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September ’15Volume 31 Issue 9

ContentsSIG News 2Club News 3Pizza Party 4Joy of Tech 10iPhone, iPod, & iPad 11Macs & Mac OS X 14The Joe on Tech 16Reviews

Affinity Photo 18Michael’s Mac Tips 24FunBITS 26Tidbits 27

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Photos: A Few Frames Shy of a Full Rollby Dave Kitabjian

Photos for the Mac does a great job of unifying the photo management experience between your Mac and your iOS devices, bringing the Moments and Collections organizational paradigm to your Mac. And then there’s the long-awaited iCloud Photo Library, which gives you access to your entire photo and video library, on all of your Apple devices, by syncing them seamlessly in the background. Finally, Photos is the only app that knows how to preserve the Slo-Mo, Time-Lapse, and Burst features on footage captured with newer iOS devices.

But Photos also has its limitations, especially if you’re used to iPhoto, so I wanted to round up some of the changes I’ve noticed, in case you’ve been struggling to make sense of the same issues. And for those of you still cautious about upgrading from iPhoto, this might help you decide whether or not it’s safe to up-grade.

Not for the Pros -- First off, let’s dispense with the Aperture question. Photos nominally replaces both iPhoto and Aperture, but you may have already heard lots of negative jabber from the professional com-munity, as it feels the pain of losing the advanced photo editing features that were present in Aperture.

I am neither a professional photographer nor an Aperture user, so I can’t compare the two. However, the topic is covered a good bit online, including this article at the venerable Digital Photography Review.

Based on this and other articles, I will make a couple of observations.First, unlike Aperture, Photos is not designed for professionals. If you are a pro, plan on buying a pro-

fessional software package for your photo management. The primary option appears to be Adobe Light-room.

Second, Photos’ built-in editing tools should suffice for most needs of most users. As such, the vocal backlash by Aperture users over the lack of pro features in Photos should not be something everyday users should worry about, especially since Photos is new and will be evolving in the future.

So, does Photos have shortcomings that should concern the amateur photographer or home user? Un-fortunately, it does.

Unlike Your Public Library, iCloud Photo Library Isn’t Free -- You may have been enjoying Apple’s combination of iPhoto and iCloud’s My Photo Stream for years, which stores all your media locally and syncs all newly taken photos across all your Apple de-vices for free. But it lacks a few key features:

It doesn’t sync videosIt doesn’t sync edited photosIt is limited to 1,000 photosLarge iPhoto libraries take up a ton of space on your

MacSince your iPhoto library lives on your Mac, it can’t

easily be accessible everywhereiCloud Photo Library is designed to fix all of these

limitations, but unless you’re a brand new user whose Photos library is under the 5 GB of iCloud storage space that Apple gives you for free, you have to shell out cash even to turn it on.

For my library, I would need the full 1 TB of iCloud storage at $19.99 per month, giving me a hefty

A Publication of the Silicon Mountain Macintosh User Group

Continued on page 6

Next Meeting: Tuesday

September1st

SMMUG Info 2SIG NEWS

The Saturday SMMUG Special Interest Group (SIG) will meet from 10:00 AM to 12:00 Noon, Saturday, September 1, 2015, in the Fire Station 18’s meeting room at: 6830 Hadler View (a map is located at the end of this NL). The meeting will be divided in to two parts.

The First part starting at 10:00 will focus on iOS, helping everyone become both comfortable and proficient with their iPhone, iPad, and iPod mo-bile devices. Starting at 11:00 we will focus on the How to use AirDrop.

All are invited, but new users are especially en-courage to attend this free meeting. Bring your tips and tricks, questions and suggestions.

For more information about Special Interest Groups (SIGs), go to the SMMUG website.

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September 1, 2015October 6, 2015

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THIS MONTH AT SMMUG

September 1, 20156:00 Q&A Session6:45 Networking Break7:00 Apple’s Photo and photo storage by

Mark pimentel8:00 Adjourn

Silicon Summit is a monthly publica-tion of the Silicon Mountain Mac-intosh User Group, Inc.

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© All material in this newsletter is Copyright 2015 by the Silicon Moun-tain Macintosh User Group, Inc. (SMMUG, Inc.).

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Announcements

September PresentationApple’s new photo storage, organizing and editing application is here and will replace iPhoto and Aperture. Apple Consultant Mark Pimentel will discuss how Apple’s new approach to pictures on your Mac, iPad and iPhone will change how you deal with photographs and videos once you switch over to Photos.

SMMUG Door Prizes for the September 2015 Meeting:$25 iTunes Gift CardSanDisk 8GB USB Flash DriveiLogic Desktop CalculatorScreen Cleaning Wipes, 20 sheets, anti-staticBlank Verbatim DVD+R discs, 4.7GB, 10 packiPad rear cover, black rubber2-in-1 pen and stylusRetractable LED Lantern

Club News

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$239.88 bill every year. You might not need that much now, but your library will only grow in the future.Meanwhile, Flickr offers a full terabyte of space for free and the new Google Photos offers an unlimited amount of space to store both photos and

videos. To be fair, the Flickr and Google offerings aren’t equivalent. In some ways, iCloud Photo Library is superior; in other ways, it falls short. The comparison between these services would necessitate another article, but my point here is that iCloud Photo Library is relatively expensive when compared with competing services.

Geolocation Data Can’t Be Changed -- Geolocation data or geotags are metadata about your global coordinates that are stamped into the JPEG files produced by a GPS-capable camera such as your iPhone. This provides a permanent record of where the picture was taken. In the care of an application like iPhoto, such metadata can be used to query or even plot a map of where you’ve been.

Unfortunately, there are lots of ways photos can come into your library without geotags:All the photos taken with standalone cameras, the vast majority of which lack GPS support, won’t include geotags.Screenshots and scanned photos will also lack geotag data.Finally, most, if not all, of the photos you download from Facebook won’t have geotags. This is often because, for security or privacy reasons, peo-

ple sensibly select options that strip geolocation data out of photos before sharing them online. The problem is, Facebook is the only way that many people exchange photos, even privately. You can ask to have photos sent to you via email, copied to a USB thumb drive, or by some other means (and ask them to disable the geotag-stripping feature before doing so). But in practice, that’s more complex than many people can manage.

iPhoto had an easy way to geotag photos, whether you wanted to modify existing geotag data or add new geotag data to placeless photos, by using the Assign a Place feature.

Photos, sadly, has no such feature, although Apple has promised to bring this capability back in the version of Photos slated to ship with OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Until then, there are third-party geotagging apps available, but all require such tagging to take place prior to importing into Photos. Once photos have been imported, it’s too late.

While we’re waiting for the geotagging interface to come back to

Photos, you can create a smart album that identifies which photos are not geotagged, so you can fix them later on. I Miss My Happy Place(s) -- Speaking of geotag informa-tion, one of the coolest fea-

tures of iPhoto was its Places feature, easily accessible from the sidebar and with a hierarchical interface that could transport you to anywhere on the map where you’ve taken a photo. This excellent feature from iPhoto is missing in Photos, though you can still see remnants of it when you click a

city name in one of your Moments, or if you open the Info window after selecting one or more photos.What if you want to search by the name of the location? A simple location search works in Photos, but in

iPhoto, you could create a smart album to round up all the photos at the location you are looking for. Alas, building a smart album using Place as a criteria is no longer an option.

Luckily, there is a hidden workaround that might work in some situations. A smart album using the Text

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7criteria will find city names in geotags. To be certain you have the name right, search first using the Search field, where Photos will suggest place names.

Goodbye Events — Hello Moments, Collections, and Years -- Photos replaces iPhoto’s Events with Moments, Collections, and Years, which isn’t always a good thing, despite the similarity with the iOS ver-sion of Photos.

In early versions of iPhoto, there were no Events, just Film Rolls, which corresponded to each import. Even though Apple later added the capability to split and combine Film Rolls (since you might import photos from many days of shooting at one time), the feature required quite a bit of manual intervention.

To simplify the process, Apple introduced Events, which automatically grouped photos together based on the proximity in time at which those photos were taken. The default was “per day,” so all the photos imported at once and which were taken in the same day were grouped into a single event. This welcome feature brought much-needed structure to our growing photo libraries, even though manual splitting and merging of Events was still often required to get photos where they should be. That was especially true if you had multiple family mem-bers shooting photos from different places at the same time, merging all their photos together into one library.

In spite of the improvements offered by Events, Apple wanted to streamline things further, removing the burden of any manual organization. So when Photos came out on iOS, the company abandoned Events, instead capitalizing on the fact that all iPhone-captured photos contain time and GPS data, which can be used to organize them automatically. The result is the aforementioned Moments and Collections concepts, which use both date and location info to organize your photos automatically. Photos on the Mac now uses the same concept.

Sometimes this works well, and is a clever solution. But other times, it falls down badly.Since geolocation information is key to defining Moments and Collections, photos with no geotag data (and no way to fix geotag data) end up

being grouped into Moments and Collections they have absolutely nothing to do with. They may have been taken around the same time, but by different family members and at completely different locations.

If that were the only problem, we could hope that when Apple puts iPhoto’s Assign a Place feature into Photos, we’ll have this under control. Un-fortunately, Moments also routinely and bewilderingly groups photos together that it knows were taken miles and hours apart.

Back in the days of Events, these mis-groupings could be fixed manually (albeit tediously), by moving photos around from one event to another. But now, with Moments and Collections formed automatically based on geotag and date/time info, we have no way to reorganize. So we’re stuck having photos grouped wrongly, making some photos difficult to locate.

As for Collections, they appear to be designed to offer an intermediate aggregation step between Moments and Years, ostensibly helping you to drill down to the photos you’re looking for. Unfortunately, Collections seem to take the already ambiguously organized Moments and group them to-gether with no rhyme or reason, making the concept perplexing at best and useless at worst.

