Those who’ve hooked up their MacBook to an external display are probably all too familiar with the dreaded dance of windows (not to be confused with George R.R. Martin’s bestselling A Dance with Dragons): You’ve got all your windows positioned exactly as you like them, then you disconnect your MacBook and blergh—windows every which way.

Sound familiar? Cordless Dog’s $15 Stay has the fix for what ails you. This menu-bar utility lets you save sets of window locations and sizes. So if you like your Twitter client pinned, just so, to the bottom-left corner of your screen, you can tell Stay to remember that window position—and here’s the key—both when you’re running your MacBook on its own and when it’s connected to your external display. If you want your IM client’s contact list to hug the right edge of the screen on your MacBook’s display but the left edge of your external display when it’s connected, Stay can do that too.

Better yet, you can have Stay automatically restore your windows whenever a display is connected and disconnected. So once you’ve chosen your favorite window positions, Stay does its thing transparently. (You can instead restrict Stay to being triggered manually, either using its systemwide menu or via a user-defined keyboard shortcut.) And if you’re particular about application window locations, you can choose to have Stay restore each app’s windows to particular sizes and locations whenever you launch that app.

Because Stay uses the names of windows to match them with the ones stored in your saved sets, the utility can have issues with windows whose titles change (for example, with text editors or Web browsers). You can fix that problem in one of two ways: by manually linking your current window to the one Stay has stored, using the Link Active Window To command in the app’s menu, or by setting up a window title pattern for Stay to look for.

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One of my all-time favorite Mac utilities was MaxMenus, a System Preferences pane that let you create multiple custom menus, each containing your choice of apps, files, folders, volumes, and other frequently accessed items. Unfortunately, MaxMenus appears to have been abandoned—you can no longer download it, its website is dead, and while it currently works under Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.2), I suspect some future update to OS X will render MaxMenus useless.

I’ve tried—and quickly discarded—a number of alternatives, but one that works well is PointWorks’s $2 CustomMenu (Mac App Store link). Launch CustomMenu, and its systemwide menu icon appears on the right-hand side of your menu bar. Click this icon and choose Customize Menu, and you can choose the items you want to appear in the menu.

Click the Add (+) button next to Group on the left to create a new group—a section of the menu that’s separated from other sections by a divider line. I don’t know if there’s a limit to the number of groups, but I had ten groups in my menu while testing CustomMenu, and the utility still let me add another. These group names and dividers take up space—and you can’t add items to the menu without using groups—but they make the menu much easier to navigate than if all your items were in a single, uninterrupted list.

Select any group, and you can add items to that group by either dragging apps, files, and folders from the Finder into the group’s item list, or clicking the plus-sign (+) button next to Items to use OS X’s standard file-navigation dialog box. You can also move an item between groups by dragging it. Select an item and click the minus-sign (-) button, or press the Delete key, to remove the item from the list.

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Last week, we reviewed QuickRes, a menu-bar utility for changing the resolution of—and accessing higher resolutions on—Retina-display MacBook Pros. But even if you aren't using a Retina display, you may have wanted something similar, because Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) is missing a convenient feature found in older versions of OS X: the Displays menu extra.

Under Lion (OS X 10.7) and earlier, a simple click in the menu bar let you change screen resolutions and, if you had multiple displays, toggle display mirroring. Mountain Lion includes an option, in the Displays pane of System Preferences, to enable a Mirroring menu (for AirPlay mirroring, not dual-display mirroring), but that menu is missing resolution options—and it appears only when an AirPlay-mirroring-capable Apple TV is available on the local network.

I've been accessing resolution settings by pressing Option and either of my keyboard's Brightness keys—a shortcut that opens the Displays pane of System Preferences. But a more convenient approach can be found in Milch im Gemüsefach's free Display Menu (Mac App Store link).

Like the old Displays menu extra, clicking Display Menu shows you a list of all possible screen resolutions, including HiDPI modes (and, for some displays, refresh rates); choose one to switch to it. If you've got multiple displays, you can also toggle mirroring, which means you can disable Mountain Lion's own Mirroring menu-bar option.

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Mountain Lion’s notifications system and Notification Center are great for letting applications get your attention and present you with information; if you’re using Lion (OSX 10.7), the third-party utility Growl performs a similar function. But have you ever wished you could use these features to get your own attention—for example, to post a quick note or reminder without having to use a full-blown notes or calendar/reminder app, or to leave an onscreen note for yourself when you step away from your Mac?

