Inhoudsopgave van December 2015 - Macworld

If the App Store had a theme song, it would probably be The O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money.” (Apple itself would probably pick something by U2 or—sigh—Coldplay.) During the company’s financial results recently, Tim Cook said the App Store pulled in record revenue, which bolstered the company’s bottom line for its services division’s $5.1 billion revenue. So yes, the App Store is still doing gangbusters business overall. But I’d also imagine that it’s the tentpole propping up the company’s services division, which also includes iCloud, Apple Pay, and AppleCare. And much as Apple is a company that focuses on developing and selling products, those services are becoming ever more critical: if iPhones, iPad, Macs, and so on are the bricks of Apple’s business, services are the mortar—the stuff that…

DAISYDISK 4 PRICE WHEN RATED $10 COMPANY Software Ambience Corp. ALTHOUGH SOLID-STATE DISKS (SSD) are lightning fast compared to poky old hard drives, they’re also far more expensive, which is why Mac users have had to with more restrictive internal storage than in years past. It’s a trade-off: Speedier disk access, but less room for files. One way to maximize this smaller capacity is to carefully monitor which files—especially big ones—take up that space and then terminate them with extreme prejudice. DaisyDisk 4 (daisydiskapp.com) is a utility app made expressly for this purpose, and it’s as attractive as it is handy. A SCANNER DARKLY In terms of functionality, DaisyDisk 4 hasn’t changed much from previous versions. Launching the application presents a list of all mounted volumes, and I do…

If you like listening to music on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, but don’t use Apple Music, you may find the new Music app to be overkill. It’s got lots of features that don’t add much to your listening experience and just get in the way. With a cluttered interface, Apple’s Music app has lost its main vocation: the ability to let you choose the music you want to listen to quickly and easily. Fortunately, there are lots of alternatives. Most of these apps try to simplify the experience of spinning songs on your iOS device, or offer more intuitive ways of controlling your listening sessions. While Apple doesn’t let you easily replace its bundled apps—for example, even if you have another browser installed on an iOS device, Safari…

YOU’LL FIND FEWER ENMITIES so fierce and opinions as strong as which Twitter client is the best—at least among Twitter enthusiasts and obsessives, who may resemble this reviewer. Tweetbot has been my client of choice for years, for both iOS and OS X, and despite dabbling with other software options—including Twitter’s own releases—I’ve stuck with the Tapbots products. Tweetbot 4 for iOS (tapbots.com/tweetbot/, $10) is now out, and shows why my trust is well placed: The product continues to mature and deepen, incorporating a lot of small, welcome changes and building in new features made available by Twitter, as well as adding some large ones. Notably, a new statistics and activity view gives you quick and easy insight into how people are reacting to what you tweet. TWEETBOT 4 AT…

MOSHI The Venturo (all iPad models; $120 to $150; moshi.com) offers convenient protection for all of your electronics. The backpack features a cushioned interior with different compartments for your iPad, iPhone, and laptop, comes with a cross-body shoulder strap, and is available in four color combinations and two different materials. MAKR The Attache (all iPad models; $240; makr.com) sports a simple envelope-style layout, secured with a tab closure for worry-free carrying. Sewn and painted by hand, this leather sleeve features burnished edges, includes plenty of room for your iPad, your iPhone, and your keys, and comes in black or ox blood. TARGUS The VersaType with Power Bank (iPad Air and Air 2; $140; targus.com) incorporates a convenient full QWERTY keyboard with backlit keys for all your typing needs. Tested to…

For a long time, Apple has had a commendable focus on building assistive technologies into its operating systems, making it easy not just for many people with a wide range of disabilities to enjoy its products, but also easy for developers to implement them in their apps. If you’re non-disabled, though, you may never have clicked the Accessibility pane in System Preferences on your Mac or tapped the Accessibility submenu on your iPhone. But here’s the thing: these sections are stuffed full of useful features that everyone should know about, and happily, by the time you’ve finished reading this, you will. We’re not going to show you every accessibility feature Apple has provided, since this particular article isn’t about accessibility as such. We’re not diminishing the value of accessibility itself,…

If you do much typing at all—especially if you dabble in graphic design or publishing—you’ll eventually need hidden typographic characters such as ®, ©, ™, ° and maybe even € and £. Back in 1984, the geniuses at Apple predicted you’d need easy access to these characters, so they built them right into your Mac’s keyboard. But how do you find them until you know where to look? In this column, you’ll learn keyboard shortcuts for the handiest hidden characters, as well as how to locate even more using OS X’s Keyboard and Character Viewers. KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS FOR POPULAR HIDDEN CHARACTERS Whether you’re watermarking photos, writing an essay, or hand-crafting a cookbook, the following keyboard shortcuts are well worth memorizing: © Option-G ® Option-R ™ Option-2 • Option-8 ° Shift-Option-8…