There is one more casualty of the demise of Events. If, like me, you rely heavily on the capability to display your photos across your LAN to an Ap-ple TV, you have probably noticed that the Apple TV’s Computers channel still does not support the new Moments/Collections/Years view of Pho-tos. And with the previous solution of browsing Events on the Apple TV having been removed (thanks to Photos), you’re now stuck with all your thousands of photos in one, giant scrolling mess of a list. We can only hope a future Apple TV (and software update for at least the current third-generation model) fixes this problem.

Batch Change of Titles and Descriptions Is Gone -- When it comes to organizing photos with data that’s connected with a photo, both iPhoto and Photos let you assign a title, enter a description, and tag with one or more keywords.

Keywords (also called tags) are the modern way to go when associating digital objects like photos with one another. You’re probably used to seeing #hashtagsInTwitter already, which are essentially a form of keywords that link tweets, and keywords are used extensively on support sites such as StackExchange for collecting similar questions. Even the labels feature in Gmail is based on the keywords paradigm, providing a way to group related email messages, and the colorful tags in the Finder perform a similar function for files on your Mac.

But keywords don’t necessarily travel with exported photos well, and an iPhoto feature that’s missing in Photos is the capability to batch change title and descriptions for a group of photos. Why might you want this?

8If you’re exporting photos for people who may not even use a Mac, much less Photos, or if you’re syncing to a photo sharing service that doesn’t

honor keywords, being able to title or describe multiple photos at once is a boon. Plus, even for your own searching, you may want to connect a set of photos with the same word in the title without creating a keyword that would never be used again.

Without a batch change feature in Photos, you’re stuck using copy and paste to modify the title or description for each photo by hand. For a trip during which you took 100+ photos, that’s not manageable.

Scrubbing Over Album Covers Has Been Scrubbed Away -- “Scrubbing”, sometimes also called skimming, is what they call the cool way iPhoto used to whiz through all the photos in an Event when you skimmed your cursor from left to right across the Event icon. Not only cool, but quite useful.

Events are gone in Photos, but we still have albums, and in Album View they’re represented by a single photo (select the one you want to use and choose Image > Make Key Photo). Unfortunately, however, there’s no scrubbing support here, so you have to open each Album to see what else is inside.

Facebook and Flickr Integration Is Dumbed Down -- We waited years for Apple to add support in iPhoto for multiple Facebook accounts, so a husband, wife, etc., sharing an iPhoto library could post photos to their own Facebook accounts. I had one for myself, one for my wife, and a third for my dad, since he isn’t too savvy with posting photos to Facebook. Worked fantastically!

Sadly, that feature has been ripped out, not only from Photos but from 10.10 Yosemite in general, and we’re back to being able to post to only a single Facebook account. My wife posted a photo to my Facebook account by mistake this week from our shared Photos library because of that limi-tation. Now, she has to go back to the dark ages where she can’t post to Facebook at all (from the Mac) without extraordinary hassle.

The general problem here is that Apple has never understood how families share photos, preferring instead to assume that every person has their own Photos library and finds the single shared album created by Family Sharing sufficient for their needs.

Also, in iPhoto we used to be able to create albums on the fly in both Facebook and Flickr, and have faces you’ve already tagged in iPhoto be tagged in Facebook. That’s all gone now, and you can post only to pre-existing albums.

Where Are Those Photos I Just Imported? -- The Last Import Album is available, as it was in iPhoto.But what about imports from earlier in the day? And sometimes you have to drag one photo at a time

into Photos, so even an import from 2 minutes ago won’t be in Last Import, since each drag-and-drop will be treated as a separate import. Sometimes your imports come from sources with bad EXIF data or were dragged right out of Facebook, so they won’t be discoverable by looking for a recent shutter date. There’s still no way to search for an import date.

In iPhoto, there was a convenient workaround for finding recent imports by making a smart album of recently created Events.

Since there are no Events in Photos, this handy solution is not available. So now those recent imports could be hiding somewhere deep inside your massive library and you have no way of finding them. Exasperating!

Ratings Are Gone, but That’s No Biggie -- You may have noticed that iPhoto’s 1 to 5 star rating system has been removed in favor of a simple heart-shaped icon, a Boolean choice: it’s either a favorite or it’s not. If you’re like me, you value having a way to separate your very best shots from your mediocre ones, and so on.

Fortunately, by tagging all your star-rated photos with keywords like “5 Star” when you upgraded from iPhoto to Photos, Apple made it easy to continue grouping your best shots into a smart album. Just search for the keyword “5 Star” — the same goes for other rating levels. Rating a photo is now merely a matter of assigning the corresponding keyword to it.

So we really haven’t lost any functionality here; we’ve just been moved to a new way of keeping track of multiple levels of favorites.

Face Recognition Is Still Lousy -- While iPhoto’s Places feature has not yet made it over to Photos, the Faces feature is present. Unfortunately, Photos’ intel-ligence at locating and identifying faces is as bad as iPhoto’s was.

While this isn’t a reason to avoid upgrading to Photos, I felt it was worth men-tioning because, in the process of trying to find an alternative to iCloud Photo Library’s high prices, I checked out Google Photos. Have you tried it

9yet? If so, have you seen how astonishingly accurate the face recognition is? It’s like something out of “Minority Report.” It spotted people in a nearly dark photo, and got them all right, even when I could barely see them myself. And when I was sure I was looking at a photo of my younger son while Google Photos thought it was my older son, it turned out Google Photos got the right child and I was in error.

It would be great to see Photos improve its face recognition capabilities.Buggy Burst Support -- If you use a newer iPhone that supports Burst

photos, you’re probably already aware that the iOS Photos app presents a special user interface indicating how many shots are in the burst, and lets you select which you wish to keep from among the many shots (and dis-card the rest).

Thankfully, Photos on the Mac also supports this Bursts interface, os-tensibly allowing you to defer making the choice about which of the shots within the burst to keep until after you’re back on your Mac.

Often, however, I’ve already selected the burst shot to keep on my iPhone and told it to discard the rest (before I connect my iPhone to my Mac to handle the fetching of any videos). Having done so, I expect that, when the burst arrives on my Mac, whether by My Photo Stream or by USB cable, Photos will be aware that I’ve already made that selection and discarded the rest, and won’t present me with the full array of original burst shots.

But sometimes the process leaves me with the full set of burst shots on my Mac (and sometimes, additionally, the one still that I selected as a sepa-rate photo), forcing me to look through things again to make sure I have what I want to keep before I once again toss out the unwanted shots.

Deleted Imports Keep Reimporting -- Even though recently imported and deleted photos are still in my File > Show Recently Deleted view, each time I connect my iPhone to my Mac, these photos show up under New Photos. And if I let Photos go ahead and Import All New Photos (with Delete Items After Import checked), they import unchallenged with no duplicate detection and no awareness that this photo had been not only pre-viously imported but also deleted.

Even if My Photo Stream were not enabled on both devices, a “delete list” (as used in ancient software like POP-based email apps) would allow Photos to keep track of such things. But with My Photo Stream in place, too, there’s really no excuse. In fact, My Photo Stream is probably the cause of the problem, and appears to have been implemented with bugs in its deletion management.

To be clear, when I delete the photo from Photos, it confirms that the photo will be deleted from My Photo Stream, which should be enough to tell all the other devices connected to My Photo Stream to yank the shot as well. That part seems to work when it comes to My Photo Stream itself. But if the photo originated on my iPhone, it also exists in my Camera Roll, where it never gets removed (in spite of the aforementioned Delete Items After Import checkbox).

I’m guessing that Photos is getting confused between having photos arrive via My Photo Stream, some arriving via a direct connection, and trying to keep track of which ones have been deleted. But I can’t tell because I don’t know how Apple intended it to work. All I can say is that it doesn’t al-ways work.

Joe Kissell, author of “Take Control of iCloud” and “Digital Sharing for Apple Users: A Take Control Crash Course,” said that he suspects that the solution would be to turn off My Photo Stream and leave iCloud Photo Library turned on. I’ll try that, and so should you if you experience this problem.

A Snapshot of the Situation -- In spite of all the aforementioned issues, I’m pleased with Photos overall. I’m glad that it handles Slo-Mo and Time-Lapse videos from my iPhone 6, and hopefully the issues with its Burst support will be fixed soon.

I also generally like the Moments and Collections paradigm, but the rules defining how photos are grouped as such are poorly implemented and need to be redone. Or users need to be able to override them.

At least Apple is making it a priority to provide geotagging support in a forthcoming update so I can fix photos that have no geotag data. I’d also like to see Places return, with its map view and the capability to use Place criteria more obviously in smart albums.

I’d definitely like to see more enticing price points for iCloud Photo Library.As for scrubbing, it was both cool and useful, and I’d like to see it return, along with tighter integration with Facebook and Flickr, including sup-

port for multiple accounts. Face recognition needs to grow some neurons so we don’t have to suffer from Google envy. And while I don’t mind being pushed to keywords, I’d still like to be able to batch change titles and descriptions.

And finally, I won’t miss Events as long as, along with geotag management and a reworking of Moments and Collections, we get a way to search based on import date.

Here’s looking forward to Photos 2.0![Dave Kitabjian has been writing software and designing databases for 25 years, most recently for NetCarrier Telecom. His favorite language is

SQL, but he also enjoys building Linux-based services and solutions. He has been a Mac owner since 1984, and he’s often asked to do technical edit-ing for O’Reilly Media books.]

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iPhone, iPod, & iPad Apple Replacing Some iPhone 6 Plus iSight Cameras

by Adam C. EngstApple has discovered that a manufacturing run of the iPhone 6 Plus ended up using a faulty component in the iSight camera, causing photos to

look blurry. (The iSight camera is the rear-facing camera.) Only a small percentage of devices sold between September 2014 and January 2015 are affected, but if your iPhone 6 Plus suffers from fuzzy photos, check its serial number at the iSight Camera Replacement Program for iPhone 6 Plus page to see if Apple will replace the camera for free. The easiest way to find the serial number is in Settings > General > About; tap and hold the number to copy it.

