Apple and Mavericks have been sitting in a tree since at least 2005; Macs shine in court; and how much flatter could a title be? The remainders for Tuesday, June 18, 2013 go to 11.

Apple’s love of ‘Mavericks’ has been around for a while (TUAW)

If you’d been paying close attention to Apple’s earlier software, you might have noticed a fondness for Mavericks, the surf location that’s become the name of the next version of OS X. It also appeared in 2005 promo materials for Aperture. Quick! Let’s see what else we can find in old marketing materials to clue us in on the next next version of Apple’s desktop OS. Uhhhh, OS X … Cute Kid?

Apple Executive Defends Pricing in Case on ebooks (New York Times)

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As is customary with just about all Macs, Apple offers a small number of standard configuration systems that you can buy off the shelf (these are the systems Macworld uses for review), along with a handful of optional upgrades that—for a price—allow purchasers to customize their new Macs. The 2013 MacBook Air is no exception: Apple offers more RAM, higher capacity flash storage, and faster processors. Macworld Lab put together an “ultimate” configuration of the new MacBook Air, and the performance gains are so significant that our configure-to-order (CTO) MacBook Air competes well against Apple’s current $1699 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.

The standard configuration 2013 MacBook Air has 4GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 RAM, a dual-core 1.3GHz Intel Core i5 (Haswell) processor that can reach speeds of 2.6GHz with Turbo Boost, and either 128GB ($999 for 11-inch, $1099 for 13-inch) or 256GB of flash storage ($1199 for 11-inch, $1299 for 13-inch).

Your configuration decisions on the MacBook Air are especially important due to the closed design of the laptop. RAM and CPU are not user upgradable, and it's unclear if third parties will offer internal storage upgrades to the 2013 MacBook Air. (The new MacBook Air has a new implementation of flash storage, so flash storage modules designed for the 2012 MacBook Air will not work.)

Configure to order

Doubling the RAM on the $1299 13-inch MacBook Air from 4GB to 8GB adds $100 to the base price, while increasing the capacity of the flash storage from 256GB to 512GB adds $300. Swapping out the standard 1.3GHz Core i5 processor (with 3MB of L3 cache) for a faster 1.7GHz Core i7 processor capable of reaching 3.3GHz with Turbo Boost (4MB of L3 cache) adds $150. Our ultimate CTO model puts all three options into a new 13-inch MacBook Air for a total of $1849.

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This week's roundup of accessories includes a new, fashionable way to keep your iOS screen clean, as well as ways to listen to (and make!) music and to power up your iPhone or iPad.

It’s no secret that trying to find things in Messages is a mess. It certainly came as no news to Flexibits co-founder Michael Simmons as he was trying to build a follow-up contacts app to the company’s popular Fantastical calendar offering and kept running into hassles when trying to search through old chat sessions.

Fortunately for Simmons, he was in a position to do something about it. Flexibits tabled its Fantastical follow-up to build Chatology, a log viewer and message search that Simmons describes as “kind of a way to filter and drill down into your search and find things within iChat and Messages.” The $20 Chatology arrived Tuesday.

We caught up with Simmons during last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. In the latest video chat with developers at WWDC, he gives us a quick preview of Chatology, explains why it’s available exclusively through Flexibits and not the Mac App Store, and shares his opinion on some of Apple’s WWDC announcements.

iChat’s transformation into Messages was not exactly welcomed with open arms by Mac users everywhere. Some find the integration between iMessages and instant messages clunky; others have experienced a lot of flakiness (some of which Apple claims to have fixed in a recent OS X update); and yet more don’t like the app’s search functionality.

It’s the last of these that Fantastical maker Flexibits has focused on with its newest app, Chatology. The software aims to revitalize the Messages search feature, providing advanced functionality that makes it even easier to find the messages that you’re looking for.

Though it’s a standalone app, Chatology does integrate with Messages; when you install it, the app hijacks Messages’s Command-F shortcut. Use that key combination and Chatology launches automatically. (If you’d rather it only launch manually, you can deactivate that feature in Chatology’s preferences—in fact, it’s the only option there.)

