January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 1Best viewed in Adobe Reader

of our club. Without those efforts, our club would not be what it is today. Similarly, Mentoring will continue to be a major part of our efforts. We will continue to help Apple product and services users in the greater Ocala area to learn, understand, and use their devices more effectively. Consistent with these objectives, Burt Stephens will lead us in a Member’s Night

on the 12th of January and Phil Davis will be presenting his Workshop on Mac Basics on the 28th of January. All in all, a very nice beginning to our club’s 25th year! For all of our members attending Phil’s workshop, I want to remind you again— the workshops will be held in the College of Central Florida’s University Center, Room 112 and they are “free” to our members. I know the SLI

A message from the prez—January - a month named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Also, we observe the month of January as National Thank You Month, National Mentor-ing Month, and Weight Loss Awareness Month... Well two out of three isn’t bad. In keeping with this month, it is appropriate to thank all of you for your efforts on behalf

registration process for the workshops has been confusing to some of you, but be patient, we will try to simplify it in the future. For those of you that missed our Christmas party, you missed a good one. I would like to especially thank J. P. Leemans and Don Boyd for their work in putting it all together. We had a good turnout and from the comments I’ve received, everyone enjoyed the catered meal, prizes, and the company of fellow members and family. Turning for a moment to things Apple, I hope Santa was good to you. I was fortu-nate enough to receive an Apple iPad Pro, Pencil, and Apple TV: I must have been a good boy this year. Unfortunately, I expect it will take the rest of the year to use them effectively. As I work my way through these new tools/toys, I will share my experiences with you. While it is still too early to say much about them, I am really impressed with the iPad Pro for reading books in iBooks. By the way, if you like to use your iPad for reading books in iBooks, I’ve found two ways to get PDF material into iBooks that might be of value to you. Download the PDF in Safari on the iPad, when the download is complete you will briefly be given an opportunity to open the file in iBooks. Second, it you have a PDF on your Mac, open iTunes and connect your iPad. When the iPad icon appears in iTunes, open it and click on the Books in the left column in the On My Device area. Then go to the location of the PDF and drag and drop it into the Book area. I’ve described these two tips briefly, so if you have any problems using them, just contact me. Hope to see you at our next meeting…

—Bobby Adams

Next Meeting, January 12th, 2016: 7:00 PM Member’s Night— Burt Stephens, Moderator

Key articles.....

Gert The Inside-Story On The Detail of Apple Refinements — page 4

What Are Your Must-Have Apps?— page 2

OMUG’s Christmas Party Happening In Photos — page 9 Dawn of the New Year

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 2

I’ve been doing some cleanup on my extensive list of apps, most of which go unused most of the time. It is going to take a

while to trim this list down to the ones that are really necessary and useful. It’s amazing how many apps in the list I couldn’t identify without looking them up on Google. I clearly need to be more selective. It got me thinking also about which of these are really my “must-have” apps – the ones that I use daily and don’t want to do without. I start by classifying my apps into three cat-egories.1 Core Apps: These are the ones that I install first when I do a clean installation of a new OS, or buy a new computer (a very rare occurrence, unfortunately). It’s interesting to think about what you do on a daily basis and which apps you use.2 Essential Apps: These are apps that I use often for specific purposes, but are not need-ed on a daily basis. Even though I don’t need these every day, I still consider this group as “essential” to my work.3 Useful Apps: These are the utilities, tools, and other apps that are rarely needed, but are vital when called upon. Another way to classify your apps is by their function. Categories like create, organize, auto-mate, develop, utilities, cloud services, backup, connectivity, security, and tech support. For what it’s worth here is a list of my “must-have Core Apps.” They start with the usual suite of the programs that Apple provides as

part of the OS release such as Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Preview, Safari, Photos, Pages, Num-bers, and Keynote. Then, I supplement these with my top 20 including some that you may not have heard of but are vital to my workflow. These include nvALT (my short-term brain), TextExpander, Marked, Reeder, SpamSieve, FoldingText, and Voila. Finally, I add Dropbox, 1Password, DevonThink Pro (my long-term brain), PDF-Pen Pro, Evernote, Postbox, Pocket, Alfred, TextWrangler, Carbon Copy Cloner, Drop-zone, LibreOffice, and Chrome to the bundle. So there you have it. Of course, there are many other apps that I use occasionally – utili-ties, troubleshooting tools, apps to create and manipulate images and videos – the list could get very long. But, the bulk of my time is spent with my must-have core. If you are interested I used the following while writing this article: nvALT, TextExpander, Marked, FoldingText, Sa-fari, and DevonThink Pro. So, what do you consider as your “must-have” apps? It never hurts to occasionally take an inventory of what is in your Applications folder and do some culling of the ones that you don’t need. Not only will this force you to think about how you work, but it can make it easier to stay on top of upgrades. This is particularly important prior to any major OS upgrades. If you are willing to share your lists and pref-erences, send them to me at omug42@gmail.com and I’ll post them on our blog site (anony-mously, if desired). a

What are Your Must-Have Apps?— by Phil Davis CyberShopping Rules by Steve Weisman, Special for USA TODAY