If your iPhone is covered by the replacement program, you can have it fixed at an Apple Retail Store or an Apple Authorized Service Provider; if neither is appropriate, contact Apple Technical Support. Don’t try to get help from your wireless carrier; they’ll refer you back to Apple.

Be sure to back up your iPhone to iTunes or iCloud before bringing or sending it in for repair. And if your iPhone has damage such as a cracked screen that would prevent the camera from being replaced, that will have to be resolved first, potentially incurring a service fee.

The replacement program covers affected iPhone 6 Plus devices for 3 years after the first retail sale of the unit, so even if your iPhone 6 Plus isn’t showing the problem now, if photos start to get blurry within that time frame, Apple will replace the camera.

How to See Your iPhone’s Precise Signal Strengthby Josh Centers

For decades, cellphone owners have relied on signal bars to determine the strength of the cellular signal. Since iOS 7, iPhone (and cellular iPad) users have become accustomed to signal dots, which do the same thing. But neither is a precise indicator, and you can’t necessarily predict what will or will not be possible when a particular number of dots are lit up.

Cellular reception in my area is awful, especially in my house. Sometimes voice calls work OK with one dot, but fail at three dots. Cellular data is even more unpredictable. My iPhone’s Internet connection often doesn’t work at all unless I have LTE coverage; 3G is almost as bad as no signal at all these days.

The folks over at Tech Insider have produced a video that will help you see what your signal strength is numerically, for troubleshooting purposes. But for some reason, they didn’t also write up the instructions for those who prefer reading. So if you fall in that camp, here’s how to see your iPhone’s precise signal strength:

• Open the Phone app• Dial *3001#12345#* and tap the green call button to put your iPhone into a

secret Field Test Mode• Hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Slide to Power Off screen appears• Release the Sleep/Wake button and ignore the Slide to Power Off prompt• Hold the Home button until you go back to the Home screenInstead of dots, you should now see a negative number in the upper left, like

-102. This is your exact signal strength, measured in decibel-milliwatts, called the Received Signal Strength Indication (or RSSI if you want to impress technical support). The higher the number, the better, but note that these are negative numbers, so -1 would be an outstanding signal, while -1000 would be beyond poor. In the real world, you’ll probably see signal strengths somewhere between -40 (a five-bar signal) and -120 (a one-bar signal).

What if you get tired of trying to interpret the numbers? Tap the numbers to switch back to dots; another tap brings the numbers back again. And if you want to go back to dots permanently? First, restart your iPhone by holding the Sleep/Wake button, swiping the Slide to Power Off Switch to the right, and then press-ing the Sleep/Wake button again to turn it back on. Then, to get rid of the num-bers for good, go back into Field Test Mode and exit it by pressing the Home but-ton.

I’ve been arguing with Verizon Wireless for years about my poor service, and have consistently received the runaround. The closest I’ve come to receiving actual help was being told to dial ### after a dropped call to mark it in Verizon’s records. (Give that a try the next time you lose a call!) But

12since standard cellular voice calls drop so consistently, I usually use Google Hangouts or FaceTime instead, and thus never have an opportunity to report problems. Sigh…

Now I can go to Verizon with this new, accurate information, and maybe someone technically minded will take me seriously. I’m not going to hold my breath.

How to Avoid Data Overage Charges When Traveling to Canadaby Adam C. Engst

It’s embarrassing — we live in Ithaca, New York, where a popular bumper sticker reads, “Centrally Isolated,” and yet, before last year, we’d never driven to Ottawa, Toronto, or Montreal, even though Ottawa and Toronto are no farther than New York City, and Montreal is an hour closer than Boston. But after Çingleton in Montreal last October (you can watch the video of our presentation, “Through the Lens of a Boutique Publisher” on Vimeo!) and participating in the Winterlude Skate-Ski-Run Triathlon in Ottawa in January (at -14°F, as you can see in the video!), we’ve de-cided to explore these great Canadian cities more. So, for our wedding anniversary this June, we returned to Ottawa to check out the city’s bike path-ways in vastly warmer temperatures. And that, to shift from the Travel section back to the Tech pages, is where I hit some cellular data-related prob-lems.

Like on our other recent Canadian trips, we were going for only a few days, so I opted not to venture into the murky waters of prepaid SIM cards, especially since my online research showed that the various options could be hard to get in the United States, weren’t that cheap, had confusing top-up options that sometimes required Canadian credit cards, and so on. So, for each of our iPhones, I turned on AT&T’s Passport package, which includes a paltry 120 MB of data for $30 (it has unlimited texting as well, which is irrelevant to us, and usuriously expensive phone calls at $1 per minute; we didn’t plan to make any calls). Data over 120 MB is charged at $0.25 per megabyte.

I had last reset my iPhone’s cellular data statistics earlier in the month, since I was tracking iCloud Photo Library’s data-sucking behavior (see “More Problems with iCloud Photo Library Uploads,” 19 June 2015), and in retrospect, I should have reset the statistics again as soon as we crossed into Canada, since I couldn’t track just the Canadian usage effectively. I had disabled every individual app that I was worried about in Settings > Cellular and I wasn’t using data excessively in the apps I left on, such as Google Maps, Messages, Dark Sky, Yelp, and the general Google app. And yet, on our fourth day there, AT&T sent me a text message warning me that I had hit 80 percent of my 120 MB plan. I then shut off cellular data entirely, figur-ing I’d hold the last 20 percent in reserve for an emer-gency. Although I don’t remember exactly what I did in terms of checking the stats, I was pretty sure I was within my limits. The only other text mes-sage I got from AT&T came several days after we returned from Canada, telling me that I had used my 120 MB data allowance. Whatever, I was back home by then.

I didn’t think too much of this until I got the monthly bill, which included a surprising $32.50 charge for a whopping 130 MB of data over the 120 MB limit. That was distressing, since I thought I’d managed usage effectively, so I called AT&T. The rep explained that it can take 3–5 days for AT&T to receive the information from roaming partners, which accounted for the delayed message. When I asked if the 80 percent message had also been based on delayed information, she wouldn’t acknowledge that directly, but said that she understood how it could be confusing from the cus-tomer perspective. I’ll say! There’s no point to a warning message if you’ve already exceeded the cap. Nevertheless, she very nicely credited me the over-age fees, so it was worth the call. The moral of the story is that it’s always worth calling and being pleasant to the rep if you feel AT&T’s system has done wrong by you.

Best Practices for Occasional Short Canadian Trips -- So what would be the best way to track and limit data usage in a situation like this, where you’ve purchased an international data roaming plan with a small data cap? Because of the delayed reporting, I have no idea what app or background process chewed all the extra data — the AT&T rep told me that the bulk of the usage was on the day I got the 80 percent warning, but my usage patterns hadn’t changed that day. Something — perhaps even iCloud Photo Library — must have gotten hungry. So here’s what I’d do, and if you have other recommendations, let me know in the comments:

• Use Settings > Cellular > Reset Statistics to get a clean slate on the cellular data used as you cross the border. There are other tools (see next tip), but I think iOS’s own data is the most trustworthy. Plus, it breaks out System Services usage better than anything else can.

• Get DataMan Next ($1.99), DataMan Pro ($5.99), or DataMan Enterprise ($9.99). With the first two, you could tweak your data plan set-tings, setting the plan type to monthly, the start date to the day you leave, and the data cap to 120 MB, which would give you the full benefit of DataMan’s forecasting and alerts. But if you don’t want to lose your normal tracking for that month, just install the DataMan Stopwatch widget in Notification Center, and turn it on as soon as you hit the border. You’ll need to check it manually, but that’s only a swipe to reveal Notification

13Center. If you use DataMan Pro, you can identify the specific culprit apps behind any excessive data usage. Better yet, use DataMan Enter-prise, which lets you set up and switch between multiple data plan profiles, so you can track your international usage separately and re-ceive alerts appropriately. Both DataMan Pro and DataMan Enter-prise also come with an Apple Watch app.

• Disable any apps that you don’t plan to use in Settings > Cellular. It’s tempting to disable only those that have used data in the past statistics period, but it can be hard to predict when an app will decide to re-trieve a large amount of data. Be especially cautious about apps like Music, Photos, Podcasts, Dropbox, Skype, Google Hangouts, and Spotify that might want to stream media, sync data, or provide real-time high-bandwidth communication.

• To prevent email and calendar data from outside arriving on your iPhone unbidden, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, turn off Push, and select Manually in the Fetch section. The data will update when you launch the associated app.

• Also, in Settings > iTunes & App Store, turn off Use Cellular Data. To be safe, I’d also recommend disabling automatic downloads. That way your iPhone won’t automatically get downloads for purchases made by someone else in your Family Sharing circle, or those made on a device you left at home while you’re travelling.

• If one of your main uses for cellular data is Maps or Google Maps, consider using a GPS navigation app that stores its maps on the iPhone rather than downloading them. I’ve not used it yet (since I have a copy of the $59.99 Navigon North America), but the free Nokia HERE reportedly offers offline navigation.

• If you have any reason to believe that an otherwise acceptable app might be transferring data in the background, double-press the Home button and swipe up on the app to force quit it. That’s generally not necessary, but some apps (like Skype, at least in the past) consume non-trivial amounts of data even when you’re not using them.

• Should you start to approach your data cap, you can disable cellular data entirely, by turning off the master switch in Set-tings > Cellular.

Finally, although this is slightly unrelated, those $1/minute phone calls will add up even faster than data usage, so try to keep most of your communication to text messaging if possible. When that’s not possible, try to use Skype or Google Hangouts while connected to a Wi-Fi network. I’d avoid FaceTime because it can switch to cellular data silently — Apple says:

When your device is connected to Wi-Fi, any FaceTime Video or Audio calls you make will use the Wi-Fi network. If your router loses its Internet connection, or if the Wi-Fi connection degrades, you’ll stay connected to the Wi-Fi network, but your device will route the data over cellular data.

