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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Review: Pid an old-fashioned platform game with modern anti-gravity gameplay

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Great accessories that match your Mac

If you're enough of a fan of Apple’s designs that you insist that your accessories not spoil the aesthetic, take note: We’ve rounded up some of our favorite gear that will blend right in with the aluminum-and-black motif of an Apple-equipped home or office.

And if you’re doing some last-minute holiday shopping for a Mac-using friend or family member, you can't go wrong with these items—they're sure to look at home next to any Mac.

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Review: Curio 8 gives you more planning and presenting power

Nathan Alderman is a writer and copy editor, and frequent Macworld contributor based in Alexandria, Virginia.
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Equal parts project manager, vector graphics engine, digital notebook, and slide deck, Zengobi’s Curio 8 makes an ideal tool for anyone planning something big, complex, and multifaceted. Though it costs more than twice as much as the low-end version of Curio 7 () I reviewed last May, it packs plenty of potent new features within a pleasantly refreshed interface.

Rebuilt from the ground up for Lion and Mountain Lion, Curio 8 casts away the confusing multiple editions and feature sets of its previous version. For a single price, every user can employ all of the program’s top-flight tools and abilities. (This also eliminates any feature-set confusion in Curio’s top-notch help files.) Files from older versions migrate seamlessly into the new one, but users should keep in mind that Curio 8 uses a different file type that previous Curio versions can't read.

It’s easy to add a multitude of customizable, trackable elements to your project.

Within each Curio project file, users can create a series of Idea Spaces to house different aspects of their business presentation, lesson plan, novel outline, or photo scrapbook, among other uses. In a wedding planning guide, for example, one Idea Space can hold to-do lists, another the guest list, a third the seating chart, etc. Easy but powerful vector graphics tools and flow chart creators —here called “mind maps”— assist with the planning. You can adjust these and any other elements’ shapes, colors, fonts, and much more, and save your own custom templates for any element.

Curio lets you drag in not only photos and video files, but also live Web page views, Google Drive documents, and live-updating file previews from a host of programs, including Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Word’s heavy hitters. In Curio 8, you can now add YouTube and Vimeo videos, or record your own audio and video with the Mac’s built-in tools. You can also link a project to your Calendar and Reminders, even if they reside in iCloud.

To help you track your project’s progress, Curio can assign checkboxes or “percent completed” markers to any element. It’ll then monitor those parts of your work project-wide to let you know which remain undone. Using your Mac’s Contacts, you can assign different elements to different team members, or even have multiple team members working on different parts of the same element.

A revised interface takes its cues from iOS, and lays out buttons and menus in a user-friendly way.

Curio 8 offers several higher-end features I hadn’t seen in Curio Core 7. You can easily turn any project into a slideshow presentation, complete with customizable Core Image transition styles. And Mac users who remember Sherlock, the old Mac OS’s rudimentary Internet search tool, may delight in Curio 8’s Sleuth. In one handy window, it can search piles upon piles of Websites creative professionals may find useful, including font foundries and image libraries. The levels of thought and care Zengobi put into this and every other Curio feature never failed to impress.

This attention to detail extends to Curio’s new interface, whose floating menus and tactile switches are heavily inspired by iOS. Despite the many different buttons and options that surround every edge of the Curio window, the interface proves easy to learn. The friendly, comprehensive Getting Started walkthrough project helps considerably.

Zengobi’s concentrated as many features as possible into logical buttons and menus. For example, just one button opens the menu to insert every possible element into a presentation; clicking on the element you want leads into more detailed specifications, without cluttering up your screen. Everything’s labeled with ToolTips in case you forget what a particular icon signifies. A new Share button exports your work as text, HTML, RTF, or PDF.

Finally, Zengobi gratifyingly fixed a few of the quirks that annoyed me in Curio Core 7. Video playback now works flawlessly, and while most Idea Spaces remain too big for a 13-inch laptop screen, holding the Q key zooms out to show the whole page, and releasing it refocuses on wherever your cursor points.

The Sleuth window makes web searching even easier for creative pros in search of good resources.

While Curio remains more expensive than many rival programs, I have yet to review a better, friendlier, or more powerful tool for taking on any project under the sun.