Searching in Chatology is much like searching in messages. Enter a search term in the field in the top right of the window, and you’ll be presented with a list of results that match. When you enter the search term, the app also lets you choose to search for conversations that contain that term or places where that term appears as a name—for example, I can search for chats about my friend Evan or chats from my friend Evan.

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One of the first things I loved about my first iPad—a first-generation model bought about six months after the product launched in 2010—was the native Notes application. Silly? Sure: Even now the app is limited, providing basically a plain text file that’s mostly useful for making a grocery list or jotting down quick ideas. But I thought it was beautiful.

Why? Because Notes was more than utilitarian. It wasn’t the faux yellow tablet paper that impressed me, rather, it was what happened in the app when I rotated the iPad into landscape mode: It became apparent that somewhere in the universe, that pad of office paper—virtual as it is—was being carried around in a nice folio, perhaps one made of rich Corinthian leather, with fine stitching all around the edges.

And I had the same thought I might have had about a real folio made of real leather with real stitching: Somebody cared enough about this to try to make it nice.

The practice of designing apps to resemble their real-world counterparts—known as skeuomorphism—has found itself increasingly in disrepute among designers and tech writers: Last fall’s ascendance of Jony Ive, who replaced Scott Forstall as the person in charge of iOS’s look and feel, meant a change of some sort was coming. And iOS (after five years) was certainly starting to feel fusty, with developments at Windows and Android at least temporarily turning the heads of formerly hardcore Apple fans.

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It’s almost summer, but the Macalope’s still digging his way out from under the blizzard of dumb WWDC analysis that fell from the skies of stupidity last week. Why, oh why did the Macalope take up residence under the skies of stupidity?! What was he thinking?! There should be a zoning ordinance!

Anyway, suffice it to say that The Verge’s Vlad Savov was not impressed by iOS 7.

“iOS 7 redesign: the beginning of the end for Apple exceptionalism” (tip o’ the antlers to Waly Kerkeboom and Harry Marks).

And here the Macalope thought the iPhone 4S was the end of Apple exceptionalism. And the iPhone 5. And the iPad mini. And …

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Apple didn’t try to fix or raise the prices of electronic books when it entered into the market in 2010, according to Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue. Rather, he says, the company was only working to ensure a profit for itself.

“We’re not willing to lose money in any business,” Cue told the court, referring to Amazon’s practice of 2009 to sell electronic books for less than what it paid for them.

But in doing so, the U.S. Justice Department contends, Apple violated antitrust laws by colluding with the five largest book publishers—HarperCollins, the Penguin Group, the Hatchett Group, MacMillan, and Simon & Schuster—to fix the prices of electronic books. As a result of their actions, the prices of electronic books rose in 2010, the DOJ contended.

While the five publishers have since settled with the DOJ out of court, Apple is defending its practices in a DOJ antitrust trial now under way at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District Court of New York, with District Judge Denise Cote presiding.

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For those familiar with the TextExpander 4 for Mac utility, it may come as no surprise that Smile Software offers a $5 iOS version of the app called TextExpander touch. While some may have been disappointed by TextExpander touch version 1’s limited feature set when compared with the Mac version, Smile has recently released TextExpander 2, a huge upgrade that has added support for more advanced “macros” and “fill-in” fields, putting it nearly on par with the latest Mac version.

In TextExpander’s terms, a macro is a placeholder that inserts variable information (like the current date, the contents of the clipboard, performing a math calculation, or moving the cursor) into an expanded snippet. A fill-in field tells TextExpander to pause while expanding the snippet so that you can fill in variable information yourself. TextExpander’s macros allow you to build some very powerful snippets.

Here’s one small example from my snippet library. I store just about everything on my Mac in plain text files that sync to Dropbox, where I can access them from my iPhone and iPad using any of a variety of Dropbox-powered text editors. I store my business expenses in one of these files, and I use the following snippet to enter an expense:

Date: %Y-%m-%d%|
Project: %filltext:name=project%
Amount: $%filltext:name=amount%
Mileage: %filltext:name=mileage% miles
Purpose: %fillarea:name=purpose%
Billable: %fillpopup:name=billable:default=Yes:No%

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Adobe has added some nice features to its new, subscription-based, pro-level Photoshop Creative Cloud; it also rolled all of the features of Photoshop Extended into the CC version. The inclusion of 3D tools aside, Photoshop CC isn’t the most feature-packed release ever, but it has some good stuff, especially in the realm of actions, filters, and enlargements. Unfortunately, Bridge CC, Photoshop's perennial file management sidekick, didn’t fare as well—it's had several useful features removed.

