The $30 Innotraveler Universal Car Mount attaches to the inside of your car’s windshield, letting you mount your iPhone for easy access—say, for GPS guidance—while you’re on the road.

For folks who want to digitize every paper note, receipt, or bill, a dedicated scanner—preferably one with a duplexing automatic document feeder—is a must. But if you aren’t a hardcore paper-hater and you occasionally need to get the contents of printed material into your computer, you may not need a dedicated scanner that takes up precious desk space. Instead, you can use an app like Prizmo 2. With Prizmo you use your iPhone camera, point and shoot camera, or DSLR to capture images of documents, and then the software uses optical character recognition (OCR) to turn the scans into editable text. Prizmo also works with scanner that lacks OCR capabilities from companies like Brother, Canon, Xerox, Lexmark, Epson, and HP.

Scanners have flatbeds or feeders that help keep pages straight, flat, and in focus. But images of documents captured with a camera can have problems—they can be crooked, have the wrong exposure, or be distorted—which makes it difficult for OCR software to correctly recognize the scanned letters. Even images that you takes pictures of can suffer from barrel distortion or be trapezoidal. Prizmo has many tools to help fix these common problems. You can open images already captured in Prizmo, or you can attach your iPhone or iPad to your Mac and, if Prizmo is on and active, photos taken with your iOS device will show up automatically in the application.

Prizmo has a clean, modern user interface. When you first launch the application and select new document, a large grey window appears that invites you to drop pictures onto it, or to click one of three icons to open an existing image file, import from a camera or scanner, or to browse your image libraries.

A dark grey tool bar sits along the bottom of the application window, the contents of which changes depending on the file type that you’ve chosen to work with: Text, Business Card, or Image. The tools on the toolbar let you rotate and crop the images and adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness, and saturation of images to make them easier for the OCR engine to recognize. You can even calibrate your camera using Prizmo to improve the quality of the images captured. Once you’ve processed the scan, click on the toolbar’s Export icon to send the text to Mail, Evernote, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, WebDAV, or a document saved in iCloud.

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The $100 Flower/Tower Floor Stand lets you mount your iPad and then adjust it for prime viewing whether you’re sitting or standing. It’s available in 3-meter or 5-meter versions to get just the right viewing height.

Logitech’s $80 Wireless Solar Keyboard K760 for Mac, iPad, iPhone is one of my favorite Mac keyboards of the past few years, thanks to—as I put it in my review—an appealing design, good keys and key layout, a nice batch of special-function keys, a reasonable price, and multi-device Bluetooth support. The company has followed up with the $100 Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard K811, a keyboard that’s similar to the K760 in many ways, yet different enough to make it even more tempting to some people. (The Easy-Switch is specifically designed for Apple devices; the Bluetooth Illuminated Keyboard K810 is a nearly identical keyboard designed for use with Windows PCs and Android devices.)

At 11.4 inches wide, 5.1 inches from front to back, and less than 0.5 inch thick, the Easy-Switch is about the same width and thickness as the K760, but the Easy-Switch is about 1.5 inch shallower than the K760 (and smaller overall than Apple’s Wireless Keyboard). The Easy-Switch is also nearly flat, front to back, which is ergonomically preferable to a sloped design. And whereas the K760 was silver with white keys, the Easy-Switch’s silver-and-black design is a better match for current Macs. My only complaint here is that the black keys show fingerprints and skin oils much more than did the K760’s white keys. The body of the Easy-Switch feels sturdy and solid.

The Easy-Switch’s smaller front-to-back dimension compared to the K760 is largely attributable to the fact that the Easy-Switch’s rechargeable battery isn’t solar-powered, so it doesn’t need the K760’s large swath of solar cells. Instead, you recharge the Easy-Switch by using the included cable to connect it to one of your computer’s USB ports. According to Logitech, a 3-hour charge lasts for between 10 days (with key backlighting on full) and a year (with backlighting off), depending on how much you type each day. Over a month or so of using the Easy-Switch with the backlighting at the second-brightest setting, I needed to recharge it only once.

