Since I’m newly single, to celebrate the first time in years I haven’t had to buy flowers and chocolates for Valentine’s Day, I’m looking at iPhone apps that could ultimately cause me to end up buying several sets of flowers and chocolates. Read More »
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Mark Crump
Bio:A long-time Mac user, Mark has been writing about technology in some form for over ten years. Mark enjoys his Kool-Aid shaken, not stirred. He also believes the “it just works” slogan from the ads should have an asterisk: except when it refuses to. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/crumpy.
Recent Posts
About a month after I bought my iPad, one thing became clear to me: I’d no longer be buying paper books. Sure enough, almost a year later I’ve only bought a couple physical tomes. But is it wise to go all-in on the future of e-books? Read More »
While Microsoft’s “Welcome to the Social” advertisements were often derided, it’s ironic that Microsoft, and not Apple, has a better history with social media interactions. Here are the three areas Apple tried to make a play with social media, and instead fell just “a bit outside.” … Read More »
VOIP and video chat solutions are becoming much more common and user-friendly. While I recommend Skype because it’s multi-platform, I’m going to take you through changing the audio/visual settings on a variety of Mac-based voice and video apps, including iChat, Skype and FaceTime. Read More »
You know what I love about iPhoto? It’s a great central storage place for my media that just about any OS X app can pull photos from. You know what I hate about it? Everything else. Here’s a few tips to help alleviate some iPhoto frustrations. Read More »
It’s a good idea to reinstall OS X every once and a while to keep your system running smoothly, so here are a few things to keep in mind before you begin. While most are pretty obvious, this list might prevent some head-smacking moments of regret. Read More »
It wasn’t consciously a New Year’s resolution, but shortly after Christmas after years of tripping over my guitar cases, I decided it was time to start playing again. Luckily, there’s a healthy stock of iPad amp apps to help me get back on the horse. Read More »
More Must Reads
Math and science folks rejoice: Equation editing finally makes its appearance in Office for Mac’s Word 2011. If you’re a student or work in an academic setting, putting equations into your papers can be a pain, but now it’s a little easier. Read More »
Apple released a fresh update of its iPad productivity suite iWork yesterday. This update supports core iOS 4.2 features such as AirPrint and multitasking. The update also brings better PDF exporting, and provides some fixes for font issues that arise on export. Read More »
One of the advantages Word 2011 has over Pages ’09 is its stellar built-in citation management; Pages’ integration is reliant on third party tools. Word 2011 has its bibliographic tools baked right in. Here’s a step-by-step guide to using them. Read More »
National Novel Writing Month, or, National Stop Procrastinating and Write Month, is soon upon us. This year marks the first time the iPad is available during the prose-fest. Here’s a breakdown of your best bets for getting some of that writing done on the iPad. Read More »
Microsoft has released Office 2011 for the Mac, and we’ve already looked at the new versions of PowerPoint and Word in the suite. Now it’s Excel’s turn. How does the updated spreadsheet program compare to the dismal reputation of its predecessor? Read More »
Word 2008 quickly fell out of favor with me. It consistently crashed on exit. It was horribly slow, and struggled to keep up with itself. If Word 2011 just felt faster and didn’t crash, I’d consider it money well spent. But Microsoft went beyond that. Read More »
Office 2011 for Mac, the latest version in Microsoft’s workhorse suite, is now available at your favorite retailer or Microsoft’s web site. In this version, Visual Basic macros are back, but Entourage is out, having been replaced by a new, all-Cocoa version of Outlook. Read More »
New versions of iMovie ’11 and GarageBand ’11 were demoed today: the only other two programs from iLife ’11 that got screen time aside from iPhoto ’11. There were some very interesting additions to the software, including trailers for iMovie and better lessons in GarageBand. Read More »
An upgrade to iWork and iLife is almost guaranteed for Wednesday, so I thought I’d share my hopes for the software bundles. These aren’t necessarily predictions. Instead, they’re the things that kinda drive me nuts about the two suites and which I hope to see fixed. Read More »
The iWork 1.2 update for iPad brings about a whole host of welcome improvements. The best one in my opinion is the ability to import and export directly from iDisk, or any WebDAV-supported virtual disk. Also, all three apps can now export in MS Office-compatible formats. Read More »
In some ways, GV Connect’s re-appearance was somewhat anticlimactic. After what felt like months of “he said, she said,” along with an FCC inquiry, I heard this news via a retweet. I had to try it out, after so much hype and conflicting opinion. Read More »
I was thrilled when I saw a tweet about the release of Parallels 6. Earlier I wrote a lengthy evaluation of gaming on virtual machines. I thought I’d run the same games through Parallels 6 to see how its claims work out in the real world. Read More »
Last year, I wrote an article about Instant Messaging Apps for the iPhone. The iPad version is slightly different. As with the iPhone apps, I found it really came down to BeejiveIM, IM+ Pro, and AIM, so I’m going to take a closer look at those. Read More »
There’s a movement underfoot. A movement to break free of cable provider’s high costs and poor service. A movement to time- and device-shift. A movement to watch what we want, where we want, when we want. So let’s take a look at Hulu Plus and Netflix. Read More »