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Review: Twitterrific 5 brings elegance to the foreground

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Dan has been writing about all things Apple since 2006, when he first started contributing to the MacUser blog. Since then he's covered most of the company's major product releases and reviewed every major revision of iOS. In his "copious" free time, he's usually grinding away on a novel or two.
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Up to a point, pretty much all Twitter clients look the same since, at their most basic, they all display a list of tweets. But within that spectrum, The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific 5—the latest update to what was arguably the first Twitter client for iOS—has taken pains to distinguish itself from the competition and from its own previous editions.

The difference is apparent from the get-go. The previous version featured recognizable elements of iOS, from the buttons and the titlebars to the pop-up menus that appear when you tapped on an avatar or a tweet’s reply button. The new version instead features a much more seamless design; yes, tweets are still broken up by dividing lines, but they still seem to flow into each other in a way that most common clients don’t. The new design also isn’t afraid to buck established conventions: Tap on a user’s followers, or the people they’re following, and you’ll get a grid of avatar thumbnails instead of just the usual scrollable list.

Worth a thousand words: Twitterrific 5 shows you a scrollable list of avatar thumbnails when you view a user's followers or the people they're following.

Content is front and center in the new design, which features large tabs at the top for Tweets, Mentions, Messages, and Favorites on the iPad; on the iPhone, those labels are condensed into icons, and Favorites is shunted into the sidebar. Symmetrical round buttons on the left and right allow you to view a sidebar and compose a tweet, respectively. There’s also quick access to lists from the sidebar, and a simple search that offers you the ability to look for tweets or a particular user. On the iPad, the sidebar can be pinned permanently to the left hand side if you feel lost without it.

The Iconfactory’s used animations for effect here, with dialog boxes flying in from the edge of the screen, but they’re not overwhelming or unnecessarily flashy. (Well, except perhaps the pull-to-refresh animation that features the iconic Twitter bird hatching from an egg, but there’s something too hypnotic about it to just dismiss it.) And despite those animations, the app is fast and responsive, with tweets loading and scrolling quickly.

The same low-key enthusiasm pervades all of Twitterrific 5. Subtlety is the name of the game here. Per-tweet controls like reply, retweet, and favorite don’t appear until you tap on a tweet. Indicators on the mentions and messages tabs are small colored triangles. The palette in general is fairly monochromatic, with the rare exception of highlight colors that really draw attention. Tweets you haven’t read yet have their timestamps in purple, instead of gray. Above all, it’s simple and not overwrought.

Any way you want it: From font face to line spacing, Twitterrific 5 offers a large number of options for how tweets are displayed.

Twitterrific has long been heralded for its customization features, and version 5 offers quite a few of those. From the sidebar, tap on the change font size button (Aa) to summon a window with a number of display options, including changing the font face throughout the app (by default it’s tried-and-true Helvetica, but four other options are also available), adjusting font size up and down, choosing from small or large avatar icons, and adjusting the spacing between lines of text. There’s also a brightness slider, independent from iOS’s own, and a choice between dark and light themes. In a nice touch, there’s an option elsewhere in the app’s settings to have Twitterrific automatically shift from dark to light themes based on time of the day.

Despite that customization, you won’t find a laundry list of services for Twitterrific to interact with for uploading images and videos. You can choose a Sync Service to keep your Twitter timeline in the same position across devices: Twitterrific offers support for both iCloud, which allows syncing between the iPhone and iPad versions of the app, and Tweet Marker, which supports syncing across multiple clients, including Twitterrific for Mac. In addition, the app will detect if your device has the Instapaper or Pocket apps installed, and provide options for bookmarking URLs to those services.

Compose yourself: Writing a tweet offers autocomplete of usernames, and the ability to quickly add images.

Gestures are on display here as well. Tapping and holding the profile picture in the top left will prompt you to change accounts, if you have more than one configured. Swiping left on a tweet will bring up a reply window to that message, while swiping right will show you the conversation thread or replies to that post. And when composing a tweet, you can tap the character counter to clear all text, and tap and hold on the camera icon to just attach the latest photo from your device’s camera roll. In one bit of hocus-pocus that I’d never seen before, a two-finger swipe up or down in Twitterrific hides or reveals iOS’s status bar. The Help section contains a list of all available gestures and where you can use them.