New features

Photoshop CC, which you download and install locally on your hard drive, fully supports Retina displays (Apple’s superhigh-resolution monitors); you’ll spot a new 200 percent option in the View menu (which lets you see Web graphics at the size they’ll appear in a browser). Several plug-ins also support these crystal-clear displays including Liquify, Save for Web, Merge to HDR, Vanishing Point, Adaptive Wide Angle, Lens Correction, and the Filter Gallery. And look for two tiny new icons at the bottom left of document windows: one for syncing your settings to the Creative Cloud for access on other machines, and one for uploading artwork to the collaborative, online Behance community.

One of the most useful new features in Photoshop CC is for conditional actions; it lets you record an action that chooses among previously recorded actions and runs the one that matches criteria you set (in order to account for variables such as document size, color modes, adjustment layers, and so on). The Image Size dialog box was simplified and includes a resizable image preview that lets you see the results of your settings before applying them. And a new Preserve Details interpolation method sharpens areas of fine detail in your image in order to produce higher-quality enlargements (this new method includes a noise-reduction slider, too). Happily, all interpolation methods now have keyboard shortcuts, and the new Fit To drop-down menu has a handy list of size presets.

Introduced in Photoshop CS6, the Field Blur, Iris Blur, and Tilt-Shift filters make creating blurry backgrounds easier than ever. In CC, those filters work with Smart Filters, so you can run them nondestructively. They also take advantage of OpenCL, a technology found in newer graphics cards that lets Photoshop tap into the card’s processing power whenever it wants. As a result, previewing and applying these filters is noticeably faster.

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Adobe has released its long-awaited and highly controversial Creative Cloud suite of applications for both longtime professional devotees and the newcomers it hopes to attract. Having historically operated on an upgrade schedule of every 12 to 16 months, Adobe is now releasing new subscription-only versions of its flagship Photoshop image-editing program—called Photoshop CC (for Creative Cloud)—along with more than a dozen of its other creative apps.

While the merits of Adobe's new subscription model promise to be a continuing topic of debate, the apps themselves are the same creative-suite products that photographers, artists, videographers, graphic designers, animators, and other people in creative fields have become attached to over the past 20 years. Although Adobe has dropped some software packages and consolidated others in the lineup since last year, the basic Creative Cloud suite will look familiar to veteran users.

As always, applications reside on your hard drive—you do not have to be connected to the Internet to use any Creative Cloud application after you’ve downloaded it. The system requires a connection every 180 days to double-check your annual subscription status (every 30 days for month-to-month subscriptions), but that is the extent of cloud involvement with typical app usage.

Old-timers are back

Released alongside Photoshop today are Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Flash Professional, Audition, Dreamweaver, InCopy, After Effects, Prelude, and SpeedGrade, in addition to companion and add-on software packages such as Edge Animate, Bridge, and Media Encoder. Muse, the year-old visual Web-design program, has entered the mix. Edge Tools & Services, also part of Creative Cloud, includes Edge Animate, Edge Inspect, Edge Web Fonts, Edge Code (Preview), Edge Reflow (Preview), and PhoneGap Build. All are available with the basic $50 subscription. Fireworks is still around, but with minimal updates. Photoshop Extended is gone, folded into the main Photoshop program. Flash Builder Premium, Acrobat XI Pro, and now Lightroom are also part of the suite. Lightroom and Acrobat XI are available both in subscription format within Creative Cloud and boxed on their own the traditional way.

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One reporter tracks down her stolen phone, an influential judge passes on, and what Steve Jobs and Winnie the Pooh have in common. The remainders for Monday, June 17, 2013 are just the bear necessities.

Hot on the trail of a kidnapped iPhone (Los Angeles Times)

An L.A. Times reporter recounts the story of her iPhone being stolen, and how she finally tracked it down. Maybe there should be a CSI spinoff just about finding iPhones.

