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

Contacts

First, you must set up your phone to sync with your Google account. To make sure that this syncing is enabled, go to Settings > Accounts > Google, and tap your email address (it will be at the top of the screen, under the Accounts heading). Then confirm that the Sync Contacts box is checked.

Next, open the Address Book app on your Mac, go to Address Book > Preferences > Accounts, and choose On My Mac. You’ll see two boxes: one that says ‘Synchronize to Yahoo’ and another that says ‘Synchronize to Google’. Check the Synchronize to Google box, press Accept in the pop-up box, and enter your Gmail address and password when prompted. You should now see a small sync symbol in your Mac’s menubar. Click this symbol, and choose Sync Now from the dropdown menu.

Calendar

To sync your Android/Google calendar with iCal, open the iCal app on your Mac and navigate to iCal > Preferences > Accounts. Click the plus (+) symbol in the lower left corner to add a calendar to iCal. Leave ‘Account Type’ set to Automatic, fill in your Gmail address and password, and click Create.

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Back in ancient times—throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s when just 1000 or so fonts were available for desktop computers—designers had a tongue-in-cheek saying among themselves: The one who dies with the most fonts wins! It made sense at the time because fonts were coveted by every designer as a creative resource of unparallelled importance, and prices were astronomical. While supply has risen and prices have dropped in more recent eras, one thing remains true today: Fonts remain incredibly important and valuable to anyone who puts words on paper or pixels.

Tiny programs

If your budget is low, or if you just want to experiment with a wide variety of type styles, check out the abundance of free and low-cost sources on the Internet. Warning: not all fonts are created equal. A font file that you install on your computer is actually a tiny program, with a variety of capabilities—including the ability to crash your applications.

Fonts come in three main formats: PostScript (Type 1) and TrueType are the oldest, and are fairly simple—but still capable of taking down your operating system. OpenType fonts can be far more complex, offering applications the ability to intelligently combine glyphs (characters) into new forms, add swashes to characters, convert combinations of numbers that look like fractions to true fraction characters, and so forth. OpenType is also capable of containing tens of thousands of glyphs, instead of the 256 limit of previous formats.

Aside from whether a font is programmed properly, quality is another issue. In some ways, crafting a font is similar to building a house. Anyone with a set of tools and some raw materials can put up a shelter that could be called a house. But the best houses are designed and built by people who have spent years studying and practicing the myriad techniques, history, styles, and materials. The same may be said about crafting fonts. Many masters around the world have devoted their lives to the true art of typeface design. Others are masters in crafting those designs into font files that you can use. Companies such as Linotype, Monotype, FontShop, and Adobe employ those masters to create the typefaces used by professional designers.

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PDF Editor Pro is a PDF editing and annotation tool from Wondershare that aspires to be a replacement for Apple’s built-in Preview app. While the app offers some features that aren’t available in Preview, it also lacks many of the basic features that make Preview so appealing as a PDF editing and annotating tool.

Open a PDF in PDF Editor Pro and it looks and feels pretty much the same way Preview does. There are several buttons in the toolbar that give you quick access to the application’s editing and annotation tools, which include tools for rearranging pages within your document, editing text within the PDF file, adding comments, drawing lines or freehand drawing and highlighting text.

Inline text editing in PDF Editor Pro works mostly as expected. Select the Touchup tool in the PDF Editor Pro toolbar, then double-click the text you want to edit to make changes. As is the case with any PDF editor, the quality of the edits you make using these tools may not be as good as your average word processor as the font used in the original PDF document may no be available on your Mac and you are only able to edit text one line at a time.

PDF Editor Pro has a new form recognition feature that automatically detects and highlights fields in a PDF file that are available for you to enter data into. When the application finds form fields a small blue bar appears across the top of the document stating that the document contains interactive form fields and all the fields are highlighted in blue. While it's possible to edit form fields in most other PDF editing applications, PDF Editor Pro is the only application I've used that makes it obvious a document contains these fields as soon as you open it.

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Back in 2008 when I last reviewed DevonAgent (version 2.3), I said this unique application had powerful research capabilities but was less successful at being a day-to-day Web browser. Now, many revisions later, this app (now called DevonAgent Pro) has matured and improved considerably, so I went back for another look.