Cybercriminals are lurking as a constant threat to people who don’t take some basic precau-tions to protect themselves while shopping online. Here is a list of a few rules for safe online shopping.1. While your new smart credit card with a computer chip will provide greater protec-tion at brick and mortar stores, you can’t use the chip for online purchases. As in the past, you will need to input your credit card number into the websites you use for online purchases. Before you type in your credit card information, make sure that the URL begins with “https” rather than merely “http.” The “s” means that your data is being encrypted and is more difficult for an identity thief to inter-cept. Resist the temptation to leave your credit card number on file with online retailers from which you regularly make purchases because leaving your credit card number on file with a company just leaves you in greater danger of identity theft in the event that the company is hacked and becomes the victim of a data breach, which is quite possible.2. Use your credit card for purchases rather than your debit card. Your credit card comes with greater protection by law from fraudu-lent purchases and even if your debit card is-suer offers zero liability, as some do, you still lose access to the bank account to which the card is attached while the bank investigates any fraudulent purchases you may discover. This can cause automatic payments that you may make for car loans, mortgages or other recurring bills to bounce while the bank com-pletes its investigation.

3. Use strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts so if one retailer that you use is hacked, identity thieves won’t have access to all of your other accounts. Having so many passwords may appear to be difficult to re-member, but it doesn’t have to be. A strong password will combine capital letters, small letters and symbols. Start with an easy to remember phrase such as “I don’t like pass-words” and make that the base for all of your passwords so it reads IDon’tLikePasswords. This long password combines capital letters and small letters as well as a symbol. Then make the password even stronger by adding a few easy to remember symbols at the end of the password such as “$$$.” Now you have your basic password which reads IDon’tLikePasswords$$$. This is a strong password. The next step is to personalize this basic password for each of your accounts with a few letters at the end of the pass-word to identify the particular account. For example, your Amazon password could be IDon’tLikePasswords$$$ama. This is both a strong password and easy to remember. (Ed’s note– Maybe, but I still prefer 1Password.) In addition, many companies, such as Amazon offer dual factor authentication when you are shopping so that when you log on to your account, the company will send a one-time code to your smartphone for you to input in order to access your account. This significantly enhances your security. For con-venience, you can provide that the dual fac-tor authentication does not have to be used if you are logging in from your own computer or smartphone. Continued on page 3—

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 3

CyberShopping: continued from page 2—4. Trust me, you can’t trust anyone. A Google or other search engine search for low prices for popular items will not necessarily turn up legitimate websites. Adept cybercriminals are able to manipulate the algorithms used to make their well-designed counterfeit web-sites appear high on a search engine inquiry. As always, if the price for the product looks too good to be true, it probably is a scam. Be particularly wary of emails or social media postings you get purporting to be from retail-ers with amazing discounts.Scammers lure you to click on links in these advertisements that will result in your either downloading keystroke logging malware that will steal personal information from your computer or other device and use it to make you a victim of identity theft or lure you into providing your credit card information to the identity thief. For many reasons, you are bet-ter off doing business with well-established companies. If you receive an email or see an enticing advertisement online that appears to come from a legitimate retailer, ignore the ad or email and go directly to the company’s

website at a URL that you know is accurate where you will be able to find any legitimate advertisement offered elsewhere. Also, websites such as Amazon’s www.camelcamelcamel and www.pricegrabber.com can help you safely find the lowest prices for popular items.5. Make sure that your anti-virus and anti-malware software on the computer, smart-phone or other device you use for shopping is kept up to date with the latest security patches. Too many people neglect to keep their security software on their smartphones current.6. Never use public WiFi for shopping. You can’t be sure when using public WiFi whether you are using the authorized WiFi of the cof-fee shop or other company providing public WiFi or whether it is WiFi that appears to be public WiFi, but is actually the WiFi of the identity thief sitting a few tables away from you. You also may wish to consider using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which will encrypt and protect your communications whenever you use the Internet away from home on a portable device. a

Wi-fi Connections Vs. Wired Connections By Ben Ryan, Smalldog.com

Wireless internet is very convenient. It’s much easier to simply connect your com-puter or phone to a wireless network instead of dealing with the network cables. Since wireless internet is a recent technology, it is often assumed that wi-fi is superior in every way to wired connections. It is true that wi-fi is easier to use than wired connections, but wired technology does have numerous advantages over wireless. Wired connections are much faster than wi-fi. They also are not vulnerable to wire-less interference. Some electric devices like microwaves can emit wireless signals and radiation that can interfere with wi-fi signals.

Wi-fi signals also cannot pene- trate objects or walls that are thicker than a certain amount, depending on the exact frequency the signal uses. In addition, wi-fi signals are much less secure than wired con-nections, since they can be potentially con-nected to by anyone in range of the signal. All of these are things to consider the next time you are setting up a home net-work, or if you notice your wi-fi connected device being slow or acting strange. It could be that your wi-fi signal is being interfered with or having trouble transmitting through something. a

1, 2, 3, 4Four Mac Workshops have been scheduled for the Spring Term (Jan - Apr). Although OMUG users will not have to pay, they must register. Registration is simple if you follow instructions.

Starting in 2016 Mac Workshops will be offered through Senior Learners, Inc. and held in Building 20 (University Center) of the College of Central Florida. You must register online for workshops by going to the Senior Learners website. The workshops are free to OMUG members and $5 to others. OMUG members will not be charged–DO NOT CLICK Pay Online! When you attend the first workshop you will get a parking permit good for the entire term to put on your car’s dashboard. More info go here—

Ever wonder about the artwork needed to create those imaginative Star Wars characters? The Adobe Illustrator file at left needed all of the vector drawing shown at right just to create the shapes before all of the color rendering was added. Want to see more, go here!

