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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Evernote on Thursday unveiled a new update for the Web, iOS, and Mac versions of its note-taking service: a new reminders function, which prompts users to make updates and add new notes.

Macworld was able to take a gander at the Mac version of the new features ahead of launch. Regardless of how you’re used to viewing your notes—card view, expanded cards, snippets, or list view—the Reminders section always shows up in the top of the app’s note list, with a different reminder section available for each of your notebooks. The reminders themselves can be organized by date, by completed items, or by upcoming tasks.

Adding a reminder is simple: Just tap the alarm clock icon in the upper right-hand corner of each note, then add the date and time the note must be completed.

On my Mountain Lion-equipped MacBook Air, the reminder was delivered via Notification Center, just as with prompts from Apple’s own Calendar and Reminders apps. You can also choose to receive reminder emails on the days that notes are due. Once notified, you can update the note with the relevant information—or simply cross it off your task list.

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Sony and Apple are at loggerheads over streaming music, AT&T gets ready to open the floodgates on video chat over its network, and the head of Turkey drops in on Silicon Valley. The remainders for Monday, May 20, 2013 are up a stream without a paddle.

One issue holding up Apple iRadio: The economics of skipping songs (CNet)

If you were expecting Apple’s rumored music streaming service to roll out at next month’s WWDC, you might be disappointed. CNet reports that Sony Music is at odds with Cupertino over what Apple will pay for songs that users skip or rate poorly. Here’s a tip, Sony: Make better music. That one’s free!

AT&T says ‘any’ mobile video chat app will work on its network by the end of 2013 (The Verge)

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Google had a lot to say during Wednesday’s Google I/O keynote—so would you, if you had three-and-a-half hours to fill. And while new features in voice-powered search functionality, Google Maps, and other pronouncements from the search giant were certainly eye-catching, just how much of what was said at this week’s developer conference should make iOS device owners sit up and take notice?

Quite a bit, actually, though there was nothing that'll cause a parade of iPhone and iPad users to swap their devices for the Android counterparts. With the understanding that Google will still need to deliver on many of the promises it made this week—and that Apple has a developers conference of its own in a month’s time—more than a few Google I/O announcements deserve your attention, even if the only way you’ll give up your iPhone is when it’s pried out of your grip. After all, it’s a safe bet that more than a few people in Cupertino were keeping a close eye on Google I/O this week.

For developers

I/O is a developers’ confab first and foremost, so it stands to reason that Google would start off its keynote highlighting new tools and features with special appeal for software makers.

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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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The release of the fourth-generation iPad so soon after the third-generation iPad may have come as a surprise to even diehard Apple watchers, but the device itself won't. By now, we all know what an iPad looks like, and the fourth-generation iPad looks nearly identical to a third-generation iPad, which itself looked more or less like the second-generation iPad.

That's not to say that the fourth-generation iPad isn't an impressive beast; it's just that those changes are almost entirely on the device's interior. This is unquestionably Apple's most powerful iPad to date, and it handles pretty much anything you can throw at it with aplomb. If the new iPad mini is a MacBook Air, as my colleague Dan Frakes alleges, then the fourth-generation iPad is the big iron of a MacBook Pro.

Meet the new new iPad, same as the new iPad

Put a fourth-generation iPad down next to a third-generation iPad, and good luck telling them apart. In fact, the only difference between the two is what kind of cable you plug into them. The fourth-generation iPad joins the iPhone 5, iPad mini, iPod touch, and iPod nano in sporting Apple's new Lightning connector. It's a lot smaller than the veritably ancient (by technology standards, anyway) 30-pin dock-connector it replaces; there are other advantages too, which I'll touch upon later.

IDG Consumer & SMB

Otherwise, though, the fourth-generation iPad has the same controls you've found on every iPad since the original: Home button, Sleep/Wake button, volume controls, a side switch that can mute the volume or lock the display's orientation, and a headphone jack. It also supports the same Smart Cover that's worked with the iPad 2 or later.

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When the iPad debuted, many called it “just a big iPod touch.” Most soon realized that such claims were misguided, as the iPad turned out to be much more: more powerful, more capable, more useful, more everything. Instead of being arithmetically bigger than the iPod touch, the iPad offered exponentially more of what was good about it.

