Here’s how to make the best of a terrible situation, get as much of your data back as possible and avoid a similar disaster if your Mac decides to smooch the ground again somewhere down the line.

Pick it up, clean it off

After your Mac falls, calm down, pick it up, look over the damage and clean away whatever dirt and detritus you can. From there, make sure that your Mac is turned off and then weigh your options.

A MacBook Pro that fell out of a motorcyclist's backpack. (JULIANBL/NEOWIN.NET)

If you feel comfortable opening the machine, find a wrist strap and tools, touch a metal object to discharge any static that your body may be carrying, and carefully open the Mac to check for case fragments, damaged parts or debris that may have ended up in the computer. Don’t turn it on; just focus on the parts that survived the fall and anything that might appear damaged, and clean out the interior as best you can.

If you don’t feel comfortable with opening a Mac on your own, remember that online guides like the ones that iFixit offers can be your best friend and will help you open the case. You can always consult the Apple Authorised Service Provider Locator to find the nearest Apple Store, service provider or consultant to help.

The first boot is your best chance

Whether you’re working with a potentially damaged hard drive inside the computer or you removed the drive and placed it in an external casing, the first boot is the most critical. At that moment you’re confronting the drive in the best possible condition it’ll be in after its fall.

Use the drive gently, don’t try to copy too much data all at once, and treat the just-dropped drive with kid gloves, no matter what.

The deep-freeze last resort

If you’re dealing with a physically damaged conventional hard drive, putting the device in a sealed bag and inserting it in a freezer for at least an hour may temporarily contract the drive’s overheated, overexpanded metal parts back into place. If that happens, the drive can be mounted and will function normally enough to allow you to pull data from it. It sounds crazy, but it works.

It’s not the best option, but if there’s a final critical file you need to get, this move won’t damage the hard drive any further and it may pull off the miracle you need in a pinch.

Back up the Users folder first

The Users folder is where most of your critical stuff lives; and if you lose it, your day is going to be that much worse. Locate your Users folder (Hard Drive > Users) and then slowly copy data from it, one file or one small folder at a time.

Remember that you’re dealing with a hard drive that has absorbed a powerful physical blow – an electronic component’s equivalent of being on the receiving end of a haymaker from the heavyweight champ when all it wanted to do was step out for a bagel. Take it easy on your shell-shocked drive.

The pricey-but-worth-it approach

DiskWarrior

Alsoft’s DiskWarrior is a great application for taking a damaged hard drive and rehabbing it to a point at which you can recover its data. At US$100, the app is pricey, but the investment pays off; I’ve rebuilt more hard drives with DiskWarrior than I care to mention.

Prosoft Engineering’s Data Rescue 3 lets you mount and work with drives that may be too damaged to mount under OS X. It can also help you work around damaged sectors on the drive to recover every savable chunk of data. At $64.99, it’s another fairly hefty investment; but between these two apps, you can rebuild and recover an amazing amount of data, if the drive’s mechanical functions are still operating normally after the drop.

No matter what, back it up

Time Machine

Back up your data to multiple destinations – to iCloud, to the $6 external flash drive you bought at the pharmacy, to Carbonite, to Backblaze, to an external hard drive via Time Machine, and elsewhere.

Hard-drive storage is cheap and backup services are affordable. Going with any of these options can save a whole lot of misery down the road, especially if the alternative turns out to involve a four-figure estimate from a drive recovery service.

The SSD option

With a solid-state drive, you pay a premium for a blazing-fast drive that doesn’t have a tonne of storage space on it. But beyond its superior speed, an SSD has one distinct advantage over a traditional hard drive: it contains no moving parts and is therefore essentially shock-proof.

An SSD isn’t invincible, but it can operate under a wider range of temperatures and can endure thumps and lumps more readily than a hard drive equipped with moving parts and spinning platters.

A Samsung internal SSD

A Samsung internal SSD.If possible, look into upgrading your Mac with a SSD for its main drive. If the sum of your data won’t fit on that drive, look into putting your operating system and your critical data on that drive and your other data on either a second internal hard drive or an external hard drive.

Bite the bullet: data recovery

Prices for professional data recovery tend to run in the high three figures to four figures, but the operation works. Send your hard drive off to a (global data) recovery outfit like DriveSavers, and its technicians will disassemble the drive and replace malfunctioning parts in a dust-free, clean-room environment. It won’t be cheap, but it’s the best route for retrieving all physically recoverable data from a damaged drive.

Recovery takes time

Somewhere, sometime, you will accidentally drop your Mac. Keep calm, don’t panic, get your thoughts in order, take care of your data, keep backups in safe locations, and you’ll be all right. Look at the bright side: ladies dig scars and guys love war stories. The more impressive the drop, the better the story you’ll have to tell.

by Chris Barylick, Macworld

The post Advice from an Apple tech: when your Mac takes a fall appeared first on Macworld Australia.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook defended the company on Tuesday before a Senate subcommittee, saying that Apple uses no “tax gimmicks” in assigning about two-thirds of its worldwide profits to three subsidiaries in Ireland, where the company has negotiated a corporate income tax rate of less than two percent.

In reality, Apple has paid a far lower rate than the two percent negotiated in Ireland, with one subsidiary paying no income taxes in the past five years, and another paying 0.05 percent in Ireland in 2011, according to a report released on Monday by the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

But Cook and two other Apple executives defended their tax decisions before the subcommittee. Apple paid an effective tax rate of 30.5 percent in the US last year and may be the single largest corporate taxpayer in the US, Cook said. The company employs 50,000 people in the US and its products support hundreds of thousands of US jobs, he said.

“We pay all the taxes we owe – every single dollar,” he said. “We not only comply with the laws, but we comply with the spirit of the laws.”

Apple set up its first Irish subsidiary in 1980 to sell products overseas and it continues to have significant operations in Ireland, Cook and the other executives said. “Apple has real operations in real places with Apple employees selling real products to real customers,” Cook said.