Twitterrific’s emphasis on simplicity does have a few casualties beyond its integration with services. Push notifications are nowhere to be found, for example, though the app’s description says that you’ll get in-app notifications for mentions and direct messages. For notifications while the app isn’t in the foreground, you’ll need to set up a solution like Boxcar. If you’re a fan of other external services, such as Favstar, you won’t find easy access to them here either.

Twitterrific 5 does offer gap control, which lets you go back and load all the tweets you may have missed. While it does a good job of eventually loading all tweets, I found that it took more taps to load all my tweets than it did on Tweetbot.

There are plenty of Twitter clients on iOS, but Twitterrific has been around the longest and The Iconfactory’s willingness to completely redesign the app every few years is part of the reason the app’s success lingers. While Twitterrific 5 features a more competitive ecosphere than ever, there’s no reason it can’t co-exist alongside other excellent clients like Tweetbot; there’s audience enough for both Tweebot’s industrial design and Twitterrific’s more spartan approach.

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App Review: AltaMail is a modest improvement over iOS's Mail app

AltaMail from EuroSmartz offers users more control over their inboxes with wireless (and offline) printing, inbox filtering, and enhanced attachment options. But the email client for the iPhone and iPad also lacks options that power users likely want. As a result, the app’s utility falls somewhere between what causal emailers and true power users demand.

While AltaMail duplicates many features found in the built-in Mail app, it offers enough improvement overall to be of use to most iPad and iPhone owners, especially given AltaMail’s support for basic email tasks as well as more complex printing options.

Wireless printing from a tablet or smartphone is one of those technologies that, after trying it for the first time, you wonder how you ever lived without it. Thanks to the ubiquity of wireless printing through Apple’s AirPrint and HP’s ePrint technologies as well as wireless-capable printers from all manufacturers, you can print an email or document from your iOS device to a printer with relative ease.

AltaMail supports wireless printing through the aforementioned technologies, Google Cloud Print, and its own WePrint software, which enables printing over cellular networks (if installed). WePrint also enables you to use AltaMail to print to older printers that don’t offer wireless functionality by using your Mac as an intermediary between your iOS device and the legacy printer. (The WePrint app must be installed on the computer.) While it’s true that the WePrint feature is but a variation on “I’ll email it to myself and print it later,” its integration here is useful, even if the result isn’t quite as groundbreaking as EuroSmartz claims.

The version I reviewed, AltaMail 3.1, introduces custom push notifications from your email accounts, although it takes some initial work to set that up. In order to provide highly customizable notifications, AltaMail requires a free companion app called WeNotify to be installed and running on your Mac. WeNotify enables users to sync their accounts without leaving their login credentials on AltaMail’s servers, thereby ensuring data privacy. Although initial setup takes some doing, power users will welcome the ability to customize notifications, provided that they use AltaMail for all of their iOS emailing needs.

In addition to printing emails, AltaMail includes an option to save emails in PDF format. Unfortunately this option is available only as a $2 in-app purchase—which seems an expensive add-on to an app that already costs $5.

AltaMail does not currently offer Dropbox or iCloud sync support, although EuroSmartz says that cloud syncing is coming soon. AltaMail does offer local file sharing through a wireless network, though. Your iOS device is assigned a local IP address which enables you to load files into AltaMail directly for later attachment. Quite frankly, simply emailing yourself a file is probably faster and easier than going through the process of loading files directly into AltaMail, which requires WeNotify—yet another free Mac companion app available on EuroSmartz’s website.

Although it falls short when it comes to importing and exporting files, it’s important to remember that AltaMail is an email app; in that sense, it does its job well. AltaMail handles writing, editing and reading email well and supports contact groups and templates—both welcome features for email power users. Sure, AltaMail’s peripheral features are lacking at times but the core email app does its job well.

Most of us have hundreds if not thousands of emails in our inboxes. AltaMail is useful because it makes taming your inbox easier and offers yet another alternative to iOS’s built-in Mail offering.