For a completely different approach, you could also unlock your iPhone, buy a Canadian SIM card, and get a local plan. That would be a particu-larly good idea if you were also planning travel to other countries; Khoi Vinh just wrote about how great it was to buy a SIM card in Paris and get 2 GB of data, a local phone number, and unlimited text and talk for only €50. Unlocking an iPhone is more involved, though, and is a topic for an-other day.

•

Reuse governed by Creative Commons license. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet top-ics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit www.tidbits.com.

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Macs & Mac OS XOS X 10.10.5 Yosemite and iOS 8.4.1 Address Numerous Security Holes

by Adam C. EngstApple has released minor updates to both OS X 10.10 Yosemite and iOS 8, calling out just a few general changes in the main release notes, but

noting nearly 70 security fixes for OS X and over 40 for iOS. It seems likely that Apple’s release was timed to follow the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences, where privately reported security vulnerabilities might be made public. Given the number of security fixes, I’d encourage you to install these updates soon, since they’re more important than the release notes might imply.

OS X -- For Mac users, OS X 10.10.5, which is available via Software Update or standalone delta (from 10.10.4, 1.02 GB) and combo (from any version of 10.10, 2.12 GB) updaters, has only three items in its release notes:

• Improves compatibility with certain email servers when using Mail• Fixes an issue in Photos that prevented importing videos from GoPro cameras• Fixes an issue in QuickTime Player that prevented playback of Windows Media filesOn the security side, however, Apple lists 69 entries that span the gamut from OS X’s Unix apps and utilities to the kernel itself. For the most

part, the specifics aren’t interesting, but a few are worth calling out. The DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE vulnerability discovered by Stefan Esser and the CEO of information security firm GrayHash, who goes by @beist on Twitter, has been blocked. That’s important because it made it possible for apps to gain root permissions without requiring a password; even more concerning was that it had started to appear in the wild. In addition, previous versions of the Unix sudo utility included in OS X could allow an attacker access to arbitrary files — that’s a bad thing.

If you have trouble installing via the App Store app, try the combo updater — I’ve seen some reports of installations failing to complete and retry-ing repeatedly.

iOS 8.4.1 -- For those using an iPhone or iPad, iOS 8.4.1 focuses its attention on six fixes related to Apple Music:• Resolves issues that could prevent turning on iCloud Music Library• Resolves an issue that hides added music because Apple Music was set to show offline music only• Provides a way to add songs to a new playlist if there aren’t any playlists to choose from• Resolves an issue that may show different artwork for an album on other devices• Resolves several issues for artists while posting to Connect• Fixes an issue where tapping Love doesn’t work as expected while listening to Beats 1But don’t get the impression you can pass on installing iOS 8.4.1 if you don’t use Apple Music. As with OS X 10.10.5, there are oodles of security

fixes — 43 all told. None are particularly notable.As always, you can install iOS 8.4.1 from Settings > General > Software Update on your device, or by connecting it to iTunes.

iTunes and the 80-20 Ruleby Michael E. Cohen

The “80-20 Rule” — you often see it cited in discussions of software usability, usually in support of calls for simplifying complex apps or for break-ing them apart. I most recently heard it come up in the entertaining and informative discussion that Kirk McElhearn and Chuck Joiner had in a re-cent MacVoices interview about Kirk’s “Take Control of iTunes 12: The FAQ.”

At issue was the ever-expanding feature set of Apple’s iTunes, which, with the addition of Apple Music and Beats 1, has become increasingly diffi-cult for users to use and navigate, turning it into what Marco Arment colorfully described as a “toxic hellstew” (a phrase he may have borrowed from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who once used it to describe Android). Kirk brought the rule up to drive home the point that most iTunes features are not used by most iTunes users, and that the app could use a complete overhaul to make it more manageable and accessible.

But what is the “80-20 Rule” to which Kirk referred? Lately, it has come to mean something like this: “80 percent of an application’s users use only 20 percent of its features.” Lurking behind this “rule” is the idea that developers could make apps far easier to use and far more reliable if they devoted their time to clarifying and optimizing the 20 percent of features that the 80 percent of users most often use.

Like many such rules, such as “wait 30 minutes after you eat before you go swimming” or “never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line,” there is a kernel of sense behind the rule: some studies have shown that, for many systems, a large percentage of functions are seldom, if ever, used. But the systems in those studies tend not to be widely used consumer apps but those being developed for specific business or engineering pur-poses, and the studies are mostly interested in examining how to get the most bang for the in-house development staff’s bucks, and are not concerned about usability.

15In any case, widely used consumer apps — and by “widely” I’m talking about apps used daily by millions of users — are rather different creatures

than, say, an enterprise’s in-house inventory control and management system that might have only a few hundred users at most.In fact, the original “80-20 Rule” was not a rule at all, but an observation by 19th-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 80

percent of Italian income was received by 20 percent of the Italian population. It was promoted to a “principle” by Joseph M. Juran in 1941, who suggested that most results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes.

All of which is to say that the “80-20 Rule” is really just an observation, and one that has less to do with usability than with the effort involved in developing and debugging complex systems. Nor can you rely upon the magical 80-20 ratio: depending on the app and the user, it might be 95-5, or 60-40, or some other ratio. 80-20 is only a ballpark figure, and the ballpark dimensions themselves vary from team to team and from sport to sport.

I have little doubt that any one iTunes user is apt to use only a small number of the many features that iTunes offers. The problem is that, for iTunes as for any app, you cannot assume that the small number of features used by one user are the same features as those favored by another user.

In addition, the very idea of a single “user” as some sort of Platonic ideal creature whose needs you must meet to have a successful app won’t get you very far when it comes to making an app usable. Most usability analysts worth their salt don’t even envision a single user at all. They often develop a variety of “personas,” imaginary folk who come with specific needs, goals, backgrounds, and tastes, and they look at an app’s feature set and imple-mentation in terms of each of those personas.

What’s more, when it comes to usability testing, analysts try to match actual test subjects to one or more of those personas: test results are seldom considered reliable if the tests don’t encompass a range of different users that match the range of personas. Nor are the analysts’ personas themselves cast in stone: they, too, are developed and expanded and refined as more information about real living, breathing human users of a product is ac-quired.

Usability analysis, in short, is a complicated blend of science and art, and applying it reliably to any particular app is usually fraught with caveats. And the larger and more varied the population of users of that app, the more difficult it is, and that is even when you don’t consider the business goals that the app must also meet for it to be considered a success.

Kirk, in the MacVoices interview, wisely employed the “80-20 Rule” only to illustrate how users might find the bevy of features offered by iTunes confusing, and he smartly acknowledged that coming up with a list of substantive suggestions that would finally “fix” iTunes to the delight of users everywhere, given how many different user needs it has to meet, was beyond him.

It may be beyond Apple as well — iTunes has seen significant user interface changes in each of its last three major incarnations, a level of variability that has generated its own confusions. That is not to say, of course, that Apple shouldn’t keep trying: the company’s $200 billion cash pile could cer-tainly pay for a lot of formal usability analysis and careful engineering. However, simple rubrics like the “80-20 Rule” are not apt to get the company very far in such an effort.

ExtraBITSGoogle OnHub Router Aims to Simplify Wi-Fi for Everyone -- Google’s surprise new hardware product, a Wi-Fi router, has many objectives similar to Apple’s AirPort base stations: simplicity, easy setup, and making services work better over a local network. Being platform agnostic, it may have broad appeal.

Six Windows 10 Features Apple Should Steal -- Julio Ojeda-Zapata has been using test versions of the Windows 10 operating system nonstop in recent months. Now, with the official release of Microsoft’s desktop OS, he has identified features he would really like to see in OS X.

Intuit to Sell off Quicken -- As financial software firm Intuit continues to lose money, it has announced that it will be selling off Quicken, Quick-Base, and Demandforce. However, the company will be holding on to QuickBooks, which picked up 110,000 subscribers during the last fiscal quar-ter. As for the fate of Quicken, we can only hope it’s picked up by a developer friendlier to Mac users.

Adobe InDesign CC 2015 Stops Installing Most Fonts -- David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion of InDesignSecrets have noted on their site that the current Creative Cloud version of Adobe InDesign no longer installs a wide array of fonts by default. Thanks to the Adobe TypeKit subscrip-tion that’s included with Creative Cloud, plenty of fonts are available, but by installing only three basic fonts (without even full bold and italic for Minion Pro), Adobe is making it hard for students who can’t necessarily install fonts at will, trainers who need to create documents that are usable on clean installations, people behind TypeKit-blocking firewalls or who are offline, and any designer who needs to configure a new installation by down-loading fonts one at a time. Cloud services have many advantages, but it’s important for companies to recognize the downsides as well.

Comcast Testing Its Internet Essentials Program with Seniors -- Comcast has announced that it’s testing an expansion of its low-cost Internet Es-sentials program for senior citizens in San Francisco and Palm Beach County, Florida. Internet Essentials offers download speeds of up to 10 Mbps and a Wi-Fi router for $9.95 per month for low-income households. So far, the Internet Essentials program has required that a household have a child eligible for the National School Lunch Program, but Comcast has not yet released the eligibility requirements for seniors.

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The Apple BiasFrom time to time I like to get away from my home office, so I take my laptop and hang out at one of the local coffee shops. As I look around the

room, I automatically notice the ratio of Apple logos (on laptops, iPads, and iPhones) to Other. In this neighborhood, the ratio tends to be about 3:1 in favor of Apple products, and of course I’m in the majority. My device has The Right Logo.

It’s true: I make judgments about people based on the platform they use. And then I make judgments about myself for doing so.moreI’d be the first person to insist that one’s chosen operating system, religion, political party, gender identity, or martini recipe is up to that person

alone, and that no one else has any business saying otherwise. In many of my recent books, I’ve gone out of my way to be platform-neutral, and (I hope) equally helpful to everyone, regardless of which device they’ve bought.