While no one accused Apple of breaking the law, some subcommittee members questioned Apple’s arrangements with its three Irish subsidiaries. Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, suggested Apple “invented” new tax dodges. While Apple bills itself as a large taxpayer, it is also “one of the biggest tax avoiders,” McCain said.

Apple has an unfair advantage over US companies that have no foreign operations and “don’t have the same ability that you do to locate in Ireland,” McCain added.

Cook disagreed, saying Apple pays a significant portion of its profit in taxes. “We do have a low tax rate outside of the United States, but this is for products we sell outside of the United States,” he said. “There’s no shifting going on that I see at all.”

Two tax experts told the subcommittee that Apple’s decision to assign profits to subsidiaries with no residency for tax purposes was an unusual tax strategy. Apple’s assertion that the Irish subsidiaries are neither Irish nor US for tax purposes gives the company what tax planners fondly call “ocean income”, said Stephen Shay, a tax professor at Harvard Law School and former official with the US Department of the Treasury.

When Apple released testimony saying it used no tax gimmicks, “I almost fell out of my chair when I read that,” added Richard Harvey, a tax professor at the Villanova University School of Law School and former official with the Treasury Department and the US Internal Revenue Service.

The current US tax system allowing Apple to arbitrarily shift about two-thirds of its profits to the Irish subsidiaries needs to be fixed, added Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and subcommittee chairman.

“We can’t continue a system where a multinational company as phenomenally successful as yours… can make a decision as [to] where the profits are going to flow,” Levin told the Apple executives. “You made a unilateral decision [about] where these profits are going to be taxed or not taxed.”

Cook also called for tax reform in the US. The US tax system is too complex and a high tax rate of 35 percent discourages US companies from bringing foreign earnings back into the country, he said. “The tax system handicaps American corporations, in relation to our foreign competitors, who don’t have such constraints on the free movement of capital,” Cook said.

Congress should lower the US corporate tax rate and allow a “reasonable” tax in the single-digit percentages on foreign earnings brought back into the US, Cook said.

Some subcommittee members defended Apple, saying executives have a responsibility to shareholders to maximise profits and minimise taxes paid.

“Frankly, I’m offended by the tone and tenor of this hearing,” said Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican. “I’m offended by a US$4 trillion government bullying, berating and badgering one of America’s greatest success stories. Tell me one of these politicians up here who doesn’t minimise their taxes.”

The purpose of the hearing wasn’t to embarrass Apple, but to show the need for tax reform, Levin countered. Cook said he testified voluntarily in an effort to push for tax reform and didn’t feel bullied by senators.

by Grant Gross, IDG News Service

The post Apple defends offshore decisions that result in low taxes appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Although the iPhone remained the top smartphone by customer satisfaction, with a score of 81 in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) published on Tuesday, Apple’s lead largely evaporated. Not only did Apple’s score fall two points from the year before, satisfaction in competitors’ devices jumped.

Samsung’s satisfaction score grew the most, increasing by five points to 76, a seven percent gain. Motorola’s score climbed 5.5 percent to 77 points, while Nokia’s gained a point to close at 76, a 1.3 percent increase. Other smartphone manufacturers’ scores slumped: those of HTC and LG slid four percent and 5.3 percent, respectively.

2012′s eight-point gap between Apple and the best of the rest was halved in 2013, as Apple now leads the next closest, Motorola, by just four points.

ACSI’s director, David VanAmburg, attempted to explain Apple’s shrinking lead.

“While the iPhone 5 had strong sales, it has not bolstered Apple’s overall customer satisfaction,” said VanAmburg in a report accompanying the survey results. “[And Samsung's] improvement is the largest yet for any cell phone manufacturer.”

VanAmburg credited the 2012 launch of the Galaxy S3 for the boost to Samsung’s score, and noted that the 81 scored by the iPhone lagged behind the 86 garnered by Apple’s Mac personal computers and iPad tablets last September.

ACSI’s results generally conformed with media coverage and customer reactions to the iPhone 5 – which was seen as a minor upgrade, even though it sported a slightly larger screen – and Samsung’s Galaxy S3 and S4, which have been applauded. Most analysts, for instance, have portrayed Samsung as Apple’s only real competitor.

According to IDC, Samsung shipped 71 million smartphones in the first quarter, while Apple shipped 37 million iPhones, or just over half as many. Apple’s share shrunk to 17.3 percent for the quarter, down from 23 percent for the same period in 2012; meanwhile, Samsung’s share climbed from 28.8 percent to 32.7 percent.

The ACSI scores can be found on the organisation’s website. The results were based on surveys of nearly 9600 Americans between 21 January and 17 March 2013.

by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

The post The iPhone’s big lead in customer satisfaction is gone appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Open a PDF in PDF Editor Pro and it looks and feels pretty much the same way Preview does. There are several buttons in the toolbar that give you quick access to the application’s editing and annotation tools, which include tools for rearranging pages within your document, editing text within the PDF file, adding comments, drawing lines or freehand drawing and highlighting text.

Inline text editing in PDF Editor Pro works mostly as expected. Select the Touchup tool in the PDF Editor Pro toolbar, then double-click the text you want to edit to make changes. As is the case with any PDF editor, the quality of the edits you make using these tools may not be as good as your average word processor as the font used in the original PDF document may no be available on your Mac and you are only able to edit text one line at a time.

PDF Editor Pro can take scanned PDF documents and turn them into editable PDF files you can annotate, edit or update as you see fit.

PDF Editor Pro has a new form recognition feature that automatically detects and highlights fields in a PDF file that are available for you to enter data into. When the application finds form fields, a small blue bar appears across the top of the document stating that the document contains interactive form fields and all the fields are highlighted in blue. While it’s possible to edit form fields in most other PDF editing applications, PDF Editor Pro is the only application I’ve used that makes it obvious a document contains these fields as soon as you open it.

If you’ve ever used Preview to edit a PDF file, you may be aware that inserting pages from one PDF file into another PDF file is pretty simple. All you need to do is open two PDF files with the sidebar open so you can see the pages and then drag a page from the sidebar on one PDF to the sidebar on the other PDF. Attempting to do the same with PDF Editor simply doesn’t work. Instead, dragging the page from one document to the next rearranges the pages in the document you’ve attempted to drag the page to. It is possible to insert pages into your document from another file, but this is only using a menu item, which isn’t as straightforward or easy as Preview’s drag-and-drop.