For a company that’s in the mobile business as heavily as Apple is, its Cloud strategy is embarrassing. Some parts of MobileMe work, like contact, bookmark, and calendar, but others, like iDisk, fall on their face so often I can’t count on them for production work. Read More »
When I was tasked to write a roundup of iPad blogging apps, I figured this would be the usual pros and cons of four or five apps. Instead, I found only two, one of which is specific to WordPress. Neither app made me all that happy. Read More »
Writing apps on the iPad have become a Holy Grail for me. I’ve tried them all. Serious Writing on the iPad, I felt, needed Serious Tools. All the apps did most of the things I felt were necessary. But that one true app eluded me. Read More »
Evernote is my dumping ground for research ideas, quick notes, and web pages I’ve come across on the Internet and want to save for future reading. When Evernote announced its new Trunk service on Wednesday, I was immediately skeptical and derisive. Read More »
I’ve got a horrible memory. While I’ve moved as much of my life to the cloud and my iDevices as possible, the reality is even though I’ll put a document in my Dropbox folder meaning to “do something” with it, I won’t. Read More »
Now that all the commercial e-book distributors have made their iPad apps available, it’s time for an overview of how each app performs, along with their pluses and minuses. So, here’s how I found each app to hold up. Read More »
Any large project I’m working on, general reference notes, or stuff I just might normally bookmark ends up in Evernote. Over time, I’ve formed a few habits to help me get the most out of Evernote and I thought I’d share them with you. Read More »
After working with Keynote on the iPad for the last month, I’ve come up with five presentation tips I want to share with you. Used properly, and in a situation that allows it to play its strengths, the iPad can be an effective presentation tool. Read More »
It’s been a little over a month since I’ve introduced the iPad to my digital workflow and I’m now convinced that I had an iPad-sized hole in my life. The iPad is a device I rarely leave the house without. Read More »
When I got my iPad, I gave myself a mandate: don’t lug a 5-pound MacBook around instead, try to make do with the iPad. For the most part, I’ve been successful. Read More »
I don’t give a ton of presentations, but I’m something of a presentation junky — one of my favorite web sites is Presentation Zen, where the author gives lessons on design theory. Therefore, I’ve been looking forward to iPad Keynote since Phil Schiller gave his dog … Read More »
While Liam opined about the challenges an iPad can face in education here, I thought I’d tackle some potential real-world pluses and minuses from the viewpoint of a college student. I think the iPad is going to succeed in education marvelously for students and teachers. Read More »
It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. While eagerly awaiting my iPad to arrive — is it April 3 yet? Pleaaaaase? — I had a stream of consciousness that went something like this: I like baseball; the iPad is a decent size to … Read More »
Because I hail from Massachusetts, where our politicians are famous for being against something before they are for it, I’ll just state this: I was dead set against another data plan for wireless Internet before I was for it. I pay $70 a month for my … Read More »
Every Friday night, I get out from my Mom’s basement, um, my wife lets me get out for a night, err, I get together with my old High School gaming group for a fun night of D&D 4th Edition. One of the things that was a bit … Read More »
I’ve written about my love affair with Quickoffice before, but there’s always been one issues I’ve had with it: the only cloud storage service it supported was MobileMe’s iDisk. I’ve come close to plunking down the money for MobileMe a few times, but because Dropbox … Read More »
I put myself squarely in the “Working Mac User” category. My MacBook sees daily use in an Enterprise. I freelance write about the Mac and use mine in school. Outside of web surfing and the occasional game, very little of my time at the keyboard is … Read More »
For 90 percent of my daily toil, OS X is the best platform for me. I use it during my day job, freelance writing, school, graphic design, and the usual goofing off everyone does. However, there is one glaring desire missing: I play Massively Multiplayer Online … Read More »
One of my end of the year rituals is looking back on what I dropped my hard-earned coin on over the year. This is a reckoning on software I thought would be a grand idea at the time and how I feel about the purchase at … Read More »
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I used to use my Mac at my day job. However, a combination of not-so-subtle hints from our Information Security folks as well as the general pain in the posterior of managing a SharePoint site on the Mac … Read More »
Recently, my boss at my day job was considering getting a Mac and asked that fateful question: So, what about games? A few years ago, any response to that question would have been met with an awkward silence and an embarrassed look and a rush to change … Read More »
With the release of 10.6.2, Apple killed unsupported support for the Atom processor — the processor used in low-cost netbooks. Certain models of netbooks could run OS X quite easily, and people used them to make the Little Netbook Apple Refuses to Make. While … Read More »
Over the years, I’ve been forced to redefine my definition of “native” game clients for OS X. At first, I was a die-hard, nothing but true native code for me, thanks. Then, as the harsh reality of understanding that true native code is about as likely … Read More »
Installing a new operating system on Day One is often a foolish undertaking. Yet, there I was, installing Snow Leopard the night of the 28th. I took the plunge day one for two reasons: as a tech journalist specializing in the Mac, I felt I owed it … Read More »
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