Author: Dan Miller

There are plenty of ways to keep track of changes made to a text document. You can use the track-changes tools built into your word processor (assuming it has them). If your needs are more sophisticated, particularly if you’re collaborating with others, you can use a sophisticated version-control system such as Github, Subversion, CVS. Or you can use a dedicated utility such as Kaleidoscope (which can compare documents, images, and even folders).

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2014. Every day (except weekends) from July until September, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a standout free, low-cost, or great-value program. You can view a list of this year’s apps, updated daily, on our handy GemFest chart, and you can visit the Mac Gems homepage for past Mac Gems reviews.

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At the office, I have a MacBook Pro hooked up to an 1TB LaCie drive. I’ve partitioned that external into two volumes: one for Time Machine, the other for maintaining a bootable clone of the MacBook’s hard drive.

Such a setup is not particularly unusual. Nor is the minor hassle of disconnecting that drive from my MacBook whenever I want to take the laptop to a meeting or home: I switch to the Finder, scroll down to the Devices section of the sidebar, click the Eject icon next to one of those external volumes (or, if I remember, press Command+E), then click the Eject All button in the subsequent dialog box. If I forget to do all that, I’m rewarded with two more dialog boxes chastising me that the volumes were not ejected properly.

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Siri is, of course, a marvel of modern technology. But it’s also one of those things that a lot of us don’t use as much as we could or should. So a couple of Macworld editors, particularly Senior Editor Dan Frakes, put together the following list of 16 things we think everybody should know how to do using Siri.

1. Search for stuff on the Web Siri can perform Web searches (using Google, Bing, or Yahoo), get answers to more specialized questions using Wolfram Alpha (“What’s the square root of pi?”), find reviews of businesses (using Yelp), search Wikipedia, and so on. Just phrase your question in natural language, and then tap a search result to go to the source site (or app) for more information.

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If you deal with lots of files (and who doesn’t?), there are surely times when you have to rename a whole bunch of them at the same time. (A classic example: a bunch of image files with less-than-helpful names such as IMG_0001.jpg, IMG_0002.jpg, IMG_0003.jpg, and so on.) Plenty of Mac utilities exist that’ll help you rename files in batches—for example, we reviewed A Better Finder Rename a little while ago. But we haven’t looked at one of our favorites, Name Mangler from Many Tricks, since version 2 back in 2008. Name Mangler is now up to version 3.3, and it’s changed quite a bit.

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Once you’ve got your edited files, it’s time to share them with the rest of the world. That means finding a hosting service and letting people know it’s there. One last time, here’s how four podcasting vets—Christopher Breen (the Macworld Podcast); Editorial Director Jason Snell (The Incomparable); Erika Ensign (Verity!); and Chip Sudderth (The Two-Minute Time Lord)—share their podcasts.

Christopher Breen

Once you’ve captured the audio, it’s time to splice it all together and trim it down. Depending on the kind of podcast, you may also need to incorporate other audio—music, ambient sound, and other effects. Once again, here’s how four podcasting vets—Christopher Breen (the Macworld Podcast); Editorial Director Jason Snell (The Incomparable); Erika Ensign (Verity!); and Chip Sudderth (The Two-Minute Time Lord)—get that done. (Warning: Ensign is a Windows user. But we still thought her overall workflow would be instructive for all podcasters, regardless of their preferred platform.)

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Once you’ve decided on a format and focus for your podcast, it’s time to get down to some nitty-gritty: Figuring out how you’re going to capture the audio. That means choosing a microphone (and maybe other hardware) and recording software. It means figuring out a recording workflow. And, if you’re going to include guests who can’t be in the same room with you, you have to know how you’re going to record them.

Here’s how four podcasting vets—Christopher Breen (the Macworld Podcast); Editorial Director Jason Snell (The Incomparable); Erika Ensign (Verity!); and Chip Sudderth (The Two-Minute Time Lord)—capture their audio.

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Everybody, it seems, has a podcast these days. The iTunes Store alone boasts “hundreds of thousands” of them. And that’s just a fraction of the overall total.

