Review: DOFMaster lets you take control of you camera's depth of field

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Dave Johnson is a writer and photographer who has covered technology for magazines such as PCWorld and Wired. He is currently the Editorial Director for eHow.comâ??s Tech channel. Dave is the author of How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera, and over a dozen other books.
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One of the most distinctive characteristics of any photograph is its depth of field: Is the entire frame in sharp focus, from near-to-far, or only the subject? For a serious photographer, achieving the right depth of field isn’t an accident or trial and error; it’s deliberate and planned.

There was a time when photographers would carry a depth of field guide around with them—a small booklet filled with spinning dials and radiating grids of numbers that looked sort of like an engineering diagram for the space shuttle. These days, you can get the same information more easily using an iPhone app. And that puts precisely planned photos with just the right depth of field within your reach.

DOFMaster is the iPhone extension of the excellent DOFMaster.com, a website that offers ways to help you calculate depth of field from every conceivable format, including your browser, iPhone, Android phone, and a Windows app.

Calculations: DOFMaster makes it easy to calculate your depth of field.

DOFMaster is the very picture of simplicity; the entire iPhone app occupies a single screen and features just five buttons. To get started, specify your camera. A drop-down menu lets you choose from among general categories like 35mm, APS, a number of medium- and large-format cameras, or compact digital. You can also select your specific digital SLR model.

Making the right choice is important because depth of field depends on the relationship between the size of your camera’s sensor and your lens. A point and shoot digital camera delivers a very different depth of field at a particular focal length than a digital SLR. And even among SLRs, there are a small set of professional caliber full frame cameras, and more common models based on the somewhat smaller APS-C sensor.

The app doesn’t list every camera on the market, past and present, but that’s okay—just choose a similar model or category that has the same size image sensor. You won’t find the Nikon D7000, for example, so just choose Nikon DSLR from the list. If you have a point and shoot camera, just choose Compact Digital.

Once the camera is set, choose a lens focal length and the f/stop at which you plan to shoot. Finally, enter the distance from you to your subject—the focusing distance—and DOFMaster immediately calculates the nearest and farthest limits of acceptably sharp focus for the shot. And that’s it.

Suppose, for example, you have a 50mm lens on your Nikon D7000, and you want to shoot portraits of someone 10 feet away. Plug in the pertinent details, and you’ll find that at f/4 you’ll have a thin 2 feet of depth of field, from 9 to 11 feet. Dial the lens to f/16, on the other hand, and the depth of field extends from 7 feet all the way to 16 feet in front of the camera.

This makes DOFMaster not just a great pocket guide to calculating depth of field, but a useful teaching tool as well. The app doesn’t just show the relative effect of varying depth of field, but it does it for your particular camera. That’s indispensable for mastering the art of photography.

The app has one other trick. At the bottom of the screen you’ll find a button marked HD, which calculates the lens’s hyperfocal distance for the selected f/stop. Hyperfocal distance is the distance at which you need to focus the lens to get the deepest possible depth of field. If you want to take a photo that’s in sharp focus from the very foreground all the way to infinity, you’d set the f/stop to the smallest aperture (say, f/22). You might find that if you focus the lens 18 feet in front of you, then everything from 9 feet to infinity will be in focus.

Most people happily take snapshots with their camera, never agonizing over achieving the right depth of field. This app is not for them. But if you would love a simple way to know if you have enough depth of field to ensure your kids and the statue they’re standing in front of are all in sharp focus, or if you yearn to take more control over your art photography shoots, then DOFMaster is a prudent $2 investment.

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Review: Thin is in with new 21.5-inch iMacs but user upgrades, SuperDrive are out

Apple updated the new 21.5-inch iMac with Intel Ivy Bridge processors, a RAM boost, and new Nvidia GeForce graphics processors. But the two most significant changes to the new iMac are its thinner design—which introduces compromises you’ll need to make—and the option to upgrade to Apple’s Fusion Drive technology.

MacworldTop view: 2011 iMac (left) and new iMac (right)

Using a process called friction stir-welding, Apple designers figured out a way to connect the front and back of the iMac’s aluminum case while reducing the width to just 5 mm at the edges. Apple also reduced the weight by more than 7 pounds. The new iMacs are positively striking when viewed from the side, and many curious co-workers came by Macworld Lab to admire the new iMac’s svelte profile and run their fingers down the super-thin edge.

When viewed from the front, however, it’s difficult to see that reduced thickness. One noticeable difference is the reduction of glare from the display, which Apple says has been reduced by 75 percent. Looking at the display of a powered-down 2011 iMac is like looking at a mirror, but on the new iMac, the reflection is much less pronounced. I used a flashlight and looked at the reflection on the wall behind me and the reflected light was much, much brighter from the 2011 iMac than on the new iMac. This is a result of Apple’s new anti-glare coating technology that lowers reflection without darkening the screen or affecting color.

Apple eliminated the 2 mm air gap that used to exist between the iMac’s glass cover and the LCD panel. Now, the glass is directly adhered to the panel, which helps to further reduce glare and reflection, but also makes replacing the front glass more expensive. If the glass breaks, you now have to replace the whole display.

Colors still look vibrant and photographic images pop, with dark blacks adding the appearance of depth. The iMac’s LED backlit IPS display, with a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, has a wide viewing angle that lets you and several others collaborate around the iMac screen with very little loss of contrast or color shifts as you move from the center of the screen.