Light ’em up

Wait, backlighting? Yes, the Easy-Switch, unlike the K760 and most other wireless keyboards on the market, features laser-etched, backlit keys to make it easier to see the keys in dimly lit working environments: The keys’ white characters are lit from behind. Unlike Apple’s backlit laptop keyboards, this model shows a bit of light bleed around the edges of the keys, but overall the Easy-Switch’s backlighting looks great. The keyboard automatically adjusts the brightness of the backlighting (four levels of brightness are available) based on the ambient light level, or you can press the F8 or F9 key to manually lower or raise, respectively, the brightness level. You can also manually disable backlighting to extend battery life.

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If there’s one thing I miss from my old MacBook Pro, it’s the backlit keyboard, which let me easily see keys in the dark—being a morlock, a dimly lit room is my preferred work environment. Moshi’s $100 Luna is a USB desktop keyboard with a similar feature: It has backlit, illuminated keys, similar to those found on Apple’s MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboards.

The Luna is a full-size, 109-key keyboard with a glossy-black finish surrounded, around the edges, by clear acrylic. The keyboard is angled downward at a nine-degree angle that can’t be adjusted, so if you prefer a flat typing surface, this may not be the keyboard for you. Having said that, I have no complaints about the keyboard’s angle—I found it fairly neutral for my usual typing position and I didn’t experience any difficulty using it for long periods.

Part of the reason for this comfort is that the Luna is a low-profile keyboard, with a key feel not terribly different from Apple’s current keyboards. Underneath the keys are scissor-switch mechanisms, which help produce a smooth, short keystroke with a soft touch. The Luna lacks the sharp, tactile response of a mechanical keyboard such as Matias’s Tactile Pro, but using the Luna is an easy transition for people accustomed to the membrane-style keyboards found on Apple’s products. The keyboard is also quiet, making it well-suited for work in a shared space.

Unlike many keyboards in this price range, the wired Luna keyboard lacks pass-through USB ports of its own, so if you have other devices you’re planning to plug in, you’ll need to use one of your Mac’s USB ports instead.

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For serious typing sessions—or if you just can’t get the hang of the iPad’s onscreen keyboard—an external keyboard offers the tactile advantages of real keys without sacrificing the iPad’s portability and touchscreen features.

The iPad supports almost any Bluetooth keyboard, but there are many, many keyboards on the market that are specifically made for use with the iPad. These tend to be designed for portability, and they usually include special iPad-function keys for adjusting volume and screen brightness; controlling media playback; opening iOS’s Spotlight-search screen; going to the Home screen; and more. Some even offer dedicated buttons for cut, copy, and paste. Most iPad keyboards are integrated into some sort of protective case, although a few are standalone models; regardless of the design, most include rechargeable batteries that last for weeks or months on a charge.

I wrote the first edition of this buying guide back in December 2011 after testing roughly three dozen iPad keyboards. Since then, I’ve had a chance to test several dozen more, and I’ve incorporated my findings into this updated edition.

Things to consider when shopping

There are a few things to consider when shopping for a keyboard for your iPad.

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It’s been about eight years since I first looked at Evoluent’s VerticalMouse 2 for another publication. The company is now at the fourth iteration of its ergonomically focused input device, appropriately named the VerticalMouse 4 (or, more specifically in the case of the model I tested, the VerticalMouse 4 Right Mac, as it’s designed for righties.)

A Macworld colleague reviewed version 3 of the Vertical Mouse four years ago, and while the device’s overall design hasn’t changed much in version 4, what has changed has improved for the better.

The VerticalMouse’s physical design remains unchanged since version 3: Your hand rests on the mouse in a handshake-like orientation that’s more natural than the usual palm-down position. According to Evoluent, this natural position is better for your hand, wrist, and arm, though the company doesn’t claim that the mouse prevents or alleviates repetitive-stress injuries.

Adjusting to the VerticalMouse does takes a bit of time, especially if you’re accustomed to a traditional mouse or a trackpad. Though I don’t suffer from chronic RSI, I immediately felt considerably less tension in my forearm and wrist. For several days, however, the VerticalMouse just didn’t feel secure enough in my hand. And instead of resting my thumb on the thumb rest, initially I would unconsciously grip the VerticalMouse at its widest part, just below the thumb rest. (After a day of consciously reminding myself to do so, I was able to use the thumb rest comfortably.)

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I use Logitech’s Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 () every day. That keyboard satisfies my particular needs: I prefer a full-size keyboard with a number pad, and I want it to work wirelessly without having to remember to change batteries.