Like page insertion, highlighting text in your documents works, but the devil is in the details. The default colour for highlighting is yellow and, unlike Preview, there is no way to change that colour from the highlighting menu. Instead, you have to open a separate Inspector window, locate the Annotation Properties and change the fill colour. This is not impossible, but it lacks the basic simplicity found in apps such as Preview or even the feature-rich PDFPen Pro.

One feature that PDF Editor Pro offers that goes well beyond the capabilities of Preview is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR lets you take text appearing in an image and turn it into text that is selectable, highlightable and editable. PDF Editor Pro’s OCR engine is good, but not nearly as good as the OCR tools available in similar applications such as PDFPen Pro. Even in very clean documents that came from originals that were crystal clear, I ended up with odd text artifacts and, in some cases, text in the middle of a sentence – with recognised text on either side of it – remained as an image rather than recognised text. Testing the same document using PDFPen Pro resulted in perfectly recognised text and a document without any vestigial images.

Bottom line

PDF Editor Pro is appealing as a PDF editor in that if offers OCR and text editing options not available in Apple’s native Preview app. However, it’s not nearly as easy to use as Preview and its OCR capabilities aren’t as good as those found in other applications. It’s not a bad PDF editing application, but you may be better off looking elsewhere for your PDF editing needs.

by Jeffrey Battersby, Macworld

The post PDF Editor Pro 3.0.2 appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Situated in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall shopping strip, the Apple store has been long awaited by South Australian Apple customers, who have long seethed at being overlooked while multiple stores have opened in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. Even Canberra has its own Apple Store.

Customers can already make reservations online for workshops and Genius Bar appointments at the store.

The Rundle Place retail store arrives a month after the Highpoint store opened in Melbourne’s north-west suburbs.

Now for Tasmania and the Northern Territory …

The post First South Australian Apple Store to open this weekend appeared first on Macworld Australia.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which certifies commercial technology for defence use, said on Friday it had approved the Apple iOS 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG).

“Approval of the STIG means that government-issued iOS 6 mobile devices are approved for use when connecting to DOD networks within current mobility pilots or the future mobile device management framework,” the agency said in a statement.

The department earlier this month cleared BlackBerry 10 smartphones and PlayBook tablets with its enterprise mobility management platform BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 to be used on its networks. It also approved Samsung Electronics’ Knox, a new Android-based platform designed by the company to enhance security of the current open source Android.

The DOD mobility strategy includes mobile devices configured to the STIG, in combination with an actively managed and defended Mobility Device Management system, DISA said. The agency is responsible for establishing MDM, which provides a process for managing and distributing mobile applications and an enhanced cyber defence infrastructure. DISA is running a pilot program to bring all the pieces together.

A DOD spokesman, Lt Col Damien Pickart, said earlier that a decision on Apple’s iOS was expected to be taken last week. Several mobile devices and operating systems are currently going through DISA’s STIG review and approval process, Pickart said via email earlier this month.

“We look forward to additional vendors also participating in this process, further enabling a diversity of mobile devices for use within the department,” Pickart said. The approvals do not result in product orders, he added. Actual orders will be linked to operational requirements and availability of funding with user organisations, DISA said in its statement.

DOD currently has more than 600,000 commercial mobile devices in operational and pilot use, including about 470,000 BlackBerry devices, 41,000 running Apple operating systems and 8700 on Android. A Commercial Mobile Device Implementation Plan aims to permit use of the latest commercial technologies such as smartphones and tablets, and to develop an enterprise mobile device management capability and application store to support approximately 100,000 multivendor devices by February 2014, DISA said.

by John Ribeiro, IDG News Service

The post US Defense Department approves Apple’s iOS devices for its networks appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Welcome to new Flickr

When you log into Flickr, you’ll see something like this.

The first thing you’ll notice when you log into Flickr is a completely new look. Instead of a homepage that is mostly text with image thumbnails, you’ll instead be greeted with a stream of big, beautiful photos from your Flickr friends, as well as recommended photos from others. The interface has a clean, simple, flat appearance, similar to what Microsoft uses with Windows Phone 8.

Profile pages

Profile pages look stunning.

The image-heavy look carries over to profile pages. At the top of each profile page is space for a cover photo – sort of like what you’ll find on Facebook – followed by a grid layout that displays a photostream in reverse chronological order. As you resize your browser window, the photos resize with it in a responsive design that makes use of every last centimetre of screen space you give them.

On the Photostream tab, three buttons in the upper right let you initiate a photo slideshow complete with a pan-and-zoom effect, access sharing options to share photos via a link, via email or another social network (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Tumblr), and choose other viewing options.

Clicking the Sets tab shows you any photosets that user has created (or your sets, if you’re viewing your own page); meanwhile, clicking Favourites will show you all the photos that person (or you) favourited.

These pages are presented beautifully, and they’re reasonably easy to navigate, too. The one thing I didn’t like was how clicking photos sent you to a new page to view the photo instead of in a pop-over photo viewer as you get on Facebook. You can get something close to this by mousing over a photo and selecting the tiny double-arrows icon to view the image in the lightbox, but I’d prefer it if this were the default behaviour, with a link to a photo page with more information.

A nice behaviour change is what happens when you click a photo. Click once and it opens in a new page, click again and it opens in the lightbox, click a third time and it starts a slideshow starting with that image.

Searching for photos

Same as it ever was… except prettier.

When you search for photos, you’ll get a layout similar to the profile pages – a grid of photos that adjusts to fit the browser window. All the usual photo searching options are there as before. You can sort photos by relevance, date or level of interesting (which appears to be based on the number of views and favourites a photo has recieved). You can also still get at advanced search options, like whether to use SafeSearch and exclude potentially objectionable photos, or to search for photos with a Creative Commons licence.

Aside from the new look, though, searching for photos is largely unchanged over the old version of Flickr, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your feelings toward Flickr search.