Now that the iPad mini is out, some of the same people are calling it “just a smaller iPad.” This time around, such a description is much more apt, as the iPad mini offers nearly all of the features, power, and capabilities of its full-size siblings. It even runs all the same apps. The result is a device that—far more than the Mac mini, or even the old iPod mini—gives you nearly everything of its non-mini namesake in a smaller package.

But calling it “just a smaller iPad” glosses over much of what makes the iPad mini unique.

Half the size, most of the iPad

At 7.9 inches tall and 5.3 inches wide, the iPad mini is just 60 percent of the footprint of the fourth-generation iPad. Even more impressive is that thanks to its 0.28-inch thickness (yes, it’s even thinner than the iPhone 5) and 308-gram (11-ounce) weight, the iPad mini is just 46 percent of the volume of the standard iPad and 47 percent of the weight. Yet the mini offers a 7.9-inch (diagonal) display that’s a full 66 percent of the screen area of a full-size iPad.

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There’s nothing remotely stylish or cool-looking about SeaSucker’s $90 iPad Mounting System (also called the Naked Flex Mount on the company’s website), but there’s also nothing I’ve seen that grips an iPad quite as tightly. The Flex Mount consists of a pair of massive, white-rubber-with-orange-accents vacuum cups, paired with a flexible stem (called a Flex Arm) that goes between them.

Once you get over the geeky appearance, it's easy to appreciate that there’s plenty of power in those 4.5-inch, pump-action vacuum cups. And, yes, I meant to write vacuum cups instead of suction cups—there’s a diference. The Flex Mount’s vacuum cups are much stronger than traditional suction cups thanks to a pump-action design that creates a tight grip on the surface of your iPad or any other tablet or case with a smooth back.

Visible bands on the plungers (in a shade of orange reminiscent of life jackets) are not for decoration. As you use the cup’s pumping mechanism, the band recesses farther and farther into the cup’s housing, until the band is completely hidden—no orange stripe means the seal is tight. If you start to see the orange stripe, that means you should give the pump a couple presses to refresh the grip.

With just three pieces—the two vacuum cups and the flex arm—it’s easy to figure out how to put the Flex Mount together, even without watching the company’s instructional video. You can see what goes where and screw everything together quickly, and there are no brackets or clips to worry about or misplace. Then you just attach one vacuum cup to the back of your tablet via the pumping action and the other to the surface you want to attach it to—a countertop, desk, coffee table, sunroof, windshield, or any other smooth surface—and you’re set.

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We’re all very familiar with the concept of All You Can Eat, from the artery-clogging Vegas buffet to the less-literal digital equivalents such as Netflix for TV shows/movies, the various digital music subscription services, and even Audiobooks.com for audiobooks.

In April, Next Issue Media launched with a similar idea for magazines. Pay a monthly fee and get access to a bunch of digital magazines from Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc. The problem? It was only available for some Android tablets. As of Tuesday, iPad users get to join in the fun with a catalog of nearly 40 magazines, and the promise of more to come. (See the complete list at the end of this story.)

As an avid reader of magazines on the iPad—I subscribe to several through Apple’s Newsstand, with individual apps, and via Zinio—I was excited to get a chance to play with the iPad version of Next Issue prior to its release.

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The Epson MegaPlex MG-850HD is a portable projector with two built-in ten-watt speakers, bright 2800 lumen output, and a dock for connecting and playing movies and music from your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Weighing in at 8.4 pounds, the piano black MegaPlex is compact and easily portable. It uses 3LCD technology and offers native 720p resolution in screen sizes from 33 to 320 inches diagonally.

The MegaPlex has auto vertical keystone correction and iris controls, as well as manual focus and zoom rings near the lens and a horizontal keystone adjustment just behind them. You can tilt the front up with an adjustment leg beneath the front of the projector. You can correct horizontal tilt by adjusting the height of the feet at the back of the projector. Manual adjustments can be made through the menu system using the included remote control. There are seven different color modes to choose from including Blackboard (for projecting onto a dark green chalkboard), and four audio modes including Vocal, which emphasizes voices and dialog during video playback.

