Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2017 in Macworld

MacPaw, the company behind the famous CleanMyMac hard-drive cleaner, has launched Setapp, a subscription-based alternative to Apple’s Mac App Store. With Setapp, a single subscription currently lets you access more than 60 curated Mac apps for a $9.99 fixed monthly fee. MacPaw says it will eventually offer up to 300 apps for that price, as new apps will be added every month. While I was quite familiar with Mac- Paw’s own CleanMyMac, as well as assorted other popular apps like Chrono- Sync Express, Hype, Polarr, RapidWeaver, Ulysses, and XMind, there are many others in the suite I’m hearing about for the first time. Getting started with Setapp is easy and free for a one-month trial period, during which time all apps are completely operative. You’ll need to first register on the…

The user reviews in the iOS and Mac App Stores can be a mixed bag. Sometimes, a user provides useful information to help you make a purchasing decision. But often the user reviews are filled with complaints about problems that were encountered while using the software. When a software developer addresses those problems in updated software, the user review lingers. In a future update to iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, developers will have a chance to address user reviews in the App Store. The release notes for iOS 10.3 state that developers will be able to respond to a user review, and the response will be available for others to see. The notes also say that this feature will be available in the Mac App Store. Apple doesn’t provide any information…

Apple’s iMac (as well as its discontinued Thunderbolt Display and Cinema Display) are cool, clean-looking devices. But to me, the sleek appearance comes with one annoyance that I call the “Mac reach around.” When you need to plug in a USB device or an SD Card, you have to reach around to the back of the display. You can’t reach around blindly, either; you have to either turn the iMac or display around to get to the ports, or, if you can’t do that (like if your iMac or display is mounted to a wall), you have to contort your body in a way to see the ports. For most people, this is a minor annoyance in the overall scheme of things, and if you never need to plug in…

Apple’s AirPods launch wasn’t exactly smooth. A months long delay led to rumors as to why that delay happened—could it be that the Bluetooth accessory Apple designed as the perfect complement to its headphone jack–free iPhone 7 wasn’t ready for prime time? But Apple started shipping AirPods in late December, just before the holidays, and has since captured 26 percent of the wireless headphone market. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the earphones are a “runaway success” and that Apple is making them as fast as possible. I love my AirPods. I wear them to make phone calls, listen to podcasts on the subway, and to listen to my jams while working out both indoors and outside. They fit perfectly and pair seamlessly to my iPhone (and to my MacBook Air and…

Where kids are concerned, pairing an iPad with apps is second only to the unbeatable combination of peanut butter and jelly. Thanks to the App Store, a new world of learning and entertainment is available at the fingertips of a new generation. One thing missing from most educational apps is the tactile feel of real-world objects. Although most of us have adapted to the glass surface of smartphones and tablets, nothing beats the touch and feel of holding a toy. French developer Marbotic came up with an ingenious compromise: A series of six tablet apps for iPad or Android devices that work in tandem with wooden letters and numbers children hold in their hands. When stamped against the screen, the apps respond accordingly with spoken words as well as animation,…

CMRA CMRA ($169) is an Apple Watch band with front and rear HD cameras, making video chat and quality photos available directly from your wrist. Its features include an “all-day” battery that makes it possible to capture up to a half-hour of video on a single charge. Pre-order now, and the device comes with a free charging dock for your watch. LEATHER BATTERY WALLET This isn’t really a case for your phone, but rather a case for your phone’s backup battery. The Leather Battery Wallet ($120, $100 on Amazon) is mostly a regular wallet—good for carrying cash, IDs, and credit cards—but with one wrinkle: It also holds a 2,400-mAh power bank for recharging your iOS device on the go. Don’t worry, the result isn’t a George Costanza wallet: The device…