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Review: The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld UK. Visit Macworld UK’s blog page for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings is undoubtedly one of the best role-playing games released in recent years and, as the name implies, it’s the sequel to the original Witcher game that was released on the PC back in 2007. Both games are based on the popular series of fantasy novels written by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski that follow the adventures of Geralt of Rivia, a witcher who roams the mediaeval fantasy kingdom of Temeria, slaying monsters and generally being mean and moody.

The Witcher 2 introduces a new storyline in which a mysterious group of assassins seems bent on bumping off all the local nobility. This leads Geralt into a web of political intrigue and skullduggery as he attempts to discover the identity and motives of his mysterious foes.

Role-playing fans will quickly find themselves drawn into this rich (and often adult) storyline. However, the Witcher games are a little unconventional when compared to more traditional RPGs, such as the Dragon Age series. You don’t have a range classes that you can choose to play, such as wizards, priests, and rogues. Geralt is essentially a swordsman, although he does have access to a limited range of magic signs and alchemical potions that can give him an edge in battle. The combat and skill systems are also quite complex so you’ll need to devote a bit of time to mastering them at first.

The original Witcher game is also available on Steam the Mac—and at a mere $10—so role-playing fans can go back and enjoy the saga of Geralt right from the beginning.

Some may find the lack of different character classes a little restrictive, but the vividly drawn world of the The Witcher 2 will appeal to anyone that enjoys old-school role-playing games. With the first game also available now you’ll have many hours of engrossing role-playing action to see you through the long cold winter months ahead of us.

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The 28th Annual Editors' Choice Awards

Hundreds and hundreds of products are released for the Mac each year. A few products truly stand out as impressive examples of quality, value, and innovation. These are the products that we recognize with an Editors’ Choice Award.

When it comes to the Eddys (as we affectionately call them), Macworld editors start with a list of candidates; this year, the list included well over 200 products (eligible products must have been released between November 1, 2011, and November 1, 2012). We take a close look at all of the candidates, debate the pros and cons of each, and determine whether a product meets our stringent standards for quality, utility, innovation, value, and excellence. After weeks of deliberation, we assembled a final list.

Ladies and gentlemen, Macworld presents the winners of the Eddy Awards.

Apple

MacBook Pro with Retina Display
$1699 and $1999 for 13-inch model, $2199 and $2799 for 15-inch model; Apple

A Retina display is a display with a pixel density so high that you can’t discern individual pixels at a normal viewing distance. You’ll pay a few hundred dollars more for a MacBook Pro with Retina display over a standard MacBook Pro, but the benefits are well worth the money. Graphics pros will love the intense image detail, and text is so crisp and clean that you might mistake your on-screen text for a printed page. If you’re worried about not having enough on-screen real estate for your work, you can always use a higher resolution than the default. The Retina MacBook Pro also comes with a speedy SSD, which gives these laptops a nice performance boost.—Roman Loyola

Fusion Drive
Optional upgrade on select Macs starts at $250; Apple

Solid-state drives are fast, but they’re pricey and their limited capacity often requires you to shuffle music, movies, and photos to a second, sometimes external, drive. Hard drives have high capacities and a low cost per gigabyte, but aren’t nearly as fast as SSDs. Apple’s Fusion Drive is a clever innovation that uses software to marry an SSD and a hard drive into a single storage volume that takes advantage of the strengths of both drives.

A typical hybrid drive uses a small amount of NAND flash (8GB in the case of the Seagate Momentus XT) with a standard hard drive, and comes as one physical device. In contrast, the Fusion Drive uses 15 times more flash storage, and the two drives that make up a Fusion Drive can split apart and serve as individual devices, if you so desire. Available as a build-to-order option on the 2012 quad-core Mac mini and new thinner iMacs, the Fusion Drive also relieves you from deciding which apps and files to keep on which drive. Appearing to both the user and applications as one volume, the Fusion Drive automatically moves your most-used files to the faster flash-storage portion, while moving untouched files to the slower hard-drive portion during periods of downtime.—James Galbraith

Tweetbot 1.0
$20; Tapbots

I fell in love with Tweetbot for iOS, but then it ruined me: No Mac client could compare. Turns out the only Mac app for Twitter that could match the experience of Tweetbot was Tweetbot. You can find numerous great Twitter apps for the Mac, but Tweetbot earns this Eddy because of its cleverly implemented approach to bringing an iOS app to the Mac. The app will feel familiar to anyone who has used its iOS counterparts, but it still embraces the fact that it is running on a desktop instead.

