Tabla de contenidos para February 2019 en Macworld

Last year’s late-October Apple event in New York City had a lot going on, and we’re still working through all the new products the company showed off. But as the dust clears, there’s one lasting impression about which I feel remarkably certain. There’s a sea change coming. John Gruber alluded to this in his piece at Daring Fireball about the new MacBook Air: Look at the iPad’s A12X compared to the iPhone’s A12 and you can see how much attention Apple is paying to the iPad’s system architecture. There’s no reason they won’t pay as much or more attention to the Mac’s custom silicon when they switch from Intel to their own chip designs. It should be downright glorious. That line in the middle, delivered in a matter-of-the-fact fashion, has…

When many professional photographers finish a job, they go to a Mac and use the sophisticated, $150 Photo Mechanic to copy, review, and cull photos quickly. Unlike a tool such as Adobe Lightroom, which manages a photo library for you, Photo Mechanic is a media browser that reads whichever Finder folders you point it at. That’s overkill, though, for people who simply want to manage their photos in the Finder, or review the images before importing them into Apple’s Photos app. Even when you view items in a Finder window as icons and scale them to their largest size, they’re still not large enough to really evaluate which shots are keepers. Using the Finder’s Quick Preview (press the spacebar with one or more images selected) can be a slow process, especially…

MOMENTUM CORI The Momentum Cori has enough going for it to further challenge the notion you must sacrifice features to meet your budget. It records 720p video and can send push notifications to your iPhone. The camera also includes a built-in mic and speaker for two-way communication, and 850nm Infrared LEDs that illuminate up to 25 feet in automatic night-vision mode. The main screen of the Momentum iOS app is called a Dashboard, and you can have one Dashboard for each connected Cori that show’s the camera’s live stream, a library of your event-triggered video, and how you configure your Cori camera to behave when it detects motion.—MICHAEL ANSALDO iDEVICES OUTDOOR SWITCH With its Outdoor Switch, smart-home product maker iDevices brings its capable smart outlet into the yard. Although iDevices…

The Apple Watch Series 4 is a fantastic upgrade to Apple’s wrist-wearable accessory, but it’s still missing a key competitive feature: sleep tracking. Each year, we hope the new version of watchOS will add integrated sleep tracking, and each year we’re disappointed. Fortunately, a number of third-party applications pick up the slack. After trying quite a few, we think the best two are AutoSleep and Pillow. They’re reliable, attractive, informative, and best of all, they track sleep automatically. All you need to do is wear your Apple Watch to bed. AUTOSLEEP Price: $2.99 AutoSleep’s primary purpose is right there in the name: automatic sleep tracking. It’s made exclusively for your Apple Watch, and it really doesn’t work at all without it. Just wear your Apple Watch while you sleep—you’ll probably want…

MYFITNESSPAL: THE BEST OVERALL WEIGHT LOSS APP Exercise is a big part of losing weight, but you could pump iron for weeks and see little difference if you keep stuffing your face with calories when the workout’s done. Thank goodness, then, for calories counters like UnderArmour’s MyFitnessPal. If you don’t want to fatten your phone with a smorgasbord of apps, this is the one to download. LOSE IT! THE BEST APP FOR STREAMLINED CALORIE COUNTING With Lose It!, you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at screenshots of MyFitnessPal with the blues swapped to orange. They’re so similar, in fact, that choosing one over the other makes little difference in the long run. But the few differences are notable. Lose It is laser-focused on the business of counting…

Ever have a problem on your Mac, where you can’t type the letters and numbers 7, 8, 9, U, I, O, J, K, L, and M—and maybe some others? It’s probably Mouse Keys at play, an accessibility feature in macOS that mimics an old IBM-style keypad feature. NUM LOCK AND ITS COMPUTER HISTORY Keyboards still have vestiges of their origins on typewriters and mechanical calculators. We mostly ignore those in our day-to-day work. The Shift key, originally meant to literally raise a set of typebars in a typewriter, merely shifts among upper and lower case. And you know better than to press Caps Lock when entering passwords—Apple even alerts you when you have it accidentally enabled. The Num Lock key was a product of the intermediate age, where mechanical and…

Listen up, Apple Music subscribers—the HomePod isn’t the only smart speaker that can handle your tunes anymore. Apple has teamed up with Amazon to allow streaming on Echo devices, so all of your songs, albums, and playlists are good to go. Here’s how to set it all up: 1. Open the Alexa app on your iPhone or Android phone. 2. Tap the menu icon in the top left corner. 3. Navigate to Settings. 4. Tap Music under Alexa Preferences. 5. Tap the plus symbol next to Link New Service. 6. Select Apple Music. 7. Enter your username and password and two-factor authentication code. 8. Tap Enable to Use on the Alexa Skill page. 9. Tap Allow on the Apple authentication page. And that’s it. Now you can say, “Alexa, play ‘Imagine’…