Apple made major tradeoffs in order to dramatically thin down the new iMacs. The iMac joins the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and Retina MacBook Pro as computers that no longer have internal optical drives. If you need to use and burn CDs and DVDs, you need to attach an external optical drive, like Apple’s $79 USB SuperDrive, an 8X DVD burner that runs on USB bus power.

MacworldLeft to right: Audio out, SDXC card slot, four USB 4 ports, two Thunderbolt ports, gigabit ethernet.

User-accessible RAM slots are also gone on the 21.5-inch iMac. The standard-configuration iMac comes with 8GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory, which should be plenty for most people. Last year’s model had 4GB of slower 1333MHz DDR3 RAM. If you think that you may want more memory down the road, you should customized your order so that 16GB of memory is installed at the factory—a $200 option.

Adding RAM after your purchase will most likely require a visit to an authorized Mac repair shop. Getting into the old iMac was no easy task; you needed suction cups to help pull off the glass, which was held on by magnets. The new iMac is even more difficult; the glass is attached using an adhesive strip that must be cut to open the iMac, and that strip needs to be replaced in order to close the iMac.

The new iMac moves the handy SDXC card slot from the left edge to the rear, next to the USB and Thunderbolt ports. FireWire 800 ports are no longer available, and you’ll have to use an adapter like Apple’s $29 Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter to connect FireWire devices. The new iMac has the same number of USB ports as the 2011 model, but the four available ports are now of the speedy USB 3 variety, instead of pokey USB 2.0. The USB 3 ports are backwards compatible with USB 2.0, should you have such peripherals. The new iMac still has a gigabit ethernet port and a headphone/audio-out port on the back, but an audio-in port is no longer provided. The new iMac gets a second Thunderbolt port, which is very convenient if you want to connect multiple Thunderbolt devices.

The new iMac also sports redesigned speakers. Setting the new and old iMacs side by side, the music playing through the new iMac sounded noticeably warmer and fuller than the previous iMac. The older model sounded a bit louder, but shrill in comparison.

All results are scores. Higher scores/longer bars are better. Reference models in blue. Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith, Albert Filice, and Kean Bartelman.

The new iMac comes with Intel’s Ivy Bridge quad-core processors that share 6MB of L3 cache. The $1499 iMac has a 2.9GHz Core i5 processor, while the $1299 iMac has a 2.7GHz Core i5 processor. The processors support Intel’s Turbo Boost, which allows a processor to run faster (up to 3.6GHz on the $1499 iMac and 3.2GHz in the $1299 iMac) with processor-hungry applications.

The optional 3.1GHz Core i7 quad-core processor, a $200 upgrade to the $1499 model, offers Intel’s Hyper Threading. This technology allows applications to address twice as many virtual processing cores, helpful in applications that can take advantage of multiple cores like Mathematica and Cinema4D.

The new high-end 21.5-inch 2.9GHz iMac was 12 percent faster than the previous high-end 21.5-inch iMac with a Sandy Bridge 2.7GHz Core i5 quad-core processor in our MathematicaMark tests and 17 percent faster in the Cinebench CPU test. The new entry-level 21.5-inch 2.7GHz iMac was 11 percent faster than the previous entry level 21.5-inch iMac with a Sandy Bridge 2.5GHz in both MathematicaMark and Cinebench CPU tests.

Apple also updated the graphics processors in the new iMacs. The ATI Radeon has been replaced by Nvidia graphics processors: the GeForce GT640M in the $1299 model, and the GeForce GT650M in the $1499 model. Our Portal 2 test results were 7 to 8 frames per second faster on the new iMacs when compared to the previous models, but the Cinebench OpenGL test results were 10 and 12 percent slower than the previous low and high-end iMacs, respectively.

Because of the reduced case size, Apple uses smaller 2.5-inch 5400-rpm hard drives in the new 21.5-inch iMacs, where Apple previously used 3.5-inch 7200-rpm drives. (The 27-inch iMacs still use 3.5-inch 7200-rpm hard drives.) Apple increased the cache size on these slower-spinning drives to help increase the performance. But even with the larger cache, the older iMac’s 7200-rpm drives finished our file copy test faster than the new iMac’s 5400-rpm drives. The file unzip test was just 1 percent faster on the 2011 iMac.

If you want faster drive speed, as well as zippier startup and application launches, the new $1499 21.5-inch iMac can be outfitted with Apple’s 1TB Fusion Drive. Fusion Drive combines fast flash storage with high capacity hard drives and presents the two as one drive to the user and software. The OS and all applications that come with an iMac are loaded onto the flash portion of the Fusion Drive, making application launches and restarts much faster than with a standard hard drive. In our testing, we found that most tasks on a Fusion Drive perform at the same speeds as a stand alone solid-state drive, even with 600GB of data loaded onto the drive. Long extended writes and reads will eventually hit the bottleneck created by slower hard drive speeds, as you’d expect. Previous testing showed Fusion Drives able to finish our 6GB file copy tests in about 40 seconds, while the 5400 rpm hard drive in the iMac took around 150 seconds to complete. Fusion Drive is not available on the $1299 model.

