Tabla de contenidos para November 2015 en Macworld Australia

As I write this, the fourth anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death has just passed. When his illness was first revealed there was great concern in the business and technology world at how Apple might persist without its, arguably, most influential founder. Clearly, the company has not just survived, but has flourished. New products, booming revenues and a burgeoning share price suggest Apple is well into a period of growth. That had me thinking: if Apple were software what version would we be on? Clearly, the Jobs/Wozniak era of the 70s and early 80s was Version 1.0. But then Jobs was out of the company and the next version of Apple was born. Apple 2.0 was not a great release. It became bloated, suffered from a lack of clear direction and…

APPLE’S LEADERS PAY TRIBUTE TO STEVE JOBS Monday 5 October marked the fourth year anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death. He would’ve been 60 this year. To commemorate Jobs’ life and legacy, several Apple executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, penned personal remembrances that were posted on AppleWeb, Cupertino’s internal news website. “He was unselfish in the face of his own mortality,” wrote Cook, recalling his last days with the iconic Apple co-founder. Cook shared how he had offered Jobs a portion of his own liver for a donor liver transplant, but Jobs refused. “Even when his outlook was bleak and he had every right to accept help, he refused, rather than put a friend’s health at risk,” Cook continued. “He put his compassion for me above his own needs, and…

BARTENDER 2 UTILITY Surtees Studios $21.94 (UPGRADE $10.97) Early in OS X’s evolution, only a handful of system items appeared by default or by choice in the menu bar at the far right. Over time, Apple has added more options as monitors have stretched. At the same time, third-party developers have found endless reasons to stick sometimes quite sophisticated controls up there as well. It can be a mess. Bartender appeared a few years ago to provide a way to reduce the clutter with a lot of control. It seemed imperilled when El Capitan’s technical features were announced, as it relied on modified system settings in a way that the new System Integrity Protection (SIP) mode, turned on by default, wouldn’t allow. Fortunately for Surtees Studios, it had a revamped…

When we plan each issue of Macworld Australia we take a look at what has being going on in the Apple universe and come up with some ideas for the different stories, reviews and features. Originally, the plan was to have a story on the recently released iOS 9 (which has already seen two updates as we’re writing this), another on the new iPhone 6s and, possibly, how iOS 9 runs on older devices. But like the German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke once said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” In our case, the article plan fell over at the first paragraph because it’s difficult, when looking at new hardware and software at the same time, to separate the two. That’s Apple’s ‘secret sauce’ or ‘11 secret…

OUTSTANDING VERY GOOD GOOD FLAWED UNACCEPTABLE Sennheiser Urbanite XL This $200 Sennheiser Urbanite headphone emulates the big, bulky, Beats aesthetic. As Sennheiser says, it has “massive bass”, but that bass compromises clarity. Aside from the booming bass, there’s poor definition across the spectrum. When we set my iPhone’s EQ to Bass Reducer, much of the music we listened to sounded tinny and distorted. This isn’t a fault of the EQ; using the same setting with other headphones didn’t result in poor sound. It’s the heaviest of the headphones we tried, at 205g, and it feels bulky on the head. There’s no case, only a cloth carrying bag, but it has a removable flat cable, which is less likely to tangle, and the cable has an inline remote with control buttons…

ANTHONY CARUANA Electronic door locks so I can check if I’ve locked up when I go out rather than worrying about whether I remembered to lock the door. MADELEINE SWAIN Some WeMo gadgets are sounding good, so I can turn off all the lights and equipment the children left on without having to get out of bed… JAMUNA RAJ A GoPro camera. It’ll be a timely gift for my travels! MONIQUE BLAIR The new Apple TV so I can test out apps on TV with tvOS!…

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The new Outlook 2016 for Mac is the same solid, dependable, occasionally cluttered app it’s always been, for good or ill. If you’re looking for must-have reasons to upgrade to the new Office suite in order to get the new Outlook, you won’t find them here. Unless you rely heavily on Outlook’s still superb integration of mail and calendars, you can probably find nimbler, more innovative email alternatives. THE NOT-SO-BIG THREE Microsoft’s Office blog excitedly touts three major new features of Outlook 2016. First, push email support means that new mail shows up in your inbox as it arrives, without requiring you to check for it. This is definitely convenient, especially for business users who can’t afford to miss a…

TWEETBOT SOCIAL MEDIA Tapbots iPAD AND iPHONE $6.49 You’ll find few enmities so fierce and opinions as strong as those discussing which Twitter client is the best. Tweetbot has been my client of choice for years, for both iOS and OS X. Tweetbot 4 for iOS is now out, and shows why my trust is well-placed. The product continues to mature and deepen, incorporating a lot of small, welcome changes and building in new features made available by Twitter, as well as adding some large ones. Notably, a new statistics and activity view gives you quick and easy insight into how people are reacting to what you tweet. The biggest improvement is landscape support, while the iPad and iPhone 6 Plus and 6s Plus receive a new column view, allowing…