“Yeah,” agreed Bergeron, on the extended Mac team since 2002. “Not right. You just don’t like it.” There are many reasons why Apple is the world’s most valuable company. Tim Cook is celebrated as a supply chain Master who has internalized the focus on innovation that his predecessor inculcated in the culture. Jony Ive has drawn global raves for making Apple a de-sign icon. Its marketing and branding practices set industry standards. But a visit to the lab where its legacy products — computers — are made suggests another reason. Sweating the details. A less-than-perfect noise isn’t a product killer, or even an official bug. Nonetheless, Ap-ple’s engineers were determined to make sure the new iMac’s Magic Mouse 2 made a better sound as it glided across the desktop. Of course, as far as iMacs are concerned, a larger question lingers: Why even bother with a desktop computer? After all, only a month ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook, showing off the new and humongous iPad Pro and its new keyboard, proclaimed, “iPad is the clearest ex-pression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” Does that make iMacs relics of a fading past? Steve Jobs himself foreshadowed the question in 2010. “PCs are going to be like trucks,” he said at the D Conference that May. “They are still going to be around [but only] one out of x people will need them.” Could it be that in the mobile age, iMacs, even shiny new ones, are dull engines of computational load bearing? “It’s not that simple,” says Phil Schiller, Ap-ple’s senior VP of Worldwide Product Market-ing. “We are in an amazing time where there are different ideas competing for your com-puting life. Continued on page 5—

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 4

cently, when I became the first reporter to venture into the Input Design Lab. The occa-sion for my visit was the release of a new family of iMacs. As usual, this iteration — something more than a “bump” and a lot less than a clean-slate reinvention — has a number of features designed to jar current owners, dissatisfied Windows users, and undecided first-time buy-ers into action. The most visible is the introduc-tion of Retina screens into the whole product line: one option for the smaller, 21.5-inch iMac now sports a 4K Retina display, and all 27-inch models use the state-of-the-art 5K display. The monitors also use an exotic new technology that shows more colors than previously, allow-ing for startlingly detailed photos and scalpel-sharp text display. The other big advance is a new set of ac-cessories: wireless keyboard, trackpad, and mouse. Unlike their immediate Bluetooth an-cestors, these wireless input devices eschew the removable batteries that always seem to be going dim, and instead use lithium batter-ies that charge exactly like iPhones and iPads through a cable that connects to the slim port that Apple has labeled “lightning.” The Magic Trackpad 2 also integrates the Force Touch function that was first introduced in the Apple Watch and now appears on the Macbook and iPhone 6s. (Force Touch is a technology that lets you press down harder than you would with a click, triggering a different set of reac-tions from the software.) The prices of these new improved iMacs — which also have the expected up-grades in microprocessor and graphics chips — are the same as the previous models.

But as with all of Apple’s products, the atten-tion to detail has bordered on fanatical. The suspect mouse sound stirred conster-nation and late nights in the maze of work-spaces located in a nondescript office building a few miles away from Apple’s Infinite Loop headquarters. This is the Input Design Lab, though employees refer to the venue as Vallco Parkway, the street where it’s sited. Behind doors that outsiders rarely venture past are an array of exotic machines, many custom-tuned, that measure and test the latest Apple wares. These were put to use to fix the problem. The culprit appeared to be the little poly-carbonate runners on the bottom of the mouse. “We changed the foot architecture,” says Bergeron, Apple’s VP for Ecosystem Products and Technologies. (Translation: you pound on her keyboards.) “And it changed the friction characteristics of the sound.” “When we did the previous mouse we spent so much time dialing those feet, the material, the geometry, everything, so that it sounds good and feels good when you move it on the table,” says Ternus, whose title is VP for Mac, iPad, Ecosystem and Audio Engineering. “But then you change the mass of the product and you change the resonant frequency of the product and all of a sudden the feet that we loved weren’t great anymore. They weren’t what we wanted.” What exactly was wrong with it? I wanted to know. “It had just changed…kind of… the sound,” says Ternus, who has worked for Apple since 2001. “They all make a noise – the question is getting a noise we like. It sounded… not right.”

InsideStory–New Apple Refinements

Editor’s comment— The word “new” in the title is misleading as this lengthy article covers Apple devices released over the past few months. It is however, a great insight into Apple’s rejection of the “it’s good enough” standard and their unyielding drive to “make it right”.—