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With the new iPad’s Retina display, developers will be able to create apps that have more of a visual impact. However, apps that support higher-detailed graphics may end up occupying more storage space. If you bought a new 16GB iPad (like me), and are going to prep your iPad for a long trip, you may find yourself running short on storage.

iCloud is there to help and you can rely on other online storage services, but perhaps you don’t want to have to depend on an Internet connection. You could consider an external storage device for your iPad, such as Kingston’s Wi-Drive.

The Wi-Drive is a small flash drive, available in 16GB ($77) or 32GB ($139) capacities. Roughly the same size as an iPhone 4, the Wi-Drive can be easily stashed in your pocket or bag. You’ll need to bring a USB cable (included) to connect it to a Mac and transfer files from the computer, and to charge the Wi-Drive’s battery.

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Anyone who’s tried to create a multi­media-based ebook can tell you that it’s not easy. While many popular applications offer export capabilities—which more or less corral text and images into an ePub document—proceeding from there is a challenge. Often, creators encounter troublesome CSS fragments, mismatched formats, and limited creative options within the apps.

Apple’s new desktop app, iBook Author (Mac App Store link), is designed to build beautifully crafted multimedia books solely for the company’s iBookstore and iPad tablet. Conceived as a tool for creating Multi-Touch textbooks featuring visually stimulating elements such as photo galleries, video, interactive diagrams, and 3D objects, iBooks Author can be used to construct an ebook in any genre. There’s no support for the iPhone, the iPod touch, or any other ebook platform.

The reason is basically structural. iBooks Author employs a new format called ibooks (.iba), an amalgamation of the W3C’s ePub standard and CSS, with some Apple-specific code mixed in. These books are far more complex than a typical ePub volume, making them incompatible with any other reader. You can also use iBooks Author to output your text in PDF or plain text, but these capabilities are designed as proofreading mechanisms rather than alternate formats. The controversial iBooks Author end-user license agreement (EULA) specifies that if you want to sell books created with the app, you must do so exclusively through Apple’s iBookstore—though you can give away your books if you choose.

While these rules vastly constrain the potential outlets for Apple’s new program, authors who want to build iPad-exclusive books will find an impressive tool in iBooks Author.

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iOS devices are in the army now, Intel’s former CEO recounts his Apple misstep, and Apple’s got its work cut out for its WWDC keynote. The remainders for Friday, May 17, 2013 lead the way.

Apple Mobile Devices Approved for Use on U.S. Military Networks (Bloomberg)

The Pentagon has given thumbs up to iOS 6 devices on military networks, though the Defense Department is still waiting for Apple’s much anticipated “Find My Enemies” app.

Paul Otellini’s Intel: Can the Company That Built the Future Survive It? (The Atlantic)

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This week's roundup of new and updated iOS apps includes cool new offerings for music and movies, as well as a new storytelling form designed just for your phone or tablet.

A new feature released Tuesday from children’s app maker Kidaptive lets parents track the progress of what their children are learning inside the company’s first story and game application.

Leo’s Pad has been out for a year, releasing short story and game content it calls “appisodes.” The new parental layer shows a control panel broken out by child, and breaks down which areas children are struggling with and what new things they’ve learned. It also gives tips on how to increase color recognition, for example, and cites research for each recommendation.

Kidaptive

The company’s founders have a varied background in comic book writing, education and 3D animation, which helped create an app that children’s-application watchers say sets it apart.

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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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The Hazard (iPad mini; $45) is a lightweight-but-durable hardshell case with a slim profile. Compatible with Apple’s Smart Cover, the case provides access to all ports, buttons, and cameras.

The Hazard is available in sheet metal or jet black.

PDF Expert has updated with the ability to cut and past your document annotations … Office2 HD now lets users hide and unhide presentation slides. Packing Pro 9.0 (pictured) lets users filter their travel lists track every item in every single bag you carry.

The latest version of YouTube Capture lets users preview their edited videos in HD, choose to upload videos only when the device has access to Wi-Fi, and is simply faster, starting up more quickly than its predecessors.

Apple may be borrowing from OS X to pay iOS, hackers have gone phishing for Apple customers, and Tim Cook will be playing Southern California for one night only. Can you spare the remainders for Wednesday, May 1, 2013 a dime?

Apple’s iOS 7 Team in Deadline Crunch Mode, Adding Engineers (AllThingsD)

According to numerous reports, Apple is working overtime to get iOS 7 ready for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The intensive nature of the project, including its new “flat” interface, is proving time-consuming, so the company has pulled engineers from other projects, including OS X 10.9, and facilities personnel, to rip up the green felt from Game Center.

