will certainly learn something from it. Be an active member of a few of the many, many photography related boards, there is always something new to see and learn and you never know when you will uncover a piece of priceless information or learn the one thing that will tip a gig your way.Do you still shoot with film? Yes, Kodak Porta-160VC. I offer it as a custom option for portraits. Some clients like the look of film and will pay a premium for it. And I still shoot Polaroid sometimes because it's fun.Where do you print your work? BayPhoto and MPIXClick to embiggenPreferred Gear:Photography: Nikon D70s, D90, D300, Nikon 17-55mm F/2.8, Nikon 11-24mm F4, Nikon 50mm F1.8, Nikon 17-55mm VR, 4 Nikon SB800 flashes, Nikon SU800, 5 Cybersyncs, Mountainsmith Parallax backpack Flashpoint carbon tripod/head, Westcott collapsible umbrellas, Photoflex Transpack, Z Raygun - a Dual Xenon battery powered light by Brinkmann.Computer: MacBook Pro 6GB RAM, 250GB drive (Travel), Mac Pro dual quad 10GB RAM, 4TB disk (studio) with a Dell 24-inch Ultrasharp monitor, Canon MP950 all in one printer, Epson 4990 Scanner.To see more of Mike’s work, visit his website.Anthony Tortoriello is a Chicago commercial photographer who specializes in animal and pet photography, action/motorsports, food and people and anything else that comes his way.  His work has been used in numerous publications worldwide. Anthony is an expert in color processing and regularly works as a digital technician for top shooters across the country. He has studied color theory with the best (notably Dan Margulis) and is also a professional retoucher.Preferred Post-Processing Applications: I’ve dabbled with every photo related software at some point or another but now the vast majority of my time is spent working in Phase One’s Capture One Pro which is a RAW workflow application, Photoshop CS4 (which I live and breathe) and occasionally Lightroom.Click to embiggenFavorite plug-in filters/scripts/actions/etc:onOne’s Software Suite: Mainly for Genuine Fractals Pro and Photo Frame Pro which I find useful for certain images and jobs.Photomatix Pro: For HDR and a handful of complex sharpening and color boost actions that I created and are specific to my style.  What tips can you share with us about working with filters in general? Less is more. Filters are to be used when needed not just because you can. Sure you can play and have fun, but if your job is to get an ordinary image to look like a breathtaking postcard then use filters with caution. Also, you can use color effects software, noise reduction software, etc., but there is no substitute for knowing how to do this all yourself by having a solid understanding of Photoshop. Photoshop is our digital darkroom period and should not be taken lightly.  I would suggest people use Photoshop as if it is a video game and you are trying to win the game by getting the best possible looking images. Try every possibility like you would in a game, for example you could try running filters in different channels.Click to embiggen Favorite Photography Tips: I am a firm believer at shooting as much as possible any time I can. This means always having a camera by your side and using it with NO worries about what others may be thinking. To paraphrase something photographer Jay Maisel has said, we have to do our visual push-ups everyday to keep our skills in shape.Do you still shoot with film? I have not touched my film cameras in years.  It just does not make sense on so many levels for me to still be using film.  Any tips on getting prints that match what we see on the screen? Make sure your displays are calibrated correctly with a calibration device such as an i1 Display 2 from X-Rite, which will help ensure that the color and luminosity of what you are seeing is accurate.  Familiarize yourself with the proper settings for your software and output device -- for example, if you are printing out of Photoshop make certain you are not double color managing your files -- turn off color manage in the print dialog box. And select the correct paper profile.  Obviously there is much more to it than that, but those things are a big step in the right direction. Where do you print your work? At home I print with an Epson 4880 and an Epson 3880 for my more manageable sized prints.  And for the larger prints I work with an amazing printing boutique in Chicago; JS Graphics. Click to embiggenPreferred Gear:Photography: Nikon D3x, Nikon D3, and Canon 5D Mark II. Lenses include “fast glass” Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8, 24-70mm f/2.8, 70-200mm f/2.8, 200-400mm f/4, 105mm f/2.8 micro, 16mm f/2.8 fisheye, & 50mm f/1.4G and similar for the Canon. Tony also loves his Canon G10 and G11 professional point and shoot cameras for everyday fun. Computer: (Studio) Mac Pro  8-Core Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" Processors  with 16GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM with 4TB Internal Storage and 20TB external RAID Storage. 30-inch Apple Cinema Display and a 22-inch CRT for proofing. Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet “I could not work without it.” (Travel) Apple 17-inch MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAMTo see more of Tony’s work, visit his website. Michele Wortman has been taking pictures professionally for over a decade. Her specialty is “macro photography with a deep emphasis on observing beauty.”  Her work also includes shooting studio portraits of her tattoo clients. Her photography has been featured in several publications and in a book, “Moments of Epiphany” by Proton Press. Preferred Post-Processing Applications: Adobe Photoshop CS3. And I particularly enjoy shooting my portrait work directly into my computer using Aperture and completely bypassing  the memory card in the camera by tethering the camera to the computer. You can really see your shot and be able to make adjustments a lot better than the film days.Click to embiggenFavorite plug-in filters/scripts/actions/etc: I don't use a lot of filters, and all of my favorites are included with Photoshop. I try not to alter the image too far beyond the original shot as I like to preserve the natural magic from the first impression. Typically I adjust the levels first, then I use the selective color menu to create better color balance adjustments. If the image needs some enhanced focus I select the area to sharpen with the lasso on a wide feather and sharpen as needed. I often use the path select tool to create cut outs for my portrait photography. I am a firm believer when it comes to digital manipulation that less is more.  A subtle enhancement can make an image look extra dreamy, but take it just a bit too far and the piece will probably look artificial and overworked.Favorite Photography Tips: Follow your bliss and where the light lands. Shoot what interests you and whatever your passion is. It will show in your work.Click to embiggenDo you still shoot with film? No, digital photography meets all of my needs plus I never have to deal with the hassle of scanning negatives with dust specs!Where do you print your work? For portfolio purposes I print on the Epson Stylus Photo r1800. I also sometimes print on high quality transparency film which I backlight when I’m exhibiting my work. Click to embiggenPreferred Gear: Photography: Canon EOS 5D with Canon EF 24-70MM, Canon MP-E 65MM, Canon EF 100 MM lenses. Lights: Calumet travelite 750 set, Nova 32 softbox, Canon 540 EZ SpeedliteComputer: MacBook Pro with 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB RAM and an iMac with Intel Core Duo 2GHz and 2GB RAM. MyBook Essential edition 1TB external drive and a Burly 4 Bay Firewire Enclosure with four Seagate 7200.10 500GB drives.To see more of Michele’s work, visit her website.

