Macworld October 2013

iWork for iCloud’s Missing Ingredient Perhaps the most surprising announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June was also the most underwhelming. Having failed to release any substantial updates to its iWork productivity suite since the iPhone versions in 2011, Apple announced that it would be bringing the office apps to yet another platform: the Web. No, you’re not experiencing déjà vu. Back in 2009, Apple launched a public beta of what it then called iWork.com. Our own editor, Dan Miller, began his first look at that venture (go.macworld.com/iworkdotcom) by saying, “Let’s make one thing clear up front: iWork.com (in its current pre-release form) is not a collaborative online productivity tool like Google Docs or Zoho.” Unsurprisingly, iWork.com fell flat, and last year it died an ignominious death. And yet,…

Fall brings pumpkins, icy air, and family members with tech questions galore. This month, our readers tell us what their best tech tips are for relatives and friends. They also muse over the future of iWork and iCloud (see page 5 for our take), and talk about Logic Pro X. THE FUTURE OF iWORK AND iCLOUD If I’m working on a project with others, I’m able to share my calendar and my tasks. For that, iCloud works great, but to work on a document with someone else (even if they’re using Pages), I have to save it out of iCloud, then put it in SugarSync. The other person then gets it, works on it in Pages, and saves it back into SugarSync. I then have to get it out of…

Review RATING 4.0/5.0 PRICE $299 COMPANY Apple URL apple.com Apple is ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting the IEEE 802.11ac wireless networking standard. While 802.11ac routers are not new, Apple’s latest AirPort Time Capsule is the first to include an integrated hard drive. Apple is also one of the first manufacturers to include an 802.11ac client adapter as standard equipment in its computer lineup. Performance When I used AccessAgility’s WiFiPerf benchmarking tool on the 802.11ac Time Capsule, with a 2013 MacBook Air as the client, I measured a very respectable TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) throughput rate of 451.9 megabits per second at close range (router and client in the same room, about 9 feet apart). That’s more than twice as fast as the older 802.11n Time Capsule’s…

Review 13-inch MacBook Air RATING 4.0/5.0 PRICE $1299 (lowest standard price, 256GB) 11-inch MacBook Air RATING 4.0/5.0 PRICE $1199 (lowest standard price, 256GB) COMPANY Apple URL apple.com As is customary with just about all Macs, Apple offers a small number of standard-configuration systems that you can buy off the shelf (these are the systems Macworld uses for review), along with a handful of optional upgrades that—for a price—allow purchasers to customize their new Macs. The 2013 MacBook Air is no exception: For both the 11-inch and 13-inch models, Apple offers more RAM, higher-capacity flash storage, and faster processors. Macworld Lab put together an “ultimate” configuration of the 13-inch version of this new MacBook Air, and the performance gains were so significant that our configure-to-order (CTO) MacBook Air competed well against…

Bento, FileMaker’s consumer-oriented database app, is soon to be no more: The developer wants to focus on its flagship FileMaker line. Bento’s simplicity and ease of use belied its functionality and capabilities, but it never took off the way FileMaker had hoped. Databases are the workhorses of the software industry; even something as simple as opening a webpage requires the use of half a dozen databases before one data packet leaves our computers. Consequently, the software industry has invested heavily in database development over the years. Today, you can find a database library for pretty much any kind of problem a developer could encounter. Bento’s customizability worked against it, because its intended audience often lacked the sophistication and patience required to use it. Bento was ill-fitted for the business world,…

Developers would love to love iCloud. But many of them find Apple’s syncing platform ineffective, unreliable, or worse. Some developers have even pointed to iCloud syncing woes as a significant holdup in releasing new versions of their apps. And now Dropbox, the beloved powerhouse of sync, has taken a direct shot across Apple’s cloudy bow, with its new Datastore API. Dropbox says this API makes simple work of syncing structured data across devices, and even platforms: Unlike iCloud, the Dropbox Datastore API works across iOS, Android, and the Web. Because of the way Dropbox works, it offers one other potential advantage over iCloud: Developers who are working with Datastore can peek directly at the syncing data on Dropbox’s servers as they test and build their apps, a level of visibility…