With a 2.1A output and 10,400mAh capacity, the Gum Max is an external backup battery by Just Mobile that works with iOS devices. Anyone who has used iOS devices extensively – perhaps some of you even use the iPad as their primary computer – knows that, for as much as Apple has focused on making iOS devices extremely user-friendly from a battery life standpoint, the battery is going to run out eventually. And if you use a lot of high-speed 3G data, watch some videos, and play a game or two, that battery indicator up in the iOS status bar is going to run out faster.

Just a few days prior to receiving my Gum Max review unit, I waited in line at the Apple Store in Rome to buy the new iPad. There, I had the chance to experience how important it is to be able to rely on iOS devices without a source of power constantly available – sure, Apple employees allowed us to use the store’s MacBooks to charge our iPhones, but it just seemed rude to me to go there every few hours just to grab a USB port without doing anything else. Waiting in line for more than 20 hours, using a lot of 3G and taking several photos of videos with my iPhone 4S, I had to recharge my device multiple times – and when I didn’t want to use the USB ports kindly provided by Apple’s employees, I had to use my friends’ portable battery packs. There, I realized I really needed to get a backup battery for iOS devices for the future. Indeed, power and battery life seem to be two common concerns these days.

The Gum Max is not one of those battery packs that you can use as a case for the iPhone. The Gum Max actually looks (and weighs) like an external drive, only it can charge iOS devices through USB. The device has a green LED indicator to show how much juice it’s got left to power your iPhone or iPad, and input and output (to recharge the Gum Max, and recharge your iOS devices) are separate, but they both use USB (regular and micro) through cables that are provided in the box. As with many Just Mobile products, the Gum Max looks like something Apple would produce, with a clean and elegant design highlighted by a sturdy aluminum shell. I like the design of the Gum Max, but how it works is what matters in critical situations.

I ran a series of tests to see how the Gum Max would recharge my iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and new iPad. Overall, the Gum Max can easily recharge an iPhone 4S from 0% to 100% in two hours, get an iPad 2 from 0% to 90% with a single charge, and recharge half of the new iPad’s bigger battery with a single charge.

Gum Max Tests

iPhone 4S, started at 3:47 AM. From 0% to 37% in 30 minutes; up to 79% after 67 minutes.

iPhone 4S, started at 11:15 PM. From 0% to 68% in 60 minutes; up to 98% in 115 minutes.

iPad 3, started at 1:10 AM. Up to 28% in 100 minutes.

iPad 3, started at 2:09 PM. Device turned on at 2:17 PM. Up to 35% in 122 minutes; 42% in 145 minutes; 51% in 176 minutes; Gum Max turned off at 5:05 PM with device at 52%.

iPad 2, started at 10:14 PM. Device turned on at 10:23 PM, reached 44% at 11:44 PM, Gum Max turned off with iPad at 90%.

At $109, you have to consider whether getting 5 hours of a new iPad back will be worth the expense, assuming you’re getting the 10 hours of battery life promised by Apple, which I have indeed noticed with my iPad (it is a 4G model, and I don’t keep brightness at 100%). Is a full iPhone charge or an iPad going back to 50% going to a considerable improvement for your work, or the way you rely on iOS devices on the go? And is that improvement going to be worth $109 over time? Especially for iPhone users, I think having a full charge back in two hours can be critical in some scenarios (last year, I spent a night at the hospital to help a friend, my phone died at 3 AM, and I couldn’t reach my parents). For third-generation iPad users, the utility of a battery pack like this is more debatable, as the new iPad is slower at charging, and it’ll completely drain the Gum Max while remaining at only 50%. For previous iPad owners, 90% of charge from zero sounds like a good investment in my opinion.

With these differences in mind, the Gum Max is a fine accessory, it’s very portable, and it comes with an elegant black carrying pouch. You can get it here.

