“We made some pricing adjustments due to changes in foreign exchange rates,” Takashi Takabayashi, a spokesman for Apple in Japan, said by phone today. He declined to elaborate.

Many of the iTunes Guy columns focus on music, since the majority of the questions I receive are about that kind of media. But I get a fair number of questions about videos, and in this week’s column, I cover four questions dealing with videos: their formats and tags, and how to make smart playlists to group movies by title.

Donald Leka, CEO of TransMedia, recently released a press release announcing a new iPhone app, Glide, that lets users share data between multiple mobile devices with the cloud. In the press release, Leka made a few comments saying people don’t really care about what platform they’re using, which Apple wasn’t too impressed with.

Cathy Kearney, an accountant in the Irish city of Cork, appears to live a fairly modest home life. A graduate of the local university, her home for 15 years has been a dairy farm outside Youghal, a seaside town a short drive from the city.

The 49-year-old lives with her husband and children in a large, but far from grand, farmhouse. Outside work she is involved in the local church. She is also, at first sight, the brains behind much of Apple's exceptional global success in recent times.

A boy received best engineer. A girl got best friend. Another girl was the best helper, and another most compassionate. A boy received best break dancer. A girl was named most athletic, and the teacher told us how when all the class raced around the track this girl "beat everyone! Even the boys!" And then my daughter got her certificate, showing her in a funky orange sweater, tight pants, and holding a bowling ball. Her award -- best dressed.

Many decades after the feminist movement of the 1960s, why are we still stuck in this gender-norming rut?

In this tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to get your G4 Mac up to speed in order that you can use it as an iTunes media server for your household.

I’m sure dropping the rear camera was a very tough decision for Apple, especially thinking about wanting more memory and speed to run iOS 7. But I’d rather have no FaceTime, slower CPU, less memory, and only 8 GB of storage any day of the week if it meant I could take photos. The rear camera is priceless.

$100 has been chopped from the price of both spec 13-inch Pro's, with the cheapest now costing $999.

Simply snap a picture in the app's camera view and it will automatically build color palettes based on the image you capture.

"In its current implementation, Apple’s two-factor authentication does not prevent anyone from restoring an iOS backup onto a new (not trusted) device," ElcomSoft CEO Vladimir Katalov wrote. "In addition, and this is much more of an issue, Apple’s implementation does not apply to iCloud backups, allowing anyone and everyone knowing the user’s Apple ID and password to download and access information stored in the iCloud. This is easy to verify; simply log in to your iCloud account, and you’ll have full information to everything stored there without being requested any additional logon information."

Largely identical to its fifth-generation 32GB and 64GB counterparts, the 16GB iPod touch features the same svelte design, with a 4-inch Retina display and dual-core A5 chip. However, it lacks a few of its siblings’ features: For one thing, you’ll find no rear-facing camera on the model. Apple’s dropped the fancy 5-megapixel iSight camera from the 32GB and 64GB models, leaving only the front-facing FaceTime HD camera, with its 1.2MP photo and 720p video capabilities.

For another, the package doesn’t include the iPod touch loop introduced with the most recent generation, or the pop-out hitch for attaching it. And the 16GB model also comes in just one color: silver.

True, I occasionally get frustrated with it, but overall it’s a remarkable piece of work. When you become accustomed to its ways, you learn that you can create great-looking videos in very little time. If you’re a screencaster producing videos on a Mac, and you want a capture/editing application that deals equally well with screen capture and live content, ScreenFlow is a must-have.

This “the more, the merrier” mode allows you and at most three of your friends to take turns on playing the same board to find out who can match and connect the most dots.

There’s no guarantee Jackson will succeed at it, just as there’s no guarantee that her hiring isn’t actually just an impressively high-profile act of greenwashing. But think of it this way: If you were an outgoing EPA director looking for an opportunity to make a real difference tackling the gnarly mess of globalization and climate change, wouldn’t the chance to do so at Apple be incredibly appealing?

He said Apple had told his committee that prices were set by the US parent and "Apple overseas", but the US committee heard Apple's Australian prices were "determined by Apple Singapore".

The In Theaters section of the app now includes the ability to redirect users to the Fandango app in order to purchase movie tickets.

It won't relieve the tedium of learning touch typing, because there are no entertaining games or letters to shoot from the sky. This is a basic "type what you see on screen" program that follows the traditional way to learn touch typing.

Highland won't replace Final Draft for most professionals, but it's a wonderful supplemental tool for getting the most important part—the writing—on digital paper.

The comparison to iPod is not entirely appropriate because as a music player, the iPod had a relatively small set of jobs to do. It was hired for exercise, escapism, isolation, etc. It was not hired for apps and services which extend the medium itself. In other words it was not a computer. As a computer, the iPhone has a near infinite set of jobs to be done and it’s the hundreds of thousands of apps which help it perform them. But as a result the iPhone needs to conform to the dynamics of ecosystems and that means consistency of APIs and user experience. It cannot vary in terms of input methods, or be below minimum requirements of screen size or memory and power.

Cook declined many, many opportunities to talk about new products.

But he did give his view on taxes (the current system should be gutted), talked a bit about about acquisitions (the pace is increasing and doing a big one isn’t off the table) and suggested wearable computing is a big deal, even if Google Glass isn’t.