Say you find yourself using the Web on a strange computer—maybe one owned by a relative or friend, or in a library or school. When using a computer or other device that you don’t control, you can enable a private-browsing mode to prevent leaving traces of your activities. That’s good for accidental security, as it keeps the next user of the device from visiting a site with your credentials, set in a cookie or via a login, when they didn’t intend to. This is an even better idea for shared computers where the subsequent user is someone you don’t know. Likewise, you can set someone else up with private browsing on your Mac, so that they don’t have access to your settings (guest mode in Chrome) or can’t change your…

The Internet of Things (IoT) has a bad rap these days. As billions of devices, like DVRs and webcams, ship to consumers worldwide, no government or industry organization has any real power to ensure that the devices have proper security and an upgrade path to patch flaws. That’s not new in the computer and consumer electronics worlds. But the IoT makes hackable devices in fixed locations attached to high-speed broadband an incredibly desirable target for security agencies and criminal gangs to use as armies of bots. While some IoT devices are expensive, like a $200 Nest camera, those are outliers. The vast majority of gear being shipped is already deep in a race to the bottom. The makers of cheap hardware don’t typically put security at the top of their…

In one of the Slack teams I’m in, a colleague posted a photo of a battery he removed from a MacBook Air. He replaced the battery just fine, but one of the cells looked like it had been inflated like a balloon. I warned him to take care, and in the resulting discussion, realized it’s not common knowledge that it’s not just a defectively designed Samsung Note7 battery that can cause fires and damage. If you believe the battery in your phone, tablet, or laptop has started to expand, unplug the device immediately if it’s plugged in, and turn it off if at all possible. Don’t charge or use it at all, because lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that are bulging have already bypassed built-in safeguards and are swollen with gases. Continued…

Ever since the release of the new MacBook Pro, which introduced two features never before seen on the Mac—namely the Touch ID sensor and the Touch Bar—it’s been an open question. When will those features go from being available only on the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro, and move across the entire Mac product line? It’s probably only a matter of time before the Touch Bar and Touch ID sensor crop up on the MacBook, if for no other reason than it’s a laptop and Apple has already showed how to integrate those features into a laptop. (But given how svelte the MacBook is, it might take a while.) The real question is on the desktop. Yes, it’s true that roughly two-thirds of the Macs Apple sells are laptops. But…

If there’s one breed of app every Mac and iOS user should own, it’s a password manager. After all, it’s no longer possible nor advisable to repeat the same easily-guessed login credentials across all the websites and services we use, and nearly impossible for most of us to remember so many combinations of letters, digits, and special characters. For my money, 1Password (for Mac and iOS) is hands down the best choice, and one I highly recommend to others. But not everyone will benefit from that software’s more advanced features, while others are simply unwilling to shell out hard-earned cash for the convenience when jotting passwords onto a piece of paper gets the job done. (Sadly, my own mother is guilty of this!) Secrets (free on the App Store) strips away…

It’s a tedious task to take your old photos in an album or box and convert them to a digital format by using a scanner. In recent years, mobile apps like Unfade, Photomyne, and Pic Scanner have taken some of the friction out of this process by automatically cropping, enhancing, and organizing prints. But those apps share a singular limitation: No matter how good the smartphone camera, it can’t compete with a decent hardware scanner. Epson’s new FastFoto FF-640 ($650; available on Amazon) offers a higherquality approach, combining sheet-fed duplex color scanner hardware capable of 600 dpi optical resolution with Mac and PC software for organizing and enhancing photos in a single step, optionally restoring faded colors, removing red-eye, or adjusting brightness, contrast, and saturation. The scanner loads up to…

As a location-based game, Pokémon Go is perfect for when you’re on your commute, walking to a store, or just out and about. However, there’s one big hassle to the experience: the need to have the app open and on your screen to track distance, ding nearby PokéStops, and try to catch Pokémon. That makes it difficult to play when you are, for example, holding the hand of a small child, carrying bags, or just simply trying to watch where you’re walking. The Pokémon Go Plus, released in September, helps with a lot of that. It’s a tiny wearable device, worn around the wrist or clipped onto clothes, that buzzes and lights up any time you’re near a Pokémon or PokéStop, and can automatically snag items or try to catch the…