That’s the idea behind Sticky Notifications (Mac App Store link), a simple but useful utility that lets you take advantage of Notification Center (in OS X 10.8) or Growl (in 10.7 or 10.8) to post simple reminder notifications. (In Lion, you don’t even need to have Growl installed—Sticky Notifications integrates the feature. If you have Growl installed in Mountain Lion, you can choose whether Sticky Notifications uses Growl or Notification Center.)

Launch Sticky Notifications, and a small note icon appears in your menu bar. Click that note, or press the app’s customizable keyboard shortcut (I use Shift+Control+Option+Command+N, believe it or not), and a small window appears for you to type your reminder’s title and, optionally, a subtitle and a message. Press Return (or click Notify) and your reminder appears onscreen immediately as either a Mountain Lion notification or a Growl notification. It stays there until you dismiss it by clicking it.

If your reminder contains URLs, Sticky Notifications can automatically open those links in the appropriate applications when you click the reminder. This feature makes Sticky Notifications a convenient way to remind yourself to check a website or to email a friend or colleague.

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One year and one week since the release of OS X Lion, Apple is back with Mountain Lion, also known as OS X 10.8.

Like Lion, Mountain Lion offers numerous feature additions that will be familiar to iOS users. This OS X release continues Apple’s philosophy of bringing iOS features “back to the Mac,” and includes iMessage, Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Twitter integration, Game Center, and AirPlay Mirroring. There are even a few features that are making their debut with Mountain Lion, and will find their way back into iOS 6 this fall.

As the first OS X release post-iCloud, Mountain Lion offers a much more thorough integration with Apple’s data-syncing service than Lion offered. Mountain Lion also brings options to limit which kinds of apps users can install, offers systemwide integration with social networking and media-sharing services, and gives some recent MacBook models the power to keep working even when they appear to be asleep. And although there are no actual mountain lions in China, OS X Mountain Lion does add a raft of features to speak to users in the country that’s Apple’s biggest growth opportunity.

At $20, Mountain Lion is Apple’s cheapest OS X upgrade since version 10.1 was free 11 years ago; like Lion, Mountain Lion is available only via a Mac App Store download. The combination of the low price and the easy download will likely make Mountain Lion the most quickly adopted OS X upgrade of all time. Given how solid a release I found Mountain Lion to be, that’s a good thing.

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I’ve written quite a bit about installing Lion (OS X 10.7) and about the benefits of creating a bootable installer disc or drive. While the latter process isn’t prohibitively difficult, it’s still a bit of a hassle. Developer Guillaume Gète has made it a bit easier with Lion DiskMaker, an AppleScript-based utility that mostly automates the procedure.

Launch Lion DiskMaker, and it checks your Applications folder for a copy of the Lion installer app. Assuming it finds the installer in that location, Lion DiskMaker then asks if you want to create an installer DVD or a boot disk, with the latter meaning a flash drive or an external hard drive.

Choose Burn A DVD, and you’re prompted to insert a blank, 4.7GB (single-layer) DVD. Unfortunately, you don’t see a progress bar while the disc is being burned—the DVD is simply ejected when it’s finished. On my 2010 iMac, it took about 17 minutes to burn the disc. You can boot from the DVD by inserting it into your Mac, restarting, and holding down the C key at startup to force your Mac to boot from the optical drive.

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Parallels Desktop 7 is the latest release of Parallels’ virtualization program, which allows users to run Windows, Linux, and now even OS X Lion directly within Mac OS X. Since Macworld last reviewed Parallels Desktop 5, the program has acquired an updated interface along with a slew of performance improvements and new features. Among the latter, there’s a simplified window for configuring virtual machines, support for Lion’s full screen mode, Launchpad integration, an in-app store for purchasing Windows and other programs, the ability to use iSight (and other) webcams within Windows clients, improved virtual printing, and more.

Parallels installs quickly and requires no real intervention from you; it even checks for updated versions during the installation process. You choose to install the application wherever you like; it doesn’t have to live in your Applications folder. You must activate Parallels Desktop (by entering your serial number) the first time you run it. Parallels presently requires one license per computer, so if you use both a desktop and laptop Mac, for instance, you’ll need to buy two copies of the program.

