Indice dei contenuti per September 2013 in Macworld

The 2009 release of Comixology’s Comics app was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between comicbook readers and their mobile devices. But the app’s interface hasn’t really changed—until now. In addition to the existing one-page and Guided View options, the updated version has two modes—two-page and fit-to-width—that users of Retina iPads and the iPad mini will find especially welcome. Additional Viewing Modes If you hold your iPad in landscape mode, the two-page view places the left and right pages of a comic together, whether it’s a two-page spread or two single pages. The text and art become rather small, but eagle-eyed readers might find the results acceptable on a Retina iPad display. Two-page view has been available on Comixology’s Web-based reader for some time, so the company maintains a solid…

When Apple CEO Tim Cook first took the wraps off iOS 7 at June’s Worldwide Developers Conference, he called it the most significant overhaul of Apple’s mobile operating system since the company got into the smartphone business back in 2007. The Alabama-born Cook wasn’t just whistling Dixie: iOS 7 is a dramatic reinvention of the mobile software that goes beyond mere additions and enhancements. Apple is changing the very look of iOS itself. As we wait for this new iOS to be released, we’ve taken the opportunity to examine prerelease versions and to ask Apple some questions. Here, then, is what we know so far—and what you have to look forward to.…

That preview version was released under Apple’s confidentiality agreement with developers, so we can’t talk too specifically about what it does or doesn’t contain. But while hanging around with developers, we couldn’t help but take an occasional glance at phones running the new iOS, to see where it’s headed. As we write, iOS 7 is still just a first beta, and (if you ask us) the OS will change a lot before it sees the light of day. But in the meantime, here are some firsthand impressions. FADE TO BLACK Locking and unlocking the iPhone comes with a fade-in/fade-out effect, which seems to be a combination of a fade effect on the screen itself plus a change in screen brightness. It’s gentle, but welcome. SLIDE TO UNLOCK The ‘Slide to…

Mountain Lion’s Messages can help you keep in touch with coworkers and friends. But the app hides some less obvious features, including screen sharing, remote slideshows and presentations, and the ability to view past chats. Share Your Screen With Messages Messages lets you see and control the screen of another Mac over the Internet. This invaluable feature enables me, as Tech Expert of the Family, to troubleshoot a relative’s or friend’s computer from clear across the country. We share the screen: I tinker with a few things, and I let them know what I’m doing as I do it. As we share, we can talk to one another via the Mac’s microphone and speakers, avoiding the cost of a long-distance call. Someone probably plays a similar role in your circle…

My wife and I are professional writers. A few months ago, on the advice of our accountant, we reorganized our small business as a corporation. We agreed to endure a considerable amount of extra paperwork in exchange for significant financial and legal benefits. Accountants Love QuickBooks Our accountant all but insisted that we use QuickBooks so that she could easily view and update our financial records. Unfortunately, data files in the Mac version of QuickBooks 2013 ( ; go.macworld.com/qb2013mac) aren’t cross-platform compatible. To share data with our Windows-using accountant, we’d have to back up the data in QuickBooks for Windows format and send her that file, which she could then “restore.” Eventually, she would send the edited file back to us to reimport. But in the meantime, we would not…

Steve Jobs famously referred to Blu-ray as “a bag of hurt” back in 2008 during a Q&A with the press: “I don’t mean from a consumer point of view—it’s great to watch movies—but the licensing is so complex. We’re waiting until things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives.” Four and a half years later, OS X still doesn’t support Blu-ray playback, nor has any Mac shipped with a drive capable of reading or burning data on a Blu-ray disc. And given that few Macs even include optical drives these days, Apple is unlikely to ever bring Blu-ray to the Mac. The Blu-ray format has come a long way, and the…

