Tabla de contenidos para Volume 2 2017 en MacLife Specials

Apple devices are some of the most intuitive and user-friendly pieces of technology on the market. But we all run into problems every now and again. The macOS & iOS Support Handbook is here to help you with those every-day problems, and those that might not be so common. We take your thought how to become your very own Apple Genius (move over Apple Store employees!), give your 104 hidden gems from iOS 10, tell you everything you need to know about macOS Sierra, and then some more. Whether you’re looking to get your devices more organised, solve problems or just get to know more about the basic workings, this book can help you. We even put your questions to the test in our extensive Ask section, so there is…

RANDOM FILES ARE UNUSABLE If your files are corrupting or becoming inaccessible, check your Mac’s storage isn’t failing. Internal drives incorporate SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology), which will alert you to developing problems so you can salvage your data before the drive becomes unusable. In Disk Utility, select the drive in the sidebar (not a volume on it) and check its SMART status at the bottom of the window. If it says anything other than ‘Verified’ back up your data and replace the drive as a matter of urgency. SPOTLIGHT RESULTS HAVE BECOME UNMANAGEABLE Strip down what Spotlight includes in its search results by unchecking what you don’t need through its pane in System Preferences. Use the same pane’s Privacy tab to exclude files and folders entirely – perhaps…

I OFTEN NEED TO CHANGE NETWORK SETTINGS As long as Location in System Preferences’ Network pane is set to Automatic, all network interfaces will be active and macOS will check which can provide an Internet connection and use it. If you can’t get online or use network services, choose Edit Locations, click + and give the location a name, click Done. Click the cog under the list and pick Set Service Order to what’s appropriate. In turn, select each interface, click the cog; for any interface you need active, select it and click Advanced, set it up however the administrator has advised – for Wi-Fi, don’t remove networks you need from the Preferred Networks list as that’ll remove them from all locations. Click OK>Apply. To switch between location settings, use…

APPLE’S LATEST AND greatest operating system has landed, bringing not just a change of name from OS X to macOS, but also some fantastic new features to make your Mac more useful than ever. macOS Sierra is here. In this feature we’re taking you into exactly how those features work and what you can do with them. We’ll start with the new Auto- Unlock feature that enables Apple Watch owners to log into their Macs without needing to enter a password – and look at a third-party option to help those without a Watch do the same. Then we’ll look at what Siri can do on the Mac, how Apple has made the Photos app more powerful and smart, iCloud’s fantastic new features, the brilliant Universal Clipboard (and some App…

HAVING BEEN a cornerstone of the iOS experience for several years, Apple’s virtual assistant Siri is now baked into macOS. As long as you have a way to talk to your Mac (using a built-in or external mic), you can give it commands, such as to display weather reports, locate documents, or add events to Calendar. On macOS, Siri lives in the Dock and the menu bar, and is triggered with a click, or you can activate it by holding c+Spacebar for a moment. That’s the same combo that opens Spotlight when pressed and released quickly, so Siri’s System Preferences pane o?ers a couple of alternative shortcuts that you can press in order to avoid confusion, or you can de?ne your own shortcut. However, you’ll need to make sure it…

1 MAGIC MOMENTS In your Photos library, click Memories and then Get Started. Photos will get to work gathering your images into groups it thinks belong together. It’ll automatically name the memories using metadata and tags from the images it’s aggregated. 2 STYLIZE YOUR MEMORIES Everything is auto-generated by Photos, so you only have rudimentary choices over the visual theme and music. There are seven choices of theme, but on the Music tab you can pick anything from your iTunes library for a more personal feel. 3 EXPLORE YOUR MEMORIES With a theme and music chosen, before you click on Play Slideshow, you can scroll down to see the photos that the app has chosen for the memory. Images are displayed in a grid, just like in the Activity view…

RATHER THAN create what Tim Cook once memorably called ‘toaster fridges,’ Apple o?ers distinct devices that communicate e?ectively as a single, coherent ecosystem. Its Continuity features enable you to make and receive phone calls on your Mac, or start a email on one device and continue it on another. With the release of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, Universal Clipboard is added to Continuity’s capabilities. With all your devices signed into the same Apple ID, you can copy text or an image, photo, or video on your iPad, for example, then switch to your Mac or iPhone and paste it in a there. What you copy is sent over a peer-to-peer connection, so nothing’s uploaded to iCloud. Useful third-party Clipboard apps COPIED $7.99 copiedapp.com The basics of Copied more or…

