Senior Contributor, Macworld
With Apple's Family Sharing program, you can share iTunes, iBooks, and App Store purchases, an Apple Music family plan, and an iCloud storage plan with up to five people. I am not a fan of Apple’s Family Sharing option, and I’m not alone among technology writers. Family Sharing remains poorly implemented for most users years after its introduction, seemingly because Apple’s back-end systems that manage iTunes, the App Store, and other purchases and ownership is so woefully out of date. (For instance, you can’t migrate purchases among accounts you control or merge multiple accounts.)
This bites users on a regular basis, because seemingly intuitive and obvious behavior isn’t supported with Family Sharing. The most galling one is that if one person purchases an app that supports Family Sharing—not all apps do—then you’d think anyone else in the Family Sharing group would simply go to the App Store page for that app and click to download it? Incorrect, sorry. If you try to use the app’s page, you see the retail price, and if you click the price, you’ll be charged.
Instead, you follow these steps:
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, and a recent visit to the optometrist revealed I needed a slightly different prescription for reading on a computer screen. (What a relief!) But like a couple billion people in the world, it’s harder for me to read small text and lightly tinted text. That’s the complaint of Macworld reader Margaret, who asks:
Messages with rich text, which allows setting text color and other formatting, relies on HTML and can’t be overridden directly in the Mail app. The Mail app uses the same rendering engine as Safari, but it lacks a feature to simplify text for reading—the Reader View.
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
Contrary to what you might think, Apple's iCloud isn’t a central storage system. Rather, it’s a synchronization system that requires data remain on the end points, such as your Macs and iOS devices. Deleting data off end points manually typically deletes it from iCloud’s central servers, used to manage sync, and from every other connected device.
Macworld reader Tom wrote in asking about this topic, which is extremely confusing, as some iCloud services can reduce storage required in varying ways, but you have to use their interfaces to let them manage it automatically. If you delete items manually, they’re just removed.
Tom asks:
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
“The cloud” is a concept, not a place, although collectively, the cloud is made up of places. Cloud computing refers to an aggregation of servers that you don’t have to know much about to gain the benefit. This can be for storage, like iCloud Drive or Amazon Cloud Drive or Google Drive, or for computation and other more specialized purposes. When you use a cloud-based service, your actions and data may be split among many machines and drives—maybe even across continents.
Macworld reader Craig has a question about that, having read that Apple stores some of its iCloud data on other companies’ servers. “What data/services are hosted/stored on Apple-owned data centers and which data/services are hosted/stored on Google data centers? A web search as well as Apple forums provide no details on this.”
The short answer: You can’t know precisely, though most of your actual file data is on Google or Amazon servers. The long answer follows.
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
After the writing had been on the wall for years, Apple only recently officially stated that it won’t be producing Wi-Fi base stations anymore. Many of us have relied on the AirPort line as an easy way to handle a number of basic network tasks without learning the vagaries of other hardware. One of those is network file sharing.
You can share files from macOS or Windows, but it’s not always convenient or applicable, especially if you (or your family) relies largely on laptops. Another option is network-attached storage (NAS), which are standalone file servers that often come with a lot of additional features, and now start in the low hundreds of dollars for “bare” units without any internal drives.
For example, the Synology DS218+ ($300 without drives) is a pretty powerful piece of hardware that can transcode video in real time to stream it over a network, as well as serve files over several protocols, like the widely used SMB and the outdated AFP (Apple Filing Protocol). Add a couple of $50 to $100 drives, and you’re smoking.
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
The badge that can appear on selected apps in the macOS Dock is a helpful reminder that you’ve got something that requires attention. But when the badge “sticks” and continues to remain in place even after you’ve carried out your task? It’s a persistent itch you want to scratch.
This can happen in the Messages app, as I discovered recently after texting myself a link when I couldn’t get the oh-so-reliable AirDrop to work between my phone and computer. The link arrived, but the badge wouldn’t disappear. Closing the conversation in the list in the left of the Messages window didn’t help. Nor did quitting the app.
I tried a suggestion many forum posters around the Apple universe of discussion boards recommended for stuck Dock icons. In the Terminal app, enter exactly the following and press return:
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
Time Machine in macOS can work within a number of apps, letting you retrieve older versions of files or even deleted email messages in the Mail app. However, if an entire folder of stuff goes away, you need to turn to the Finder.
Macworld reader Harold found himself in this pinch, because a folder that contains all his business emails disappeared from Mail without any action on his part that he’s aware of. He first tried to use Time Machine within Mail, opening Mail, then choosing Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine system menu item. Every time he did so, Mail quit!
If you’re using IMAP, a protocol for syncing messages with a remote server to a local app’s mailbox, it’s possible to recover it that way, assuming the deletion didn’t propagate to the server, too. You should be able to select in Mail: Mailbox > Synchronize > Mail account name, and this will restore access to the messages.
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