Photo pages

Flickr’s new photo pages aren’t a huge improvement over the old version.

From a functional standpoint, Flickr’s new photo pages aren’t all that different from the old ones. From here, you can comment on a photo, mark it as a favourite, view its EXIF data and licensing information and more. The major difference here is that the photo itself is larger than it was in the previous design.

Compared to the rest of the redesigned site, though, the photo page feels like an afterthought from a cosmetic standpoint, especially after playing with the whiz-bang shininess of the homepage and profile pages. It’s as if Yahoo took the old photo page design, changed the top half and left the bottom half of the page intact. It doesn’t make the new Flickr harder to use, but it does make it feel a little incomplete.

Uploading photos

The new Flickr features a slightly updated photo uploader that lets you easily upload large batches of photos. You can select Choose photos and videos and upload that way, or you can drag and drop items you want to upload directly into your browser window.

Once you do that, you can give titles to your uploaded items, add descriptions, tags and people, add them to sets or groups, and set the licence and privacy level. You can also reorder images by dragging them around or rotate them as needed. The layout of the page and placement of options seem to be different, as is the black background, but functionality is roughly the same as before. The image uploader worked well in my hands-on, but I was also using it on a speedy connection at the TechHive offices, so I wasn’t able to try it out on a more typical home internet connection.

The one hitch with the image uploader is that simply sticking them in the image uploader will not publish them; you have to click the blue ‘Upload’ button in the upper right corner for it to actually publish them to your photostream. Flickr will nag you if you try to leave the Uploader before you actually upload and publish your photos, though.

Updated Android app

Flickr’s website isn’t the only thing that’s improved. On Monday Yahoo also released an update to the Flickr Android app that puts it on a par with the version that’s currently available for iOS. We tried out the latest version of the app on a phone running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and were quite pleased with what we saw. Whereas previous versions of the app felt like shoddy Instagram clones, the new Flickr app puts a much bigger emphasis on browsing through photos rather than taking them.

The updated Android app.

The first thing you see after signing in to the app is a wall of photos that you can browse through by swiping left or right on each individual row. The photos are pulled in from your friends’ photostreams, but you’ll also see photos from people Flickr thinks you should follow. Tapping a photo brings up a fullscreen version of the image, where you can comment, star or view more information about the photo, such as what camera the photographer used and where the picture was taken.

Once you get sick of looking at your friends’ ‘artistic’ efforts, the Explore section of the app is a veritable treasure trove of great looking images. Flickr lets you filter by recent and popular photos taken nearby, giving you a good idea of that area’s local colour. For instance, most of the images taken near the South Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco featured naked people and hipsters – an accurate representation of the types of things you’d see here.

If you’re itching to show off your own photography skills, Flickr provides a number of photo editing options to get your images into tip-top shape. You can crop photos, adjust the contrast and saturation, and even add text to help your photo stand out. There are also a number of generic filters you can slap onto your photo to give it the ‘Instagram’ treatment, but the advanced options should prove enticing to more serious mobile photographers.

The app is available for free from the Play Store and is worth checking out if you consider yourself a photography buff – or just like to stare at pretty images on your smartphone.

Expect improvements, not miracles

By and large, the new-look Flickr is a nice improvement over the old version, and it’s hard not to like the free TB of storage. That said, it does feel incomplete in spots, and in terms of functionality, it isn’t a huge improvement over the old Flickr. It’s great to see Yahoo give Flickr more attention, though, so here’s hoping for still more improvements and upgrades in the future.

by Nick Mediati, Techhive

[Assistant Editor Armando Rodriguez contributed the Android app coverage to this story.]

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Contacts

First, you must set up your phone to sync with your Google account. To make sure that this syncing is enabled, go to Settings > Accounts > Google, and tap your email address (it will be at the top of the screen, under the Accounts heading). Then confirm that the Sync Contacts box is checked.

Next, open the Address Book app on your Mac, go to Address Book > Preferences> Accounts, and choose On My Mac. You’ll see two boxes: one that says ‘Synchronise to Yahoo’ and another that says ‘Synchronise to Google’. Check the Synchronise to Google box, press Accept in the pop-up box, and enter your Gmail address and password when prompted. You should now see a small sync symbol in your Mac’s menubar. Click this symbol, and choose Sync Now from the dropdown menu.

Calendar

To sync your Android/Google calendar with iCal, open the iCal app on your Mac and navigate to iCal > Preferences > Accounts. Click the plus (+) symbol in the lower left corner to add a calendar to iCal. Leave ‘Account Type’ set to Automatic, fill in your Gmail address and password, and click Create.

If you have multiple Google calendars associated with your account, you can choose which ones to show in iCal by clicking Delegation (iCal > Preferences >Accounts), and checking (or unchecking) the appropriate boxes.

Media

One of the easiest ways to sync media, including music, videos, photos and podcasts, is to use DoubleTwist – a free Android app that’s commonly known as ‘iTunes for Android’. You can sync media with DoubleTwist either via a USB cable (which is free) or via Wi-Fi (which requires a one-time US$5 download of AirSync by DoubleTwist).

Regular USB syncing over DoubleTwist works with Android devices that have USB mass storage (MSC) mode enabled. Android devices running Jelly Bean or later support USB MTP mode, but not USB MSC mode. Consequently, until DoubleTwist updates its app to support USB MTP, these devices (which include the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 2) can sync only over Wi-Fi via AirSync.

To get started with DoubleTwist, download and install the free DoubleTwist desktop app on your Mac. When you open the program for the first time, it will scan your iTunes and import your media (music, videos, photos and podcasts). It won’t automatically import your playlists, but you can manually import them. Go to Playlist Setup (in the lower left menu), and select Import iTunes Playlists. If you want DoubleTwist to automatically import changes made to your playlists in the future, check the box next to Automatically Import iTunes Playlist Changes.

Next, download the free DoubleTwist app to your Android phone. Then use a USB cable to connect your phone to your Mac, and follow the instructions on the screen to mount your phone to your computer. Once your phone is mounted, click on your device (in the lower left menu) to open the sync options. You can sync all of your music and videos at once, or you can pick and choose different playlists to sync. You can also drag and drop files and photos to your device.

