Table of contents for January 2017 in Macworld Australia

It’s been rumored for some time, and it even made an appearance in the macOS Sierra 10.12.1 update ( go.macworld.com/toolbarleak ), but on October 27th Apple officially revealed a new MacBook Pro. The killer surprise-and-delight feature? It’s called Touch Bar, an OLED panel that replaces the row of function keys usually found on the top of the Apple laptop keyboard. The Touch Bar does a lot of things, but the headline feature may be support for Touch ID. When you encounter a process that requires you to show your fingerprint (such as Apple Pay), you place your finger on the Touch ID area of the Touch Bar. The Touch ID sensor is integrated with the power button. The functions provided by the Touch Bar change based on the software you…

THERE’S A LOT TO LIKE ABOUT THE SATECHI SLIM ALUMINUM TYPE-C MULTI-PORT ADAPTER, INCLUDING THE PRICE. PASSTHROUGH POWER WAS initially rare for USB-C docks, which were designed to extend the single port on a 2015 and 2016 Mac-Book. This was unfortunate, because a dock should be a way to get more out of a laptop without watching the battery drain. The Satechi Slim Aluminum Type-C Multi-Port Adapter ($60 on go.macworld.com/ satechislim ) is part of a wave of docks that started to appear in mid-2016 that are both affordably priced and can make use of an Apple or a third-party USB-C charger while offering extensibility. The Satechi is a neat combination of aesthetics and function. The rounded corners are nice for a unit you’ll drop into a bag, and the…

WHEN I WAS A KID, it didn’t take much to get me to the movies. A promising trailer or article in one of my favorite genre magazines, and my butt was in the seat. Flash-forward a few decades, my busy schedule—and a decent home theater setup—means I’m far more selective about what I’ll pay good money to see on the big screen. MOVIE TRACKER Reelgood (free on the iTunes Store go.macworld.com/reelgoodapp ) is an iPhone app designed with folks like me in mind. At launch, the Discover view populates with gorgeous full-color poster art from current and upcoming theatrical movies. With a tap, you can quickly add the ones you’re interested in to a Watchlist, or mark them already watched. If you’d rather sit through a root canal than watch…

It’s thinner, lighter, and smaller all around, but the new MacBook Pro ( go.macworld.com/buymac  bookpro ) makes a big impression. The trackpad on the 15-inch version is downright ridiculous—twice as large as the trackpad on the previous generation—but I didn’t look down and say, “Holy cow, that is a seriously huge trackpad,” until I’d been using it for a couple of minutes. Because it’s really all about that gorgeous Touch Bar. Apple doesn’t do touchscreen Macs, but the Touch Bar adds a strip of ultra-handy iOS-style contextual controls right where you need them, and the rest of the MacBook Pro got great updates too. After my limited hands-on time, I think it’s got the right mix of power, portability, and ports to satisfy users of previous MacBook Pro and…

Server’s calendar service is one of my favorite features in the Server app and the one most likely to fly under your radar. This two-part series will help you set it up. When you think about hosted calendar services, your mind likely drifts to Google, iCloud, or Exchange. But the Server app’s calendar service offers more features than you may be aware of and gives you the benefit of keeping your business’ private calendar info secure and within the walls of your company. In addition to the usual calendar fare, Server’s Calendar service lets you manage resource schedules (say, conference rooms and projectors), delegate calendar responsibilities to surrogates, offers automatic schedule checking for all invited attendees, including resources, allows file attachments, private event annotations, and uses Apple’s push notification services…

As smartphone cameras advance, offering features that rival and sometimes exceed the point-and-shoots of old, hobbyist interest in photography has surged, not only for documenting friends and family, but for recording a critical world view—similar to classic street or landscape photography. When Apple posts billboards of scenes shot by amateurs and pros using their iPhone, it’s not hard to see where the inspiration comes from. For those who want more visual tricks than Apple Photos offers (especially for composition and special effects) they turn to Adobe Photoshop Elements ( go.macworld.com/elementsapp ), an app designed for consumers who seek an easy way to achieve sophisticated special effects. Elements, now in its fifteenth iteration, is no Photoshop ( go.macworld.com/photoshopcc ), but a good number of its advanced features are derived from the…