1 SECURE A work computer, games console, family planner, photo album, and a music library… your Mac is an integral part of your life. To prevent that information falling into somebody else’s hands, or your Mac being compromised by outside attack, we’ll walk you through various options for tightening its security. 2 PREVENT Prevention really is better than cure when the “cure” for a significant crash could be spending days trying to reclaim your data. Take practical steps to monitor your Mac when a problem crops up, or even ahead of time, and you can predict or forestall problems before disaster is even able to strike. 3 RECOVER Should the worst happen, don’t panic – we’ll show you how to fix common Mac problems without reaching for your backups. If…

If your Mac is unresponsive or exhibiting problems that can’t be resolved using the tips in the previous section, use your Mac’s diagnostics tools to check for physical problems before contacting Apple for support. First, eject and detach all external devices, then shut down your Mac. Power on your Mac and hold d while it starts up until you see either Apple Diagnostics or Apple Hardware Test. (If you’ve completely erased your Mac’s startup disk in the past, you can start Apple Diagnostics from the Internet by holding Alt+d instead.) On Macs introduced in June 2013 or later, your Mac will run Apple Diagnostics. When finished, either return to macOS if no problems are found, or restart in macOS Recovery (hold c+r), a hidden partition that enables you to repair…

Force Quit The Force Quit key combo (c+Alt+oe) isn’t a panacea for whatever ails your Mac, but it’s the quickest way to see which apps are unresponsive; they’re clearly marked in the list this shortcut reveals, and there’s a button to force the selected apps to quit. Hide everything You may know that c+h hides all of the active app’s windows, and that you can click the app’s Dock icon to bring them back. If you have a screen full of sensitive info in multiple apps, you might put the display to sleep using a method described at apple. co/2frGvfl, which differ between models. Secure your Mac When leaving your Mac alone for a moment in a shared space, logging out is an extreme way to secure it, and it…

The Lock screen 1 The Lock screen has been revised in iOS 10, and you don’t even need to press a button to show it if you leave Settings>Display & Brightness>Raise to Wake on (this needs an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus). Unlocking your device now requires you to press the Home button, rather than swiping. 2 Raise to Wake is complemented by a setting that unlocks a device with Touch ID without even needing to press Home: Settings<General< Accessibility<Home Button<Rest Finger to Open. This is helpful on large iPhones. Note it only works on devices with Touch ID. 3 Notification Center and Control Center are still accessed with swipes inwards from the top and bottom screen edges, respectively, but Today view has been moved: swipe right on the Lock…

What do you do when your Mac goes wrong? Over the following pages, we will unveil the answers. In our Mac|Life handbook, you’ll learn how to diagnose problems with unresponsive Macs, misbehaving network connections, uncooperative backups, and macOS mishaps. A word of advice before you begin: don’t let on to friends and family about your newfound skills, or you’ll be forever plagued by requests for help and advice……

THE FILES I NEED AREN’T IN TIME MACHINE Check the drive or folder in which they’re stored isn’t excluded from the backup set. Open the Time Machine pane in System Preferences and click Options. If the drive or folder is listed here, it’s excluded from Time Machine’s backups: select it and click the – (minus) button. If your backups are on a network drive – a Time Capsule or a NAS with Time Machine support – check their health: hold Alt and click Time Machine’s menu bar icon, and choose Verify Backups; macOS will detail any problems it finds. TIME MACHINE IS TAKING TOO LONG TO BACK UP The first backup creates a complete copy of your Mac’s contents. Later ones should be quicker as Time Machine then only saves…

IF ALL else fails, taking your gear to Apple may be the answer. That said, Apple isn’t always the cheapest option. Before booking in at a Genius Bar, compare Apple’s prices with those charged by your local Authorized Service Provider (apple. co/2fBpTU0), and third party repair stores. If you use a local repair shop, go to getsupport.apple.com, click ‘See your products’ and sign in with your Apple ID to see the warranty status of devices, and whether consumer law might still apply. From here, you can book an appointment for a repair, not only with Apple but also members of its authorized support network. DATA RECOVERY Broken and corrupted hard drives are a frequent cause of lost data, which is why we recommend running both Time Machine and a second…

1 DO MORE WITH YOUR PHOTOS Photos arrived in Yosemite, but it’s taken until now to become really intelligent. The brand new Memories feature collects groups of related images to create a movie, while improved search makes large libraries more manageable. 2 SPRUCE UP MESSAGES Messages on the desktop reflects many of the changes in Messages on iOS 10. You can now interact with messages (similar to a ‘Like’/’Love’ on Facebook), see stickers and bigger emoji, and see Digital Touch drawings. 3 ASK SIRI TO FIND THINGS Siri is getting more powerful with every iOS and tvOS release, and now it’s the turn of the Mac. It’s capable of searching for files, playing music, finding information from the web, adding calendar appointments, and more. 4 MAKE MORE OF THE DESKTOP…