Thomas Penfield Jackson, Outspoken Judge, Dies at 76 (New York Times)

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At Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference, the company announced iTunes Radio, a Pandora-like streaming radio service that will start broadcasting to the general public in the fall.

While some view this as Apple finally embracing a model other than traditional music ownership, others wonder if the company is simply dipping a toe in the water. Will Apple go all-in and produce something that’s a step forward, or is iTunes Radio a half-hearted me-too measure? As someone who loves music, I’m certainly rooting for the former. But I fear the latter unless Apple meets these expectations.

1. No sea of holes, please

Nothing will elicit comparisons to Apple's failed music social media experiment Ping more quickly than an obviously porous catalog. For instance, if you attempt to create a Beatles station that plays not a single track by the Fab Four because Apple hasn’t secured the streaming rights, iTunes Radio will look half-baked. Apple has made a lot of noise about having artists that other services can’t touch (The Beatles being the obvious example) and listeners expect to stream what they can buy. Most people don’t care whether you can do X with an artist’s catalog but not Y because of licensing issues.

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Armor Games' Kingdom Rush for iOS was a challenging, charming, and moderately deep real-time strategy experience. Enemies and the soldiers you hired to kill them were adorably caricatured, and you could easily whittle away hours at a time coming up with the best strategy for stopping your foes. Kingdom Rush Frontiers, the sequel (spin off? successor?) to Kingdom Rush landed earlier this month and brought with it a number of improvements that help make it one of the best tower defense games on mobile.

Fans of Kingdom Rush will be very familiar with Frontiers’ gameplay. You can think of Frontiers as the Angry Birds: Seasons of the Kingdom Rush franchise: it’s more remix than innovation. Still, if you liked the frenetic strategy, endearing artwork, and memorable personalities of the first game, you’ll enjoy Kingdom Rush Frontiers as well.

As in the original title, you’re commanding an army of cartoon soldiers as they seek to defend their lands. You’ll get mission briefs and updates on the story—something about evil tribesman invading—then you’ll deploy towers to kill them all. The tribesman/cannibal enemies are perhaps not as well-worn as the high fantasy enemies the first game utilized, but the "evil tribesman" plotline feels a bit tone-deaf and borderline offensive.

The campaign appears a bit scattered at points too, introducing gimmicky enemies that are hard to kill (teleporting, laser-gun toting) and break from both the overall medieval theme and the rock-paper-scissors combat mechanic Armor Games perfected in the original game. The jokes and easter-eggs are equally anachronistic, but they’re still a highlight—look for an Indiana Jones reference in one of the temple stages and an exceptionally fun pirate-themed stage (with requisite Pirates of the Caribbean jokes).

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A reader who wishes to remain anonymous is curious about the structure of DVDs. He or she writes:

A friend has a DVD that he needs to turn into a QuickTime movie. He’s used a program that copies the contents of the DVD to a folder on his Mac. Inside this folder are VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. The audio folder is empty, though. Does that mean that the converted movie won’t have audio?

No, it doesn’t. The original DVD standard didn’t include an AUDIO_TS folder. All content was intended to be found within the VIDEO_TS folder. (In case you’re curious, the TS stands for title set.) This includes video as well as the audio that accompanies that video.

The AUDIO_TS folder was added as an option after the standard was established. This folder was created for standalone audio files much like the audio tracks on a CD. The idea was that DVDs would replace CDs as audio media. It never caught on but the folder remains, even though it's invariably empty.

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The Star Trek universe is appealing in many ways: there’s a frontier of outer space with thousands of planets, a virtually limitless number of aliens, a galactic federation dedicated to peace. (Also: big space ships and funny costumes.) But its concepts of freedom, commanding a ship and crew, and going on adventures appeal to almost everyone. Those ideas make up the main premise of $3 Star Command, an adorable, challenging, and addictive sci-fi strategy game loosely based on Star Trek itself.

You're not tasked with boldly going where no one has gone before. Instead, you have the more cliché task of helping Earth's fleet defend its borders and ultimately save humanity. You're given a ship and a crew, and you’ll learn to utilize both to fight off enemies over several missions.