  • The Ultimate MacBook Pro Protection Suite by Moshi

    I'm a huge fan of Moshi's Apple-centric line of products and accessories. In fact, my entire collection of Apple products has now been complimented by Moshi. For example, I use the iLynx USB/Firewire hub and Celesta keyboard with my iMac; my iPhone is protected by the iGlaze 3G; and recently, my Macbook Pro experienced a thorough makeover. Over the years I have owned a variety of Apple laptops, and each one inevitably ends up with scratches on the screen, discoloration on the wrist area, disgusting keys, and other forms of wear and tear. I decided to not endure this experience with my new aluminum MacBook Pro. My goal is to maintain a pristine look for as long as possible, and I intend to achieve this goal by combining Moshi's products into the ultimate protection solution. Clearguard MB: $25 The Clearguard MB is a thin cover for your MacBook or MacBook Pro keyboard. Installation is simple: lay it across the keyboard. After a few minutes of typing, it's barely noticeable. It's virtually transparent so your backlit keys are still visible in dark rooms. I have been using it for a couple of months, and you can clearly see how my keyboard still looks like I just slid the computer out of the box. Cleaning the Clearguard is a simple process involving dish soap and water. The best part about the Clearguard MB is I no longer see key indentations on the screen (a problem MacBooks and PowerBooks have experienced for a long time). Below is a picture of the Clearguard after a couple months. See the keys on the right side? I'm impressed. Palmguard: $20-$28 The Palmguard is used to protect the area where your wrists sit on the computer. For me, that's the part that receives the most damage over time. I'm always amazed at how powerful skin oil is. Again, installation is simple: Line up the Palmguard carefully in the corners and then firmly slide your hand across. If you aren't satisfied, it's easy to take the Palmguard off and try again without leaving any residue. In the past, I used a competitor's product to protect the wrist area. One thing missing was something to place onto the trackpad area. The Palmguard comes with a separate piece just for that. The accuracy and clickability (I just made up that word) of the trackpad are not affected. Moshi sells a variety of Palmguard products to match the color and size of your Apple laptop. Below is a picture of the Palmguard after a couple months. Again, I'm impressed. iVisor AG: $35-38 iVisor AG is the flagship laptop protection product by Moshi. Not only does it protect the screen from scratches, dust and fingerprints, but it also eliminates glare. Remember when we had a choice between matte and glossy screens for our MacBook Pros? Well, this is as close as you can get to owning an aluminum MBP with a matte finish without swapping the screen. Installation is shockingly easy. You just line up the corners, press down, and firmly slide your hand across the screen. The air bubbles you see while applying a protective layer on your iPhone are not a problem. I was nervous about this, but fortunately Moshi delivered on its promise. There's a hole at the top for your iSight, and a transparent part in the black border so the “Macbook Pro” text on the bottom is still visible. Below is the iVisor after a few weeks. No reflection, no scratches. Conclusion A MacBook Pro is an investment. It deserves to remain in perfect condition. What I love about Moshi's products is that they can be installed in minutes and they perform to my standards: no air bubbles, no scratches, and no damage. I purposefully did not include outer cases because I dislike adding bulk to the laptop. Also, a simple and artistic way to protect the top from scratches is to add a Gelaskin. Moshi products are available for purchase at Dr. Bott and nuCourse. Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more

  • ★ 4

    The first thing you notice is that the iPhone 4 feels smaller in hand — the decrease in width, even more so than thickness, is quite noticeable. It feels tight. Then you turn it on, and you see the screen. Apple seems very confident about the precise size and dimensions of the iPhone display: 3.5 inches, with a 3:2 aspect ratio. Not 3 inches. Not 4 inches. In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone. There are no new buttons, or even moved buttons. The Retina Display is emblematic of the iPhone 4 as a whole, both hardware and software: the same fundamental idea as the original iPhone, but clarified. It hasn’t really changed so much as improved — like the same picture in increasingly sharper focus. As I wrote after examining Apple’s iPhone 4 demo units after the WWDC keynote, the Retina Display’s overall effect is like that of high-end glossy magazine print — except that it updates live. It’s living breathing print. I don’t recall ever having seen motion graphics of this resolution, anywhere. And (again as noted previously) it’s more than just the pixel resolution — it’s that the LCD is so much closer to the surface of the glass. Like pixels on glass rather than pixels under glass. This is the result of a new manufacturing process Apple has pioneered. No other company gives a shit about things like this. The iPhone 4 feels like a major step toward an idealized iPhone form factor. What defines the iPhone, physically, is the 3.5-inch diagonal screen. The iPhone 4, in terms of width, seems about as narrow as you could possibly want it to be without reducing the size of the display itself. There’s just enough of a bezel around the sides to avoid inadvertent touches from fingers holding the phone by the edge. My older iPhones now feel swollen along their rounded edges. And yet somehow, despite making the form factor noticeably smaller, Apple made room internally for the battery to be bigger. In my review of the iPhone 3G two years ago, I wrote: The home button on the 3G seems to require a more forceful push. The clickiness of my original iPhone’s home button is better. On the other hand, the clickiness of the 3G’s volume and sleep buttons is better. Apple sometimes seems to be the lone consumer electronics company that pays any attention at all to the tactile response of buttons. The iPhone 4’s buttons are improved all around. The Home button restores the clickiness of the original iPhone’s. The new volume buttons, silence toggle, and power button all have a better feel than ever before. Apple is so good at making buttons, it’s almost enough to make one wish they made button-laden devices. The overall build quality seems impossibly good. The iPhone 4 is beautiful to behold and feels like a valuable artifact. It’s like a love letter to Dieter Rams. The Flat Sides The flat sides make it feel much more like a real camera — a decidedly thin camera, but a camera nonetheless — while taking pictures. This improvement is equally noticeable when holding the camera horizontally for any reason — like, say, to watch video. When you’re holding a phone vertically, you’re typically cupping it in the palm of one hand. But when holding a phone horizontally, you typically pinch it between your forefinger and thumb. The iPhone 4’s flat sides make this grip far more secure. Performance The iPhone 4 is definitely faster than the 3GS, but it doesn’t feel to me as though the difference is as noticeable as last year’s leap from the 3G to 3GS. This video on YouTube, which compares the startup time for Plants vs. Zombies on an iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and original iPhone, feels exactly right to me: the 4 is noticeably faster than the 3GS, which in turn is way faster than the original iPhone (and the 3G, which performance-wise was nearly identical to the original). The big win for Apple’s A4 system-on-a-chip, I suspect, is not raw performance (even though it is faster), but rather performance-per-watt. It’s an even better balance between speed and power consumption. And, on a related point, the A4 system is physically smaller, which has enabled Apple to reduce the size of the iPhone form factor and still include a bigger battery. Battery life seems a tad better on the iPhone 4 than the 3GS, which is saying something, given that the CPU is faster and the Retina Display packs four times as many pixels, is brighter, and offers a better contrast ratio. Typing on the iPhone 4 keyboard seems better than ever. The increase in performance has made the iPhone 4 more responsive to touch events, and for me this is most evident while using the keyboard. The increase in RAM from 256 to 512 MB is, no surprise, welcome. More web pages remain in memory in MobileSafari, and more apps remain resident in memory for fast app switching. The combination of more RAM and iOS 4’s new fast app switching makes the process of switching between a handful of apps feel like an all-new experience compared to older iPhones running OS 3. The Glass Back Both aesthetically and tactilely, the iPhone 4’s glass back is very pleasing. It has a 2001-monolith-like symmetry. But as a heavy iPhone user since day one, I’m finding it slightly disconcerting. I’ve always carried my iPhone the same way: front right pants pocket, with the glass toward my body, so that if my leg hits something or something hits my leg, the back of the iPhone would take the impact, not the glass. Now it’s glass on both sides, and what keeps happening is that I reach into my pocket to take it out, my fingers feel the smooth glass facing out, and I think, “Shit, I pocketed my iPhone wrong last time.” I’ll get used to it shortly, I suppose, but there’s really no way to distinguish the front from the back by touch other than to find the Home button or speaker. And, for obvious reasons, the glass back raises concerns about the iPhone 4’s droppability. With previous iPhones, it was liking dropping a piece of buttered toast — there was a lucky and unlucky side on which it could land. With the iPhone 4, it’s like dropping a piece of toast that’s been buttered on both sides. FaceTime I don’t really talk on the phone that much, but I’ve had fun trying out FaceTime with a few iPhone 4-enabled friends. It truly is delightfully easy to initiate, whether by starting with a voice call or not. The video quality is far smoother than anything I’ve ever gotten using Skype or over AIM with iChat — better resolution, far fewer compression artifacts, and almost no pauses or lag. It’s early in the game, but so