We get it: You’re busy. Much as you would love to read every story we publish here on Macworld.com, it’s inevitable that you miss the occasional piece. But we love you, and we want to help. So here are some highlights from the past week.
A new take on an old store
The ever-reliable Internet rumor mill was rife with excitement: What exciting newness would Apple unveil to commemorate the tenth anniversary of its retail stores? As it turns out, the answer was: iPads. Not a new model of iPad for you to take home and caress, but rather a slew of iPads that replaced in-store signage. The iPads offer product information, pricing, and other such details, and even let you page an Apple Store rep to come help you. Sadly, their Home buttons are blocked, so you can’t use them to play Super Stickman Golf. The Apple Store now offers personal setup for all major Apple hardware purchases, too. And lest the iPhone Apple Store app get jealous, it also received an update. Frankly, though, I’m not interested until it gets multiplayer.
Other news
If you missed our story on Apple’s response to Lodsys regarding threatening legal letters the latter company had sent to iOS developers, then you should probably check our homepage more often. We also published the full text of the letter from Apple Legal.
Amazon launched an unexpected Mac Downloads Store, but it’s really hard to browse it from a Kindle. Our own Dan Frakes wrote an in-depth hands-on article about the store experience.
For our next item I turn now to my rhyming dictionary, with sincerest apologies to Dr. Seuss (who deserves better):
Another big story we covered this week Relates to the Mac’s tarnished safety mystique. Will cruel MacDefender be OS X’s ender? Should all of us turn off our Macs and surrender? No! Since Apple has published removal instructions, And we shared Rich Mogull’s quite lucid deductions; He says not to panic and ditch all our Macs; It’s our brains—not our bytes—that most malware attacks.
Hints and how-to’s
First, let’s take a moment and appreciate that I correctly pluralized “how-to’s” per Macworld’s style guide on my first try. Then, let’s move on; we published some great tutorials over the past week.
If you’re frequently mocked for mis-singing lyrics like “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do,” don’t miss Kirk McElhearn’s guide to adding lyrics to your music in iTunes. Business folk who need to prove they use their iPads for work in order to justify expensing them will rejoice upon reading our guide to editing spreadsheets on the iPad. And if you’re planning a summer vacation, don’t miss our travel tips for Apple hardware enthusiasts. (Bonus tip: Don’t play Flight Control on the plane. It makes people nervous.)
We also shared hints on opening multiple copies of a PDF in Preview, transferring iPhoto photos between networked Macs, and skinning Twitterrific, which is less painful than it sounds—particularly for Twitterrific. And we shared advice on creating an OS X flash drive installer, and yes, this refers to the kind of flash Mac users should embrace (not the crashtastic memory hog).
Reviews and previews
As ever, we offered a slew of reviews. MetalStorm offers great multiplayer—complete with in-game trash-talking; Notificant reminds you about your tasks and [NOTE TO SELF: Finish Notificant’s description later]; Fantastical lives up to its name, and ScreenFloat floats our boat. Risk, unfortunately, was a bit of a disappointment.
On the hardware side, we really liked the Future Sonics Atrio m5 Professional Earphones, although their name is certainly an earful. We also covered a new digital camera that will only set you back $45,000—”And to think,” some Windows fan somewhere must have chortled, “it’s not even made by Apple!” Chris Breen couldn’t deny that the Peel Universal Remote has (forgive me) appeal. We also wrote up iPad accessories just for your lap, which we managed to do with a straight face.
We’re done here
With that, you should be mostly caught up on Macworld’s coverage from the week gone by. Tune in again next weekend to read about all the stuff you’ll miss between now and then.
[Macworld Staff Writer Lex Friedman’s working for the weekend.]