Make no mistake: from retro pixelated crewmembers to the dialogue choices, this game is a love letter to Star Trek. The most obvious example is how you organize your crew, who can be assigned to one of three classes, distinguished by the color of their uniforms. The red shirts operate the ship's guns, armory, and bridge. They're also your first line of defense against any enemy invaders beaming onto your ship (yes: they die a lot). Yellow shirts, meanwhile, are engineers who operate your “dodge” drive (a sci-fi tool that allows you to dodge enemy attacks), sentry robots, and engines. They're useless in combat, but can repair any damage your ship takes once they don their adorable little welding masks. Finally, there are blue shirts, which are your science officers. They maintain your ships’ shields and medical bay, but essentially they're a healer class.

Combat in Star Command has a steep learning curve and a huge list of things to pay attention to, but once you get the hang of it, you only wish there was more to do and things to fight, which is, in short, the mark of a great game. Through combat, you earn tokens, which serve as Star Command’s in-game currency. At first, this combat is overwhelming, and not entirely well explained; just when I had gotten used to ordering my crew around, I was thrown into battle and had to manage about a dozen different things at the same time. You have to dodge, use shields, brandish weapons, and take care of your crew simultaneously.

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Back in March, I opined about the next generation of the Mac Pro, explaining both what I hoped for and what I actually expected. First, I was hoping for a new Mac that fell somewhere in between the current Mac mini and Mac Pro—a moderately expandable, more-affordable minitower that was still powerful. Second, I thought that Apple might not only make such a machine, but make it the new Mac Pro:

What if that Mac minitower isn’t just a new Mac Pro, but the new Mac Pro? It sounds crazy, but thanks to both technological advances and shifts in the pro market, Apple could conceivably offer a “pro” minitower and drop the full-size Mac Pro completely. I wouldn’t bet my paycheck on such a move, but for the first time, the technology is there—and Apple has a penchant for making bold, “We know better than you, trust us” moves.

Not unexpectedly, that article generated quite a bit of feedback, including a number of people pointing out (correctly) that what I wanted and what some higher-end users wanted were not necessarily one and the same.

Last week, Apple gave us a sneak peek at the Mac Pro so many have been waiting for, and that preview was a stunner—both because of what the new computer will look like and because of the features it will (and won’t) have.

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You have a Mac. And some half-crazed part of your brain really, really wants to take it apart and tinker with it, upgrade it in every way possible, and put it back together again. You've been warned not to do it, but warnings be damned.

Congratulations, you now possess the right mentality to become a Macintosh technician. Now you just need some free time, a Mac to tear into, and no one around to complain about it. But before you start taking stuff apart, here’s some advice, from one Apple Certified Technician to a potential one.

Accidents will happen

So you’re ready to do your own repair on your Mac. First things first: Be ready for nothing to go perfectly the first time. Open the case on your Mac and the circuitry that greets you is nothing short of daunting.

Macworld

There will be mistakes, count on it. In the 19 years that I’ve been working on computers (mostly Macs), I've accidentally severed my fair share of cables, heard that brain-shattering "snap!" when a connector was irreparably wrenched in the wrong direction, and set two drives on fire. (The first incident was an honest mistake—I connected a SyQuest EZ 135 drive to a PC’s parallel port, and ran Windows 95's Find New Hardware feature until smoke rose from the connectors).

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In an open letter published to Apple’s website Sunday, the company outlined its policies for responding to government requests for information and promised to work to safeguard user privacy.

Early this month, The Guardian broke the story about a U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) program—code-named Prism—under which the NSA has reportedly been monitoring the Internet activities of Americans. The report claimed that the NSA has been directly monitoring the servers of major computing and technology companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

Since that tech-world bombshell, many of these companies, including Apple, have denied working with the NSA in any capacity other than that required by court order. Specifically, an Apple representative told the Washington Post that the company does “not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.” Other companies have issued similar statements.

These same companies have attempted to further assuage user fears by revealing exactly what cooperation has occurred, but they’ve reportedly been hamstrung by “gag orders” preventing them from revealing such details due to national-security concerns.