Early this year, the top-secret laboratory where Apple designs its Macintosh acces-sories was bedeviled by a crisis on tiny feet. It had to do with the reinvented mouse the team was designing to accompany a new set of iMac computers. The input device, dubbed the Magic Mouse 2, would look to users exactly like the previous model. But on the inside and underneath, everything would be different, mainly because Apple was switching to a rechargeable lithium battery instead of the previous replaceable alkaline ones. Late in the process, everything seemed to be going fine. The internal lithium battery was custom-engineered to fit the cavity. The redesigned antenna — necessary to deal with the potential interference from an internal bat-tery — was working well. But one thing was totally unacceptable. The mouse didn’t sound right. That’s what Apple engineering leaders Kate Bergeron and John Ternus told me re-

by Steven Levy as written on BACKCHANNEL

John Ternus

Kate Bergeron

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 5

Apple Refinements— Continued from page 4That’s great — we love that. And we have thought long and deep about what choices we want to offer customers. One is iPad — it can do many things you want to do on a PC, so many that people choose to make it their primary computing device, and it can do that. That’s more true with the iPad Pro than it’s ever been. But that’s not everybody. There are other people who will decide that nothing does the things they need in their lives as well as a Mac.” Schiller, in fact, has a grand philosophical theory of the Apple product line that puts all products on a continuum. Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line. “They are all computers,” he says. “Each one is offering computers something unique and each is made with a simple form that is pretty eternal. The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striv-ing to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a note-book? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things! The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, What’s its job?”Good question. And the answer?.... “Its job is to challenge what we think a computer can do and do things that no com-puter has ever done before, be more and more powerful and capable so that we need a desk-top because of its capabilities,” says Schiller.

“Because if all it’s doing is competing with the notebook and being thinner and lighter, then it doesn’t need to be.” Which brings us to the new iMac product line. Despite the fact that Apple revenues and profits are dominated by its iPhone success, it still considers Macintosh as a serious part of its business, and according to Schiller, this iMac is a significant part of that. (Apple does not break out iMac sales from the Macintosh numbers, which lately have been a bit below five million per quarter. It sells about ten times as many iPhones than Macintoshes.) “We care about it deeply,” says Apple’s VP of Macintosh Product Marketing Brian Croll, who has been with the company since 2001. The importance goes beyond the num-bers: History will mark the iMac as a critical product in Apple’s revival after the return of its co-founder. It is no accident that the recent Steve Jobs movie ends with the launch event of the first iMac in 1998. Though, as with almost everything in the movie, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin plays fast and loose with the facts– but the iMac did symbolize a new approach for Apple that would characterize its subsequent revitalization. I spent a couple of days hang-ing out with Jobs in the run-up to that release and he made it clear that he believed it was absolutely necessary to make a great desktop computer for the consumer. “This is our soul,” he told me. In a sense, the eye-popping display of the new Retina iMacs are a continuation of that tra-dition. “The display is the theater for the soft-ware,” Jobs told me just before that first iMac launched, and with the new models, Apple has built a proscenium that could host The Lion King. Of course, Retina displays on the whole iMac

line became an inevitability from the moment that technology was introduced on the iPhone in 2010. It migrated to the Macbook in 2012 and then to the iPad and even the Apple Watch.

“We really, really wanted to get Retina to the iMac,” says Ternus. “It was screaming for it.” As Apple’s Senior Director for Mac Hard-ware Tom Boger explained to me, the iMac’s display incorporates not just a denser screen resolution but a wider color palette that re-quires a new technology. Even compared to the Retina screen on the current $2,500 iMac, the new ones are improved, he says. “We’ve given these a wider color gamut. Basically meaning they have a bigger palette of colors they can display,” he says. All high-end displays aspire to represent the full range of colors that the human eye can possibly see, which is a giant technological challenge. The previous industry standard was called sRGB (Standard Red Green Blue), which captured a pretty good chunk of the color spectrum. Currently, Apple’s Retina displays deliver 100 percent sRGB. “We are very proud of that — a lot of monitors don’t do a hundred percent of sRGB. So that was really good,” says Boger. “But about ten years ago the film industry got together and said we could do better than that, they said there were more colors in the world that we could be showing in our films. So they created a new color standard, called P3. It’s actually twenty-five percent larger than sRGB.” By supporting P3, these iMacs deliver richer color. “Color is a big deal, but [previously] we didn’t have the pieces to do it,” says Ternus. Ap-ple had come up with a solution that involved a new way of coding the LED (Light Emitting Di-odes) that would generate high-intensity reds and greens that, passed through a color filter, would create the entire gamut of colors. Then

the team had to find the suppliers that would implement the scheme. One alternative was a technology called quantum dot, but Apple re-jected it because it required cadmium, a toxic element. “Eventually we found this path with our LED suppliers that got us everything we wanted without the environmental downside.” One question is how much it will transform the experience for regular users. In A/B tests for certain photos Apple showed me, I could indeed see a difference, not only in the color popping, but in additional detail that the ex-panded palette revealed. But don’t expect to see dramatic difference in your iPhone shots: the P3 effects will really explode only with dense-pixel images like raw data from DSLR cameras and other high resolution pictures. Movies are another issue; currently, you can’t download a 4K movie from the iTunes store. Apple acknowledges that the P3 is really an of-fering for the pro market. “The pros are so tuned to [color palettes], they will see it immediately,” says Croll. “The consumer will look at it and say, Gee, I don’t really know why, but it looks better.’” There’s one thing, however, that is conspic-uously not in the new iMacs — a touch screen. While Microsoft and others now believe that multi-touch should extend to the desktop dis-play, Apple believes this is dead wrong. “From the ergonomic standpoint we have studied this pretty extensively and we believe that on a desktop scenario where you have a fixed key-board, having to reach up to do touch interfac-es is uncomfortable,” says Schiller. “iOS from its start has been designed as a multi-touch expe-rience — you don’t have the things you have in a mouse-driven interface, like a cursor to move around, or teeny little ‘close’ boxes that you can’t hit with your finger. Cont’d. on pg 6—