Since I acquired that keyboard more than a year ago, I’ve considered also replacing my Magic Trackpad with something that doesn’t require batteries. But once I went trackpad, I just couldn’t go back-pad. So I kept on keeping on with my Magic Trackpad, swapping in replacement AA batteries when the need arose—a smidgen too frequently for my taste, I thought.

Which is why Logitech’s announcement of its $70 Rechargeable Trackpad for Mac was big news for me. I was delighted to get my hands—or, really, fingertips—on one.

What it says on the tin

The Rechargeable Trackpad for Mac is, like Apple’s own standalone trackpad, a glass trackpad that supports OS X’s Multi-Touch gestures. But unlike Apple’s trackpad, this one has a built-in, rechargeable battery. You charge that battery by connecting one end of the included USB-to-Micro-USB cable to the Micro-USB port on the back of the trackpad, and the other end to a USB port on your Mac. Logitech says three hours of charging should give you about 60 hours of use.

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If your total experience with scanners is with the flatbed type that sits atop all-in-one printers, you may be excused for thinking scanners are not all that exciting. Given the slow, awkward, one-sheet-at-a-time way these devices perform, it’s hard to imagine using them to convert a stack of documents into scanned images.

That’s why we have document scanners. These devices can dispense with paper at speeds of around 25 pages per minute. While they can’t scan intact pages from a book, they are otherwise the perfect solution for getting rid of the clutter in your office.

The two most popular lines of document scanners are from Neat and Fujitsu. Their top-of-the-line desktop machines are Neat’s NeatDesk for Mac ($400) and Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX500 ($495). Both feature new mobile scanning options.

The hardware weigh-in

The ScanSnap iX500 and NeatDesk both claim similar specs. They scan at up to 600 dpi resolution, duplex and in color, with speeds of up to 25 pages per minute. Both automatically adjust to different sized papers in a single stack.

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Apparently, there’s at least one person who wants a touchscreen iMac. But Apple’s new iMacs do not have touchscreens, and there are no signs that touchscreens are in the iMac’s immediate future.

Macworld

To get that touchscreen iMac, you have to take matters onto your on hands and use LumiaView’s Zorro Macsk. Designed to fit the 21.5-inch aluminum iMac with a 16:9 aspect ratio, the Zorro Macsk is a frame that fits over the front of the iMac to add touchscreen functionality. Instead of using a mouse, you can tap the screen to press buttons, drag onscreen items with your finger, and use gestures similar to those used on an iPad.

Macworld

Thanks to the iPad, touchscreen interfaces are widely accepted, but right now, the experience doesn’t quite translate to a desktop computer. You can’t just slap a touchscreen on a Mac and expect the same usability as an iPad. While there are issues with the Zorro Macsk, the main issue is that OS X was made for mouse and keyboard input, not touch.

I tested a silver Zorro Macsk. LuminaView also offers black, white, green, blue, pink, and a classic style that matches the black and silver motif of the iMac. The outer shell of the silver Zorro Macsk looks like it is made of coated plastic.

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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.

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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.)

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Matias has long been a champion of mechanical keyboards, which use real, physical switches underneath the keys. The company’s flagship Tactile Pro 3 keyboard is the current go-to keyboard for many long-time mechanical-keyboard enthusiasts. The only problem is that typing on the Tactile Pro is loud. Antisocially loud, especially if you work in a shared office environment, need to type when you’re on the phone, or need to work (or play) in the evening hours when others might be trying to get some shuteye. Matias has worked hard to fix that complication in the company’s newest mechanical keyboard, the $150 Quiet Pro Keyboard for Mac.

Matias sells the Quiet Pro in versions optimized for Mac or Windows PCs. The Mac version comes in a silver case to mimic Apple’s hardware, while the PC version comes in black. (The keys are black on both models.) The Mac version’s silver-plastic finish looks a bit cheap. The keyboard itself also looks a bit clunky and heavy, but that’s par for the course: Mechanical keyboards are, by their nature, much heftier than their membrane (non-mechanical) and laptop-style counterparts. Despite the inexpensive-looking finish, the Quiet Pro is solid and very well constructed.