The new iMac steps into the future, with cutting-edge design (literally), updated processor and RAM, better sounding speakers, and reduced-glare (but still glossy!) screens. Unfortunately, the new iMac also follows Apple’s trend towards less repairable and upgradeable Macs and the elimination of useful features such as optical drives and FireWire 800 ports. I think it’s reasonable to drop the optical drive from laptops, where the benefit of reduced size and weight can be immediately appreciated when you walk around with a laptop in your bag. On a desktop computer like the iMac, it’s unclear what the benefits are of going without these conveniences in order to have a thinner and lighter iMac at your desk—unless you’re admiring the iMac from the side, of course.

The $1499 iMac benefits from a Fusion Drive upgrade to Fusion Drive and Core i7 processors—something you can’t do with the $1299 iMac.

 Duplicate
2GB FolderCompress
6GB FolderUncompress
6GB Folder21.5-inch iMac/2.9GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/2.5GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/3.1GHz Core i7, 1TB Fusion Drive, 16GB RAM BTO
(Late 2012)Mac mini/2.3GHz Core i7
(Late 2012)15-inch Retina MacBook Pro/2.6GHz Core i7
(Mid 2012)20-inch iMac/2.4GHz Core 2 Duo
(Mid 2007)Results are in seconds. Lower results are better. Best result in bold. Reference models in italics.

 Import
iMovie
ArchiveiMovie
Share to
iTunesHandBrake
Encode21.5-inch iMac/2.9GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/2.5GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/3.1GHz Core i7, 1TB Fusion Drive, 16GB RAM BTO
(Late 2012)Mac mini/2.3GHz Core i7
(Late 2012)15-inch Retina MacBook Pro/2.6GHz Core i7
(Mid 2012)20-inch iMac 21/2.4GHz Core 2 Duo
(Mid 2007)Results are in seconds. Lower results are better. Best result in bold. Reference models in italics.

 iPhoto
ImportAperture
ImportPhotoshop
CS5 Action21.5-inch iMac/2.9GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/2.5GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/3.1GHz Core i7, 1TB Fusion Drive, 16GB RAM BTO
(Late 2012)Mac mini/2.3GHz Core i7
(Late 2012)15-inch Retina MacBook Pro/2.6GHz Core i7
(Mid 2012)20-inch iMac/2.4GHz Core 2 Duo
(Mid 2007)Results are in seconds. Lower results are better. Best result in bold. Reference models in italics.

 iTunes
EncodeCinebench
CPUVmware
PCMarkMathe-
maticaMark 821.5-inch iMac/2.9GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/2.5GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/3.1GHz Core i7, 1TB Fusion Drive,
16GB RAM BTO (Late 2012)Mac mini/2.3GHz Core i7
(Late 2012)15-inch Retina MacBook Pro/2.6GHz Core i7
(Mid 2012)20-inch iMac/2.4GHz Core 2 Duo
(Mid 2007)iTunes and Cinebench CPU results are in seconds, (lower results are better). VMware PCMark and MathematicaMark 8 are scores (higher results are better). Best result in bold. Reference models in italics.

21.5-inch iMac/2.9GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Late 2012)21.5-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/2.5GHz Core i5
(Mid 2011)21.5-inch iMac/3.1GHz Core i7, 1TB Fusion Drive, 16GB RAM BTO
(Late 2012)Mac mini/2.3GHz Core i7
(Late 2012)15-inch Retina MacBook Pro/2.6GHz Core i7
(Mid 2012)20-inch iMac/2.4GHz Core 2 Duo
(Mid 2007)Results are in frames per second. Higher results are better. Best result in bold. Reference models in italics.

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Review: Apple's Remote app gets a new iPad interface, support for Up Next

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Serenity has been writing and talking and tinkering with Apple products since she was old enough to double-click. In her spare time, she sketches, writes, acts, sings, and wears an assortment of hats.
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When the Remote app first launched in 2008, it could control your Mac and Apple TV’s music from afar—but that was about it. The program has come a long way in four years: Version 3.0, which launched alongside iTunes 11, gives the whole app a good polish along with a new iPad interface and a few new features that tie in nicely with Apple’s latest desktop media manager.

The Remote app retains most of the features you might know and love from version 2.4: You can connect to your iTunes or Apple TV libraries via Home Sharing, control content playback, create and edit playlists, tap into other shared music libraries, trigger the visualizer remotely, and create Genius playlists.

Version 3.0 takes all of those features, adds a few tricks, and incorporates iTunes 11 improvements. From the start, the icons in the Remote library have been updated to reflect iTunes' new silver icon; you’ll also spot colored icons in the iPad version of the app.

The Remote app’s biggest new feature is support for Up Next, iTunes 11’s live playlist/jukebox. Once you start playing a song from the app (or connect the app to a library already playing music), iTunes generates an Up Next list of songs. You can add to the list or edit it at any time by tapping the Up Next icon and choosing the Add or Edit button, respectively. The Up Next icon also holds a button for viewing your listening history, in case you want to hear a certain song again.

Tap Add, and you’ll see your library with an 'Add songs to Up Next' label atop it. Select songs by tapping the blue plus button next to them, or tap and hold an album cover to add all of its tracks to your queue. When you’re finished, just tap the Done button.

Up Next lets you add songs from anywhere in your music library.