Files

Syncing nonmedia files, such as documents and spreadsheets, between your Android phone and your Mac is easy, thanks to cloud storage services. In this example, we’ll use Dropbox (and assume that you already have it set up on your Mac), but you can use any service that appeals to you, such as Box, Google Drive, SkyDrive or SugarSync.

Download the Dropbox app on your Android phone. From there, sign in to Dropbox with your account info. Thereafter, any file you place in your Dropbox folder will be synced between your devices automatically.

As on the iPhone, you can choose to have Dropbox automatically save and sync the pictures you take on your Android phone (you get an extra 500MB of storage space if you enable this option). This option is similar to Google’s option to automatically upload photos taken to your Google account, and it can be a little creepy at first (maybe you don’t want those photos to be synced off your phone), but it can be useful if you lose your device.

Everything

The easiest way to sync everything from your Android device to your Mac is to use Google’s own apps for email, calendaring, photos and contacts. If you do, you can enable syncing from your web-based Google account to your Android device by going to Settings > Accounts > Google and tapping your Google account (under Accounts).

From this menu, you can toggle syncing of various Google services – including Google Chrome, Photos, Google Play Books, Google Play Magazines, Google Play Music, Google+ and Picasa Web albums – on or off. You can also choose to sync the internet, an interesting feature that syncs your Google search results across devices.

by Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, Macworld

The post How to sync an Android phone to your Mac appeared first on Macworld Australia.

This weekend, Eesha Khare of Saratogoa, California took home a US$50,000 scholarship from this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for her supercapacitor battery that can fully charge a smartphone in fewer than 30 seconds. Additionally, the tiny technology can last for 10,000 charge-recycles, compared to only 1000 cycles for traditional rechargeable batteries. (Apple, for example, claims its iPhone battery is designed to be able to maintain 80 percent of its original capacity through 400 full recharge cycles.)

Manufacturers are surely taking note that in addition to its extreme efficiency, Khare’s charger is also flexible, which would make it an ideal component for the coming wave of wearable tech making its way to our wrists and faces.

The Tesla Model S still takes five hours to charge.

Aside from mobile, the technology has obvious applications in all-electric cars. Tesla’s all-electric Model S recently scored Consumer Reports’ highest car rating ever: a 99 out of 100. The only reason it didn’t score a perfect 100 was because of the time it takes to fully charge – around five hours, even when using Tesla’s proprietary high power wall Connector. Hopefully, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is watching.

The Intel Fair also recognised 17-year-old Henry Wanjune Lin of Shrevesport, Louisiana for his new cosmological mapping data and awarded him a US$50,000 scholarship. Nineteen-year-old Romanian Ionut Alexandru Budisteanu took home the fair’s Gordon E Moore Award and its US$75,000 scholarship for his new take on autonomous car navigation tech that costs around only US$4000 to implement.

A quick Google search turned up the fact that last year Budisteanu was awarded a US$10,000 scholarship for inventing a technology that enabled the blind to ‘see with their tongue‘.

This should stand to shame all of us for what we failed to accomplish when we were teenagers.

by Evan Dashevsky, Techhive

The post Teen invents tech that fully charges phone batteries in under 30 seconds appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Those searching for even the merest hint of Apple’s future plans will want to find another tree up which to bark: the 18-page testimony deals almost exclusively with the relatively dry subjects of Apple subsidiaries, the company’s corporate structure and its broad suggestions for overhauling the US federal tax system. Given that, it’s no surprise that Cook will be joined by Peter Oppenheimer, the company’s CFO (chief financial officer) and Phillip Bullock, Apple’s head of tax operations.

In its testimony, Apple begins by stressing that as one of the largest companies in the US, it provides a huge benefit to the economy. Included in the numbers the company tosses around are estimates of how many jobs it supports or has created in the US (approximately 600,000, including 50,000 of its own employees and around 290,000 related to the company’s so-called ‘App Economy’), the large sums it’s paid out to app developers (more than US$9 billion), and the company’s fiscal year 2012 tax bill (almost US$6 billion, which it estimates will rise to more than US$7 billion for fiscal year 2013). The last, Apple says, makes it likely to be the largest corporate income tax payer in the US.

Apple strenuously asserts that it pays every cent it owes, both to the US Government and to the governments of other countries in which it does business. The most significant of those is Ireland, in which Apple has five – count ‘em, five – subsidiaries, each of which the company says adhere to the letter and spirit of the law. Apple says it doesn’t use tax gimmicks, such as offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands or Caribbean nations, and its large foreign holdings are simply due to the fact that the majority of its revenue – 61 percent last year – is generated internationally.

Those Irish subsidiaries take up a lot of time in Apple’s testimony; the earliest of them, Apple Operations International (AOI), was founded in 1980, and features cost-sharing agreements made in that year that allow Apple to fund research and development jobs in the US. However, the company staunchly avows that AOI and its other subsidiaries do not reduce Apple’s US tax liability.

Throughout, the company stresses that all the decisions it has made are done to better serve its shareholders, both in terms of letting it easily (and cheaply) use foreign money to fund overseas operations, as well as by returning more money to its shareholders through its capital return program, which it recently expanded. In particular, the company addresses its much-criticised decision to issue a bond and take on debt to fund its ambitious capital return, rather than bringing its overseas cash back into the US:

If Apple had used its overseas cash to fund this return of capital, the funds would have been diminished by the very high corporate US tax rate of 35 percent (less applicable foreign credits). By contrast, given today’s historically low interest rates, issuing debt at a cost of less than two percent is much more advantageous for the Company’s shareholders. Because Apple was able to borrow at a cost lower than the cost of its equity, issuing debt lowered Apple’s overall cost of capital.