If you were to ask me to suggest a pair that will please most people—no matter their musical tastes or how they intend to use them—I’d recommend Jaybird’s X4 wireless sports earphones. Waterproof, lightweight, comfortable to wear, and boasting an adjustable equalizer, the X4 has enough going for them that almost everyone will enjoy owning them. DESIGN Weighing just over half an ounce, the X4 is so light that you can forget you’re carrying them in your pocket. When they’re stuffed in your ears, their minimal heft helps deliver a listening experience that most people will find comfortable for hours. The tail end of the X4’s comfort comes courtesy of the Jaybird’s inclusion of three different sizes of silicone ear caps and three different sizes of silicone ear fins to…

Here we are, another 525,600 minutes gone by, and it’s time for an annual look into the crystal ball to try and catch a glimpse of the things I’d like to see from Apple in 2019. But before we unpack a nice, fresh crystal ball, it’s time to take this grimy old crystal ball and smash it into a million pieces. Or to put it another way, this is my annual opportunity to review my hopes and dreams for the Mac and the iPhone and iPad in 2017 and see which ones came true in 2018—and which ones were crushed flat by the steamroller of fate. THE YEAR IN MAC How soon we forget. 2016 was the Mac’s annus horribilis, with no desktop Macs released the entire year and a new line of…

Photoshop CC, Adobe’s flagship image editing app, remains an industry standard because of its innovative vision of how the software can assist photographers and graphic designers in doing their jobs. While technically, Photoshop’s subscription model frees it from the tyranny of yearly upgrades, Adobe still announces high-profile updates on a yearly schedule. Having dispensed with commercial version numbers (it is now at version 20), Adobe now renames the app according to the prospective year. If you already use Photoshop CC, then you are either a Creative Cloud or a Photography Plan subscriber, which means that the Photoshop 2019 update is automatically available. If you are not a subscriber, new features in the 2019 version may inspire you to give the app a try. The 2019 version offers improvements to existing features like…

Provided you ignored the awful charging process, the Apple Pencil was a marvel of design—a stylus that looked, felt, and wrote much like an actual pen or pencil. That’s not to say it didn’t need some improvements (as we outlined in a wish list), but adding them may have run the risk of over-complicating the simple elegance that made the Pencil such a joy to draw and write with. But with the Apple Pencil 2, Apple shows that it can significantly improve one of its trademark minimalist products without sacrificing much of its design’s power. Almost every new feature counts as an improvement on the previous model (although with some caveats). The only real drawbacks are the $30 price boost and the inability to use the Apple Pencil 2 with…

After Apple received a spate of bad publicity about how it chose to throttle older iPhones with degraded batteries, it apologized and offered a battery replacement program for many phones at reduced cost. But it also pledged to improve how it disclosed to users the state of their battery. It’s a little hidden, as you have to launch Settings and then tap Battery to see monitoring details. Tap Battery Health, and you see two important stats. Maximum Capacity measures the peak charge that the battery can hold. (Mine is currently 91 percent after about 14 months of solid use.) It’s normal for this to decline slowly over a period of time, and decline faster the more frequently you run through a charge on your phone. Even at 70 to 80 percent,…

We may never know what the R in the iPhone XR actually means—Apple VP Phil Schiller himself said that the R doesn’t really mean much to Apple. But I have my own guess: reboot. Before the release of the iPhone X last year, the iPhone 8 was in need of a redesign. It had been some three years since Apple first unveiled its large-screen iPhones, but nothing about them changed much since the iPhone 6. The iPhone 8 brought wireless charging and a better camera, but it didn’t look or feel like a 2017 phone, let alone a 2018 one. But rather than scrap the idea of the iPhone 8 and go all in on the higher-priced and margined X, Apple went back to the drawing board to create a seemingly impossible iPhone…

In a recent interview with Axios on HBO, Apple CEO Tim Cook was made to answer a very uncomfortable question. He was asked how he squares taking billions of dollars from Google to make it the default search engine for Safari (both on Mac and iOS) with his company’s stance on privacy. Google is certainly not the only company that trades in monetizing your online activity, but it’s one of the biggest. And Google’s search is far from achieving the level of data privacy that Apple demands of its products and services. Tim’s answer was honest, if not satisfactory. “I think their search engine is the best. Look at what we’ve done with the controls we’ve built in. We have private web browsing. We have an intelligent tracker prevention. What…

Remember Ping? Back in the days before all-you-can-eat streaming music services, iTunes was king. So Apple built a social media platform into iTunes where artists could promote their work and talk about what’s inspiring them. As for users, they could recommend tracks and albums to each other. But nobody liked it, so Apple shut it down. Six years ago, we published a postmortem of sorts that laid out all the ways in which Ping went wrong. Discoverability was bad, artists didn’t keep up with posting. And it felt more like marketing than genuine social connection. For that matter, discoverability and virality were terrible—the list goes on and on. And then when Apple Music launched in 2015—wouldn’t you know it—Apple repeated all the same mistakes with a new social network called…

