Tabla de contenidos para October 2015 en Macworld Australia

One of the fun things about my work is getting to play with lots of interesting gadgets. About 15 years ago, I remember reading about the house Bill Gates was building in Seattle with his then new wife Melinda. A major feature of that home was automation. When guests arrived at the house, they’d be presented with a pin that would activate various devices as they moved around the house, according to their personal preferences. At the time it was practically science fiction. Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing with some home automation gear and a new app on my iPhone. In my home I’ve been using various devices from WeMo – Belkin’s new home automation product range. Being able to control lights and other devices has made…

WORD 2016 If Word is your primary tool for getting work done with words, run, don’t walk, to upgrade to Word 2016. It doesn’t matter if you think Microsoft Word doesn’t matter anymore. It does – for tens, hundreds, thousands of people, Microsoft Word is an everyday event. An indispensable tool for getting daily business done. And without it, whether you like it or not, much of what must get done in the world of words wouldn’t, if it weren’t for Word. What matters most to those users is how it works: whether it works well. Whether it will get the job done without getting in the way. What matters to the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve traded up from a PC to a Mac and the tens of…

While many Mac, iPhone and iPad owners use their devices for purely personal pursuits, there are those who document, record and share as part of the their day to day work. What are the most efficient and effective hardware and software options for your needs? How can you start using it immediately to drive sales, connect with colleagues, create powerful presentations, reduce communication charges? We examine the latest technology for enterprise users to help you make the best use of your time and resources for your business. Anthony Caruana - Editor of Macworld Australia We started this section as we appreciate that technology is a critical foundation for the success of your business.…

OUTSTANDING VERY GOOD GOOD FLAWED UNACCEPTABLE LifX The brightest of the bunch and available with a range of connectors, LifX’s Australian-designed smart bulbs are great for shedding light on the situation. Producing a very bright 1000 lumens, the bulky 14W LifX LED lights are about as bright as a traditional 100W bulb. Available with bayonet, screw or downlight connectors, they’re a good choice for locations where dim mood lighting just won’t cut it – such as the kitchen while you’re cooking, lounge room while you’re reading or dining room if you’re working at the table. They have the highest running costs of the 14W bunch, but they’ll still cut your power bill significantly compared to traditional bulbs. The LifX range has expanded to include the cheaper 11W ‘White 800’ –…

Belkin has been a long-time player in the computer accessory business. So it’s no surprise that it has become a significant player in the home automation game already with its WeMo line of products. We’ve installed several around our home. Rather than reviewing each one separately, we’re going to look at life in a home that’s been given the WeMo treatment. The WeMo product ecosystem is very extensive. There are light bulbs, that come with both screw and bayonet fittings, smart switches that replace your existing switches or work off existing power points, security cameras and motion sensors, as well as appliances from third parties that integrate WeMo’s automation smarts. We set up our place with a WeMo LED Lighting Starter Kit, a WeMo Insight Switch and a WeMo Switch.…

COSTLY GADGETS Most of Macworld Australia I find is great reading, and I particularly enjoyed the recent article on Siri. However, the Gadget Guide seems to feature only the top end of the price range. A kickstand case for iPhone 6 at $64.99, an Adonit stylus at $129.99, and a Tabletop Radio at $449 are all highly priced. Google the products or their equivalents and you will find a range of products at a range of prices. I know you have to pay for quality, but how much? A recent purchase of a charging stand for an iPhone 4s cost me $6, including postage from China. Paid for by PayPal, delivered within five days from order, and a happy customer thank you. Not so good, a charger for my MacBook…

Star date: 46254.7. Captain Jean-Luc Picard walks into his quarters. “Lights – 35 percent, tea: Earl Grey, hot,” he says to no one. A few seconds later all of the captain’s requests are fulfilled. Welcome to the world of home automation. When Star Trek: The Next Generation was being made in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the sorts of applications and hardware that were common in that fiction were fanciful compared to what we could do at the time. Voice control, artificial intelligence, fast processors and storage – what was hard to imagine in a large computer system is almost here today and we carry it on our iPhones. So, like the original series of Star Trek that foreshadowed the mobile phone, the crew of the Enterprise D demonstrated…

TRIPIT TRAVEL Concur iPAD, iPHONE & APPLE WATCH FREE (IN-APP PURCHASES) As a frequent traveller, keeping track of flights, accommodation bookings, car hire and meetings can get tricky. TripIt makes all of this much easier. The app is backed by a cloud service that can extract travel and accommodation information from itineraries and present it in an easy to use form. To use the app, you need to register with TripIt. You can create an account or leverage your existing Google, Facebook or Yahoo! account. Once that’s done, you can access your travel plans from just about any device. Adding travel plans is a snap. You can either enter them manually or simply forward your travel plans to plans@tripit.com from your registered email address. If you’re really lazy, you can…

We usually store our photos, documents and more on a single hard disk – or, increasingly these days, a solid state drive (SSD) – but there’s always the nagging worry that the disk will fail, taking all your work and memories with it. Backing up using Time Machine, SuperDuper or CrashPlan are all good ways of reducing this risk, but there is another: RAID. RAID can be complicated, but it’s extremely worthwhile – one of the things it can do is to mirror the contents of one disk completely to another, all the time. While cloning your hard disk using SuperDuper, for example, is something that might happen once a day, with a RAID system, every bit of data that’s written to one disk is simultaneously written to the second,…

TRIPMODE UTILITY TripMode US$7.99 Ever since it became possible to tether a computer to a cell modem, it’s also been possible to blow through one’s monthly or service-plan limit and either run out of mobile data, be throttled to a trickle or face expensive overuse fees. TripMode is the first easy-to-use OS X utility to help with that problem. When installed, TripMode (tripmode.ch) appears in your system menu bar and monitors for network changes in Yosemite. Whenever you join a new Wi-Fi network or connect to a Personal Hotspot, TripMode activates and blocks all system-level and application network usage. The utility was built as an access whitelist, so all network usage is blocked until you allow it. You can check boxes next to any activity you want to approve from…

If you’re an audiobook fan, you probably like to listen to your favourite books in many places: at home, in the car, in the gym or when you’re out walking or running. You can use your iOS devices for this, and you can use a number of apps, depending on where you get your audiobooks. Here’s an overview of apps for listening to audiobooks on iOS. You can get audiobooks from a number of sources. You can buy and download books from Audible.com or from Apple’s iBooks Store, or you can rip your own audiobook CDs. You can also buy some audiobooks on MP3 CDs; these CDs contain books already converted to MP3 files, which you can add to your iTunes library without ripping. Where you buy the files affects…

! Getting rid of bad autocorrect suggestions Does your autocorrect seem to have a mind of its own and often suggest nonsensical replacements for what should be normal words? Here’s how to fix it. Go into Settings, tap on General, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and tap on Reset. On the next screen, tap on the option Reset Keyboard Dictionary, you will then be prompted for your PIN and finally an option will appear at the bottom of the screen where you can choose to Reset Dictionary or Cancel, tap on Reset Dictionary and it will remove any garbage suggestions that have been given in the past. This worked wonders for me and may help some others. • EACH MONTH, STM gives a prize to the Macworld…