MacworldApril 2015的目錄

Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned of “dire consequences” if tech companies can’t protect the privacy of those who use their products. Giving up our privacy to digital technologies exposes us to greater risks than just identity theft and financial losses, Cook said in a brief speech at a cybersecurity summit in Silicon Valley. “History has shown us that sacrificing our right to privacy can have dire consequences,” Cook said. “We still live in a world where all people are not treated equally,” he said, “where too many people do not feel free to practice their religion or express their opinion or love who they choose, a world in which that information can make the difference between life or death.” He may have been alluding to oppressive regimes that punish…

OS X’s clipboard has always been a transient storage place, intended to hold whatever you copy or cut just long enough to paste it somewhere else. Once you copy something else, that new snippet overwrites whatever’s already on your clipboard. And if you restart your Mac, you lose whatever was on the clipboard beforehand. But what if you had something important on the clipboard but forgot to paste it, and then copied something else? What if you want to copy several things and then paste each of them multiple times? What if you want to preserve what’s on your clipboard past a restart? And what if you copied something in one format but want to paste it in a different format—for example, removing text formatting or changing capitalization? You need…

BUSINESS SOFTWARE QUICKBOOKS ONLINE SELF-EMPLOYED is a thinned-down version of QuickBooks Online with a very specific focus: Sole proprietors and small business owners who mix business and personal accounts, who pay quarterly taxes, and who need to do quick triage on business and personal income and expenses. QuickBooks Online Self-Employed performs its magic with the combination of a Web app and an iOS app (go.macworld.com/qb) and makes it easy to quickly separate your business and personal expenses. QuickBooks Online Self-Employed is small business focused, which is to say that it’s aimed at business owners who are sole proprietors or LLC owners without partners and who write off business expenses using a Schedule C when filing their personal taxes. The assumption on Intuit’s part is that the people who own these…

Iam truly a sucker for data. At my day job, I get to help businesses collect and analyze all kinds of information—a process that often leads to transformative change on the way our clients operate. During my last physical, my doctor told me that it was time to start monitoring my weight and blood pressure, so naturally, I looked at this as an opportunity to try out HealthKit (go.macworld.com/hkit)—something that I had been looking forward to ever since Apple introduced it with the launch of iOS 8. A couple months in, I’m here to tell you all about my little adventure in the land of smartphone-powered healthcare. A HEALTH-CENTRIC SHOPPING SPREE Before I could start measuring everything Tabini, I would obviously have to acquire some new gear—namely, a scale and…

ADONIT IS TIRED of sitting on the sidelines as others build software to work with its line of iOS styluses. Forge (adonit.net/forge), the company’s first app, has been two years in the making, but it’s more than a simple sketch app—it’s a brainstorming tool. Adonit’s chief design officer, Peiter Buick, explained to me that Forge was inspired by employees within the company, built to duplicate the iterative process of storyboarding, sketching, and pinning ideas from every possible source onto your office wall. The inspiration is evident once you begin using the free app (go.macworld.com/forge). The first time you open it, you’ll see the demo Wall and its sketches. A single sheet of paper contains a rough outline of a rider’s head. In separate columns are different designs and color options…

POP: VIDEO TEXTING The free Pop (go.macworld.com/pop) app for iPhone lets you send short video messages to your friends. Just record and send; you can even create a favorites list of your “superfriends” to send your most-frequent messages to. Jolly Jam The free Jolly Jam game (go.macworld.com/jolly) for iPhone is, uh, well... Let’s let the developers explain: “A fresh puzzle game that will surely make you jolly! Prince Jam needs YOU to help save Princess Honey and the Jelly Kingdom.” In-app purchases of $1 a pop let you buy extra lives. (And yes, this is a match-three puzzler.) Frozen: Story Theater Are your kids still singing “Let It Go?” They’ll probably enjoy the $6 Frozen: Story Theater (go.macworld.com/go) for iOS. “Imagine your own Frozen story as you record your voice;…

MASTER If you’ve used a Mac longer than the span of a typical Hollywood awards show, you probably know that Command-P means print, Command-C means copy, and Command-V means paste. That’s great—it shows you already have a taste for how keyboard shortcuts can save you time. There are hundreds of shortcuts for just about anything you can do with a mouse. But shortcuts can be intimidating. They’re not always intuitive and they can take a lot of time and practice to commit to “finger memory.” Adding just a few keyboard shortcuts to your repertoire can be painless and easy. And painless in more ways than one, since shortcuts mean spending less time on the mouse, which in turn means a lower risk of Carpel Tunnel and Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI).…

