Kirk McElhearn

When Apple unveiled its preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion earlier this year, many people in the blogosphere concluded that Mac OS X was being "iOSified." In other words, features from iOS were being ported to OS X for use on the desktop, a continuation of the Back to the Mac campaign Apple first initiated with Mac OS X Lion. Some lamented that this has been a bad thing--as if features that work, in some cases, better on iOS than on the desktop, shouldn't be added to OS X, because the former is a mobile operating system, and the latter built for the desktop.

iOS and OS X have the same foundation, and there is no reason why efficient features of one shouldn't be added to the other. But Apple is, in my opinion, developing a much deeper and longer term strategy in iOSifying OS X.

[Ask the iTunes Guy is a regular column in which we answer your questions on everything iTunes related. If there's something you'd like to know, send an email to the iTunes Guy for consideration.]

There's a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: I named my iPod "Titanic" so when I sync it, iTunes tells me "The Titanic is syncing." While it actually says "Syncing 'Titanic'," this joke hints at the fact that syncing your library to an iOS device isn't always simple (even if it doesn't rise to the level of disastrous). In today's column, I look at some common questions about syncing all or part of an iTunes library to iOS devices.

Backgammon NJ. Source: iTunesBackgammon NJ. Source: iTunesBackgammon is a board game that is perfectly suited to iOS devices. The shape of the board fits the iPhone and iPad, and the gameplay-rolling dice and moving pieces-is greatly simplified when you tap to perform these tasks. Over the past few months, I've tried out a number of backgammon apps, and two stand out: Backgammon NJ (available for the iPad in a separate version called Backgammon NJ HD), and FaceMe Backgammon.

There are three things I looked for in a backgammon app, starting with an attractive interface. This isn't as common as you might think, as some backgammon offerings in the App Store have garish colors or horrid cartoonish boards and pieces. If you're better than a casual player, you'll want an app with strong artificial intelligence: If you can beat the app all the time, it's not much fun. And, if you like to play different people, you'll want multi-player options, preferably using iOS's built-in Game Center feature.

I use Dropbox to sync files across my Macs, but also to collaborate with others using shared folders. One day, I discovered that the disk space on my MacBook Air had dropped substantially. I started poking around, looking for swap files and other usual suspects, but eventually found one especially large folder hidden inside my Dropbox folder: .dropbox.cache.

Looking inside this folder, I found that it contained three dated folders, one each for the past three days. Inside each of those were a number of files; many, I could tell, were from my shared project folders. Because we use a versioning system on one of those projects, I could see multiple versions of many files. In all, I found 8 GB of cached files.

[Ask the iTunes Guy is a regular column in which we answer your questions on everything iTunes related. If there's something you'd like to know, send an email to the iTunes Guy for consideration.]

There are many tips and tricks that can make working with iTunes a bit faster or easier, and we've gotten a number of questions about such techniques. In this installment, I answer questions about some of the little things in iTunes, tips and tricks that every iTunes user should know.

[Ask the iTunes Guy is a regular column in which we answer your questions on everything iTunes related. If there's something you'd like to know, send an email to the iTunes Guy for consideration.]

The idea of file compression-and what file types iTunes works with-can be confusing. In this installment, I answer your questions about lossless audio compression and file formats.

The iTunes Store is the most popular retail outlet in the United States for buying music, and has become a digital bazaar, selling everything from TV shows and movies to ebooks and audiobooks.

The iTunes Store has a number of excellent features: ease of use, a wide variety of content, and exclusive releases. But there are a number of ways Apple could improve the usability of the iTunes Store. Here are seven ideas for making the iTunes Store a better experience for customers.

Apple's $25-a-year iTunes Match service can match the tracks in your iTunes library with those in Apple's 20-million-song catalog, and lets you upload the ones it can't match (up to 25,000 non-purchased tracks) -- and then access those songs via iTunes or your iOS devices whenever you want.

And for the tracks it does match, you can download Apple's copies to replace your own poorly ripped MP3 files from a decade ago.

While the PDF file format is a great tool for sharing documents while retaining their formatting and for assuring that documents aren't changed (contracts, for instance), sometimes you need to use the text from a PDF. You may need to copy a paragraph, a page or more, and edit it in a Microsoft Word document, or in another word processor or text editor. While you can select text in a PDF, chances are that this text will be seriously munged. You'll often see odd breaks, or no breaks at all, and styles will be lost. There are ways, however, that you can convert a PDF to formatted text. Here's how to do this.

Create a workflow that extracts text

The first method is the cheapest, and uses a tool that is part of OS X: Automator. You can use Automator to create a workflow that can extract text from PDFs and save it as a text or RTF document.

So you've downloaded Lion from the Mac App Store, and updated your Mac. You're delighted by many of the new features, but there are some that rub you the wrong way. You may wish you could revert some of them to the behavior they had in Snow Leopard. Maybe you just can't get used to the changes, or perhaps you simply don't find them appealing. Here's a look at some of the many new features that you can revert to the Old Way. While it may be a good idea to get used to the way Lion does certain things, it's certainly understandable that you might want to change some of them back-I know I did.

(Note that when I mention preferences that can be changed, unless I name a specific application, all these preferences are found in the System Preferences application, which you can access from the Apple menu.)

As the summer heat arrives, I'm already thinking about the fall, when the cycle of nature returns us to more comfortable temperatures. It's also the time when Apple tends to release new version of iTunes -- generally when Apple unveils new iPods, and iTunes gets updated with a handful of new features, as well as for compatibility with the new devices. iTunes 10 saw the light on Sept. 1, 2010; iTunes 9 was unveiled on Sept. 9, 2009; and iTunes 8 a year earlier to the day.

This year, the fall will see the release of iOS 5, and iCloud, and a new version of iTunes (currently called 10.5 in developer releases, but perhaps iTunes 11 when it rolls out publicly). It will finally offer some Wi-Fi syncing with iOS devices, but here are some small tweaks I'd like to see in a future version of iTunes. (You may want to look back at a similar article I wrote last year, where I looked at big features -- none of which, alas, has seen the light of day.)

Music and lyrics-there's a reason you hear those two items discussed together, because they are equally important parts in the composition of a song. While you can tap your foot or strum along with a tune on your air guitar, you can't sing along if you don't know the words. And how frustrating is that?

Lots of CDs provide lyrics in liner notes, but songs purchased from the iTunes Store or ripped from your CDs don't include that information in the files. (Gracenote, the company that provides metadata for the iTunes Store and for the CDs you rip in iTunes, does offer lyrics, but Apple hasn't included the lyrics portion of Gracenote's database in iTunes yet.) You may have digital liner notes in PDF format from some online purchases, but, again, viewing them while you listen to music isn't always easy. But iTunes can still help you sing along by letting you add lyrics to your music files, which you can then view in iTunes or on any iPod or iOS device (with the exception of the iPod shuffle).