If I could rate a game based solely on how adorable it is, High Voltage Software’s free Le Vamp for iOS would easily get five mice. Unfortunately, “adorableness” isn’t really part of the criteria we use for rating games. But Le Vamp’s cuteness is just icing on the cake: this endless side-scrolling runner is a great game, with a couple of twists to keep you playing for hours.

I move over to iMovie to create my presentations for two reasons. First, I have more control over authoring the video, as you will see in a minute. And second, I can easily share the finished product online to YouTube and other social sites. Plus, it’s an easy workflow.

In documents filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California Tuesday, class-action attorneys said the money from Apple would be placed in a fund to be shared by roughly 153,000 customers who had been denied warranty coverage under an Apple policy associated with handling water damage. The papers seek court approval of the proposed settlement.

Jackson joins Apple to co-ordinate the environmental policies right across the company.

Prompted by Mossberg, Cook agreed that consumers are interested in larger screens, but he also pointed out that such screens come at a cost: “People do look at the size. They also look at things like do the photos show the proper color? The white balance, the reflectivity, battery life.”

According to Cook, Apple’s strategy is to weigh all the possible alternatives and come up with what it thinks represents the best possible compromise. “What our customers want is for us to weigh those and come out with a decision. At this point we’ve felt the retina display that we are shipping is overwhelmingly the best."

The Mac App Store, and a handful of cloud-based services are what I use to keep all my data consistent across two machines running OS X.

The point is not to blindly follow Apple’s lead, but to figure out why they arrived at their wording.

A year later, Apple’s digital textbook effort still seems to be in the early stages.

Version 2.0 of the aptly-titled Blockbuster app is aimed squarely at the DVD/Blu-ray fraternity, letting Blockbuster by Mail users browse for movies, TV shows and computer games and manage their queue, watch trailers and check for availability.

Tributopia provides a permanent way for people to see and share memories about celebrities and others who have passed away.

Downloads are no longer permitted for trailers uploaded on May 22nd or after.

It was designed extremely well and the entire product was made solidly. It is a fine and top-quality accessory that will turn heads as you walk down the street. But, like a pair of three-inch heels, you pay the price for you looks because of its added weight and size.

The new interface makes for faster and smoother use of LifeCrumbs.

My grandma got a new laptop for Mother's Day. She's in her nineties, and first started using a computer a few years ago. Email, watching music on YouTube, and playing bridge online are now essential parts of her life.

If you are happy to whip out the smartphone to check your progress, the Flex is a great choice for the price in terms of what it can offer, but a little extra can get you a One that has a display, a better battery life and increased accuracy while a little more will get you a Fuelband that works as a pretty nifty watch as well.

Just when machines are developing ways to watch us, cry out to us and move independently, the police are becoming as remote as a warehouse of servers.

That ancient tension between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion, and between a corporation’s self-interest and the fundamental requirements of a government and its citizens, remains at the heart of the American system. It was on full display at the Senate hearing last week on Apple’s tax practices in the 21st century.

Marcela Miyazawa, a founder of the start-up, Wanderable, said the honeymoon gift registry has exceeded her expectations in attracting users, but she is disappointed in the response to the app. She was thankful for all of the reader suggestions, which she discussed in a conversation that has been edited and condensed.

Mr Cook is often said to lack Steve Jobs’ charisma, but this week he brought his predecessor’s famed “reality distortion field” to Washington.

In promoting a searchable, taggable library, doo takes your Mac where it was already headed: To an unbounded space where folders matter as little as the location of their contents.

If you want to share a drive but keep some files on it encrypted, you can easily do so with a couple of approaches in OS X.

Drive Genius offers repair and maintenance utilities you can use to make sure your hard drive runs at maximum efficiency.

The truth is that focusing on market share as the primary metric is the only way to paint the iPhone as anything other than a roaring success.

Inseparable from her iPhone, but apt to tire of the sites she uses it to access, Casey at once personifies why much of the technology world has become obsessed with capturing the attention of people her age, and why those efforts risk turning into expensive debacles. That teens' friendships and relationships will play out online is certain. But which site will host that social intrigue is constantly up for grabs.

This device is essentially a rack tray for Apple's Mac Mini, but in addition to a built-in power supply and pass-through connections for the Mac's built-in inputs, it offers PCI Express expansion through a Thunderbolt connection to the Mac Mini.

With the discovery of malware signed with a valid Apple ID, here are some steps you can take to help prevent the remote chance of any such programs infecting your computer.

It's not caricatures feuding at a wedding, or acting stupidly at a pool party, or rushing to do something or be somewhere they won't even remember a week later. It's people living their lives, and those lives made better in small, constant ways by Apple.

Next week at AllThingsD’s D11 conference in LA, Apple CEO Tim Cook will be interviewed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Here are some questions I’m hoping they will ask.

Eye-Friendly's keyboard shortcuts and multiple-display support make it a nice resolution switcher for the Retina MacBook.

With the latest version, developer Flying Meat has pulled out all the stops, adding non-destructive filter effects and speeding the app up considerably. There’s also been a re-jigging of the layer and brush controls so things work a little differently from the previous version.

“Apple controls everything from the manufacturing to the gear for the iPhone 5,” says Jeff Haynes, editor at deal site TechBargains.com. As the iPhone 5 is larger than the 4, the cost for replacement parts rises, he says. “Apple is trying to get people to sign up for Apple Care for $99 and to rely on their services at the Apple store,” he says, “If you don’t, that cracked screen could cost you at least $230.”