Though you’re technically allowed to add playlists to Up Next, I encountered a slew of crashes with the Remote app when I tried to go through the Add routine; even when the app finally let me view them, I was stuck selecting only individual songs from playlists in this mode.

Tap and hold any song or album to get this contextual menu.

Thankfully, Add mode is not the only way to select new songs for your queue. You can also tap and hold on any song, artist, or album to bring up a pop-up menu with an option for adding it to Up Next. Tap and hold on an individual song, and you can also start Apple’s Genius feature, or create a Genius playlist. And all playlists have arrows at the top allowing you to add the entire playlist to Up Next.

Once you’ve added songs, you can edit the list by tapping the Up Next icon and selecting Edit; drag the songs into position as you wish, and tap the delete button for any songs you’d like to eliminate. You can even clear the entire queue, if you don’t see any songs you want to listen to.

The settings section of the Remote app sports the program’s two other improvements: You can now sort your music in Songs mode by artist instead of by title, and you can turn on a Stay Connected setting that allows you to keep the link with your library—at the cost of your iPhone or iPad’s battery life.

On the iPhone, the Remote app looks largely the same as its predecessor, with a few iTunes 11-inspired interface tweaks. Searches have adopted iTunes’ gray-and-black category labeling, while the track list of the Now Playing screen has become a space for viewing and editing the Up Next queue.

On the iPad, however, Apple has completely revamped the app’s interface: Connect to a library or an Apple TV, and you’re greeted with what looks to be an iOS version of iTunes 11.

The previous, play/pause, and next controls occupy the top-left corner of the app, with the playhead in the center; controls for volume and AirPlay (if connected to an iTunes library) or a touchpad and keyboard (if connected to an Apple TV) are also present. When a song is playing, the playhead displays the song’s album artwork; a center portion with the title, album, artist, and scrubber; and the Up Next icon (three dots and horizontal lines).

You can tap the album artwork within the playhead to enter the app’s full-screen mode, which largely resembles the full-screen mode of the Music app.

Remote's full-screen mode looks strangely unfinished; it has the previous version's rating display, but shows Up Next tracks below that.

As in the iPhone version of the Remote app, you can tap the old track-listing button to see a list of songs in your Up Next queue—but you'll find no buttons to add new songs, arrange the order of current songs, or delete unwanted ones. Instead, you have to exit full-screen view and tap the Up Next icon to do those things. The iPad’s full-screen mode also appears to be the only place where you can still rate songs from the Remote app—on the iPhone, the rating controls have been replaced with buttons controlling Up Next. It makes me wonder if Apple hadn't completely solidified this view when the Remote app shipped—it’s the only area of the iPad app that feels unfinished.

The main area of the Remote app on the iPad is, as always, dedicated to content display. By default you see a list of songs in alphabetical order (though a toggle is available in the Settings portion of the app to sort the list by artist instead); you can also choose to view your songs by album, artist, playlist, genre, or composer. All these views are identical to their iTunes 11 counterparts—including the custom-color sampling behind the tracks of an album.

You have no way to turn off the album custom-color sampling in the Remote app—you're stuck with it.

Classical-music lovers missing iTunes 11’s Composer sort can still find it in the Remote app; it looks similar to Artist, Playlist, and Genre view, displaying a left sidebar containing all the composers in your library organized alphabetically.

Annoyed because iTunes 11 has no Composers grouping? You can still view it in the Remote app.

On the iPhone, all content categories hide within the Remote app’s More button, listing music groupings like Genre next to Music Videos and TV Shows. Not so on the iPad, where the More button contains only options for Genre and Composer. To get to your movies, you instead have to tap the Library button in the lower-left corner (it should list the name of the iTunes library or Apple TV that you’re connected to).

This action produces a pop-up menu with Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, and iTunes U options. Tap a category, and the Remote app’s library content and grouping buttons change to reflect it: For instance, tap TV Shows, and the groupings change to Unwatched, All TV Shows, and Genres.

Content organization takes a cue from iTunes 11, and hides within the library button.

In theory, once you’re logged in to the iTunes Store on your Mac, your purchased TV shows and movies should show up when you view these categories; in practice, I couldn’t get this feature to work on my own devices, but it may just be an iTunes quirk that a few restarts might solve.

Although I generally like the revised Remote app quite a bit, it has a few flaws. Genius in particular feels very flaky, and has some crashing problems. (Trying to load the Genius playlist when no song is playing is a good way to crash the app outright.) And Genius Mixes don’t even appear on the iPhone version of the app when you’re viewing an iTunes library; you must either use an iPad or be connected to an Apple TV.

You still can't view your Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, or Radio streams on the Remote app if connected to an Apple TV.

Speaking of the Apple TV, Remote still lacks any way to interact with its streamed video content: If you want to use your iPad to tell the Apple TV to play a movie, either you do it entirely through the gesture controller and the Apple TV’s menus, or you stream it via Home Sharing—through your iTunes library’s collection. This arrangement seems needlessly clunky, especially since iTunes 11 is handling a great deal of streamed content these days.

Apple’s Remote app is free, making it practically a necessity to download in the first place. But even if it weren’t, the company has done some great work in version 3 that absolutely warrants the upgrade. If you’ve upgraded to iTunes 11 and want to control your music from afar, this app is a great companion for iPhone and iPad alike. It still gives Apple TVs short shrift when it comes to controlling nonmusic content, but the gesture controller and keyboard make the Remote app much more valuable than its metal cousin.