After activating, a new Parallels Wizard window appears. It focuses on helping you install Windows from a variety of sources. You can also install Mac OS X Lion (if your Mac is running Lion) from the wizard, import an existing virtual machine, and visit the Parallels Convenience Store, where you can buy a variety of operating systems and apps that run on them.

Parallels also makes it simple to install Chrome, Fedora, and Ubuntu operating systems: You can download ready-to-go versions of them from within Parallels, and they then auto-install themselves. It really doesn’t get much easier.

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The ninth major release of Apple’s server operating system is as big a change as the change from Mac OS X Server 1.0 to Mac OS X Server 10.0. (Readers with longish memories may remember that OS X Server had a pre-10.0 version, which was called version 1.0.) In many ways, Mac OS X Lion Server (version 10.7; Mac App Store link) succeeds, but it's hampered by UI annoyances and inconsistencies that will probably be fixed in future updates. But right now, using Lion Server is a tad more maddening than it should be.

Welcome Server.app; good-bye Server Admin—sort of

There’s a new kid in town for managing Lion Server, and it's called Server.app. I’m sure that this new server-management program will one day completely take over all the functions of the familiar Server Admin application, but right now it doesn’t, which results in a somewhat tedious bit of hopping back and forth between applications to get things done. For example, Server.app handles Address Book, File Sharing, iCal, iChat, Mail, and other service settings. Server Admin handles DHCP, DNS, NetBoot, Software Update, and others.

The impression is that Server Admin handles what Server.app doesn’t—but there are instances when you need to use both applications, such as for the Mail server and the Podcast server. Server Admin has access to more settings than Server.app does, so they complement each other. But when both applications manage the same settings, such as host name or SSH enabling, it’s really annoying.

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Tapfuze’s $3 Shade Control (Mac App Store link) is a simple yet useful utility that serves a single purpose—providing you a way to easily toggle your monitor’s brightness setting. When you install Shade Control it appears in your menu bar, represented by a lamp icon. Click the icon and you see a slider for adjusting brightness up and down as well as a toggle command.

With Shade Control toggled on, adjust the brightness for your current environment—you’re working in a dark room and don’t need the monitor at full brightness, for example. When you’re ready to return it to its “regular” setting (as configured by the keyboard brightness controls or Display preference setting), just choose Toggle Off from the Shade Control menu. Simple.

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Captur is a free Mac utility that offers easy access to the OS X screen capture command in the menu bar.

OS X has a built-in screen capture feature. To use it, you press command-shift-3 to capture the whole screen (or screens if you have multiple displays). Press comman-shift-4, and a crosshair appears, allowing you to capture a portion of the screen.

If you are unable to press the appropriate keys, you can use Captur. You can take screen captures of their entire desktop, a select area of the screen or particular window or even a Dashboard widget. Shots may be taken either instantaneously or after a brief five-second countdown. After you take a shot, Captur shows a preview of the image with options to either save the image, edit the image in Preview, or ignore (and delete) the image.

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Based on Macworld Lab's benchmark results, the new Mac mini models provide a great leap in processor performance over the previous generation. The new Mac mini was unveiled on Wednesday, and Macworld Lab has been testing the new machines that come with Lion and Core i5 processors.

The new Mac mini is available in two standard configurations: a $599 model with a 2.3GHz Core i5 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 processor; and a $799 model with a 2.5GHz Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and discrete AMD Radeon HD 6630 graphics. These two models replace a single $699 Mid-2010 Mac mini ( ) model that had a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and Nvidia GeForce 320M integrated graphics.

We’re busy putting together a new version of our Mac system performance suite, Speedmark, but its not quite ready yet. The current version, Speedmark 6.5, was created using Snow Leopard and uses older versions of applications. New Macs ship with Lion, so instead of downgrading the new Macs to try and run Snow Leopard (if that’s even possible), we have updated 10 of our tests to run on Lion using the latest versions of the applications that make up Speedmark.

It should come as no surprise that the new Core i5 Mac minis beat the pants off the 2010 Core 2 Duo Mac mini in processor tests. With Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost in the Core i5, the new 2.5GHz Core i5 Mac mini was more than twice as fast the 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini in our Cinebench CPU test and HandBrake MP4 encode. The new 2.3GHz Core i5 Mac mini was 46 percent faster than the older 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini on our Cinebench CPU and 45 percent faster in our HandBrake encode test.