The new feature combines in-app and email-based reminders, quick note-based to-do lists, and the ability to pin notes to the top of your list so that your to-dos are readily visible.

Security researchers have identified multiple samples of the recently discovered “KitM” spyware for Mac OS X, including one dating back to December 2012 and targeting German-speaking users.

The answer to making it work lies outside Dropbox’s options. Specifically, I needed Mac OS X to trick Dropbox into thinking it was still copying files to its Camera Uploads folder, even if the folder is located on another disk.

ArcSoft’s new Photo + is like iPhoto on steroids. They both handle most of the same tasks, but the new app is a bit beefier and faster.

These days, Microsoft gadgets and Apple gadgets can co-exist happily in the same household—and the companies know that. Hence Microsoft’s free Xbox SmartGlass app for iOS, which lets you interact and control the Xbox 360 game console on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

More Info offers a slicker view that puts your Mac’s most important information front and center.

Foxconn operates plants in Texas and has long handled a lot of Apple’s hardware production and assembly. Recently, the company said it was expanding its existing manufacturing operations in the U.S. to meet the needs of certain unnamed customers. Not definitive proof that Foxconn will manufacture Apple’s Made-in-USA Mac, but certainly a clear indication that it might.

The Word-alternative may not pack the full feature set found in Microsoft's app, but those with basic/semi-advanced (and frugal) needs will find a lot to like.

The new update adds a redesigned interface, which lets you tap an album to see lyrics, artist info, or other notes. You can also publish information directly to Facebook and share recommendations with your friends.

If you happen to be a user of the Omni Group’s apps, like OmniGraffle and OmniFocus, you’ll be happy to know that the company is releasing its own sync solution—aptly dubbed OmniPresence—on Wednesday, bringing yet one more option into the fray.

The Irish Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore said it is not his country which is the problem, and says it’s an international issue: “They are issues that arise from the taxation system in other jurisdictions and that is an issue that has to be addressed in those jurisdictions”.

It’s still a pricey beast, but the use value to cost ratio is through the roof regardless.

Accessory maker ZAGG has introduced a pair of keyboard covers for the iPad Mini that work great in low light, as both come with backlit keys. A physical keyboard is a great accessory to have for anyone who does anything constituting work on their iPad, and these new options from ZAGG look promising.

The keyboard will come in two flavors; a Lightning-equipped model that will be shipping in August, and a 30-pin connector version that is expected in October. Since it's designed to be used by students of all ages, the Wired Keyboard has a spill-resistant design and is expected to put up with the pounding of over 5 million keystrokes.

Timebar is appealing thanks to its unique approach: It gives you a constant, though subtle, indicator of your timer’s status. Though I’d prefer more time controls, Timebar is a helpful utility to keep around.

Congratulations! You've made the leap from a Windows PC to the Mac. Now that you're here, it's no surprise that you might be feeling a bit lost. We've assembled this chart to make it easy for you to find the feature you're looking for, whether it's your printer settings or audio controls.

But let's break it down into its elements. What turns a normally sensible iPhone user into a Dots zombie?

Apple CEO Tim Cook defended the company Tuesday before a Senate subcommittee, saying that Apple uses no “tax gimmicks” in assigning about two-thirds of its worldwide profits to three subsidiaries in Ireland, where the company has negotiated a corporate income tax rate of less than 2 percent.

As someone who does work on both the development and design side of iOS apps I find that many designers struggle with the transition to UI work, or with the different processes involved in iPhone and iPad app design. In this guide I'll describe the deliverables you'll be expected to produce, outline the constraints of the medium and introduce fundamental iOS and UI design concepts.

If you are using more than one Mac, or have replaced your Mac with a new one, there are several ways you can migrate your account to the new system.

From the moment Paper hit the App Store, zoom has been one of the top features requested by creators. While we wanted to implement the feature sooner, many of the off-the-shelf solutions didn’t feel right for Paper. We’d like to shed some light on why we chose to invest the time in developing a new type of zoom, and what was involved from both the technical and design end.

Today the U.S. government is under pressure to collect more tax revenue. They’re fighting information-based global companies like Apple who have organized themselves, legally, in the best interests of shareholders.

This is a battle the U.S. government will lose, and they better start looking at alternative ways to solve their tax revenue problems. Picking a fight with their biggest taxpayer seems utterly stupid.

TextExpander touch still isn’t as powerful and polished as TextExpander 4, but it’s gotten closer with today’s major update. Some of its limitations can’t be overcome unless Apple makes profound changes to iOS’ architecture; others could be fixed and improved by Smile.

Fill-in snippets and a new editor make TextExpander touch 2.0 a fantastic new version of TextExpander that I highly recommend. I look forward to seeing how third-party developers will integrate with the new SDK – TextExpander is now an impressive time-saving utility, but its strength lies in the developer community.

Apple strenuously asserts that it pays every cent it owes, both to the U.S. government and to the governments of other countries in which it does business. The most significant of those is Ireland, in which Apple has five—count ‘em, five—subsidiaries, each of which the company says adhere to the letter and spirit of the law; Apple says it doesn’t use tax gimmicks, such as offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands or Caribbean nations, and its large foreign holdings are simply due to the fact that the majority of its revenue—61 percent last year—are generated internationally.

