Macworld April 2015

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…