It was only after I’d written the first few installments of Think Retro, which started about a year ago, that I was hit by a blinding realization: not only could I use this weekly column as an excuse to buy more vintage Apple stuff on eBay, but I could legitimately write these purchases off against tax. Fun and legal; hot damn! The resulting uptick in my eBay shopping since then has meant I’ve gotten better and better at picking out and picking up bargains, since for me there’s infinitely more joy to be had in rescuing a lovely old Newton or LC or G5 from a trip to the trash, and giving it a dignified and loved retirement after a long and useful life, than in lining the coffers of…

STEELSERIES NIMBUS If you’re serious about gaming on the new Apple TV, take the plunge on a controller: Many games are better with buttons and analog sticks as opposed to the Siri Remote’s tiny touchpad. SteelSeries just released the excellent $50 Nimbus controller for Apple TV (steelseries.com), which offers the best combination of feel, functionality, and starting price. It takes inspiration from Microsoft’s Xbox One gamepad, albeit with symmetrical analog sticks like on PlayStation controllers. The Nimbus fits really well in your hands, the buttons and sticks are responsive, and it pairs easily over Bluetooth with the Apple TV.—ANDREW HAYWARD DROP SCALE Drop’s $100 Kitchen Scale (getdrop.com) turns your iPad into an even more useful cooking scale, going beyond simple step-by-step recipes to help you measure ingredients. It’s been on…

SONOS PLAY: 5 AT A GLANCE Sonos knocks one out of the park with the all-new Play:5. This is a spectacular speaker either on its own or as part of a whole-home audio system. PROS • Wonderfully musical to listen to • Sonos’s mesh network makes for outstanding whole-home audio • Terrific price/performance ratio CONS • Not as high fidelity as the more expensive B&W Zeppelin Wireless • No threaded mount PRICE $499 COMPANY Sonos.com SONOS’S BUSINESS MODEL differs from most consumer-electronics companies: It doesn’t rely on planned obsolescence for ongoing revenue. Sonos doesn’t want you to replace the product you bought from them two or three years ago; it wants you to expand your system with new components, to bring music to new rooms in your home. “You liked…

Apple finally updated its Apple TV set-top box, which had remained virtually unchanged for years, since going 1080p in 2012. The new version is faster, easier to use, and less frustrating, at least most of the time. What it isn’t is a revolution—everything Apple added already existed in its competitors. An App Store and a microphone-equipped remote for voice search are both excellent features to have, and they bring the Apple TV closer to the Amazon Fire TV and Roku. But Apple still has a ways to go. The Remote app for iOS doesn’t work with this new model, for example, so we’re back to entering passwords one letter at a time by clicking with the remote—that’s actually a step backward from where we were. You still can’t enter your…

With rapidly expanding image and video collections, three things are hot on everyone’s wishlist: constant and automatic backups to an offsite location, having your entire image and video library available on all your devices, and having the edits you make to an image on one device show up on your other devices. Both Apple Photos and Google Photos offer these insanely great, sanity-saving features, but how do the apps really stack up? I’ll put Apple Photos against Google Photos and discover just how similar (or different) they are when it comes to storage, importing, organizing, editing, sharing, and creating projects. As you’re about to learn, Google Photos grants a couple of wishes that you didn’t know to ask for. STORAGE AND COST Apple gives 5GB of free storage space to…

Sitting quietly in the Tools panel of the popular image editors Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, as well as in the Pixelmator Team’s own Pixelmator, is the Gradient tool, a wonderfully useful painting tool that lets you create a soft, gradual transition from one color to another (or several). But besides using the tool to add color to your designs, you can use it inside a layer mask (referred to as a gradient mask). By setting the two colors of the gradient to black and white—to conceal and reveal, respectively—the tool lets you fade layer content in interesting ways. In this column, you’ll discover six handy uses for this creative technique. FADING IMAGES TOGETHER A gradient mask lets you quickly fade images together into a collage. With at least two…