PDF Editor Pro is appealing as a PDF editor in that if offers OCR and text editing options not available in Apple’s native Preview app. However, it’s not nearly as easy to use as Preview and its OCR capabilities aren’t as good as those found in other applications. It’s not a bad PDF editing application, but you may be better off looking elsewhere for your PDF editing needs.

Thanks to iCloud, syncing an iPhone with a Mac is a piece of cake. But Mac users who don’t buy into the whole “one vendor to rule them all” thing will find that syncing an Android phone with OS X isn’t quite as easy. That said, it isn’t terribly difficult, either, thanks to Google’s own cloud services.

Users still can't delete Apple's default apps from iOS devices (grumble grumble…) but there are plenty of useful alternatives out there for people hoping to use something other than the default.

The release addresses a rare problem that could cause a system to fail to start back up from a crash.

The sole function of the Dropbox Encore application is to launch a second instance of Dropbox using the official Dropbox application in your Applications folder.

The cap on WWDC tickets means it won’t go the way of SXSW - a wildly successful conference that has grown consistently since its inception. I used to go every year until one late night we looked around a huge sea of strangers and decided that we no longer knew this conference. The experience had become diluted. It had become unfamiliar, full of strangers, and unknowable.

Playing casual games like Dots and Bejeweled are the cognitive equivalent of working out a single muscle: you strengthen a very specific skill without necessarily improving your overall mental dexterity. But if you’re like me and concerned about your addiction, this news may still come as some comfort: you may be giving up hours of your life, but at least you’re getting very good at making a bunch of colored dots disappear.

Targeting devs looking to refine their user interfaces, it enables you to interactively tweak view properties like frames and layers.

There are some special requirements for handling firmware updates as opposed to standard software updates, and if they are not met, the system may fail to install the update.

Last year the Air Force's Air Mobility Command (AMC) awarded a $9.36 million contract for up to 18,000 iPads as part of an ambitious project to replace flight manuals with state-of-the-art tablets. Contractor Executive Technology clinched the deal to deploy the so-called Electronic Flight Bags (EFBs).

Bang With Friends, the somewhat-controversial hookup app that lets users anonymously pick which of their Facebook friends they'd like to "bang" and then notifies users when there's a match, has had its iPhone app pulled from the App Store.

Constrained availability of existing models is often one of the first signs of an impending product refresh, as Apple draws down inventory in anticipation of the release of new hardware. Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, scheduled for June 10 through 14, would be an opportune time for the company to introduce newly updated MacBook Airs.

The answer to that, I’m afraid, may disappoint those who want cut-and-dried answers to complex questions: it depends on how you use Photoshop, and what you use it for.

Many TidBITS readers made great points that we wanted to share, along with suggestions for how Adobe could soothe the savage user base.

The Defense Department said in a statement today that it has approved the use of Cupertino, California-based Apple’s products running a version of the iOS 6 mobile platform.

Version 6.4 is focused on improving Skype’s instant messaging features for better usability, while also introducing support for Simplified Chinese.

It is way past my bedtime, but I’ve been caught off-guard by an addiction Mosaique. This minimalist puzzle game brings you to another dimension of sands and blocks. It’s a must-have game you’ll definitely be fond of.

With creative syncing, and using iTunes’ checkboxes, you can accomplish what you want.

Like its predecessors, Delicious Library 3 helps you track your media, and it makes a real attempt to keep up with the digital nature of today’s virtual bookshelves. The app still needs some work in that area, however, so it continues to appeal the most to those whose media collections are heavy in physical forms: books, albums, and DVDs.

Whether you need to know what a word means or just how to spell it, the days of leafing through hefty paper dictionaries are gone. But few Mac users really know how to make the most of OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Today I’ll show you five tricks for doing just that.

If you're looking for ways to focus better on your work, taking advantage of Apple's application-hiding features may help.

I found some clues and hopes in the works of a non-profit, named “School In A Box”: an Apple education representative in Asia pointed me to the head of Apple Education who addressed me to them, so that I could discuss some of these questions with someone who had already thought about that. These amazing teachers from Ireland were passionate about trekking and new technologies, which led them to start a project whereby they would bring to schools in the third world all the tech you need to teach in a box. It effectively removed one hurdle from the past attempts at doing that much — the OLPC failed because of two main reasons: the absence of power and the disconnect between teacher and students when you put a laptop between them. So, a typical SIAB solution would have: solar panels, a power generator and accumulator, a wifi base station, a projector, iPads, all packed in a military-grade box. Cool, and it gives an idea of where you’re going. I contacted them around Christmas 2012.

Apple has submitted plans to open a new retail store on Union Square, replacing its nine-year-old store at Stockton and Ellis streets a few blocks away.

Both Apple and Google tabulate unique downloads of apps per user account. This means that they count only one download of an app no matter how many devices that you install that app on after you purchase it. Neither company counts updates in its app download numbers. These are purely single downloads from their stores.

CEO Tim Cook is coming to Washington to testify in front of a panel of senators about stashing more than $100 billion overseas, rather than sending a lower-level executive.

He will offer Congress Apple’s ideas for comprehensive tax reform — an unusual move for the company into the world of policy.

Among the changes in 11.0.3 is a revamped MiniPlayer, which now features a progress bar, complete with draggable playhead. The audio output button, which now uses a speaker icon instead of Apple’s traditional AirPlay icon, is also now visible even when you’re not hovering over the window.