Criminals compromise over 100 sites to display fake Apple ID login pages used in spam email phishing attacks (The Next Web)

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

Straighten your photos

iPhoto for iOS allows you to straighten your photos in a few smart ways. The first is by auto-detecting a strong horizon line. Open iPhoto, choose a photo and then tap Edit. Now tap the Crop & Straighten icon in the bottom left. If the photo displays a white line across it with icons at either end, then that means a horizon line has been detected. To proceed with straightening, simply tap the arrow icon at the right.

Unfortunately, iPhoto can’t always detect a horizon line and that means you’ll have to make the adjustment yourself. The Crop & Straighten mode places a dial under your photo, and you can straighten your photo simply by dragging the dial left or right. A grid overlaid on your photo as you turn the dial, lets you straighten with visual cues in your photo.

What happens when your photo has no visual cues, but still feels off-kilter? iPhoto for iOS has one more strategy to assist you, and it’s a lot of fun. Choose a photo you want to straighten and then hold the iPad or iPhone up in front of you. Now tap the dial. iPhoto then calls on the gyroscope in your device to help you straighten the image. Simply tilt the iPad or iPhone to the left and right; as you do, you’ll notice that the photo remains upright. It’s helpful to tilt your head as you tilt the device so that you have a better sense of the final crop. Once you’re happy with the position of the photo, tap anywhere on the screen to lock it in.

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Reader Patricia Whitney has done the Bad Thing to her iPad and wonders if there’s a way to make it Good. She writes:

I dropped my first-generation iPad and now the screen’s colors are all wrong. Blacks are green and there’s a lot of “static” in all the images the iPad displays. Is there anything I can do to fix it?

In the days of classic sitcoms there was an old wheeze where Main Character A would suffer a bump on the head, causing said A to lose his or her memory. After the ensuing hijinx, the arrived-at solution was invariably to bean them again, thus restoring their memory. Those penning today’s sitcoms avoid such advice, understanding the litigious society we now live in.

I offer this stroll down the hoary path of television history to suggest that while our ancestors may have lived in a black-and-white world, they knew a thing or two about fixing misfiring systems. Take your iPad, for instance.

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You love your iPad, and chances are good that you need to use Microsoft Office for work. You have lots of options for editing documents created in Microsoft Word and Excel on your iPad, but what about the third major component of Microsoft Office, PowerPoint ()?

If you need only view a PowerPoint document, you can use almost any iOS app that displays documents (including Apple’s Mail and Safari). iOS can natively display, though not edit, PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx) documents—but it shows them as a continuous scroll rather than as individual slides. You also won’t be able to see any animations, builds, transitions, or other special features. For displaying an existing PowerPoint presentation, a better choice is the free SlideShark app, which preserves most major PowerPoint features but still doesn’t allow editing.

When you need to edit a PowerPoint presentation or create a new one from scratch, your alternatives fall into three main categories: Keynote, a third-party office suite, or a virtual copy of PowerPoint for Windows.

Use Keynote

Apple’s $10 Keynote for iOS () is a fine tool for creating, editing, and displaying presentations. This version doesn’t have all the features of the desktop version of Keynote (), and if you import a presentation (whether created in Keynote on OS X or in PowerPoint), you may lose some important content. Say good-bye to fonts, transitions, and builds that aren’t available on the iPad, as well as audio and more. Even so, using Keynote is arguably the best way to edit a PowerPoint presentation on an iPad, because the app offers more powerful editing tools than any other native iPad presentation app does, and it has a better touchscreen interface than a virtual copy of Microsoft PowerPoint.

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Snap and share: It’s one of the most common things we do with our mobile devices these days. But sometimes you don’t want to broadcast a picture for the whole world to see. Here’s a quick overview of how Shared Photo Streams can help you with that.

Transcript

This is Macworld senior editor Dan Moren. Unlike Twitter or Instagram, iOS 6’s Shared Photo Streams make it easy to share photos with only a select group of friends or family, no matter what kind of computer, smartphone, or tablet they use.

