Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2016 i Macworld UK

This autumn, Apple will release macOS Sierra, a major update to the Mac operating system. Here we answer some of the general questions you may have to help you learn what it’s all about and whether you should install it. macOS? What happened to OS X? Apple decide to change the name in order to fit with the names of iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. So no more Roman numerals (or that annoying person who insists on calling it “OS eks”). Some trivia, if you’re interested: macOS isn’t entirely a new name. Before version 10, Apple used to call its Mac operating system Mac OS, with the last version being Mac OS 9. Apple change the name to OS X when version 10 was released in 2001. Does Apple still name…

Apple Music has 15 million paying subscribers, which is nothing to sneeze at. But Apple’s Spotify competitor isn’t easy to use, so iOS 10 is bringing a complete redesign. It’s a totally new look, with giant cards, bigger and bolder fonts, and a clean white background that allows the album art to shine. The first tab when you open Apple Music in iOS 10 is your Library, which makes the most sense. Currently Apple Music buries your library of songs under My Music on the far right side, then further divides it into two sections, Library and Playlists. The categories are nonexistent, and it’s easier to search for something you have saved than to browse your own library. That’s about to change. The Apple Music library in iOS 10 is…

The Apple Watch’s biggest problems are its apps, namely the time it takes for them to load, and the limited features developers are allowed to bake in. Apple is fixing these issues with a major overhaul to watchOS, coming this autumn as a free upgrade for all Apple Watch owners. During the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple previewed a slew of new features coming to watchOS 3. Here are the major changes that will breathe new life into your Apple Watch. First things first: faster apps Every Apple Watch owner knows the struggle of launching apps. By the time the app opens, you’ve given up and turned to your iPhone for help. Apple Watch apps will launch instantly in watchOS 3, and not just Apple’s native apps – third-party ones,…

As creative director of advertising agency TWBA/Chiat/Day, Ken Segall crafted ads for NeXT Computer and then Apple. He helped create the iconic ‘Think Different’ campaign upon Steve Jobs’s return to Apple and gave the iMac its name when Jobs preferred a pretty terrible alternative. Segall spent 12 years working alongside Jobs, in the process picking up enough tips on running a successful business that he wrote two books behind Apple’s guiding principle: simplicity above all else. Segall’s first book, Insanely Simple, was about how Jobs simplified Apple across the board, from products to operations, and turned his floundering computer business from a sinking ship into the most profitable company in the world. The second, Think Simple, hits shelves on Tuesday and picks up where Insanely Simple left off. Segall found…

Macworld recently received an email from Kurt Jefferson, who told us that sometimes El Capitan’s hard drive won’t unmount no matter what he does. He’s had this happen routinely with a Mac mini using flash drives and external hard disk drives (HDDs). If OS X ‘understands’ why it can’t unmount a drive, starting a few releases ago, it will tell you. But the dialog boxes Kurt is seeing aren’t the informative kind that tell you which app is involved. People across the internet seem to have connected the rise of this issue under El Capitan to Spotlight indexing. They’ve tested whether that was the cause by removing the mounted drive from Spotlight, and then they are able to unmount it. (Open the Spotlight preference pane, click the Privacy tab, and…

If you have more than one Mac, you probably need to exchange files between the two computers from time to time. There are lots of ways to do this, and the method you choose may depend on the type of file you need to share or the way you manage your workflow. Here are nine ways you can exchange files between two Macs. File Sharing The basic way to share files between Macs is to use File Sharing. To use this feature, you must activate it in the Sharing pane of System Preferences – select File Sharing. If you want to only share specific folders, or allow certain users to access them, add folders to the Shared Folders list, and then select a folder and add users in the Users…

i Tunes and iOS devices offer a number of ways to tweak the sound during playback. You can use an equalizer to adjust certain frequencies, use Sound Check to normalize the volume of different tracks, and use Sound Enhancer to, well, enhance your sound. There’s also Crossfade Songs, which lets you play songs so they segue from one into another. Here’s what you can do to fiddle with your sound in iTunes and on your iOS device. Equalization Depending on how you listen to your music, you may want – or need – to adjust the sound that comes out of your computer or your iOS device. If you have simple speakers connected to your computer or use an iMac’s internal speakers, you might not have bass and treble adjustments…