There is nary a bombshell in sight in the company’s testimony, to my admittedly layperson’s eyes. But perhaps the most interesting point is the final section, in which the company lays out its vision for corporate tax reform, which it describes as stemming from its belief “in the simple, not the complex”. As such, it offers four points of reform: first, the system should be revenue neutral; second, it should eliminate corporate tax expenditures; third, it should lower corporate income tax rates; and finally, it should implement a ‘reasonable’ tax to repatriate those foreign earnings.

Apple acknowledges that such an overhaul may mean it pays more, but says that it prefers an “overall improvement in efficiency, flexibility and competitiveness”. And, moreover, the company believes that the new system it lays out could bolster the country’s economy and help create new jobs.

Apple’s CEO will probably face questions from the subcommittee members after his prepared testimony on Tuesday, but don’t expect him to diverge substantially from the matter at hand. Even senators attempting to coax out details of Apple’s forthcoming products are unlikely to get Cook to stray.

by Dan Moren, Macworld

The post Apple to tell US Senate it pays every cent of its taxes appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Q: I have a lot of music and an iPod. I can’t fit all the music onto the iPod, so I uncheck the tracks I don’t want to sync. This works fine, except when I want to listen to an album in iTunes on my Mac.

I might have the three best songs checked so they get synced to my iPod, and when I go to play the full album in iTunes, it will only play those three songs, unless I check the others. If I do that, however, the next time I sync the iPod, those other tracks will get copied. Even if I create a playlist, it will skip the unchecked songs, so the only way to listen to music that I don’t want on my iPod is to check the boxes and hope to remember to uncheck them again.

How can I get around this problem?

I know how you feel. I long used the ‘Sync only checked songs and videos’ option to only copy tracks that I want. However, over time, this became problematic. Like you, I’d find myself checking and unchecking tracks to listen to albums.

First, let me provide an overview of syncing options available. If your music library – and any other content you want to copy, such as videos, apps and so on – takes up less space than you have on your iPod or iOS device, the easiest thing to do is just sync everything. If you have a lot of videos, you probably don’t watch them often, so selecting which ones you sync is fairly simple. When your iOS device is connected to your Mac, click it in iTunes, and then go to the Movies or TV Shows tabs to choose which items to sync.

But if your library is larger than your iOS device’s storage capacity, then you have to make selections. And there are two (OK, two and a half) ways to do so.

Reality check

The first, as you describe, is fairly simple as far as the sync process goes. You merely check and uncheck tracks in your Music library, and check the appropriate setting for the iOS device.

Select ‘Sync only checked songs and videos’ to tell iTunes to only sync those tracks that are checked.

It’s important to note that with iTunes 11, the checkboxes that used to be visible all the time are now only displayed in certain views, such as Songs view, or in a playlist in List view. So in other views, you will only notice if songs are checked or not by the colour/shading of their names (checked tracks are black, unchecked tracks are light grey).

In this screenshot, you can see that certain tracks have names in black type, and others in grey. The black ones are checked, the grey ones are unchecked.

Again, with iTunes 11, since that checkbox is no longer visible, the only way to check or uncheck tracks is to select one or more tracks, then Control- or right-click and choose Check Selection or Uncheck Selection from the contextual menu.

Pick and choose

The second method involves picking and choosing. If you click your iOS device, then in the Music tab, you’ll see options for syncing music. You can either sync your entire library – which is the best thing to do if you have more storage than music – or choose selected items: playlists, albums, artists and/or genres.

Choose here whether to sync everything, or only what you select.

Below that section of the Music tab is where you make your selections. You can choose to only sync playlists, or specific artists or genres, or you can get as granular as selecting specific albums. If you have a lot of music, I’d recommend creating a number of playlists, and filling these with the music you want; choosing individual albums is too much of a hassle. You may also want to just sync specific genres. For example, you may have one iOS device for, say, classical music and one for other genres. As long as your classical music doesn’t overflow your iOS device, you’re fine.

Keep an eye on the capacity bar to know whether you have room on your iOS device.

Note that as you make your choices, the capacity bar at the bottom of the iTunes window will tell you how much free space you have left.

Simplify, simplify

I’ve covered two ways to choose what you sync so far, and here’s the half.

You saw above that you can choose specific items to sync: playlists, artists, albums and/or genres. Well, one easy way to resolve your problem is to create just one playlist, and dump all the music you want on your iPod into that playlist. Only add the tracks you want; so the three tracks you want to sync from your favourite album go in the playlist, and the rest remain on your Mac. They can all remain checked, but only your favourites get synced. This is much simpler, and only requires managing that playlist.

This can be a bit troublesome when you want to change what you sync, but if all your music is in a single playlist, you can view that playlist in List view or Grid view, and find tracks to remove fairly easily. I find it easier than the Music tab I mentioned earlier, where you check and uncheck different items.

So, there’s no easy answer to your question, but with creative syncing, and using iTunes’ checkboxes, you can accomplish what you want.

by Kirk McElhearn, Macworld

The post What to do when you have more content than room on your iOS device appeared first on Macworld Australia.

by Joel Mathis, Macworld

The post Festival de Cannes – official appeared first on Macworld Australia.

PayPal Australia’s research notes that, while Australians are quick to adopt new technology, there is a gulf between what consumers know and what they believe they know.

After interviewing 1000 Australians who own a computer and a smartphone or mobile device, the research found 55 percent of respondents were unsure how websites used their personal information.

Almost one in three of those surveyed were unsure how to distinguish between safe and scam websites, and 23 percent said they, or someone they know, had fallen victim to online scams.

In a press statement, PayPal spokesperson Adrian Christie said that “while Australians have become more comfortable browsing, shopping and connecting online, they are often unaware of the size and impact of their digital footprint”.

In a July 2012 report, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) said 56,859 phishing sites were detected in a one-month period – marking an all-time high in phishing websites.

National Cyber Security Week runs from 20 May until 24 May.

The post Australians are complacent about security, says PayPal appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Most of the text is by Rolling Stone magazine senior editor David Fricke, with contributions from Greil Marcus, Patti Smith, Hunter Thompson and other notables. Much of what makes the app worth a fan’s time is that this ‘official’ history isn’t completely airbrushed – mistakes and mediocrity are acknowledged, and some naughty bits are left in.