For serious, detailed Web research, especially when you have to find data that’s not accessible in conventional search engines, DevonAgent Pro can cut through clutter and help you make sense of complex information. It’s unlikely to replace Safari, Chrome, or Firefox as your everyday browser, but for what it does best, no other tool can compare.

As a visually impaired user, my effective use of these devices depends on the quality and brightness of the screen. In order for me to achieve optimal use—especially on the iPhone, the device I use the most—I’ve found that I really need a Retina display set to maximum brightness.

It’s not as powerful as more specialised photo editors such as Photoshop Elements, but Pixelmator is an affordable and fun tool for smartening up your photos. It’s not purely a photo-editing program either, as it also includes a number of vector graphics tools – and it’s that area of the program that receives the most attention in this latest update.

We sorely need Apple. Because Apple brings beauty and simplicity. It takes the pain and the confusion out of computing.

I still meet people who appear surprised that Apple devices remain largely untroubled by viruses and malware.

Even the Federal Aviation Administration will acknowledge that there is no scientific proof that today’s gadgets can interfere with a plane’s avionics.

Thinglist isn't your everyday task list or reminders app. Actually, it's neither of those things. At its core, Thinglist really functions as a way for you to jot down ideas and things to remember that aren't so time pressing. How about that time that you wanted to watch a movie your friend told you about but now can't remember the title? These are the types of uses Thinglist for iPhone is perfect for.

A free service that includes text, photo, and video messaging, Hangouts is a rebrand of Google’s former video-chat service for Google+. The new Hangouts will unify Google Talk and Google+ messages under a single service, storing conversations in the cloud.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to testify at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation's hearing Tuesday, POLITICO has learned.

The hearing is part of the panel's continued examination of how companies shift profits offshore and how that impacts the tax code.

A few month back, Apple quietly slipped a very nice Objective-C to Javascript bridge into WebKit. Since the first commit while we were busy celebrating New Year’s Eve, it has been fairly actively developed and improved. This new API supports straightforward embedding of the JavaScriptCore interpreter into native Objective-C projects, including reading and writing variables and object members with appropriate type coercion, calling methods on JavaScript objects, and directly binding Objective-C objects into JavaScript.

Robot Unicorn Attack 2 isn't as difficult, and it's perhaps not as funny (sequels to jokes rarely are) but I think it's actually a better game. Challenge your friends, engage in the daily battles between rival robot unicorn factions “Team Rainbow” and “Team Inferno,” and enjoy the expanded mythos for one of the most interesting franchises for iOS.

As you suggest, Apple would likely point you to iMovie as the way to get these simple tasks done, but, as you also suggest, I believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Follow the link above, pungle up your $29, and you’re well on your way to performing simple movie edits.

Apple said in court papers filed April 26 and made public today that it engaged in “one-on-one, and at times contentious negotiations” with book publishers over e-books. Apple said it “never spoke to more than one publisher at the same time” during its negotiations and had no knowledge of any intra-publisher communications during the time Apple was negotiating its agency agreements.

Although iPhoto for iOS isn’t quite as robust as its OS X counterpart, it’s a very capable image editor—and it can do a few cool tricks you simply can’t do on your Mac.

The standard and perhaps intuitive method of adding items to these locations is to drag them there; however, it's not foolproof. If you inadvertently release your mouse before the cursor has reached the Dock or sidebar, then you chance copying or moving the item out of its current folder to the Desktop or to another window. Sometimes you can even embed items in open documents that were under where you released the mouse.

Apple's voice interaction system Siri has been updated, this time specifically to ask users to keep it short. Siri's system doesn't deal well with longer user queries, so if you happen to ask something that's just too long for Siri to deal with, she'll interrupt you, giving you a quote from a famous person, and then asking you to rephrase the question, shorter or in fewer words.

Internet payment company Square has announced a new accessory that turns your iPad into a high-tech cash register, complete with built-in credit-card swiper and a slew of point-of-sale accessories.

I’ve always been a big fan of Time Machine. I love that Apple has made backing up as simple as they have. This little experience has given me pause though. Time Machine had failed and I never received an error message. No notice, no warning. Just a lot of missing files.

Like the iOS version, oneSafe for Mac is iCloud enabled, meaning now you can sync all of your information across all of your devices. It's pretty much the missing link in the chain, for anyone who uses these apps seriously will likely need them on the desktop as well. The same 256-bit encryption is employed in the Mac version, as are all of the popular features from oneSafe for iOS.

By sticking a little $8 lens to an iPhone with a piece of double-sided tape, a Canadian doctor has produced a microscope that works reasonably well at diagnosing intestinal worms in children.

I made way too many mistakes for a guy that has been doing this for over three decades. Learn from my errors and ship awesome software. I’m trying to do the same.

The idea is to alert parents about the apps their child uses, including whether or not they have educational value. It doesn’t prevent the child from actually downloading or installing apps.

Dots is a wholly satisfying pick-up-and-play game, perfect for those fleeting free moments.

President Francois Hollande will decide by the end of July whether France should impose new taxes on technology giants like Apple and Google to finance cultural projects, a move that could feed into an anti-business image days after a spat with Yahoo!.

The TouchFire isn’t a keyboard at all; it’s a piece of plastic that lies on top of your iPad, attached by some magnets, just covering the area of the standard virtual keyboard. The plastic is thin enough that your touches are felt by the iPad’s touchscreen, but thick enough to give your fingers a sense of position and feedback, as if you were typing on a very thin physical keyboard.