Phil Shiller

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 6

Apple Refinements— Continued from page 5 The Mac OS has been designed from day one for an indirect pointing mechanism. These two worlds are different on purpose, and that’s a good thing — we can optimize around the best experience for each and not try to mesh them together into a least-common-denominator experience.” (Speaking of Microsoft, Schiller says he has read about but not tested its new products, as recently announced to surprising acclaim. He does note that Microsoft’s full-blown entry into computer hardware is tacitly a belated ad-mission from Redmond that Apple had it right all along. “It’s amazing that one event validat-ed so much of what Apple does, and held us up as the gold standard. And that’s flattering.”) Apple is still committed to multi-touch con-trol across the product line — it just believes that on the desktop, touch control should be a hands-down experience. Apple has been methodically introducing the multi-touch gestures from its mobile operating system into desktop accessories like the Magic Mouse and the Magic Trackpad. But this iMac iteration may well be remembered for the new input devices with internal rechargeable batteries.

“The driver was environmental,” says Schil-ler, referring to the notion that Apple’s toxic footprints would be considerably lessened by eliminating the need for constant discarding of AA batteries. A two-hour charge lasts over a month. But if you lose track of how low the charge is, plugging the input device into the USB port for just a minute gives you a half a day’s worth of work. Also, those who have previously fumbled to make a Bluetooth con-nection will be happy to learn that plugging the mouse or keyboard into the Mac instantly pairs the devices.

Fixing the battery inside the devices though, forced the Mac team to do some considerable redesigning. Until now both the standard wireless keyboard and trackpad were characterized by a small bedroll at the top that held the batteries. It determined the entire user experience, creating what Apple’s people call a “diving board” effect. For the keyboard, removing the battery chamber meant that Apple could shrink the device while actually making the keys larger.

“We have been trying to improve our input technology for a long time and earlier this year, as we saw in the MacBook, we finally got to a point where we broke through and said preci-sion in keys and typing is something that we really want to do quite well,” says Bergeron. Though the key caps on the Magic Key-board are larger than on the previous version, Bergeron also revealed that one prototype had even bigger keys. “We did a lot of devel-opment early on and probably went down a path that was more extreme than it needed to be, so we backed up a little bit.” The result, she says, is very minimalist. “We made the sur-face area as much of the keys as you can, and minimized the border around that keyboard to take up as little space on the desktop as pos-sible. It weighs less than the one before, and it maintains rigidity.” The Magic Trackpad 2 is most drastically redesigned. Its surface area is 29 percent big-ger, wide enough to accommodate the fre-quent swipes imported into the Macintosh experience from the iOS multitouch world.

“The whole touch experience requires a track-pad that’s larger,” says Croll. “Our belief is that [iMacs] are insane multitouch devices — when your hands are down.” Because it can lie flat, no matter where users click on it, they can get

results with the same degree of force. It uses high-performance glass, tested to withstand a drop. And perhaps most important, the track-pad now supports Force Touch — one more step towards the inexorable mesh between the desktop and mobile experience. In fact, porting Force Touch to the desktop illustrates Schiller’s vision of how features can percolate throughout Apple’s product line. Remember, Apple first came up with the idea for its watch-es, and this year it has moved to the iPhone, and now to iMac. “We’re actually a combined team,” says Croll. “The people developing iOS are the same people developing OSX. So they are carrying both models in their heads.” The iMac may be a truck [compared to mo-bile Apple devices], but Apple is making sure that it has all the bells and whistles of its sports cars. My visit to the Input Design Lab dispelled some of the mystery of how Apple plans vari-ous iterations of its product line. Though from the outside it appears that the company fol-lows a strict schedule — and a cottage industry devotes itself to creating unofficial calendars of product releases — executives insist on the Orson Wellesian principle of no launch before its time. In the case of the new iMac, features came from a combination of factors. The fea-sibility of the always inevitable Retina screen. The necessity to include Force Touch on the desktop. An eco-urge to jettison repleaceable batteries. And the usual Moore’s Law bonan-za of cheaper chips and components. (One bonus I haven’t mentioned: the Fusion Drive option, which combines a hard disk and flash memory for speed and ample storage, is now much cheaper.) Still, once a deadline is set, the team has to concentrate on getting the product out the door. And in the case of the mouse with the

sound that just wasn’t right, that meant find-ing a harmonic solution. Fortunately, Apple has a vast array of ma-chinery at Vallco Parkway to help in just these instances. One machine, for instance, is dedi-cated to testing a mouse on different surfaces and measuring the friction. Another machine setup involves putting a mouse or typewriter keyboard in an anechoic (ultra-soundproof) chamber and measuring precisely — really pre-cisely — where a noise is coming from. In this case, it was the way that the new mouse feet interacted with the surface. The original Magic Mouse maximized the surface contact from its runners. But that approach didn’t work with the new version. “It was a little bit sticky — not in an adhesive sense but it didn’t glide the perfect way we wanted it to glide across the table,” says Bergeron. That resulted in the not-right noise. “The solution was to reshape the high den-sity polyethylene (HDPE) feet. “By actually rid-ing more on the edge this time it was a better experience,” says Bergeron. “Geometry turned out to be the variable that dominated the ex-perience.” After creating runners made of sev-eral new mixes, the team organized a bake-off to choose the best one. Ternus explains that the process “involves getting a core group of people from engineering and design together and looking at different samples and saying, ‘Yeah, this is the one, this sounds right!’ And then we go for it.” And then they go for it again. “Even after all these years with Mac, there’s so much to do,” says Croll. “It’s almost like a roller coaster, where you get off, and then run to the front to do it again. There’s so much more to do.” As you’d expect, work is well underway for the next iMac iteration. But they didn’t show that one to me. a

