Innehållsförteckning för April 2014 från Macworld

Think platform fragmentation is something that only Android users need to worry about? Over at Sophos’s NakedSecurity blog (go.macworld.com/naksec), Chester Wisniewski thinks Mac users should worry, too. Why? Because with the increasing pace of OS X updates, users who don’t or can’t update to the latest version of Mac OS may be left vulnerable to security exploits. Wisniewski claims that “Apple appears to have stopped releasing security updates for OS X 10.6.8, 10.7.5, and 10.8.5.” But before you fly into a panic and start yanking the power cords out of all your old Macs, let’s take a closer look at Wisniewski’s assertions. Enterprise Focus First of all, Wisniewski’s examples come largely from the enterprise market. According to the figures he posts, 82 percent of enterprise Mac users are at risk…

Optical cables that connect peripherals to the Thunderbolt 2 ports in newer Macs are becoming both longer and more expensive. Other World Computing now sells, for $899, a 30-meter Thunderbolt 2 optical cable (go.macworld.com/owctb30) that can carry 4K video streams from a Mac to a 4K monitor. OWC also offers a 10-meter version for $319, and a 20-meter one for $619. At the CES 2014 trade show, Corning demonstrated optical cables stretching 200 feet, or 61 meters, that are also Thunderbolt 2 compatible. The technology transfers data at speeds of up to 20 gigabits per second. Thunderbolt cables come in optical and copper varieties. For longer distances, optical offers faster data transfers but costs more. Optical cables require a power source, too, whereas copper cables carry power. Because optical cables…

The Mac’s 30th anniversary has come and gone, and I can’t help wondering how much longer the Mac will play a key role in our lives. Apple execs say it still has its place in the grand scheme of things. I’m not so sure. Taking a Backseat In the 1980s and 1990s, Apple’s future was tied to the success of the Macintosh. When the Mac’s fortunes dipped under the onslaught of Windows PCs, consumers feared for the company’s survival. And the device that ushered in Apple’s late-’90s renaissance was the original iMac. But increasingly, despite its recent record-setting sales, the Mac has taken a backseat to Apple’s newer products: first the iPod, then the iPhone, and now the iPad. With these other lines contributing so much to Apple’s overall revenue…

The Latest on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and App Store Whether you’re the proud owner of an iPad Air, iPad mini, or iPhone, great apps abound for your iOS device. Here are some of our top picks. Part I: iPad Air and iPad Mini I’ve surveyed my colleagues for their favorite iPad apps, and picked the ones that are best for certain tasks. Whether you see your iPad as a productivity tool, a gaming device, or a family resource, we’ve selected the right app for you. Write: The iPad can be a powerful productivity tool, especially when loadedwith the right apps. Power users who work with text can turn to Editorial ($5; OMZ Software, go.macworld.com/omzeditorial), which won an Editors’ Choice Award in February. Its customization features let you bend…

AApple announced in early January that App Store sales topped $10 billion in 2013, with record-breaking revenues of over a billion in December alone. According to an Apple press release, this pushes the total amount it has disbursed to developers to more than $15 billion. The App Store has generated nearly $21.5 billion in revenues for the tech giant since its 2008 inception. App Store revenues have been accelerating almost constantly: It took nearly two years to generate the first $3.6 billion in gross revenues—a sum that the company matched, on average, in a little over four months last year. The App Store has also reached impressive milestones in app availability and downloads. In October 2013, Apple revealed that its online software marketplace had reached more than a million apps—a…

Angry Birds Go! GAMES Offering a familiar character, a basic go-cart, and a fun course with polished visuals, Angry Birds Go! (go.macworld.com/angrybirdsgo) starts off strong. The racetracks are fun, particularly the ones that involve great leaps and flying, and various types of races spice up the game. One involves collecting fruit by driving into it, while another requires you to maneuver around ice, rock, and wood obstacles before the timer runs out and a bomb explodes. Unfortunately, the game quickly gets bogged down by in-game purchases. To unlock different tracks and characters, you must first pass all the levels of your current racing course, which requires cart upgrades that cost gold coins. You earn these coins by completing challenges and then repeating races over and over again, unless you pay…