far FaceTime seems best-of-breed technically. Audio quality over FaceTime is excellent. This is particularly noticeable with calls that start using voice. The difference is so stark that it makes me wish FaceTime could kick in for audio-only calls between FaceTime-capable phones. AT&T should be ashamed. Portrait orientation looks perfectly natural for FaceTime, for the obvious reason that it frames the face like — duh — a portrait. When you initiate a FaceTime call directly — by clicking the “FaceTime” button on a contact — you get an iChat-sounding “ringer” sound while waiting for the recipient to accept the call. If the recipient is not available for FaceTime (e.g. if their device is not currently connected to Wi-Fi), they will get a “missed FaceTime” notification pretty much just like what you get when you miss a phone call. This includes a notification alert on the lock screen, and an increase to the number in the Phone app’s red badge. Voicemail would be great for these missed FaceTime-only calls, but it’s not there. (“Facemail”?) When you switch to the home screen or another app during a FaceTime call, the video pauses, but the audio continues. Once you switch a call to FaceTime, you can’t switch back to voice-only, but switching to another app while the call continues effectively turns FaceTime into voice-only. That FaceTime goes through the Phone app, rather than a dedicated FaceTime app, makes me wonder what Apple will do if I’m right that this year’s upcoming new iPod Touches will be FaceTime-capable. My guess is that it’ll be sort of like with the iPhone’s “iPod” app, which on the iPod Touch is split into separate Music and Video apps: on the iPhone, FaceTime is subsumed by the Phone app, but on the iPod Touch, it could be its own standalone app. It’s no surprise that FaceTime, not the Retina Display, is apparently going to be the centerpiece of Apple’s TV ads for the iPhone 4. It is instantly compelling. It’s also the sort of thing that drives critics of Apple products nuts. “Look at these stupid people who think Apple invented video chat, or even mobile video chat.” Right? What they’re overlooking, and will always overlook, is the value of the “It just works” factor. Normal people aren’t just going to use FaceTime — they’re going to love it. And if it really takes off, it’ll turn FaceTime into a de facto social network. People will buy iPhone 4’s (or other future FaceTime devices) because two or more of their friends have them and they feel like they’re missing out. Mark these words: FaceTime goes down as one of the most important things Apple has ever introduced. Helvetica Neue It’s a subtle change, but Apple has changed the system font for the iPhone 4, from Helvetica to Helvetica Neue. The change is specific to the iPhone 4 hardware (or more specifically, the Retina Display), not iOS 4. On older iPhone hardware, iOS 4 still uses Helvetica as the system font. If you think it’s hard to tell Helvetica apart from Arial, this one’s going to shoot right over your head. Helvetica Neue isn’t so much a different typeface as a “reworked” version of the same face. Here’s an overview of Helvetica’s history from U&LC. (And a pronunciation thread on Typophile.) Says my friend and fellow Helvetica aficionado Mike Monteiro,1 “In comparison to Helvetica Neue, Helvetica looks ungainly. It’s 95 percent there. Neue took it the other 5 percent.” In general, where Helvetica Neue differs from regular Helvetica, its glyphs are slightly wider and rounder. The most telling difference, to my eyes, is the uppercase bold M: A good place to spot the difference, side-by-side with an older iPhone or iPod Touch, is the “AM/PM” in the status bar. On the iPhone 4, it’s clearly Helvetica Neue (with the wider M), and on an iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.0, it is regular Helvetica. Aesthetically, this change is a win. Helvetica is a great typeface; long-time DF readers know I’m a huge fan of it, and the choice to use it for the iPhone’s system font is one of my favorite decisions in Apple history. But Helvetica Neue, subtle though its differences are, is a nice improvement. It is a more Helvetica-y Helvetica. Why change only on the iPhone 4, though? I suspect it’s because Apple’s digital version of Helvetica is better hinted for on-screen rasterization than Apple’s Helvetica Neue, which makes it look slightly sturdier on the relatively crude pre-Retina Display iPhone screen. I.e., Helvetica looks better than Helvetica Neue on older iPhones, but Helvetica Neue looks better on the truly-print-caliber Retina Display. In the old days, there was print (high resolution) and screen (low resolution), and a wide resolution gap between them. The iPhone, and devices with similar pixel density, introduced a sort of middle ground — many print fonts that never looked good on screens before looked good on the iPhone. The iPhone 4, however, offers type rendering that is legitimately print quality. That Apple pays so much attention to the details as to pick a different version of Helvetica for different classes of displays is emblematic of what makes the iPhone the iPhone — software and hardware that are designed in tandem as parts of a single whole. Helvetica Neue’s Missing Italics There is, however, one problem with Helvetica Neue in iOS 4.0: it doesn’t include italics. You can see this for yourself on this web page I’ve created that specifies Helvetica and Helvetica Neue alongside each other, including spans of bold, italic, and bold italics. Here’s how that test page renders in the following browsers: Safari 5 on Mac OS X 10.6.4 iPad running iOS 3.2 iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.0 iPhone 4 running iOS 4.0 It renders correctly on the Mac and iPad, but on both iPhones, the italic and bold italic variants of Helvetica Neue are not available, and render as non-italic. I can only assume this is an oversight on Apple’s part. It affects iPhone developers who use the italic system font in their applications — in all previous versions of iOS (née iPhone OS), [UIFont italicSystemFontOfSize:] returned an italic font; in iOS 4.0 it does not. The iPhone’s OS has long included several non-italic weights of Helvetica Neue. The iPad’s OS (version 3.2) was the first to include the italics. But iOS 4 only includes the same non-italic weights of Helvetica Neue from OS 3.1 and earlier. (Yet another sign of the divergence between the iPad’s and iPhone’s software.)2 I’ve filed a radar on the issue, requesting that Apple add the italic weights of Helvetica Neue to a near-future iOS update. The iPhone should include all the same fonts as the iPad. (Those of you with Apple developer accounts who agree should file duplicate radars.) Camera I thought last year’s 3GS provided a nice improvement to the iPhone camera, with superior still photos and the addition of video. The new (primary) camera in the iPhone 4 is a bigger improvement. Still photos are of the quality of a low-end dedicated point-and-shoot camera, and the 720p video is surprisingly good. Here are a handful of stills and a video I took over the weekend — none of them post-processed in any way. The iPhone 4 adds a flash to the main camera. I suppose that’s nice, for when you absolutely can’t get a decent exposure in low light without it, but the new camera is sensitive enough that you can take pretty good photos in relatively low light without it. I’ve turned the flash on mine off, and don’t expect to turn it on more than a handful of times. Is the video quality just as good as a dedicated 720p video camera like the Flip HD? I say yes. And at the very least, it is very close. Most impressively, video shot with the iPhone 4 doesn’t seem to suffer from any sort of lag or stuttering, even while panning or walking around. Playback, needless to say, is silky smooth. More importantly, Flip-class cameras don’t offer online connectivity, and don’t offer on-device editing like the iPhone 4 does with iMovie. Flip’s not dead yet, because you can get an HD Flip for about $120. One can imagine sending a class of six-graders out armed with a few school-owned Flips; that’s not going to happen with $499 iPhones. But my guess is that we’re going to see a similar camera in this year’s new $299 iPod Touch, which will be next year’s $199 iPod Touch. I think Apple is going to be able to get the price on such an iPod Touch below $200 before Cisco is going to create iMovie-like editing software for the Flip. It’s hard to overstate just how many wildly variant devices the iPhone and iPod Touch compete with. Phones and handheld audio/video players, yes, obviously. But now also cameras and handheld game consoles. It’s an old adage that the best camera is the one you have with you. It’s getting to the point now where the iPhone camera isn’t just good because it’s with you, but good because it’s actually pretty good. The Reception and Proximity Sensor Problems There are two widely-reported problems with the iPhone 4. First is the issue surrounding 3G reception and hand placement on the device. There’s no doubt that this is an issue for many — but I think a minority — of iPhone 4 owners. I haven’t been able to duplicate the problem on mine, though. Sometimes, but rarely, I can make it drop a single bar, but I can’t duplicate the drop to “No Signal” that many others can. Best as I can tell, based on the reports I’ve read, including many emails from DF readers, the problem is multivariate. It definitely seems related to signal coverage (or cell tower proximity, or something like that). I’ve received many emails (and a few tweets) from DF readers who can reproduce the problem at will in one location, but can’t in another. Not much help, though, when the problematic location is, say, your home or workplace. But I’ve also heard from a few readers with fellow iPhone 4-owning friends and colleagues, who’ve been able to test several units side-by-side. Some iPhone 4 units seem more susceptible to the problem than others — which makes me question whether this is something a software update can address. I think it’s like a combination of software and manufacturing. The other issue regards the proximity sensor — the sensor which turns off the touchscreen when you hold the phone to your head for a call. The proximity sensor on the iPhone 4 seems far more sensitive than on previous iPhones, such that minor movements away from your head during a call re-enable the touchscreen, which then leads to your cheek inadvertently engaging the Mute or End Call buttons. Here’s a description of the problem at EverythingiCafe; and here’s a 24-page (!) thread about it on Apple’s discussion forum. This problem, I have seen myself. My cheek invoked the End Call button during a call yesterday, something that I don’t recall ever having happened in the three years I’ve been using iPhones. Garrett Murray is afflicted by both these problems. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple is able to address either or both of these problems via a software update. And, if so, when? The iPad was released in April and still hasn’t seen a single software update. (Perhaps the iPad is an exception, and Apple has decided against a 3.2.1 iPad update to devote all of its iPad OS development time on iOS 4.1.) The proximity sensor issue strikes me as more likely to be fixable via software. As for the reception issues, I can see this playing out three ways: Best case: It’s fixable, or at least improvable, via software changes alone. OK case: It’s a manufacturing issue that Apple can address going forward, with future production runs. Apple has sold a lot of iPhone 4’s already, but most of the iPhone 4’s they’ll eventually sell haven’t yet been made. They might take a small hit on exchanges from existing iPhone 4 users who are seeing the problem. Worst case: It’s inherent to the design of the iPhone 4’s novel external antennas, and all iPhone 4 units will be susceptible to the problem. As I stated before, some people seeing the problem can’t reproduce it (or at least see lower amounts of signal loss) when they try using a different iPhone 4 unit in the same location. That suggests it’s fixable, but perhaps only in manufacturing, not in software for existing units. And even in the worst case scenario, it only seems to be a problem when holding the phone in certain ways while in areas of marginal signal strength. That’s not to pass the blame from Apple to AT&T, but only to say it’s far from catastrophic. It may wind up being more of a publicity problem than a technical one. At the very least it isn’t going to help the iPhone’s perception as a great device but weak phone. Monteiro uses Helvetica Neue in this excellent series of paintings.↩ Also goes to show that iOS developers should be specifying the font for UI elements via API calls for the “system font”, rather than hard-coding for “Helvetica”. But according to the Apple’s iOS 4.0 release notes, “References to the Helvetica font in nib files will be decoded as the system font on these newer devices.” That said, I’ve noticed a few spots in iOS 4 where you still see Helvetica rather than Helvetica Neue; e.g. the “All Contacts” list in the Contacts and Phone apps, and the Phone app’s Recent calls list. (The Phone app’s Favorites list, however, uses Helvetica Neue.)↩

  • Upgrade Guide - Build a Better Mac

    Wondering if your Mac is as awesome as it could be? Want to make sure it is? We’ve got the answers to all your questions on upgrading RAM, hard drives, video cards, and more.Your Mac is a hefty investment, so it’s in your best interest to keep it running well for as long as you can. Upgrading its components instead of going for a new machine is a smart idea. (Bonus: Better components will also increase the resale value.)Still, like we said, your Mac is a hefty investment. So before you crack it open to drop in a larger and faster hard drive, add more system memory, or even slap on a fresh new battery, you’ll have questions. You’ll want to be confident in choosing components, finding the right tools, and knowing what to do before you find yourself digging into your Mac’s circuitry.Unfortunately, we can’t walk you through your upgrade step by step--each model of Mac is different, and they’re revised on a regular basis. But we can answer your questions about upgrading and give you the know-how you need to pick out the parts, locate the instructions, and get it done. Your upgraded Mac will work much better, plus you’ll be a happy camper knowing you did it all yourself.RAMThe low-hanging fruit of any Mac upgrade, more RAM equals more get-up-and-go.Should I order my Mac with extra RAM installed by Apple, or just order the standard amount and upgrade later?It’s wise to compare prices before you check out at the Apple Store. Sometimes Apple’s RAM is cheaper than third-party prices, but often it’s much more expensive. And since Apple’s build-to-order options don’t always allow you to max out RAM when you buy, upgrading later may be the only way to load your Mac with as much memory as it supports.That said, if you’re squeamish about opening your computer, the convenience of getting extra RAM preinstalled may be worth the compromises. RAM not installed by Apple isn’t covered under your Mac’s warranty or AppleCare, and neither is damage caused by faulty RAM modules or their installation. But just between us, installing your own RAM is an easy and typically trouble-free procedure when done correctly.What are the different types of RAM?This laptop-sized SO-DIMM has 204 pins. The pins are what connect the module to the RAM slot.The RAM modules--or, more accurately, SDRAM modules--used by modern Macs come in a variety of speeds and two physical designs: desktop-sized DIMMs and compact, laptop-friendly SO-DIMMs. Many flavors of RAM have come and gone over the years, but the latest is DDR3, which moves data even faster than earlier DDR memory, while using less power. Although it may seem like there’s a galaxy of RAM to choose from, the memory you need depends on which Mac you want to upgrade, and your Mac’s needs are specific. So don’t worry about having to decide between cheaper DDR2 RAM and speedier, more expensive DDR3 RAM--you won’t have a choice.How do I find out which type I need and how much my Mac supports?Click the Apple Menu and select About This Mac to see how much RAM you have.Apple lists the type of RAM each currently selling Mac uses on the Tech Specs page for that Mac on Apple.com. For example, the current iMacs come with 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM in two 2GB SO-DIMMS. The iMac’s four SO-DIMM slots can support a total of 16GB, meaning four 4GB SO-DIMM modules.But that’s just the Macs for sale right now. To find out what kind of RAM is in your own Mac, click the Apple Menu and select About This Mac. The Memory section will tell you how much RAM you have installed and what kind it is--according to the screenshot, our MacBook Pro has 4GB (amount) of 667MHz (speed) DDR2 SDRAM (type). For more details on the individual RAM modules installed in your Mac’s memory slots, click More Info to launch System Profiler, then click Memory in the sidebar (under Hardware).However, this won’t tell you the maximum amount of RAM your Mac supports. If your Mac isn’t a current model, research sites like Everymac.com or simply go shopping. Many RAM vendors’ websites list a Mac’s capacity alongside its compatible memory.Do I always want to max out my RAM? Crucial (crucial.com) is happy to tell us our MacBook Pro supports up to 4GB of RAM.Want to? Sure. More RAM lets your Mac handle memory-intensive tasks like gaming, video editing, and running multiple applications simultaneously. Adding as much RAM as possible helps ensure your Mac will be ready for a variety of tasks--and RAM-hungry software updates--for years to come.Need to? Not so much. While RAM is an easy, inexpensive way to boost your computer’s performance, an extra gigabyte or two over Apple’s stock configuration may be enough for everyday use.How and where can I comparison-shop for RAM?Other World Computing carries RAM from several manufacturers for one-stop comparison shopping.First, arm yourself with as much information about your computer and its supported RAM as possible. Many vendors use detailed technical specifications--even screen size--to differentiate one Mac model from another. Crucial (crucial.com) even has a System Scanner tool that can auto-detect your Mac model.Ramseeker.com lets you compare RAM prices based on specific Mac models. Sites like Pricewatch.com, PriceGrabber.com, and larger Mac-friendly retailers like Other World Computing (macsales.com) let you compare prices based on RAM type and manufacturer.Do the modules really have to be bought in matched pairs?This DDR3 DIMM can go in a current Mac Pro.Some Macs, like many Xserves and Mac Pros, require RAM to be installed in two modules of the same size and specifications--check your manual to be sure. Others, including all Intel Macs, don’t require matched pairs, but will see some speed benefits with matched memory. But even in these machines, more unmatched memory (say, one 2GB module and a 1GB module for a total of 3GB) generally provides greater benefit than a smaller amount of matched RAM (say, two 1GB modules for a total of 2GB).Where can I find instructions for my Mac?Find Other World Computing's how-to-install videos at eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/.Your Mac’s instruction manual or support documents on Apple’s website (support.apple.com) will show you how to install memory in your computer. Failing that, some Mac hardware vendors like iFixit.com, Crucial, and Other World Computing offer instructions on their websites--often as easy-to-follow videos--for a wide variety of Macs.How do I know if the installation "worked," and what should I do if it didn't?Choose About This Mac from the Apple Menu. You should see your new RAM total in the Memory section. If the number isn’t what you expect, shut down your computer, unplug all the cables, then access your Mac’s RAM slots again and make sure the new RAM modules are firmly seated.RAM GlossarySo many acronyms, am I right?DIMM: Dual inline memory module. Also known as a RAM module or chip, installed into a slot in your desktop Mac.DDR2: Second-generation double-data-rate SDRAM; bandwidth up to 8.5GB/sec.DDR3: Third-generation double-data-rate SDRAM; bandwidth up to 12.8GB/sec.ECC: Error-correcting code. ECC RAM modules, which are used in Mac Pros, have extra chips that detect and fix errors in reading or writing to the memory.SDRAM: Synchronous dynamic random-access memory. Or just "RAM" for short.SO-DIMM: Small outline dual inline memory module. (See why we need acronyms?) Smaller than a DIMM, SO-DIMM modules are used in Mac laptops and iMacs. Shop DifferentHere are our favorite Mac-centric dealers on the internet, compared on the basis of what you’ll pay