On the Mac, Tweetbot lets you Control-click (or right-click) almost anywhere to access extra features: You can right-click a user’s name or avatar to follow/unfollow, mute, reply, or direct-message; right-click a link to compose a new tweet with it, save it to a read-it-later service, or email it; right-click a hashtag to mute it or tweet with it; and so on. Tweetbot integrates with every power-user service you’d want a top-notch Twitter client to offer, including syncing service Tweet Marker and a slew of link shorteners and photo and video services. It’s a first-class Mountain Lion citizen, integrating cleanly with Notification Center, too. I now use Tweetbot to read Twitter across all my Apple devices, and I’m thrilled that I have it.—Lex Friedman

MacJournal 6
$40; Mariner Software

You’ll have no problem finding a writing app for the Mac; the market has dozens of options, from basic text editors with minimal tools to word processors with so many features you may not even know what to do with most of them. MacJournal is designed for personal writing, whether you want to work on a collection of poems, notes from a lecture, a daily journal, or brainstorming for your next great idea. MacJournal’s strength is its easy-to-use organizational tools, which focus on a tiered system of tracking entries in a user interface similar to that of Apple’s iLife apps. MacJournal also has support for encryption and password protection, and can serve as a way to post to a blog on WordPress or Blogger.—Roman Loyola

Wireless Solar Keyboard K760
$80; Logitech

Logitech

We rarely give an Eddy to a keyboard, but Logitech’s Wireless Solar Keyboard K760 has earned the honor by being functional, flexible, and even a little bit fashionable. The Mac-matching K760 is one of the best keyboards on the market thanks to an appealing design, good keys and key layout, a nice batch of special-function keys (that work with both OS X and iOS), and a reasonable price. But what makes the Bluetooth-wireless K760 truly stand out is that it can pair with up to three devices—Mac or iOS—simultaneously, letting you switch between devices with a simple button press: One second you’re editing an important work document on your Mac, and the next you’re composing tweets on your iPad. The K760 doesn’t offer a numeric keypad or other extended-keyboard keys, but the benefit of those omissions is that the K760 is small and light enough to slip into your bag for travel. The K760 is sufficiently versatile to be the primary keyboard for your desktop Mac, your MacBook, and your iPad or iPhone—without sacrificing full-size keys or a standard key layout.—Dan Frakes

iPad mini
$329 to $659; Apple

Apple

The iPad mini has been widely—and justifiably—criticized for its lack of a Retina-quality display. But in every other way, it’s just as much of an iPad as its Retina-equipped larger siblings, wrapped in a package that’s about half the overall size and weight. Inside the mini’s incredibly slim but solid body, you’ll find the CPU, GPU, and screen resolution of the iPad 2 along with the wireless and camera features of the fourth-generation iPad. The result is a smaller device that offers full compatibility with all 275,000 (and counting) iPad-optimized apps, as well as performance that’s surprisingly non-mini. In fact, the biggest praise I can give the iPad mini is simply to describe it as what it is: a more portable iPad. I suspect that enough people will be wowed by the iPad mini’s features, design, build quality, and—most important—size to make it the best-selling iPad. If it’s any indication, the mini has already become the favorite iPad of many a Macworld editor.—Dan Frakes

iPhone 5
$199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB, $399 for 64GB; Apple

Apple

To what should be nobody’s surprise, Apple finally increased the size of its smartphone screen—in its own particular way, of course. The iPhone 5’s taller screen is still the same width as every previous model’s, but the additional pixels provide more room for developers to exercise their creativity without hampering owners’ ability to hold and use the device with a single hand.

The new version is no slouch in performance, either: The iPhone 5’s A6 processor handily beats its predecessors, and the addition of LTE cellular technology means that the network connection finally brings actual 4G speeds, instead of the previous model’s reheated 3G. Likewise, better cameras on the front and back mean that the camera you carry with you everywhere is even more capable. Few things are more futuristic than the ability to conduct high-definition FaceTime calls no matter where you are (assuming your carrier supports it).

