Dan writes about OS X, iOS, troubleshooting, utilities, and cool apps, and he covers hardware, mobile and AV gear, input devices, and accessories. He's been writing about tech since 1994, and he's also published software, worked in IT, and been a policy analyst. More by Dan Frakes
In 2007, the Optimus Maximus keyboard was all the rage on gadget-oriented websites. In place of traditional plastic keys, this pricey, programmable keyboard used special keys with a tiny OLED screen on each. The idea was that you could customize each key to perform whatever task you wanted, and give that key a custom appearance to make it easier to find that function.
The Optimus Maximus was more a clever idea than a successful product, but it was interesting because we often wish our keyboards had a few extra keys for performing particular tasks. Many of us get around this limitation by using macro utilities such as Keyboard Maestro, but those require you to remember keyboard shortcuts, or use menus, or use some other onscreen mechanism for accessing those macros.
Lately, I’ve been using my iPad as a poor man’s version of the Optimus Maximus (if you can call anything requiring an iPad a “poor man’s version” of anything) thanks to Actions. Unlike most Mac Gems, Actions isn’t just a Mac app. Rather, it’s a combination of a free Mac app called Actions Server and a $4 iPad app called Actions that, together, let you use your iPad to control your Mac and automate Mac tasks.
Lex uses a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 5, an iPad mini, a Kindle 3, a TiVo HD, and a treadmill desk, and loves them all. His latest book, a children's book parody for adults, is called "The Kid in the Crib." Lex lives in New Jersey with his wife and three young kids. More by Lex Friedman
There are oodles of apps for keeping tabs on Twitter from your Mac, but few options for monitoring Facebook. Moment (; Mac App Store link), a $10 app from Tapmates, is here to help.
Moment lives in your menubar. It lights up—and sounds an alert—whenever you receive a new Facebook notification. Click the menu icon, and you see your notifications, old and new alike. (Older ones are dimmed to make it easier to spot the new ones.) It’s the same list you could expect to see if you viewed your notifications list on the Facebook website.
Marco Tabini is based in Toronto, Canada, where he focuses on software development for mobile devices and for the Web. More by Marco Tabini
I never though I’d say this when I first listened to a podcast, many years ago, but I love podcasts. Each week I listen to a dozen or so different shows, some produced by friends, and others by celebrities of various caliber.
Apple offers a couple apps that are supposed to make it easy to listen to podcasts: iTunes on the desktop, and the appropriately-named Podcasts on iOS. Alas, these two apps might as well have been developed by two different companies, because making them work in tandem—particularly when it comes to syncing episodes between them—is, well, complicated.
Jonathan has been covering the tech industry since 1998. He loves watching TV shows on his iPhone while exercising, and has already indoctrinated his young twins in the ways of the Apple TV. More by Jonathan Seff
There are plenty of apps that can transcode video from one format to another, and there are a number of nifty apps that let you tag media files with useful metadata. But Jendrik Bertram’s $20 iFlicks (Mac App Store link) does both, and I’ve found none better at combining the two tasks. iFlicks does its job with a clean, responsive, and very Mac-like interface that makes working with the software intuitive and fun.
Like the free Video Monkey, iFlicks can help you tag movies or TV shows you’ve ripped from your DVDs, recorded with an EyeTV-powered device, or downloaded from elsewhere—it supports adding artwork, genre, description, release date, episode titles and numbers, and more. It can also convert videos to smaller versions to save bits and bytes on space-crunched iOS devices, or to take files that iTunes can’t understand and make them playable on your Apple TV, to name just a couple examples. (As with other similar apps, iFlicks can convert only media files that aren’t protected with digital-rights-management [DRM] technology, which means it can't convert video purchased from the iTunes Store.)
Marco Tabini is based in Toronto, Canada, where he focuses on software development for mobile devices and for the Web. More by Marco Tabini
Nearly two decades after it first made an appearance on my desk, the mouse has yet to gain my favors. Modern graphical-user interfaces (GUIs) make its use practically mandatory, but I use it only when I have no other choice.
My dislike for pointing and clicking is not just a matter of reliving the good old days, when the only way to use computers was to type for hours on end—uphill, both ways—but rather a simple consequence of the fact that, unlike the mouse or trackpad, a keyboard gives me haptic feedback that allows me to type without looking.
I mention all this to help explain why Shortcat caught my eye. This little utility promises to let you use the keyboard to perform many operations, such as clicking textual links on a Web page, that normally require a pointing device.
Jackie is always looking for creative mischief to get into. So it's fitting that she oversees cameras and camcorders as well as software related to photography, video, publishing, music, and Web design for TechHive and Macworld. More by Jackie Dove
Sometimes you just want to see your images in one place without a lot of fuss: You don’t need an image editor; you don’t want to move anything; you just want to browse your photos and possibly do some very light editing or share some images with others. For such situations ArcSoft’s $10 Photo+ stands out.
Photo+, normally $10, but on sale for just $2 at the time of this review—is a seriously no-hassle photo viewer. It has an elegant, dark interface with a filmstrip-style photo bin at the bottom that lets you swiftly scroll through all your images. Choose a photo, and you get immediate information about it, such as its resolution, date taken, file size, and other bits of data you choose (in the app’s preferences) to see. If you want to view all your EXIF information in one place, just choose View > Show Info to see a separate window listing your camera model, exposure, and other routine data.
You can view just your image, or reveal full EXIF information.Read more »
Dan is Macworld's Executive Editor and, thus, the senior Dan on staff. More by Dan Miller
Gentle Bytes’ $10 Startupizer is one of those utilities that does one very specific thing, but does it well. The thing, in this case, is manage your login items—those apps and other nifty processes that you’ve opted to automatically launch or open every time you log in to your account on your Mac. Startupizer does this well by giving you greater control than OS X over exactly when and how those things launch. (Note that, confusingly, Startupizer doesn’t manage startup items, the system-level items that run when your Mac starts up. Rather, it manages only the user-level items that open when you log in.)
Normally, your list of login items sits buried a couple levels deep in the System Preferences utility (specifically, in the Login Items screen inside the Users and Groups pane). Once you find that list, there’s not a lot you can do with it: You can add items to it, and decide whether they should launch visibly or not, but System Preferences doesn’t let you otherwise control the login process.
Startupizer replaces the Login Items list in System Preferences with its own list.Read more »
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