for a 4GB RAM upgrade kit and an SSD for Susie’s trusty workhorse, a 2.4GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro (late 2007 Santa Rosa model). Prices change all the time; these are accurate as of press time. Store Name URL RAM Price SSD Price Notes OWC macsales.com $97.50; OWC 4GB PC5300 DDR2 667MHz Upgrade Kit (two 2GB modules) $399.99; Crucial 128GB M225 2.5-inch SSD Site is somewhat cluttered, but we still manage to find what we need easily. Live chat with customer service. Crucial crucial.com $97.99; Crucial 4GB Kit PC5300 DDR2 667MHz $399.99; Crucial 128GB M225 2.5-inch SSD Memory Advisor tool and System Scanner help you find compatible parts for your Mac. Live chat with customer service. MacMall macmall.com $149.99; Kingston Upgrade to 4GB PC2-5300 DDR2 667MHz $542.99; Axiom 128GB 2.5-inch SATA SSD Confusing navigation. No way to see all compatible parts for your Mac. iFixit.com ifixit.com $119.90; Two 2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 667MHz (two 2GB modules) $299.95; Intel 80GB 2.5-inch SATA SSD (128GB capacity not available) Our favorite site for upgrade and repair instructions. Powerbook Medic powerbookmedic.com $97.90; Two 2GB PC5300 DDR2 667MHz modules ($48.95 each) $349.95; 128GB SSD MacBook and MacBook Pro Lots of parts and detailed instructions. Send in Mac if the repair is too tricky.Next Page: Hard Drives >> Hard DrivesYour Mac's hard drive is like a closet that stores your whole digital life. Might as well make it a walk-in.Why upgrade my iMac or laptop's internal drive instead of just adding on external drives?Convenience and cost. A laptop with a large hard drive lets you carry more files with you without requiring extra gear. External drives are great for backup, but you don’t want to have to juggle them--and the power cords they may require--while you’re on the go. In desktop Macs, more built-in storage reduces the need for workspace-cluttering external drives and helps you avoid lengthy searches for files across multiple devices.A desktop-sized 3.5-inch SATA drive comes in larger capacities.Plus, internal drives tend to be much less expensive than their external counterparts, so your dollar will go further when you boost a Mac’s built-in storage. This can pay off down the road when you’re finally ready to replace your Mac with new model--a large internal drive will make your computer more desirable to buyers on the secondhand market.How do I find out which size and speed drive my machine supports?Your Mac’s manual can tell you what internal hard drive specifications your computer supports. If you’ve lost your manual, just find your Mac’s serial number in System Profiler--click the word Hardware at the top of the left-hand pane, then locate your Mac’s serial number and copy/paste it into the Search Manuals box at support.apple.com/manuals/. Or consult the website of your favorite Mac-centric retailer (see “Shop Different,” left) to see available drives for different Mac models.But we’ll get you started with some basics. All modern Macs use a hard drive connection called Serial ATA, or SATA. This simplifies your shopping a little, but Mac hard drives aren’t quite one size fits all. The SATA drive you need depends on what kind of Mac you have.MacBooks and MacBook Pros use 2.5-inch hard disk drives (or HDDs) that run between 5200 and 7200 RPM. These speeds determine how quickly data can be read from and written to the drive. The more revolutions per minute, the faster your drive. Currently, most 2.5-inch HDDs offer a maximum capacity of 750GB.Crucial's 2.5-inch 256GB SATA SSD will set you back $700 at crucial.com.Solid-state drives (or SSDs) are increasingly popular in laptops--they’ve been build-to-order options in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro for a few years. These drives use flash memory that has no moving parts, so data can be read from them even faster than from HDDs. This increased speed is an SSD’s main benefit. They’re currently more expensive and offer much smaller capacity than conventional drives. Anything larger than 256GB will currently cost you four figures, moneybags.Desktop Macs use 3.5-inch HDDs that run at 7200 RPM. These drives offer much greater maximum storage capacities than their laptop counterparts--up to 2TB.Which Mac laptops have user-replaceable hard drives?MacBook owners, you’re in luck. All MacBook models sport hard drives you can replace without voiding your warranty. Unfortunately, not all MacBook Pro owners are as fortunate. MacBook Pros with a unibody design (those sold after October 2008) have user-replaceable hard drives, but older models don’t. No model of MacBook Air offers a hard drive users can swap out for another.However, you don’t need Apple’s say-so to upgrade the drive in an unsupported machine. Unofficial drive-replacement instructions for any Mac laptop are available on the internet at Powerbookmedic.com, iFixit.com, and elsewhere. All that’s required is a Google search, steady hands, and a flagrant disregard for AppleCare coverage. But be warned--these renegade procedures aren’t for the faint of heart. Some involve significantly dismantling your computer, and any damage incurred definitely won’t be covered by Cupertino. Then again, if your warranty is up anyway, grab a screwdriver and get cracking.How and where can I comparison-shop for hard drives?First, gather as much information about your Mac and the type of drive it supports. Stores often differentiate internal hard drives only by a confusing alphabet soup of numbers, acronyms, and manufacturer names. A little research up front can make your shopping that much easier.When you’ve done your homework, it’s time to hit the internet. Sites like Pricewatch.com and PriceGrabber.com let you compare drives by size, manufacturer, capacity, and other features. But don’t forget to visit Mac-savvy retailers such as Other World Computing, Small Dog Electronics, or MacMall. These stores make it easy to find a specific Mac model and choose a compatible drive. If you know what you want, Newegg’s and Amazon’s prices are often tough to beat.How can I tell if my hard drive is dying?SMARTReporter pops up an error when the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard drive is anything other than "Verified."If you hear a clicking sound, that’s bad. Really bad. But monitoring your drive’s S.M.A.R.T. status can clue you in before it gets to that point of no return. In Disk Utility, select your hard drive from the sidebar and look for “S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified,” which means the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology built into your drive isn’t detecting any problems. To keep the S.M.A.R.T status front and center, SMARTReporter (free, www.corecode.at/smartreporter) can put it in your menubar. A green hard-drive icon in the menubar means everything’s okay.What are some best practices for installing a new HDD or SSD myself?First things first--back up all the data on any drive you’re replacing (see “How to Transfer Data to Your New Hard Drive,” below), then print out and read thoroughly the instructions for installing your new drive. Carefully organize any tools the installation requires. Setting aside a container to hold the tiny screws and other parts you may need to remove can save you time--and stress--when putting your Mac back together when the job is done. We like to stick the screws to our printed-out instructions with double-sided tape, so we know exactly which step in the process those screws go with.The insides of a 3.5-inch SATA drive, which hopefully you'll never see. Ooh, shiny.Next, turn off your computer and let it cool down for 10 minutes to make sure any heat lingering inside has a chance to dissipate. Unplug all cables (especially the power cord) from your Mac before you get started on the installation.Electricity runs your computer, but it has no place in a hard drive transplant. Work on a static-free surface--no wool sweaters or shag carpets for you--and touch a metal object to discharge any static electricity you’ve picked up before you handle your Mac’s internal components or the new drive. Many stores that sell internal hard drives also offer anti-static wrist straps that help ensure you don’t accidentally zap anything as you work. Get one if you want to stay as safe as possible with your Mac.Is one brand better than another?Western Digital's 2.5-inch drives fit in Mac laptops.Almost every computer user swears by a particular manufacturer, and one fan’s favorite will be another person’s “Worst. Drive. Ever.” So who’s right? The facts are that any computer equipment can fail unexpectedly, and any manufacturer can put out a batch of problematic hard drives from time to time. After all, a hard drive’s delicate moving parts are subject to wear and tear over repeated use just like anything else. Your best bet is to buy a known brand with a good warranty like Samsung, Western Digital, or Seagate. Buy from a reputable store, and make multiple backups often.How to Transfer Data to Your New Hard DriveWhen it’s time to upgrade your hard drive, you have to get your current data--including Mac OS X and your applications, naturally--moved over to the new device. Mac|Life recommends you clone your whole drive onto the new one.1. CleanAppZapper finds and deletes an app's related files.First banish the clutter from your current hard drive. Take a spin through your Documents, Pictures, Music, Movies, and Applications folders and delete items you’re sure you don’t want. AppCleaner (free, freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/), AppZapper ($12.95, appzapper.com), or Hazel ($21.95, noodlesoft.com, see here) can help you delete the application and its preference files along with the app itself.2. ConnectWhen you pick out your new hard drive, buy an enclosure for it too. They aren’t expensive--Other World Computing sells them for less than $20. Get an enclosure made for SATA drives that connects to your Mac via USB (same size as the drive you’re buying--2.5 inches for laptops and 3.5 inches for desktops). Install your brand-new hard drive in it, and connect it to your Mac with a USB cable. It should mount on your Desktop as a removable drive.3. FormatReformat your drive with Disk Utility.Launch Disk Utility, select the drive you just attached, click the Erase tab, and format the new drive (not your old one!) as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This