Oh, and did I mention that all of these impressive capabilities fit into in an attractive new package that’s somehow, amazingly, smaller and lighter than the already sleek iPhone 4S? Once again, Apple has managed to top its own flagship product, with a device that makes its once-impressive forebear look decidedly long in the tooth.—Dan Moren

Pogo Connect
$80; Ten One Design

Ten One Design

I’ve been waiting for a pressure-sensitive stylus since Ten One Design previewed a pressure-sensitivity test back in July 2010. Since then, several companies have attempted to conquer the mountain that is pressure-sensitivity support, and have encountered difficulty: Apple allows you to send this information only via Bluetooth, and each app must be individually altered to recognize and accept this information.

Ten One’s Pogo Connect cannot surmount these problems entirely, but the company, partnering with iOS app developers, has made the process as simple as possible for users. You don’t need to pair your Pogo with the tablet in the traditional way, or worry about turning it on or off to conserve battery power. Compatible apps have a single switch to pair the stylus—and once paired, the connection lasts until you quit the app or turn off your iPad. It’s an elegant solution, accompanied by an equally elegant pen.

The company’s pressure-sensitivity engine is sleek, and one of the best at recognizing both pressure and speed input that I’ve seen. And although the rubber nib—an 8mm beast similar to other companies’ rubber-nib offerings—may not please everyone, it offers decent friction against the iPad’s surface for fast lines and detail work. We don’t know what Apple plans for the future. But looking at the pressure-sensitive styluses on the market today, the Pogo Connect is the one to beat.—Serenity Caldwell

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Review: Google Maps for iPhone drives competition with Apple

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Dan has been writing about all things Apple since 2006, when he first started contributing to the MacUser blog. Since then he's covered most of the company's major product releases and reviewed every major revision of iOS. In his "copious" free time, he's usually grinding away on a novel or two.
More by Dan Moren

Given the celebratory hubbub over the release of Google Maps for iPhone, you’d be excused for thinking that Google had instead perfected some entirely new form of transportation—portal technology, perhaps.

The truth is somewhat less spectacular, though it will still delight many users of iOS 6: Google Maps for iPhone is a very good mapping application that returns some much-missed features to the platform, but it’s not without its shortcomings.

Google Maps's design is definitely evocative of iOS 6's Maps, though with Google's own aesthetic themes.

If you at least like the look of Apple’s iOS 6 Maps app, then firing up Google Maps won’t be so terribly jarring: The two look strikingly similar, down to the blue dot that marks your current location and the placement of the compass icon that appears in the top right corner when you use two fingers to rotate the map.

Their aesthetics are different, though: Google eschews the use of gray/silver chrome titlebars and buttons for a spartan black-and-white interface that evokes the simplicity of its websites and services. In satellite view, Google Maps overlays roads with translucent white lines, and labels more roads than Apple does at similar zoom levels. Ultimately, though, the different approaches are more a matter of personal preference than anything else.

Google Maps provides additional interface layers that can be accessed by tapping or swiping the little pull-handle near the bottom right corner of the screen, or by performing a two-finger swipe from the right edge of the screen (much like the trackpad gesture you use to expose Notification Center in Mountain Lion); I found that last gesture a little touchy—it often ended up triggering accidentally when I was trying to simply pinch-to-zoom the map.

You can apply multiple layers simultaneously in Google Maps, though the result can often be confusing.

Those layers—Traffic, Public transit, and Satellite—can be applied individually or in any combination, unlike iOS 6’s Maps, which give the option of either traditional maps, satellite imagery, or a hybrid view. There’s also an option for Google Earth, which you can tap to launch the app if it’s installed (otherwise, it’ll take you to the App Store). That’s probably an attempt to fill a gap in Google Maps’s functionality, since Google Earth provides a 3D satellite view akin to Maps's Flyovers. However, you can pan up and down in Google Maps by using a two-finger swipe; in the traditional map mode you will see translucent 3D models of many of the buildings.

While the satellite imagery in Google Maps is about on par with iOS 6’s Maps, Google offers more traffic coverage, though it doesn’t seem to provide construction and accident advisories as iOS 6’s Maps do. And as for public transit, well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish (see below for more).