DevonAgent Pro’s main function is to search for information on the Internet—but not just from a single search engine such as Google. DevonAgent Pro can collect data from all the major search engines as well as from dozens of specialized sources, such as USA.gov (government data; formerly called FirstGov), Lexis Web (legal data), MedlinePlus (medical data), Scirus (scientific data), the U.S. Patent Office, various online libraries, and so on, not to mention Facebook and Twitter.

You start a search by selecting or creating a Search Set, which tells DevonAgent Pro where to search and what to look for. The Search Set can include Boolean operators (AND, OR, XOR, NOT), proximity terms (BEFORE, AFTER, NEAR), and wildcards; it can also specify whether and how deeply to follow links, whether to search inside documents such as PDF and Microsoft Word, and how to present the results (for example, displaying only images or audio files). Besides filtering the search results according to your preferences, DevonAgent Pro ranks all the results in order of relevance and provides a brief summary of each one.

A search might take anywhere from seconds to hours, depending on how thorough you want a given search to be. But searches can run unattended on a schedule, and can even look for only newly added items since the last search. You can ask DevonAgent Pro to cache all downloaded pages (optionally clearing that cache—which can become quite large—when you quit), and you can also archive any search results within DevonAgent Pro or in DevonThink Pro, the document management app from the same developer.

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Chartsmith is a Mac app designed to do one thing, and only one thing: make charts. If your charting needs are casual and infrequent, this is not the app for you; you’ll be more than happy using Numbers, Excel, or any other spreadsheet to create the occasional chart. Conversely, you’d assume that if your chart needs are serious and frequent, Chartsmith would be the app to use, right? The answer to that question, unfortunately, isn’t an automatic yes.

Launching Chartsmith is a bit like stepping into a time machine: Chartsmith’s interface seems dated, with a two-window setup (plus a nearly-required Inspector window), a drawer for chart notes, and an odd toolbar-like thing that floats next to the chart window, yet is attached (with a delay) when you move the chart window around.

The flashback extends to the tutorials, too. Remember Aqua’s stripes and bright blue 3D-esque tab buttons? You’ll find them alive and well in the screenshots in the tutorials. (Thankfully, the app itself doesn’t share the appearance of the tutorial’s screenshots.) The whole thing just feels somewhat dated and dusty, though everything works.

Using Chartsmith is unlike using a spreadsheet to create charts. Once I learned the interface, though, Chartsmith was relatively easy to use. The aforementioned two windows contain the chart viewer (which holds the charts) and the data viewer (for entering/editing data), and the inspector is used to customize every element of your charts. The chart viewer window shows real-time changes as you make edits in the data viewer window, and you can change text (but not values) directly on the charts, if you prefer. Creating a chart is as simple as adding rows and columns in the data viewer, entering your data, and choosing a chart type. Want to change one bar of a three-bar chart to line? One click of a button in the data viewer window, and that task is done.

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There’s an endless array of minimalist, “distraction free” text editors to capture notes and ideas, but what about more visual, free-form thoughts? Fapptory’s $7 Delineato Pro (Mac App Store link) is a new diagramming and mind-mapping Mac app with a clean design and lack of visual clutter.

Each Delineato Pro document starts fresh with a gray canvas that is limitless in size. There are five other themes to choose from, but they’re mostly similar. To add to the canvas, either double or right-click to bring up a palette of shapes and lines, then drag the desired object onto the canvas. A grid can be enabled to help you align objects.

There are two simple ways to connect shapes. You can just drop a line out of the palette, then drag each end to connect it to a shape. Alternatively, click on a shape, then drag on one of the pop-up arrows to draw a line to another shape. If you just drag a line out of a shape and drop it on a blank spot in the canvas, it will create another shape of the same type.

There are a number of shapes to choose from, like clouds, but there are also purpose-specific shapes intended for Concepts, Tasks, Ideas, and Notes. You also have a selection of lines to choose from, including my favorite, a curved line that makes just about any diagram look elegant.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just plug a flash drive into your iPhone or iPad when you want to transfer a file or you’re short on storage? PhotoFast actually has one: The i-FlashDrive HD is a flash drive for the iPad, iPhone, and Mac.