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Apple first offered iChat in 2002, as part of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. Though I’ve tried iChat repeatedly with various releases of newer versions of the Mac OS, I always end up abandoning the software for the free, open-source Adium instead. iChat has long had one major leg up on Adium—its built-in support for audio and video chatting—but other Adium features offered enough improvement over iChat that I considered Apple’s instant messaging (IM) tool an also-ran.

What’s new

The newly released Mac OS X Lion includes iChat 6.0. It’s the first iteration that really can rival some of Adium’s advances in the IM software space. That’s because iChat finally adds features it’s missed for far too long.

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iCal, Apple’s built-in calendar application, sees some big changes in Mac OS X Lion. Many of the visual tweaks are borrowed from the Calendar iOS app on the iPad, with a focus on making appointments easier to view, and in some cases giving you more room in which to view them. There’s also a new way to enter events, a new view, and more.

New look

In Lion, iCal gets a makeover. The first thing you’ll notice is that the boring gray title bar of old has been replaced by a leather-looking pattern reminiscent of an old desktop calendar. In Apple’s typical attention to detail, there’s realistic stitching in the leather, and if you look closely, you’ll even see the remaining bits of pages ‘torn off’ the calendar.

Event bubbles have seen some changes, too. Shading is darker, and text is rendered in a heavier, bolded font. Both changes make events stand out better and make them easier to read at the same time.

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In a decade, Mac OS X evolved from a curious hybrid of the classic Mac OS and the NextStep operating system to a mainstream computer operating system used by millions. It was a decade of continual refinement, capped by the bug-fixing, internals-tweaking release of Snow Leopard in 2009.

But the last four years have seen some dramatic changes at Apple. In that time, while Mac sales have continued to grow, Apple has also built an entirely new business around mobile devices that run iOS. Combine the influx of new Mac users with the popularity of the iPhone and iPad, and you get Lion.

Can Apple make OS X friendly for people buying their first Macs and familiar to those coming to the Mac from the iPhone, while keeping Mac veterans happy? That would be a neat trick—and Apple has tried very hard to pull it off.

(Before you read any further, you need to know that Lion isn’t right for one particular group of users: If you’re using an early Intel Mac powered by a Core Solo or Core Duo processor, you can’t run it. And if you rely on PowerPC-based apps that run on Intel Macs using the Rosetta code-translation technology, they won’t run in Lion. For more on the fate of older software, see Chris Breen’s series on Lion-incompatible software.)

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The way we organize files is changing. Tags—keywords associated with files or other digital assets—have long been used by websites, and they’re now making their way to the files on your Mac, replacing the rigid folder structure. Tags, by Mac developer CaseApps, allows you to tag anything and everything on your Mac. Tags is a satisfying and easy-to-use application.

Tags lets you tag any file or folder with an unlimited number of keywords. You tag files by pressing the default control-spacebar command key combination, which then opens the Tags window. You can create new tags or using existing tags. From the Tags window, you can see all files that have been tagged system wide. You can also edit or delete tags from any file or view any file in the Finder. All tags are processed using AppleScript.

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Mac users seeking ways to keep files and folders hidden on their Macs have a plethora of options. Some options, like sparse images, are built right into Mac OS X. Others, like Nova Media’s Übermask , compliment OS X in a logical, helpful manner.

Übermask allows users to hide files or folders from view by rendering them invisible to Finder, Spotlight and even popular add-on utilities like Quicksilver and Alfred. It does this by working continuously in the background. Files remain hidden even after Übermask is closed because you must input your OS X administrator password each time you open Übermask, thereby granting the program the ability to hide files continuously.

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DwellClick (Mac App Store link) allows you to navigate your Mac with your mouse without clicking. It works surprisingly well.

After you turn on DwellClick, the utility tracks your mouse cursor across the screen. When you place your cursor on, say, an application icon and wait for a second, DwellClick kicks in and opens that application for you, all without you actually clicking on your mouse buttons.

The process of clicking without actually clicking is strange at first, and there is a bit of a learning curve with DwellClick. Thankfully, the developer, Pilotmoon Software, includes step-by-step instructions on how to tailor DwellClick to your needs. DwellClick has options to change how long the software waits until it performs a click.