SUNSETS AND BRIGHT WINDOWS If you find yourself observing a beautiful sunset, and you’re itching to take someone’s picture in front of it, remember that the sun is still very bright even when it’s setting. This means that you’re shooting in a backlit situation, so you need to take the same steps you would if you were shooting in front of a sunny window. When capturing a backlit portrait, use your iPhone’s flash to illuminate your subject. Because the camera will expose for the background lighting, the result should be a nice, even exposure. Alternatively, you can tap to set the exposure on your subject and then use the iPhone’s HDR mode to flesh out the sunset’s shades. HDR is perfect for capturing sunset landscapes. LANDSCAPES You might suppose that…

You can use far more powerful applications to edit your images. Consider the following coverage as merely outlining the first steps in image editing. The Edit Window To begin the editing process, select an image and choose Photos • Edit Photos (1-E) or click the Edit button at the bottom of the iPhoto window. The resulting window offers an enlargement of your image, previews of nearby images, and three tabs. Quick Fixes, Effects, and Adjust. Let’s walk through each one. The Quick Fixes Tab iPhoto’s Quick Fixes area is for making broad edits without a lot of bother. Here’s how the options shake out. Rotate: If your image is in portrait view when it should be in landscape view, you correct its orientation with this control. Click Rotate, and the…

You can back your iPad or iPhone up to your computer using iTunes, or you can back it up to Apple’s iCloud (www.icloud.com). If you choose the latter course, the device backs up whenever you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network. But iCloud provides just 5GB of free storage to cover all devices associated with your Apple ID, so it’s easy to run out of space. Here are some tips for optimizing your iPhone and iPad backups. Turn On iCloud Backups To back up an iOS device to iCloud, you must first turn on this feature. Back up from a Mac: From iTunes, with the device connected to your Mac, click first the device’s name, and then the Summary tab. In the Backups section, under Automatically Back Up, select the iCloud…

Q&A In this installment of Ask the iTunes Guy, I address how to get a list of apps on an iOS device, offer suggestions for iTunes controllers, and show some tagging tricks for multidisc sets. Q: I have a lot of apps in my iTunes library that I no longer need, and I’d like to clean them out. How can I create a list of the apps on each of my two iOS devices, combine the lists, and toss out anything not on them? A: You can see all the apps installed on a given iOS device in Settings • General • Usage—but I don’t think that’s what you want. I can think of two ways to generate a list to determine which apps you can delete. The first method…

Google has been on a content kick since it rebranded its Android Marketplace as the Google Play store, including recent forays into content streaming first with the mostly defunct Google TV and then with Chromecast. Now Google hopes to bring iOS users into the fold with the Google Play Movies & TV app. The app works on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices, but you can’t browse the Google Play store directly from it. Instead, you’ll have to add content to your queue from the Google Play site on your browser, at which point you can watch the items on the device of your choice. Google says that you can even use Chromecast to watch Google Play movies and TV shows, though there’s no support for the Apple TV. You…

You needn’t be a musician to find uses for GarageBand, Apple’s audio and music app. Want to craft a ringtone from a favorite tune? Here’s how to do it. Choose a Track Launch GarageBand. Select Ringtone in the Project chooser, and click the Choose button. The main GarageBand window will open. Inside you’ll find a single track called Audio 1. The Cycle button will be engaged, and the ruler will bear a yellow bar (denoting the length of the cycled section) stretching for 20 measures. To the right, the Loops pane appears by default. In the display (which currently shows bars, beats, divisions, and ticks), click the icon depicting a note and metronome, and choose Time from the pop-up menu. Drag the right side of the yellow cycle bar so…

The insider tips you won’t get from Apple. Rearrange Account Address Order in Mavericks Mail Although you can easily rearrange the order of your accounts in Mavericks’s Mail sidebar, the app gives you no obvious method to rearrange the order in which your email addresses appear in the From drop-down menu when you’re composing a new message. Annoyingly, the Mail program lists those addresses in the order in which you first added them, which may not match your preferred ordering at all. But there’s a potential workaround: Launch System Preferences and select Internet Accounts. Determine the order in which you’d like the From addresses to appear. In that order, select each account in turn, and uncheck and then recheck its Mail option. Doing so removes and then re-adds the accounts…