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Mac Gems: CustomMenu provides quick access to your favorite apps, files, and folders

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Dan writes about OS X, iOS, troubleshooting, utilities, and cool apps, and he covers hardware, mobile and AV gear, input devices, and accessories. He's been writing about tech since 1994, and he's also published software, worked in IT, and been a policy analyst.
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One of my all-time favorite Mac utilities was MaxMenus, a System Preferences pane that let you create multiple custom menus, each containing your choice of apps, files, folders, volumes, and other frequently accessed items. Unfortunately, MaxMenus appears to have been abandoned—you can no longer download it, its website is dead, and while it currently works under Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.2), I suspect some future update to OS X will render MaxMenus useless.

I’ve tried—and quickly discarded—a number of alternatives, but one that works well is PointWorks’s $2 CustomMenu (Mac App Store link). Launch CustomMenu, and its systemwide menu icon appears on the right-hand side of your menu bar. Click this icon and choose Customize Menu, and you can choose the items you want to appear in the menu.

CustomMenu's configuration window

Click the Add (+) button next to Group on the left to create a new group—a section of the menu that’s separated from other sections by a divider line. I don’t know if there’s a limit to the number of groups, but I had ten groups in my menu while testing CustomMenu, and the utility still let me add another. These group names and dividers take up space—and you can’t add items to the menu without using groups—but they make the menu much easier to navigate than if all your items were in a single, uninterrupted list.

Select any group, and you can add items to that group by either dragging apps, files, and folders from the Finder into the group’s item list, or clicking the plus-sign (+) button next to Items to use OS X’s standard file-navigation dialog box. You can also move an item between groups by dragging it. Select an item and click the minus-sign (-) button, or press the Delete key, to remove the item from the list.

CustomMenu's menu

Any changes you make are reflected immediately in CustomMenu’s menu. Select any app, file, or folder from the menu to open that item: apps launch, folders open in the Finder, files open in their respective apps. Command+selecting any item reveals it in the Finder. CustomMenu offers hierarchical submenus for browsing the contents of folders and volumes, letting you navigate to, and open items in, any subfolder.

Hidden in a secondary settings sheet (accessed using the gear icon in the configuration window) are a few additional settings. The most useful for keyboard jockeys is a systemwide keyboard shortcut for opening the CustomMenu menu. Press this shortcut, and you can then navigate your custom menu using the arrow keys (or by typing the names of files and folders); press Return to open the selected item, or press Command+Return to reveal it in the Finder. Another nifty option: While many menu-bar utilities offer several menu icons to choose from, CustomMenu lets you change its menu icon from CM to any string of up to three text characters. I used OS X’s Character Viewer palette to use the Command (?) character for my menu’s icon.

One drawback of CustomMenu is that you can’t stick its menu in the corner, or even position it all the way to the right-hand side of the menu bar—locations that, in accordance with Fitts’s Law, would make it faster and easier to access the menu. (I personally use the outstanding Bartender [], which lets you reposition third-party menu items, to get around this limitation.) I’d also love to be able to assign keyboard shortcuts to items within CustomMenu’s menu.

I look forward to future updates to CustomMenu, but even now, it’s a great utility for quickly accessing your favorite apps, files, and folders from within any app—even when you’re using an app in full-screen mode.

Want to stay up to date with the latest Gems? You can follow Mac Gems on Twitter.

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Review: Evernote 5.0 for Mac improves an already-indispensable service

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Tom Negrino is the author of more than 40 books and a longtime contributor to Macworld. His latest book is Adobe Dreamweaver CS6: Visual QuickStart Guide (Peachpit Press, 2012).
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That interesting Web article. The emailed order for your new Mac. The snapped picture of the label as a reminder of that terrific pinot noir you just drank. A quick audio note you make with your phone. Those hundreds of downloaded PDFs of bank, brokerage, and utility company statements. You’ve got the information—heck, you’re practically drowning in it. Now you need somewhere to put it. You need an Everything Box. That’s a program that can store and sort those clippings and files, index them for easy search and retrieval, and allow you to add your preferred organizational structure as well, whether it be to group similar kinds of information into collections, or add metadata such as tags or categories.

Evernote is an Everything Box, as are other familiar Mac programs, such as Devon Technologies’ DevonThink (), Bare Bones’ Yojimbo (), and Chronos’s SOHO Notes, to name just a few. Where Evernote differs is that it’s free (with a paid Premium tier providing extra features), available for Mac and Windows and as a Web app, and it has native iOS and Android apps. Evernote automatically uploads everything you put into it to the company’s servers, making it available for syncing to all your devices. Evernote 5 is a major refresh of the program’s look and operations, and makes the service easier to use and more appealing than ever.

See Your Notes Your Way: Evernote 5’s clean new interface includes notes presented in this new Card view, which gives you a nice preview of each note, with the main content in the large pane on the right. This shot also shows, at left, the new Shortcuts and Recent Notes, which give you quick access to your pinned and latest notes, respectively (click to enlarge image).