Brian Croll

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 7

THIS AND THAT HOT L I NKSHow to Use iPhone 6s as a Scale to Weigh Items— OSXDaily.comThe 3D Touch display on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus is able to detect pressure ap-plied to the screen in order to serve the 3D Touch pop and peek functions, but with the help of a little third party web app you can transform the iPhone and 3D Touch display into a fairly precise scale ... Link 6

How to Save eMail Attachments on iPhone & iPad Mail to iCloud Drive— OSXDaily.com

The iOS Mail app allows users to save various types of attachments directly to the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This is a great feature that is available in the latest versions of iOS, and for most file attachment, you’ll be able to save whatever the file is directly to iCloud Drive in iOS. — Link 7

Apple chooses Affinity Photo as the best Mac App of 2015— There are great new features and it now includes SIX extensions for Apple’s Photos app. This means you can access some of the power of Affinity to do some quick edits on your images without having to leave Photos. Extensions included are:DevelopHaze RemovalLiquifyMiniatureMonochromeRetouch Watch Video...

How to Burn Disc Images in OS X El Capitan Without Disk Utility— from OSXDaily.comApple removed the ability to burn disc imag-es from Disk Utility in OS X 10.11 and newer. While that makes sense for many Macs that no longer have SuperDrives, CDRW, and DVD burners, for those who use an external burner, use disc drive sharing, or who do have hardware with a built-in SuperDrive, may ... more info link

Charger/Expander from InfoGroup USB-C Cigarette Lighter Charger and Hub– QuickerTek, a leader in mobile power and wireless networking products for Apple com-puters, has announced two new products, the USB Type-C Cigarette Lighter Charger and USB Expander for the 2015 12-inch Mac-Book. Both products enhance the capabilities of the newest model MacBook. Charger is $24.95; Expander is $19.95 Go here!

good idea to encrypt them. You don’t need any special software to do this; your Mac already contains the app you need.       Apple’s Disk Utility lets you create an encrypted disk image that you can use to store sensitive files that no one, not even the NSA, can get at.— Link 3

iCloud Drive: Features and Costs— from Tom Nelson– About.com iCloud Drive, part of Apple’s iCloud service, allows you to store files in the cloud for easy access from multiple devices. iCloud itself lets you easily sync app documents, such as those created by Pages, Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, but with iCloud Drive, you can store and sync documents from any source at any time. iCloud Drive has been available since the release of OS X Yosemite last year. Since then, Apple lowered the price for buying addition-al storage, making it competitive with other cloud storage services....... Link 4

Apple iOS 9.2 adds iPhone sup-port for USB camera adapter for direct photo transfer— from dpdreview.com Apple released a number of software up-dates yesterday including iOS 9.2. In addition to a large number of bug fixes, the update adds iPhone support for the company’s Lightning to USB Camera Adapter, making it possible now to transfer images directly from a camera to your iPhone. Previously, only iPads were supported. —Link 5

CleanMyMac now supports Photos for OS X— from OSXDaily.com Clean Photos app with CleanMyMac 3. Its Photo Junk module cleans up the cache that Photos app generates (and that cache can add up to gigabytes). Make sure you update to version 3.2 to remove photo junk that’s taking up actual photo space.

How to Disable “Shake to Find Cursor” in OS X El Capitan for Mac— from OSXDaily.com One of the new feature additions to OS X 10.11 and later is the ability to quickly locate a mouse cursor on screen by shaking the mouse or trackpad cursor around, which causes the cursor to enlarge briefly, making it very easy to find on single or multiple display setups. But what if you don’t want ... Link 1—

Use “Delete Immediately” on Files to Bypass Trash in Mac OS X— from OSXDaily.com The latest versions of OS X include a new ability to immediately delete a file or folder from the Mac, bypassing the Trash can. Essentially how the “Delete Immediately” feature works is by circumventing the Trash and rather than waiting for user action to remove the files, it just deletes the file(s) instantaneously.... Link 2—

How to Encrypt Disk Images with Disk Utility to Protect Sensitive Files— from apple.com If you want to protect files on your Mac, on an external drive, or even in the cloud, it’s a

To get the answer to this seemingly normal pic, yet Photoshop goof-up, go to page 10.

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 8

Choosing the Right AirPort Device— by Don Mayer of smalldog.com

Let’s say you just got that new iMac and you are finding that your network is run-ning slow. Your wireless signal drops out

a few times a day and you just can’t seem to stay online. Well, it is probably time to upgrade your wireless network. Fortunately, Apple offers several options with their Airport wireless routers. When it comes to equipping your home or office with a wireless network, Apple offers three different options for Apple AirPort base stations: the Apple AirPort Express, Apple AirPort Extreme and the Apple AirPort Time Capsule. With an AirPort base station you can easily create a Wi-Fi network with a Mac or an iOS device in just a few steps. You can also use the AirPort base station to share a printer or hard drive, stream iTunes to your stereo and back-up your Mac.