Hardware Apple iPod Touch ; $229; Apple; www.apple.com In most ways, the $229 16GB fifth-generation iPod touch is identical to the 32GB and 64GB fifth-generation models released in October 2012. It has the same dimensions, 4-inch Retina display, dualcore A5 processor, frontfacing FaceTime HD camera (with its 1.2-megapixel photos and 720p video capabilities), Lightning cable, and remoteless EarPods. Given that it offers no new or improved capabilities over its highercapacity siblings, your buying criteria boil down to just a few factors: money, storage space, and what you want from an iPod touch’s camera. This model is $70 less than the 32GB model. If your budget is tight, this is the one to pick. However, its limited capacity makes it ill-suited for anyone who tends to store rather than stream media.…

Review RATING PRICE $149 COMPANY Adobe URL adobe.com If you like Lightroom 4, you’re probably going to appreciate version 5 even more, as this latest version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom introduces a new set of well-thought-out features while also maintaining snappy performance. Some of the new features are innovative. Others are refinements to existing tools. As for the stuff that grabs your attention: Upright offers four modes to straighten images. Smart Previews lets you work on images even when the originals aren’t available. The Advanced Healing Brush corrects irregular shapes. The Radial Gradient tool provides a way to direct your viewer’s eyes to a particular area of the image. And Video Slideshows enables you to connect clips into a single presentation. Smart Previews If you want to leave your original…

The last major version of iPhoto—iPhoto ’11—came out in October 2010. But looking at iPhoto for iOS, I suspect Apple is working on a major overhaul of the Mac application, which would explain the development lag. However, until the next major version appears, here are four ways Apple could improve iPhoto ’11 in the short term. 1. Turn Off Faces Nothing spins up the fans on my MacBook Pro like iPhoto, and that’s because it appears to be searching for people to identify for the Faces feature in the background. I think Faces is a fine idea, and iPhoto does a good job of locating people in pictures after you’ve spent time identifying them in several shots. But I don’t use it enough to justify hogging a majority of my…

UTILITY: Keyboard Maestro 6.0 $36; Stairways Software; keyboardmaestro.com Many users whose relationship with the Mac predates OS X retain an affection for macro utilities—applications that let you string together a series of actions to automate repetitive tasks, and summon those macros with a click or a key press. Keyboard Maestro is one of the best, and the workflow in the latest version remains simple. The macro editor has three columns. The first includes any macro groups you’ve created and the All Macros group. The second displays all macros in the selected group. The third column details the actions included in the selected macro. When you create a new macro, the third column becomes the editing area, where you add actions and configure triggers. You can classify Keyboard Maestro’s new features…

In June, Apple announced that the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education had approved deploying iPads to students across the district. The deal, worth $30 million, will see an iPad distributed to every student on 47 campuses this year—and that’s just the beginning. Jaime Aquino, the LAUSD’s deputy superintendent of instruction, says the goal is to provide every child with a device by 2014. The district has more than 640,000 students in its 900-plus campuses and 187 charter schools. The rollout, when complete, will mark the largest such deployment in the country. It will bolster Apple’s presence in the education realm, too; Phil Schiller, vice president of worldwide marketing, announced that nearly 10 million iPads are already in schools. Education has long been part of Apple’s DNA. Last…

Star Command GAMES In this challenging and addictive strategy game loosely based on Star Trek, you get a ship and a crew, and you use both to fight enemies over several missions. At first, combat is overwhelming, and not well explained; just when I got used to ordering my crew around, the game threw me into battle and forced me to manage a dozen things at once. After you get the hang of combat, you’ll wish you had more stuff to do and more things to fight. My biggest issue with Star Command is its narrow focus. I love visiting planets, meeting a diverse spectrum of aliens, and organizing the ship. But every battle involves enemies boarding your ship—you can’t send an away team to attack theirs. You also can’t…