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote was packed with announcements, from all the features coming in iOS 10 to a new iPad coding app for beginners (Swift Playgrounds). Here’s everything you need to know. iOS 10 iOS 10 includes major upgrades to iMessage, Photos, Siri, Maps, and Apple Music, and a new Home app to control all of your HomeKit devices. Check out all the announcements here. The iOS 10 developer beta is available now, with a public beta coming in July. Anyone can sign up to test the public beta for free, though beta software can be annoying and bug-ridden. Check out the beta sign-up details here. iOS 10 launches publicly in September. macOS Sierra Goodbye, OS X. Hello, macOS. The next-generation Mac operating system has a new name, macOS…

Aptly enough, iOS 10 has 10 major features, including sweeping new upgrades to Messages, a much more intelligent Siri, and a Memories feature in Photos that recognizes objects, people, and even locations. Introduced during Apple’s WWDC keynote, iOS 10 also makes the iPhone sublimely integrated with third-party apps. Developers can now design apps to directly enhance Messages, Siri, Maps, and Notifications. There’s also better integration for VoIP calling and a brand-new Home app. Apple’s most noticeable update comes to Messages, which the company said is the most frequently used app on iOS. In addition to opening up the iMessage platform to third-party developers, Messages in iOS 10 has gone through a major “emojification.” Emoji sent by themselves are three times bigger, and with iOS 10 it’s easy to simply tap-and-replace…

Apple’s Pay will soon be let users make online purchases. “Now when you’re shopping online, you’ll have a ‘Pay with Apple Pay’ button,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. Apple Pay first went into operation in October 2014, but it’s been confined to real-world brick-and-mortar transactions – with iPhone owners using that device to pay for items when checking out at such stores – as well as purchases made from iOS apps. The announcement expands the service to the broader realm of e-commerce.…

It was a developers conference, after all, so during Apple’s WWDC 2016 keynote, Tim Cook called special attention to Swift Playgrounds, a free new app for beginners who want to create iOS apps using Swift, Apple’s programming language. Swift Playgrounds features lessons to help beginners learn coding concepts such as creating functions, issuing commands, loops, and more. Apple will release new challenges, so coders can continue to learn new skills as they progress. Apple says that teachers can use Xcode to create their own content for Swift Playgrounds. The interactive, intuitive interface has support for Apple’s Multi-Touch iPad interface. It has a coding keyboard with a shortcuts bar, and you can swipe across a key to type Swift-specific characters. There’s also a pop-over keypad for numbers, a colour picker, and…

The next big update for Apple TV is all about making you do even less work as a modern couch potato. Apple is still sticking with the idea that the future of TV is apps – the company didn’t announce any long-rumoured streaming services or drastically shake up the Apple TV interface – but new capabilities within tvOS focus on making those apps easier to access. The update will bring expanded voice search capabilities, more convenient ways to sign into apps, and more interplay between the Apple TV and the iPhone. Here’s an overview of what Apple announced: Search by topic: Although Siri can already search by genre, Apple TV will also answer more specific queries, such as “Find comedies from the 80s.” Search YouTube: By saying “Search YouTube for…”…

In college, I built a PC from my friend’s castoff parts. It lived on the floor of my room, wholly without any sort of case or enclosure, except at one point when I tried to keep it all in a shoebox. Because it had no case, that also meant there was no power button: to turn it on, one took a screwdriver and touched it between two pins on the motherboard, and it would whir to life in all of its Frankensteinian glory. Those days of the shoebox computer are largely behind us now. Instead, our computers often seem to be fully formed widgets, sprung whole from Apple as Athena from the head of Zeus. There’s little ability to upgrade them once you’ve purchased them, and in most cases those…

Looking for a brand-new Mac game to get absorbed in? Look no further, because May brought us another fine bounty of fresh games to consider, and it’s another diverse array of options. We’ve got a deep space exploration and strategy game (Stellaris), for example, but also a bonkers indie game about driving a school bus in wondrously wild situations (OmniBus). Other highlights include multiplayer racer Super Impossible Road, an enhanced port of iOS role-playing favourite Oceanhorn, and games like Kathy Rain and Youtubers Life. 1. Stellaris Space is vast, and so too should be strategy games that hope to share in its scale, right? Luckily, Stellaris (£34 from tinyurl.com/peh54x8) is up to the task: Paradox’s space exploration strategy game lets you jet off into the cosmos to find new alien…

I read this question and almost replied, “That’s easy!” But the more I thought about it, the more I realised it’s an intricate question, because of how Apple has its own organisational structure that’s invisible in the Photos Library, independent of how you sort images in the Photos app. And because there are several possible answers to the same question. The first question is, really, what is your ideal outcome for this copy on the external drive? • An exact duplicate of the library. Quit Photos, if it’s active, find the Photos Library, and copy it. The Library includes 100 percent of everything that Photos needs. Done. But that’s probably not what the reader was asking. • Copy the file structure of the folder in the Photos Library. You can…