The basic unit of information in Evernote is the note. You can collect similar notes in a notebook, creating as many notebooks as you need, or throw everything in one main notebook. You can add tags to notes to help categorize them further, and when you search for a tag, it finds notes with that tag in all notebooks. If your new item is a picture with words in it, Evernote will run optical character recognition on its servers to make the picture’s text searchable (even if the text is handwriting); the text then gets synced down to your Evernote clients with the rest of the note.

Evernote gives you many ways of capturing new notes. You can type text notes directly in an Evernote client, or drag text, images, sounds, or videos into the program. You can also use the Evernote Web Clipper, an extension for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, to snag all or part of Web pages. You can even email notes to Evernote. On the desktop, a menu bar extra allows you to create a new note, an audio note, or a screenshot, paste whatever’s on the Clipboard, and search the program.

The Mac client allows you to use your FaceTime camera to snap pictures (but not video) of yourself or anything else you hold up to the camera. Both the Mac and iOS versions of Evernote record audio notes, but they are low-quality (with a sample rate of just 8 kHz), mono WAV files, optimized for small file size and speech quality. It’s understandable that the company wants to keep files that will be synced with mobile devices small, but it would be nice to have an option for higher-quality audio, even if that would just be for Premium accounts.

Evernote 5.0 for Mac gives the program a major refresh. The left column has sections for Notes, Notebooks, Tags, Atlas (a view that uses geotags in your notes, especially images, to show on a map view where that note was created), and Trunk (more about that later). New to the program are two areas at the top of the left column: Shortcuts, where you can pin frequently used notes; and Recent Notes, which gives you quick access to your latest work. You can right-click on Notebooks or Tags to show their contents in the left column, as in previous versions of the program.

In the main part of the program window, where you view notes, are new Card and Extended Card views, and you can view notes by Notebook or Tag without doing a search. Speaking of which, searching for notes has been extensively improved, with type-ahead search that tries to anticipate your search string, and allows you to use note attributes as search tokens. As before, you can save searches for later use (now a smoother process). The note editor gains a bunch of small changes that make it easier to write with; you can choose a plain-text note or add basic formatting, including full-screen composition.

I had a few minor issues with Evernote 5. Notes on one of my Macs did not sync at the set interval; I had to sync manually until I uninstalled and reinstalled the program on that Mac. I also had trouble searching on a particular tag, but while writing this review, two minor updates with bug fixes and a few new features were released, and the tag problem went away.

Where’s That Note?: The new Atlas view shows you a note's original or source location, if it's tagged with geographic information. You can get a preview of the note right in the Atlas.

One of the most useful things about Evernote is the huge ecosystem that’s sprung up around it, consisting of hardware, software, and services that all use Evernote as their hub; Evernote calls its built-in access to these add-ons the Trunk. Some of these are owned by Evernote itself: for example, in 2011, Evernote acquired Skitch, a popular screen capture and annotation tool, which is now integrated with the Evernote program, with Skitch images  syncing to an Evernote notebook. Other Evernote tools include Hello, a mobile app that makes it easier for you to remember people; and Penultimate (another acquisition), an iPad notebook app that works with Evernote’s handwriting recognition.

But many other companies and developers work with Evernote. Numerous scanner manufacturers now have a scan-to-Evernote feature in their drivers. The Trunk lists dozens of mobile apps that enhance Evernote in one way or another; in addition, there are paperless services such as FileThis, which automatically connects to and downloads statements from credit card, brokerage, and utility companies and sends them to Evernote.

The Evernote basic service and clients are free, and most users will be satisfied with that service (I used it for more than two years as a free account). The company says that approximately 96 percent of its users are free account members, who may upload up to 60MB of data per month (data can be of any type). Small ads appear in the client programs for free users.

Advanced individual users can pay $5 per month or $45 per year for Premium features, such as a 1GB monthly upload quota; a capability to recognize text in PDFs and make it searchable (this feature, combined with my Fujitsu ScanSnap desktop scanner and a fervent desire to go paperless got me to upgrade to Premium); offline notebooks for mobile devices; shared notes and notebooks; the ability to hide the ads; and a few other features.

The paid Evernote Business service ($10 per user per month) adds still more features for managing employee accounts and shared business notebooks and notes. Employees can keep their personal notebooks separate from their company notebooks.

Evernote 5 is a major refinement to an already-good client for the Evernote service. The release of the Mac client roughly coincided with new versions for iOS as well, refreshing the entire experience. Whether you are among the large majority of free users of the service, or use an Evernote Premium account, you will benefit from the new client programs.

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Review: Das Keyboard Model S Professional for Mac is a solid mechanical-switch keyboard

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Peter Cohen loves video games, anime and almost anything Apple. When he's not compulsively watching TV or movies, he's a freelance technology journalist and executive editor at The Loop.
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Mechanical keyboards, which have hardware switches underneath the keys, cater to computer users who prefer a stronger tactile key response than they can get with today’s membrane keyboards, including Apple’s current keyboards. The actual switches hidden under each key produce a solid “clack” in response to each key press.

Das Keyboard is a premium brand of mechanical keyboards, but before 2012 the company produced models only for PC users. That changed with Das Keyboard’s $133 Model S Professional For Mac, which finally offers some mechanical-keyboard competition for Matias’s popular Tactile Pro 3 ().