As I have said it has shown me the value of what reading later is all about. I just don’t want to be confined by the limitations of a single company.

Thanks to the latest updates, 1Password for iOS is reaching the same degree of functionality of the desktop app with browser extensions.

If you like to find new ways to tweak OS X, you sometimes need to look in unexpected places. For example, the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, which houses a number of features to help users who have limited seeing, hearing, and mobility, contains some nifty features that all users should know about. Here are five system tweaks that you might want to try on your Mac.

The deeper problem is injudicious design, which excessive skeuomorphism can be emblematic of. Design which falsely promotes one embodiment over the essence of content and function. A lack of creativity and insight, masquerading as a deliberate aesthetic choice.

I commend Apple for including the “Report a Problem” feature in their Maps app from day one. They knew that the data was not bulletproof, and they understood that their vast, loyal user base was a great resource for improving it. But I think this reporting process is failing Apple precisely because corrections to Apple’s maps lack all of the advantages of the-fashioned old pen & paper method. After laboriously detailing the problems with a point of interest in Apple’s maps, correcting its name, dragging its pinpoint to a corrected location, etc., the user is rewarded with continuing to suffer using the app with the incorrect data.

It's really time for communities to spread out and become more inclusive. With a well-curated river, the Mac community can explore more niches, and grow in some interesting ways, perhaps.

Metro probably doesn't need full-blown iTunes any more than iOS does, and the Windows 8 Store probably won't get old-style iTunes much faster than the App Store will get old-style Office.

The world has changed.

The concept is bigger than that of a project manager, who’s really about assigning tasks, but it’s also not the indie app developer and designer who’s doing it all themselves. I think of the App Director as more of an auteur because they’re realizing a vision like the director of a film. They may not wield the camera or the sound boom, but they’re still making their vision real.

The plot remains the same: A young boy tries to take off his hat to honor the king, only to have a new one appear repeatedly on his head. While some children’s apps tend to pile on visual stimulation and ­techno-bells-and-whistles at the expense of storytelling, the digital version of “500 Hats” uses the original Seuss artwork as a solid foundation and then layers on simple touches that don’t distract from the reading experience.

The StreamPort is a cute little plastic cuboid – little bigger than a matchbox – that picks up music without wires, using Bluetooth from your PC or smartphone. It plugs into one of Bayan Audio's iPod speaker docks or directly into a hi-fi system via a pair of analogue phono output sockets.

If you are having difficulty configuring your printers or even just printing to them in OS X, one thing to try is to reset the print system, which will clear out your printers and allow you to set them up again from scratch. This service may appear to only remove your printers, but it in fact does a number of checks on the system and restores configuration files to factory defaults.

Well, to be fair, Chien probably just read the iPad user guide, where the warning is plainly written.

Apple has now included Canada in on the feature, as well as users in Argentina, Pakistan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Austria, Brazil, Belgium and Portugal. In other words, two-step authentication is now rolling out to a more or less worldwide release.

This nifty utility is simple to use, yet it offers a slew of useful features for creating your own animated images.

If you sell a low-priced app in the App Store with no free version, you make money from every tire kicker.

Matt has created three simple, yet challenging games for the iPhone and iPad: Zotz!, Diabelli’s Theme, and LinkSame. If you’re looking for a mental challenge to kill a few minutes, give them a try!

ATF says no law enforcement agency could unlock a defendant's iPhone, but Apple can "bypass the security software" if it chooses. Apple has created a police waiting list because of high demand.

I meet a lot of people with Automator anxiety: they think using OS X’s built-in workflow-maker is a lot more complex than it really is. The truth is that Automator workflows are (a) pretty simple to assemble and (b) great for simple but repetitive tasks that you do all the time anyway.

To show you what I mean here are five workflows that I think pretty much every Mac user should have. They do things we all need to do: Wrap text in quotation marks, for example, or count the number of words in a selection of text. There might be other ways of doing the same things, but Automator is built into your Mac and you can implement them yourself for free in a couple of minutes.

For consumers who want to organise, correct, and enhance their photos, and then share them in a variety of ways, iPhoto for iPhone is a great option.

Apple’s “sold” numbers are really its shipment numbers, according to several prominent financial analysts who obsessively follow every word and number that emerges from Cupertino. Horace Dediu, who writes the Asymco blog, told me that “Apple’s reports show shipments not sales.” He added, “All vendors as far as I know report shipment data since that is what they can record.”

If you are experiencing problems with a menu extra and can't seem to remove it by standard means, it may have a nonstandard implementation, which will take a couple of steps to root out and uninstall.

According to Apple, the update is a stability fix for Thunderbolt and Target Disk Mode. The update is a scant 1.2MB in size and requires OS X 10.8.3 or later.

What this commercial does so well is capture the human side of technology. It’s a reflection of daily life, and it’s easy to see ourselves in it. The ad shows us how essential our phones have become, enabling us to capture the people, places and images we don’t want to forget.

If a person falls asleep with the iPad2 on the chest, the magnets in the cover can “accidentally turn off” the heart device, said Chien, a high school freshman in Stockton, California, whose father is a doctor. “I definitely think people should be aware. That’s why I’m presenting the study.”

The new post-play feature will cue and then begin the next episode in the season once the currently watched one ends.

"The Loop magazine is an extension of my interests on the Web site, so they will always complement one another. On the Web site, I will link to a story that I find interesting. In the magazine, I will go to the writer and ask them to write an exclusive article for The Loop magazine."

