Category: Reviews-HowTos

Reader Steffie L is concerned not about what her iOS devices sees, but rather what it hears. She writes:

With more and more apps listening in at all times on your iOS device (Shazam, etc), short of deleting the app is there any way to control when this happens?

Under iOS 7, yes. One of the features introduced with this version of iOS was the ability to limit apps’ access to the device’s microphone. When you first launch an app that wants to use the mic, you’ll see a dialog box asking if you’re willing to let the app do this. Tap on OK and it now has the access it desires.

In this week’s column, I look at four interesting questions. One about setting the start and end time for tracks in the cloud, another about shunting some or all iTunes media files to another location, and two about smart playlists.

Q: I bought an iPad Air, and I don’t plan on syncing it with my desktop computer because I download all of my iTunes music from the cloud. But there were a number of songs that I have edited to be shortened. Some of them have a minute of banter at the beginning or end from the musician at a live show that I don’t want to hear every time (and a couple with “colorful” language banter I don’t want my kids to hear when the song comes up on random play). As far as I can tell, I can’t edit the track length on the iPad. Where is this simple feature?

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Most digital cameras (with the exception of many compact cameras) offer the option to shoot both in Raw and Raw + JPEG formats. Whereas JPEGs, as a compressed format, get various in-camera algorithms to produce an image that the camera thinks is best, Raw files get no in-camera’s adjustments. Because the data is relatively untouched, users can adjust various parameters such as white balance and exposure after the fact on the original shot.

While image editing programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements are equipped to make some adjustments to JPEG files, Raw file processing provides a much broader and more accurate method of image editing. (Whether and when it’s advantageous to shoot Raw is another story.) 

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If your inbox is a many-headed beast that you battle every day, Mail Pilot (Mac App Store link) might just be the enchanted blade that helps you slay that email monster once and for all. This new program’s sleek looks conceal a few still-rough edges, and its singular approach to email may not fit with your own. But Mail Pilot nonetheless offers a clean, impressive, often beautiful way to manage unruly email.

Born from a Kickstarter by two Virginia Tech grads, Mail Pilot seems inspired by management guru David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to productivity. In the simplest terms, Allen encourages people to finish tasks they can easily accomplish right away, and put aside thornier jobs until they have time to tackle them properly.

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I spend lots of time listening to music on my iPhone. I don’t consider myself an audiophile but I’m always on the lookout for ways to tweak the quality of the audio coming out of my device. The built-in iOS Music app provides quite a few stock equalizer settings to choose from, and I’ve looked at a few other audio-enhancing music apps, but I can’t help thinking that there’s something better out there. So I thought I’d give GoodHertz‘s $3 CanOpener—for Headphones a spin.

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A few years ago, Information Architects set the standard for “distraction-free” text editors with its iA Writer. After I reviewed iA Writer, it became one of my essential text tools, and I was excited to hear that the company was releasing a new writing app.

Writer Pro, $20 each for OS X (Mac App Store link) and iOS (App Store link), is not an enhancement of iA Writer, but rather a totally new concept of a tool for writing. It’s not for everyone—whether or not it’s for you depends on whether your workflow, and the way you think about writing, match that of the developers.

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There are well over a million files on my Mac. Sure, a few hundred thousand of those are components of OS X itself or of the apps I’ve installed. But, still, the number of user-generated files I’ve accumulated over the years astonishes me.

Most of the time, those files just sit there minding their own business, bothering no one. But sometimes, say, when I do a Spotlight search for a document and thousands of potential matches pop up, I start thinking a bit of file-simplification is in order.

Now, in this context “simplify” could mean “delete”—but it doesn’t have to. I might need a certain old file only once in a span of several years, but that doesn’t make it safe to delete. Depending on the context, simplification might mean reorganizing files, creating archives, offloading files to an external disk, or other strategies. And, of course, it would be easy to get carried away with this sort of thing and spend endless days looking for every last way to optimize one’s files, but that’s sure to produce diminishing returns. Instead, I suggest concentrating on the easiest and most fruitful kinds of simplification.