The dance of printing a document, taking a pen and signing it, then scanning and emailing it to a banker or client is one I think we’ve all done. It’s also extremely inefficient, not to mention annoying. The Mac’s handy-dandy Preview app makes it possible to fill out and digitally sign a document, but it’s just as easy to sign from an iOS device, and of course there is no shortage of apps for that. I’ve whittled that selection down to these five that cover all the bases, letting you sign, fill out forms, connect to your cloud storage accounts, and use’s iOS 8’s share extension, among other features. The differences between them boil down to aesthetics, workflow, and pricing—which means one of them is probably just right for you.…

My worst iOS habit is hands-down my inability to keep my Camera Roll clean—I never go through it to delete my crappy selfies, random screenshots, or my 49 failed attempts at photographing Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland at nighttime. (Even worse: I back up everything, so those same terrible photos live on my Mac, too.) It’s been an ongoing problem that I can’t quite seem to kick, though I think I may finally be onto something: the answer to de-cluttering my Camera Roll is to clutter up my home screen with more apps. These three photo management apps tackle photo clutter in different ways, and combining the three together into a weekly routine has, so far, started to make a dent in my never-ending pile of photos. SERIOUSLY, YOU DON’T…

Apple recently extended its two-step verification protections to two more services. The SMS-based security measure now covers FaceTime and iMessage in addition to iCloud and your Apple ID, as first reported by The Guardian (go.macworld.com/guardian). If you have two-step verification enabled, the next time you try to login to iMessage or FaceTime on a new device you will have to supply a code sent to your smartphone via text message as well as log in with your password. Apple’s version of two-factor authentication does not work with authenticator smartphone apps. The impact on you at home: After the so-called celebrity iCloud hacks, security measures for Apple services were criticized for not being strong enough. Apple first improved security when it extended two-step verification measures to protect iCloud backups (go.macworld.com/icb). Extending…

UTILITY THE INTRODUCTION OF the Macintosh back in 1984 helped release us from the bondage of the command-line interface (go.macworld.com/line). It seems ironic that there’s a relatively new category of Mac productivity apps that lets us control our Macs from the keyboard. Quicksilver was one of the first, and I was a big fan. But when developer support fragmented, other apps like Launchbar and even Apple’s own Spotlight moved in to stake a claim. I’ve tried all of them and, while all have their merits, I eventually landed on Alfred by Running With Crayons and haven’t looked back. ALFRED 2.6 FOR MAC ALFRED REMOTE FOR IOS AT A GLANCE: App- and file-launching utility adds workflows and customizable themes while maintaining ease of use, and users can build their own workflows…

GARMIN VIVOSMART By choosing not to go head-to-head against the Apple Watch, Garmin’s $170 Vivosmart (garmin.com) makes a compelling case for fitness enthusiasts who appreciate a few smart features in their fitness tracker. It keeps tabs on your activity by covering the number of steps you take, steps remaining to your daily goal, distance covered, calories burned, and time spent inactive, and syncs all of this info to your iPhone. Plus, its battery life is impressive: Garmin says the Vivosmart lasts up to seven days on a charge, and I easily surpassed that throughout my testing.—CHUCK LA TOURNOUS iFORTE DELUXE UNITI SET The $299 Deluxe UNITI Set (iforte.com) is an all-in-one workstation that elevates your Mac’s monitor for ergonomic awesomeness at two viewing heights with front-facing USB 3.0 ports and…

It’s not a shock to learn that Apple is always hard at work on the next big thing. There will always be another iPhone, a lighter MacBook Air, a faster iMac, and new operating systems to run on them. 9to5Mac reports that, according to its unnamed sources, iOS 9 would focus not on new features, but rather on cleaning up iOS and making sure all the bells and whistles added in iOS 7 and iOS 8 work like they’re supposed to, every time. Think of it as the Snow Leopard of iOS. When Apple decided to slow the roll of feature creep in OS X 10.6, the result was an OS that didn’t boast hundreds of new features, but turned out to be stable and reliable—and we loved it (go.macworld.com/love).…

