Macworld July 2015

News and Analysis About Macs, OS X, and Apple Apple has brought Yosemite to the mountain: El Capitan, specifically, which is the name of OS X 10.11 as well as a peak in Yosemite National Park. Revealed at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, El Capitan is intended to reach a higher point, but not dig new ground. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, emphasized the release is about an improvement in experience and performance. El Capitan’s (go.macworld.com/elcapitan) announcement focused on small points of irritation and big bumps in efficiency. NEW OPTIONS Safari adds pinning, letting users keep particular pages readily available. The sites will be regularly updated in the background to keep them up to date. In a feature that received plenty of applause among the audience, Safari will…

Spotlight, Apple’s search technology, has been available on Macs since Mac OS X 10.4, back in 2005. For many years it remained relatively stable, offering no new features. But with OS X Yosemite, Apple added a slew of new search results to Spotlight. If you use Spotlight, you may only invoke it to search for, say, contacts or emails, or the occasional file. But Spotlight can search for much more: it can search the web, find information on Wikipedia, convert pounds to grams (or dollars), define words, and more. In other articles, I’ve looked at Spotlight basics (go.macworld.com/spotbasics) and have shown you how to construct search queries (go.macworld.com/spotqueries) with Spotlight. In this article, I move from Spotlight to the Finder, and show you how to perform even more advanced searches. When you search…

Without designer Jony Ive, Apple as the world knows it wouldn’t exist. Macs, iPhones, and iPads certainly wouldn’t be as iconic without Ive’s industrial magic. The Cupertino company has always prized Ive’s skills, but now the former senior VP of design is joining CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri in the C-suite as Apple’s first ever Chief Design Officer. Ive established a signature look for Apple’s core device lineup and ushered in a new product category this year with Apple Watch. In his new role, which takes effect July 1 and was announced in a memo (go.macworld.com/ives-cdo) from Cook to Apple employees as well as a glowing profile of Ive in The Telegraph, the design chief can focus his ambitions on high-level, grand-scale design projects like Apple headquarters, and perhaps…

MAC GEMS ARE APPS THAT OFFER STANDOUT UTILITY OR UNIQUE FEATURES AT A GREAT PRICE. CLEANMYMAC 3 IS the new version of MacPaw’s catch-all utility to scan your Mac and remove gigabytes of assorted kerfuffle and gunk that builds up over time. Like its previous versions, CleanMyMac 3 (macpaw.com/cleanmymac) wraps itself around a series of tests and services and works to remove generally unused, developer-oriented, extraneous, and backup files associated with your most commonly used applications that take up available disk space. CleanMyMac 3’s selection of available tests has grown to add tools such as an uninstaller, general maintenance, online privacy functions, and file shredder to its previous suite of tests. This is on top of the Smart Cleanup, System Junk, iPhoto Junk, Mail Attachments, iTunes Junk, Trash Bins, and Large and…

KEEPING YOUR CONTACTS WRANGLED can be a challenge, especially when you have to hop between Mail, your calendar, your contacts, and social media apps to keep tabs on everything that might be going on in your personal orbit. BusyContacts, a new contact-manager-cum-customer-relationship-manager from the folks at BusyMac, attempts to simplify and centralize all your contact needs into a single app, helping you keep tabs on everyone without having to leave the BusyContacts app. BusyContacts works its magic by linking to and collecting information from Apple’s Mail, Contacts, and Messages apps, and your social media accounts, gathering that information into a single, multipaned window that lets you select a contact and see your personal interactions with them as well as their social media feeds. BUSYCONTACTS 1.0.2 AT A GLANCE: BusyContacts is a contact manager for…

FROM THE OUTSIDE, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display looks like the MacBook Pro we’ve come to know from the recent past. The major changes to the laptop are only apparent once you start using the machine: increased speed, and a new Force Touch trackpad that provides new input functionality. The changes are most certainly welcome, but overall, they may not be enough for anyone who bought a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro within the past three years to upgrade. But if your laptop is older, or you’re thinking about upgrading from a MacBook Air, you’ll see great benefits. 13-INCH RETINA MACBOOK PRO AT A GLANCE: If you have an older non-Retina Mac laptop, it’s a good time to upgrade. Obviously, you’ll see a huge performance boost. But you’ll also be wowed by…