The kids are back in school. Football season is underway. That can only mean one thing: We haven’t found ourselves stuck in a frozen timeless vortex of agony and despair. Let’s celebrate our good fortune with another edition of the Weekly Wrap, wherein we look back at Macworld’s best stories from the past week.
Soft wherewithal
Intuit released a new version of QuickBooks for Mac, and said it wasn’t aiming for feature parity with its Windows counterpart. In his first look at QuickBooks 2012, contributor Jeffery Battersby reassures us that, fortunately, the software doesn’t appear to be a feature parody of its Windows counterpart, either.
1Password went Lion- and Mac App Store-only. A few disgruntled customers who have chosen to stick with Snow Leopard threatened a boycott, before realizing the futility of such a plan mere seconds later. Meanwhile, Adobe launched Carousel, a cloud-based photo app that seemingly competes with iCloud’s photo syncing services. Though Carousel is available and iCloud isn’t yet, I suppose you could call them both vaporware.
We covered plenty of iOS apps this week, too:
- Agendas—which we reviewed without any hidden ones,
- MadPad—from the creators of I Am T-Pain, which may or may not be a compliment,
- Facebook—a small social-networking startup working on improving its privacy controls,
- The Civil War Today—an app about which we felt internally conflicted,
- Three comic-style photo editors—which take your snaps and add POPs,
- Tiny Tower—a game as fun as it is alliterative, and
- Two iOS take-out apps—only one of which should itself be taken out—in the sense of “put out of its misery.”
We can’t hide our Lion pride
Senior editor Chris Breen can help you avoid triggering unintended multitouch gestures, which ideally means you won’t be showing your Mac any unkind gestures of your own. His fellow senior editor, Dan Frakes, wrote up an app that helps you make various Lion tweaks; the app is creatively named Lion Tweaks.
Contributor Sharon Zardetto revealed the secrets of Lion’s Spotlight menu, at which point they promptly stopped being secrets, and her otherwise excellent feature suddenly became a paradox. Mr. Breen jumped on the Spotlight bandwagon with advice for folks whose Spotlight seems suddenly forgetful, if I remember correctly.
We also offered up a hint about monitoring Wi-Fi with Lion’s hidden tool. When real Lions start hiding tools, that’s when I’ll panic.
Speaking of panic…
Don’t, yet. But do read up an ongoing iTunes gift credit theft we’re calling the Towson Hack; it’s written by one of my all-time favorite Macworld writers. If you prefer your lengthy articles in audio form, senior associate editor Dan Moren and I recorded a Towson Hack podcast, too.
Meanwhile, if you want to ensure you’re browsing the Web safely—and you should— make sure you fire up Software Update.
Some serious hardware
We love software—who doesn’t? But we love hardware, too. We reviewed the WaterField Designs MacBook Air Smart Case, rounded up another week’s worth of iPhone Cases, and, of course, a slew of iOS accessories, too.
And if you want to know just how well your Macs are running, we can help. Our lab director James Galbraith wrote up our new Speedmark 7 benchmark suite, and also shared more Thunderbolt performance metrics. (Spoiler: Thunderbolt is so fast, it already finished reading this Weekly Wrap.)
Oh, and look at that—so did you! We’ll see you here again next week, and we’ll miss you terribly until then.