Table of contents for March 2016 in Macworld

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,…

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…

GRIFFIN TECHNOLOGY’S TRAVEL POWER BANK Carrying an extra cable just to charge the Apple Watch when traveling can be a bit of a pain. The Apple Watch Magnetic Cable is longer than a Lightning cable (easier to get tangled) and the magnetic puck can sometimes get caught inside your tightly packed luggage. The $70 Travel Power Bank (griffintechnology.com) aims to solve that very problem—this tiny portable battery packs 800mAh of power, which is enough to fully charge your Apple Watch four times. When the Travel Power Bank runs out of power, it can be recharged with a built-in micro-USB cable. This portable battery/charger hybrid has a keyring attached to it so you can clip it to your keys or to your luggage for easy access. —OSCAR RAYMUNDO PURO SOUND LABS…

EXPLODING KITTENS The $2 Exploding Kittens (go. macworld.com/explodingkittens) “is a local multiplayer card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.” (If you’ve played the physical card game of the same name, you know what’s up.) You can play with two to five people on the same network; the game is modeled on Russian Roulette—draw cards until you pick the “Exploding Kitten,” at which point you’re out Yousican Aspiring musicians use Yousican (go.macworld.com/yousican) to learn to play guitar or piano. The app can listen to your performance and offer feedback as you learn to play. The latest update? Add ukelele to the mix. The Outbound The Outbound (go.macworld.com/theoutbound) is a free travel app that orients (get it?) you to local outdoor…

Macs ship with the display set at a certain resolution, and Apple defines this in the technical specifications for each model. But with Retina displays, these numbers can get confusing: there is the display’s resolution and the “looks like” resolution used on the Mac. Resolutions on Retina Macs look like half the actual number of pixels measured vertically and horizontally because of “pixel doubling.” For example, if you have (as I do) a 5K iMac, the display resolution is 5120x2880, but the Displays pane of System Preferences tells me that it looks like 2560x1440. That’s the default resolution, but you can change this if you want. To do so, you must first select Scaled in the Displays pane, as I have in the screenshot here, and you then see five…

With the arrival of the fourth-generation Apple TV, I found myself trying out the Plex (plex.tv) media server, and I realized that using Plex is one of the best ways to watch media on the Apple TV. You can install the Plex server software on a variety of devices: your Mac, a PC, a NAS (network-attached storage) device, and more. (Heck, you could even set it up on a Raspberry Pi; go.macworld.com/raspberrypiplex.) It’s advantageous that Plex’s server be always on, so you can start watching your movies and TV shows without having to boot your Mac. If you have a large media collection, you may want to use a Mac as a dedicated device to run Plex. The Mac mini is a perfect candidate for this. Plex doesn’t need a…

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…

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…

The Latest on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and App Store Over the last almost-decade, Apple’s established a pretty consistent pattern when it comes to its mobile OS. Every year, the company launches a new major version of iOS, usually alongside a flagship smartphone release. After the new software hits, the subsequent months see a flurry of intermittent, smaller updates, usually fixing bugs, patching security, and perhaps even tweaking a minor feature or two. PODCAST Tap to listen to our weekly podcast about iOS 9.3 and CES 20016. go.macworld.com/ios93podcast It’s pretty rare for Apple to use these “point releases” to add more substantial new features, but that’s just what happened recently, when the company not only put out a beta version of iOS 9.3 for developers, but also posted a…

THE LATEST iOS PRODUCTS REVIEWED & RATED VLC FOR MOBILE (APPLE TV VERSION) AT A GLANCE It’s not the prettiest app you’ll find in the Apple Store, but there’s nothing better when it comes to playing videos and music encoded with atypical codecs. PROS • Suports a huge variety of video and audio files • Relatively stable • Doesn’t cost a dime CONS • Some minor bugs in its first release • Doesn’t have the prettiest browsing interface PRICE Free COMPANY VideoLAN THE APPLE TV is a great networked media player, but it would be greater still if it supported more file types and played from more locations. By locations, I mean over the network from something other than an iTunes server, and—oh, I don’t know—an attached USB drive? Well,…

THE WRISTLET If you’re looking for a fashionable way to charge your iPhone while on the go, check out the Wristlet (iPhone 6/6s; $70), a wallet-style case with a 3,500mAh built-in battery designed to double your talking and surfing time. Made of pebbled leather and featuring custom gold hardware accents, the Wristlet (case-mate.com) packs a few card and ID slots, plus a cash compartment. If you don’t want to carry the whole wallet with you all the time, the Wristlet includes a detacheable slim case with metal press-through button overlays—just slide your iPhone out of its battery cradle, and you’re good to go. SAFESLEEVE The SafeSleeve Case (iPhone 6/6s and 6 Plus/6s Plus; $45) (safesleevecases.com) has been designed to absorb and deflect potentially harmful radiation without interfering with your iPhone’s…