To create a Shared Photo Stream, open the Photos app and tap the Photo Stream tab. By default, you’ll see your own personal photo stream, which syncs pictures shot with your iOS devices to all of your Macs and other iOS devices. (If you don’t, you may need to enable both your Photo Stream and Shared Photo Streams under Settings -> iCloud -> Photo Stream.)

Tap the Plus (+) button to create a new stream. You’ll be prompted to give the stream a name and invite some friends via email—but don’t worry, if you forget somebody; you can always add them later. You’ll also see an option to create a Public Website—more on that in a bit.

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Your iPhone and iPad can speak aloud any text you can select. In this video, I’ll show you how to enable that feature, and how to type emoji symbols in your text, too.

Transcript

I’m going to show you a few quick fun things your iPhone or iPad can do to make text more interesting.

First, I’ll show you how you can make your iOS device read aloud any text you select. Fire up the Settings app, tap on General, scroll down to Accessibility, and then tap on Speak Selection. Turn it on, and then, if you’d like, you can play with different accents and speech speed. A good Australian accent always makes me say “crikey,” so I can’t resist.

Now, go into any app where you can type or select text. I’ll use the Notes app here. Select the text you’re interested in hearing by tapping and holding, and then tap the new Speak button that appears. Instantly, your iPhone begins reading the text you selected—in your chosen accent, if applicable.

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Attentive reader Sarah Wagner wants more from her Kindle. She writes:

I watched your video on syncing books to Kindle devices and apps and thought it was helpful. But I’d like to sync documents other than ebook files. Is that possible?

It is indeed. In that video I showed you that with the free Send to Kindle application on your Mac you can upload Kindle-compatible ebook files to your Kindle. But the Kindle platform supports more than just these files. Also supported are Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), HTML (.html, .htm), RTF (.rtf), JPEG (.jpeg, .jpg), Kindle Format (.mobi, .azw, .azw3), GIF (.gif), PNG (.png), BMP (.bmp), and PDF (.pdf) files.

There are a couple of ways to move these files to your Kindle or a Kindle app on your iOS device. The first is the Send to Kindle application I mentioned. Just drag into it the files you want to sync, choose the Kindle devices and apps you wish to sync with, and upload the files to Amazon, where they’ll be synced with the devices you’ve chosen.

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You have one of Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers as well as the Kindle app on an iOS device. When you purchase a Kindle ebook from Amazon, it syncs beautifully between devices—you read to page 212 on one device and when you pick up the other, it asks if you’d like to move to that page on the device you’re currently using.

But suppose you’re picked up an Amazon-compatible ebook from a different site—Project Gutenberg, for example? If you load such a file on a couple of devices you’ll find that they don’t sync. Unless you know the trick that I demonstrate in this video.

Congratulations: You’ve unwrapped, purchased, or otherwise braved wait times to pick yourself up a brand-new iPad or iPad mini this holiday.

But before you get to playing with your new device, you’ll probably want to set it up. Thanks to iOS’s step-by-step activation process, Apple’s made it pretty simple to get started; but just in case you need some extra help, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide to your new iPad, activating it, transferring data from an older tablet or your computer, and some suggestions for exploring its new features.

Meet your iPad and iPad mini

Welcome to your iPad. Apple’s tablet packs in all sorts of magic depending on what model you’ve received: If you have an iPad with Retina display, you’re looking at a device with a 3.1 million pixel screen, dual-core A6X chip with quad-core graphics, a Lightning connector, LTE service, two cameras, and up to 64GB of storage; if you have an iPad mini, your device also has a Lightning connector, LTE service, cameras, and up to 64 GB of storage—but it runs a dual-core A5 chip.

Though the iPad mini is smaller and lighter than the iPad—weighing .7 pounds to the iPad’s 1.5—they both sport the same buttons and ports. We’ll walk you through these buttons, calling out differences where they appear.

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Struggling to read small text on your iPad mini? There’s a fix for that. Watch the video above, or read the transcript below:

The iPad mini is, of course, smaller than the 9.7-inch versions of the tablet. And while that makes the iPad mini more portable, the scaled-down screen size also means that, in some cases, text can look awfully tiny. Luckily, there are workarounds.

If you find that your email, notes, address book, or iMessages are too tiny to read comfortably on your new iPad mini, there’s a potential workaround you can try.

Launch Settings, tap on General, and then Accessibility. Next, tap the Large Text button and choose a font size.

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