Among the new features are a slew of new shape tools, a Smart Move tool, a clever Paint Selection tool, a Light Leak Effect, and plenty more.

Between using apps on the classroom projector, enabling Guided Access for student devices during exams, and preparing content at home, my iPhone and iPad are essential tools for me as a teacher.

You’ve almost certainly never heard of Peter Belanger, but you’ve definitely seen his photographs. In fact, you may even see his work every day, and it’s likely that you own some of his most famous subjects. Belanger is the man behind some of Apple’s most iconic product images, a San Francisco-based product photographer at the top of his field. Apple is but one of his clients — he’s done work for everyone from eBay and Nike to Pixar and Square — and we sat down with Peter to talk about his work, his background, and some very, very expensive gear.

Or, put another way: the backend system will become nearly as important as the UI frameworks, and plain-old-syncing isn’t enough.

If you’d rather avoid iOS lock-in for your ebooks, there are few disappointments to the Kindle app experience.

Sure. Transmit installs a few Automator actions. Among them is Mount, which you can use to mount a directory on your FTP server. But you can save yourself some trouble by instead using Transmit’s Transmit Disk feature that lets you mount an FTP directory as if it were a local disk.

OS X has long been able to uncompress zip files and some other archive types, using its built-in Archive Utility, but I’ve switched to The Unarchiver because it supports more formats and offers easier customization options—and it’s just as free as Archive Utility.

Here are a few tools and tricks—some for power users, others for business cases, and even a slightly nerdier option—that can help take the drudgery out of managing social media.

For now, the Pebble delivers on its premise, but it doesn’t deliver very much. It's an impressive piece of hardware—the software just needs to catch up.

If you want to change the inner-workings of OS X, you typically need to dig into Terminal commands or download a bunch of special software. MacUtil is an app that makes customization simple by providing you with all sorts of tweaks in a simple menu.

One of the most talked about companies for online news right now isn't a journalism outlet or a media conglomerate, but rather a small startup incubator and investor located in the heart of Manhattan's meatpacking district.

Apple just celebrated the 10th birthday of its famed iTunes, which is easily the most popular source for buying digital content. Still, I regularly field questions from my family and friends about how iTunes works. These range from basic questions about syncing to storing music in the cloud and sharing music with family. And iTunes also has a lot of features most people don’t know exist. This week, I rounded up some ways to improve the way you use iTunes.

As a rule, I have upgraded as infrequently as possible, stretching out my purchases over as many years and operating systems as possible. I live very low on the Adobe consumer hierarchy, trying to eke out whatever time I have left with my CS 4 suite. It's time now to seriously look at alternatives.

While I can't remember the last time I did any amount of pen-to-paper long-form writing (do signatures count?), it's hard to refute that Evernote’s free Penultimate for the iPad is a rather attractive concoction.

Small, not obscenely expensive, and capable of accessing media locally as well as online, the Mac mini has a lot going for it. But is it the perfect solution for those anxious to cut the media cord? I spent a month with one to find out.

This week, I tested two new mobile apps, Kodable and Hopscotch, that are aimed at teaching young children the basic skills necessary for computer programming.

We think the Mophie Juice Pack Air for iPhone 5 is a cracking piece of kit. It’s stylish and offers good protection, and the extra oomph on the battery can be tremendously useful for long trips and Sat-Nav journeys.

The madness had to stop. I had gotten to the point where I never could remember in which app I put what where. I remember thinking, "Geez, did I make that note with the Notes app or Simplenote, or maybe it was buried in Dropbox because I had used iAWriter?"

Even in the San Francisco Bay area, retail stores and restaurants still mainly use traditional dedicated point-of-sale systems (that is, cash registers). Smartphones and tablets equipped with card readers plugged into the headphone jack are not the norm. But that’s changing.

Desktop clutter happens to the best of us, even if we try our hardest to maintain a remarkably simplified virtual workspace. Whether it’s way too many icons thrown all over the desktop from working with files, or just a million and one windows open for various apps, documents, and browser tabs, there are some simple ways to alleviate all of this, even if you’re right smack in the thick of things. The next time you’re inundated with some virtual clutter, use these tricks to maintain focus and get back to work.

Signaling a new focus on integrating creative services in the cloud with its professional desktop software, Adobe launched a new cloud-based Creative Suite—with a new CC moniker, for Creative Cloud. But it will look familiar. Significant upgrades to all current Creative Suite 6 apps are coming soon, but they will be available only by subscription to Creative Cloud, not traditional software licenses.

The Dell’s display is good, but the iMac’s is sensational, and the superior GPU sees it trounce the Dell in our gaming benchmarks. If you’re in the market for the ultimate all-in-one PC, the Apple iMac 27in reigns supreme.

Empty of customers, the store nevertheless has about 500 lamps and spotlights burning bright on all three floors, the light passing through Apple's signature glass walls onto the pavement.

The Bluetooth standard for wireless connections has allowed accessory makers to build products that can work with many kinds of devices because they no longer have to worry about a physical hook. Other phone makers like Samsung and tablet-computing device makers like Amazon have become strong alternatives in the eyes of gadget shoppers. And Apple itself provided an opening for competitors when it changed the way its phones connect to other devices, aggravating both its business partners and consumers.

