Table of contents for July 2014 in Macworld Australia

Is this the beginning of Tim Cook’s Apple? That is the question that some pundits ended up with in the wake of the company’s WWDC event in June. It seems that many on the periphery of the Apple space enjoy proclaiming the death of Apple, always referring to Steve Jobs’ ghost hanging over those who walk the halls of Cupertino. ‘Steve Jobs wouldn’t have allowed this’, ‘this wouldn’t have launched if Jobs was alive’, we often hear those naysayers claim. The WWDC keynote that Apple produced may have put some of these to bed. This is now Tim Cook’s Apple. It has been for a while now, but his influences are starting to be very apparent. Steve Jobs was, from what I have read, certain about what the public needed…

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO BECOME PRODUCTIVE AT HOME? AND HOW MUCH WILL IT COST? When the time comes to get some work done at home, there’s more to setting up a home office than simply slapping your MacBook down on the dining room table. Whether you’re self-employed or working for the man, chances are you sometimes need to knock over some work at home. If these times are few and far between, then you may get away with sitting at the dining table or resting on the couch, but often there comes a time when you need to create yourself a decent workspace. ADAM TURNER investigates. The key to working at home is productivity – there’s little point in burning through your home time if you’ve got little to…

SETUP THREE WAYS TO CUSTOMISE THE INTERFACE 1. Make the text larger and bolder. The Helvetica Neue font can be difficult to read at times. If you have trouble reading text on your iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Larger Text to increase the default font size on your device. To make that font size even larger, enable Larger Accessibility Sizes in apps that support the feature. And to make Helvetica Neue show up just a bit bolder, visit Settings > General > Accessibility and enable the Bold Text slider. (You’ll have to restart your iPhone after doing this.) 2. Bring back the buttons. iOS 7 has ditched most of the traditional buttons that past versions of the mobile OS offered. But if you’re after…

Beats by Dr. Dre Wireless There’s no doubt that Beats by Dr. Dre has become one of the world’s most identifiable products. But the Beats Wireless headphones aren’t only about looks – they deliver excellent, albeit pricey, quality. Headphone fit can be a very subjective thing. We found the Beats Wireless to be quite a tight fit and there’s very little padding on the top section. As a result, we found them to be quite uncomfortable once we had them on for an hour or so, even though we did play with the adjustment quite a bit. As expected, charging was over USB, with battery life rated at 10 hours – enough for a day in the office or some travel. Sound quality was very good. The bass didn’t exhibit…

Similar to Apple’s AirPort Express, the Netgear Trek N300 travel router can act as a range extender on your home Wi-Fi network. You can plug the Trek into any power point, make a wireless link back to your main base station, and then relay the Wi-Fi signal to those hard-to-reach corners of your home. When the Trek is connected to your wireless network, you can use its two built-in Ethernet ports to connect internet-enabled gear to your home network – using the Trek as a wireless bridge. For example, if your Smart TV features an Ethernet port but not built-in Wi-Fi, then you could connect your Smart TV to the internet by connecting it to the Trek via an Ethernet cable, and then linking the Trek to your Wi-Fi network.…

JONATHAN STEWART SPOTLIGHT I really like the update to Spotlight in OS X Yosemite. Locating documents, applications and searching the internet will be a cleaner experience. MADELEINE SWAIN FAMILY SHARING Anybody that knows me will already know I'm going to plump for the Family Sharing features of iOS 8! A no-brainer in our house. TYNAN McCARTHY CONTINUITY I'm excited to be able to make and receive phone calls and send messages on my Mac. MONIQUE BLAIR iCLOUD DRIVE It's a Dropbox-like service that syncs documents across Macs, iOS devices and Windows, offering an iCloud storage folder directly within Finder. Great idea!…

DECKSET PRODUCTIVITY Unsigned Integer $24.99 Like Adobe Voice (App Guide, Page 53), Unsigned Integer’s Deckset aims to remove this obstacle while making it easy to create clean, attractive presentations. But unlike Adobe’s iPad creation, this Mac app goes about the task in a very different – and delightful – way. Though it offers eight beautiful themes for your presentations, the majority of your visual work with Deckset is done outside the app, in your favourite plain-text editor. That’s because Deckset uses basic Markdown syntax to style your text to your theme. One omission we hope to see addressed in future versions is transitions. Deckset is the kind of program that begs you to save time with it rather than spending hours styling font colours and sizes. HIDER 2 UTILITIES MacPaw…

FITSTAR HEALTH & FITNESS FitStar iPHONE & iPAD FREE (in-app purchases) Like many other fitness apps, FitStar aims to help you improve your personal fitness and stamina with not much more than your own body weight. It uses a mix of squats, planks, bridges, twists, leg-lifts and yoga moves to get you stronger and faster in your daily life. Not only is FitStar beautifully-designed – a criterion many workout apps tend to gloss over – but its programs are designed with your own personal tolerances in mind. When you start up the app, it runs you through a basic fitness test and has you rate each task; from there, you get assigned badges for your prowess in certain areas. The app then incorporates that data into creating your workout plans,…

THE SHAMBLES THAT IS PAGES 5.2 I have owned Apple computers since about 1982 (Apple IIc) and at present own both a MacBook Pro and an iMac that is less than a year old (as well as two iPhones, two iPods and three iPads). Since I have retired, I have written many books on family history all using Pages Layout. All was going well until I upgraded to the new version of Pages. I was halfway through my last book. All hell broke loose when I opened the file with the ‘new and improved version’. Much to my disgust and disappointment, the Layout capabilities within Pages had undergone major revision – Layout was gutted of some of its major creativity functions. Gone are the linked text boxes; gone too the…

Cygnett ChargeUp Sport The Cygnett ChargeUp is a portable battery bank for your smart devices. The power pack carries 4400mAh of charge in a rubber exterior. The ChargeUp Sport lets you know the level of charge remaining via a LED indicator and is available in black or grey with colour trims. $39.95 / Cygnett / au.cygnett.com Native Union Switch Searching for a portable Bluetooth speaker? Maybe the Native Union Switch is the audio device for you. The Switch is a three-way Bluetooth speaker, conference call unit and smartphone charger. The speaker has an 1800mAh battery, boasting up to 14 hours of music and calls and a USB port for charging external devices. The Bluetooth can cover 10 metres. From $199.95 Native Union www.nativeunion.com/au Just Mobile AluCable Flat The…

YOU CAN ASK THE MACWORLD AUSTRALIA TEAM ANY MAC- OR APPLE-RELATED QUESTIONS BY EMAILING EDITOR@MACWORLD.COM.AU . ANSWERS THIS MONTH BY CHRISTOPHER BREEN AND DAN MILLER. ! MAGNETIC SIMs  I have a neat tip that may be of interest to readers, especially those with an iPhone who regularly switch SIM cards. As it turns out the SIM eject tool (at least the recent Liquidmetal ones) are susceptible to magnetic fields. There's a very handy one on most recent Apple displays in the top right-hand corner... Gavin Maxwell • 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 drifter laptop backpack worth $169.95.…