1 SEARCH THE WEB Ask Siri to search the web for a topic. It also knows about sports and weather; ask how a major team fared recently (‘Did the Giants win?’), or for today’s or tomorrow’s forecast. 2 GET ORGANIZED Rather than laboriously typing out Calendar events, you can have Siri ‘set a meeting with Craig on Friday at 9,’ move existing events, or tell you what’s scheduled for a given day. 3 FIND AND OPEN STUFF Open apps, access preference panes, and change things like screen brightness. Have Siri open specific files in certain folders: ‘Show all the JPEGs in my Downloads folder.’ 4 STASH YOUR SEARCHES After finding some files using Siri, click the + to save the search in Notification Center as a Finder Search widget; it’ll…

FOR A LONG while, Apple pushed back against traditional ?le systems. On iOS, documents only live ‘inside’ apps. With |iCloud, cross-device syncing worked well when using the same app on iPad, iPhone, and Mac. However, when using multiple apps, you had to copy documents between them; this often resulted in many part- ?nished ?les strewn across devices. With iCloud Drive’s introduction, Apple added a more typical ?le system to the core iOS experience, and made it accessible on Macs and iOS devices. You can delve into app-speci?c folders, but also add folders of your own, just like in Finder on a Mac. Now, with the release of macOS Sierra, Apple is making a particularly audacious move regarding iCloud Drive, enabling you to keep your Mac’s Desktop and Documents folders on…

>>> APPLE’S INSTANT messaging service is about to get a lot more interesting, with a mix of fun and practical features that make it more engaging. Messages in Sierra supports many of the same tools that are found in the iOS 10 version, enabling you to send a quick reaction to a message in two clicks and without any typing. Share a web page’s address from Safari and Messages presents it more attractively than before, with the page’s title and a picture to make it a little clearer where clicking will take the recipient. The app also deals with media better than before. However, Sierra lacks some stuff from iOS 10; unsurprisingly, fullscreen effects such as balloon animations, but also the message bubble animations. 1 SUPERSIZE YOUR EMOJI Messages already…

Apple Filing System (APFS) is the new storage format which all four of Apple’s operating systems will eventually use. While it isn’t fully used in Sierra, Apple has provided an early version to developers to test in the new OS; APFS supports almost all the same features as HFS+, the Mac’s file system since the late ’90s, but Apple explicitly warns that disk utilities will need to be updated for APFS. So, if you depend on anything of that nature, start saving for an upgraded version. The reason for APFS’s development stems from technical attributes of HFS+ that are a clue to its age; HFS+ dates from a time when magnetic media was the dominant type, whereas APFS will be optimized for the flash storage that’s used in most Apple devices…

The latest operating system comes with an ever-evolving collection of apps that greatly add to your Mac’s total value. Many of them have gained helpful enhancements in Sierra, and new features, such as Siri, offer you fresh ways to work. Though the bundled apps and built-in features can each be used in isolation, some interact to save you time. Sierra detects new people and events in more apps than just Mail, and adds them to Calendar and Contacts if that behavior is enabled in the latter two apps’ General prefs. Let’s look at other fun and practical things it offers. Tweak the menu bar Previously you could move only some of the icons at the right end of the menu bar. In Sierra, by holding c you can drag almost…

Every new version of iOS brings with it a host of changes. Sometimes that means headline features such as an entirely new style of interface, though more often than not, the tweaks are more subtle, if just as useful. iOS 10 was a huge update that added a ridiculous number of new options to your iPhone and iPad – we revealed over 100 in our big feature in issue 120, but there are still more to discover, and new features have been added with Apple’s latest updates. So here are more tips and tricks for iOS 10!…

I CAN’T EMPTY THE TRASH The operating system locks files that it’s using or previewing, so if you can’t empty the Trash entirely there’s a good chance one of its contents is still required by macOS or an app. Quit your apps and try again. If that doesn’t work, it could be that one of its contents is locked. Click Finder in the menu bar, hold Alt and click the Empty Trash option (note that the ellipsis after it disappears when Alt is held, meaning you won’t be asked to provide additional instruction in a dialog). Still no luck? Open Terminal, enter sudo rm ~/.Trash.* and provide an admin account’s name and password as confirmation, then press ®. Back up first! THERE’S AN OPTICAL DISC STUCK IN MY DRIVE If…

HOW DO I KNOW WHETHER A PROBLEM IS MINE OR APPLE’S? iCloud tends to be very stable and its various services exhibit excellent uptime. However, like all online services it can suffer outages from time to time. It’s a good idea to check the service status at apple.com/ support/ systemstatus before tinkering with anything to see whether a problem is at Apple’s end or yours. MY ACCOUNT IS UNEXPECTEDLY FULL Sierra can make use of iCloud to store your Documents and Desktop folders in iCloud Drive so they are available on all your devices. You may have enabled this when you installed Sierra. While useful, this can eat up your iCloud space. To switch it off, go to System Preferences’ iCloud pane, click Options next to iCloud Drive; uncheck Desktop…