Apple no longer uses hard drives in most of its laptops in its current lineup, opting for speedy flash storage. (The always-forgotten non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro uses a hard drive.) Flash storage, however, doesn’t have the low price per gigabyte that hard drives offer. If you bought a Mac laptop recently, you probably bought it with 128GB or 256GB of storage. That’s well short of the terabytes offered in hard drives nowadays, so it’s possible you’ve filled up your flash storage space. You can buy an external hard drive to lug around with you to alleviate your storage crunch, but the new TarDisk Pear (tardisk.com) could be a more attractive solution. TarDisk Pear is flash storage that finds a permanent home in your laptop’s SDXC slot, but it’s not like…

Tons of third-party iOS apps don’t yet take advantage of Apple’s 3D Touch, a key feature of the new iPhone 6s models, but thankfully additional apps get 3D Touch support every day. Here are six iOS apps that use 3D Touch to help you save a few seconds here and there and be more efficient. 3D TOUCH ON iPHONE 6s HELPS YOU GET STUFF DONE Evernote (freemium; evernote.com) is the Big Daddy of note-taking apps, despite increasing competition from Microsoft OneNote (onenote.com). Using 3D Touch on the app icon, you can quickly create new notes, take photos, set reminders, or search for existing notes. As of this writing, Microsoft OneNote doesn’t support 3D Touch. Handle (free; handle.com) is a useful app that merges to-dos, Gmail, and calendar appointments. With…

INSTAPAPER 7 PRICE Free (Premium and subscription options also available) COMPANY Instapaper THERE WAS A TIME not so long ago when reading web-based content required patience while sifting through pop-ups, inline ads, and poorly formatted HTML. While things have improved in recent years—especially with iOS 9’s adoption of content blockers—nothing beats cozying up with a good “read later” app that makes everything look neat, clean, and most importantly, ad-free. When I think of read later, Instapaper (instapaper.com) is the first app that springs to mind. That’s not just because it was one of the first such services to save web content from browsers back in early 2008, but also because it continues to offer the best experience without the unnecessary bells and whistles of its rivals. CLUTTER-FREE READING Instapaper…

The Mac is a small fraction of Apple’s total business, and of that, roughly three-quarters of the Macs sold are laptops. Apple could probably be forgiven if it put the entire iMac line into maintenance mode: after all, sometimes it seems like that’s what most of the PC industry has done. But it’s clear that Apple views the Mac in general and the iMac in particular as a point of pride. In a time when PC growth has stalled, Apple continues to grow its market share and update Mac hardware in interesting, innovative ways. Last fall, Apple finally brought its high-resolution Retina display technology to the desktop for the first time on the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display. Now with the new 21.5-inch iMac with Retina 4K display (mmmm;…

My friend Swoozy got in touch: She needed to print some articles she’d written for the web as PDFs, but wanted to keep the links intact, so that those receiving them could follow them. It’s an easy proposition with a few options. Web browsers render the text on a page as rich text in different ways—you can see this when you copy text from a webpage and paste it into a Word, Pages, or TextEdit document. Safari seems to handle using the built-in print-to-PDF function in OS X perfectly well, preserving a reasonable amount of formatting, as well as keeping hyperlinks marked and active. 1. Visit a webpage in Safari. 2. Select File ? Print. 3. In the PDF drop-down menu (lower left), select either Open PDF In Preview or…

Apple probably thinks that not everyone wants to spend a ton of time correcting images. Heck, lots of people are content with a quick click of the Enhance tool in Photos for Mac or iOS, but that tool can’t fix every picture you take. If you want to lighten only the shadows, darken only the highlights, boost contrast, change color saturation, and more, you need the advanced editing power nestled inside the app’s Adjustments panel. Many folks have discovered and used that panel in Photos for Mac but they don’t realize that it exists in Photos on your iOS device, too. It lacks some advanced adjustments you can use in Photos for Mac (histogram, sharpening, noise reduction, vignette, and so on) but it’s well worth using. Since the screens on…

The case of the missing El Capitan hard-disk space Q: On my late 2013 model MacBook Pro, which was running Yosemite 10.10.5, my available disk space went from 230GB of free space to 183GB. I have run Disk Utility, and it tells me all is fine with the SSD 1TB disk. —Thom Vagt A: I’ve seen similar problems at times with my various Macs, and so have many users. You should pinpoint where the free-space reporting error is first, however. OS X reports remaining storage in multiple ways: Select comment → About This Mac, and the Storage tab reveals all attached drives, along with breakdowns by coarse file type for bootable (“blessed”) volumes. In the Finder, select a volume then choose File → Get Info (Command-I). The General area shows…