Macworld March 2016

Blast from Apple’s past From the outside, the Apple Museum could easily be mistaken for an Apple Store from the ‘90s. Apple I The museum’s first room is dedicated to the first computer Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ever built back in 1976. The Apple I exhibit includes an original operation manual signed by Woz. Look but don’t touch Reminds us of the Macworld storage room (go.macworld.com/mwvintagemacs). The Apple product family tree Even though the Apple Museum doesn’t have every Apple product ever released, it does a pretty good job of cataloguing them in this visual wall display. Macintosh 128K The launch of the Macintosh in 1984 serves as the opening scene in the recent Steve Jobs movie. Jobs & Woz The Apple Museum doesn’t just have products on display,…

There will be a day when our iPads and MacBooks run the same operating system. Despite what Tim Cook wants us to believe, the crossover potential is simply too tantalizing for it not to happen; in fact, I’m willing to bet that somewhere deep inside Jony Ive’s laboratory there already exists a machine that merges the best of the mobile and desktop operating systems into a singular first-class experience. But if the Surface and Pixel C have taught us anything, it’s that two worlds aren’t quite ready to meet. Even if Apple has dreamed up a technical solution to bring iOS and OS X together under one roof, there are a slew of little wrinkles that need to be ironed out before such a dream machine can even be considered…

The Latest Mac Products Reviewed & Rated MAC GEMS ARE APPS THAT OFFER STANDOUT UTILITY OR UNIQUE FEATURES AT A GREAT PRICE. NUMBERS 3.6.1 FOR MAC PRICE WHEN RATED $20.00 COMPANY apple.com WHEN I LAST reviewed Numbers for OS X (go.macworld.com/ numbersforosx), it was the first release of the “new” Numbers, and it came with a slew of changes—both good and bad—to the interface and feature set. Now, two years on, Numbers has gained 0.6.1 version numbers (apple.com/mac/numbers), as well as some new features and changes to its interface. It’s also a much stronger collaboration tool now, and you can work on spreadsheets on OS X, iOS, and the web. ISSUES FROM THE ORIGINAL REVIEW In my original review of version 3.0, I noted that the left-hand sidebar…

CHAPTERS 1.0 PRICE WHEN RATED $20.00 COMPANY Thomas Pritchard SOME APPS ARE highly focused; Chapters (chaptersapp.com) is clearly one of them. Chapters lets you add division markings—yes, chapters—to MP3 files, useful for podcasters who want to provide a quick way for listeners to jump to a segment or past one. It’s also handy for making a single long MP3 file of a music performance, album, or lecture, and marking points along the way rather than dividing into individual audio file tracks, which have to be managed. Divisions could be added to AAC files using a format defined by Apple to create so-called enhanced versions for years, but which aren’t universally supported. An AAC chapter break can contain a title, a URL, and an image. A fair amount of OS X…

DEFAULT FOLDER X 5 PRICE WHEN RATED $35.00; $15.00 upgrade for users who bought a license before June 1, 2015. COMPANY St. Clair Software DEFAULT FOLDER X has long been among the first pieces of software I install on a Mac, alongside LaunchBar, 1Password, and TextExpander. With the public betas of El Capitan released during the summer of 2015 came a concern: A new security mechanism to protect core system files and directories against malware might prevent many kinds of utilities (go.macworld.com/utilitiessecurity) from functioning at all without disabling that protection. The fear proved short-lived. With minor tweaks from Apple and hard work by developers, nearly all the software that seemed threatened—including disk-cloning tools—was updated or rewritten. Default Folder took the longest, and required rebooting into Recovery Disk, using a Terminal…

DASHLANE 4 FOR MAC PRICE WHEN RATED Free; Premium, $40.00 per year COMPANY Dashlane IT’S A LITTLE SCARY to think that the lowly password is, in many cases, all that separates our most private data from utter ruin. Passwords are hard to get right, and all too easy to accidentally let fall in the hands of the shady characters that lurk around the dark corners of the Internet, ready to steal every last bit of our digital footprints for their own profit. Luckily, this generates demand for apps that can help us manage our passwords, like Dashlane’s eponymous app (go.macworld.com/dashlaneapp), which is now in its fourth major release and acts as a “digital vault” in which all kinds of private information can be stored and encrypted using a single “master…