In this issue, we delve into iLife (see page 46) and iPhone photography (see page 37), while our readers share the ways they use their Macs and iOS devices to make music, create art, and cut together movies. GARAGEBAND AND iMOVIE LESSONS My wife and I jam, and we experimented with GarageBand back in the early Intel days. We even bought a Lexicon interface to get our guitars and mics into the mix. Our new quad-core i7 with fusion drive and 8 gigs of RAM may just overcome that propagation delay. Now the only question is where did we put that Lexicon gizmo?—TheHeeNow, via Macworld.com In 2005 I made a DVD on my G5 without having to read any help files for iMovie. Yesterday I wanted to edit a short…

As the lucky guy who got to review the 2013 Mac Pro (see page 12 in the March issue, or visit go.macworld.com/pro13), I’ve spent quite a bit of time with it. One thing that struck me is that in addition to radically changing Apple’s professionaldesktop line, it illustrates the changing face of “power-user” computing. Not long ago, if you wanted a really powerful computer, or one with a lot of storage, or one that could handle the latest games, you looked to the Mac Pro line—even if you didn’t work with video, perform 3D rendering, or do scientific modeling. The Mac Pro was as much a computer for power users as it was for people doing professional work. These days a lowly Mac mini packs an impressive amount of power,…

Christofle Sphére The $490 Christofle Sphére from LaCie was designed by the famous Parisian company Christofle, which is known for its luxury silver items. Handcrafted in France, this hard drive offers 1TB of storage and USB 3.0 connectivity—and because it gets power from USB, a power cable is not required (lacie.com).—ROMAN LOYOLA Mail Pilot 1.0.2 Mindsense’s $20 Mac email client takes a task-oriented approach to handling your mail. When you read a message, you can mark it as complete, or you can designate it as incomplete in case you need to send a reply or perform a related task. You can set reminders for tasks, set aside messages for later, sync with your iOS device, and more (www.mailpilot.co).—ROMAN LOYOLA PowerMate Bluetooth Button The $60 PowerMate Bluetooth Button is an updated…

Apple is now offering the iPhone to more than 760 million China Mobile customers, which could help it move up from fifth position in this growing market. The company already sells its phones through China Telecom and China Unicom, but a deal with China Mobile, the largest carrier in the country, had eluded it. One reason is that China Mobile uses a different wireless telecommunications standard from its competitors. As part of the agreement, China Mobile and Apple retail stores in China made the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c available starting January 17. Apple’s share of the Chinese smartphone market reached 8 percent in the third quarter of 2013, according to research firm Canalys. Samsung Electronics was the largest player with a market share of 21 percent, followed by Lenovo…

Apple iPhone and iPad users can easily add 1TB of external storage space to their devices by introducing LaCie’s $199 Fuel wireless hard drive. The Fuel allows users to preserve mobile storage by moving large files onto the drive. They can access those files from the Fuel while on the go and upload or download them remotely, effectively creating a personal data cloud. The battery can provide a 10-hour run time on a single charge. In addition, the Fuel can act as an access point for an existing Wi-Fi network, or as a router for a wireless network. Users can stream movies from the AirPlay-compatible Fuel to TVs hooked to an Apple TV box, and then mirror that content on other iOS devices. With a USB 3.0 port, the Fuel…

The big challenge when you shoot images with an iPhone is to successfully capture great-looking photos from a gadget that’s primarily designed for chatting. If you keep these tips in mind as you shoot, however, you can take some pretty sharp pictures. 1 GET A HEAD START It’s a good idea to get in the habit of accessing the camera from the lock screen on your iPhone. Press the Home button to wake up the screen, and slide the camera icon to the top of your display. This way, you can take a shot without having to enter your passcode or using Touch ID. Another way to ensure that you’re always ready to take a shot is to stick the Camera app on your first home screen, or even in…

IMPORTING & SHARING IMAGES When you string a USB cable between your Mac and your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or switched-on camera, iPhoto launches and offers to import images from the device. Unfortunately, though importing usually works well when you’re linking to an iOS device, it doesn’t work with some cameras. In the absence of a technology enabling the Mac OS to recognize every camera that comes along, Apple creates updates to let cameras work with its software. The updates cover many popular cameras, but some models don’t make the cut. Your digital camera contains a memory card—in most instances a Secure Digital storage card. If your Mac has an SD slot, remove the card from your camera and slide it into this slot. By default, iPhoto will launch and…