The Quiet Pro’s 109-key layout will be familiar to anyone with experience using Apple’s current-model keyboard with numeric keypad. There are 18 F-keys, with most of the first twelve offering special functions: F1 and F2 are mapped to brightness down and up, respectively; F3 opens Mission Control (or Exposé, if you’re still using OS X 10.7 Lion or earlier); F4 pulls up Dashboard; F7, F8, and F9 serve as skip back, play/pause, and skip forward, respectively, for media playback; F10, F11, and F12 are volume controls (mute, down, and up, respectively). As on Apple’s keyboard, F5 and F6 are blank. These F-keys, unlike with many recent Mac keyboards, are separated from the main area of keys and are grouped into the traditional pods of four (F1 through F4, F5 through F8, and so on). This arrangement makes using these keys by touch much easier.

The keys are sculpted to fit your fingers, not unlike Apple’s old Pro Keyboard. Two feet on the underside of the Quiet Pro let you elevate the top edge of the keyboard about an inch if you prefer an angle. The keyboard connects to your Mac using a black, six-foot USB cable that emerges from the center of the keyboard’s back edge.

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First seen by our friends at The MacObserver, the $25 iSchmutz Air Filter For Mac Pro earns our favor merely for bringing Yiddish to the world of Apple accessory names. Lucky thing it’s also useful, filtering dirt, dust, and pollen to keep your Mac Pro in tip-top shape.

The $45 PlugBug World lets you charge your MacBook and an iOS device from a single outlet, at the same time. The new World version includes five different adapters, including those that will let you use the device to power your electronics in Europe.

As with past Expos, the show floor at the 2013 edition of Macworld/iWorld was peppered with companies showing off wares that help Mac OS and iOS users make make beautiful music with their beloved Apple devices. And many of the products making headlines at Macworld/iWorld were fresh off their debuts a week earlier at the NAMM music industry show in Southern California.

Castiv makes clamps for musicians looking to attach iPads and iPhones to mic stands, guitar headstocks, and tripods. This year, the nice folks at Castiv spared some love for drummers with a new Drum Sidekick, a clamp for holding your iPhone to the rim of your drum for recording or reading music. Due in April, the Drum Sidekick (pictured above) is expected to cost $49.

In the show’s Appalooza section, Focusrite touted its $199 iTrack Solo. A digital audio interface, the iTrack Solo lets you connect instruments and microphones to either your iPad, iPhone or Mac. Most audio interfaces support either a Mac or iOS connection, so having one interface for both is very convenient. The iTrack Solo has a quarter-inch input for connecting a guitar or bass, and an XLR input for microphones. It comes with a dock connector cable for connecting to an iOS device, a headphone port and two RCA phono ports for connecting external speakers. The iTrack Solo ships with Ableton Live Lite 8 for Mac and Windows, but will work with GarageBand for iOS and just about any other digital audio workstation.

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Still chasing that paperless office dream? If so, the floor of Macworld/iWorld offers many options that will let you digitize receipts and documents. The trend at this year’s show seems to be mobile scanning.

The Neat Company in booth #410 is showing off its NeatReciepts, NeatDesk, NeatCloud and NeatMobile apps and hardware. In particular, Neat has put a focus on its Digital Filing System software, sold separately if you already have a scanner. New this year: The ability to take photos from your iOS device and have the NeatMobile App sync your scans with your Mac or other devices via the NeatCloud service (which requires a monthly subscription fee).

Fujitsu has its ScanSnap line of document scanners on display in booth #610. A winner of Macworld’s Best of Show award this year, the ScanSnap iX500 is faster than before and allows you to send searchable scans wirelessly from the device to ScanSnap apps on your iPhone or iPad. From the mobile apps, you can save to services like EverNote, DropBox and Google Drive.

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Walking up to your Mac to control it with a mouse or trackpad is so 2012. The Mauz aims to turn your iOS device into a portable and even more capable input device, via a dock connector add-on and some nifty software.

The Mauz offers a full computer mouse interface, with right- and left-click and scrolling functions, that activates when you connect the hardware to your iOS device (currently 30-pin, but a Lightning version is also in development). But you can also use 3D navigation (think Wii controller) to rotate objects; program gestures to say, move between open webpages in a browser; and take advantage of your device’s built-in camera to use pre-programmed and customizable visual gestures to control actions based on hand movements.

Spicebox, which showed off the Mauz earlier this month at CES 2013 in Las Vegas, is actually looking to Kickstarter to help crowdfund the Mauz's development; it still has quite a way go to reach its $150,000 funding goal by March 8. But if all goes well, you may see it on sale starting in August.