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There are dozens of launcher applications available for speeding up your productivity on your Mac, each with their own strengths and peculiarities. Nulana’s Launcher (Mac App Store link) is an admirable addition to the crowd, providing quick and easy access to applications, folders, files, Web searches, system commands (like going into Screen Saver mode), and shell commands.

Activated by a keyboard shortcut, the launcher itself is a small horizontal text box reminiscent of Spotlight. Like Apple’s system tool, you can enter in application names, dictionary definitions and numeric equations, and file names—but Launcher doesn’t stop there: The application takes it one step further by allowing you to map customized phrases to your tasks. (To open Macworld.com in my browser of choice, for example, I would need only to type in “mw”.)

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Mac OS X may have a friendly, easy-to-use interface, but underneath that appealing UI is Unix. Which means OS X also has a shell—a command-line interface. Most Mac users who’ve accessed the shell, perhaps to enter a command they discovered on Mac OS X Hints, have done so using OS X’s Terminal utility (located in /Applications/Utilities). But if you frequently use Terminal, and most of that use is for quick, in-and-out tasks, check out DTerm (Mac App Store link), a nifty utility that provides instant access to a Terminal-like shell interface from within whatever application you’re currently using. I originally reviewed DTerm 1.0.1 back in 2008, but it’s gained quite a few features—and a new, low price—since then.

With DTerm running (it can run either as a standard application or as a background application that doesn’t appear in the Dock) you press a user-defined keyboard shortcut and a small, command-line dialog appears on the screen. (Depending on the active application, DTerm’s dialog appears either at the top of the active window or just below the menu bar.) Type or paste your command—DTerm supports the bash shell’s autocomplete feature for commands and paths—and press return, and the command or program is executed, with any results displayed in just below. When you’re done, press Escape, and DTerm disappears—you can get right back to work. DTerm is ideal for simple commands and for running command-line programs that don’t require much interaction.

But DTerm offers a number of features designed to make it even more convenient. For example, if the active window is a document or a Finder window, DTerm sets the shell’s current working directory—the “active” folder in the shell—to the location of the document or Finder folder, respectively, displaying that path at the top of the DTerm dialog. DTerm also provides an option to insert, in your command, the name of the current document or, if you’re in a Finder window, the name(s) of selected item(s). The drawback to this “always in the right place” approach is that you can’t force DTerm to change the current working directly—the cd command simply doesn’t work. (If you want to use a different directory as an argument for a command, you must include that directory path in the command itself.)

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Quick—count how many open windows you have on your Mac right now. If you’re like me, you have four or five programs and windows open at the same time. It can be tough to keep track of everything with so many programs open at once.

In July, Apple will introduce a new feature called Mission Control as part of its forthcoming Lion operating system. Mission Control will make switching between programs easier and incorporate elements of Exposé, the longstanding switcher in OS X. But if you don’t want to wait for Lion and you want a more immediate solution, you might want to look at Window Commander, a slick and fast visual application switcher available in the Mac App Store.

While Window Commander replicates much of the functionality of OS X’s command-tab keyboard combination, it does so with a distinct visual style which enhances its usefulness. Window Commander displays images of each open window rather than only showing a list of icons for open programs, as OS X’s command-tab does.

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OpenMenu X is a menu-based launching solution. You can fill it with a hierarchy of things you want to launch, including applications, AppleScripts, documents, Services, and URLs. The list and organization is customizable.

The menu itself can invoked in three different ways: a menu bar item, as part of the context menu, and as a pop-up menu. The pop-up menu can be opened either by tapping a key twice or by using a hotkey. The slightly more interesting method of bringing up OpenMenu is using the context menu.

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We’ve already shared the results of our benchmark tests for the $1999 27-inch 3.1GHz Core i5 iMac, one of four new iMac configurations released by Apple this week. We’ve had the chance to finish testing the remaining three standard-configuration models, with our results showing a significant boost for the new iMacs over the models they replace. However, not much differentiates the performance of the four new iMacs among each other.