One big reason there are so many podcasts is that it’s never been easier to produce one. All you need is a microphone and a bit of software, and you too can be an online radio star. Well, that and a bit of know-how.

That last bit is what we’re hoping to provide. We asked four podcasters we know to tell us how they do it: How they prepare, capture, edit, and then share their programs.

Two of those podcasters are on the Macworld staff: Senior Editor Christopher Breen (who produces the regular Macworld Podcast) and Editorial Director Jason Snell (who in his copious spare time produces a personal podcast called The Incomparable). We also asked the folks who produce a couple of our favorite non-Macworld podcasts. Strictly by chance, they’re both about Doctor Who, the British sci-fi series: Erika Ensign (Verity!) and Chip Sudderth (The Two-Minute Time Lord). (Can’t imagine why Macworld staffers would have a thing for Doctor Who.)

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The first step in creating a podcast is deciding on a focus for your show. (One central topic? Whatever you feel like talking about?) Then you have to choose a format. (Solo? Two or more regulars chatting? Interviews with guests?) And you have to decide how much you want to prepare for each episode. (Script the whole thing? Or just go with the flow?) Here’s how four podcasters—Christopher Breen (the Macworld Podcast); Editorial Director Jason Snell (The Incomparable); Erika Ensign (Verity!); and Chip Sudderth (The Two-Minute Time Lord)—answered those questions for themselves.

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Today I wanted to show you how to create keyboard shortcuts in OS X.

First, the why: Why would you want to create keyboard shortcuts? The first and most obvious reason is that you simply want to be able to invoke a command quickly and easily without mousing through a bunch of menus. One other reason: Poorly designed apps might use one of OS X’s global shortcuts for their own purposes, and you need to resolve such conflicts. Whatever the reason, creating your own keyboard shortcuts for a given app is really simple.

The first step is note the exact spelling and phrasing of the command you want to create a shortcut for. To do so, just open the app, find the menu command, and note the phrasing and spelling. That includes any ellipses (those three little “periods” at the end of the command).

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Seven or so years since the introduction of iOS, getting stuff from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac—and vice versa—is still a pain.

Sure, there are plenty of ways to sync or share files. You can sync data using iTunes or (for some apps) Dropbox. You can send files via email. You can sync Safari bookmarks, Reading List URLs, and open tabs over iCloud. You can share photos via PhotoStream. You can even share clipboard contents using utilities such as Command-C. But these are all piecemeal solutions that each work for one particular type of data, but not others. (Alas, Apple’s AirDrop feature handles many kinds of data, but it currently works only for sharing files from Mac to Mac, or from one iOS device to another—it doesn’t work between OS X and iOS.)

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I’ve got a confession to make: I have a compulsion about iTunes track data: I’m obsessed with making sure it’s accurate and, more importantly, consistent. This is especially true of classical music: I have a format that I like all my classical tracks to follow when it comes to name, artist, and album that I think makes it easier to find the music I want on my Mac and on my iOS devices. So I spend some time—some might say an inordinate amount of time—making sure that all of that data is the way I want it.

There are a couple of ways to do that. First and most simply is to select a bunch of tracks and hit Command-I (or select File > Get Info) and edit the metadata there. This obviously works best for fields like Album and Artist—fields that are the same for multiple tracks. You can edit that information for multiple tracks simultaneously from the Get Info window.

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If you deal with lots of files (and who doesn’t?), chances are you’ve occasionally run into problems with their names. Say you’ve got a series of image files with less-than-descriptive titles (such as IMG00001.jpg, IMG00002.jpg, and so on)—you’d like to rename them in a more useful, more descriptive, manner. The trick is to find a way to do so without manually renaming each file, one at a time.

There are a bunch of batch-renaming utilities out there that make such chores simpler: You give the app a selection of files, and then tell it to rename all of them at once, using some kind of pattern (for example, “Add Summer vacation photos 2013 to the beginning of each file’s name”). Many of these utilities are relatively inexpensive apps, such as File Rename Pro ($7), Rename ($4), and Rename It ($3), that provide relatively basic services. But there are also a few more-advanced (and more-expensive) tools designed for those who need power beyond what such basic apps provide.

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