SYSTEM IMPROVEMENTS System improvements aren’t always the flashiest features, so they can get short shrift at keynote presentations. But they’re often hidden gems. Audio-only FaceTime calls: This little nugget got a few seconds during the WWDC keynote when Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, briefly mentioned its virtues. Audioonly Face Time calls will allow you to voice-chat with other people—no phone plan needed—but only over Wi-Fi. We’re sure that Apple would love to implement this feature over 4G and LTE networks, but we’re also pretty certain that AT&T and the other cellular providers would have something to say about that. Given the short time Apple spent on the topic during the presentation, it’s uncertain whether audio-only calls might also make their way to the Mac via OS X…

Among our favorite utilities at Macworld is Smile’s $35 Text-Expander ( go.macworld.com/textexp4). For people who type for a living, TextExpander—or a similar app such as Ettore Software’s $20 TypeIt4Me ( ; go.macworld.com/typeit4me) or Startly’s $60 QuicKeys ( ; go.macworld.com/quickeys4)— quickly becomes indispensable. TextExpander enables you to insert fixed bits of text—or “snippets”—by typing short abbreviations. For example, you could create a snippet called Date that inserts the current date whenever you type an abbreviation (I use date), followed by a designated delimiter (I use the backslash key, \). Once you start assembling your library of snippets, they quickly become an integral part of your workflow. Here are some of the snippets I use the most. Email Signatures A snippet can be any little chunk of text that you find yourself…

You probably spend a lot of time moving in and out of folders in the Finder as you navigate among your files and apps. But you may be surprised to learn that OS X gives you many ways to move up a folder in the Finder. Here are eight of them. 1. From the Keyboard This trick lets you move to the folder enclosing the current window’s contents. With a Finder window open, press 1-<Up Arrow>, and your Finder window will shift to show the enclosing folder. 2. From the Finder Toolbar If you double-click a folder to enter it, returning to the folder above it is easy: Click the Back button in the Finder toolbar. If you entered a folder in some other way, however, the Back button will…

Apple recently announced the arrival of HBO Go and WatchESPN on the Apple TV—channels that the Roku streaming player has long offered. HBO Go lets subscribers stream all HBO programming on demand, including older shows such as The Wire, along with all the movies currently showing on HBO. Not all HBO subscriptions include HBO Go access; it’s up to your cable company to support the service. DirecTV is perhaps the most prominent provider not to support either HBO Go or WatchESPN for the Apple TV; however, it says it will soon support HBO Go, and it currently offers access to the HBO Go app for iOS, which you can use to watch HBO Go on the Apple TV via AirPlay. WatchESPN simulcasts ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Goal Line, and ESPN…

Jongo wireless multiroom music system Pure has begun shipping several components of its Jongo multiroom music system in the United States. The $199 Jongo S3 is a portable, rechargeable wireless speaker that can shoot sound 360 degrees or in just one direction. You can stream music to it from a computer or mobile device over Bluetooth or use Wi-Fi to listen on one or more speakers around the house. The $129 Jongo A2 adapter lets you connect to an existing audio system and turn it into a music streamer. (A larger Jongo T6 speaker model will ship later in 2013.) To control Wi-Fi playback, you use the Pure Connect app; a free Pure Connect account lets you stream Internet radio and on-demand programming. And later this year, the Pure Music…

Throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, when just 1000 or so fonts were available for desktop computers, designers had a tongue-in-cheek saying among themselves: The one who dies with the most fonts wins! And it made sense at the time because fonts were coveted by every designer as a creative resource of unparallelled importance; consequently, the prices were astronomical. While supply has risen and prices have dropped over time, one thing still remains true: Fonts are incredibly important to anyone who puts words on paper or pixels. Tiny Programs If your budget is low, or if you just want to experiment with a wide variety of type styles, check out the abundance of free and low-cost sources on the Internet. Warning: Not all fonts are created equal. A font…