In terms of performance, zooming in and out of Google Maps is at times a bit more sluggish than I’d like, especially compared to iOS 6’s Maps; it can take longer for Google’s map tiles to resolve and become readable. The use of vector-based tiles in Google Maps makes loading new data smoother than the old iOS 5-and-before version, and it allows the app to store more information when you’re offline; in my tests, Apple Maps stored a larger geographic area, but trying to zoom in to an area that wasn’t loaded, you eventually get blank tiles—Google Maps, by contrast, just lets you zoom further into a blurry tile.

One major absence that I imagine will be addressed sooner rather than later is that Google Maps is designed only for the iPhone and iPod touch; there’s no native iPad interface, though you can run it in the tablet’s iPhone compatibility mode.

Search is Google’s bread and butter, and the company’s been refining its maps data for years now. As a result, it’s pretty good—and it definitely has an edge over Apple’s Maps in my testing experience.

For example, Google Maps correctly located Mount Everest on a search (in Apple’s Maps it has reported an erroneous result since iOS 6's release) and managed to correctly locate a Finger Lakes winery I visited in September, which iOS 6 Maps could not find at all. (I did find, to my amusement, that Google Maps insisted upon labeling a local radio station as an airport, probably since it has a helipad; Apple Maps, meanwhile, had no label for that location at all.)

Of the two, Google Maps (left) is far less confused than iOS 6's Maps (right) about the location of the world's tallest mountain.

If you search for a term that matches multiple results, Google Maps will mark them on a map; you can view the full list of results by tapping on the list icon that appears in the search bar, or by swiping through the details bar that appears at the bottom of the screen.

While I didn’t have time to do a comprehensive investigation of Google Maps’s international locations, a broad survey of cities from around the world showed generally good coverage in places like Paris, Riyadh, and Tokyo. Apple’s coverage in the same locations was close to on par in some locations, and decidedly less comprehensive in others (Riyadh in particular). Again, this isn’t surprising, given Google’s long and abiding interest in mapping.

Searching for multiple locations in Google Maps plots them in an overview, but also lets you swipe through the options using the bar at the bottom of the screen.

Getting information about a specific place of interest is as easy as tapping on it; instead of the popover you may be used to, you’ll instead get a bar at the bottom of the screen with the place's name, a Zagat rating (if applicable), how many reviews it has, and how long it will take to get there by your current chosen mode of transportation. Tapping or swiping upward on the bar will display more information, including pictures, contact information, and reviews. One neat feature: Google provides an “at a glance” section that pulls out commonly mentioned terms from customer reviews. You can also share a location via mail or Messages, or copy it to the clipboard; in each of these cases, the location will be turned into a short URL.

Street View makes a triumphant return to the iPhone in this detail view, and now includes a nifty gyroscopic mode that you can enable, letting you pan your phone around to view a scene instead of tapping and swiping. There’s also a similar feature called "See inside," which gives you a Street View-style look into certain places of business (it seems most prevalent for local businesses and eateries than for chains). Both are nifty features, but I find their overall utility questionable beyond the novelty of showing them off.

Overall, Google Maps also does a good job of correcting my search mistakes. For example, when I misspelled the name of a local Italian restaurant, Google prompted me with the correct spelling; Apple’s Maps, by comparison, just told me that it couldn’t find any results. Google also seems to be more adroit at autocomplete, quickly winnowing out what I’m looking for and providing results that better match my expectations.

That said, Google Maps does have at least one notable shortcoming in search: Unlike Apple’s built-in Maps, it can’t recognize your contacts. So if you start entering John Smith, Google Maps won’t offer to find John Smith’s address—rather, it will look for a John Smith Street.

Log in with your Google profile and you can set addresses for your home and work, as well as save bookmarks to locations.

Some of this can be addressed—pun firmly unintended—by logging into your Google profile, which Google Maps will prompt you to do when you first launch the map. If you don’t, it will subsequently suggest you do so every single time you make a search.

That profile lets you set work and home addresses for yourself—entering them adds a briefcase icon and a house icon to those map locations, respectively, and they pop up as quick-pick options when you start a search.

Your profile also lets you save other frequently-visited locations by tapping the save button when viewing details about the location; those places also appear when you make searches near those locations and as star icons on the map. It’s nice to be able to bookmark locations like this, and even nicer that they then sync to Google Maps on the Web, but it’s frustrating that the bookmarking features aren’t available without logging in to your Google account. (And for those who are a little put off by storing location data with Google, you can edit your search history under your profile if you want to keep some places private.)