My wife tends to misplace things. Whether it’s her keys, iPad, or iPhone, almost daily she’s searching for something inside our home. With the iPhone, I solved this problem by gifting her an Apple Watch, but the other items remain a challenge. I thought I had solved the problem of mislaid keys with Elgato’s Smart Key, one of the early “find my whatever” gadgets. It worked well until the battery died, which seemed to happen frequently and without warning. Last year I reviewed TrackR Bravo, a similar device that also seemed to run out of juice prematurely. Like the devices mentioned, Chipolo Plus is a small, lightweight disc equipped with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy that connects to an iPhone or Android smartphone. Open the app, press a button, then follow the…

Read professional reviews of Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup, and you’ll come away thinking the new laptops have great battery life. Dive into a customer forum, though, and the upshot will be exactly the opposite: The new MacBook Pros have “piss poor” battery life. That characterization came from user yillbs on MacRumors.com. “I don’t think anyone can convince me that this thing isn’t just flat out the worst battery life ever on a MacBook,” yillbs wrote, clearly frustrated. “I’ve been defending it like mad, but at this point… how can you? 4.42 hours is just bad.” User Happypuppy was anything but. “Not happy with the battery either. I was editing my MacBook review video last night and at 6:28 p.m. it was at 100 percent,” Happypuppy wrote. “At 8:52 p.m.…

You can be tracked and have your data intercepted from many angles, by legitimate and illegitimate actors alike: governments, criminals, personal enemies, corporate spies, children without moral compasses, you name it. Many techniques let you encrypt and shield your data at rest— on your devices and on remote servers— and in transit. But there’s one problem with all the shields you can put up: when you need to use a website, you’re giving yourself away, whether it’s from your current location or via a virtual private network (VPN) service that encrypts your request out to a data server location from whence it issues. Tracking which sites you visit or observing VPN end points can reveal a lot, even if the contents of sessions can’t be determined. And websites and VPNs…

It’s no secret that the iTunes Store is so tightly integrated into the iTunes application that it’s almost as though they were Siamese twins. As your local copy of iTunes has become increasingly linked to Apple’s cloud, it has become dependent on Internet access. But what if you don’t have Internet access? Your connection is down; or your router is broken; or you simply don’t want your computer to connect to the Internet? Well, iTunes will remind you of this, over and over and over. In such a case, iTunes will pop up an alert every single time you play a song and every time one song finishes and another one begins. You may think you’re clever and try to deactivate the many iTunes features that connect to the iTunes…

Recently, I spent some time with a couple of friends who both have Windows laptops and I found myself experiencing a hitherto unfamiliar feeling while watching them use their computers: envy. Let’s be clear: I’m not talking envy for Windows. Throughout my life, I’ve spent a not inconsiderable amount of time untangling problems created by Microsoft’s operating system, and I have no desire to switch from macOS. No, what drew my eye was one specific hardware feature that their laptops—a Microsoft Surface Book and a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga—shared: a touchscreen. Look, I know. I know that touchscreen notebooks are supposed to be toaster-fridges, hybrids that aren’t as good as either a full-blown touch-based device like the iPad or a traditional laptop. But as I watched them swiping away at…

The perfect USB-C dock doesn’t yet exist, but CalDigit’s simply named USB-C Dock ($150; available on Amazon) comes close. The dock, which works with all 2015 and 2016 MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro models, has a full array of ports, including two different video inputs, as well as high-speed USB charging via Type-A and USB-C jacks. It’s not a cheap option, but it’s reasonably priced for all it offers. The USB-C Dock’s only significant drawback comes from supporting only, under macOS, two monitors that mirror one another through its full-sized Display- Port and HDMI jacks with a 2016 MacBook Pro. You can’t have two external displays act independently and expand the desktop. CalDigit says this is an Apple feature choice, and I’ll explain it and more display details in-depth later…