The i-FlashDrive HD has a USB 2.0 connector on one side and a 30-pin connector on the other; it comes with a Lightning adapter for newer iOS models. PhotoFast offers four storage configurations, ranging from 8GB to 64GB.

PhotoFast

When you first use the i-FlashDrive HD, the device promptly takes you to the App Store in order to download the free app needed for viewing and transferring files. While I wasn’t keen on having to install a third-party app in order to view my files, it is necessary, and the app itself is an easy-to-use file viewer that allows access to the drive, and also comes with options to back up your contacts and to sync with a Dropbox account.

While in the app, you can encrypt any of the files on the drive by pressing the small padlock icon on the bottom right side of the screen. You’ll then be able to select which files to encrypt and set a password. Accessing the encrypted file is done by simply retyping the password that you created earlier. However, decrypting is only possible from the iOS app itself—trying to open the encrypted files from your computer won’t work. This is a nice little feature of the app that adds protection to the drive’s contents.

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PDFpenPro has long been my favorite application for managing, editing, updating, and signing PDF files on my Mac and iOS devices. PDFpenPro 6 is a significant upgrade to what was already an outstanding app, adding features such as automatic form recognition, export of PDF files to Word documents, and an updated interface that puts oft-used tools just a short click away.

If you’ve used PDFpenPro before, one of the first things you’ll notice is some changes to the program’s interface. A new toolbar appears above the top of your document, giving you access to all of PDFpenPro’s most commonly used tools. What this means, speaking practically, is that you no longer need to navigate a string of menus to reach editing and annotation tools, add form fields, or draw on your document.

One new feature that I’ve already found to be especially helpful scans your document for possible data-entry locations and then automatically adds form fields to those locations in the document. Although it wasn’t always 100 percent accurate in recognizing possible data-entry points, it was able to find field locations easily, whether they were checkboxes or text fields. Once the recognition process is done, you can quickly adjust the size and location of the fields and add new fields if PDFpenPro fails to recognize one properly.

My only gripe about the automatic field-recognition tool is that it recognizes fields on only a single PDF page at a time. This issue isn’t terrible with a one- or two-page document, of course, but longer forms led to more repetition, which I found annoying.

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StockTouch is a colorful, creative alternative to Apple’s stock Stocks app. The free StockTouch app works on iPhones and iPads alike.

The app works only in landscape mode, which is annoying—at least on the iPhone—but not a deal-breaker. Its default view is a colorful chart of stock performance, grouped by sector. You can tap into, say, Consumer or Technology funds as desired. Each sector is made up of tiny icons representing stocks’ relative performance.

Tap on any individual stock, and you can see all the market-related stats you’d expect, along with charts and recent news related to the company in question. You can swipe through that overview screen to see a larger chart or more news stories.

You can mark funds you care about most as favorites by starring them. Those stocks then get visually highlighted in StockTouch’s colorful default view, though you can also instead switch to a view that only lists your favorites. Disappointingly, there’s no way to view your favorite stocks’ performances in a list view—akin to Apple’s Stocks app—which makes reviewing your own investment performance take a bit more tapping than it ought to.

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These days, it’s hard for me to imagine life without password-management software. Good “password hygiene” is essential to protect my online data from prying eyes, and it would simply be impossible to handle the dozens of passwords I use every day in a safe way if all I relied on was my poor, overtaxed brain.

Alas, many users are still on the fences when it comes to a password manager; scared away by high prices and overwhelming features, they end up relying on unsafe practices that could cost them dearly if their information falls in the wrong hands.

Luckily, there are plenty of choices in this market, and the folks behind LastPass have come up with a solution that is ideal for users who want increased security with minimal effort.

Protection for all

Unlike many other password managers that store your data in a file and use third-party cloud providers like DropBox to synchronize it among different devices, LastPass is entirely Web-based. Your information is saved directly to the company’s servers, from where it is readily available any time you need it.

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Dropbox, the file storage and synchronization service, has become an essential part of many people’s workflow in the years since the service’s 2008 launch. The service frequently updates its feature, but its recent major 2.0 update goes beyond that—changing the desktop interface to make accessing the Web service easier and to make sharing items faster and more obvious.