The Model S Professional is a big, solid slab of glossy-black plastic that weighs about 3 pounds. It’s tapered from top to bottom to produce a contoured shape; and pop-out feet under the back edge let you raise the rear of the keyboard if you like.

The Model S Professional connects to your Mac via a 6-foot USB cable that terminates in two USB plugs. One plug is for the keyboard itself; the other offers power (250mA) and connectivity to the two USB 2.0 ports located on the keyboard’s right side. Most other keyboards, including Apple’s wired model, divide power between what the keyboard itself needs and what the keyboard’s built-in USB ports can provide; 250mA is sufficient for syncing and charging iPhones and iPods, though most iPads will need a separate AC adapter. (If you don’t plan to use the keyboard’s USB ports, you can leave its second cable unplugged to avoid needlessly occupying a USB port on your Mac.)

The Model S’s sculpted, black plastic keys have a matte finish, and its gold-plated MX keyswitches from Cherry Corp. give them a pleasant, solid feel. You can easily and safely remove most of the key caps in order to clean the dust, crumbs, and other detritus that gets underneath. Das Keyboard provides removal instructions and a video, and it also sells a special key-removal tool for users who dislike the idea of prying off key caps with whatever tool thay have on hand.

Like Matias’s keyboards, the Model S has a solid, recognizable, mechanical feel, but they differ in their key travel and switch sensation. Matias’s ALPS-made keyswitches produce a hollow “clunk” sound, while Das Keyboard’s Cherry MX switches offer a crisp “click.” But the sensation in each case is precise, highly tactile, and quite physical—nothing like the soft, mushy, indistinct key presses you experience with a membrane keyboard.

Like many other typists who prefer mechanical keyboards, I find them more accurate and easier to type on than membrane keyboards. To increase precision, Das Keyboard equipped the Model S Professional with circuitry that permits five-key rollover: You can press up to five keys simultaneously, and the keyboard will still detect the discrete presses and accurately generate the appropriate characters. As Das Keyboard notes, the feature benefits not just fast typists but also gamers, who frequently mash multiple keys at once.

Mechanical keyboards are considerably louder than membrane keyboards, so if you work in a shared office environment or need a quiet keyboard for dictation or for typing while you’re on the phone, the clicky-clack sound of the Model S Professional may be a drawback. The Model S’s keys aren’t as quiet as those of Matias’s Quiet Pro [], but they do beat the Matias Tactile Pro 3's keys.

(Das Keyboard offers a $135 Soft Pressure Point version of the Model S Professional that, like the Quiet Pro, delivers the feel of a mechanical-keyboard without the noise. Though the Soft version is available only in a Windows PC model, you can buy a $14 Mac Key Cap Set to swap out the Windows-specific keys for Mac versions.)

Mac-focused accouterments of the Model S Professional for Mac include a bottom row hosting Control, Option, and Command keys. F6 through F11 are media-control keys that handle back, play/pause, forward, volume mute, volume down, and volume up, respectively; F1 is mapped to a handy sleep function. You don't need any special software to get these keys to work with OS X—or to use the keyboard with a Mac.

The keyboard’s 104-key layout is standard, with F-keys properly separated from the main key area and grouped into pods of four, so touch-typists can easily find the keys by feel (Apple’s keyboards, in contrast, position F-keys in an uninterrupted, half-height row adjacent to the number keys). Whereas Matias’s Mac keyboards include three additional F-keys and an Eject key above the number pad, the Model S does not.

Unfortunately, the Model S Professional doesn’t provide other Mac-focused F-key special functions, such as Mission Control and Dashboard, though you can use the Keyboard pane of System Preferences to assign these functions to other F-keys. The Model S does have display-brightness controls, but they’re assigned to unorthodox keys, F14 and F15. Also, inexplicably, the Model S's fn key doesn’t function as a Mac-keyboard fn key, so you’ll have to remap Mountain Lion’s dictation-activation shortcut to another key via the Dictation & Speech pane of System Preferences.

The Model S Professional For Mac represents a good Mac-specific start for Das Keyboard. It provides a solid and reassuringly physical mechanical-keyboard experience, and its keyswitch technology and physical design differentiate it from the popular Matias offerings, providing a crisp, clicky sensation. However, I hope the next version of the Model S will offer standard Mac function keys, instead of just media-control keys.

Updated 12/4/12, 12:40pm, to correct error about display-brightness controls.

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Review: iTunes 11 adds cool features, but can be jarring to longtime users

[Editor’s note: The iTunes 11.0.1 update released on 12/13/12 addresses several of the problems discussed in the review, including very slow searching and the missing ability to display duplicate tracks.]

iTunes 11, whose delayed release fueled much speculation about last-minute changes following an internal reorganization at Apple, sports the most radical alterations to the program’s interface since its inception. Previous upgrades to iTunes were incremental, adding features and tweaking the interface, but iTunes 11 puts a whole new face on the software. In addition, iTunes 11 seems to be designed more for playing music than for organizing it—a slightly anachronistic approach, given the prevalence of portable devices.

The most obvious change is the reintroduction of color to the program. In my review "First look: iTunes 10," written in September 2010, I lamented the absence of color, saying, “iTunes 10 has a somewhat Soviet utilitarian look which, to my eyes, makes it less interesting to work with.” Well, color is back, both in the sidebar and in the Library pop-up menu at the top left of the iTunes window. In addition, when you display playlists, their text will be larger and bolder, and the background of the Playlists column will be lighter, providing much better contrast. The program also uses a Helvetica font with reduced spacing between letters, enabling iTunes to display longer texts in short spaces (such as in the Playlists column).