Tips, Tricks, and Tools to Make You and Your Mac More Productive I think I’ve had a Mac running as a server in my house continuously for nearly 20 years. Over the years, the hardware has changed—at least four times, so far as I can remember—and the tasks required of it have changed dramatically, too. But despite all that change, the presence of a server in my house has always been useful. Then again, running a Mac server isn’t for everyone—and these days, network-attached storage (NAS) devices can provide most of the functionality of a computer at a lower cost and reduced complexity. What I’m saying is, it’s complicated. WHY HAVE A HOME SERVER? It can be very convenient to have a computer that’s always available. Let’s say you have…

It took less than two years for CloudMagic to garner 3 million users and the title of best overall email app (go.macworld.com/cloudmagic) for iOS. Now the CloudMagic team is hoping to translate that email magic to the Mac. After almost nine months in development, CloudMagic for Mac is finally available in the Mac App Store (go.macworld.com/cloudmagicapp). The Mac version borrows successful elements from its iOS predecessor: a minimalist, lightweight design; intuitive actions; and what the company calls an “opinionated user experience,” or clever quips to help you navigate your inbox. While the CloudMagic app for iOS is free, CloudMagic for Mac is $20. It supports a wide range of email clients, including Gmail, Office 365, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail/Outlook, Exchange, iCloud, and IMAP. It also supports Handoff so you can effortlessly…

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…

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…

FORECAST BAR FOR iOS PRICE $2.00 COMPANY Forecast.io FORECAST BAR MAY BE THE MOST inevitable app (go.macworld.com/forecastbarios) ever created for the iPhone. When it launched last year for the Mac (go.macworld.com/forecastbar), it brought the flavor of iOS to OS X, putting a sleek weather forecast in your menu bar (hence the name). Everything about it was heavily influenced by iOS, from the at-a-glance interface to the hidden charts and animated icons, and it was refreshing to see a mobile-minded developer bring their vision to the Mac first. But anyone who used Forecast Bar knew it wouldn’t stay locked on the Mac forever. It would be doing the app a disservice, and besides, weather apps and the iPhone go together like peas and carrots. So when I saw that Real Casual…

If, tomorrow, something goes wrong with your Mac or if it gets stolen or damaged, replacing the hardware itself is technically very easy to do; it just takes money. But the data that was on its hard disk or SSD—those precious photos, that carefully amassed iTunes library, that work, that novel? The best case scenario is that you pay hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars to a data recovery specialist to try to get some back, and the worst case is that it’s gone for good. And that’s why, today, you should back up your Mac. We all know this, but understanding the different ways of backing up, and picking a backup strategy that’s right for you—so that you can rest easy knowing that it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll lose any…

When you want to collaborate with someone on a document or project, Apple’s iCloud.com offers collaboration features that can make it easy to work with others. Whether you just want friends or colleagues to make comments on your documents, or whether you are creating documents with others, you can use Apple’s iWork (apple.com/iwork-for-icloud) apps (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) and iCloud.com to streamline this process. Here’s a look at how you can collaborate with iCloud.com, the features it offers, and what’s missing. GETTING DOCUMENTS INTO THE CLOUD When you create iWork documents, you can store them on iCloud Drive (apple.com/icloud/icloud-drive). Once your documents are in the cloud, you can share them with others on iCloud.com. To use iCloud Drive, you need at least iOS 8 or OS X Mavericks. On a…

Everything You Need to Know About iPods, iTunes, and Mac-Based Entertainment Whether you use iTunes or buy and download digital music, you’ll have come across a number of terms and abbreviations that describe digital audio files. This alphabet soup can be quite confusing. What are codecs or audio file formats? What is a bit rate, and what’s a sample rate? What does it mean when music is “high-resolution”? This article covers what you need to know about digital audio files. I’ll tell you the difference between lossy and lossless files, I’ll explain why bit rates matter (or don’t), and I’ll help you understand the various file formats you may encounter. COMPRESSION: LOSSY AND LOSSLESS When you buy a CD, the audio on the disc is uncompressed. You can rip (or…

Answering Your Questions and Sharing Your Tips About Getting the Most From Your Mac How to avoid a surprising bill due to Wi-Fi Assist Christina Farr, a health and technology senior writer at Fast Company, had an unexpected bit of coal in her end-of-year stocking: A bill for cell data overage charges. But, she noted on Twitter, she takes care in staying on Wi-Fi and not using the cellular network. Most of her usage was at home or at Starbucks. The culprit? Wi-Fi Assist. This feature added in iOS 9 is intended to make your Internet experience more consistent. When you’re on a Wi-Fi network that has erratic service, such as Internet connection dropouts, Wi-Fi Assist uses the cellular network as a secondary data source. Apple notes on its site…