Quick recap

When you sign up for Dropbox, you must download and install client software on each computer that will access your Dropbox. Client software is available for all major desktop and mobile OSs, and on the Mac, the client appears in your menubar. The software creates a Dropbox folder on your computer; and from then on, the file and folder contents of your Dropbox are automatically and transparently synchronized from your machine—up to the Dropbox servers on the Internet, and down to every other machine with access (machines on the same network copy files over your network for the best speed, but they also sync to the service). Just save or change a file or folder inside your Dropbox folder, and the changes will be distributed to the rest of your machines.

You get 2GB of free storage to start, and you can add more free storage by referring friends, up to a maximum of 18GB. Dropbox also offers paid storage tiers, as well as a version with special features for teams. Dropbox’s complete Web interface allows you to download, delete, and work with items; show their history; and even restore previous versions. You can use the Web interface to share files or folders in your Dropbox with one or more people.

Menu bar improvements

The new client software improves the menu in several ways. When clicked, the two buttons at the top open the local Dropbox folder and the Web interface, respectively. Below that information is a brief list of the last few items other people have shared with you, followed by a Recently Changed list; both sections now sport file icons indicating what sorts of files they are. At the bottom of the menu, a status indicator tells you whether the service is syncing or is up-to-date, and a gear menu leads to the listing of available space in your Dropbox and to Preferences.

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Last February, Intuit released an addition to its QuickBooks Online offering, an iOS app called QuickBooks Online for iPad that allow access to your QuickBooks data without requiring you to be pinned to your desk. While it’s clearly a first generation app—which means it doesn’t have all the features I’d like to see in an app of this sort—QuickBooks Online for iPad has the potential to ease your estimating and invoicing while you’re on the road.

It’s important to note from the start that QuickBooks Online for iPad is not a standalone app that you can use to manage your business’ books, and it isn’t an app you can use with the Mac or Windows versions of QuickBooks. QuickBooks Online for iPad is solely designed as a helper app for a new or existing QuickBooks Online account. A service that costs from $13 to $40 per month. If you don’t already have a QuickBooks Online account you can use the app to create one, and if you do you can use the app to log into your existing account and go right to work.

Work using the app is limited to a few basics functions that do not encompass everything possible with QuickBooks Online. You can add new customers, create estimates and invoices, add expenses, receive payments, and create some basic but useful reports. These features work well, but you don’t have access to some of the core functionality of QuickBooks Online and it’s also missing features that seem pretty obvious for what is ostensibly a mobile app.

Adding customers is easy, as is adding any other type of transaction. From any QuickBooks Online for iPad screen you tap a (+) that appears in the app’s upper right-hand corner, then choose either Customer, Invoice, Payment, Expense, or Note and begin adding the appropriate information. If you’re creating a customer the app is able to pull info from your Contacts app. Although, while the app offers a field for a customer photo, that photo is not imported from the Contacts app. Customers viewed within QuickBooks Online for iPad display a map pinpoint with the address location for the customer. Tapping that map opens the Maps app and automatically finds directions from your location to the customer location.

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The iPad and iPhone are powerful devices, but they can’t do it all yet. We still rely on traditional computers for a number of tasks, especially gaming and Flash videos. Splashtop 2 (iPad App Store link, iPhone App Store link, Mac App Store link) is a remote desktop app that promises to fill that gap, bringing the full capabilities of Macs and PCs to mobile devices. While there are numerous ways to access your computer from anywhere, such as VNC, LogMeIn Ignition, and GoToMyPC, Splashtop 2 is unique in that it emphasizes multimedia, and is capable of streaming audio as well as video. Even more interesting, it’s currently free for home use, with in-app purchases for additional functionality.

To begin, download the Splashtop Streamer for the computer(s) you would like to access. It’s available for the Mac, Windows, and Linux. Once installed, you need to create a login for the Splashtop service. While the original Splashtop required a Google account for remote access, Splashtop 2 now has its own login system.

This is where I discovered my first major problem with Splashtop Streamer: it won’t let you paste a password—a pain if you use a password management app, like the great 1Password. (At least you don’t have to reenter the password once Streamer is set up, but that itself is a potential security issue.) Splashtop support told me that this was disabled “in Splashtop 2 for security reasons.” Well, I’d like to be able to copy and paste my secure password, for security reasons. Fortunately, you can also create an optional 8- to 20-character security code that is required every time you remotely access your computer. You can’t paste that code in either, but at least it’s another layer of protection.