“Save for Web” – not everyone’s favorite thing to do as a designer, but it’s part of the job. It’s monotonous but not a difficult task to do, it simply takes time. MacRabbit, who created Espresso, has released a new Mac app called Slicy. Its sole purpose is to turn PSD files into images for the web and applications. Slicy examines your .psd files for Layer Groups that are named like a file (.png, .jpg, .tif, .icns) and auto-exports them, no “Save for Web” dialog boxes necessary. “Name layer groups like the files you want to create, and Slicy will extract them individually. Enjoy complete freedom to move, obscure and even hide these named layer groups without affecting the extracted images.”

I can admit that my layers and layer groups are not always properly named; I think all designers can attest to this, so Slicy will also help you do a better job with naming objects within your PSD files. Once your naming is done and file is saved, drag the .psd into the apps’s window and Slicy will do the work for you. If you make changes to the .psd after you run Slicy, the app has an option to auto-export the images when they are re-saved. Delicious! If you want to repeat a job you already did, Slicy saves your previous exports under the “clockwise” icon in the upper right. Slicy, however, cannot guarantee a perfect replica for every .psd – the CMYK color space and some advanced filters are not supported.

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Developed by Caleb Thorson, World Contacts+ is the classic example that, sometimes, good ideas can be remixed and combined to produce something new that’s still fresh and has a place on the market. In the past months, the App Store has seen the rise of “launcher apps” that, through URLs schemes, leverage many iOS apps’ capability of exchanging data and information to facilitate the process of forwarding files, short bits of text, or data. Shortcuts, if you will, collected in a single app that acts as a bridge between the user and all the other apps installed on a device. At MacStories, we’re big fans of Launch Center and Buzz, two apps that take the concept of “quick launcher” and apply it to third-party apps and Address Book contacts, respectively.

World Contacts+ is a bit of both, but stands out on its own because of the very specific approach it takes in regards to quick dials. World Contacts+ keeps a short list of the people you contact the most during the day, and allows you to initiate a call, FaceTime call, send a message or a new email with just one tap. Like Launch Center, it displays a vertical list for your shortcuts. Like Buzz, it allows you to pick contacts from the Address Book, and it uses native iOS frameworks to activate actions like email and iMessages. The app, however, adds a world clock to the mix, allowing you to see the local time for each entry in your list, so you can decide if it’s an appropriate time to call them or text them. The app even cleverly dims contacts that are located in time zones where it’s currently night. To assign a time zone, you simply search for a contact’s location every time you add a new entry to the list.

World Contacts+ isn’t as customizable as Launch Center, or as powerful as Buzz. If you’re looking for more advanced options when it comes to app shortcuts and contacts, go with those apps. But because World Contacts+ cuts the feature set down to a minimum and only adds one very specific feature, I believe the app could have a chance on the App Store for those people, like me, who communicate with people from different timezones on a daily basis. Currently, the MacStories team is made from people living in Italy, the US, Japan, and Australia, and it’s incredibly convenient to know the local time of each person without doing the math every time.

World Contacts+ is available at $0.99 on the App Store.

In there’s one thing (among others) that I have noticed while using the iPad extensively over the past five months, is that it makes for an excellent “kitchen screen” while cooking. Whether it’s for browsing recipes or keeping an eye on what the final results should look like, the iPad’s form factor and wide array of apps, coupled with the excellent Safari and Facebook apps, allow for a fantastic experience when browsing recipes, checking out friends’ recommendations, and saving instructions and photos for future usage.

It was with particular interest that I tested Kyle Baxter’s new iPad app, Basil. Available today on the App Store, Basil is a fresh take on “smart recipe books” that lets you to keep your recipes neatly organized in a clean interface that gets out of the way, but it’s also smart enough to facilitate the process of cooking better.

A recipe app should have a clean interface with text on a white background, large buttons you can easily tap, search features, and timers. Basil does this by leveraging the inner strengths of iOS, and it adds its own implementation of bookmarklet/parser to make the process of saving recipes from the web effortless and intuitive. Read more