There are few feelings that will make a person’s heart drop quicker than the dreaded swipe of the credit card that is met with a message of “Declined.” If you’re used to managing your budget the traditional way, you no doubt have a filing cabinet full of unorganized bank statements, pre-approved loan offers, and receipts that you can’t recall why you saved. (Did you really need to make a whole “Bagels” folder for that one time you bought a single bagel?)

While there are a plethora of financial management tools available for your iOS device, no one has yet to come close to the Mint.com Personal Finance app. The main purpose of the app is simple: Make managing your money easy. It does that by offering up an unprecedented list of features to take control of your budget.

Mint.com’s app is the most reliable app on the market, trusted by nearly every financial institution imaginable. You can sync up your savings, checking, credit, PayPal, and most other accounts where you may keep assets — though you’ll have to enter the emergency fund shoebox you keep under the mattress manually. With the constantly updating list of transactions, you’ll know exactly where your finances stand at all times.

The most powerful tools in this Swiss Army knife of an app are the budget planning and monitoring abilities. Mint will automatically organize all spending into a multitude of categories, making it easy to see where cutbacks can take place and savings can be found. Goals can also be set for that added bit of motivation to avoid short term spending (e.g.: buying novelty socks) and look ahead to the future (e.g.: opening your own novelty sock store).

The best part of the entire Mint experience? It’s all completely free. Download it for the iPhone or the iPad and start getting your finances in order.

The Best is a weekly column in which we spotlight the most helpful or impressive iOS app to fit a certain need, whether it’s a part of your day-to-day life or just something cool that might come in handy down the line.

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A Look at Mint.com Personal Finance

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  The second the Mint.com app is open, you’ll immediately be greeted with your current financial standings.

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  Every recorded transaction is automatically organized by category, giving a complete breakdown of all spending done across the board.

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  If you’d like to see how you’re progressing in your spending habits, the Spending Over Time view gives a great look at habits over time and periods when money has historically been tight.

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  It’s hard to save money when not enough is coming in, and the Net Income view gives a great look at how your spending habits compare to your earnings.

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  The Budget overview shows what you’ve set for goals and how you’re progressing toward meeting them.

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  Take a closer look at every category so you can see exactly where you’ve been sinking your money and what it has cost you.

The Faces feature in iPhoto is useful, but how does it work?

Digital cameras recognize faces as an arrangement of shapes, and they use this to select the best focus and exposure settings for the picture, on the assumption that any faces will be the most important part of the image. Only a few cameras take the next step, which is to try to distinguish one individual from another on the basis of their facial features, but this is the basis of iPhoto’s Faces system.

It works in two stages. First, it scans your photos to see which, if any, have faces in them. It then attempts to group faces by likeness, and match any new faces to those you’ve already identified.

It doesn’t get it right every time, and you have to train it by manually identifying or confirming the identity of your subjects. But it does learn, so that the more you train it, the better it gets at recognizing particular people. Of course, you might go along quite happily without using this Faces feature at all. If you’ve got a library of thousands of photos, the prospect of trawling through them all looking for and identifying every single individual is daunting.

But you don’t have to look for faces throughout your whole library. You can look for specific individuals and ignore the rest. You could even create smaller libraries for this job. Our walkthrough shows one instance where this works very well. It’s a library consisting of old photos scanned in then imported into iPhoto. What iPhoto can do is bring together pictures of people who may appear in dozens of unrelated prints taken over a period of many years. It can also help you identify people based on who they’re with, or by the context they appear in. You can see connections that you wouldn’t spot simply by leafing through prints.

What can be confusing about Faces is that there are different ways to identify and confirm them: from the Faces corkboard via the Find Faces button; by double-clicking a face on the corkboard and checking to see if iPhoto has found additional photos where they might appear; or by opening a photo, displaying the Info panel and seeing who’s been recognized. Each has its pros and cons, but they’re all just different ways of doing the same thing, and it really doesn’t matter which you use.