Once set up, Streamer stays in your menu bar and out of your way. However, you’re not going to want to run it all the time, as it has a habit of choking the CPU. On my MacBook Pro, with no clients connected to Streamer, I noticed my computer slowing down, and Activity Monitor reported that 98 percent of my CPU activity was dedicated to Stream. I restarted Streamer, but it did the same thing a couple of days later, using 91 percent of my CPU. Splashtop has told me that Streamer is being reworked and a new, improved version will enter private testing soon.

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

Aimed squarely—if you’ll pardon the pun—at small businesses, the $299 Square Stand allows you to connect an iPad to a secure card-swiping machine; it’s designed to work alongside the company’s free Register app. This, in turn, combines a credit-card-processing facility with a powerful point-of-sale system that can be used to maintain inventory and charge customers, essentially working like a souped-up version of a traditional cash register.

The Stand also features a hub that can be used to connect external accessories to the system, including a receipt printer, cash drawer, and barcode scanner. The current version works with an iPad 2 or a third-generation iPad—later this year, the company will release a version that works with Apple tablets that use the new Lightning connector.

The company’s new hardware is slated for general availability starting the week of July 8, when it will be sold both online from Square as well as at Best Buy stores; pre-orders begin on Tuesday. If you want to see it in action before then, Square says that it will be piloting the Stand at select small business throughout the United States starting May 15.

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Motorola Mobility abuses its dominant position in the E.U. by seeking and enforcing an injunction against Apple in Germany on the basis of its mobile phone standard-essential patents (SEPs), the European Commission said in a preliminary antitrust review of the case on Monday.

The Commission opened the investigation into Motorola Mobility in April 2012, about a month before Google's acquisition of the company closed, to scrutinize whether it abuses its patents that are deemed essential to an industry standard to get a sales ban on products of the infringing party.. Such conduct may be abusive if the potential licensee is willing to enter into a licence on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, the Commission said in a news release.

Motorola Mobility has asserted a standard-essential patent against Apple in Germany that relates to the European Telecommunications Standardisation Institute's (ETSI) GPRS standard, a key industry standard for mobile and wireless communications, the Commission said.

The Google-owned company committed to license relevant patents on FRAND terms when the standard was adopted in Europe, but still it sought an injunction against Apple in Germany over a GPRS patent, the Commission said. Moreover, after the injunction was granted, Motorola went on to enforce it, even when Apple had declared that it would be willing to be bound by a determination of the FRAND royalties by the German court, the Commission said.

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Printing often isn’t easy for iOS users—especially in large organizations. Luckily, Massachusetts-based Ecamm has just released Printopia Pro, an enterprise-class version of its extremely popular Printopia utility, which allows iOS apps to print to any printer without the need for special iOS software.

Like its consumer-level counterpart, Printopia Pro runs on a Mac and acts as an AirPrint server, allowing iOS devices to connect to it and send documents as if they were dealing with a real printer. It also circumvents the need to buy a printer model that supports Apple’s AirPrint—most of which are aimed at the consumer market, rather than SMB or enterprise.

Printopia Pro adds a number of features designed for corporate users to the mix, such as additional security, improved support for complex networking setups, and the ability to centrally manage arbitrary numbers of printers and users, tightly controlling access and privileges.

According to a company press release, the software is fully scalable, can support hundreds of users and printers from a single server, and is even capable of storing—rather than printing—the documents it receives to one or more Web-enabled folders. From, there documents can be accessed as part of more complex workflows for a variety of applications, ranging from education to business processes. However, it does lack some of the more consumer-facing features of Printopia, such as sending to a specific application or Dropbox.

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The Uncovermac line of products was created after this company's Amsterdam-based masterminds realized that the MacBook’s screen has a whole light panel behind it. They started designing the Uncovers, each of which offers glowing pieces of art—from flames to radioactivity symbols and more—to replace the Apple logo on your laptop. Prices start at €249, or around $325 in U.S. dollars. (Hat tip to Engadget.)