The app includes a half-dozen or so videos, which can be played without an internet connection, short spoken audio clips, scores of photos and other images, and even detailed, annotated photos of recording equipment. Standard iTunes samples of each song are available, which is common in such apps. Where The Doors deserves some credit is that if you already have Doors songs in your iTunes library – including iTunes in the cloud – the app finds some of them, but not others. It’s unclear why.

The main page for Waiting For The Sun includes links to an essay on the album by David Fricke, a video, ‘Tech Nuggets’ that provide details on recording equipment, and a scrapbook with photos and other images. Throughout the app, an audio player enables you to listen to streaming song samples via iTunes, and to some full songs if you have them in your iTunes library.

by Jeff Merron, Techhive

The post The Doors appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Five ways to take a screenshot

If you want to show someone what’s on your screen (perhaps in order to give or receive technical support), there are many ways to capture an image that shows all or part of your screen, for sharing with others. Here are five practical methods for grabbing a screenshot.

22 Full screen

To capture an image of your entire screen, simply press c-Shift-3.

23 Selected area

To capture a selected area of the screen, press c-Shift-4 and then drag the rectangular marquee around the area that you want to include in the screenshot.

24. Most screen-grab utilities let you capture a whole window or all or part of the screen.

24 Window or object

To capture a window, a menu, an icon or any other on-screen object (along with its drop shadow, if there is one), press c-Shift-4, press the spacebar and then click the object that you want to obtain a screenshot of.

The preceding three commands (for full-screen, selected-area and window or object screenshots), save the captured image as a file on your desktop. If you would prefer to copy the image to your Clipboard, add the Control key to the shortcuts listed above.

25 Grab

For more capture options – including a time-delay feature, the ability to choose how the cursor appears and the option to have your system emit a confirmation sound when you make a capture – use the Grab app that comes built in to OS X (in /Applications/Utilities).

26. Snapz Pro X lets you capture screens in any of eight formats.

26 Third-party utilities

If you need more capabilities than OS X’s Grab can provide – for example, the ability to specify file formats on the fly, or to scale a screenshot’s size – you have many screen capture utilities to choose from.

Among the most popular of these are Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro X (US$69; www.ambrosiasw.com), Realmac Software’s LittleSnapper ($41.99 from Mac App Store) and Overtone’s Skitch (free from Mac App Store).

Create a motion capture of your Mac’s screen

27 Motion capture

27. Select the microphone, video quality and mouse-click visibility you want in QuickTime Player.

Launch QuickTime Player and choose File > New Screen Recording. In the Screen Recording window that appears at this point, click the downward-pointing triangle; then choose whether to record with sound or without sound and whether to capture medium- or high-quality video. You can also opt to show mouse clicks in your recording.

To start the capture, click the red Record button. To record the entire screen, click anywhere on the screen. To record a portion of the screen, click and drag to make your selection and then click within the selection. To end your recording, simply click the Stop button.

Two ways to share a screen

28 Locally

If your Mac is set up on the same local network as the Mac that you wish to control remotely, you just need to ensure that Screen Sharing 
is enabled on both Macs (System Preferences > Sharing > Screen Sharing).

In a Finder window’s sidebar, select the Mac you wish to control or view and then click Share Screen. Enter a username and password for the Mac that you intend to control (or choose to log in with an Apple ID supported by that Mac). You should be screen-sharing in no time.

29 Remotely

If you want to control a Mac that isn’t on your Mac’s local network, sign up for a free AIM account (www.aim.com) on each system, using a different account for each.

28. To share your screen on the local network, check the Screen Sharing option in the Sharing box.

On each computer, launch the Messages application; in its Accounts preference, click the plus (+) button and configure your AIM account. Click the Video menu and select Screen Sharing Enabled on both Macs.

Now, when each Mac has Messages running, you can select the other Mac and choose to share its screen. Alternatively, you can sign up for a free LogMeIn (secure.logmein.com/au) account. Install the free LogMeIn server application on any Mac you wish to screen-share with and you can access and control that Mac through a web browser.

Coming next: part 3 of 100 More Things Every Mac User Should Know: System

By Christopher Breen, Dan Frakes, Joe Kissell and Dan Miller, Macworld

The post 100 more things every Mac user should know: Desktop & Dock appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Panning is a technique that lets you capture the essence of motion in a photo. By shooting with a somewhat slow shutter speed and tracking the action as you take the picture, you blur the background while freezing the subject. With a little practice, the results can be striking.

Unfortunately, panning does require a little practice. It’s unnatural and a bit counterintuitive; for as long as you’ve been taking pictures, you’ve probably tried to hold the camera as still as possible. Now I’m asking you to move the camera while you take the shot, albeit in a careful and controlled way.

Choosing the right camera settings

Let’s start with the camera settings. If you can control the exposure (like on a digital SLR or compact digital camera), you’ll want to slow down the shutter. Ideally, you want a shutter speed that’s slow enough to blur the background as you move the camera during the exposure, but fast enough that the subject you’re tracking will be fairly sharp.

The right shutter speed is slow enough to blur the background, but fast enough to keep the subject sharp.

So what’s the magic setting? Switch your camera to Shutter Priority and dial in about 1/15 second. That’s a good starting place; after you get comfortable panning for action, you may want to try slowing the shutter down to 1/8 second.

What about smartphone users? Good news: you’re not left out in the cold. Even with a vanilla smartphone, you can often get decent panned action photos, because your phone might be shooting with a relatively slow shutter speed anyway. But if you really want to exert control over the situation, try an app like Top Camera, which includes a slow shutter mode.

Learn your body motion

Once you’ve prepped your camera with the right shutter speed, it’s time to practise your swing. Taking a good panned photo is not unlike swinging a baseball bat or a golf club; it’s all about the follow-through. Here’s what to do: position yourself so that the action passes directly in front of you. Pivot your body at the hip, so you can see the subject approaching from the side, and place the subject directly in the centre of the viewfinder. Pivot your body so that you can smoothly keep the subject centred. As it is about to pass in front of you – when it’s moving fastest with respect to you and the background – gently press and release the shutter button and continue to turn, keeping the subject in the viewfinder.