Belkin’s quest for total home domination is in full flight. As well as automating many appliances and helping you monitor and manage power consumption through the WeMo range of products, it has a hand in security with its two camera products: the NetCam ($129.95) and NetCam HD. I’ve been testing the NetCam HD for a few weeks. Setup required installation of Belkin’s free NetCam from the App Store to my iPhone. From there, I connected directly to the NetCam HD over a point-to-point Wi-Fi connection that was used to configure the NetCam HD for my wireless network. The process worked quite well. It does require you to create an account with Belkin but, once the camera is on your network and has internet access, you can access it when you’re…

GOODBYE TO MY FAVOURITE BIG CAT Well it’s finally happened. After six happy years of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, I’ve finally been forced to update. I don’t consider myself someone who’s particularly resistant to change; in fact, I’m usually one of the early adopters of new technology. But I’m self-employed, and my income is directly proportionate to my productivity on the computer, so I tend to shy away from anything that may compromise that. When I hear things like ‘major upgrade’ and ‘some compatibility issues’ or, worse still, ‘a great new way of doing things’, I am more than a little hesitant to partake. My main computer is an early 2008 Mac Pro with 3GHz dual quad core processors, 32Gb of RAM and a solid-state hard drive. The computer…

Passport. MacBook. iPhone. iPad. If you’re anything like me, this is how your packing list begins. It could be yet another business trip, a well-earned overseas holiday or even a long weekend away. But it’s a safe bet that for Macworld Australia readers, a clutch of Apple tech is always your travelling companion. In this month’s feature, we’ve pulled together a stack of real-world tips for travelling with your Mac and assorted iDevices that’ll get you ready to roam. Now all you need to do is book your ticket… PREP YOUR TECH TRAVEL KIT One of those fancy business class or first class amenity kit bags, emptied of its moisturisers and what-nots, makes a perfectly-sized pouch for odds and ends such as USB cables, adapter plugs, SD cards and a…

One of the advantages of doing the last Office 2016 product review is that I can leverage work others have done to save you, the reader, from some redundant explanation. So, if you haven’t yet, check out the reviews of Outlook, PowerPoint and Word. Much of what you’ll read about in those apps applies to Excel 2016 for Mac, too: Mac-specific features like multi-touch gestures, full screen support, Retina graphics, a cleaned-up and easily-hidden ribbon, a fixed task pane that replaces floating palettes for formatting, integrated support for OneDrive and excellent cross-platform file compatibility. You can read more about these features in the above mentioned reviews; they work just the same way in the new Excel. (As with the other apps, you can only presently get Excel 2016 if you’re…

LifeProof Nüüd for iPad Air 2 Your iPad Air packs in some pretty sophisticated tech in a very compact body. While Apple uses some of the best materials of any technology maker, there are situations your iPad just isn’t made for. The LifeProof Nüüd cocoons your iPad Air 2 – there are versions for almost every other iOS device – so that it’s protected from water, snow and dust, as well as falls. The Nüüd offers plenty of protection. Rather than covering the iPad’s touchscreen, the Nüüd forms a waterproof and dustproof seal around the edge of the display. This ensures no contaminants can get into the iPad’s inner workings while ensuring you can still use the touchscreen easily. Every port is still accessible courtesy of well-sealed flaps and other…

! Autocorrecting names If you find that autocorrect tries to correct people’s names wrongly for you, then add their name as a contact. The contact need only contain the person’s first name and doesn’t need anything else. After doing this on my iPhone I no longer have issues with my daughter’s name being constantly marked as misspelled or corrected to the wrong word. Jamie Dobbs This is a really handy tip. While autocorrect does a reasonable job at fixing many typos, some of its mangling of names is pretty incredible. Thanks for this, Jamie. • EACH MONTH, STM gives a prize to the Macworld Australia reader who submits the best and most useful tip (undocumented tips preferred). This month’s prize is a comfortable and portable STM sequel small laptop shoulder…

To say the fitness tracker and smartwatch category is getting crowded is something of an understatement. But when an established player such as Fitbit adds a new product to the mix it’s worth taking a look. The Fitbit Surge isn’t a smartwatch, although it does have some basic smartwatch features. And it’s more than a regular fitness tracker, as it does more than simply count steps. As a keen exerciser, I’ve been looking forward to putting the Surge through its paces for some time. I’ve worn it while playing tennis, engaging in various fitness classes, including boxing, Pilates and weight training, as well as on many runs and the occasional bike ride. And while it lacks some of the high-end features found in speciality devices – such as pacing tools…