The new entry-level iMac is a 21.5-inch, $1199 model with a 2.5GHz Core i5 quad core processor, a 500GB hard drive, and AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics with 512MB of video memory. The other 21.5-inch iMac has a 2.7GHz Core i5 quad core processor, a 1TB hard drive, and AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics with 512MB of video memory for $1499. A 27-inch iMac with otherwise identical specifications to the $1499 iMac costs $1699. And finally, the previously benchmarked 27-inch iMac is a $1999 system with a 3.1GHz Core i5 quad core processor, a 1TB hard drive, and AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics with 1GB of video memory. All four systems run on Sandy Bridge processors from Intel.

Macworld Lab’s overall system performance test suite, Speedmark 6.5, showed these four new Sandy Bridge iMacs to be considerably faster than the systems they replace. The new $1199 21.5-inch, 2.5GHz Core i5 quad core iMac was nearly 24 percent faster overall than last year’s entry-level 21.5-inch iMac, which had a 3.06GHz Core i3 dual core processor. As you would expect, the new iMac showed the most improvement in applications that could take advantage of four processing cores. The new entry-level system was 37 percent faster in our Handbrake encoding test, 34 percent faster in our Cinebench CPU test, and 64 percent faster in MathematicaMark.

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On Tuesday, Apple released an updated line of iMacs, featuring quad-core Sandy Bridge Intel processors and Thunderbolt ports. Macworld Lab has all four standard configuration models, and the results for the $1999 27-inch iMac are in. The results do not disappoint, with the new iMac besting the previous generation of standard-configuration iMacs. The new 3.1GHz iMac even bested the performance of some impressively-equipped build-to-order models we've tested previously.

The $1999 iMac was the first to arrive in our lab and the first to be tested. At the heart of this iMac is a 3.1GHz Core i5 quad-core processor. This iMac also has a 1TB 7200-rpm hard drive, and AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics with 1GB of video memory.

Our overall system performance test suite, Speedmark 6.5, shows the new system to be 16 percent faster than the previous high-end standard configuration iMac, a 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 quad-core model with a 1TB 7,200-rpm hard drive, and ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics with 1GB of dedicated RAM. (Apple considered the older 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 iMac a BTO option, but the online Apple Store didn’t treat it like one, so we decided to treat it like a standard configuration model.)

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The latest iteration of Apple’s Mail client, like the OS it accompanies, seems little changed on the surface. Its greatest improvements lie under the hood, and while not all of them entirely live up to Apple’s promises, the program on the whole remains dependably excellent.

A correspondence with Redmond

The new Mail’s greatest selling point is its built-in support for Microsoft Exchange 2007, which lets Mail now work fluently with e-mail systems built for Microsoft’s Outlook. If you prefer to use a Mac at home, but work for an all-Windows company, you’ll no longer need Webmail or a remote access client to get your business mail.

Mail works with Outlook the same way it does everything else: simply, effectively, and with no frills or fuss. After establishing a VPN connection to my office network, and getting the necessary info from the tech folks, I was easily able to set up an Exchange IMAP account. My work mail appeared seamlessly alongside my personal accounts, with all my Outlook folders faithfully represented. Mail can also use Exchange data to populate your Address Book and iCal calendar.

Mail’s documentation notes that businesses can add an autoconnect feature to their Exchange servers, allowing your Mac to fetch mail with no account information beyond an e-mail address and password. The server I connected to didn’t seem to run this, so I wasn’t able to test it. Manual setup was hardly a chore, though, taking maybe an extra minute and a few additional fields of data. If you want easy access to Exchange-based mail, but don’t want to use Microsoft’s Entourage or its forthcoming Outlook 2010, the latest Mail makes an ideal substitute.

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With three years of major iPhone software versions under its belt, Apple’s strategy for releasing updates has fallen into a recognizable pattern. So far, every release has been anchored by a tentpole feature that many will argue should have been there from the beginning. In iPhone OS 2.0, that was support for third-party apps; in iPhone OS 3.0, it was cut, copy, and paste; now, in the re-branded iOS 4, it’s multitasking.

Make no mistake, multitasking is the lynchpin of iOS 4; for better or worse, the rest is just window dressing—though welcome window dressing, to be sure.

He tasks me, and I shall have him!

Multitasking represents the biggest fundamental change to iOS at least since last year’s introduction of cut, copy, and paste—possibly in the history of Apple’s mobile devices. As with those text manipulation features, we’ve grown so accustomed to working without multitasking that it’s likely going to take an adjustment for most users to override that instinctive muscle memory that requires jumping back to the Home screen whenever switching applications.