But deep down inside, I don’t truly believe all brands are equally good. I’ll buy whatever TV, printer, or car seems best at the time given my research, but if you see me carrying around a PC laptop or Android phone, you’ll know that a transporter malfunction has caused me to switch places with Evil Joe from a parallel, mirror-image universe. I just can’t picture it happening. You can use whatever brand you want, but I’ll stick with Apple products, thanks very much.

Let’s see if I can think my way through this seemingly irrational preference.Rationalizing My DecisionFirst of all, I’ve never considered myself an Apple apologist or fanboy. (In fact, I think the very word “fanboy” is dismissive and unbecoming.) Apple

has released some truly awful products (including lousy software updates and unreliable cloud services). The company has made some boneheaded business decisions I couldn’t disagree with more. When a new product appears, I’m more likely to say “meh” than buy one, and I can’t even imagine waiting in line outside an Apple Store to be among the first to get the latest toy.

And yet, my computers run OS X and my mobile devices run iOS; anything else is unthinkable. As surely as I wouldn’t align myself with the “wrong” political party or the “wrong” religious viewpoint, I wouldn’t buy an Acer laptop or a Samsung phone.

Sure, there are practical considerations, including the investment I’ve made in software for Apple devices. There are the habits I’ve formed over many years that would have to change if I switched platforms. And there’s the much-discussed metric of Total Cost of Ownership, which suggests that when you factor in a device’s longevity, the cost of maintenance and software, and so on, Apple devices tend to be a better value even if they’re more expensive up front.

I could say that my computer can run OS X, Windows, and Linux (all of which I use from time to time), while PCs can’t run OS X—so I have the most flexibility. I could point out that my phone is much less likely than an Android phone to be infected with malware. I could say that because my colleagues use Apple products, it’s most convenient if I do too.

All these things are sort of true, but they still don’t explain why I stick with Apple. I freely admit that if I were stranded on a desert island with a Linux computer and a Windows Phone (and somehow, miraculously, electricity and a network connection) I’d find ways to be just as productive as I am now. But then, I could also subsist entirely on coconuts and wild boar if I had to. Given the choice, I’d rather not.

We All Have Our ReasonsFor some people, the Apple logo and the trademark white earbuds are status symbols. They say: I’m one of the cool kids. (And also: I have some

money.) For others, it’s a utilitarian choice—I use this because I depend on software that runs only on this platform. Still other people simply chose the tool that was best for them based on whatever criteria seemed important at the time—and might make a different choice next time.

Then there are people with irritatingly inconsistent attitudes. Like me. Here I am saying that one should always dispassionately choose the right tool for the job, while turning right around and declaring that my tool will always be made by the fruit company. I acknowledge the apparent contra-diction.

My Apple bias doesn’t amount to blind faith in a corporation or fanatical devotion to a brand. What it comes down to for me is simplicity. For all their flaws (and there are many), OS X and iOS require less thought and fewer steps to do the things I personally need to do most frequently. On the whole, they require less fiddling, nudging, and head-scratching than other operating systems, at least for someone of my disposition. And on the whole, I’ve found Apple hardware to be reliable and capably supported.

The Apple CalculusTo be sure, Microsoft is righting wrongs and rapidly advancing in a refreshingly human-friendly direction (on all its platforms). I notice and respect

that. Google is…well, sometimes not entirely evil. There are some very spiffy laptops, smartphones, and tablets out there from a wide variety of manufacturers that do useful things Apple’s products don’t.

The Joe on Tech

17But for every problem some other brand’s device might solve, I have to consider whether it will also create a new one (or un-solve a problem I ad-

dressed long ago with my Apple gear). Will my net balance of solved problems go up or down? And, if up, will it be far enough and fast enough to justify the cost in time and money? Is it even worth the effort to keep doing that mental calculation?

In keeping with my regular refrain of “Life is too short,” I expect to maintain my Apple bias until the facts compel me to change. Some of the stuff I write here will be just for Apple users, because that’s what I know best, and I hope those who don’t use Apple gear will let that slide.

I want you to know that if you use another operating system, you can still be my friend. I’ll still tell you useful and interesting things on this site that will help you with technology, and I’ll respect your decisions without trying to convert you. I may be a tiny bit sad or disappointed, because I’d always prefer that people agreed with me—but that’s my problem, not yours. Apple bias or not, what’s most important to me is that you’re happy. Your path to happiness may be different from mine, and I hope we can support each other’s journeys.

Joe Kissell • April 7, 2015

Reprinted with permission from Joe Kissell - Creator and author of the Joe on Tech web site

ExtraBITSFour iOS Interface Patterns That Work Badly -- User experience company Nielsen Norman Group has posted an article pointing out problems with four official iOS interface patterns: page control dots, form submission links at the top, the plus icon, and the move icon. The authors aren’t speaking theoretically — these design patterns fail in actual usability testing — and they both give specific examples of each criticism and offer alter-native approaches. In other words, if you’ve had trouble with an app that uses these interface controls, it’s not just you.

How iTunes Fails Classical Music Fans -- Over at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer explains how iTunes, and even the MP3 format, fails fans of classical music. It began with a lack of a composer tag in the MP3 format, which was added to iTunes only in 2004. Furthermore, Meyer says Apple Music offers slim pickings for classical fans, as well as a number of library-wrecking bugs.

T-Mobile Announces Incentives for iPhone Users -- T-Mobile has announced two incentives for iPhone users. The first is that Apple Music will be included in its Music Freedom service, which means that streaming songs from Apple Music will not count against T-Mobile users’ bandwidth caps. The second is that anyone who has an iPhone 6 through the $15-per-month JUMP! On Demand program can trade up to the next iPhone for free until the end of 2015.

Nike Ordered to Compensate FuelBand Owners -- As part of a class-action settlement, Nike is distributing a total of $2.4 million to owners of its FuelBand fitness tracker, due to inaccurate tracking of calorie burn, steps, and overall activity. Affected customers can opt to receive $15 in cash or a $25 gift card. Hopefully the Apple Watch is more accurate.

How to Replace a Cracked iPhone 5c Screen with Screasy -- With his wife’s iPhone 5c suffering from a broken screen, Josh Centers had the per-fect opportunity to test out the Screasy iPhone Screen Repair Kit.Apple Recalls Some Apple TV Units -- Apple has reached out to some recent purchasers of the third-generation Apple TV, telling them that their units were shipped with a faulty part and that the company will replace them free of charge, even throwing in an iTunes gift card for the trouble. Apple hasn’t issued a public statement, meaning that this issue probably affects only a handful of customers. There is no need to worry about this unless Apple contacts you.

Marco Arment Explains Why People Block Ads -- With Apple giving developers the capability to block Web content in iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 El Capitan, ad-blocking has become a hot topic, with many content creators complaining that it robs them of revenue. But blogger and developer Marco Arment, who himself relies on ad revenue, has decided to block ads. His reason: increasingly invasive ad-tracking that robs users of their on-line privacy. Arment argues that users cannot possibly consent to automatic tracking of everywhere they go on the Web. Arment calls on publishers to reject privacy-invading ads, even if it “won’t be a clean, easy transition.”

Rite Aid Surrenders to Apple Pay -- Drugstore chain Rite Aid, which last year blocked Apple Pay at its cash registers (see “The Real Reason Some Merchants Are Blocking Apple Pay… for Now,” 26 October 2014), has decided to officially accept both Apple Pay and Google’s Android Pay. Rite Aid had blocked Apple Pay due to its allegiance to the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) and its CurrentC payment system, but many retailers in the MCX, such as Best Buy, have since welcomed Apple Pay. CurrentC has yet to launch.

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ReviewsAffinity Photo

by L. DavenportIf you in the market for a photo editing program or would like to get away from Adobe’s Photoshop with its unending subscription fees, then you should take a look at Affinity Photo. Affinity Photo just hit the market after 5 years of programing to get it “Just Right”, and the wait was worth it.

Affinity Photo is a full-featured photo editing program that rivals Photoshop and is aimed at the professional market. For those of you that are on a tight budget - Affinity Photo is only $49.99 - with NO SUBSCRIPTION FEES!! That’s a fraction of the price Adobe charged for the old stand alone version of Photoshop.

Affinity Photo takes full advantage of the latest Apple technologies like OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch and Core Graphics. Which means whether it’s a 100 megapixel image or a complex composition with 1000s of layers, you can still pan and zoom at 60fps and see live views of all ad-justments, brushes, blend modes and filters with no compromise. This speed and depth of features really makes Affinity Photo a joy to use and sets it apart from anything else out there.

The InterfaceAffinity Photo’s user interface/window has the dark look that is becoming very popular with software designers (though there

are a couple of preference siders that let you lighten up the canvas and surrounding window). If you don’t like the all-in-one window, you can select the “Separated Mode” option that divides the UI into separate floating toolbars, panels, and page area/canvas - or you can customize the panel layout by undocking and re-docking/combining the different tool palettes.

At the center of the window is the canvas and surrounding the canvas are the tools - much like you would see in Photoshop (along with a color wheel, Layers, History, Navigator, etc. palettes). But the Affinity Photo tools don’t stop there. In the upper left corner of the window are four “Persona” buttons. The available tools dynamically change depending on the chosen Persona:

• The first button is the “Photo Persona”. When clicked on, you are presented with tools that are very similar to Photoshop’s: various Selection tools, Paint brush, Gradient, Eraser, Clone Brush, Blur and Smudge brush, Burn, Dodge, and Sponge brushes. It also has Pen and Node tools, Mesh Warp and Perspective tools, along with a Healing brush, Patch tool, Blemish removal tool,

Figure 1 Affinity Photo’s Inpainting tool can be used to remove unwanted items such as people, telephone wires, signs, and debris from your photo. Removing this man was accomplished in about 3 seconds by quickly swiping the Inpainting brush over his body.