HEAVEN FOR A HARDCORE graphic artist or photo editor is a Wacom Cintiq (go.macworld.com/cintiq), one of those fancy input devices that builds in a display and includes a pen stylus for drawing, painting, or retouching photos. They’re amazing, but they’re pricey and not the most mobile. What if graphic artists on a shoestring could simply use their iPads, at a fraction of the cost and with glorious portability? Astro-HQ wants to make that possible with software that transforms an iPad into a Mac graphics tablet. Founders Giovanni Donelli and Matt Ronge are even former Apple engineers. Their product, Astropad (astropad.com), consists of companion apps for Mac and iPad (go.macworld.com/app). With the apps installed, the tablet links to the computer via Wi-Fi or a syncing cable to become a touchscreen editing…

ALLO BIKE MOUNT The Allo Bike Mount (theallobikemount.com) is billed as the “world’s first all-in-one bike mount and speaker”—a safer alternative to using earbuds while still listening to music or conducting phone calls while you’re zipping down the street or up mountain trails. The hardened plastic case protects the phone from scrapes if you get in an accident. The product has been funded through Kickstarter, but it’s not to late to get in and grab an “early bird special” price of $40 for the device. BEOLIT 15 BLUETOOTH SPEAKER The $599 Beolit 15 (beoplay.com) is a portable Bluetooth speaker: It features two 35-watt amps, a 5.5-inch driver, two four-inch passive bass radiators, and three 1.5-inch mid-range tweeters. Also, it comes in three soft pastel colors. ECHO CONNECT PLUS Here’s another…

You‘re changing jobs—either voluntarily or not so—and IT is going to shut off your access to your old email, contacts, and calendars. While they may consider all of this company property, the truth is that many people often mix in personal email with their company stuff. The upshot is that you‘d like to make copies of this before it vanishes. How do you do it? Let‘s start with Mail. The trick to grabbing your old email is making an archive of your selected inbox or account. In this case, I have a bunch of mail stored in Mail’s inbox for a Google account that I’ll say is my work email account. To make an archive of it, I just select Export Mailbox from the Mailbox menu. (Or I can just…

One thing I hate when I’m browsing the web is being distracted. I hate those blinking, moving ads, auto-play videos, and all the other cruft that websites use to try to get you to click, click, click somewhere, rather than read the article that attracted you in the first place. Fortunately, there are ways to avoid the most egregious annoyances on the web. Some of them can be easily muted using browser plug-ins, like the five that I use with Safari to make my browsing experience a lot better. (Note: some of these plug-ins also have equivalents for other browsers, such as Firefox and Chrome.) CLICKTOPLUGIN One of the worst offenders on the web annoyance hitlist is Flash animations. They can take the form of videos on YouTube and other…

One of the many advantages of an image editor that supports the concept of layers—Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Pixelmator, to name a few—is that you can push a picture through the content of other layers. In this column, you’ll learn how to push different pictures through the word LOVE. Not only is this technique a fun project, but it also makes a super sweet gift. If you go the extra step of printing it, you could frame it or the lucky recipient can tack it onto their fridge, and then use it as a bookmark later on. The following steps are for Photoshop, but you can easily adapt them for use in Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator. CREATE THE DOCUMENT AND ADD LETTERS Choose File → New to create a…

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF APPLE For a consumer electronics company that won’t even put a TV on the market, an Apple Car sounds unlikely on paper. But mounting evidence says Apple is gearing up for some type of automotive effort, and recently, we learned that Apple is targeting 2020 for a full-fledged car. Referencing “people with knowledge of the matter,” Bloomberg (go.macworld.com/bloomberg) reported that Apple wants to put an electric vehicle into production within the next five years. 2020 is a deliciously specific launch date, and, at first glance, this sounds like a long way away. But once you factor in all the hurdles Apple would have to cross, five years is actually an aggressive time frame. Consider: Apple has no experience or history with cars, save the dashboard tech in…

UTILITY DISKWARRIOR 5 AT A GLANCE: DiskWarrior 5 goes 64-bit and adds new (and welcome) features. If you have a Mac that can misbehave (and you do), you should also have DiskWarrior. PROS: • Preventive maintenance helps keeps disks healthy • Repairs corrupted disks • Can help recover data caused by certain disk problems • Monitors disks for SMART errors PRICE: $120 COMPANY: alsoft.com I’VE SAID IT COUNTLESS TIMES: it’s not a question of if you will lose data, but when. Media, such as hard drives, eventually fails. Or you can make the kind of mistake that results in deleted folders or erased disks. And files can simply get corrupted. There are two things you need to do to ensure you don’t lose data: back up your files regularly and…