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The arrival of Google Chrome 5 for OS X seems to have intensified the arms race among Mac Web browsers. Mere weeks after Google took its own admirable shot at the browser crown, Apple’s Safari 5 once again secures its place on the throne. The duration of its reign is anyone’s guess, but for now, you won’t find a faster, more powerful Mac browser than Safari.

The king stays the king

Once again, Safari 5’s biggest new feature is its increased horsepower. On a 2GHz aluminum MacBook with 2GB RAM and Snow Leopard, I tested Apple’s latest browser against Firefox 3.63, Chrome 5, and Opera 10.53. Safari trounced them all, with a few minor asterisks.

Like all its rivals, Safari 5 scored a perfect 100 in the Acid3 Web standards test. Unlike the rest of the pack, Safari 5 seemed to stumble slightly in a compatibility test for CSS3 selectors, passing only 576 checks out of the possible 578. However, a Safari 5 security update document explains that the browser still supports the two selectors in question, which deal with visited links. It simply disables them in some situations to prevent malicious pages from automatically detecting which sites a user may have already visited.

In XHTML rendering, Safari 5 ran roughly as fast as its predecessor, displaying a locally hosted test page in 0.58 seconds against Safari 4’s 0.54 seconds. In fairness, the difference could simply owe to random chance; other tests I ran at different times yielded even closer results. More importantly, Safari 5 thumped the competition here; Chrome took 0.78 seconds, Opera 1.67 seconds, and Firefox a decidedly odd 12.42 seconds. (Those scores are the lowest out of six consecutive tests for each browser, to rule out one-time hiccups.) Safari also topped a locally hosted CSS test, scoring 33 milliseconds against Chrome’s 51, Opera’s 193, and Firefox’s 342.

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One of my major annoyances with Snow Leopard is the lack of support for creator codes—no longer can you assume that double-clicking a file in the Finder will open that file in the application that created it.

While some like the new behavior, many do not. If you’re one of those in the latter category, I covered one solution, LaunchCodes, back in January, but Michael Fortin’s Magic Launch is even better, and it's just what I've been looking for.

Magic Launch is a System Preferences pane that runs a tiny background process—technically a launch agent—any time you double-click a document; this process intercepts the system’s calls and routes to the program of your choosing the command to open that document. Once the desired program is launched, Magic Launch's agent quits, thus requiring no system resources when not in use.

How do you assign a document type to an application in Magic Launch? The simplest method is simply to add the desired file extensions to the list of file types handled by Magic Launch; for example, if you want Magic Launch to intercept requests for text files, add the .txt extension to the list.

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Virtualization programs such as Parallels Desktop ( ) are extremely useful for people who need to work with both Macs and PCs, as they allow you to create a virtual machine that works just like an ordinary PC, but which runs on your Mac at the same time as all your normal Mac programs (unlike Apple’s Boot Camp, which requires you to restart and switch back and forth between the Mac and Windows environments).

This can also be useful for people who are switching from a PC to a Mac for the first time, as it provides a kind of halfway-house that allows you to keep your existing Windows software while you get used to the Mac way of doing things.

With that in mind, Parallels has a special version of Parallels Desktop designed specifically for switchers who have bought their first Mac.

The Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition includes version 4 of Parallels Desktop (it comes with a free upgrade to the latest version of Parallels, version 5) along with a set of video tutorials and a special USB cable that can be used to transfer files from your old PC onto a virtual machine running on the new Mac. However, it costs $100, compared to $80 if you buy Parallels Desktop on its own.

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eBuddy Pro aims to be Adium for the iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a push-enabled chat application that lets you instant message with your buddies on AIM, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, GTalk, MySpace, and Hyves.

eBuddy works pretty well—just not right out of the box. That is, eBuddy has the capacity to be a very good multi-protocol IM app; you just need to tweak a few settings first to get things working sanely.

When you first launch the $5 app, you’re prompted to create an eBuddy account—a single username for all your IM accounts that will also work at the eBuddy Website, too. Once your eBuddy account is ready to go, you can start adding all of your other IM credentials to it. Yes, this means that you’ll need to trust the company with your passwords for all of those other services, but the eBuddy icon looks so cute and cuddly, how could you not trust it?

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