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If the Wii has taught us anything, it’s that technology can help us get off our butts while still enjoying the fun and excitement of gaming. The BowBlade looks to catch in on the archery craze (that’s a thing, right?) and add an upper-body workout to your first-person shooting.

Jonathan Seff

Described as “the most versatile active-gaming device on the planet,” the BowBlade is a bow with a clip for iOS and Android devices that lets you play more than 35 target, shooting, sniper, and other games by drawing back on the bow and pulling the trigger—with enough resistance to make you feel it in your shoulders the next day.

The BowBlade will come in three different sizes depending on your height. Expect for it to ship in April for $185.

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Accessory vendor Logitech on Wednesday announced two additions to the company’s line of Mac-focused input devices, the $100 Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard for Mac, iPad and iPhone and the $70 Rechargeable Trackpad for Mac.

Like Logitech’s Wireless Solar Keyboard K760 (), the Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard (shown above) can pair with up to three devices simultaneously—for example, a Mac, an iPad, and an iPhone—and lets you switch between those devices with the press of a button. It offers a Mac-standard key set and layout, including Mac- and iOS-compatible special-function F-keys. The keyboard uses the same low-profile key design as Logitech’s other recent Mac keyboards.

Unlike the K760, the Easy-Switch Keyboard offers backlit keys to make it easier to find the right key in dim or dark rooms; Logitech says a sensor on the keyboard automatically enables this backlighting whenever your hands are near the keyboard and automatically adjusts the backlight brightness based on the ambient light level. Instead of being solar powered, the Easy-Switch runs off a rechargeable battery that charges via a USB cable.

The Rechargeable Trackpad, Logitech’s first standalone trackpad for the Mac, offers an alternative to Apple’s Magic Trackpad (). Like Apple’s offering, the Rechargeable Trackpad provides a large, smooth-glass, multi-touch surface for controlling the pointer and using gestures. (Logitech also says the trackpad is resistant to fingerprints and scratches.)

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There are plenty of great Mac accessories that we don’t cover in standalone articles. Our Mac-accessory roundup gives them a home—and gives you the latest info on stuff to make your Mac more useful.

Just Mobile: This vendor of accessories is known for its variety of aluminum stands, and the company has announced two new models, the $50 AluBase and the $60 AluRack. The AluBase, made from a single piece of aluminum, is a small cradle that holds your laptop upright for closed-lid use (while connected to an external display) at a desk. Soft-plastic inserts let the AluBase fit any current MacBook model. The AluRack (shown at the top of this article) mounts to leg of your iMac, Thunderbolt Display, or Cinema Display and holds either a closed MacBook or a hard drive behind the display. The two-piece AluRack is made of aluminum with an “anti-scratch TPR” cradle, and it attaches securely to the cable hole in an iMac or Display’s leg.

Logitech: This vendor of all things that send input to, and produce sound from, your computer has debuted the $200 Broadcaster Wi-Fi Webcam, a Wi-Fi-enabled webcam that broadcasts your live video to Ustream and can be controlled and previewed from your Mac or iOS device. Included software even lets you stitch together dual-view video from the Broadcaster and your Mac’s built-in webcam. The camera features 720p video capture (with H.264 compression) with digital zoom and digital pan and tilt, as well as a built-in microphone and an input for using an external mic. It also sports a lamp for illuminating your subjects. The camera is just 118mm long, 47mm wide, and 28mm thick and weighs just 97 grams (including the two-hour battery); the included base adds 161 grams. The camera can also be used as a standard webcam for FaceTime, iChat, and Skype video chats and for recording video using QuickTime or Photo Booth. Logitech says the camera ships this month.

Macally: Looking for something to protect your MacBook Air that doesn’t take away from its svelte figure? Macally’s new $50 SlimFolios (website not yet updated), to be available for both 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models, are form-fitting covers that clip onto your MacBook Air, letting you use the laptop without removing the cover. But unlike form-fitting plastic shells, the SlimFolio looks like a folio-style, metallic case. Each case features a soft lining and is available in four brushed-metallic finishes: black, silver, blue, or purple.

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You may be able to ditch your heavy laptop and take along your iPad instead, if you use an external keyboard for long typing sessions. In this video, I show you how to use a keyboard with your iPad and we take a look at some keyboards made especially for that purpose.