will also erase anything on the new drive; sometimes they ship with included utilities and software you don’t care about. We want it empty.4. CloneCarbon Copy Cloner will copy everything on your current hard drive to your new one.Download Carbon Copy Cloner (donations accepted, bombich.com) or SuperDuper! ($27.95, shirt-pocket.com), and use it to make an exact, bootable clone of your current hard drive on the new hard drive you formatted in Step 3.5. InstalliFixit's illustrated instructions are specific to each Mac model.Eject the removable hard drive from your Mac in the normal fashion, then remove the drive from the enclosure. Find and follow the instructions to install the bare drive in your Mac--your Mac’s manual or the guides at iFixit.com, Powerbookmedic.com, or Other World Computing will walk you through it.6. BootWhen your new hard drive is installed, boot up your Mac and make sure everything looks right. Now you can install your old hard drive in the empty enclosure, and use it like an external drive. All done!Next Page: Video Cards and Optical Drives >> Video Cards and Optical DrivesMac Pro owners only: Your spacious case leads to easy upgrades and longer life.Why can only Mac Pro owners (and Power Mac G5 owners) upgrade their video cards and optical drives?Look at all that room inside a Mac Pro. Makes you want to roll up your sleeves and swap out some components...These high-powered machines are the multipurpose workhorses of the Mac world, and they’re designed to be easily upgradeable to perform a variety of jobs. Expandability also helps protect the steep financial investment these Macs represent--and require--against early obsolescence.Why should I upgrade my video card?Power and flexibility. Gamers and media pros know that replacing an older card with the latest pixel pusher from Nvidia or ATI extends a Mac Pro’s useful life. Not only can new cards handle images, video, and 3D fragfests at higher resolutions, they speed up some everyday tasks in OS X as well. But don’t kick your old card to the curb when you upgrade. Two video cards let you use up to four monitors with your Mac Pro, offering significantly more screen real estate for all your applications.Video cards can be bought from Apple or almost any vendors specializing in Mac hardware. Apple publishes a partial list of cards compatible with the Power Mac G5 and Mac Pro lines that can help you plan your shopping trip.Is it cheaper to get Apple's stock options and upgrade myself or just have Apple build-to-order?Video cards available for preinstallation by Apple can sometimes be found cheaper at other stores, but not always. As with RAM, it’s smart to compare Apple’s prices with those of third-party vendors before you buy. But upgrading yourself can offer more choices. Not every Mac-compatible card--such as the Nvidia Quadro FX 4800--is available as a build-to-order option from Apple.Don't pay $100 for a second SuperDrive in your Mac Pro. You can fill the empty optical-drive bay yourself later.Optical drives are a different story. Currently, the only way to customize a Mac Pro’s spare optical drive bay at checkout is by adding a second SuperDrive that’s identical to the first. Go ahead and leave that bay empty. You can install a comparable DVD drive yourself for less than half of Apple’s asking price.Should I put a Blu-ray drive in my Mac Pro?Adding Blu-ray to your Mac Pro makes sense only if you need to work with Blu-ray data discs or author your own movies in the format (you’ll also need a copy of Toast or Final Cut Studio to do either). Until Cupertino hops on the Blu bandwagon, OS X can’t natively read Blu-ray, much less play District 9 in glorious 1080p on your 30-inch Cinema Display.This lack of system-wide support--and hardware costs higher than those of standard DVD drives--make Blu-ray on the Mac a technological no-man’s-land for the average user. But if you’re still tempted, it’s easy to add a Blu-ray drive to your Mac Pro.Where should I shop for Blu-ray and what models will fit?Almost any store that sells computer components offers internal Blu-ray drives that will fit your Mac Pro. But for the simplest shopping experience, stick with stores that cater to Mac customers. Some, like Other World Computing, offer bundles that include necessary software and other extras along with the drive.You’ll want a 5.25-inch Blu-ray drive to fit your Mac Pro’s spare optical drive bay. These drives connect using a standard SATA interface, so they’ll install in Mac Pros sold since March 2009 with no fuss. For an older Mac Pro, you’ll need to buy inexpensive adapter cables to connect it to the PATA (also known as ATA/IDE) optical drive interface in these Macs. Installation instructions can be found in your Mac Pro’s manual, the support section of Apple’s website, or even from the store that sold you the drive.The Right Tools for the JobWhile you’re shopping for parts to upgrade your Mac, don’t forget to pick up any tools you might need. These are essential for your toolbox. Find them at your local hardware store, or at Other World Computing (macsales.com) or iFixit (iFixit.com).Phillips screwdriver set. Or at least the 00, 0, 1, and 2 sizes of Phillips screwdrivers. Newer technology's 11-piece toolset is only $17.95 and has everything you need.Torx screwdriver set. You'll most likely need the T6 or T8, but pick up a whole set if you can so you're never stuck without the right size. iFixit sells a 26-Piece Bit Driver Kit for $14.95 that includes every Torx and Phillips screwdriver they carry.Spudger sticks. These nylon pry tools help you seat RAM modules, remove other computer parts, and open up iPods.A putty knife. You'll need one if you're planning to open a Mac mini.Next Page: Batteries >> BatteriesYour laptop's battery is nearly as essential as its screen--and it's easier to replace.How much of my battery's original capacity is left?How much juice your battery still holds on a full charge depends on your charging habits and which laptop you have. Apple claims the nonremovable batteries in MacBook Pros retain 80% of their original capacity for up to 1,000 charge cycles, and you can expect roughly the same performance from batteries in the latest MacBooks. A MacBook Air’s battery offers similar results for up to 750 cycles, and the most recent Apple laptops with removable batteries will keep delivering at 80% capacity for 300 cycles.System Profiler can fill you in on your battery's health.What’s a charge cycle? It’s a full discharge of your battery followed by a full recharge. To find out how many your battery has gone through, launch System Profiler from your Mac’s Utilities folder, then click Power in the sidebar. Your battery’s cycle count is in the Health Information section of the resulting window. If the number exceeds Apple’s benchmarks, and you find yourself scanning rooms for power outlets, it may be time for a new battery.Is the battery in my laptop considered user-replaceable?With the unibody's slim design comes a trade-off: a nonremovable battery.All MacBooks released before October 2009 and MacBook Pros released before October 2008 have user-replaceable batteries. You just buy a new one and slap it on; heck, you can even tote a spare for marathon computing sessions. The batteries in all MacBook Airs, unibody MacBooks, and unibody MacBook Pros aren’t considered user-replaceable.Where can I buy a replacement?Newer Technology's batteries are a little cheaper than Apple's.Replacing the batteries built into Apple’s latest laptops requires taking your Mac to an authorized service center. Replacement batteries for other Mac laptops are available from Apple or from many stores that specialize in Mac hardware. Some third-party manufacturers, such as NewerTechnology (newertech.com), sell their own Mac-compatible batteries for less money and at higher maximum capacities than Apple’s offerings.Are external laptop batteries worth the money?The HyperMac batteries sure don’t come cheap. Depending on which MacBook you own, you’re looking at $200 to roughly double your battery life or $400 to more than triple it. (HyperMac also offers $300 and $500 batteries; hit hypershop.com for the gory details.) It’s important to note that those performance stats really vary depending on what you’re doing--watching a DVD movie, for instance, drains batteries approximately twice as fast as just writing in Word or browsing the web. That can be invaluable, and we really appreciate how HyperMacs include a USB port for charging your iPod or whatever. So, yes, they’re a great option if you need to extend your battery life and can afford the steep pricing, but if that’s not you, we’d recommend putting those greenbacks toward something else... like that iPad you know you want.Do battery conditioners do anything worthwhile?Newer Technological sells battery conditioners ($149.95, newertech.com) for every Apple laptop.Battery conditioners automate the monthly full discharge and recharge cycle recommended by Apple if you don’t use your laptop often. This helps keep the battery’s electrons active and can improve the accuracy of its “fuel gauge” in OS X, giving you a more accurate picture of its remaining charge.How can I extend my battery's capacity?Keep your software up to date. System updates have the latest power-management features, and Apple occasionally releases updates that address battery issues. Protect your Mac from extreme temperatures, especially heat. “Exercise” your battery by charging it intermittently throughout the day, and avoid leaving it plugged in for long periods. If your laptop will be stored for more than six months, give it a 50 percent charge before shutting it down.How to Replace Your iPhone's BatteryDifficulty Level: EasyWhat You Need: >> New iPhone battery ($19.95, ifixit.com)>> Phillips 00 screwdriver (iFixiit includes one with your battery)>> Two spudgers (we used one pointy black spudger and one flatter greenish spudger)>> A soft cloth to cover your work surface>> Small suction cup ($2.95, ifixit.com)Once your iPhone is a couple of years old, you might notice the battery lasting less time on each charge. Apple can replace it for $79 plus $6.95 shipping (apple.com/support/iphone/service/battery/), but you can buy a new battery for around $20 online and do it yourself.We have helpful, step-by-step videos for all iPhones at maclife.com/iphone_battery_videos. They point out every single screw, connector, and part you need to know.

