Dennis Sellers

<p>Adobe has released its 2015 online shopping data for Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day. A record $4.45 billion is expected to have been spent online, including $2.72 billion on Black Friday, 14 percent more than in 2014 and $1.73 billion on Thanksgiving Day, a 25 percent increase year-over-year (YoY).</p>

<p>If you want to really improve the audio on your Mac's speakers or headphones, plug in the $149.99 <a target="_blank" href="http://tinyurl.com/px5y6b2" rel="noopener noreferrer">D3 Premium 24-bit DAC (digital-to-analog converter)</a> from Audioengine. It bypasses your computer’s headphone jack and sends music directly through USB. The result: a noticeable improvement in the sound coming from your music, movies and games.</p>

<p>While not making them waterproof (although rumors claim the upcoming iPhone 7 will indeed be waterproof), Apple wants to make its iOS devices, and perhaps Mac laptops more resistant to spills. The company has filed for a patent (number 20150340795) with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for “electronic devices with housing port shutters.”</p>

<p>On a regular basis, <em>Apple World Today</em> posts a list of notable new apps or app updates that have been released. They may not necessarily be new, but they're popular and deserve mention. Here are today's picks for Mac OS X and iOS.</p>

<p>Apple <a target="_blank" href="https://www.apple.com/cn/retail/chaoyangjoycity/" rel="noopener noreferrer">says it will open its 27th store in China</a> on Saturday, Nov. 28, in the Chaoyang Joy City shopping mall, Beijing. It will be the fifth Apple Store to open in China’s capital city.</p>

<p><a target="_blank" href="http://tinyurl.com/p979lb7" rel="noopener noreferrer">Camtasia</a> is an application for recording and annotating audio and video captured from your Mac commonly known as screencasting.  I’ve used other programs in the past to do raw captures from my Mac and then did the painful editing in iMovie and GarageBand but Camtasia does everything  with an intuitive and easy to use Mac interface.</p>

<p>Another day, another lawsuit. Apple has been hit with a second class action lawsuit claiming that the company failed to properly warn users that the new Wi-Fi Assist feature in iOS 9 will use data from their cellular plan.</p>

<p>In a note to clients — as noted by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.appleinsider.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">AppleInsider</a> — Cowen and Company analyst Timothy Acuri says the A9X CPU found in the iPad Pro poses a threat to Intel as it surpasses the Intel Core M processor (the one used in the new 12-inch MacBook).</p>

<p>As announced, Apple is taking orders for the iPad Pro online. However, instead of waiting until Friday, you can pick one up today at an Apple retail store (at least as long as supplies last).</p>

<p>Since many modern Macs come with limited internal storage, it can be handy to move space-consuming items like your OS X Photos library to an external drive. Thankfully, it’s easy to do this. Quit the app, attach an external drive to your Mac, and then:</p>

<p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.farmawaygame.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">FarmAway!</a> from Futureplay Games is a farming app in which players tap and swipe to cultivate cute animals, crops and virtual riches. The game plays on iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. It’s also one of the first games released for the fourth generation Apple TV, and it’s that platform on which I tested it.</p>

<p>I’m a big fan of Photos, Apple’s replacement for iPhoto and Aperture. However, there’s one feature it lacks that I really want: the ability for the app NOT to sync certain photos and/or folders to iCloud.</p>

<p>The iPad Pro is shaping up to be a hit in Japan. Five percent of Japanese consumers say they plan to buy Apple's super-sized tablet, according to a new survey by Mobile Marketing Data Lab (as noted by <a href="http://brightwire.com">BrightWire.com</a>, a global investment newswire).</p>

<p>With Mac OS X El Capitan, you can now hide the menu bar. Personally, I don’t do this, but you can enable this feature if you wish. When you do, the menu bar disappears until you move your cursor to the top of the screen. To make this happen:</p>

<p>If you want to resize your JPEG images for the best web performance or create thumbnails for an image gallery check out <a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/1Qmv6uT" rel="noopener noreferrer">iResizer</a> for Mac OS X (10.7 or higher). It scales an image without changing important visual content such as people, buildings and animals — and avoids distortion of the important parts of the image.</p>