Review RATING PRICE $1199 (lowest price) COMPANY Apple URL apple.com Most of the products Apple announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June won’t ship until later this year, but the new MacBook Air is here. It didn’t undergo a dramatic, Mac Pro–like redesign. Even compared with last year’s MacBook Air—which brought Thunderbolt and USB 3.0—this new Air is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Under the Hood The biggest change is the inclusion of Intel’s latest generation of Core processors, code-named Haswell. These fourth-generation Core processors replace the Ivy Bridge chips in last year’s MacBook Air. The Haswell processors require less power than Ivy Bridge, a change that improves battery life in portable computers like the MacBook Air. Haswell also includes new integrated graphics technology in the form of the Intel…

By now, you’ve no doubt heard that Microsoft Office Mobile is available for the iPhone. (Yup, it’s iPhone-only.) Should you care? That depends on whether you are a subscriber to Microsoft’s Office 365 and SkyDrive services, because Office Mobile is really a front end to Office 365, not a stand-alone productivity suite. (The services cost from $100 to $120 annually for personal use. If you want to give the app a test run, Microsoft offers a 30-day free trial of Office 365, which you can set up at office.microsoft.com.) Office Mobile does give you access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each of the three iOS apps lets you read and edit documents created in its related PC, Mac, or Web applications; if you want to create new documents on your…

Hardware HP OfficeJet Pro 276dw ; $375; HP; hp.com Though expensive, HP’s Office-Jet Pro 276dw is an excellent inkjet multifunction printer that supports ethernet, Wi-Fi, and USB. The 276dw also installs easily, produces nice output quickly, and has low ink costs. The MFP sports a 4.3-inch touchscreen control panel with a well-thought-out menu structure. Management features include email alerts, a firewall, and proxy support. Output text is near-laserquality, and color graphics are very nice overall. Plain-paper photos appear a little washed out, but they look good embedded in newsletters and the like. Color photos on glossy paper are excellent, though with slightly orangish skin tones. A greenish tint persists in monochrome graphics printed via PostScript on the Mac. Scan quality is top-notch. In tests, the 276dw printed text pages (which…

Review RATING PRICE $20/month $50/month (full Creative Cloud) COMPANY Adobe URL adobe.com Adobe has added some nice features to its new, subscriptionbased, pro-level Photoshop Creative Cloud; it also rolled all of the features of Photoshop Extended into the CC version. The inclusion of 3D tools aside, Photoshop CC isn’t the most feature-packed release ever, but it has some good stuff, especially in the realm of actions, filters, and enlargements. Unfortunately, Bridge CC, Photoshop’s perennial file management sidekick, didn’t fare as well. New Features Photoshop CC, which you download and install locally on your hard drive, fully supports Retina displays. And look for two new icons at the bottom of the document windows: one for syncing your settings to the Creative Cloud for access on other machines, and one for uploading…

Check Your Laptop Battery’s Health Here’s a quick, handy way to check the vital signs of your Mac laptop’s battery. Usually, when you click the battery-status icon in the menu bar, you get a menu showing you (approximately) how much time you have left before your battery runs out of juice. But if you press <Option> before clicking, you’ll see an additional entry: Condition. You’re hoping it reads ‘Condition: Normal’. (The Condition line won’t appear if you hold down <Option> after you’ve already clicked the menu.) The other status options—Replace Soon, Replace Now, and Service Battery—reflect progressively more serious battery woes. In each of the two Replace options, your battery still functions normally, though it holds less charge than it used to (significantly less, in the case of Replace Now).…

How to Encrypt Your Email Q: After reading stories about the U.S. government’s program to collect phone and Internet data, I’m a little concerned about my email privacy. What can I do to encrypt my email? Jack Burns A: You must first get your hands on a personal certificate. This is a small file, added to the Mac’s keychain, that verifies your identity in mail you send. Symantec sells such things for $23 per year (go. macworld.com/digitalid; you can try one for free for 25 days). You’ll need a separate certificate for each email address you wish to send encrypted messages from. You’ll be asked to register your email address with the certificate seller. A message containing a link to the certificate will be sent to that address. You’ll also…