Transcript

This is Macworld senior editor Scholle Sawyer McFarland.

It’s light. It’s portable. And the iPad is powerful enough that many of us have wondered if we could skip lugging the laptop around and use it instead. But the sticking point is what to do about a keyboard.

The iPad’s onscreen keyboard is OK for typing in URLs and short messages, but for long typing sessions—taking notes at meetings or in class, or writing in coffee shops—you can’t beat the comfort and feedback of a real keyboard.

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We've covered Dragon Dictate—a program that allows you to dictate into your favorite application, to save time and effort typing—over several iterations now. But the recently released Dragon Dictate 3 () adds a transcription feature that can be useful in certain situations. Here's how that feature works and how you can take advantage of it.

About transcription

Transcription differs from standard speech recognition. Instead of sitting in front of your computer and dictating with an application open, you dictate into a portable digital recorder or an iPhone. Nuance's free Dragon Recorder iOS app lets you make voice recordings on an iPhone, and many companies sell portable digital recorders.

Dragon Dictate is a speaker-dependent program, meaning that you start by creating a voice profile and Dragon Dictate interprets the sounds it hears based on this profile. For this reason, you can't use Dragon Dictate's transcription feature for meetings or interviews. (Nuance says that it plans to update its MacSpeech Scribe transcription program, which doesn't run on OS X 10.7 or 10.8, but which can transcribe audio without requiring an existing profile. The company did not say when it expects to release the updated program.)

How to dictate for transcription

You don't have to pay attention to how your words will look on your computer screen when recording your voice for transcription, but you still need to think about it and use the special words that tell Dragon Dictate when to insert punctuation, when to skip lines, when to capitalize words, and more. You need to speak like this:

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Using a desktop scanner to bring printed materials into Adobe Photoshop is as old as Photoshop itself. In fact, one of the reasons Photoshop became the de facto image editor is that Adobe licensed it to be bundled with scanners throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s when designers and publishers were buying their first scanners. In those days, if you bought a scanner, you got Photoshop!

Now, everything has changed. After 20 years of “scanning into Photoshop,” the latest Macs, OS X, and Photoshop CS6 have made so many changes to their architecture that users of some older scanners—as well as current users of Apple's Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8)  are finding it impossible to do this any longer.

There are several reasons for this breakdown, and several ways to deal with the consequences.

What broke?

TWAIN: Beginning in the early 1990s, Apple and Photoshop supported TWAIN plug-ins. TWAIN was developed as a universal standard so that applications could access various manufacturers' scanner driver controls. In most cases, it worked brilliantly—so brilliantly that people forgot about the aging TWAIN connector technology between their apps and their scanners.

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When you use the volume controls on a Mac to increase or decrease the sound coming from your speakers, those levels increment in whole steps on a scale from 1 to 10: Press the Up Volume button once, for example, and the volume goes up one step out of ten.

But in versions of OS X prior to 10.7, it was possible to adjust the volume in smaller increments: If you held down Shift and Option before pressing the Volume keys on your keyboard, you could adjust the volume in quarter-steps instead of whole ones. For some reason, Apple removed this ability in OS X 10.7. But reader aGr[j5(6WU noticed that it has returned in 10.7.4—a change not mentioned in the release notes.

In addition to using this Shift-Option combination to control the volume more finely, you can also use it when you adjust the brightness on your Mac. Press Shift-Option, then press one of the brightness keys on a Mac keyboard, and you’ll notice that the brightness changes in quarter-steps. This is nice if you find your display is just a bit too bright or too dim.

Every so often, the two worlds in which I inhabit collide. Take this question from reader Scott Masel:

I have started taking piano lessons with my daughter to encourage her and have some father-daughter shared experiences. The problem is I rarely can practice because the kids are asleep when I am free to do it. I am looking for a full-sized (88 keys?) electronic keyboard that I can practice on with headphones, that feels like a real piano, that makes it easy to record things my daughter plays so we can share with family around the world, and that won’t break the bank. Do you have any suggestions?

Kudos to you on two counts. The first is showing your daughter that even adults can struggle to learn new skills (I hate to break it to you, but she’ll likely pick it up more quickly than you as her fingers and hands will adapt more easily). And the second is that you’re considering a full-sized keyboard that feels like the real thing (or close to it). Mini-keys are difficult for adult-sized fingers and when you graduate to a “real” keyboard it will be harder to adapt. Plus you and your daughter need to develop some strength in your fingers and the unweighted keys that you find on all cheap keyboards don’t provide enough resistance.