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A week that began with a flurry of Worldwide Developers Conference announcements from Apple is ending with its once-fiercest rival making a little news of its own. Microsoft on Friday announced a mobile version of its Office productivity suite for the iPhone. The software giant’s move answers a longstanding demand for a version of the world’s most widely used office software for one of the world’s most popular mobile platforms—though there are a couple of big caveats that could limit just how widely this iOS-friendly version of Office gets adopted.

Microsoft’s Office-for-iPhone announcement couldn’t have been more low-key than if it had sent company representatives door to door to quietly spread the news. Microsoft broke the news on a Friday—that’s the day in the news business when you typically let people know that you’ve been indicted, or that those rumors about you are true and that you and the intern hope everyone respects your privacy—posting the announcement in its Office 365 blog and not, say, at a high-profile press event. That’s a significant choice by Microsoft.

It’s also a lot to digest for iOS users, especially with our heads still swimming from iOS 7 previews and promised Siri announcements. Still, here’s a quick breakdown of everything we know about Microsoft’s new iOS offering so far.

Microsoft

What’s the app called?

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That’s pretty much all pundits have left to complain about. But complain about them they will! Our first pundit this week decries Apple’s wanton destruction of a vital app category. Then we’ll get caught up on this week’s ways in which Apple is doomed. Finally, we’ll learn how emperor iOS 7 has no clothes!

Cry, the beloved free app category

Ah, pundits. Is there nothing you can’t get exactly backwards?

“Apple Stays Closed As iOS Shuts The Door On Developers.”

Apparently not.

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By now, you’ve no doubt heard that Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone is now available for iPhone. (Yup, you read that right: It’s iPhone-only.) The question is: Should you care?

That depends largely on whether you’re already a subscriber to Microsoft’s Office 365 and Skydrive services, which (for personal use) cost from $100 to $120 annually. (If you want to give the app a test run, Microsoft offers a 30 day free trial of Office 365, which you can set up at the Office 365 website.) Because, really, Microsoft Office Mobile is a front-end to that service, not a standalone productivity suite.

Getting connected

Office Mobile does give you access to the three legs of the Microsoft Office suite: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each of the three iOS apps is able to read and edit documents created using their related PC, Mac, or Web applications; if you want to create new documents on the iPhone, Office Mobile lets you do so with Word and Excel, but not PowerPoint.

When you sign in with your Office 365 account from the mobile app, you should also have access to your SkyDrive folder and be able to see any of the files you have stored there. But, after installing the app on two different devices, I found that only one automatically connected to my SkyDrive. For the second install, I needed to use the app’s Add a Place tool and choose SkyDrive. Add a Place is also the way you connect to your business’ or school’s Office 365 SharePoint.

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As someone who makes a Mac app for tracking the differences between files, you’d expect developer Patrick Burleson to have some thoughts on the changes Apple has announced for its operating systems during this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference. So that’s what we talk to him about in our latest video chat with developers attending WWDC.

Burleson runs BitBQ, and he also works on Briefs, a Mac app for iOS prototyping. His Mac app for tracking differences between files, Changes, may well benefit from the changes coming in OS X Mavericks, the update to the Mac OS announced by Apple this week. And his iOS app Fitness Tracker will need some updating to look at home on the forthcoming iOS 7.

In this video, we talk to Burleson about his work on Briefs, his plans for his own apps, and his reactions to Apple’s recent announcements.

I love my iPhone, and have loved it since I ditched my Sony Ericsson 710a way back in 2008. But no device is perfect, and every year I look forward to Worldwide Developers Conference keynotes and the new iOS features that typically come with it. iOS 7—previewed at this year’s WWDC—brings fixes for quite a few of my long-term quibbles—here are the ten I’m most looking forward to.

No more digging around settings

As a general rule, I like keeping the automatic brightness control off, so as to save my battery life. Unfortunately, this means that my screen’s occasionally too bright (or too dim) for the environment. But until iOS 7, there’s been no easy way to change my brightness on the iPhone without diving into several Settings menus.