I don’t consider myself an excessively private person nor think I’m a superspy in civilian clothes. But there’s something about sharing my location with other people that gives me the heebie-jeebies. I absolutely don’t want to do it all the time, but I love the ability to choose when, where, and to whom I do. iOS 8 offers a host of ways to share your location with other people, some of which appear for the first time in this release. Each method of sharing brings with it a complementary control that lets you either disable it temporarily, stop sharing entirely to a given individual, or set a time-bounded limit. These controls neatly offset my burbles about privacy. Apple has responded to these sorts of worries by making fine-grained options available.…

IFTTT BASICALLY AUTOMATES the Internet, letting you create recipes to bridge various products and online services—you can get a text when there’s rain in the forecast, for example, or have your Belkin WeMo Switch turn on your lamp when the sun goes down. While IFTTT (ifttt.com) works with dozens of popular services, all its functionality was rolled into one website and mobile app—until now. FTTT has launched three new “Do” apps for iOS and Android, and the original IFTTT app we already know (go.macworld.com/iftt) and love is getting a new name—going forward, it’s just IF (go.macworld.com/if). In fact, IFTTT is now a company with two separate products, Do and IF. The new Do apps are a play on what IFTTT is known for, but unlike the old IFTTT app experience,…

The BrydgeAir (brydgekeyboards.com) keyboard is unlike any iPad accessory I’ve used before. With integrated speakers underneath a backlit keyboard with a 180-degree hinge, it makes your iPad feel like a laptop, and that’s the entire point. In a market of nearly identical iPad keyboards that offer the same core features, Brydge is trying to set itself apart. After spending the last week with its solution for the iPad Air 2, I’d say it does just that. FAMILIAR, YET DIFFERENT As with nearly all iPad keyboards, the Brydge is equipped with the standard Mac keyboard layout. The keys are a bit smaller than those found on the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover (go.macworld.com/ultra), and appear to have the same amount of travel, yet offer less resistance. In my use, less resistance translated…

LAST JUNE, APPLE ANNOUNCED THAT IT WOULD STOP development of its Aperture and iPhoto apps (go.macworld.com/stop) and offer a single photo app in their place—Photos for OS X. Today, developers are getting their first glimpse of Photos, as it’s bundled with the beta version of OS X 10.10.3. Providing many of the features found in its mobile sibling, the Yosemite-only Photos for OS X offers an interface less cluttered than iPhoto, improved navigation, simpler yet more powerful editing tools, the ability to sync all your images to iCloud (though it doesn’t require you to), and new options for creating books, cards, slideshows, calendars, and prints. I’ve had the opportunity to take an early look at Photos, and this is what I’ve found. PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF APPLE THE LOOK Photos has…

In a recent column, I explained the use and benefit (and some of the drawbacks) of turning on full-disk encryption (FDE) with Apple’s built-in FileVault 2. Readers had a few questions of which I’ll expand here. Then, I’ll provide a longer explanation of encrypting individual files using Disk Utility. FileVault 2 encrypts data at the hard drive level. Programs that run on your Mac see the data as if it has no encryption. This lets you back up drives while you’re logged in, even if the system is locked. But the files copied to Dropbox, an online backup service, a local drive, or a Time Machine destination are unencrypted, although you can layer encryption on all of those options. Time Machine and other local drives can be encrypted using the…

With tens of thousands of fonts in circulation, it’s tough to identify a specific font from memory. Fortunately, you don’t have to. There are free websites, and an iOS app, that can identify font samples for you on the fly. The process is easy and a lot of fun. FROM A PRINTED SAMPLE No matter which resource you use, font identification from a printed sample works the same way: you scan or take a photo of some text, upload it, and then the resource tries to guess the characters in the photo. After the characters are correctly identified, the resource tries to find the font. For the best results, use a clean, straight image of the example text. Ideally, find a large printed example of the font and then scan…

Your Photos for OS X questions answered In this month’s issue, I offer a first look at the developer’s beta of the Photos app, which is included in the just-as-beta OS X 10.10.3 developer’s release. (See First Look: Photos for OS X.) Unsurprisingly, my inbox is flooded with questions. Let’s get to some of them now. Q: Will Photos import my events from iPhoto? A: In its own special way, yes. When you import your iPhoto library, events will appear under the Albums heading as iPhoto Events. Open this album and you’ll see each event listed by date. Double-click on one of these former events to view its contents. Q: What about star ratings? If I understand correctly, Photos doesn’t support them. A: While it’s true that star ratings have…