David Chartier

Weekender Nylon Travel Bag by Incipio. Image from www.incipio.comTraveling has gotten quite a bit less convenient over the past decade, especially if you're packing gadgets. A few years ago, we started to see TSA-friendly laptop bags to help ease the hassle. The big trend now seems to be luggage-like bags, such as Incipio's $129 Weekender Nylon Travel Bag, designed with your MacBook, iPad, and other gadgets in mind.

The Weekender is a bit of a hybrid-it can be used as a briefcase-style bag, a messenger bag, or a backpack-but it has the soul of a piece of carry-on luggage. The bag's detachable messenger strap has a removable shoulder pad that's lined with a not-too-sticky grip, while the built-in backpack straps can be tucked into a zippered compartment that runs the vertical length of the back panel.

Mission Workshop's The SanctionMission Workshop's $180 The Sanction is a laptop bag that's prepared to take a beating. This backpack--nay, rucksack--has a waterproof construction and is designed with a full day's essentials in mind. As long as you're not obsessed with packing every pen and flash drive in its own little pocket, this is a solid bag that can take your daily commute and the elements in stride.

The Sanction is a tall backpack with plenty of individual compartments of varying size. Two of the three main compartments, each of which runs the full height of the bag, have open tops that are protected by the bag's main flap. These two compartments each have more than enough room to store a couple books and a rolled up hoodie or rain shell. The third main compartment, capable of accommodating a 15-inch MacBook Pro, is protected by a waterproof zipper, as are two additional smaller compartments on the front of the bag. A third small compartment on the front of the bag, near the bottom, is secured with a velcro flap, but its opening is restricted to prevent the elements from seeping in.

Twitter has quite possibly become the widest, most insightful, and perpetually open window into the minds of the masses that the world has ever seen. Its large and growing group of users post everything from news about current events to, yes, the occasional photo of what's for lunch. All this tweeting can be invaluable for any number of uses -- but only if you know how to find what you need.

Why to search

There are now over 200 million users who constantly post just about anything you can imagine: links to important news, complaints about a product, design tips and inspiration, favorite new bands, family photos -- you name it. These diverse nuggets are getting posted by Twitter's equally diverse share of the world's population: the general public, celebrities, politicians, authorities, marketers, customer support, and more. Fun fact: 70 percent of Twitter's usage now comes from outside the United States. If Twitter is the world's largest water cooler, its search tools are an omnipresent pair of ears that can give you an instant perspective on any topic at any time.

Zoho, maker of a wide variety of Web-based productivity apps similar to Google Docs, has increased the market for Mac-friendly online meeting services by one.

Announced on Zoho's blog, Zoho Meeting now features full support for the Mac, thanks to a new browser plugin the company released. This plugin allows you to take advantage of Zoho Meeting's features to start or schedule meetings, share your screen, participate in audio or text chats, and join meetings started by Windows users through Zoho's Web service.

Getting things done with Appigo's popular Todo apps for iPhone and iPad has finally come to your desktop. On Tuesday, the company announced the forthcoming Todo for Mac.

On iOS, Todo has been a full-featured task manager that offers flexible features and an interface that can follow the Getting Things Done philosophy or your own. You can manage projects or create simple to-do lists, focus on a particular collection of tasks, create tasks from a handful of third-party apps, set tasks to repeat and alert you multiple times, and sync between devices.

Hot on the heels of Apple's new Thunderbolt-equipped lineup of iMacs is a Boot Camp update for said iMacs.

As with last month's Boot Camp update for the Thunderbolt-enabled MacBook Pros, this is a minor Boot Camp 3.2 update that addresses unspecified "issues" with Japanese and Korean keyboards on the new iMacs.

Since Apple introduced stationery to Mail in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, a handful of shops like Jumsoft and Equinux have offered add-on stationery packs that offer a little variety from Apple's slim selection. Now Equinux is going one step further with Mail Designer, a new tool that allows you to design and customize your own stationery for Mail.

Mail Designer comes with a handful of its own templates, as well as a blank canvas in case you'd rather start from scratch. A broad set of layout, graphic, and text-editing tools allows you to add things like three-column promotion blocks, charts, textured backgrounds, and banners.

Since Apple introduced stationary to Mail in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, a handful of shops like Jumsoft and Equinux have offered add-on stationary packs that offer a little variety from Apple's slim selection. Now Equinux is going one step further with Mail Designer, a new tool that allows you to design and customize your own stationary for Mail.

Mail Designer comes with a handful of its own templates, as well as a blank canvas in case you'd rather start from scratch. A broad set of layout, graphic, and text-editing tools allows you to add things like three-column promotion blocks, charts, textured backgrounds, and banners.

The first time former U.S. vice president Al Gore issued his warning about the dire state of our environment, he used the traditional format of bound paper. To follow up on his first book and explore some of the renewable energy solutions that are being built today, Gore turned to a new interactive book platform that expands the definition of the word "book."

Gore's new book, Our Choice, is available as a traditional book. But it's also a universal iOS app and the first to be built with a new interactive book platform created by Push Pop Press. That Gore turned to iOS for his title isn't particularly surprising, given that he sits on Apple's board of directors.

An official Office suite for iOS might still be nothing more than a dream for now. But Microsoft has teased our imaginations once again with an update to OneNote Mobile.

First released in January, OneNote Mobile is an iOS client for Microsoft's Evernote-like but Office-rooted apps and services by the same name. You can create notes that contain text, pictures, lists, and to-do lists, then sync it all with the OneNote Web App at office.live.com and OneNote 2010 for Windows. So far, Microsoft does not make a OneNote client for the Mac.

The arrival of the almost mythical white iPhone 4 isn't Apple's only product news on Wednesday. The company has also announced that it is bringing the iPad 2 to Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and ten other countries within the next week and a half.

Japan is first on the list of new countries to get the iPad 2, as both the Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G versions of the tablet arrive there on April 28. Come April 29, both editions of the iPad 2 will come to Hong Kong, India, Israel, Korea, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Apple will also make the iPad 2 with Wi-Fi available in China on May 6.

Professional photographers who use Lightroom have one more excuse reason to swap an iPad for their MacBook while traveling. Squared Enterprises has released Photosmith, an iPad app for organizing your photos on the road before importing them into Lightroom.

Photosmith is a fairly full-featured photo organizer. Thanks to Apple's Camera Connection Kit, it can import photos from most digital cameras, including many DSLRs. You can create collections, assign keywords, rate, label, and filter your photos. You can also set titles, captions, descriptions, and IPTC information, and you can even view EXIF data like ISO, shutter speed, and f-stop.