It doesn’t take much effort to fall in love with Instagram. If you’re an iPhone user there’s probably not an easier way to upload and share photos online.

What about Instagram on your Mac?

For now, the official Instagram app is iPhone only. Fear not– Carousel is the Mac way to experience Instagram on your favorite personal computer. Almost.

A couple of bucks gets you the Carousel app which lets you view your Instagram feed and profile photos, including your own uploads, using a deliciously Instagram-like user interface.

What Carousel does is bring Instagram to you. Unfortunately, you get all the goodies except the most important. Sending photos to Instagram.

Other than the inability to share photos from your Mac to Instagram, Carousel gives you the rest of the leftover good stuff.

You can search, pin tags, see all photos you’ve marked as liked, open multiple windows, click to single photo view, even go full screen.

You can like and comment on photos, open photos in your browser, copy a photo’s URL, even check on who’s following you and check on those you follow.

Carousel has four attractive Instagram-like themes, and works with Growl notifications.

The only negative is that you can’t upload photos to Instagram.

What was once my absolute favorite to-do list manager on my Mac has taken a back seat to another Mac app.

It’s Things vs. Todo. For now, Things is losing. Todo is ahead of the pack.

To-do list apps on the Mac are a dime a dozen. Many are free, most are nearly dirt cheap, and the expensive ones can also double as task managers and project managers (and you’ll pay for the privilege).

That’s the story of Things, which debuted a few years ago as an elegant, almost simple to-do list manager that could also stretch into listing tasks within a project (and multiple projects).

Then along came Things for iPhone. Things users could take Things on the road and have them sync up to their Mac via WiFi later.

Then along came Dropbox, and iCloud, and automatic, on-the-fly synchronization of data between devices. Things was left behind.

Things still had tasks and projects. Things was still easier to use than most, with a mild learning curve to get into the more advanced features. Things had the ability to zoom into details of a task, and cam with task alerts.

But things required the now archaic WiFi sync instead of cloud sync. So, I packed up my to-do lists and moved to Appigo’s Todo for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. While it’s not quite as capable as Things, it quickly became more useful and synced instantly with Dropbox (or, iCloud, or Toodledo, et al).

Thanks to the cloud, Things is back. Almost.

The latest version starts over and runs alongside your old Things. The new Things uses the cloud to store your to-do lists, tasks, and projects. But it doesn’t use Dropbox or iCloud. It uses Things Cloud. It’s yet another cloud service designed to store your app’s data online and sync back to your devices; Mac, iPhone, iPad.

My switch from Things to Todo is chronicled in The Problem With To Do Lists And The Mac, iPhone, iPad To Do Solution.

It’s good to see Things finally join the 21st century of the Cloud. For many of us, it may be too late because the future of to-do apps, indeed any Mac, iPhone or iPad app that creates and manipulates data, is in the cloud.

My Mac’s System Preferences are set up to zoom into the screen by using Control-Scroll (zoom in and out). It’s a quick and easy way to view portions of the Mac’s screen up close, in a super-magnification mode.

Guess what? There’s an app for that.

It’s called Zoom It, a dirt cheap Mac app that gives you multiple loupes so you can zoom in on any portion of the Mac’s screen by using keyboard shortcuts.

Toggle between the round and rectangle loupes by using the keyboard command.

While using the Zoom It loupe you still get access to your keyboard, trackpad controls, and mouse clicks. All it does is zoom the screen.

Another keyboard shortcut holds the loupe onscreen, then dismisses it with a release. Screen magnification goes up to 500-percent. You can also take a screenshot of the image in the loupe.

Zoom It is good for people who need the screen image to be bigger (bad eyes, or for presentations that need to zoom in on an image), but it doesn’t have the ability to capture screen colors on a per pixel basis. That would be useful.

What can you do when you don’t have an ice chest to hold cold beer? Improvise.

Truly, necessity is the mother of invention.

An iPad can hold hundreds of expensive textbooks in low cost digital form, so why does and article on Cult of Mac compare paper textbooks to iPads? It’s math. Apple says learning on an iPad is a superior experience to the centuries old paper textbook. CoM says:

We completely agree that interactive learning is the road America needs to take, but getting there is going to be a huge problem. A recent study shows that using paper textbooks in schools is a lot cheaper than iPads, and that’s not likely to change unless Apple takes some drastic steps to reduce cost.

In the number crunching graphic that compares iPads to textbooks, it would cost $27-billion to provide an iPad to every student in the US. Six books per year for a high school student would equal $450 (about the cost of an iPad for schools). That’s at $75 per textbook. If the textbook price drops to, say, $15, the iPad becomes competitive as a way to distribute inexpensive digital textbooks in just a few years of use.

The CofM math shows that it costs a school about half that of an iPad to equip students with textbooks. But that assumes two things. iPads will remain at the same price. Digital textbooks would remain at the same price as paper textbooks.

The equation changes further when schools also stop using desktop or notebook computers in the classroom and use only iPads.

My prediction is that digital books (tablets like the iPad) will become less expensive. Prices on digital textbooks will drop dramatically. At some point in a few years, overall per-student, per-textbook costs will be less than using paper textbooks.

If you believe the techno pundits, Apple plans to sell an Apple television. What can Apple do to a television that makes it more appealing than a Sony, Vizio, Samsung, Phillips or whatever television already on the market?

Already you can buy a TV with Wi-Fi and internet capability. Many have apps built-in to browse the web, search Google, or play YouTube videos.

The Mac maker’s $99 Apple TV device is interesting, perhaps compelling for some, but hasn’t set the industry on fire. Sure, you can stream Netflix, watch live sports, get news, stream HD movies and TV shows, even play games from your iPhone using AirPlay.

What’s missing?

What’s missing is obvious. There’s no built-in video recording capability. The DVR. It’s the device that cable TV companies love (because they can charge extra to rent you the device). It’s the device that television watchers love because you can record and playback TV and movies and fast forward through commercials.

It’s also the device that content providers and networks hate. Fast forward through the commercials? Besides DVR users, who else wants that?

The best that Mac users can come up with is Elgato’s EyeTV. It’s the app that acts like a DVR on your Mac. Attach the right video capture device to your TV cable and your Mac becomes a very expensive, but highly configurable DVR.

That’s what’s missing from Apple TV. It’s also a must-have function in any upcoming Apple television.

Otherwise, what does Apple bring to the television that’s not already there? My feeble imagination comes up with a far reaching desire and works backwards. What do we really want from a television?

We want to watch anything we want, whenever we want. That means everything; all video– TV shows, movies, news, sports– on demand. The only way that will happen is if TV channels become apps.

Either Apple builds in EyeTV-like functionality into an Apple branded television, or, they launch TV channels as apps for the whole world.