Apple says it is fine with the wireless direction in which accessories are headed. “Apple provides users with the best wired and wireless connectivity options to work with the broadest range of accessories,” said Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple. “As a result, iOS users have access to the world’s largest ecosystem of options and the most seamless integration with our products.”

Outware Mobile is a Melbourne-based iOS and Android app developer, which was recognised by Deloitte late last year as Australia’s fastest-growing technology company over the past three years, and the 11th fastest growing in the entire Asia-Pacific region. Here director and co-founder – and Macworld Australia contributor – Danny Gorog gives an insight into the world of app development.

At its list price of $300, the Thunderbolt Express Dock isn’t cheap, but you do get lots of ports. The second of the two Thunderbolt ports gives you the ability to add up to five more Thunderbolt devices to the dock by daisy-chaining them together. This Belkin dock also has three USB 3.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, a gigabit ethernet port, and audio-in and -out ports.

FoxTube, however, is a great complement to the YouTube app that I recommend if you’re looking for more flexibility and customization in certain aspects of the YouTube experience.

Trojans, false positives, and the case of accidental cross contamination.

At a large wooden table sat a man with a laptop. I’m sure you can picture that. But this man had a stack of Starbucks gift cards laid out neatly to form an arrow. The arrow pointed to an iPad that was being used as a sign. The sign read “Test my App and Coffee’s on Jim.”

The app connects to your IMAP email accounts using a secure connection and extracts all the photos from each account quickly and efficiently. Just type your email address and password into the Lost Photos window, and the app sifts through every message on the server, scraping up any photos it finds and placing them into a folder, named for that email account, on your drive for later viewing.

Creating playlists in iTunes can be as simple as dragging a few songs, or as complex as creating smart playlists that refer to other playlists and use nested conditions to pick songs that meet specific criteria. In this week’s column, I answer three questions to show just how complex smart playlists can be. While perhaps not the same as the smart playlists you want to make, they are good examples of the complexity that is available with smart playlists in iTunes.

While Apple got credit for supporting efforts to defend users by modernizing electronic privacy laws, its apparent willingness to hand over your personal information to the government without a warrant and its failure to tell its users how it handles such requests put it in the dock.

Let’s face it if you want a super-slim 2013 iMac. You had better configure it with all the build-to-order upgrades you expect to get for the life of the machine. Because you won’t be opening it up any time soon.

Based on the same idea as your Dock, Popup Window enables you to add folders quick access tabs around the frame of your workspace.

First launched in November, the free app helps users live their dreams, and achieve their goals. It does so by offering an outlet in which to store these items. Better still, each task is easily sharable with others who can provide much needed motivation, when necessary.

The lucky winner will receive a $10,000 gift card redeemable on the App Store.

I use Calzy because it blends powerful features with delightful gestures and animations.

Apple has added new storage options to its iMac lineup, allowing users to choose either a 256 GB or 512 GB flash storage drive as part of the order customization process. The new options are available as $300 and $600 surcharges respectively to replace the 1 TB traditional hard drive that is standard across all iMac models.

The release, available for $29.99 throughout the month of May from the Mac App Store (regularly $49.99), boasts 150 new features, including an improved filter interface, non-destructive filters, a new curves adjustment tool, and more.

With the aid of a short Automator workflow, AppleScript can have you connected to your VPN with a single keystroke.

CrazyTalk7 Pro is a powerful character animation tool that is both fun to use and has practical application for professional producers that seek a creative animation option. For beginners, the interface and tools are intuitive and easy to use and you’ll be animating quickly with no prior animation experience.

ReadKit streamlines your reading with offline support for Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, plus bookmarks from Pinboard and Delicious.

You can now import from Aperture as well as iPhoto, Photo Booth, and the Finder. In the Erase tab, you can paint on objects you want to remove, use the polygonal or free lasso, or even choose the Clone tool to pick the exact part of the photo you want to use to cover the unwanted part.

With Prizmo you use your iPhone camera, point and shoot camera, or DSLR to capture images of documents, and then the software uses optical character recognition (OCR) to turn the scans into editable text.

Google Now is often compared with the Siri voice assistant on Apple's mobile devices, but its power lies in giving you information you need to know before you have to ask. It works best as a supplement to Siri, rather than a replacement, now that it has expanded from Android devices to iPhones and iPads.

There’s no question that Briefs is an ambitious tool, and a professional one—at $200, it’s not really targeted at the casual hobbyist. But it fills a very specific niche in design and prototyping, one that is often overlooked in the development process.

PrivacyScan is a worthwhile addition to anyone’s set of security tools. It’s easy to use, handles most modern browsers and also supports common Mac apps. As long as you remember to run it, you can rest assured that your privacy will remain protected.

Its tight integration with Mac OS X, ease of installation and performance make it a first-rate choice.

For those looking for a fairly pain-free setup consider the following iPad apps. All of them are free and can have you connecting to your desktop computer with minimal hassle.

Digital marketer Stephen Kenwright downloaded the app earlier this week, tried it out, uninstalled it, and went to bed. When he woke up, he found that Path had gone on a rogue mission early in the morning, texting and robocalling an unknown number of his contacts, including his grandparents.

ADN has become far more than just an ad-free Twitter replacement. And eventually the service will reach a point where any one single client cannot (or at least should not) handle all the functionality of ADN. But at the moment, for the core functionality of ADN as a social network, Riposte handles everything I am most commonly using with flying colors. It has become one of my favorite and most-used Home screen apps.