How to create entertaining, appealing videos—from start to finish. STARTING A PROJECT iMovie 10 gathers its import options in a single window that you access by clicking the Import button in the toolbar or by choosing File • Import Media. With the Import window open, you’ll see three headings: Cameras (for cameras and iOS devices attached to your Mac), Devices (for volumes such as hard drives connected to your Mac), and Favorites (for Home and Desktop entries). Import Digital Assets To import media from a connected digital camera, camcorder, or iOS device, select the device’s name under the Cameras heading. The top of the Import window will reveal an ‘Import to’ pop-up menu where you can choose an existing event or choose New Event to create one. On the window’s…

Say you want to have a Minecraft server that’s available to your friends over the Internet, or you want to screen-share with a Mac on your home network while you’re on the road. If you’ve ever tried to set up one of these types of services, you may have encountered the rather arcane term port forwarding. Port forwarding lets people outside your local network access a service on one of your home machines by forwarding specific traffic to that machine. Think of it as creating a rule in your Mail client to forward email from specific senders to a different address. Technologies do exist to automate port forwarding, but they aren’t always compatible, so it helps to know exactly how to configure the process manually. I’m going to show you…

People have been waiting for Apple to transform its Apple TV set-top box into an actual Apple television set for years. Well, Roku just beat Apple to the punch. At January’s International CES exposition in Las Vegas, Roku announced Roku TV—Roku’s streaming service built into smart TVs, starting with an array of 32-to 55-inch models from Hisense and TCL. Like a Roku set-top box, these sets will offer more than 31,000 movies and 1200 channels of streaming content. Users can navigate the whole thing with a simplified 20-button remote control, or they can use the Roku apps for iOS and Android. Though final prices, specs, and release dates remain unannounced, Roku CEO Anthony Wood says he doesn’t expect the TVs to be expensive. Both Hisense and TCL showed their models…

Custom photo books are a popular and polished way to show and share your images, whether you aim to create an album of photos for a special occasion, a professional portfolio, or anything in between. Ever since the 2012 partnership between Adobe and Blurb—the company that lets you produce your own hard-copy photo book—Adobe has integrated a Book module with Lightroom, specifically in versions 4 and 5, that lets you print from Blurb. Books can be 20 to 240 pages long (not including covers). The Book module offers a wealth of options, especially with the new features available in Lightroom 5, but the process of creating a photo book is similar in Lightroom 4. You’ll need to set aside a little time for planning, but if you follow the steps…

Review RATING 4.0/5.0h PRICE $2 COMPANY Menschmaschine Publishing URL www.tadaa.net Your iPhone is remarkable in many ways, but its camera will never capture photos with the same deliciously shallow depth of field that your digital SLR camera can manage. And unless Apple finds a way to cram a much, much larger sensor into future versions of the phone, that limitation will always be the case. Nevertheless, you can simulate a luxuriant, shallow-depth-of-field effect through software. Tadaa SLR does just that. Actually, Tadaa doesn’t simply permit you to artificially tweak the depth of field; it enables you to change the focus point of the photo. And it does that after you’ve taken the image, not unlike what you can do with the innovative Lytro camera. You start Tadaa in camera mode;…

Upgrading Your Mac With an SSD Q: My wife has an iMac from 2010 (model 2389) that she says runs really slowly. I can’t afford a new Mac, but as a gift I would like to make this one faster. It currently has 4GB of RAM. Would adding more memory make it noticeably faster? George Robertson A: That iMac will hold up to 16GB of RAM. These days 4GB is a little light, so bumping up the RAM is not a bad idea at all. However, if you do this on the sly and then expect your wife to burst into the room shouting, “George, it’s a miracle! My iMac has suddenly turned into a speed demon!” you’ll be disappointed. A RAM upgrade does not a miracle make. If you’re…