Beyerdynamic’s Amiron Home Headphones Beyerdynamic’s $599 Amiron home headphones tether you to your choice of musical source and practically insist that you stay put and take your music seriously—they are strictly wired headphones, with a 3 meter cable sporting a traditional analog jack (get your Lightning adapters ready). The Amiron home are an open-back, circumaural design with an impedance of 250 ohms, making them easy to drive with today’s mobile devices. The claimed frequency response for these dynamic driver headphones is an astounding 5Hz to 40kHz. Those aren’t just some numbers on a spec sheet, these headphones delivered some of the best and authoritatively clean bass I’ve heard out of a headphone priced less than $1,000.—THEO NICOLAKIS NONDA ZUS SMART CARCHARGER The $30 Zus Smart Car Charger is pricey for…

In its quest to make you more organized and productive, popular note-taking app Evernote grew a bit bloated. The app’s speed, or lack thereof, is a common thread in user reviews. Evernote just released a redesigned iOS app that aims to address those complaints, plus make your notes a little easier on the eyes. The first thing you’ll notice when you launch Evernote version 8.0 is the new home screen, which picks up right where you left off with your most recent notes at the ready. The note preview allows you to see which notes have a lot of content and which contain just text. Then there’s the new navigation bar pinned to the bottom of the app, where you can jump into all notes, search, see shortcuts, or view your…

Truecaller Truecaller (free, iPhone) has been around for a while, letting users identify and block spammers—and adding to a crowdsourced list from the app’s users. The latest iteration of the app features faster updates of the spam list, an option to clear your call history, as well as 3D Touch applications. Toontastic 3D Toontastic 3D (free, iPhone and iPad) lets you draw, animate, and narrate your own cartoons. Create your characters, move them around on screen, and record your voice all to create an animated 3D video. And there’s help, with songs available to insert in the soundtrack, as well as three different templates to help you tell your story. Lifeline Lifeline: Whiteout (free, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch) lets you play as an adventurer “alone in a frozen wasteland…

I remember a call from Apple PR in October 2000. The company wanted me to test its wireless AirPort equipment, and would loan me a spaceship-shaped base station and the associated plug-in card required for my Mac. I was dubious. I’d tested and been disappointed by previous “wireless” (infrared) technologies, and hadn’t heard great things about an earlier, slower version of what was being called Wi-Fi. Nevertheless, I told Apple I’d take a look. I was blown away by the consistency and performance. And thus began a 16-year-so-far love affair with Wi-Fi and associated technologies, and which led to a blog I wrote for a decade about Wi-Fi. Now, according to reports that Apple never confirmed, Apple’s Wi-Fi road may be at an end. While it will still include the latest…

A headline in the Guardian recently was certainly eye-catching: “WhatsApp Vulnerability Allows Snooping on Encrypted Messages.” The allegation was that a newly discovered flaw could allow messages you’d sent to a known and confirmed party through a highly secure method could be replayed, or sent again to other parties that could insert themselves as trusted recipients. It turns out, almost none of this is accurate or represented in a way that will help WhatsApp users improve their security. This doesn’t mean that WhatsApp is created perfectly (nor do I allege the Guardian has an agenda). A few months ago, I explained how to configure WhatsApp to be as secure as possible, because defaults and prompts made it more likely that you could have your messages intercepted by criminals or by…

Do you have a new MacBook Pro? If so, you may have a problem that a number of readers have been asking about lately. With no hard-drive option in these new Macs, what do you do if you have a large media library and don’t want to pay the SSD tax? After a long examination of that question, I also look at a problem with ripping audiobooks and playing their tracks in order and answer two questions about viewing media. Q: I need to replace my 2008 MacBook Pro, which has a 1TB hard drive. But none of the new MacBook Pro models offer a hard-drive option, and it would cost a lot to get the same amount of storage on an SSD. I’ve got about 400GB of media files…