The gray icons are gone, and increased contrast makes viewing playlists easier.

The new options to view music by Genres or by Artists display sidebars showing icons for genres or for artists, with icons from your album art. (Videos, Books, and other types of content offer similar options.) You can sort items in these views as you like: Press Command-J to display a tiny View Options window, where you can sort by Title, Artist, Year, or Rating, for example, when in Genres view.

Apple removed some views from iTunes, but it increased the number of view options. In each view mode—Songs, Albums, Artists, or Genres—you have sort options, but if you click Playlists, and then select a playlist, the View button near the top right of the iTunes window gives you even more options. Although I regret the loss of Album List view, I’m quite happy with some of the new options.

In Albums view—the new default view—everything is an album; that is, whether the actual content is a single song, a few songs from an album, or an entire album, a single graphic represents it. The only way to determine how many tracks are collected there is to click the graphic. This design choice is surprising, as younger music fans tend to focus on individual songs rather than on albums.

When you're in Albums view, you can click a graphic to see what’s behind it. The expanded view shows the tracks in several columns (if there are enough tracks), with the album artwork to the right. The background and text take on colors from the album art. (To turn off the expanded view’s colors and album art display in the General preferences, uncheck Use custom colors for open albums, movies, etc.)

In its expanded view, iTunes 11 focuses on a single album, showing its tracks in columns and its artwork to the right, and using dominant colors from the album art for the background and text.

The limited information shown in Albums view can make it harder to choose what you want to play. Imagine that you have an album containing several songs you like, but you can’t remember which ones. If you haven’t rated them, there’s no way to identify your favorites. In previous versions of iTunes, you could see information such as play counts and last-played dates, but in iTunes 11 you can't. So if you don’t remember the song you liked so much on a particular Radiohead album, say, you won’t be able to find it quickly. You can get the information in Songs view, but that view is sterile and uninviting, with no album art and no clear separation between albums.

Also in Albums view, iTunes groups compilation albums at the bottom of the list. This leads to two problems. First, nothing tells you that the compilations are compilations; as there are no letters to give you milestones in the album list—such as A, B, or C, for artists’ names—you don’t known where the compilations section starts (and it’s hard to tell where a particular artist is at a glance). Second, the artist listed below the title of a compilation is the artist of the first track of the album; identifying the performer as “Various Artists” would have been more helpful.

You can’t change the size of the icons in Albums view, most likely because of the new track display in the expanded view. The fixed icon size limits the way you view your content, and the very wide display of tracks is neither very practical nor economical, at least on a large display. On my 27-inch Cinema Display, 15 albums string across the screen in Albums view, and as many as four columns for track names in expanded view, which looks odd to me; when I make the window smaller, as on a laptop, the two or three columns that display are much more readable. Another drawback: The small icons truncate titles that are longer than about 20 characters.

On a 27-inch display, the iTunes window is too big for the size of the album icons.

Other elements of iTunes 11 suggest that it was designed for small displays. If you don’t show the sidebar, the buttons for accessing different features are very far apart. On the left, a pop-up menu lets you choose which library to view. But to access your devices—iPhones, iPods, and iPads—or to go to the iTunes Store, you have to move your mouse all the way to the other side of the screen. Clicking the button to activate the Mini Player involves the same long-distance mouse travel, though there’s a keyboard shortcut for that: Command-Option-3.

By default, the entire iTunes window displays your content in what was previously called Grid View. The sidebar is hidden, though you can display it by pressing Command-Option-S or by choosing View > Show Sidebar. List View, which you can access it by clicking List in the header bar, is still available for content other than Music; but Cover Flow and Album List views are gone. In the Music library, this is called Songs view.

Classical music fans are out of luck with iTunes 11. The only way to view your music by Composer is to use the hard-to-navigate Songs view. Neither the Artists nor the Genres view provides a Composers column; and the Column Browser, which could simplify matters, is available only in Songs view.

You can view playlists in a new way. Click Playlists in the header (the sidebar must be hidden for this option to be available), and you'll see a sidebar that displays only playlists. A pop-up menu above the list offers access to your different libraries—Music, Movies, TV Shows, and so on. Another pop-up menu, this one at the right side of the iTunes window, provides access to your iOS devices.

With the new Playlists view also comes a new way of creating playlists. Click the Add To button at the right of the iTunes window to show a two- or three-pane display. On the left are Songs or Albums in a single pane, or Artists and Genres with a list to the left and content in the middle. Your playlist is on the right; you can drag items to it, and click Done when you’ve finished.

The new way of creating playlists in iTunes 11 simplifies this task.

Curiously, if you have the sidebar displayed, you don’t see the Add To button when you click a playlist, and you have to manually drag items to the playlist. This surprising situation is one of the many inconsistencies in iTunes 11, where controls appear and disappear according to what you are viewing and how.

All of these view options are essentially the same for other types of content. I’ve focused on music here, but movies, TV shows, books, and so on, inherit the same options.

Continue to page two of our iTunes 11 review ?

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