In an effort to return cash to investors, Apple is reaching out to the debt market and offering $17 billion in bonds, the biggest non-bank bond offering in history, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The bond offering comes after Apple announced last week that its board of directors had approved a plan to return $100 billion to shareholders through the end of 2015. That plan adds $55 billion to a previously announced capital return program.

The Apple offering has been oversubscribed and has generated in excess of $50 billion in new orders, the WSJ report said Tuesday, citing sources.

Apple did not immediately return calls for comment.

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Apple’s fiscal second quarter earnings announced Tuesday proved to be a mixed bag for the company—record sales for the March quarter, offset by a drop in income. But Apple CEO Tim Cook is optimistic about the company’s future, as he made clear during a conference call with analysts.

Here’s an edited transcript of what Cook had to say on Tuesday about Apple’s most recent quarter.

We’re now halfway through our fiscal 2013 and we’ve accomplished a tremendous amount. We’ve introduced and ramped production of an unprecedented number of new products, and we’ve set many new sales records. Our revenue for the first half was over $98 billion, and our net income was over $22 billion. During that time, we sold 85 million iPhones, and 42 million iPads. These are very, very large numbers, unimaginable even to us just a few years ago.

Despite producing results that met or beat our guidance, as we have done consistently, we know they didn’t meet everybody’s expectations. And though we’ve achieved incredible scale and financial success, we acknowledge that our growth rate has slowed and our margins have decreased from the exceptionally high level we experienced in 2012.

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Ambrosia Sofware—the maker of Snapz Pro X, Soundboard, and other popular utilities and games on Apple platforms—on Thursday fended off suggestions it was going out of business, even as employees of the company reported being laid off.

“To paraphrase Mr Clemens, the rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated,” the company said Thursday morning, via Twitter.“We are still in business, and supporting our products!”

Even if the company is still technically afloat, the head count has clearly been reduced. At least five of the company’s 10 stated employees—not including president Andrew Welch—posted on Twitter that they were now unemployed, including developer Jon Gary, developer Jeremy Knope, developer Rudy Richter, product support person Evan Smith, and sales and reception person Kat Brady. Two other employees, artist Marcus Conge and lead developer Dominic Feira, had updated their LinkedIn profiles to refer to Ambrosia as a “previous” employer. Still unknown as of this writing is the fate of the company’s other three employees: finance manager Bernard Cockhern, the company’s public relations specialist John Champlin, and quality assurance specialist David Dunham.

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It’s not a question of whether you can get real work done on an iPad. After doing so ourselves, and talking to readers who do likewise, we know that it’s already happening—the real question is how to get the most out of it. That’s why we’re proud to unveil our second iPad-only iBooks Author book, the iPad Office, now available on the iBookstore for just $3.99.

In this extended Macworld feature, we’ve packed in how-tos for writing, editing spreadsheets, creating presentations, and—yes—even using Microsoft Office from your iPad and iPad mini. We also have suggestions on how to best manage your files, access cloud services, print documents, and attend meetings from afar. And don’t miss out on our in-depth buying guide for finding the perfect external iPad keyboard.

To close out this extended feature, we have opinion pieces from senior writer Lex Friedman, editorial director Jason Snell, and senior editor Dan Moren. Follow Dan’s three-day iPad-only journey, let Jason tell you why he loves writing on an iPad, and read about Lex’s iPad writing experiences.

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

1. Change the cursor size

If you mirror your Mac’s display to a large-screen TV or use a large (or especially high-resolution) monitor, you may find that the cursor on your screen is too small. You can change the size of the cursor, and make it anywhere from big to huge.

Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences, click Accessibility, and then click Display. Drag the Cursor Size slider from Normal (smallest) toward Large, settling on the size you want to use; the cursor changes size as you drag the slider.

This setting will change the standard mouse pointer, as well as other cursors (the text input cursor, for example), though it won’t work in all applications. It will even make the hand pointer, which displays when you hover over a link in Safari, much larger.

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Keeping up with just one social media account is tough enough. But if you personally hang out on even one or two more services, or are in charge of socializing with your business’s customers online, juggling it all starts to feel a lot more like work, and not the fun kind. Here are a few tools and tricks—some for power users, others for business cases, and even a slightly nerdier option—that can help take the drudgery out of managing social media.