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The Pegasus2 R6 from Promise is the first Thunderbolt 2 peripheral to make its way into the Macworld Lab. It’s a six-drive 12TB hardware RAID box and can be purchased from the Apple Store for $2299.

The Pegasus2 R6 we received has six 7200-rpm hard drives with 2TB of capacity each, the same capacity as the first Pegasus we tested. The Pegasus2 is a hardware RAID that comes preconfigured as RAID 5 array, but can easily be changed to to RAID 0, 1, 10, or JBOD using the included software. The Pegasus2 has a black aluminum case to better match the design of the new Mac Pro and has two Thunderbolt 2 ports to allow for daisy chaining up to six compatible devices. Thunderbolt products with just one port, must sit at the end of a daisy chain, and having two ports gives you more flexibility, and have two Thunderbolt 2 ports means that you can connect more Thunderbolt 2 devices.

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Every time I read about a new Mac or iOS app in a category I use, I think to myself, “Oh, cool. That could save me some time and effort.” I download the app and try it out, but more often than not, I quickly conclude that my previous solution was just as good, and leave the new app sitting unused. From then on, whenever I see the app, I feel a vague, low-level anxiety. But still I accumulate more apps, and the cycle repeats.

Now I’m on a mission to simplify my apps by choosing fewer, better tools; learning them well; and deleting the rest.

Reduce decision-making

We’ve all heard of Moore’s Law, which posits that the number of transistors on a typical integrated circuit doubles every two years. But one of the overlooked side effects of such technological progress is the proliferation of cheap chips. For example, the price of Bluetooth ASICs, used in everything from audio devices to smart watches to fitness monitors, has dropped dramatically over the past few years. As a result, a growing number of small vendors are bringing stereo-Bluetooth headsets to market at prices that would have been unheard of just five years ago. I took a look at six budget-priced Bluetooth headphones to see if there are (finally) affordable options worth considering.

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It’s a tradition that a true garage band must have at least one guitar (and more if you can rustle up enough outlets, amps, and kids who can nail a bar chord three out of five tries). Given that, it would be ridiculous if Apple’s GarageBand didn’t have some fairly hefty support for guitar and bass players. And it does, particularly if you drop the $5 in-app purchase price to gain all of GarageBand’s content.

Getting connected

Before you can strum, pick, bar, shred, tap, or whammy your way to wonderfulness you must find a way to jack your guitar into your Mac. At the most basic level it can be done for about $7 with a 1/4-inch-to-1/8-inch mono audio cable. The 1/4-inch connector plugs into your guitar and the 1/8-inch connector goes into the Mac’s audio input port. If you choose such a cable, make it as light as possible. If you add an adapter to a standard guitar cable its weight may put undue strain on your Mac’s audio port.

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Apple added yet another channel to the Apple TV this week, meaning there are more than 30 icons on the device’s homescreen. That can be a lot, especially if you don’t use all of those content providers on a regular basis. Allow me to help you make that glut of icons a bit more manageable.

Transcript

This is Macworld senior editor Dan Moren. With all the options on the Apple TV these days, loading up that grid of icons can often be overwhelming. Here are a couple of quick tips to organize the Apple TV’s homescreen to your liking.

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If your email is completely under control—your Inbox is normally empty, filing new messages is a breeze, and you feel no anxiety at all about the number of messages you receive every day or the number you’ve stored over the years, you can stop reading this article now. For everyone else, I have a few suggestions to help simplify your email experience.

Consolidate your accounts

Most email clients, such as Apple’s Mail and Microsoft Outlook, can handle as many accounts as you throw at them, and of course it’s often necessary to keep work and personal accounts separate. But do you really need email accounts from iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, your ISP, and so on? You can simplify your email by picking just one as your go-to account and setting up all the other services to forward email to that primary address (so you don’t need to worry about sending everyone a change-of-address notice).

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