My relationship with the new Apple TV (£129 at the Apple Store) got off to a rocky start last autumn. From password entry issues to some serious quirks with the new Siri Remote, the long-awaited transition to an Apple TV that could run third-party apps was a letdown. But something funny has happened in the past few months: I’ve found myself using (and enjoying) the fourth-generation Apple TV a lot more than I did the previous generation. In an era where so many tech products offer a quick hit of excitement before fading into the background, the Apple TV has grown on me. There’s no doubt that the Apple TV got off to a slow start. When it first arrived last autumn, it didn’t support the iOS Remote app that…

Don’t call it OS X anymore, and if you do, Siri will probably correct you. Apple unveiled at its 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference that the Mac operating system is now called macOS, and the next version will feature the Siri vocal interface and digital assistant. Siri is the headline feature in what will be macOS Sierra. As had been rumoured, a new Siri icon will be accessible in the Dock; clicking on it will launch a Siri window that iOS users will be familiar with. (Siri can also be activated using a keyboard shortcut.) During the macOS Siri demo at WWDC, Apple VP Craig Federighi used Siri to find files and followed up the search to refine the results. Federighi also showed how Siri results can be integrated into other…

The updated version of iCloud Drive will automatically store your Mac’s older documents in the cloud, Apple officials announced at WWDC, making room on your hard drive for new and recently used files. The iCloud update will offer an ‘optimised storage’ feature that also automatically dumps trash, cleans up old caches, and removes other redundant data to help preserve storage on your Mac; a demo of the feature showed it taking a computer with 20GB of free space and increasing that to 150GB of free space. iCloud will also make it possible for users to share items on their Mac desktops to other Macs, as well as to their iPhones. Users have already stored more than 10 billion documents on iCloud.…

One year after launching the HomeKit framework for smart home devices, Apple is releasing a dedicated Home app to control them. The Home app in iOS 10 will provide quick access to all of the user’s smart lights, door locks, thermostats and more. Users will be able to launch custom “scenes” (which group together multiple device actions into concepts such as ‘Good Morning’) with one tap, and view a master list of devices for individual control. Apple’s official Home app will support remote control smart home devices, provided the user has a third-generation Apple TV or newer. (The Apple TV is required to provide end-to-end encryption between the iOS device and the HomeKit devices.) Lock screen actions are supported as well – for instance, users can see who’s at the…

Apple revealed a lot of new features from iOS 10 and macOS Sierra at WWDC. The final versions of each OS won’t be available until the autumn, and developers are the only people who can try out them out right now. But in July, Apple will release betas of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra to the general public. If you’re game for running a beta operating system, you can get your hands on the software by joining the Apple Beta Software Program. Before installing a beta OS, always back up your data. Go to (tinyurl.com/pffuwnz and sign up.…

If, tomorrow, something goes wrong with your Mac or if it gets stolen or damaged, replacing the hardware itself is technically very easy to do; it just takes money. But the data that was on its hard disk or SSD – those precious photos, that carefully amassed iTunes library, that work, that novel? The best case scenario is that you pay hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars to a data recovery specialist to try to get some back, and the worst case is that it’s gone for good. And that’s why, today, you should back up your Mac. We all know this, but understanding the different ways of backing up, and picking a backup strategy that’s right for you – so that you can rest easy knowing that it’s extremely unlikely…

Apple released iTunes 12.4, changing a number of interface elements users had become familiar with for navigating their iTunes libraries. There are fewer buttons, and the interface is less cluttered (at least that’s my opinion) but some users are lamenting the loss of some of these buttons and menus which allowed them to move around iTunes with just a few clicks. It’s true that, for some features, you now need to click a bit more. For example, there was previously a row of icons near the top left of the iTunes window. These icons let you change media libraries, going from Music to Movies, or TV Shows to Audiobooks. But now, there’s a menu that Apple calls the Media Picker; you need to click that menu to choose a media…

Reader Craig Gorsuch has written in with a commonly asked question about OS X and Apple IDs. He notes that in his family, they pass older computers down to other members as they acquire new computers. But even removing all his identifying information, the old computer still asks for his Apple ID for updates. This issue affects my wife’s/son’s computer, my daughter’s new computer and my mother’s new computer. Is there any way to force these three computers to accept the Apple IDs of the primary operator of the computer and not my Apple ID? Is the only solution a complete reset of the hard drive and a manual copying of profile data? When Apple switched to handling routine software updates for OS X and its own applications via the…