News and Analysis About Macs, OS X, and Apple In the January issue (page 16), we reviewed the $1299 entry-level 2013 iMac, the first of the new iMac models we could get our hands on. And now that we’ve brought the other three standardconfiguration iMacs into the Macworld Lab to test, we’ve taken a good look at the rest of Apple’s iMac line. All four iMacs have a quad-core Intel Core i5 (Haswell) processor, 8GB of memory, and a 1TB hard drive. The 21.5-inch units have 5400-rpm drives, while the 27-inch iMacs come with 7200-rpm drives. The memory in the 21.5-inch iMacs is not user-upgradable, whereas each 27-inch iMac ships with memory in just two of its four user-accessible DRAM slots. The $1499 21.5-inch model carries a 2.9GHz quad-core Core…

Considering that the new Mac Pro is more of a specialized workstation than a generalpurpose computer, we wanted to see whether upgrading our 2012 Mac Pros would help to close the performance gap with the latest model. We started with our stock 2012 quadcore and dual-six-core (12 cores total) Mac Pro systems and upgraded them with fast flash storage in the form of OWC’s Mercury Accelsior E2 PCIe SSD ($630), as well as 32GB of RAM from Crucial and a faster Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition ($500) graphics card. Speedmark 9 The stock 2012 quad-core 3.2GHz Mac Pro with a 1TB hard drive, 6GB of RAM, and Radeon HD5770 graphics earned a Speedmark 9 score of 171. After our upgrade, the same system earned a score of 241, or 41…

PHOTOGRAPHY: Focus 2 3.5/5.0; $12; MacPhun; macphun.com A paid update to the original Focus app, MacPhun’s Focus 2 allows you to add tilt-shift-like effects that direct the viewer’s eye to the part of your photo that you want to emphasize. It works with 8-or 16-bit Raw and TIFF files, plus JPEG and PNG files. Each of the five fine-tuned presets offers a predefined primary focus and a gradualfalloff focus, but both focus settings are adjustable. The Custom setting works the opposite way, as it applies a blur to your entire photo, and you then paint a mask over the areas where the blur shouldn’t appear. I was especially impressed with how the app fixed a flawed macro shot. I recommend cycling through the app’s settings, regardless of your subject, to…

The road to cross-platform compatibility for Nokia’s mobile mapping app didn’t turn out to be as smooth as the company had hoped. At the end of last year, Nokia pulled Here Maps from Apple’s iOS App Store. The culprit? Nokia is blaming iOS 7. Specifically, “recent changes to iOS 7 harm the user experience,” Nokia claimed in a statement supplied to news sites. iOS users who downloaded Here Maps when it arrived on the App Store more than a year ago may beg to differ. Nokia has paid scant attention to the app since its debut, and it has garnered tepid App Store reviews. With Apple telling app developers to make their submissions compatible with iOS 7 by February 1, 2014, Nokia likely decided to pull the plug on an…

Directr This free iPhone app (go.macworld.com/directr) guides users through creating professional-looking videos. The latest update includes a new video trimmer that can time cuts to accompanying music. It also balances and mixes the audio, and it has an improved preview and a revamped interface. When you are done editing, the video posts to YouTube.—JOEL MATHIS Jelly Best described as a cross between Pinterest and Quora, Jelly (free, go.macworld.com/jelly) lets users shoot and post photos that they then use to ask other Jelly users questions about the items depicted. You can forward questions outside the app to non-Jelly users, and Jelly works in conjunction with other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.—JOEL MATHIS Google Play Music Although the mobile radio battle has focused on offerings from Apple, Pandora, and Spotify,…

Unlike a compact camera or a DSLR, your iPhone doesn’t let you adjust the most popular settings: aperture, lens length, shutter speed, and white balance. That said, several tools within the Camera app (and other thirdparty programs) can aid you in taking very attractive pictures. EXPOSURE AND FO Setting your iPhone camera’s exposure (which controls the image’s brightness) is a simple matter of tapping once on whatever part of the image you’d like to source. If you move, or if the view changes too much, the Camera app recalibrates and picks a new focus and exposure point. If you’re taking a macro shot (where one object is in sharp focus while the background is blurred), or if you want to focus on a bright area and leave the rest of…

