Hear that sound? That’s the sound of autumn’s unceasing approach. If you spent much of the past week enjoying summery weather before fall’s inevitable arrival, we can’t say we blame you. And we won’t hold a grudge if you missed a slew of important and exciting Macworld stories because of it. Instead, we’ll fill you in on all the good articles that you missed.
The Lion Thing
Although we’ve very nearly exhausted our supply of headline-worthy Lion puns, that hasn’t stopped us from covering Mac OS X 10.7 in great detail. If you’d like to show Lion who’s king of your Mac jungle, we can help you tame Lion’s Mail and take control of Mission Control. If, on the other hand, you’re still looking to migrate some files from an older Leopard Mac, you don’t necessarily need a CAT-5 cable, but you’ll definitely want to check out Apple’s Migration Assistant update for Leopard users.
If you’re worried about a potential crash the next time your Lion installation roars to a halt, you’ll want to check out Apple’s freshly-released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. Dan Frakes, who’s installed Lion at least as many as Steve Jobs has uttered the word "boom," went hands-on with the new assistant, which lets you turn a USB stick into a Lion book disk.
While our love for Lion knows few bounds, we stil came up with a few improvements we’d like to see. Steve, feel free to call us if you need further elaboration on those issues. Meanwhile, Ted Landau found a few more Lion compatibility issues.
We owe you iOS
When it comes to iPhone cases, contributor Marco Tabini is always on the case. Er, cases. He writes up a weekly roundup of iPhone cases each week, and then I write a weekly round-up of all our biggest stories each week, and if we stop, it’s worse than if Desmond doesn’t push the button.
We reviewed a slew of iOS apps:
• Photogram, which makes photo postcards, scored our stamp of approval, • Smail Stencil, for saving frequently sent messages, lacks much SMS finesse, • Zombie Gunship, a game focused on killing the undead, is to re-die for, • Ticket to Ride, an engrossing, train-focused board game, is worth choo-choo-choosing, and • Alarmed, a timer, reminder, and alarm clock app, is pretty beeping impressive.
Of course, now there’s more to the iOS ecosphere than true native apps. This past week, Vudu unveiled a new iPad optimized Web app, and Amazon took the wraps off its new Kindle Cloud Reader. Jason Snell went hands-on with the Web-based Kindle app, and he liked it, but he’s not ready to break up with the native Kindle app just yet. Yours truly spent some time (and a couple thousand words) ruminating on just what this slow, steady march of iOS-optimized Web apps really means.
We also wrote up an iOS copy-and-paste tutorial for beginners, the new Tweet Marker support in Twitterrific, Facebook’s new Messenger app for iPhone, and Boxee’s new iPad app. Elsewhere, contributor Joel Mathis reported on the iOS-integrated myTrek exercise monitor from Scosche, though in truth, he spent most of his time figuring out just how precisely you spell "Scosche."
Intern-turned-staff-editor Alexandra Chang reviewed the Olloclip three-in-one camera lens for iPhone, and also ended my streak as the sole member of the Macworld editorial team with an "x"-bearing name.
Back to the Mac
You don’t even need to bid a buck for eBay’s new desktop app; it’s available in the Mac App Store for free. We reviewed the iOS-inspired Sparrow email client, the HTML5-creation tool Hype, and task-management software Todo.
Apple unveiled a new, $999 education-only iMac, but Chris Breen says it’s too much, too late. Chris also explains just what the heck an OS X stationery pad is, and how to limit your kids’ Internet access. Watch for Chris’s series next week on "How to get kids off your darn lawn."
Serenity Caldwell pours one out for the soon-to-be-shuttered Walmart digital music streaming service. So if you’re one of the seven people making the switch from Walmart to iTunes—or one of the millions of folks who already use iTunes—here’s Kirk McElhearn’s piece on how to back up your iTunes media files. If you’d rather make your own kind of music, note that Apple released updates for Logic and Logic Express this past week.
Movie fans too may want to consider embracing iTunes, since DVD-streaming service Zediva has shut down after some legal wrangling. Speaking of legal wrangling, let Dan Moren take you Under the Gavel for another edition of our intermittent roundups of Apple-related court matters.
And if you’d rather write your own roundup of our stories, we suggest that you at least do so in plain text, and if you want to print it out, consider one of these new Mac-friendly printers. Then mail it to me and grant me permission to pass it off as next week’s Weekly Wrap.