Thank goodness, then, for Control Center. In addition to bringing easy on/off controls for Airplane mode, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Do Not Disturb, and screen rotation, there are big friendly sliders for both brightness and volume. Not only does this bring the iPhone ahead of the iOS 6’s paltry controls implementation, but it gives the end-user more control over basic settings (and eliminates one of the major reasons I ever thought about jailbreaking my device).

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The free Bonnarooo brings you every part of this famous music festival, except perhaps for a very particular kind of secondhand smoke. If you’re at Bonnaroo, you can use the app to see which stages your favorite artists are playing on, views schedules for other acts, and share info through Facebook. If you’re not there, the updated stream of news stories and videos will make you feel like you are.

Bluetooth enhancements are among the big changes to be found in the next versions of iOS and OS X, according to a Bluetooth trade group. Unveiled at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, iOS 7 andOS X 10.9 Mavericks will, among other things, allow Bluetooth-connected devices to use Notification Center. The changes are part of an “unprecedented” effort to more fully integrate the wireless technology into the Apple ecosystem and accessories such as game controllers, keyboards, and wearable health monitors.

Bluetooth SIG, a trade group of more than 18,000 companies that work with the short-range wireless technology, pointed out the development in a blog post and press release.

“This sets the table for some incredible innovation developers can bring to market,” Bluetooth SIG’s Suke Jawanda wrote in the blog post. “For example, my favorite sports app will seamlessly push an alert to my Bluetooth Smart watch every time my beloved Seattle Seahawks score a touchdown.” That means less time spent checking one’s phone for updates, Jawanda said.

OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 will include other Bluetooth-related enhancements, as well:

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If you enjoyed this week's roundup of iPhone cases, check out the previous edition, Dalek Dreams.

It’s time for another grab bag, selected from the many questions I get from readers. In this week’s column, I look at some questions about font size in iTunes (spoiler: your options are limited), identifying music file types in iTunes, finding which tracks iTunes has lost track of (spoiler: there’s an easy way), and moving podcasts to another Mac.

Q: I’m having trouble seeing the type in iTunes. Is there a way to change the font and/or size in its display?

I’ve long lamented the limited font and size options in Apple’s OS X and various applications as I, too, have vision that is far from 20/20.

iTunes does offer a limited option to change the size of its fonts. Open iTunes’ preferences, click the General icon, and then check Use large text for list views. This makes the text in both the sidebar and the main window larger. Unfortunately, you have no other options, and can only choose from those two sizes.

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When I received an invitation to the keynote event at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, my first reaction was, “Why?” I’m known as a security guy, which means my keynote invites are only when major security features are released. But as I watched the presentations, I began to understand why.

Among the many new features in iOS and OS X that the company discussed, two security-related ones received extended attention: iCloud Keychain and Activation Lock. And as I thought about the demos of those and other new features in the days that followed, I came to realize something about the company’s approach to security that I hadn’t thought about before.

The human factor

Apple is famously focused on design and human experience as their top guiding principles. When it comes to security, that focus created a conundrum. Security is all about placing obstacles in the way of attackers, but (despite the claims of security vendors) those same obstacles can get in the way of users, too.

Take passwords, for example: As essential as they are to protecting us and our devices, they are one of the most universally despised things about using technology. (I’ve ranted about passwords elsewhere).

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark office has confirmed four claims of Apple’s overscroll bounce patent, including a claim that played a crucial part in Apple’s $1.05 billion dollar lawsuit against Samsung, according to a document filed with a Californian court on Thursday.

Apple’s “list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touchscreen display” patent describes a way to scroll past a document’s border. When a user reaches the edge and stops scrolling, the screen bounces back to the nearest display area.

The most important claim in the patent is claim 19. During the Apple/Samsung billion dollar patent trial, the jury found that 21 accused products infringed claim 19, and the jury awarded damages regarding 18 of these products. Samsung's Galaxy S II, Galaxy Tab, Galaxy Tab 10.1 (WiFi), as well as the Droid Charge and the Nexus S 4G were among the infringing devices.

While the USPTO rejectedclaim 19 of the patent in a decision called a “Final Office Action” in April, the USPTO now has informed Apple that it intends to reverse that decision in a notice of intent to issue an ex parte reexamination certificate of the claims, according to a document filed by Apple with the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, San Jose Division.

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