Let’s take a look at each of Apple’s offerings:

AirPort ExpressThe compact AirPort Express utilizes the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard and supports AirPlay. It is great for an apartment or smaller space. It allows you to use AirPlay to wirelessly stream music to your stereo or compatible speakers and has a USB port so that you can print wire-

lessly. It also has an audio output port (AKA headphone jack) to support wireless music streaming. It has an Ethernet input and one Ethernet output so it can be easily connected to your DSL or Cable modem and to your Ethernet network if you have that, too. The Express has an internal power supply, so no wall wart!

AirPort ExtremeThe Apple AirPort Extreme is more powerful, features 802.11ac Wi-Fi and offers increased performance and extended range. This is the unit for you if you have a larger home, a small business or in the classroom. Its taller shape increases the range due to better antenna performance and it features a USB port to enable wireless printing or to connect a hard drive. It features three Ethernet LAN ports in addition to the single Ethernet WAN port. The AirPort Extreme’s power supply is also built-in.

Airport Time CapsuleThe Airport Time Capsule looks identical to the AirPort Extreme and has the same ports and wireless specifications. It adds either a 2TB or 3TB internal hard drive for Time Ma-chine backups.

All of these Apple AirPort base stations are very easy to set-up. You plug it in, turn it on and connect it to your cable or DSL modem via the Ethernet WAN port. Your Mac or iOS device will recognize the AirPort, select the new AirPort base station and the built-in setup assistant provides step-by-step instruc-tions and suggests the best network configu-ration. You select “Create a new network” cre-ate a password and you are surfing.

Deciding which Apple AirPort base station is right for you depends on where you are us-ing it, i.e. the range you need and whether you need the maximum speed. The latest Apple Macs all support 802.11ac and that may push you towards the Extreme or Time Cap-sule.

It is somewhat of an undocumented fea-ture that you can, in fact, attach a USB drive to an AirPort Extreme and use that combination with Time Machine for backups. It does take a little bit more configuration time but I can say from personal experience that it works flaw-lessly. While there is an advantage to having the all-in-one Time Capsule it can also be an advantage having separate devices so that IF one fails, the other is still functional. a

Editor’s note— While the latest Apple Macs support the faster 802.11ac standard, older Macs may only have the “n” standard and will function at its slower speed.

Check Store & Restaurant Business Hours with Siri—If you’ve ever needed to know how late a particular store or restaurant is open, just pull out your iPhone and ask Siri. This should be handy when you’re out and about running errands or need to make a last minute shopping stop, but it’s clearly useful for many purposes. And if you have a new iPhone with Hey Siri enabled for hands free queries, it works great in the car or when you’re out walking around too. • As usual with Siri, the secret is simply in asking the right question, but as long as the business, restaurant, or store is listed and Apple Maps can find it, the store hours most likely will be able to be retrieved. For the full “how-to” story from OSXDaily, visit this webpage! a

5 Incredible Storm Photographers & Their Best Images— by James Brandon on digital-photography-school.com (edited)

Nothing on earth can compare to the feeling I get when standing in front of a mas-sive supercell with 40-50mph winds at my back, watching it twist and churn, as it tries to lower itself to the ground. It’s the most intense and pure mixture of awe, fear and respect for mother nature that I’ve been able to find to this day. In addition to my images, here’s a collection of four of the best chaser photographers out there (along with a few of their best images). See this amazing work. a

Voice Guided Navigation, Severe Weather Alerts and more, now in inRoute — The first voice guided naviga-tion app to automatically check your route for severe weather! inRoute’s route planner

– with automatic order optimization and custom routes based on elevation, weather, curviness and more – has now been coupled with a voice navigation upgrade that detects severe weather ahead on the route plus many more features. Featured by Apple as a Best New App in Navigation. Check the App Store in the Navigation category. Free trial! a

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 9

OMUG Christmas Party 2015— Our new home, the Discovery Center was the venue this year and thanks to Phil, we were joined by our gracious hosts, Suzanne Shuffitt, Discovery Center Manager and our DC liaison, Stephanie Brown. Our OMUG membership and spouses all had a teriffic opportunity to socialize, converse one-on-one with each other, share stories, enjoy music of the season and... CHOW DOWN. J.P. Leemans got the party-down deals started by arranging for 2J’s Catering and an outstanding buffet fare of salad, Chicken Marsala, Fresh Thyme Beef Ten-derloin, Vegetable Lasagna, delicious sides, and a palate pleasing Coffee Flan dessert to top it all off. Meanwhile, Don Boyd, in ad-dition to all his advance organizing, along with Ruth Ingmire made sure all the tables looked “Christmas party” right. Santa Tom Lee arranged for the bounty of door prizes and congratulated the lucky winners— prizes: three $40 gift certificates for Chayote Latin American Cuisine, a 1T Western Digital hard drive, HP 60 Printer & inks, two $25 iTunes gift cards, two Take Control eBooks, and a Google Chromecast 2015 media streaming player. All in all, a wonderful way to close out our OMUG 2015 year with many fond memories. Now.....“party-on” into 2016– just look at J.P., Kimberly and Josette– they’ve already made it to the pool.....