Google Maps's turn-by-turn directions provide automatic audio prompts and let you skim through directions.

While iOS 6 brought free turn-by-turn directions to the mobile operating system, Google has now fired back with its own wayfinding solution. Google Maps for iPhone includes not only turn-by-turn directions for driving, but also routes for walking and, more significantly, public transit.

If you’ve already searched for a location, getting directions to it is just a matter of tapping the blue car/person/transit icon in the bottom right corner, but woe betide you if you want to find out how to get, say, from that location to somewhere else, or starting from any place that's not your current location. There are Directions to here/Directions from here buttons, as in Apple’s Maps; instead you’ll have to clear out any terms from the search bar, tap the Route button, and re-enter the starting point and destination.

Google’s turn-by-turn directions are, as expected, very good. Plotting a destination gives you multiple options for routes, letting you quickly swipe or tap between them to choose the one you want; each option provides the time it will take, distance, and the primary routes. Avoiding highways and tolls are options as well.

As with iOS 6 Maps, Google Maps provides audio cues for making turns. While the app lacks the low-level connections with iOS that allow it to display directions on the lock screen, it can still provide notification banners and audio cues while the phone is locked.

You can actually swipe through Google Maps’s turn-by-turn directions, which lets you preview the next turns you’ll make. Doing so will pause your directions, but you can tap the Resume button in the bottom left to jump back to where you were. Tapping the options button in the bottom right lets you view a step-by-step list or mute voice guidance.

Walking directions are serviceable; as on iOS 6, they provide a list of directions that you can manually swipe through as you go.

In general, the actual directions seem on par with iOS 6’s Maps, though I noted that in many places, there was no overlap among all of the multiple routes the two apps offered. I also found I often disagreed with those routes: In some cases, none were the ones that I, as a local, would take, though all would get you to your destination in the end.

Public transit directions are color-coded with appropriate icons, and even warn you of travel advisories.

If there’s a major edge to be had with Google Maps, it’s the app’s support for public transportation directions. As part of the end of Google’s involvement with iOS’s Maps, transit directions fell by the wayside, but they’re now back with a vengeance.

Google has an extensive transportation database covering most major cities and even many smaller ones, including information about buses, subway, train, and tram / light rail. When plotting directions using public transit, you can specify a departure or arrival time as well as choose which forms of transportation you’d like the directions to take into account.

As with walking and driving directions, public transit gives you multiple route options, each with a overview of the route, the amount of time it will take, the fare (if available); it'll also provide you with a  notification if there any applicable transit advisories.

I appreciate the step-by-step transit instructions, and especially the fact that Google appropriately color codes lines or marks them with an icon where available; it makes the directions a lot easier to follow, for those who are unfamiliar with a particular city, or, for local residents, take in at a glance. The directions also provide a collapsible list of stops on certain lines, which is useful if you’re trying to track your progress—though Google Maps does provide an overview map of your journey, it doesn’t let you step through as it does with walking and driving directions.

However, I did notice some shortcomings where Google Maps again wouldn’t suggest particular routes that I’d take—for some reason, in many cases it would seemingly ignore the bus that runs down my street in favor of more oblique routes.

Still, the overall benefit of having public transit built-in to the app is hard to deny; it makes Apple’s third-party integration approach seem clumsy and incomplete by comparison. Google's raised the bar here and I’d be surprised if iOS’s Maps didn’t evenetually incorporate public transit information.

Google Maps is a very solid entry in mapping and navigation apps; those that have been waiting for it since upgrading (or holding off their upgrades) have probably already downloaded it. But given that it’s a free app, having it on your phone costs nothing but its slim 7MB download.

Best of all, installing it isn’t an either/or proposition: Google Maps and iOS’s Maps can happily live side-by-side on your iPhone, and you can choose whichever you like at any given moment. As it is, there’s no reason not to download Google Maps and give it a try, and many will find it preferable to Apple’s built-in offerings.

And, of course, the race is now on in earnest for both Apple and Google to bring new features and improvements to their respective software in an attempt to earn the loyalty of you, the user.

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