A good pan starts before the subject hits the centre of the frame and ends after it passes through.

This is the tricky part, because many cameras (particularly digital SLRs) blank the viewfinder during the exposure. That means the most critical time to keep the subject smoothly centred in the viewfinder is exactly when you can’t see the subject at all. This is where practice comes in handy; get used to following through with smooth motion even when the viewfinder is momentarily black.

Remember the order of actions: start panning the camera, then press the shutter release after the camera is already moving. And continue pivoting your body – the follow-through – even after you’ve taken the photo.

Other tips

You may be tempted to try panning with a tripod, which will help you take a steadier photo. But in fact, tripods tend to get in the way and can keep you from achieving the smooth motion you need for a great panned photo. If you do use a tripod, keep the head loose, so it’s easy to swing the camera around from side to side.

Another handy tip: don’t zoom in too much. You’ll want to stay zoomed out a bit, both so you can see more of the blurry background and to minimise the impact of the inevitable blur on the subject itself.

Most importantly, practise panning as much as you can, and tweak the shutter speed until you find the right setting that gives you the blur you want while still allowing you to freeze the subject.

by Dave Johnson, Techhive

The post How to capture a sense of speed with panning appeared first on Macworld Australia.

Accenture, in consultation with the Australian Rugby Union and the Qantas Wallabies, has released the Official Wallabies 2013 Lions tour mobile app for iOS and Android.

The free app aims to give fans the “ultimate fan experience”, providing news, fixtures, results, live scores, statistics and team information, according to Accenture Australia’s Mobility Lead, Dr Jock Cassidy.

“We are delighted to partner with the ARU to deliver an interactive fan experience during the 2013 British & Irish Lions Tour,” Cassidy said in a press statement.

“Designed with fans in mind the app will revolutionise match analysis, through live play-by-play commentary, real time scores, video and post-match analysis. This application puts the Qantas Wallabies and the ARU at the forefront of global innovation in sports and fan engagement.”

The app will also offer video content from the ARU’s YouTube channel, which includes behind-the-scenes footage and analysis pre- and post-games.

The first test between the Qantas Wallabies and the British and Irish Lions begins on 22 June in Brisbane.

The post Rugby Union: Official app launched for British and Irish Lions tour appeared first on Macworld Australia.

It’s important to note that Status Board is a niche tool; it’s not something you’re likely to use casually at home or if you only have one iPad. But it is perfectly suited to situations where you want to publicly display specific information that’s updated on a regular basis.

Open Status Board for the first time, and the app walks you through a quick setup process to configure and create some of the app’s prefabbed status panels. These panels are little rectangles of data you can move, resize and rearrange in almost any way you choose. By default, the app comes pre-loaded with calendar, clock and weather panels, and can also display Twitter timelines, RSS news feeds and the subject line of your latest email messages.

Display On! Once completed, your Status Boards can be displayed on your iPad or HD TV.

Some of the panels allow you to customise the way your data is displayed. So, for example, your Twitter, email and news feeds can be displayed as either a list or as a ticker; the ticker shows one message at a time, and it slides across the screen, sits for a couple of seconds so you can read it, then slides the next update into view. I loved the ticker feed, but was disappointed there was no option for adjusting the delay setting to something slower or faster than Status Board‘s defaults.

Three of the panels – graph, table and do-it-yourself – offer more versatile options for displaying data, but they also require a better understanding of how to collect, format and refresh data for display. Most of these panels require that Status Board have access to CSV or HTML files on or outside of your network that, when updated, update the info displayed in the panel. To this end, Panic provides excellent documentation on how to prep your data and make it available to Status Board. What’s equally as interesting is that, because of the app’s customisation features, a small cottage industry of Status Board creators cropped up shortly after the app was released. The Panic Blog contains links to sites such as Status Board Widgets and Status Board App Info, which collect Status Board panels from across the globe. You can use these boards as they are, or as a jumping off point for creating panels of your own.

Databoarding: Status Board makes it easy for you to display data from a variety of sources by dragging preconfigured panels to your Status Board display.

Once you create a Status Board with a complete set of panels, you can email it to other Status Board users so they can use it on their own iPads. Unfortunately, there is no option within the app to save existing Status Boards when importing new ones. So, if you want to reuse your current Status Board without recreating it, you’ll need to email it to yourself before you install one that someone has sent to you.

Alternative Output: you can also email any Status Boards you've created to be used by anyone else using the Status Board app.

You have a couple of options for displaying your Status Board, the most obvious of which is on the iPad itself. Stick your iPad on a stand and you have a simple way of displaying information. Because many of Status Board’s status panels are touch aware, you also have one-tap access to the data driving what you see. So, for example, if you display a feed for your Twitter timeline, tapping an update will offer you the option to view the update on the Twitter itself or, if there is a link in the update, open the update in Safari.

While the iPad makes a nice display on its own, Status Board really shines when you connect your iPad to an HDTV via HDMI or use AirPlay to mirror your iPad to an Apple TV.  The basic Status Board app does a nice job of displaying a letterboxed version of your iPad screen on your TV, but to make the most of your TV you’ll need to make a US$20 HD Out in-app purchase. HD Out allows you to take full advantage of your widescreen TV by creating a non-letterboxed version of your Status Board that fills the entirety of the TV screen. And, because the screen is wider, you also have more room on the screen to add more or larger panels. In short, Status Board on your HDTV is stunning, and probably the best way to use this app.

The only thing I really wish that Status Board did better is offer more in the way of customisation. While some of the panels can be customised to a small degree, those options are limited. For example, there are only two clock face options, and it isn’t possible to change the colour theme or fonts for the pre-configured panels.

Bottom line

Status Board is a beautifully designed app that’s amazingly easy to use and which fills a very specific need. If you need to display and update data on a regular basis with a minimum of difficulty, it’s unlikely that you’ll find anything better at handling that task than Status Board.

by Jeffery Battersby, Macworld

The post Status Board for iPad appeared first on Macworld Australia.