Innehållsförteckning för January 2016 från Macworld

It’s not clear when it happened, but Amazon recently added two-factor authentication as a login option for your Amazon account. This is a key security measure that’s long overdue on a site that handles your credit card information. For several years, we’ve encouraged you to add two-factor authentication to your accounts whenever possible, and Amazon is no different. When the new security option is active, signing in is a two-step process. First, you sign-in with your password as usual, then you’ll be required to enter a short code generated by a smartphone authenticator app or received in a text message. The advantage is that if your password is compromised by a hacker, they won’t be able to access your account without the short code—a much harder proposition. If you want…

While Apple was busy touting the benefits of increasing the iPad’s overall size, iPad keyboard maker Brydge has been hard at work creating a keyboard for the iPad mini. The $129 BrydgeMini (brydgekeyboards.com) is available in gold, silver, and space grey, naturally, to match your iPad mini—and the keyboard is compatible with every version of the iPad mini except for the iPad mini 4. Like other keyboards for the iPad mini, the BrydgeMini is cramped, but does a good job at hiding that fact—I could pair it to my test device and begin typing relatively error-free almost instantly. The main letter keys are sufficient in size, as are the number keys, and there’s a handy top row of iOS shortcut keys.…

While Getting Things Done (go.macworld.com/gtd) might be a proven method for maximizing organization and efficiency, you don’t need to adopt a whole new philosophy just to get your life in order. All you need is the right app. However, finding that one perfect app can be the most difficult task of all. Do a search for “task manager” or “list maker” and you’ll get dozens of apps solely dedicated to scheduling and organizing your life. The task managers on this list all let you dive in and out of your lists and to-dos with ease and efficiency, showcasing not just the beauty of iOS but also its power and versatility. And of course, they will all help you get things done. Here are our picks. THE BEST TASK MANAGER: TODOIST…

APPLE’S PRESSURE-SENSITIVE PENCIL is a home run, exhibiting remarkable performance on the new iPad Pro, but that should not come as a shock: The two were engineered from the ground up to work together and only with each other. The iPad screen recognizes when you are using the Pencil (apple.com/apple-pencil), and in response, dynamically boosts its scan rate to 240 times per second (twice the speed it scans for your finger) to minimize latency, the time between the Pencil’s point touching the glass and a mark appearing on the canvas. Simultaneously, the Pencil’s sensors work with the display to detect its position, force, and tilt via APIs in iOS 9.1 (go.macworld.com/ios91api) that not only register current location but predict future movement. Press lightly to get a thin stroke, press harder…

Whenever I set up a new Mac, I install a number of utilities that make me more productive, that save me time, or that protect my data. I bought a new MacBook recently, and, as with every Mac, I installed some essential utilities. I’ve been using some of these apps for many years; others are recent additions to my roster of essential software. Here’s a look at my 10 essential Mac utilities. LAUNCHBAR The first two apps I install on a new Mac are the ones that help me get everything else set up on my computer. LaunchBar is one of the rare apps that has consistently garnered 5-mouse reviews here at Macworld (go.macworld.com/launchbar6rv). I use it to launch apps without needing to rifle through my Applications folder, to move…

To begin our work with Profile Manager, we’re going to start with a fresh install of El Capitan (apple.com/osx) and a fresh install of the Server app (apple.com/osx/server). If you haven’t yet, please read the introduction to this Working Mac mini-series before continuing. A NOTE OF CAUTION You may already have El Capitan and Server installed on a Mac somewhere, but it’s never a good idea to play with server configurations on computers in a production environment, so we’re going to spend a little time here setting up El Capitan and Server on an external drive. Once you’ve practiced using Profile Manager in a test environment, you can take what you’ve learned here and introduce it to your production environment. If you choose to throw caution to the wind and…

The problem with iCloud Photo Libraryand Family Sharing Steve Gentile writes in with a question that, in similar language, many readers have. He wants to be able to maintain essentially a family iCloud Photo Library. He upgraded to 200GB of iCloud storage and has about 20GB in his own Photos library. He and his wife both sync to their own iCloud accounts, and they have a Mac with Photos on it as well. Q: The problem now is that although we want all photos synced to the cloud, we don’t want to have three duplicates of 20GB on each machine. My wife’s iPhone is running low on space. What is the best way to sync our iPhone photos to the cloud but not need to store them all? —Steve Gentile…

MAC GEMS ARE APPS THAT OFFER STANDOUT UTILITY OR UNIQUE FEATURES AT A GREAT PRICE. PROSOFT’S DATA RESCUE PROGRAMS have been among the go-to applications for data recovery. If you had a hard drive you needed data from, and it was in semi-functional shape, capable of mounting to some degree and not making terrible grinding noises, there’s always been a good chance you can run a Data Rescue program across it for however many hours, days, or weeks that the process required and get some of your data back, including deleted files. DATA RESCUE ONE PRICE WHEN RATED $49 to $409 COMPANY Prosoft Engineering, Inc. As of now, the old standby is now arriving in a Data Rescue One (prosofteng.com/data-rescue-one) format, which bundles both the Data Rescue 4 application with…

SINCE THE DEBUT OF THE CLASSIC Mac OS System 1.0 in 1984, the Finder has been an indispensable hub of the graphical user interface experience. Despite many improvements over the year—most radically with OS X in 2001—the core functionality of Apple’s Finder remains largely the same, despite efforts to improve upon the experience even today. COMMANDER ONE 1.1 PRICE WHEN RATED Free; $10 Pro version COMPANY Eltima Software TAKE COMMAND UTILITY SOFTWARE COMMANDER ONE PRO REVIEW: A FREE FINDER ALTERNATIVE FOR POWER USERS BY J.R. BOOKWALTER MACUSER REVIEWS Commander One (go.macworld.com/commanderone) is a Mac application written entirely using Apple’s new Swift programming language that provides an alternative to the Finder. The main window is split into dual panes that can be used to act upon files and folders in…

