Macworld June 2017

When Apple met with select members of the media to talk about the Mac Pro, Apple VPs also mentioned that the company plans to update the iMac this year. The gap between updates for the iMac isn’t as long as the Mac Pro, but it’s been a while. The current iMac was released in October of 2015, well past the yearly updates Apple used to issue. So the iMac is due. Pike’s Universum, which has an eagle eye for finding references to future Apple products in Apple’s operating system code, reported on some specs that could be used for the new iMac—though the site says that the information should be “handled with care/skepticism.” I’ll point out Pike’s findings in each section I discuss, along with my commentary. THE LATEST CPUS…

Apple never used to announce what its road map looked like. Instead, the company held its cards close and let the rumor mill run amok. But lately, Apple is being much more open about its future. Expect new iMacs later this year, company executives said earlier this month, but that’s not all: Apple plans to make all of its products with recycled materials. That means the end of mining metals from the earth, which is a tall order. Apple doesn’t have a time line for moving to a completely closedloop supply chain, said Lisa P. Jackson, the company’s vice president of environmental and social initiatives. Jackson, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama, told Vice News Tonight that Apple is trying to move the industry in…

The iTunes Store was launched 14 years ago, and has morphed from its initial music-only offering to embrace all forms of digital media. It’s now just another digital purveyor among many, though still the leading seller of digital music in the world. While music files were protected with digital rights management (DRM) in the early years, it’s now been eight years since this was removed. But other types of content sold on the iTunes Store still have DRM: movies, TV shows, apps, audiobooks, ebooks, and ringtones. For these types of media with DRM, there are restrictions as to how many devices you can use. It gets complicated, though, because there are two types of restrictions. The first is for computers that are authorized to sync and play content from the…

The word free seems like a good thing, right? After all, who doesn’t like not paying for things? The recent announcement that Apple’s productivity and creative software— namely Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, and iMovie—is now free to all users was mainly greeted with a positive reaction from pundits and consumers alike. I’ll agree that making these apps (which were already provided no charge to people who bought new Macs, iPhone, and iPads) free across the board is largely a positive move. But that decision does have some consequences that could be a downside for end users, developers, and even Apple. NOT-SO-FIERCE COMPETITION The effect is probably most pronounced for small and indie developers. Since Apple can afford to fund the development of these apps and then just give them away, it’s…

You can’t avoid handling PDF (Portable Document Format) files: every website and program seems to generate them, either as a preferred choice or an option. And, often, you need to make some tweak or change in a PDF or fill it out when it hasn’t been set up by its creator to have preset form elements. If you’re working as a design professional, you probably already subscribe to or have access at work to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which includes Adobe Acrobat pro tools. If not, you likely rely on Apple’s Preview app, which has basic PDF handling, but suffered a series of glitches in Sierra that made it hard to use with PDFs. (Those all seem to be fixed now.) But I’ve found in my own work and in correspondence…

Optical character recognition (OCR) software provides a way to quickly convert printed or scanned documents into editable text or searchable PDF files. In recent years, OCR has found its way into numerous cloud services and mobile apps, allowing consumers to take advantage of the technology without the need for stand-alone software. If you need OCR on the Mac, the reigning heavyweights are Abbyy and Canon-owned I.R.I.S., whose respective FineReader and Readiris products continue to offer affordable alternatives to OmniPage, which abandoned the platform nearly 15 years ago. IMAGE TO TEXT Readiris Pro 16 ($99) is the latest edition of the company’s consumer OCR software. If you frequently convert scanned documents into editable text files, it’s hands-down the fastest way to get the job done. Version 16 introduces an all-new user…