  • iTunes Power Tips Every Mac Owner Should Know

    Your quick-and-dirty guide to the world's most popular digital media app.It’s been more than eight years since Apple released the first version of iTunes. And although it’s expanded to incorporate many smart features since its January 2001 debut, it still looks remarkably similar to the way it did when it first appeared, running on OS 9. Back then it was just a jukebox, but over the years came enhancements like CD burning, the iPod, smart playlists, the iTunes Store, video support, and, most recently, the iPhone.Apple has gradually turned iTunes into a hub for managing and playing all the music and movies on your Mac and mobile devices, while continually adding support for new devices and services like the Apple TV, movie rentals, and much more. In 2003, Apple made the smart move of developing a Windows version of iTunes, opening up the iPod market and the iTunes Store to a much wider audience. iTunes remains one of Apple’s most important applications, and it’s capable of far more than just playing music.Whether it’s converting movies to watch on your iPod, building party playlists, getting album art online, buying music, renting movies, or backing up your iPhone, there’s an awful lot under the surface--and even more than ever with the release of iTunes 9 in September. Many of the tips and tricks we show you throughout this feature will save you time and even reveal a few things you didn’t know you could do.Master Your MusicTake control of your music collection with these time-saving tips and tricks.Use smart playlists to manage music on the fly.Apple introduced smart playlists in iTunes 3, and it’s one of those features that, once you make using it a habit, you’ll never go back to plain-vanilla “dumb” playlists again.To create a smart playlist, go to File > Smart Playlists (or press Option-Command-N). You’re presented with a dialog in which you’ll set the “rules” for your smart playlist. When you’re first starting out, it’s best to keep it relatively simple. But once you have the hang of it, you can go bigger, creating much fancier smart playlists to capture only specific types of content, weed out other content types, and so on.Smart playlists take the manual drudgery out of creating dynamic playlists out of iTunes media libraries of any size--and they're not limited to music.If you specify that the playlist should show all songs with the Artist tag “Rolling Stones,” for example, all tracks in your library by the Stones will appear in the playlist. You can go a step farther and add all Rolling Stones tracks that have certain star ratings. By using the Match Any Rule option plus other options, you can have playlists that display different sets of tracks--a playlist, for example, where the genre is both blues and rock, as well as a bit rate greater than 128kbps. Be sure to check Live Updating, so iTunes will watch the library and automatically add any new files that meet the criteria you’ve specified.Use Genius to find new music--or rediscover music in your library.With more music than ever available in the iTunes Store, it can be time-consuming to find new artists and albums you might like. The Genius feature in iTunes sends information about your musical tastes to the iTunes Store and recommends new music based on similar artists and other people’s listening habits (if you haven’t already, you need to turn Genius on by choosing Store > Turn on Genius). If you select a track from your library and click the Genius button in the lower-right corner, iTunes will create a list of recommended albums and tracks that you can buy from the iTunes Store to complement your chosen track. Then you can preview and buy these songs directly from the sidebar. Since it knows what music is already in your library, Genius won’t recommend anything you already have.By activating the Genius feature you can have iTunes recommend new music based on your listening habits.With iTunes 9, Apple expanded Genius to include mixes using songs already in your iTunes library. To get the Genius Mixes feature to appear in iTunes 9, turn on Genius if you haven’t already, then update Genius by selecting Store > Update Genius. Now, to see what Genius Mixes iTunes recommends for you, click Genius Mixes in the left-hand pane (under Genius) in the iTunes window. You’ll see a grid view of album cover-style graphics. When you mouse over one, you’ll see a name for the mix and a brief explanation of what it’s based on--for example, “Rock/Pop Mix 6: based on: The White Stripes, Weezer, Red Hot Chili Peppers & others.” Mouse over each mix and click the Play button to hear the mix. We just wish that once the Genius Mixes are created you could do more with them than just sit and listen--once a mix starts playing, there’s no way to tell what song is coming next. And, most frustrating of all, there’s no way to capture the mix as a regular or smart playlist.Genius Mixes in iTunes 9 auto-create mixes using songs in your own library on the fly.Share iTunes libraries.You can duplicate an entire consolidated iTunes library by simply copying the Music folder on your Mac. But with libraries frequently running into many gigabytes in size, this is a slow, inefficient method. iTunes can share your library over a local network, so it can be accessed by anyone on your Ethernet or wireless network. Go to Preferences > Sharing and turn on sharing of the whole library or specific playlists. You can password-protect access and also tell iTunes to look for other shared libraries. Since the music is streamed--not copied--it takes up no disk space on the machines of those who tap into your library.iTunes can share selected playlists or your whole library, including videos, over a local network, with optional password protection.Automatically rip and import music CDs.Go to Preferences > General and select “When you Insert a CD, Import CD and Eject.” As long as this setting is active, whenever you insert an audio CD, it will capture track names, encode tracks based on your import settings, and your Mac will then eject the disc. Next click the Import Settings button and choose the quality setting you want iTunes to use to convert the CD tracks as it imports them (192kbps AAC or MP3 files will offer good sound quality at reasonable file sizes). When you insert an audio CD, iTunes will now retrieve all track names and artwork from the Internet and import the tracks using the quality settings you chose.To set the bit rate for the AAC encoder, in the Import Settings dialog, choose 192kbps, leave the other options on Auto, and click OK.Next Page: Video Tips: What You See is What You Get... Video Tips: What You See is What You GetiTunes is just as good with video as it is with music.Manage playback settings for the best viewing experience.iTunes can display videos from your library in many ways. If you go to Preferences > Playback, you can tell it to play back videos in the small artwork viewer, in iTunes’ main window, in a separate window, or in full-screen mode. You can have anything from a small, unobtrusive window to a full theater presentation, blanking out additional displays. When it’s in a floating window, video can be resized during playback, and if you right-click, you can select any preset size. If you have more than one screen, move the floating window onto the display you want to use as the main screen. This is handy if you have a digital TV connected as a second screen.Use the Playback settings to control how video screens are arranged on your main monitors or multiple displays.Convert video for playback in iTunes & on your iPod.iTunes is picky about what video file formats it can read and play back. It doesn’t like AVIs, WMVs, or other non-Apple formats, for example. If you have a movie that’s already been digitized into one of these incompatible formats, the best course of action is to convert it with QuickTime Pro ($29.99, www.apple.com/quicktime) into an MP4 or M4V file using the File > Export > MP4 or Apple TV options. You will also need to install Perian (free, www.perian.org) to enable QuickTime to open the videos in the first place. You should be able to drag the converted movies into your iTunes library, holding down the O key if necessary to override automatic copying of the file. Then choose Advanced > Create iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV version, and iTunes will convert the video using the optimum quality and screen-size settings for the device that you plan to view the video on.Combining QuickTime Pro and Perian, you can convert video formats that iTunes doesn't favor (such as .AVI) to .M4V files, so you can watch them on your Mac, iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV.Export your home movies to your iPod or iPhone.If you use iMovie ’08 or ’09, you can export a project directly into iTunes using the Share menu. Or, choose Media Browser and check the iPhone and iPod options. For each option you check, a different version will be compressed and exported.However, if you’re still using iMovie HD 6 or your movie has come from another source, such as straight from a camera, you can use a third-party compression tool like ffmpeg (homepage.mac.com/major4/) to convert most kinds of video files.If you have QuickTime Pro and Perian installed, you can opt to export directly for iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV within QuickTime Pro.Next Page: How to Digitize Your DVDs... How to Digitize Your DVDsThere are, of course, legal issues with ripping a commercial DVD. To keep the feds off your back, only use this how-to for digitizing a commercial DVD movie or other content that you have purchased. This, according to the MPAA, is legal. Making 100 copies of I Love You, Man and selling them for $5 each at your cousin’s garage sale--not so much.Before you start, download and install Handbrake (free, handbrake.fr) and VLC (free, www.videolan.org/vlc).1. Get to the source.Load the DVD into your Mac and launch HandBrake. The software needs you to select your video source. Navigate to your DVD and select it. Now it should appear under Source.2. Get inside the source.HandBrake doesn’t make it easy to figure out which file on the DVD is the movie. In the Title section in the main interface, you get a pull-down menu showing the available files on the DVD. The files are identified by time length, so if you’re ripping a movie, you’ll probably want to select the file with the longest running time. (It can get tricky if you’re ripping a DVD with a commentary track or extra features that run the same length as the featured video.) If you’re selecting a TV show, look for running lengths of about 24 to 45 minutes. Under Destination, pick a place where you want to save the converted file.We identified our Lawrence of Arabia movie file by its length of 2 hours, 19 minutes, 16 seconds.3. Output settings.If you want to convert a video for iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, you can use one of HandBrake’s presets. Click the Toggle Presets button at the upper-right to open the Presets window (if it’s not already open). To create a video to play on your Mac, select QuickTime.We're taking a cross-country plane trip and plan to watch Lawrence on our iPhone to while away the hours in flight.4. Tweak video and audio settings.The bottom half of HandBrake’s main window lets you make adjustments to the video settings. For example, lowering the frame rate can help reduce the file size. The Quality settings also influence file size. If you select a target size, HandBrake will rip the video based on your setting; the smaller the setting, the lower the video quality. If you go with an average bit-rate setting, enter a setting between 400 and 600 (though you can go much higher or lower if you want). Constant quality reduces the quality based on a percentage. Click on