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Identify Faces in Your Photos

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  Scanning for Faces

  When you import photos, iPhoto scans them for faces. This happens in the background, and might only take a minute or so. If you’re upgrading an old library, though, or creating a new one from scratch, this scanning process could take some time.

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  Naming Faces

  If you’re using Faces for the first time, clicking Faces in the source panel displays the faces iPhoto has found in sets of three. Click below each one and type in a name, then click the Show More Faces button bottom right to see the next three.

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  Faces Corkboard

  As soon as you start identifying faces, iPhoto displays them on the “corkboard”. This is what you’ll see when you click Faces in the source panel. Now you can click the Find Faces button on the bottom toolbar to go back to the previous screen and carry on identifying faces.

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  Photos of One Person

  Alternatively, say you want to find more photos of a particular person. If you double-click on their face on the corkboard, iPhoto displays thumbnails of pictures where you’ve so far identified them. But it tries to identify other photos it thinks they might be in too.

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  Photos or Faces

  There’s a switch at the top right marked Photos/Faces. Use this to display only faces of the people you’re identifying (see the previous screenshot) or the entire photo they appear in. Click the Confirm Additional Faces button, bottom right, if needed.

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  Confirm More Faces

  iPhoto will display thumbnails of all the other instances where it thinks that person appears. Click on a face to confirm it, and option-click if it’s not the face of that person. You may need to go through this a few times as iPhoto expands the list of possible matches.

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  Checking Faces in Photos

  Now for the third way of adding names to faces; this can be useful with group shots – who else is in the shot can often tell you who the person is. Open the photo as normal and open the Info panel. Recognized faces will then be identified, with their names underneath.

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  Adding New Faces

  You can enter names directly in the boxes below and, if a face hasn’t been identified at all, click the Add a face button in the Info panel, and drag the marquee over the face; resize it by dragging on the corner handles. Now you can type in the appropriate name.

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  Quick Tip

  Sometimes iPhoto sees faces where there aren’t any. We don’t know what it saw under this deckchair (creepy!), but it’s certainly not human. If this happens, just click the close box (the cross in a circle) at the top left of the face marquee.

While dirt on a Mac could add character, it could also be a detriment to how your machine performs, especially if the dust and grime starts to seep into your inner components. That’s why it’s important to do a little spring cleaning for your Mac. Here’s all you need to create your own arsenal of cleaning products to keep things looking like new.

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10 Essential Tools for Cleaning Your Mac

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  Use compressed air to blow the dust out of your computer. It will keep your iMac or Mac Pro running smoothly and at the right temperature.

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  Use a product like this Endust cleaning spray to add an anti-static and anti-dust coat to your computer, keyboard, and mouse.

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  Have a lot of dust buildup? Consider a computer vacuum to really eliminate the dirt.

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  A computer brush is really handy for getting in between keyboard keys, and for getting the dirt of your Mac’s internal parts. A toothbrush works for this, too.

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  There are a variety of LCD cleaning sprays to keep your iMac, MacBook, or Thunderbolt Display looking sharp. Alcohol and water aren’t good for screens, so opt for an LCD specific solution.

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  Use a lint free micro-fiber cloth to wipe things down.

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  Alcohol wipes are great for disinfecting and cleaning the grime off your keyboard, since alcohol dries so quickly.

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  If you’re looking for a wipe to quickly clean your screen, opt for an electronic specific non-alcohol formulation.

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  Q-tips are the best for getting into the tiny crevices of your keyboard. Dip them lightly in alcohol for extra cleaning power.

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  Use an anti-static cloth to safely wipe off the parts inside your Mac.

Well, well, well… what have we here? An invitation to a special Apple media event in San Francisco next Wednesday, March 7 at 10am PST. Sounds to us like a new iPad is incoming, although there are also plenty of rumors about a third-generation Apple TV (not the kind with a display, mind you). But hey, maybe we’ll get some improvements to iTunes Match as well, judging from this “adaptive streaming” report below. Here’s a look at the rest of the day’s tech news for Tuesday, February 28, 2012.