At this point you can go in one of two directions. You can purchase a keyboard that has on-board sounds or one that’s simply a controller—a keyboard that doesn’t make sounds of its own but rather controls music applications and devices connected to it. In either case, you want your keyboard to have a USB port so that you can connect it to your Mac for recording in an application such as GarageBand.

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Do you yearn for a paperless office, dream of being able to search your paper files as easily as your digital files, or simply want to reduce paper clutter? In all these cases, your goal is to turn all those piles of paper on your desk, and the contents of your bulging filing cabinets, into PDF documents that look exactly like the originals—and have searchable, selectable text. The best tool for this job is a document scanner.

When you need a document scanner

As the name suggests, document scanners are optimized for large volumes of documents—primarily letter- and legal-sized pages consisting mainly of text. If you’re looking at reams of business or academic papers, or personal documents such as receipts, bills, medical records, and tax forms, a document scanner is just the thing. (For more on converting to a paperless office, see “How to make your office paperless” or my ebook Take Control of Your Paperless Office.) On the other hand, with a few notable exceptions, document scanners are not what you want if you mainly need to scan photographs, slides, books, magazines, or anything thicker than card stock.

Most modern document scanners have a compact, upright design reminiscent of fax machines—you load pages to be scanned into an automatic document feeder (ADF) at the top, and they come out in a horizontal tray in the front. The scanners invariably include software that can perform OCR (optical character recognition), and are generally speedy enough to churn through dozens of sheets per minute. Operation is simple; after an initial setup procedure, you typically load your document(s), press a button, and watch it go. The pages zip through the scanner, and a few minutes later, searchable PDFs appear on your Mac.

The vast majority of document scanners offer 600 dpi optical resolution. That may not sound very high, as flatbed scanners intended for scanning photos and artwork more typically have resolutions of 4800 dpi or even higher. But when you’re scanning primarily text-heavy business documents, 300 dpi is adequate for highly accurate OCR, and higher resolutions massively increase file size while providing no practical benefit.

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If you use a speech recognition program such as Nuance's Dragon Dictate ( ) or the new Dragon Express to dictate to your Mac, you may be using the default headset provided with the software, or you may have picked up some other kind of microphone to use for dictation. While the headset that Nuance includes with Dragon Dictate is acceptable, if you want to get better accuracy and use a comfortable microphone for speech recognition, it's worth looking at the many different types of mics available.

Here's an overview of the different types of microphones you can use with speech recognition software, how they work, and what might be the best mic for the way you work.

Three types of microphones

There are three types of microphones that you can use with speech recognition software. The most common type of microphone is a USB headset. Nuance includes one of these with boxed versions of Dragon Dictate. While the headset they provide is acceptable, there are many headsets that are much better.

The second type of microphone is wireless. There are two technologies for wireless: Bluetooth and DECT. Each offer different advantages and disadvantages.

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Reader Joe Forbes’ heavy-handed mousing is causing problems with Safari. He writes:

I am now using Lion with a Magic Mouse. Sometimes when navigating windows in Safari with the mouse the page zooms in. I have never been able to figure what I was doing to make it zoom or how to zoom out. The only way I have found to go back to the original is to close the window and re-open it. Can you enlighten me?

You’re undoubtedly triggering one of Lion’s gestures. By default, if you double-tap with a single finger, you’ll zoom in on a Safari page element. To zoom out, double-tap again with that single finger. This is the Smart Zoom gesture.

This is one reason I find the Magic Mouse a less-than-ideal input device under Lion. Because it has no physical buttons that register an intended tap or touch, it’s possible to accidentally trigger gestures, much as you seemingly have. Thankfully you have options.

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But if Lion is any measure, gestures are becoming an important part of OS X; someday, they might replace the mouse entirely. So Lion's launch is a perfect opportunity to make the switch—or, at minimum, to become conversant in this interactive language. And even if swiping and tapping on a trackpad is already familiar to you, you’ll still need to adjust to Lion’s new vocabulary. Here are some tips for doing both.

If you use gestures now

Learning to use gestures in Lion will obviously be a lot easier if you've already been using them in Snow Leopard. To make things even easier, several of them haven’t changed.

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