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Red eye removal tool, and an Inpainting brush. BTW: I really like Affinity Photo’s “Flood Select” tool. If you click in

the sky and then start dragging your cursor to the right, this movement increases the tolerance value (and selection) of pixels that are similar, e.g. instead of just selecting the bright blue sky, it will start selecting the darker blue mountains in the background and so on. If you drag all the way to the right, the selection tool will select your whole image. Dragging to the left decreases the tolerance/selection.

If the “Contiguous” button is unchecked, other areas of the photo (with the same color values) are also selected. I really liked this feature because in the past when I wanted to select the sky but had a tree off to the side of the photo, it was a pain to select all of the sky that peaked through the branches and leaves. But now with Contiguous turned off, all of the sky (and similar color values) are selected no matter where it is located in the photo! Way cool!!!• The second button is for the “Liquify Persona”. The available Liq-uify tools are: Liquify push forward, Liquify push left, Liquify Twirl/Punch/Turbulence, Liquify Mesh Clone tool and the Liquify freeze and Thaw tools (the “Freeze” tool that will lock a portion of the mesh so no future modifications will effect that area). These tools can be used for touchup work or special effects.

Touchup: Using the “Push Forward” tool, you can make small adjustments to an image by slowly pushing the image’s edges to increase their size or shape, etc. In Affinity Photo’s “Liquify Persona” video tutorial, the instructor uses the Push Forward tool to increase the width of the fingers of a man painted on the side of a wall. He also uses the Twirl tool to rotate an area of the mesh, followed by the Pinch tool that he used to decrease and then increase the size of the man’s eye.

Special Effects: For an extreme example/use of the Liquify tools, do you remember Salvador Dali’s surrealistic painting “The Persistence of Memory”, where the stopwatches seem to be melting over vari-ous items? Well the Liquify Persona tools will let you replicate that very effect (as seen in Figure 3).

• The third button is for the “Develop Persona”. This has all of the tools needed to adjust RAW formatted Photos. It offers a dedicated pre-processing workspace offering incredibly accurate editing in an unbounded linear color space. BTW: According to Serif, Affinity Photo is compatible with all major camera file formats.• The fourth button is for the “Export Persona”. This lets you output: layers, objects, groups, or regions as graphics. There are: Export 1, Export 2, and Export 3 buttons that doubles or triples the output size. Your graphics can be exported to:

Figure 2 The Inpainting tool can be also used to remove the dreaded dust and lint specks that accumulate on old slides and are carried over when you digitize them. Simply swipe the Inpainting brush over the spots and they instantly disappear. This is so much easier than using the Clone brush.

Figure 3 The Liquify tools can be used to change the mesh of your photo such as in melting a stopwatch over the edge of a step. Image obtained from the Affinity web site.

Figure 4 In addition to being able to export the whole image, you can also ex-port one or more parts of the image using the “Slice” tool.

20PNG, JPEG, GIF, PDF, SVG, EPS, PSD, and TIFF file formats, plus you can also save Retina qual-ity images. Affinity Photo also lets you export one or more “Slices” of the im-age (a slice is a portion of the image) - note (in Figure 4) the title of each Slice’s bounding box shows the slice’s size, name, and format.

MasksA Layer Mask hides parts of a layer

(without actually deleting it) so the under-lying layers show through (look at the images in Figure 7 to see a Mask used to replace the faded out sky with a more col-orful one).

Quick Masks let you make a selection by painting on a layer Mask using your paint brush and setting it to white. Simply paint over the area that you want selected. This gives you more precise selection option over using the Selection Brush since the Selection Brush may try to select more than the area that you want.

InpaintingThe Inpainting brush is at the top of the list of my most favorite tools. It can be used to easily remove unwanted power/telephone lines, signs, de-

bris, people, etc. from your photos (see Figure 1). It can also be used to remove dust and lint particles from photos that were copied from old photo slides (see figure 2).

I have thousands of slides that I converted/digitized before their colors faded or changed hue. I was pleased that I saved them, but I was disap-pointed in the amount of dust and lint that had accumulated on the slides - and was carried over to the digitized versions. The idea of having to use the Clone tool to try and fix them seemed daunting, so I never fixed them. But now with the Inpainting tool, all I have to do is swipe over the dust - no having to tell the clone tool where to copy from before doing the cloning, etc. The Inpainting tool is so much easier. I can't wait to fix all of my digitized photos now.

FiltersAffinity Photo comes with a wide variety of customizable high-end filters: lighting, blurs, distor-

tions, tilt-shift, shadows, glows, etc. These filters are fully modifiable plus you can see a real-time live preview of the results.

There are two filter varieties: • Destructive: Once a destructive filter has been applied, it is set in stone (unless you use the His-tory palette to reverse them). • Non-destructive “Live Filters”: These Live Filters can be used to modify your image just like regular (destructive) filters. They differ in that the applied effects can be removed at a later date without having to use the History panel (which would result in undoing other modifications on your work applied afterwards).

Lighting EffectsLighting Effects filter gives you tools to simulate ambient, point, directional, and spot lighting in

your image. You can add one or multiple light sources for more advanced lighting control. Each light source can be independently configured and positioned using on-screen nodes/handles (see Figure 9). Light source types:• Spot: This casts an elliptical beam of light focusing on a specific subject of interest, like with a flashlight.• Point: This casts omnidirectional light, like with a light bulb.• Directional. This casts light directionally from infinity, e.g. from the sun.

Figure 5 The 1 or 2-plane Perspective tool can be used to change the perspective or angle of a building or item in your photo. BTW: I chose to demo this feature on a closeup view of a Tiny House model (that had a chicken coop at one end). But this feature works better if you have an item that is further away from the camera.

Figure 6 Affinity Photo’s Media Browser is compatible with both iPhoto and Apple’s Photo programs.

21There are light settings for things like: Diffuse, Specular, Shininess, Ambient light color, Distance and

Texture.

Adjustment layersYou can correct and enhance your images using nondestructive Adjustment Layers - meaning you

can turn them on or off at any time. There are Adjustment Layers for Curves, Levels, Black and White, White Balance, HSL, Shadows and Highlights plus over a dozen other adjustments that are previewed instantly and can be edited any time. You can adjust, readjust, and drag and drop onto any layer, group, mask, or in any place in a stack to control how they’re applied.

Live blend modesAs you edit, you can see live changes to blend modes without having to click apply each time. Affinity

Photo’s 28 layer blends preview smoothly in real time while you scroll through them.

Perspective Correction & Mesh WarpsYou can apply high quality single-plane and dual-plane perspective correction as well as warp your

photo with fully customizable Mesh Warps - all in real time. You can also hide and show grids, auto-clip the layer, and see before/after split views.

Other tools and options:• Smooth and retouch skin with built-in Frequency Separation.• There is a background AutoSave that will protect against loss due to unexpected shutdowns.• Gradient fills: I really like that the Gradient tool not only lets you specify the start and finish colors, but you can also set additional nodes (colors) plus adjust the rate of change in the gradient. So you can make a multicolored (rainbow) gradient. You can choose from: linear, elliptical, radial, and coni-cal gradient fills.• Channels: You can view and edit image color channels, work with the image alpha, create lumi-nosity layers from channels, etc.• Layers: Layers can be used to organize your work into grouped items, re-order your objects, or make a layer a parent or child.• Color Tools: End-to-end CMYK; LAB mode; RGB, HSL, Grayscale and Hex color modes; full 16-bit per channel color depth support; easily switch between color modes on the fly; 16-bit mode includes a full set of filters; color sliders, wheels, and boxes; and you can copy the current color to the clipboard as Hex.• Defringe: Occasionally when you take a photo with high contrast areas (especially when a dark element is strongly backlit, such as branches silhouetted against a blue sky), the edges turn purple. The “Defringe Filter” selectively adjusts these areas to remove the color fringing.• Frequency Separation: You can separate your image’s color/tone and texture into separate low and high frequency layers, respectively, so you can retouch the image’s color/tone and texture independ-

Figure 8 Affinity Photo’s Selection and then the Refine Mask tool (the red surrounding area), can be used to remove unwanted back-grounds so you can replace them with a new background. These tools are easy to use and real efficient at selecting fine details like hair, fur, or even the fins and spines like on the back of this fish.

Figure 7 If you uncheck “Contiguous” and then click-drag to the right with the “Flood Select Tool”, it will select all in-stances of that color, e.g. the sky. Notice in the middle screenshot of the Mask, the sky was selected even within the closed areas around the light poles. Af-terward, I was able to replace the pale original sky with a more vivid sky.

22

ently. This feature is perfect for portrait retouching, where spots, stray hair, blemishes, dimples, and wrinkles, etc. are made smoother or removed using the retouch brushes and tools.• Displace Filter: The Displace Filter applies distortion according to a pattern defined by a displacement map. The lightness values of pixels within the dis-placement map determine the degree to which the distortion occurs.

An example of using the Displace Filter is shown in the Figure 10 screenshot. After writing the word “Jail” on the side of a stonewall, I used the Displace Filter tool along with its “Load Map from layers beneath” option to make the word look like it actually was spray-painted on the stone wall (see how it conforms to the highs and lows of each stone). Afterward I added a Gaussian Blur to the text so the text would have the same blurriness as the stonewall/background.• Affinity Photo works on Lion and newer OS X versions and is fully optimized for Yosemite and retina 5K iMacs.

Photoshop Plug-in Compatibility - (not perfected yet)I have quite a few Photoshop plug-ins and unfortunately none of them work with

Affinity Photo at this time. I did look around to see if anyone has gotten this feature to work with their plug-ins. According to the Affinity forums, some plug-ins work and others don’t. When I looked further, I found that other vendors are working on the incompatibility too, e.g. ON1 Inc. says (in response to a question about this on their forum) “...we’re doing our best to offer ON1 integration with them (Serif ’s Affinity Photo) in the future”.