CNBC Claims Quad-Core iPad 3 with LTE, But Bungles Event Location

Just prior to today’s official announcement from Apple about the March 7 media event, CNBC stepped in a big pile by tweeting an alert claiming that a “quad-core iPad 3 with 4G LTE” would be “unveiled in New York next week.” According to MacRumors, the Twitter moment set off a firestorm of debate over its dubious source (later revealed to be an iMore.com report from two weeks ago), even backtracking at one point by claiming that an “unspecified” Apple event would take place in New York City next week. Within an hour, Apple issued invitations for the real event, which takes place next Wednesday, March 7 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco — all the way across the country. Better luck next time, CNBC…

Apple Planning “Adaptive Streaming” Audio Format for iCloud

It’s nice to see that Apple isn’t sitting still as the king of the digital music heap with iTunes. According to a new report from The Guardian, the company is hard at work on “a new audio file format that will offer ‘adaptive streaming’ to provide high or low-quality files to users of its iCloud service.” The idea is that users who wish to download music to their iPhone, iPod touch or iPad will get the full, high-quality source material, but Apple could also offer a second, lower resolution version for those who prefer to stream — a key feature of subscription services like Spotify that’s currently missing from the $24.99 per year iTunes Match, with the exception of the Mac and Apple TV. “A source with inside knowledge of the process says Apple has asked a London studio to prepare audio files for a new streaming format that will adapt to bandwidth or hardware capabilities,” the report reveals. “It is unclear whether the files will convert to the smaller types such as AAC in real time, or if Apple will convert the master file to several different types upon submission to iTunes.” As usual, Apple remains mum on the possibility, but with iTunes currently encouraging labels to submit higher quality 24-bit, 96KHz master files, it would seem to be just a matter of time before it becomes reality.

MacTech Shows You How to Fight ATT Data Throttling

Are you an iPhone user grandfathered into an unlimited data plan who’s suffering through ATT’s attempts to throttle your data speeds? According to MacTech, you may have a small claims case against the carrier that could net you upwards of $850, the sum recently awarded to an iPhone user in Southern California after taking ATT to court. Of course, with our society already so litigious, it would seem ill-advised to take this approach — but after all, ATT started it by not living up to their promise. MacTech outlines the five steps you’ll need to follow, which includes finding out where to file in the first place, thoroughly reading your contract, being able to prove you have an unlimited data plan, having an amount in mind for damages and of course, being prepared and polite. The bottom line is, ATT users have rights, and sometimes big companies need to remember that. Be sure to hit the link to read the entire story before blindly heading down to the courthouse to file your small claims action!

Apple Scores a Major Win for Multitouch Patents

Patently Apple is reporting that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has published 24 patents today which have been granted to Apple Inc. The first of these “highlights three out of five important Multi-Touch patent wins,” which cover multitouch auto scanning (for “disabling components of a touch-panel device during periods of inactivity to conserve power”), multipoint touchscreens (encapsulating 21 patents dating back to 2004) and Apple’s 3D curved substrate lamination process used for the Magic Mouse. “No matter how you slice it, it’s a huge day for Apple on the Multi-touch patent front,” the website proclaims. Today’s patent victories also include 8,125,455 and 8,125,464 which cover “Full scale calibration measurement for multi-touch surfaces” — less sexy than the others, to be sure, but definitely additional ammunition in Apple’s arsenal nonetheless.

Marvel Graphic Novels Arrive in iBookstore

The Loop is reporting that Marvel Digital Media Group has announced the availability of 80 graphic novels through Apple’s iBookstore. Titles are sorted by popular characters such as The Avengers, Captain America, Spider-Man, X-Men and The Hulk, and all of the titles can be read on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. “Marvel is taking the world of comics by storm and releasing a massive selection of our best and brightest graphic novels on the iBookstore,” announced Peter Phillips, Senior Vice President General Manager, Marvel Digital Media Group. “For the first time ever, fans will be able to easily find and enjoy all of their favorite heroes including The Avengers, Spider-Man and The X-Men on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch — one of the best digital platforms for reading comics and graphic novels.” The publisher also continues to offer many of these titles through its own Marvel app as well.

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