After September’s annual iPhone-focused event, it was time for the Mac to have its turn in the spotlight. And boy, did we get some major Mac news on October 27: Apple revealed three new MacBook Pros ( see page 7 ), two of them featuring the Touch Bar, Apple’s brand-new touch control panel at the top of the keyboard. The MacBook Pro got a minimal refresh in October 2015 to introduce the Force Touch trackpad, but it’s been a minute since the line has seen a major update. As new products come in, old products must go out—so Apple’s complete MacBook lineup now looks a little different. Here’s a look at each MacBook in Apple’s collection, including information on pricing and on-sale dates for the just-announced Pros. THE NEW MACBOOK…

NONDA HUB+ MINI If you have a 2015 (not 2016) MacBook, and you have a DisplayPort version of the Apple Cinema Display (models A1267 and A1316)—not the Thunderbolt version—then the Nonda Hub+ mini ( nonda.co ) fits your needs. If you want to drop $150. For that price, you get a nice little package of brushed aluminum, available in three finishes. It comes with a short, removable USB-C host cable that’s intentionally directional. One end (marked) fits into the dock very neatly and solidly; the other plugs as firmly into the MacBook as Apple’s own charging cable. With a two-display setup streaming 4K video from YouTube to the Apple Cinema Display, performance went off without a hitch. —GLENN FLEISHMAN WACOM BAMBOO SLATE The concept is simple: If you like to…

“I DO THINK THAT A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THE POPULATION OF DEVELOPED COUNTRIES, AND EVENTUALLY ALL COUNTRIES, WILL HAVE AR EXPERIENCES EVERY DAY, ALMOST LIKE EATING THREE MEALS A DAY.” Apple CEO Tim Cook has a hunch about the future of augmented reality, and whether it will ever become mainstream. Recently, Cook said that it will take some time for AR to become “acceptable.” But once that happens, AR experiences will be an integral part of our daily lives, comparing the emerging technology to the iPhone and eating three meals a day. “I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day. It will become that much a part of…

In the first part of this series, we took an initial look at setting up the Calendar service in macOS Server. Now we’ll look at some of the advanced features available to you within the Calendar service. MANAGING RESOURCE ACCESS The default scheduling behavior for resources is Accept If Free, Decline If Busy. Which makes perfect sense in most situations. But in some cases you may want to make someone responsible for managing access to resources, particularly if you have someone or some group responsible for the devices and rooms used for meetings. In order to use this feature effectively you’ll need to have Open Directory set up on your server, which is something we covered in our Primer on Profile Manager ( go.macworld.com/profilemanager ) a few months ago. If…

One of the most exciting projects you can tackle in image editing software that supports layering—Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Pixelmator, etc.—is to combine images in interesting ways. Whether you’re crafting a surreal piece of art or swapping heads, the process is similar in each program. In this column, you’ll learn how to use Photoshop Elements to combine a photo of an Italian villa and a glass of red wine in order to create a version of Italy you can drink. COMBINE THE IMAGES INTO A SINGLE DOCUMENT, ROTATE AND RESIZE 1. Fire up the Elements Editor and click the Expert button at the top of the workspace. 2. Choose File → Open and locate the image you want to base the composite on, such as the wine glass shown here.…

How to troubleshoot a swollen Photos cache folder Q: I have a massive Photos library and use iCloud Photo Library stored on an external HD to maintain a local backup of all pictures. However, my wife and I use a large number of shared albums to share our pictures with each other, and these keep eating up space on my MacBook Pro in com.apple. cloudphotosd. My MacBook Pro keeps filling up, rendering Photos completely unusable. — Michael McKissack A: You’re not alone in experiencing this! And it’s definitely a loose thread in how Apple manages photo storage. The ~/Library/Containers/com. apple.cloudphotosd folder is a cache, not part of your Photos library. It’s used both for temporary storage, as images are synced and transferred to your library, and as local storage for…

Apple’s never been shy about shaving off features in its quest for slimmer, faster computing. The new MacBook Pro lineup is no exception. Following in the footsteps of the radical 12-inch MacBook, the revamped MacBook Pro and its slick Touch Bar cull several old standbys from its design—and kill one of its siblings in the process. Here are seven technologies eradicated in the new MacBook Pro notebooks. For more details on whether we think the eliminations are worthwhile, check out Macworld’s MacBook Pro hands-on impressions ( see page 79 ). MAGSAFE This hurts. This really hurts. The MacBook’s vaunted, brilliant MagSafe used magnets to gently attach your power cord to your laptop, rather than relying on a hard connector jammed inside a port. MagSafe clamped on tightly enough to stay…

FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS, the options for professional font-management utilities have been three: Extensis’s Suitcase Fusion, Monotype’s FontExplorer X Pro, and Insider Software’s FontAgent Pro (now simply FontAgent). Each caters to a different type (pun intended) of user, and FontAgent 7 ( go.macworld.com/fontagent7 ) seems squarely aimed at users who need to manage a sizable collection of fonts but don’t want to worry about lots of details. It also makes sharing a font collection among multiple Macs or members of a workgroup very simple. New to FontAgent 7 is an updated interface, new font previews, a dramatically improved font identification engine that eliminates the need for dedicated FontAgent libraries, auto-activation plug-ins for the latest design apps from Adobe and Quark, and a new way to share fonts. NEW INTERFACE…

The best camera is the one you have with you, the old cliché goes, and as we found in our experiment, if that camera happens to be an iPhone 7 Plus, you’re going to be just fine. The dual-lens camera system lets it take better photos than any smartphone we’ve tried, and the Portrait mode in iOS 10.1—which was just recently pushed out—is a lot of fun to play with. Adam, our staff photographer, was incredibly eager to see what the iPhone 7 Plus could do, so we hired a model to re-create the kind of fashion photo shoot that he would normally do with his trusty Sony a7R II with a Canon 50mm lens. We shot indoors in low lighting as well as full light, then took the show…

FOR MY SON’S FIRST CHRISTMAS, his godfather gifted him a stuffed animal. Although the kid didn’t immediately fall in love with that floppy-eared brown dog, within a few months the mutt we christened Biscuit became a more loyal companion than the family’s real-life canine. Soon, the two of them were inseparable—together while shopping with Mommy, playing with friends, or as a passenger on cross-country road trips. My son was so devoted, my wife and I feared the day would come when Biscuit could be accidentally left behind. That was exactly what happened a few years ago during a fateful McDonald’s trip with grandpa. (He was found, but not before sufficiently terrifying the entire family.) Nearly seven years later, Biscuit doesn’t travel as much as he used to, but my son…

IN 2014, THE COMPANY INKED A DEAL WITH IBM TO DEVELOP MOBILE-FIRST ENTERPRISE APPS FOR A VARIETY OF INDUSTRIES, A MOVE THAT HAS BEEN INCREDIBLY SUCCESSFUL. Last year, IBM made a bold decision. The company let its employees choose between a Windows PC or a Mac for their own work machines. IBM staffers prefer Macs, so the company bought up 30,000 of them. This year, IBM has 90,000 Macs in use. But Macs are expensive, as we all know, so IBM must be spending a fortune on making the switch…right? Apparently not. IBM said recently at the Jamf Nation User Conference that it’s actually saving money on each Mac: $273 to $543 per Mac over four years, compared to a Windows PC over the same time period. And no, that’s…

Apple showcased its new MacBook Pro recently and demonstrated the new Touch Bar, an OLED touchbar across the top of the keyboard that replaces the function keys. The Touch Bar can be customized to suit the app that your Mac is currently running. The problem is that you may not have instant access to one of the most important keys on your Mac: The Escape (esc) key. The esc key isn’t completely gone. If the Touch Bar is in another mode, you can hold down the fn key on the lower left of the keyboard. That will make the function keys appear on the Touch Bar, and that includes an esc key. Maybe that’s not good enough for you. Maybe you want a physical esc key you can access instantly.…

Watermarking your photos is a fantastic branding opportunity. It can also deter photo theft, and including your URL in the watermark ensures anyone who sees the image online can easily find you and book a session. If you use Adobe Lightroom, you can create graphic or text-based watermarks quickly and easily, even though in Photoshop it takes far more effort. In this column, you will learn how to make a simple text-based watermark in Lightroom and then apply it using the Export command. CREATING A WATERMARK To create a watermark, choose Lightroom → Edit Watermarks. In the resulting dialog box, turn on Text. In the field below the image, enter some text and be sure to include your URL. To copyright the photo, add a copyright symbol by pressing Option-G…