To my surprise, a person at Serif replied to this same ON1 forum thread saying: “We’re going to start up a program soon to get in touch with plugin makers, so we can improve compatibility and offer a better experience for our users.” So hopefully the fix will be made shortly.

New Document formatsType: There are five different document types that you can choose from when

you are creating a new document: Print, Print (Press Ready), Photo, Web, De-vices. Each option brings up preset Color and Dimensions settings (that the user can further change to their needs). The Devices settings let you specify which de-vice your finished image is destined for: iWatch, iPhone (4 - 6+), or iPad (from Mini to iPad (Retina)).

Color Formats: When you create a new document, you are able to choose the color format. The choices are: RGB 8 &16, Grey 8 & 16, CMKY/8, and LAB/16. You can also select your preferred Color Profile.

Figure 11 These before (left) and after (right) views show the purple fringe (along the window edges) being removed us-ing the Defringe filter.

Figure 10 The Artistic Text Tool can be used to add words to the side of building. The Displace Filter can then be used to make the text appear to conform to the highs and lows of the underlying surface. Notice in this (closeup) example, the white color of the “J” appears to adhere/conform to the underlying stones.

Figure 9 The Lighting Effects filter gives you tools to simulate ambient, point, directional, and spot lighting in your image. Moving on-screen nodes/handles changes the direction and other light parameters. So in this preview, and with the current settings (which includes decreasing the Ambient lighting), it looks like the photo was taken at night or in a dark room with a spotlight on the singing lady.

23Compatibility

Photoshop PSD Support: Affinity Photo can open PSD files. The layers, adjust-ments, effects, text, etc. seem to come in intact and are editable from within Affinity Photo. Photoshop can likewise open and modify the PSD files saved by Affinity Photo (see Figure 13).

Import formats: PNG, JPG, TIFF, GIF, PSD and PSB, Raw file format list, Open PDF, EPS, SVG and AI, Scanning is supported, Color manage-ment profiles are supported, and various color depths are supported.

Media browserAffinity Photo comes with a Media Browser that is com-

patible with both iPhoto and Apple’s Photo programs. You can also add photo filled folders to the Media Browser list. This way you have all of your photos grouped together in one place for quick retrieval.

Wacom SupportI like being able to vary the width of my strokes. So I got

out my Wacom Intuos 4 and started drawing strokes with different brushes and with differing pressures applied. I am happy to say that my lines did in fact start and end thin with a nice bulge at its center. So Affinity Photo does support pres-sure sensitive tablets and styluses.

These are only a few of the available tools and options. There are too many to go into detail in this review. If you are interested, I suggest you go to the Affinity Web site and read the “Affinity Photo Complete Feature List” or watch one or more of the available video tutorials (they are divided into topic groups).

The SkinnyEvaluation: This is an impressive piece of software that they are working on making it even better. I have decided to use it 90% of the time, the re-maining 10% will be devoted to Photoshop. Reason: I have a lot of Photoshop plug-ins that are not currently Affinity Photo compatible, so I will still need to use Photoshop when I want to use those plug-ins. But once Serif makes Affinity Photo able to run ALL Photoshop filters, it’s going to be - “Good bye Photoshop! I’m moving 100% to Affinity Photo”.

BTW: I am not going to let this plug-in problem detract from my opinion of Affinity Photo - at least they are trying to get it to work. Besides, I figure, what do you expect for a brand new piece of software? I am thoroughly impressed with how much they have included (and got to work) in the Affinity Photo package at this early stage of its development.

I was really impressed with the Inpainting tool. I can’t wait to start using it on all of my old converted slides.FYI:Affinity is also working on a desktop Publishing program called Affinity Publisher. If it turns out as good as Affinity Photo and Affinity De-

signer, I will definitely get it. These three programs could be the 1-2-3 knockout punch to Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign stranglehold on professionals.

IMHO: If Serif can sell this program so cheaply and still make a profit - it shows me that Adobe was/is soaking the photo editing crowd with their exorbitant cost in the past and the fees now. Well look out Adobe, your days could be numbered.

Requires: Mac OS X 10.7.5 (Lion) and higher - Optimized for El Capitan, 64-bit processor

Company: Serif (Europe) Limited

Price: $49.99 (from the Mac App Store)

Available 10 day trial

Figure 12 This extreme form of Chromatic Aberration (where the color planes are severely mis-aligned) can be fixed using the Chromatic Aberration filter.

Figure 13 The Affinity Photo background layer, Text layer, Text Mask layer, and the Curves Adjustment layers that were applied to the Figure 10 image, were preserved when that image was exported as a PSD file and then opened in Pho-toshop.

Affinity Photo layers Palette Adobe Photoshop Layers Palette

24

Speakeasy.net Speed Testing

One of the first things I do when I arrive at a foreign hotel with my com-puter is connect to the internet and visit the Speakeasy speed test website at : http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

The Speakeasy website has a simple interface and all you have to do is click once to have the program do its magic. Speakeasy will prepare an innocuous test file and download it from one of their servers to your computer while tracking the progress of the download. Then it uploads the file back to Speakeasy while verifying the rate of data transmission for the upload from your computer to the Speakeasy server. Then it tells you how fast or slow your connection is.

Not only is Speakeasy an excellent tool to compare and contrast what you are paying for and what you are actually getting from your ISP, it is also a terrific tool to use every time you arrive in a strange location that offers wireless internet connectivity.

For example, on the occasion of our arrival at our hotel in Saigon for a week (our assigned room was on the seventh floor) before we even opened our suitcases I launched Speakeasy to see if we would have good internet access. Speakeasy indicated that the wireless access at our loca-tion was two levels below pathetic. We asked for a room on the fourth floor and moved down to where the connection to the router was shown by Speakeasy to be much more robust.

If all you are going to be doing with your computer while you are away from home is sending a few text-only emails and backing up your photos to your hard drive, robust internet access may not be a priority, but if you intend to use Skype from the pri-vacy of your hotel room, and upload photos to your family (or post images to Twitter, Flickr, and Face-Book), it can be very frus-trating to find that your internet is slower than dial-up.

Anyone who works in a hotel knows which rooms have the best Wi-Fi and which rooms have the worst Wi-Fi. Providing its

paying guests with dependable wireless internet access is as much a re-quirement for the modern hotel as providing its guests with hot water and private plumbing. Make sure you have good Internet and if there are doubts about securing alternative accommodation, ask to inspect the room before paying - and get your iPad or MacBook onto the internet before you commit to staying.

Typical Wi-Fi connection speeds in the third world will range from abysmal to incredibly fast, and if you are paying for internet access and need internet access, use the Speakeasy Speed Testing website to make sure you are going to get it.

Submitted by Michael Shaw

Get Good Internet When you Travel First off, check out the article about Speakeasy, found elsewhere in this

issue. By using the Speakeasy website you can find out if the wireless signal in your hotel is stronger in some places than it is in others. When you first arrive at a hotel is the best time to ask to be moved to a better room with better Wi-Fi. Bad Wi-fi is a legitimate reason to refuse to stay at a hotel.

Be pre-emptive: Check out TripAdvisor or any of the travel blogs that offer reviews of hotels and ask people who have stayed in a hotel you are interested in if the internet was dependable and strong. You will want to use your hotel’s internet for online banking and sensitive emails but for general surfing, any cafe or spot will be OK.

Next big hint: At the root level of your hard drive there is a folder called System that has a big "X" on it. In that folder there is a folder named CoreServices. The CoreServices folder has wonderful stuff in it,

including a network diagnostics utility called, appropriately, "Network Diagnostics". The application window (above right) will also be found

Michael’s Mac Tips

25to be a useful tool for switching between various ways to access the internet when you have more than one and can also be used to figure out what is happening with your wired network when using Ethernet for communicating between various networked devices. Drag this appli-cation to your Dock and you will have an instant answer to the question that always arises when you suddenly cannot connect to the internet: Is it me, or is it them? When you launch Network Diagnostics you will see a list of all of the possible ways you can connect to the internet: modem, Ethernet, Airport, and your auxiliary Wi-Fi antenna if you have a USB adapter.

Avail yourself of a USB Wi-Fi antenna and a USB extension cable. There are many types of USB devices from simple little nondirectional USB dongles that plug directly into your computer to several different types of elaborate directional antennas with longer cables that can either be located at a remote location or can be fixed on the top of your screen and rotated to maximize their ability to pickup a signal. Wi-Fi extenders come with software - so make sure you get one that is Mac-compatible - and basically gives you internet access by mimicking the existence of another Ethernet port for you to connect through. I have tried three types of Wi-Fi ex-t ender s (USB adapters) when traveling and have found that the di-rectional Wi-Fire unit worked the best, especially when using a laptop in Argentina and other parts of South America where an excessive amount of steel web-bing is imbedded in hotel walls to reduce potential earthquake damage. However, it is bulky.

The USB adapters shown here at right have the advantage of being smaller than the Wi-Fire but I found them to be less effective. Your experience may vary. Some have an antenna that detaches when not in use and are similar in size to a flash drive.

It is also entirely possible that wireless reception is good in the hallway on one side of a door and almost non-existent inside your room on the other side. I have solved this problem on occa-sions by either camping out in the hallway or by hanging a wireless an-tenna over the door.

Look for the hotel's original wireless modem (probably located close to the reception desk in the lobby) and try to locate the repeater(s) on your floor. Try to get close to one - direct line of sight is nice - and locate the nearest electrical outlet if you think you might spend more than a few hours on the internet. For increased flexibility, find a really light- weight extension cord or make one out of thin lamp cord. Most manufac-tured extension cords are quite heavy, due to legislated stan-dards, but even the lightest wires are adequate for the power re-quirements of your computer power supply. Access to extend AC power is especially important if your travel computer is an older model with an old battery. Everything simply works better run-ning off AC power. Coincidentally, I am writing this article out on the shaded balcony of our room in Luang Prabang, on the Mekong River in Laos, at the end of a twenty foot extension cord.

