Macworld February 2019

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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…