If you’re looking for a speaker system for your iOS device that’s as comfortable outdoors as it is indoors, the Braven 625s is an excellent option to consider. Jeff Butts took the speaker camping, and found it to be an excellent modern addition to his family’s primitive campground site.

As schools integrate emerging technology into the classroom, a challenge emerges to properly leverage the technology without sacrificing the educational merits of the curriculum. In this installment of Mac in the Classroom, Jeff Butts looks at how one school dealt with these challenges by getting into the app development business.

Jeff Butts is a self-avowed file hoarder, hanging on to downloads from more than five years ago. While hard drives are getting less expensive and more expansive, a drive with duplicates can get bogged down and slow. Even more importantly, SSD drives are short on space and long on cost, making it important to clean up duplicate files from time to time. Enter Gemini: The Duplicate Finder for OS X.

Jeff Butts is a file hoarder, keeping just about every file he’s ever downloaded. When he wants to find a particular file, he usually arranges files by date to find the most recent copy. In Snow Leopard, he was used to the “Arrange by Date” contextual menu, but OS X Lion has changed how that looks. In this Quick Tip, Jeff shows how to coax OS X Lion to give the same user experience of arranging files by date as in Snow Leopard.

Apple has had a place in the class room for years — even before the first Macintosh computer was released — and the iPad’s versatility has the company in an even stronger position in the education market. Jeff Butts is digging into the education options that go along with Apple’s products, and he takes a look at the end of Encyclopedia Britannica’s print era, too.

In OS X Lion, Apple has added several “data detectors” that work alongside Mail to make your Mail more interactive. In this TMO Quick Tip, Jeff Butts shows how to track your packages right from Mail.

Apple released Apple Configurator this week, a new tool designed to allow corporate and enterprise IT departments to manage fleets of Apple devices. Enterprise IT staff have bemoaned the lack of better tools to manage fleets of iOS devices, and some recent government migrations to the iPhone and iPad have made it clear that a better solution was needed for managing these devices en masse—Apple Configurator is intended to meet that need.

The Karotz Smart Rabbit is a PC- and Mac-compatible gadget that brings a variety of fun and useful apps into a small, entertaining form factor. You can control your smart rabbit using your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. Through a web page interface, you can load up your Karotz with applications from an “Appz Store” that, while small, is growing daily and is open for developers to do business.

Simplify, by Pixel Mates, provides a full-featured mini-player and desktop widget for iTunes, Rdio, and Spotify. The app makes it easy to control your music playback even when you have many applications filling your desktop real estate.

A favorite utility for cleaning up Windows PCs, Piriform’s CCleaner, is now available for the Mac. The app provides a variety of system optimization capabilities for OS X, all wrapped up in a single interface.

Apple’s “reinvention” of the textbook has created a buzz throughout education, as educators and journalists alike try to predict what impact iBooks 2’s interactive textbooks might have on K-12 public and private schools. What hasn’t really been covered yet (outside the outlets covering home schooling), is what impact the new interactive textbooks might have on the growing number of home schoolers.

Today, Apple announced iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and a new, free iTunes U app. Apple executives tout these as efforts to reinvent education and curriculum, and at first blush, they look very exciting. When you dig down into the innards of how it all works, though, Jeff Butts thinks the plan seems to break down quite a bit, and he’s dubious.

Mint.com and Scholastic are teaming up to make it a little more fun to develop good money management skills. The release of Mint.com’s online game, “Quest for Money,” will hep teach kids (and even adults) sound money management principles through a fun online board game. It’s all part of Intuit’s financial literacy program, announced in December 2010.

GoodSync for Mac provides fast and easy file synchronization and backup capabilities to the Mac. While Time Machine is great for maintaining a backup of your Mac, the backup files aren’t easily accessed by other computers. For that, you need a way to sync the files, and GoodSync fits the bill for that quite nicely.

Apple’s Education division has been quietly touring universities around the country, promoting the adoption of the iPad as a learning tool in higher education. The 60-minute seminar covers a number of features of the iPad, as well as Apple and third-party apps that carry great potential for students and educators alike. The seminar also highlights case studies of iPad adoption in universities, sharing the experiences from these early-adopting institutions.

Farmville is one of the most popular Facebook games ever, and there was a fair bit of excitement in the Farmville community after the iPhone 4 announcement when Zynga announced the upcoming Farmville app for the iPhone. The app is out, and TMO has put it through its paces. The Farmville app shows that it is definitely possible for games like Farmville, which is Flash-based on Facebook, to come to the iPhone, but the experience isn’t quite the same in this case.

A veritable explosion of cases have hit the market since the iPad released. Marware, a leading manufacturer of iPhone cases and skins, has joined the growing market with its Eco-Vue folio-style case for the iPad. The case is designed to give a professional impression while protecting your iPad, but does it actually fit the bill? Read on to find out.

We Rule, one of the latest games from ngmoco, allows you to rule your own kingdom on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. You farm the land, plant trees, and build cottages and businesses in an easy-to-use interface. As part of the Plus+ gaming network, the developers have encouraged network play by allowing your friends to place orders from your businesses. The game play is fun, if repetitive, and the game’s graphics make it easy to see the beauty of the iPhone as a gaming device.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 is the latest document scanner to hit the markets. If your goal is to digitize all of your financial records, legal documents, and other miscellaneous papers on the fly, the ScanSnap S1300 should fit the bill at a fairly inexpensive price. The scanner is portable, scans both sides of a page simultaneously, and offers a variety of choices for saving your scanned files.

PhoneSuit makes one of many battery packs for the iPhone. Jeff Butts has been testing the PhoneSuit MiLi, which has a 2,000 mAh (milliamp-hour) smart battery. The device does an excellent job extending the iPhone’s battery life. The battery pack has its drawbacks, but it’s definitely one of Jeff’s favorite iPhone accessories so far.