Macworld April 2017

Apple employees will begin the process of moving to the company’s new campus in April, and in six months more than 12,000 people will work in Apple Park. Steve Jobs conceived of the 2.8 million-square-foot building, which evokes a flying saucer with panels of curved glass, and Apple will honor its late founder’s memory with a 1,000-seat auditorium named Steve Jobs Theater. Apple Park sits on 175 acres of land designed to be part nature refuge, part center for collaboration and creativity. The campus replaces Hewlett-Packard’s cocrete jungle with 9,000 trees, two miles of trails for employees to walk and run on, plus an orchard, meadow, and a pond. Apple claims its new HQ is the world’s largest naturally ventilated building and won’t need heat or air conditioning for nine…

In a departure from the norm, Apple just announced the dates and location of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. This year, the event will be at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center instead of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, though Apple is keeping its usual June time slot. Apple unveiled the dates and venue change in a recent press release. The company typically holds off on revealing WWDC details until much closer to the event, but Apple execs wanted to give developers plenty of time to make travel arrangements, according to The Loop. The convention center in San Jose is comparable in size to Moscone and will still be able to fit about 5,000 developers and 1,000 engineers, who flock to WWDC every year to learn about Apple’s latest updates to iOS,…

Why use one processor when two will do? Recently, Bloomberg reported that Apple has developed an ARM-based chip that it will integrate into future Macs to handle some of the low-power responsibilities, thus taking pressure off the main, more power-hungry Intel processor. Here’s the thing: This multipronged approach is nothing new to Apple. And while I do believe that Apple is investigating building computers based solely on the same type of ARM architecture it uses in its iOS devices, this latest report doesn’t necessarily draw a straight line to that future. After all, the Touch Bar and Touch ID sensor in the new MacBook Pro already rely on an ARM chip dubbed the T1. Mainly, it’s another example of Apple mixing and matching technologies where appropriate so that it always has the…

Shaving off annoyances in macOS is always worth a few bucks, and if you manipulate audio sources and volumes frequently, it should be worth $10. Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource 3 provides splayed-out, easy access to the settings divvied up in the Sound system preference pane, and only partly available through the system audio menu item. In the Sound preference pane, options are split among Sound Effects, Output, and Input. These are shown instead as separate sections in a long menu from a system menu-bar icon that belongs to SoundSource. From this menu, you can see every audio input and output source available; switch system input, system output, and sound effect output; and change the volume of each of those as well. (Some devices reserve volume controls to hardware settings, and Sound- Source…

After establishing a solid reputation as a slick third-party email iOS client, Spark (free; available on the App Store) recently leapt from mobile to the Mac desktop. This marks Ukrainian developer Readdle’s second full-fledged macOS application after PDF Expert, an excellent document viewer/ editor that finally got me to kick the Preview habit for good. Although Spark for iOS is quite good, the idea of using different email clients on mobile and desktop never appealed to me. I do the bulk of my daily work on an iMac, so having the same application available on my iPhone and iPad is a must. Now that Spark for Mac has arrived, is it finally curtains for Apple Mail? The short answer is: Almost. Many of the best iOS features are present and accounted for,…

When it comes to the web, smaller is always better. If an image-heavy site takes too long to load, visitors will just click over to something else. While there are plenty of software tools for optimizing image files on the Mac, few do it with the simplicity and speed of Squash. CRUSHING IT Over a year ago, I reviewed a useful Mac utility called JPEGmini, which reduces image files with no discernible loss in image quality. Although limited to JPEG, the software was easy to use and produced impressive results, but at $99, it’s clearly not aimed at casual users. Enter Squash ($20; available on the App Store, which offers the same quality and simplicity for less, and does it faster. The premise is the same: Drag and drop one…