Get started posting with OS X

Depending on your needs, there is, of course, always OS X itself. As of Mountain Lion, Apple added some much-needed integration of a handful of social media accounts right into OS X. Go to Apple menu > System Preferences and select Mail, Contacts, & Calendars. Here, you can add multiple Twitter accounts, one Facebook account, and Yahoo, Vimeo, and Flickr accounts.

OS X’s social media integration mostly makes the process of sharing out to your accounts much easier. If you mostly just need to post status updates, links, and media, having these tools built into most of your apps and even having the good ol’ fashioned right-click menu can simplify a lot of your social tasks.

Try Tweetbot for heavy tweeting

But what if your needs are greater, as they might well be if you’re using social media for both work and play? In addition to your personal Twitter account, you may have another for your blog or business, a parody account for your favorite TV character or meme, and more. If logging in and out of each account at Twitter.com is getting dizzying, give Tapbot’s $20 Tweetbot for Mac a try.

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When you’re working in a deeply nested folder (a folder within a folder within…), the Finder provides several options for moving back up through the hierarchy. But only one option provides both at-a-glance info and powerful shortcuts for working with files: the Path Bar.

Open a Finder window (Finder > New Finder Window) and then choose View > Show Path Bar. The Path Bar appears at the bottom of all your Finder windows, showing the complete path from your computer to the current folder. (A path is the series of subfolders that leads to a specific folder or file.)

This is the only way you can see a folder’s path when a Finder window is in the background, but that’s merely the most obvious of the conveniences the Path Bar provides.

1. Access folders in the path

Is the path too long for its folder names to show? Just point—no clicking necessary—to a truncated name, and it expands so that you can read it. This point-and-expand technique works even on background windows, whether you’re in the Finder or in another app. Double-click a folder in the Path Bar to see its contents in the current window. Or, open a folder into a separate window with a Command-double-click on its miniature in the Path Bar.

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If you’re switching from a PC to a Mac, one of the first things you’ll want to do is to move all your data to your new computer. The process is fairly simple, but you can go down any of several paths depending on your setup and your needs.

Consider what’s in the cloud

Before deciding on a data-transfer strategy, consider the extent to which the data on your PC is already mirrored in the cloud. For example, if you already store most of your personal files in a folder that syncs to the cloud via a service such as Dropbox, you can install the corresponding Mac app, log in with your existing account, and sit back while your files sync automatically.

Likewise, if you store all your email on an IMAP server, you need only enter your credentials for that server in a Mac email client such as the built-in Apple Mail, and all your messages will download to your Mac. And if you rely on Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets, your documents will be right there in whichever Mac browser you choose.

Take a quick mental inventory of your data. Be sure to consider personal data such as email, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks; media such as music, photos, movies, and TV shows; and documents you’ve created or downloaded. If most of that is already somewhere in the cloud, the path of least resistance may be to connect to the same cloud services on your Mac, and then manually transfer any remaining items that live on your PC’s hard disk and nowhere else.

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Text is incredibly powerful—whether you’re making a business card or a garage-sale sign, you’re sending a message. The look of that message influences the way the receiver reacts: If the message is visually pleasing, the reaction is generally positive, but if the text is hard to read, that feeling of difficulty transfers back to you, the messenger. Here we’ll cover the basics of everyday typography, font pairings that are pleasing to the eye, practical formatting tips that work with a variety of software, and common mistakes to avoid.

Basics of typography

Before diving into formatting, let’s get a grasp on the lingo. Point size refers to the actual size of the text. The base line is the imaginary line on which text sits. The x-height is the size of the main character body, excluding any ascenders (bits of the character that extend above the x-height, such as in f or h) or descenders (bits that extend below the baseline, such as in g or y).

Font family refers to the character design, whereas font style refers to variations of that same design, such as regular, light, bold, italic, and so on.

Fonts also come in different categories such as serif, which has lines extending from the main stroke of each character that resemble tiny feet (think Times or Hoefler); sans serif fonts don’t have feet (think Arial or Helvetica). Other categories include slab serif (same as serif but thicker in weight), decorative and display fonts (characters with ornate shapes or those that are really thick), and scripts (those that look like cursive handwriting).