Here is another good idea if you are far from land, or deep in the jun-gle or in a desert, or somewhere similarly well off the beaten path: Ask at your hotel if there is a time of day when their internet access is particu-larly good (or particularly bad). This information may be invaluable and help you to schedule your internet usage. Although it is possible to write all of your emails off-line and then send them when the opportunity permits, this is not ideal.

You will also find that the Mail program in the Apple OS is often particularly useless compared to Yahoo and Gmail, so get webmail be-fore you leave home. On my recent holiday I found that Apple mail worked perfectly in Cambodia and Thailand but not at all in Vietnam and Laos. I do not know if it was a matter of blocked servers or what, just that repeated attempts to send and receive using Apple Mail gave no joy.

Take an Ethernet cable with you. I know this sounds like old tech, but let’s face it: we are not prone to staying in the most up-to-date pal-aces. Some of the most charming older hotels and guest houses were built in the latter years of the 20th century, before the age of true wireless connectivity, and it is not that unusual to find an RJ45 twisted pair Eth-ernet cable port above the desk in some hotel rooms.

Submitted by Michael Shaw

Reprinted with permission from Michael Shaw - President and Newsletter Editor of the MaUsE User’s Group in Ontario Canada.

26

FunBITS: Music in Time and Spaceby Michael E. Cohen

One thing we all learned from the recent New Horizons fly-by of the dwarf planet Pluto and its assorted satellites is that, as Douglas Adams said, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” You can, however, get a hint of how big it is by realizing that to send a signal to the New Horizons probe, and then confirm that the signal was received, takes well over 9 hours at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). And Pluto is, compared to the rest of the universe, right down the street! To send a signal to the nearest star outside our solar sys-tem would take more than 4 years.

This means that any of our nearest celestial neighbors who intercept our radio transmissions are just now hearing our golden oldies. However, there’s no need to hunt up back issues of Billboard to find out what the folk around Arcturus (36.67 light-years away) are hearing: Lightyear.fm can do it for you.

This site has leveraged the statistics compiled by the Whitburn Project to find which songs were popular during the entire history of radio trans-missions from Earth. It then uses that information to take you on a tour of space, starting from Earth orbit, playing snippets of the most recent music

that you could hear broadcast at that distance. As you travel farther from Earth, you hear bits of tunes that get increasingly older the longer you listen. Unlike real space travelers who, like our transmissions to Pluto, are lim-ited by light speed, you travel much faster. For example, after you listen for slightly more than 30 seconds, the site has taken you as far from Earth as New Horizons currently is (which, by the way, took more than 9 years to get where it is at the

moment): about 4.5 light-hours away. Of course at that distance you’re still hearing stuff that is popular right now.But keep listening. Like Han Solo putting the pedal to the metal in the Millennium Falcon, you pick up speed quickly. After 90 seconds you are

more than halfway to the nearest star and can rock out to the stylings of Macklemore as heard in 2013. After listening for 5 minutes, you find yourself get-ting broadcasts from 2007. If patience is not one of your particular vir-tues, though, you don’t have to remain a passive passenger: the time-line at the side of the page is live — click a point anywhere on it, and

FunBITS

27you are instantly that many light-years from home. For example, click near the 36-year point to discover what our Arcturian neighbors are enjoying. Sing it, Rod.

So if you simply can’t find anything of interest in Apple Music’s For You offerings, and if Pandora and Spotify have begun giving you the same-old-same-old, you might want to take a trip with Lightyear.fm for some listening recommendations. Remember, it may be old, but if you’ve never heard it before, it’s new to you!

Tidbits[Click on the blue titles to read the whole story]

Google Is Dead. Long Live Google! -- No, this is not an April Fool: Google, the publicly traded company, will soon be no more. Later this year, it will be reorganized as Alphabet, with what we recognize as Google as a subsidiary. Google co-founder and current CEO Larry Page will be the CEO of Alphabet, while current Senior Vice President of Products Sundar Pichai will become CEO of Google. Google will focus on ads, Android, apps, maps, search, and YouTube, while side efforts like Google Fiber, Google Ventures, the mysterious Google X, and Nest will be managed outside of the Google entity. Google’s goal is to highlight how well the company’s search business is faring, without the financial results being dragged down by the company’s long-play projects.

What You Need to Know About the Thunderstrike 2 Worm -- Researchers will demonstrate a new proof-of-concept worm that attacks Mac firmware at this week’s Black Hat security conference. It’s fascinating research, but not something average users should worry about.

Eight Apple Watch Stands That Stand Out -- Julio Ojeda-Zapata checked out an assortment of Apple Watch charging stands, which vary wildly in design and pricing. He found a few gems. But technology changes by Apple will soon trigger a flood of new watch-stand designs.

Dark Sky 5 Offers Hyperlocal Weather Forecasts for iOS -- To set itself apart from the many other weather apps for the iPhone, Dark Sky pro-vides accurate precipitation forecasts for your exact location for the next hour. It couples that with customizable alerts for upcoming weather events and an excellent interface for the traditional 7-day forecast.

Verizon Dropping Contracts, Subsidies, and Family Plans -- On 13 August 2015, Verizon Wireless will radically change the way it sells mobile phones and cellular service. Contracts, subsidies, and family plans are being eliminated for anyone not on an existing contract. Instead, customers will pay the full price of their phones, with an installment plan available to spread out the cost. It will cost $30 per month for unlimited talk and text, plus 1 GB of data, with an additional $20 “access fee” for connecting a smartphone or $10 for a tablet. Other plans include 3 GB of data for $45, 6 GB for $60, and 12 GB for $80.

Reinventing the (iMac) Wheel -- Thanks to Khoi Vinh for this link to a video from George Fox University’s IT department, which combined 36 iMac boxes into a giant wheel and then took it for a spin around campus. Big fun.

How “The Martian” Author’s Comcast Email Was Hacked -- In a Facebook post, Andy Weir, author of “The Martian” (which we highly rec-ommend reading!), explained how a hacker took control of his Comcast email address. The simple, yet disturbing answer is the hacker called Com-cast customer service to gain access. When Weir called to regain control of his email account, all he had to provide was his street address and the last four digits of his Social Security number. Weir has now flagged his account so that any password changes require a call to Comcast’s security depart-ment and a special code. The moral of the story, wrote Weir, is: “No amount of password complexity or multi-factor authentication will protect you from bad company policies at your provider.”

Apple Denies Plans to Become a Cellular Carrier -- In a rare move, Apple has refuted rumors that it will offer its own cellular service as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). Business Insider had reported that Apple was testing an MVNO service in the United States and was also plan-ning to bring it to Europe.

Keyboard Maestro 7 Features Enhancements Throughout -- After two years of free updates, Peter Lewis of Stairways Software has released Key-board Maestro 7.0, a major update that adds new triggers, new actions, and themed palettes to the macro utility, along with numerous changes to the Keyboard Maestro Editor that improves ease-of use.

28HOW TO FIND USGeneral meeting:SMMUG General Meetings are held on the FIRST Tuesday of each month at Penrose Library’s Carnegie Reading Room - located at 20 N. Cascade Ave. (It is by the RED BALLOON on the map). The Penrose Library has two parking lots - one to the south of the building and another to the west of the building (there is an elevator that will take you to and from the west lot).

Directions:From the front door (on Cascade) - walk all the way to the back aisle, turn right, turn left at the stairs then left into the Carnegie Reading Room.

Smoking is not permitted on the premises.

Sig meeting:The SIG Meetings are held on the SECOND Saturday of each month at Fire Station #18’s meeting room - located at: 6830 Hadler View [the fire station is behind Walgreens].

Directions:#1) Take I-25 to Garden of the Gods Rd (head west), turn right on Centennial, left on Flying W Ranch Rd., right on Hadler View.#2) (This route is bumpier and probably not the best for winter travel) Take I-25 to E. Woodman/W. Rockrimmon Blvd., turn right on Vindicator (at the Safeway intersection), and then right on Hadler View.

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Membership Application FormMembership entitles you to access to our online forums, participation in prize drawings, and access to the bar-gains in the members area of the SMMUG website at www. smmug.org. SMMUG renewal membership dues ($25) apply to the calendar year and are paid each December for the following year. Use the following table for NEW MEMBERSHIP ONLY:

JAN 1 to MAR 31 - $25.00 APR 1 to JUN 30 - $21.00 JUL 1 to SEPT 30 - $14.00 OCT 1 to DEC 31 - $7.00

Please Print Clearly! Today’s Date

Name Street Address

City/State/ZIP Home Telephone

E-mail AddressHave you previously been a member of SMMUG?How did you learn about SMMUG?

Make your check payable to: SMMUG Then mail or give this form and your check to:

SMMUG, Inc. Skip Mundy, Treasurer PO Box 62741 Colorado Springs, CO 80962

Please make an online account for me.User Name _______________

Don’t make an online account for me. I do not want one or I already have one.

Business Telephone

About Us

The Silicon Mountain Macintosh User Group, Inc. (a nonprofit educational corporation) was formed in Colorado Springs, Colo-rado in 1985, and is one of the oldest Macintosh User Groups in the United States. SMMUG, Inc. is dedicated to helping mem-bers enjoy and learn about their Macintosh computer, iPhone and iPad devices.

Club membership is open to everyone and you are cordially invited to visit our free monthly General Meeting on the First Tues-day of each month, at 7:00 PM. For those new to the Macintosh, we have a Question & Answer session at 6:00 PM, where our collective expertise can help answer your questions.

All members receive a monthly newsletter, published on our web site, see great reviews of software and hardware, or can partici-pate in the monthly door prize drawing. Each member gets one vote during annual Officer Elections. No corporate memberships are granted.

Our officers are volunteers and receive no pay. All funds raised are used for the cost of operating the club and its meetings.