Photo Stream is a component of Apple’s iCloud service. The general idea behind it is pretty simple. Once you’ve signed up for an iCloud account and configured it properly, you can sync any images on a device associated with your Apple ID with other devices that use that same ID. So, for example, if you’ve taken a picture with your iPhone, that picture can appear on your iPad, your Apple TV, and (within iPhoto) your Mac. And it will do so without your having to choose to share it. Everything happens in the background. Set Up Photo Stream on Your Mac Begin by launching System Preferences (under the Apple menu) and selecting the iCloud preference. If you haven’t signed in to your iCloud account, do so now. (If you haven’t…

Even though you use your Mac for serious work, you may want to add a touch of whimsy to it. Here are four tips for customizing OS X and making it more fun to use. 1. Try the iTunes Artwork Screensaver When you’re not working, by default your Mac’s screen turns black with a subtle, shifting white Apple icon and a bit of text, usually your username. But you needn’t settle for that. To pick something different, go to Apple menu • System Preferences, select Desktop & Screen Saver, and then click the Screen Saver tab. You’ll find a lot of fun options to explore here, such as “Word of the Day.” If you’re a music fan, though, try the iTunes Artwork screensaver, which displays a collage of random album…

Hardware and Software for All Your Business Needs Hardware My Passport Slim 3.5/5.0; $89; Western Digital; www.wd.com The My Passport Slim isn’t flashy, in any sense of the word. In fact, its most distinguishing feature may be its lack of distinguishing features. It’s a USB 3.0 bus-powered portable drive built around a standard rotational hard drive with a healthy 1TB of storage capacity. Western Digital announced a version with a more noteworthy 2TB of storage capacity, but that model is not yet shipping. With read and write speeds hovering at around 100 MBps, the My Passport Slim didn’t break any performance records, but it is fast enough for incremental backups. The drive ships formatted as NTFS and comes with WD Smartware Pro for Windows, which offers automated backups and even…

As was readily apparent from the multitude of offerings on display at the International CES showcase in January, plenty of companies are coming up with innovative ways to enable you to control the lighting in a room from your smartphone. But the people who make Holi think you should be able to set a mood from your phone as well. Holi is a uniquely shaped lamp. It’s essentially a framelike aluminum square with rounded corners that, instead of featuring a single bulb, contains 18 individually controlled LEDs. The design permits the lamp to give off light in a number of different colors and shades. Exactly what color and intensity of light the Holi displays is up to you, with the help of a mobile app. The app—currently available for iOS,…

We seldom have complete control when shooting portraits, but we own our images when we open them in Aperture for editing. In just five easy steps, you can transform a ho-hum snapshot into a framable work of art. Step 1: Crop as You Like Nearly every portrait benefits from cropping. By zooming in a bit tighter, we can bring out the subject’s personality. Enable the cropping tool by clicking its icon at the bottom of the screen, or by pressing the C keyboard key. A floating palette appears along with an adjustable grid. Click and drag any of the eight handles of the grid to frame the image. To constrain the frame’s proportions, select the dimensions you want from the Aspect Ratio pop-up menu in the floating palette. To reposition…

Review RATING 4.0/5.0h PRICE $2 COMPANY Menschmaschine Publishing URL www.tadaa.net Serious photographers may spend hundreds of dollars on an incident light meter—a small handheld device that measures the light falling on the subject. Luxi is a $30 iPhone accessory that promises to do the same job using just your existing phone. Some photographers carry a separate light meter, despite having a perfectly good one built into their camera, because stand-alone incident light meters are more accurate over a wider range of photographic situations. Such meters measure the light falling on the subject from the direction of the camera, not the reflected light that bounces back into the camera. Luxi replaces the expensive, standalone light meter with your iPhone. It consists of two parts: a plastic adapter that slips over your…

Writer, virtual-community consultant Who are you, and what do you do? I explore and try to understand the way our use of new media changes people and society, then communicate what I’ve found. I’ve written books and magazine articles, created videos, blogged, taught courses at Berkeley and Stanford, and offered my own online courses at Rheingold U. You can find out about these activities and more—such as my artwork!—at rheingold.com. What hardware do you use? A quad-core Mac Pro with 16GB of RAM, four 1TB drives, and 30-inch and 24-inch monitors. I do some video editing, hence the RAM and the big monitor. I also do a lot of writing from notes and editing video from storyboards, and the dual screens help. I also have a MacBook Pro. I had…