>>> YOU CAN unlock a Mac when your Apple Watch running watchOS 3 is nearby. Assuming your Watch has a passcode set and two-factor authentication is enabled for your Apple ID, you can turn on Auto Unlock in System Preferences’ Security & Privacy pane. Try to unlock your Mac; it’ll say it’s doing so with your Watch. If the Watch is absent, you’ll get the standard password screen. Sadly, there’s no automatic locking based on proximity, but MacID can do that (see below). How to Unlock your Mac using your iPhone and MacID 1 INSTALL THE MAC APP Download, install and then open the Mac component of MacID from macid.co. It requires OS X 10.10 and a Mac that supports Bluetooth 4. 2 GET MACID FOR iOS Install MacID ($4.99)…

APPLE SAYS IT brought the new Memories feature to macOS’s Photos app to turn your shots into unforgettable experiences. Well, it’s kind of overdue: Photos on the Mac has been a little underwhelming to date. Most of us use it, but we hardly ever think it’s the complete experience it should be. Photos in Sierra at least takes two steps forward to making us feel like it’s close to being the app we expected to get in the first place. Photos becomes more useful for the most common tasks of searching and displaying your pictures Photos becomes more useful for the most common tasks of searching and displaying your pictures in creative ways. With its ‘machine learning’ tech, not only does Photos have better face recognition – remember how hit-and-miss…

>>> SIERRA’S OPTIMIZED Storage feature provides guidance about operating system and app preferences you may want to change to help conserve storage space – an important consideration given that most MacBooks still ship with a fairly limited amount. The feature isn’t in a particularly obvious place: go to ?>About This Mac, click the Storage tab, then click the Manage button at the top right of your startup disk. The window opens with a Recommendations category selected in its left pane. Some of these actually cover multiple app preferences. For example, if you’re not already using iCloud Photo Library, the top item (Store in iCloud) covers two changes: enabling that feature, but also turning on the ability to move your Desktop and Documents folders to iCloud Drive, which enables files in…

Mac old-timers will often advise keeping around 10% of your startup disk free for temporary storage. These days, that figure may seem a bit excessive now that drive capacities are far larger. However, if you’re using an older computer, or a Mac with a small amount of memory, either add more memory or free up some storage to improve performance. Use Activity Monitor to check memory usage; if the Memory Pressure graph regularly shows orange or red, more memory will mean macOS doesn’t have to write the contents of memory used by idle apps out to disk in order to free up some for apps that need it. On a Mac with a hard drive (not flash storage), keep at least the same amount of free storage as your Mac…

Enable secondary click Though there’s only one discernible button on Apple’s trackpads and mice, you can perform a right-click (known as a secondary click) to access contextual menus – enable it in System Preferences. You can turn it on for both kinds of device separately in the Mouse and Trackpad panes. Trackpads offer an alternative option of pressing either their bottomleft or bottom-right corner for a secondary click. Desktop navigation Swipe left or right between desktops and fullscreen apps using four fingers on a trackpad or two fingers on a Magic Mouse. Double-tap (lightly) with two fingers on a Magic Mouse or swipe upwards with four fingers on a trackpad to open Mission Control and switch to another window. Turn on App Exposé in the Trackpad pane and you’ll find that…

> Preserve Camera settings in iOS 10.2 The Camera app defaults to the standard Photo setting when you open it, but maybe you tend to mostly use the Square setting, or take video. A new setting in iOS 10.2 will help – go to Settings> Photos & Camera>Preserve Settings. If you switch on “Camera Mode,” the app will remember what mode you used when you last used the app, and will open to that. “Photo Filter” and “Live Photo” do the same for Live Filters you were using and Live Photos, respectively. > View related photos When viewing an image in Photos, if you place your finger on it and swipe upwards, you’ll be shown more information. First are any people in the image, then location. Under that will be…

TECH SUPPORT & TECHSPLANATIONS This problem hasn’t just affected many users of Synology NAS drives, but people using alternatives from some other vendors, too. There have been long discussions and suggestions of solutions on Synology’s and other support forums – see bit.ly/2fbYBCR for just one example – but no one has yet discovered a lasting answer. It’s probably the result of a mismatch between Synology’s software and macOS Sierra. To convince Time Machine that it’s a suitable backup store, the software running on the NAS has to follow various protocols. Sierra has apparently changed its side of that, either intentionally or due to bugs, and thrown the process off. It’s always worth checking that your NAS is running the latest version of its software, and that you’ve followed the instructions…