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As a doctor, educator, and administrator, I attend a lot of meetings. That means taking lots of meeting notes and, after those meetings are over, making sure that all of the action items we’ve decided on get done. Over the years, I’ve tried many different ways to do so.

For ages, I regularly hauled my MacBook Pro along with me, and relied on a variety of apps to capture notes and to-dos. Next, I transitioned to taking handwritten notes with the Livescribe Echo smartpen; that pen translated my scrawl into computer-readable graphics. But—true to the physician stereotype—I have awful handwriting, and my notes were illegible. To make matters worse, that workflow offered me no good way to hand over my action items to OmniFocus, my task manager of choice.

Finally I hit upon an effective workflow: Using an iPad coupled with a Zagg Folio keyboard, I take notes that are immediately available on all my other devices in a format I can search quickly, and to-do items get into OmniFocus almost seamlessly. Here’s how it works.

Taking notes

For starters, I have two note-taking apps on the iPad (and iPhone): Drafts and Notesy.

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Backing up your data is the most important thing you can do with your computer—even more important than tweeting or posting on Facebook. If you don’t back up your Mac regularly, you may lose those photos that you want to share; you may find that your latest holiday videos are missing; and your music library may go poof!

Time Machine is a great tool for ensuring that your data is safe, and it’s pretty easy to set up and use. But for some users, the basic Time Machine interface isn’t enough. As with most of OS X’s functions, there is a command-line tool that lets you do many things with Time Machine. Here’s how you can use the tmutil command to control and tweak Time Machine from Apple's command-line tool, Terminal.

The basics

Most people won’t need to use this command for their backups because the Time Machine interface will suffice. Who will need it? People who want to manage remote Macs or who want to run scripts containing commands for Time Machine.

The basics of the tmutil command can be found by typing man tmutil in Terminal. (You'll find the Terminal app in your /Applications/Utilities folder.) The man page tells you what you can do with this command.

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Increasingly the iPad is found not just attached to recumbent bodies on a couch but in businesses as well. With that in mind, Macworld, under the guidance of one of our guests, has introduced The iPad Office ebook. I’m joined by that book’s editor, Serenity Caldwell, as well as some of those who were responsible for the contents within it to share tips for using an iPad intended for business.

Download Episode #350

Show Notes

We mention a fair number of services and apps we believe are must-haves for any business user, including a Dropbox account, GoodReader for iPad, Printopia, PDFpen, Office2 HD, and 1Password. You’ll find many more in The Office iPad ebook, our $4 iPad-only publication available at the iBookstore.

You can subscribe to the Macworld Podcast by clicking here. Or you can point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader at: http://www.macworld.com/column/mwpodcast/index.rss

You can find previous episodes of our audio podcasts at Macworld’s podcasting page.

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Feel like shopping? Both the Mac App Store (Apple menu > App Store) and the iTunes Store (accessed through Apple’s iTunes) may appear to be applications, but they are actually websites. That means you don’t have to fumble through menus or wait for iTunes to launch in order to access the stores. It also means that you can use powerful Web-based tools—like Google search—to find apps, music, movies, and more. Here are six tips for using a Web browser to access the stores more quickly and efficiently.

1. Search from the Web

When you want to search the Mac App Store and iTunes Store apps, the limitations can be frustrating. For example, iTunes doesn’t let you search for record labels. If you’re looking for a song that’s been covered by 100 bands that makes it hard to find the version you want. Try Google to search instead.

Harness the power of Google: Say you want to find all the albums by a certain artist that are available in the U.S. iTunes Store. In your Web browser, type in a Google search such as this: Grateful Dead site:itunes.apple.com/us/

This search string has four parts. The first, Grateful Dead, is what I’m searching for. In the second part, site: specifies that the search is limited to the domain following the colon. The third, itunes.apple.com is the actual domain where the search will take place. (Both the App Store and the iTunes Store use the same URL.) Finally, the /us/ part at the very end limits the search to the United States stores. If you want to search in France, use /fr/; in the United Kingdom, use /gb/; and so on. (If you don’t know the two-letter code for your country, see this Wikipedia article. Naturally, not all countries have the iTunes Store or the Mac App Store.)

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