the Picture Settings button to adjust the pixel size of the video.Selecting 2-pass encoding will improve video quality, but it takes longer to create the file.Click on Audio & Subtitles to tweak the audio settings. Make sure the language you want is selected in Track 1. You can also adjust the sample rate, bit rate, and activate subtitles.5. Hurry up and wait.When you have your settings settled, click on Start, and go do something else. It can take a while to rip a DVD. Fortunately, HandBrake is a Universal application, so Intel Mac folks will get much faster results. Lawrence of Arabia took 1 hour, 12 minutes to rip on a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM.6. Drop into iTunesWhen HandBrake is done, navigate to where you saved the file. Drag and drop the file into iTunes, then connect your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, and sync. iTunes will transfer the file to your device. Or, if the movie was converted for your Mac, just double-click the file to watch it.Next Page: Sync and Swim... Sync and SwimBetter ways to manage music, video, and apps between your Mac and your iPod or iPhone.Manage apps on your iPhone or iPod touch.Hallelujah--iTunes 9 brought the option to more effectively manage which Home screen’s apps appear on your iPhone or iPod touch. Now when your device is connected and you select it in the sidebar, click the Applications tab to see a visual representation of where app icons will appear on the 10 possible Home screens. Although we’d love to see the option to name each screen rather than having them be numbered, the new management option is miles ahead of the old way of doing things.We created a screen just for the news apps we use most.Automatic syncing saves time and space.iPods and iTunes have always had the ability to automatically sync with each other--sharing exactly the same music files. For some this is great, as it maintains an exact copy of your music, photos, and contacts on your iPod or iPhone and on your Mac. Others, though, prefer more flexibility. With your iPod selected, go to its Summary tab and click Manually Manage Music and Videos. Then you can add or delete tracks from the iPod’s music library by hand. Just drag and drop tracks from your iTunes library to add them.In each subsequent tab you can choose to manually sync contacts, calendars, ringtones, videos, applications, and more. This is a great way of syncing some data without performing a full sync, which can be slow and puts you at risk of accidentally overwriting data. Use Senuti to get music from an iPod to your Mac.Being able to copy songs from an iPod to a Mac is incredibly useful, and no, we’re not talking about pirating. If you keep distinct iTunes libraries on more than one Mac, your iPod can carry them back and forth. If your hard drive crashes, or you get a new Mac, restoring iTunes tracks via an iPod is a great trick to have at hand.FadingRed’s Senuti ($18, www.fadingred.com) lets you do exactly this--a simple operation you’d think iTunes would allow but doesn’t.You can drag not only songs and videos, but whole playlists, right to your iTunes library.Senuti supports the iPod touch and iPhone, as well as all the iPods. When you connect your device, its library and playlists appear at the top of the sidebar, while your iTunes library and playlists are listed on the bottom. Blue dots next to the tracks show you which songs on your iPod already exist in iTunes. Drag songs from your iPod’s library and drop them onto your iTunes library, or select songs and click the big green Transfer button. Senuti can copy the songs anywhere on your hard drive for you to back up, or it can even add the songs directly to iTunes--just choose iTunes Music Folder as the default download location in Senuti > Preferences.Senuti can also rebuild playlists from your iPod in iTunes. Smart playlists on your iPod become regular playlists in iTunes, however, preserving the list as it was on your iPod, without adding in more qualifying songs from your iTunes library, as a smart playlist would. To copy a playlist to iTunes, you drag the whole playlist name from the iPod area of the sidebar and drop it on top of the word iTunes in the bottom half of the sidebar.Pump up iTunes with AppleScriptsWe have long been fans of Doug’sAppleScripts for iTunes, a huge--and we do mean huge--catalog of AppleScripts created by Doug Adams and available to the iTunes-loving masses for free at dougscripts.com/itunes.You can laugh, but we would never have taken the time to manually compare the similarities of these playlists. Thanks, Doug's Scripts!One particularly useful script--though it’s very hard to pick just one--is the Compare Two Playlists script, which compares the contents of two playlists and creates a text file on your Desktop listing the tracks they have in common and the ones that are exclusive to each. This comes in handy if you make a lot of playlists for parties and want to easily tell them apart. Download the script, unzip it, and copy the scripts to the your usernameLibraryiTunesScripts folder, creating the Scripts folder if necessary, as directed in the instructions.

  • First Look: iPhoto ‘09

    I've spent several hours tinkering with Apple's new iPhoto '09 — part of the newly updated iLife '09 suite of media applications — and I like what I've seen so far. The entire application is a strong step forward, and the exciting new features (facial recognition and geotagging) don't disappoint. The following is a focused walkthrough of iPhoto '09 and the interesting new features it boasts. Faces The most interesting (to me at least) of iPhoto's new tricks is facial recognition. Immediately after firing-up the application, your library will be updated, and then analysis of all captured faces begins. The nearly two thousand photos in my library took around 30+ minutes to process. Once it was done, I named the members of my family and began training it for accuracy. After confirming about 20 photos for each person, the results were pretty accurate. I'd get an awful lot of utility from this feature in Aperture — fingers crossed that it comes sooner than later. An unexpected side effect of Faces was an answer to the question my wife and I ask each other often — which one of us do our kids look like? It was interesting to see my oldest showing up, mingled amongst images of me, and our middle mixed in with photos of my wife — we always considered it the other way around. I'm no expert on how the face-matching algorithm works, but its accuracy is enough that I trust its take on the question. From the high level corkboard view of all the Faces you've identified, you can add extra information about each individual. Specifically, their full name and email address. A peek at Help, and I discovered that the email address comes in handy when using the Facebook upload feature, but details on this below. A small niggle comes when updating the keyphoto (or identifying photo for a grouping of photos) for an individual. When reviewing the info for a person, you can scrub through their pictures and click on one to change the keyphoto. The keyphoto doesn't change until you exit the info screen. Lack of instant gratification led me to believe it hadn't worked. I would suspect this behavior to change in a later update. iPhoto Faces Corkboard View iPhoto '09 Picture Info Bezel Places Thanks to my GPS location tagging on my iPhone, Places immediately had some points of interest for me to review. The rest of my photos lack geographical EXIF data, so it was on me to mark them accordingly. Thankfully, the Events grouping makes it relatively easy to grab all images from a specific place and mark them at the map in one fell swoop. My preference is to geotag the trips we've taken — places that aren't home, because home is the obvious place for the majority of our family photos. The map displays pins, in typical Google Maps style, where your photos were shot, and hovering over the pin displays the name of the location and an arrow to view the related images. It's simple and effective. The Smart Album button below the map makes it easy to create an album of all the photos from the location of the selected pin — nice if you want to group all of your ski photos for instance. If you decide to email off some of your photos, you can choose to include location information. When I tested this however, I couldn't find the location in EXIF, or captioned beneath the photo in the email. It's quite likely I didn't look in the right place, but from my experience, it didn't seem to work. (Feel free to point me in the right direction in comments, if you've found it to work properly!) The Places feature is nice, though for my family who doesn't travel too terribly much, it's not all that interesting. Though it does have me thinking much more about grabbing one of those slick Eye-Fi Explore memory cards which will handle the geotagging for me. iPhoto '09 Places Map iPhoto '09 Places Assignment The combination of these different grouping options (Events, Faces, Places) is ridiculously powerful, with little user input. Suddenly we can find any photo or group of photos in a variety of different ways, cross-checking them by parameters in what might be described as different dimensions. This is very cool and I'm excited to see how my photo management evolves because of it. Facebook & Flickr Upload Prior to iPhoto '09 you could upload your photos to these two popular services, but through third party plugins. Now however, it's baked right in (along with Mobile Me, if you like that sort of thing). The process is simple and streamlined, and when the upload is complete, iPhoto displays a clickable URL to go directly to the photos in your favorite browser. Very handy! The Facebook integration has a couple of extra features that are nifty in an understated sort of way. At upload time, you can choose (directly within the iPhoto interface) the security level of your photos — who can actually view them. The other comes from the Faces feature, when you add the email address to an identified face in your library. That email address, when an associated picture is uploaded to Facebook, is matched to your Facebook friends and alerts them that a photo of them has been uploaded. This is quite nifty indeed! iPhoto '09 Facebook Upload Link Slideshows If you've ever used the Flash gallery plugin SlideShowPro, it feels like much of iPhoto '09's slideshow layout and functionality came from there. This isn't a bad thing mind you, it just has a very familiar feel to it, and it works. The slideshow setup options are a bit more intuitive than they were in earlier versions of iPhoto, and get out of your way for full screen play as soon as you've selected your desired settings. Of the settings, there are 6 themes to choose from for presenting the photos. These themes give a fresh feel to the slideshows that were once 'wowing,' and as of late, getting a bit stale. iPhoto '09 Slideshow Launch Export While you can use the Share menu in iPhoto to export your photos to iWeb, there's a simpler option hidden under Export in the File menu. Webpage gives you some simple options for generating a barebones web gallery page with navigation. It's nothing elaborate like iWeb, just a quick and dirty HTML generated gallery for when you need to throw some pictures up quickly (temporarily?). There's no doubt that iPhoto '09 is a wonderful update. The highlight features seem to work very well, and haven't disappointed. I haven't had time to play with the other iLife apps yet, as I've been working on this article. But if the rest of the updates are on par with iPhoto, the suite as a whole is certainly (as always seems to be the case) a steal at only $79. Concentric Hosted IT Solutions and Web Hosting Click here to save cost on your IT demands

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