FREE UP STORAGE BY DELETING iTUNES BACKUPS OF iOS DEVICES If you use iTunes to back up your iPhone, the actual backed-up data starts to pile up. Backups often run from gigabytes to tens of gigabytes, retaining anything unique on an iOS device that isn’t synced via iCloud or available from the App Store. For example, if you have iCloud Photo Library enabled, the iTunes backup doesn’t include the Camera Roll. Apple oddly doesn’t have an automatic “garbage cleaning” routine, or prompt to delete, or ask you if you want to delete these backups. You can easily fill up your drive with iOS backups, and it will feel mysterious as you won’t even know why you’re running out of storage. However, you can find these backups and delete older ones,…

Apple’s well known for its centralized approach, not just in terms of hardware and software, but also in geography. The company has previously pushed hard to locate as many of its non-retail employees as possible in its hometown of Cupertino, in large part because of its belief that its employees work better on physically proximate teams. Look no further than its enormous new home base, Apple Park, which opened there earlier this year. But recently, the company announced that it would be expanding its footprint in several U.S. cities outside the Bay Area, most notably in Austin, Texas, where it already has its largest non-Cupertino presence, but also in a few other key locations. In particular, Apple projects that in the next three years it will exceed 1000 employees in three…

“I trust that you now find yourself aboard the Obra Dinn. I expected this day to come and my every intention was to tell the ship’s strange tale within the pages of this book. Regrettably, failing health has allowed me to produce only the basic outline that follows. Your presence on the Obra Dinn is critical. I leave the discovery of its fate and the completion of this book in your hands.” Thus begins your time aboard the Obra Dinn, a 19th century merchant vessel that set sail with a full complement of 50-odd crew members and about a dozen passengers, and returned with none. None alive, at least. And it’s your job to figure out what happened. DEATH IS THE ROAD TO AWE It sounds like the setup to…

People on social media enjoy saying 2018 was an awful year, but you’d never be able to tell it from the amazing selection of games that came to the iPhone and iPad. It was a year filled with fresh incarnations of old favorites, such as The Room: Old Sins, Alto’s Odyssey, and Reigns: Game of Thrones. But there were also surprises, such as Fortnite and its almost unbelievably effective port of its Mac and console counterparts. It was a year of art, of action, and optimism for the future of iOS as a gaming platform. From a pool of many worthy contenders, these games stand out ahead of all the rest.   ALTO’S ODYSSEY Price: $0.99 Alto’s Odyssey is a game about maintaining momentum, so I’m not surprised it follows much…

The Goal Zero Sherpa 100AC is a combination of all modern and past technologies used to charge our devices. For the current generation of devices, there are two USB-C ports and a Qi wireless charging pad. For older devices, there are two standard USB ports. For even older devices, there’s a standard US 110V outlet—like the one your phone’s wall adapter plugs into. There’s also a charging port, that can fill up the 94.7Wh battery pack in just a couple of hours. You’ll need to purchase that dedicated charger separately. However, our testing showed that a USB-C wall adapter with Power Delivery charged the Sherpa in just over two hours. The Sherpa 100AC is pricey. It’s currently listed at $299.95, which is a lot for a battery pack. But the…

Apple really wants us to believe a tablet can take the place of a MacBook, and it’s spared few resources in its quest to proselytize us with the 2018 iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is a beast, one that can hold its own alongside powerful laptops. It’s a stunner, especially with a redesigned Apple Pencil and Smart Folio Keyboard that feel more like essentials than peripherals. It’s versatile, thanks to the new support for USB-C, and it achieves all this while looking both familiar and futuristic. Oh, how I’ve waited for it. I’m one of the loons who willingly used an iPad Pro as my primary writing machine for almost two years, and I loved its portability and the ease of switching between typing and longhand writing. Yet for all…

HighPoint’s RocketStor 6661A PCIe/NVMe external storage enclosure may be a mouthful of a moniker, but it’s a top-notch performer and extremely easy to set up. At $189 on Amazon, it’s more basic, but also more affordable than the direct competition—Akitio’s Node Lite (currently $220 on Amazon). DESIGN The RocketStor 6661A features sturdy all-metal construction, including the slip-off cover secured by captive thumbscrews. Not intended for eGPU (external graphics) use, it’s just wide enough for normal-size PCIe cards to fit in its single x16 (sixteen PCIe lanes) slot. The slot is just like those you’ll find in a desktop PC, and as with a PC, cards are held in place with a screw through the upper part of their end bracket. The 6661A isn’t really anything special to look at, but…

Seeing the BoseBuild Headphones at Maker Faire this past summer was instantly intriguing. Only a handful of large established companies have made the foray into the STEM educational market and I’m curious how they are able to leverage their expertise and brands. It’s no shock that Bose created a kit focused on sound. The BoseBuild Headphones kit is targeted at children ages 8 and up and is comprised of 10 pieces that snap together to build fully functional wireless bluetooth headphones. Before, during, and after assembly, there are various lessons and activities on the BoseBuild’s iOS app that teach about the physics of sound and how the brain processes it. One critical lesson teaches about proper listening volume, there’s even a simulation that shows what damaged hearing sounds like. The…