Photo left: courtesy J.P. Leemans • Montage photos: credits— Larry Feller and Bobby Adams

Oh... and one last thing— The Sunday before Christmas, Dec. 20th,the CBS television network featured Apple on its “60 Minutes” programming. The segment was “Inside Apple” with Charlie Rose as correspondent. A copy of the interview transcript plus video can be seen here. A very interesting topic was the anatomy of the iPhone camera. It can be seen here. Fascinating stuff!

Pg. 7 photo answer: Count her fingers— if you add her thumb, she has six!

January 2016 | MUGSHOT Newsletter | 10

There are two main aspects to consider when beginning to attempt any equine photography, the photographic side (technical and creative) and the dealing with horses side (sometimes unpredict-able and can be dangerous). Horses have distinct personalities which can range from extremes such as: a tendency gallop across a paddock to attack you on one end of the scale, to willing to defend you at their own expense at the other end. Their main instinct is flight, and they can be easily spooked by just about anything — including cameras. There is a whole horse language involving their ears, leg stance, and head movement. The horse owners I have worked with prefer certain positioning of these things in photographs. For example, they really don’t like images where the horses ears are pinned back, which means the horse is not very happy. I would suggest spending some time googling horse body language before you set out on your first equine photo session – not only to know all the best positions, but to also know if a horse is about to attempt to do you some serious damage. Never stand behind a horse. Never catch a horse by surprise. Make sure the horse knows where you are. They don’t like people jumping out from behind bushes, or sudden movements. Never run up to a horse. One owner trainer tells me that even wearing bright colors can startle some horses.

Horses and cameras— Unless you know that a horse is very used to flash, using one could endanger you, the horse, or the handler/rider. I would avoid it at all costs. The sight and any sound of your camera can be enough to startle them, even just the slap of a DSLR’s mirror. (Chat with the handler about the horse’s personality.) It is often good to have the handler introduce you. Let the horse approach you, sniff the camera, and move slowly, talk softly and calmly, and if it’s all okay to do so, give it a pat. If you’re unsure how the horse will react to camera sounds do a few test shots while the horse is calm, and you are all in safe positions. I would recommend a zoom lens so you can get in close on detail, without getting too close to the horse.

The photography— You’ll want a fairly fast shutter speed, even for portraits – those ears move fast. I’d recommend a minimum of 1/250th for general photography, faster if the horse is moving at speed. Generally you want good horse shapes where you can see all four legs, and the animal has its ears forward. Find a safe spot where the horse can see you from a distance, and don’t keep moving about. Reminder, do not use flash. An image that involves horse and rider in mid-jump, with all legs off the ground and front legs tucked under, is generally preferred by riders and owners. You’ll need a fairly fast shutter speed, somewhere around 1/650th – 1/800th is a good place to start. Set your camera to continuous release (burst) mode, and press the shutter just as the horse lifts off. Go here for the full DPS article!

Apple Users Helping Apple Users—OMUG’s Help Team will try to help you with your computer, iPad, iPhone and software problems. Please go to the website’s help-team for a list of help topics and phone/email contacts for the following member volunteers: Bob Adams Richard Bambridge Don Boyd Philip Davis (email ONLY) Marilyn Kennedy Dr. Roberto Putzeys Tim Rankin Al Sypher Brian Voge Lorraine Wieskamp

OMUG Assignments—

Fifty-Fifty Raffle– Tom LeeMembership– Don Boyd MUGSHOT Newsletter– Al SypherProgram Coordinator– Burt StephensOnline Services Coordinator and Apple Ambassador– Philip DavisSunshine Ambassador– Don Morrison

Next Workshop—

Mac Basics– Phil Davis: 1/28/16 Location: College of Central Florida

OMUG Meeting Information—

The Ocala Mac User Group meets the 2nd Tuesday of the month at 7 PM:

Discovery Center of Ocala— Tuscawilla Park 701 NE Sanchez Ave, Ocala

Workshop sessions are held with Senior Learners, Inc., using their CF meeting room on the 4th Thursday of the month from 1:30 to 3:30 PM.

OMUG Board of Directors—President– Bobby Adams badams0993@gmail.com • 274.0177 Vice President– Marilyn Kennedy marilynkennedy2@mac.com • 854.1021 Secretary–Lorraine Wieskamp wieskamp37@gmail.com • 351-3533Treasurer– Don Boyd trpdip7@gmail.com • 203-4059Director– Tom Lee twleeper@embarqmail.com Director– Philip Davis davistech@gmail.com • 369-8432Director– Burt Stephens burtstephens@gmail.com • 873-6177 Director– Al Sypher aes@imageocala.com • 237-9501Past President– N.C. Sizemore ncsizemore@gmail.com • 291-8778

Disclaimer— The Apple logo is the property of Apple, Inc. All tradenames, trademarks, and registered trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners or companies. Content presented herein attributed to specific sources remains the property of the named sources. The information presented in this newsletter is for the personal enlightenment of OMUG members and friends, does not constitute an endorsement, and shall not to be used for commercial pur-poses. Reproduction of any material herein is expressly prohibited unless prior written permission is given by OMUG.

Beginner’s Guide to Photographing Horses— an excerpt from the full DPS article

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