Well, that was quick: Less than a day after leaked photos of the Apple Watch charging dock spread around the Internet, Apple put the $79 dock (go.macworld.com/awmagdock) up for sale online and in Apple Stores. Unlike third-party watch stands, which are essentially charger accessories, the official dock comes with the small inductive charging disc built in. You plug the whole dock into a wall charger using the Lightning cable it comes with. You can place your watch flat on top of the dock with the band undone, as you would on the standard charger it comes with, or you can raise the charging disc and wrap the watch around it to charge in Nightstand mode. Why this matters: The dock is beautiful, to be sure. It’s also one of the…

LIKE MANY PROSPECTIVE iPAD PRO OWNERS, I was eager to get my hands on Apple’s companion accessories at launch, particularly the keyboard case that takes advantage of the new Smart Connector. Imagine my dismay upon picking up the massive device at my local Apple Store, only to discover no such accessories in stock. LOGITECH CREATE PRICE $150 COMPANY Logitech As fate would have it, Apple did my wallet a favor: One of the best and brightest accessory makers around was better prepared with a keyboard case of their own—one superior to what Cupertino’s designers came up with. ON THE CASE The Logitech Create (go.macworld.com/logitechcreate) is a keyboard case providing all-around protection for the iPad Pro. And I do mean “all-around”: Available in five colors (I tested the Black with…

Like it or not, cloud storage is the future, despite the fact that even major players with deep pockets haven’t quite nailed it yet. Now that Dropbox has come down to Earth on pricing and capacity, it’s generally considered superior to competing services from Amazon, Google, and Apple—and don’t even get me started on Microsoft, which recently reneged on its promise of unlimited storage for Office 365 subscribers. Last month, a new player named Upthere (upthere.com) burst onto the scene, offering an alternative, sync-free “cloud computer.” Currently available free with unlimited storage while in beta (the company has yet to announce pricing), Upthere does have at least one ace up its sleeve: Founder and former Apple vice-president Bertrand Serlet, who worked as software engineering lieutenant under Steve Jobs for more…

If you have a large iTunes library, you may have reached the point where you need to offload some of your media files to another drive. There are several ways you can do this. You can connect an external hard drive to your Mac, and use that to store your iTunes Media folder. If you use an iMac, this is probably the easiest choice. However, if you use a laptop, you may not want the hassle of connecting and disconnecting an external drive whenever you want to use iTunes. Another option is to use a network-attached storage device, or NAS. This is a storage device that your Mac connects to over your network—usually via Wi-Fi, but you can also use Ethernet—and that can give you vastly more storage, especially if…

There’s nothing like printing your own photography, though adorning your walls with your own art can be intimidating. A safe way to print—and thus enjoy—your digital memories is to create a calendar in Photos for OS X. At 13 by 10.4 inches, Apple’s calendars are big and printed on thick, high-quality paper so they look better than the ones you get anywhere else. They’re stunning and they make great gifts. The calendars you create in Photos can be customized in myriad ways. You can choose from a variety of themes, customize the look of each page, add captions, national holidays, pull events from your Calendar app, and plop pictures onto individual date squares (great for birthdays!). You’re not stuck with a 12-month calendar either—you can include up to 24 months…

I can remember the exact moment I stopped missing my iPhone: Three days earlier, I had embarked on a brave new journey with the Nexus 6P (go.macworld.com/nexus6prvw), a month-long break from my long-term relationship with the iPhone. I wasn’t completely illiterate to Android—over the years I’ve tried a few Galaxies and a Moto or two, and even bought an original Nexus 7—but extended daily use was a bit of a shock to my system. But it took less than 72 hours to wipe away eight years of memories. Part of it was the allure of the younger Nexus 6P, but it wasn’t just a newness thing; for a fleeting moment it was as if iOS and Siri didn’t exist. My once-beloved iPhone 6 sat on my nightstand, slowly draining its…

Profile Manager is a tool you can use to take control of all the Mac OS, iOS, and Apple TV devices you own or are responsible for. It can also help you provide your employees access to company resources, such as VPNs, file servers, and email, using their own devices while still requiring those employees to secure their devices in ways that comply with your company security policies. WHY USE A MDM SERVICE? Whether you’re a small business owner with just a few users and devices to manage or an IT manager with hundreds, you’re faced with similar challenges: How do you provide users with a unified experience and make sure devices and data are secure, while still handling everything else needed to get the job done. Depending on the…

When Apple introduced the latest version of the Apple TV, a lot of people were worried that they would no longer be able to stream content from their iTunes libraries. In the screenshots on the Apple website, the Computers tile isn’t shown, and on the Tech Specs page (apple.com/tv/specs), nothing said that you could still use Home Sharing to access your iTunes library. Well, rest assured; nothing much has changed. You can still stream music and videos from your iTunes library, as you have been able to do for years. You can watch movies and TV shows, you can stream music, and you can listen to podcasts and audiobooks on the Apple TV. Here’s how you set up and use the Apple TV to access media in your iTunes library.…

Since the launch of Apple Music, your iTunes library can contain several different types of music files, and they can be stored in different locations. You may have files that you’ve ripped from CDs, which are stored on your Mac. Your library probably holds some music that you bought from the iTunes Store, which may be on your Mac, or may be in the cloud. And if you’ve signed up for Apple Music, you might have added some music to your iTunes library. It may be local, or it may be on Apple’s servers. All this can be a bit confusing. While you don’t always need to know which tracks are on your Mac or in the cloud, it can be useful. For example, if you decide to not opt…