Indholdsfortegnelse for No. 222 i iCreate

While there are many rich and exotic locations I could fantasise about penning an editor’s letter from to welcome you to this magazine, the reality this month, unfortunately, was that it was from a hospital bed. Having attempted to ride out an internal, very painful, abscess on deadline week, a very real possibility of developing full-on sepsis forced me into the caring hands of our beloved NHS. But in a strange way, this helped to emphasise the importance of this issue’s two main features. With your devices connected to Apple’s iCloud, you really can up sticks and make an office anywhere while maintaining full access to all of your essential files – in this case, the pages of this very magazine to work and collaborate on and see over the…

ONE OF THE HOT RUMOURS GOING AROUND AT THE MOMENT IS THAT APPLE WILL KILL OFF THE TOUCH BAR ON THE MACBOOK PRO LINEUP LATER THIS YEAR. While it definitely has not been confirmed by Apple that this will happen, journalists like Mark Gurman of Bloomberg have reported that the MacBook Pros released in the third quarter of 2021 will replace the Touch Bar with physical function keys instead, and shift back to MagSafe for faster charging. The current MacBook Pros have only USB-C ports, which function for charging and for connecting peripherals. The MagSafe design found on older MacBook Pro models was a dedicated charging port with a magnetic connection, which meant that if you tripped over your charging lead you didn’t knock your MacBook Pro on the floor,…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available With iOS 14.3, iPhone 12 Pro users can now shoot in the Apple ProRAW format directly from the Camera app. As Apple ProRAW files capture more information about a scene’s colours and tones you have much more control over the look of edited images. You can use the editing tools in the Photos app to reveal more detail in shadows and highlights while keeping compression artefacts such as noise at bay. The Apple ProRAW format also takes advantage of your iPhone’s Smart HDR feature to selectively analyse and expose different parts of the scene to capture maximum detail. ProRAW files are captured as.dng (digital negative) files. You’ll need to develop a.dng in the Photos app and share it as a JPEG. Editing…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed When big time music producers talk, their eyes tend to twinkle at the mention of plugins. It can seem a bit confusing to most GarageBand users, so what are they? Well, usually those guys are eulogising about essentially units that ‘plug in’ to software like Ableton Live and Apple’s own Logic. With the latter being GarageBand’s bigger brother, it stands to reason that they exist here too, albeit in simplified form. Plugins are what power Library patches and while quite hidden, they can be manipulated directly to achieve advanced results. Here we’ll identify the plugin stack but more specifically pick a plugin to add, open up and tweak. To follow you’ll want a project open containing at least one track and region of any…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Photos and illustrations make dull text documents more interesting and they can show things that plain text cannot. If you use Pages to create documents, eBooks or PDFs, consider inserting photos to make them stand out. You could spend time in a photo editor getting them looking perfect before they are added to a Pages document, but there is no need because the app contains many of the photo editing tools found in apps like Photos and Preview. There are tools in Pages to correct the exposure, saturation, colour, transparency, sharpness and more. Here we look at these photo enhancement features. Follow along by opening a new document and select the Easy Decorating template. Step-by-step Enhance images in Pages documents 1 Apply a style…

Developer Fingerlab Difficulty Time needed The music making potential for Mac was always important to the late Steve Jobs. His legacy is a platform of Apple devices offering incredible music apps, headed by GarageBand. However the democratisation of Apple development has yielded amazing independent audio apps, like Fingerlab’s DM1. This enduring standalone drum machine boasts 154 electronic kits, six instruments and a plethora of effects. However its real defining quality is the accessibility it brings for designing loops visually with the Step Sequencer. Effectively a grid for toggling beat strikes on or off, users of any level can start composing immediately this way or use drum pads to tap ideas out. Here we’ll focus on building a beat from scratch using the Step Sequencer before exporting the loop. Machine learning…

Safari extensions have been around for a very long time and their use has likely diminished with the surge of apps dominating the way we use our computers and mobile devices. This would be to ignore the huge advantages the best extensions offer though and if you consider that you likely use Safari more than any other app on your Mac you may as well make the most of what it has to offer. Extensions rarely get in the way and are only activated when needed, with the majority only offering a simple notification that they are ready in the Safari toolbar at the top. The trick is to only install the extensions that are genuinely useful to you and to not overcomplicate what is one of the most simply…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed The Weather app on the iPhone may look like it always has, but dig a little deeper and you will find that it has been updated and is now even better. It can display a large amount of information on the quality of the air in your area. It tells the air quality, pollen level, the quantity of particles and pollutants in the air you are breathing, and more. As we head towards spring and flowers begin to appear, the pollen count will rise. As we begin to travel more after 2020’s woes, air quality will soon take a turn for the worse as cars, planes and other sources of pollutants increase. This air quality update to the Weather app has come at a…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed When Apple removed the Home button from a good number of its iPhone and iPad models, it replaced it with a swipe up bar that constantly resides at the bottom of the screen. We’ve become used to it, by and large, but it becomes more noticeable in certain situations: perhaps when you’re playing a game. There’s also a chance that you end up swiping on it by accident, leaving the app when you didn’t actually want to. So can you remove it from the screen? Of course. You can temporarily banish the bar on an app-by-app basis and it comes with the bonus of preventing you from accidentally leaving an app – particularly useful if you’re mid-game. It’s all thanks to the Accessibility feature…

Developer Microsoft Difficulty Time needed For many users, a MacBook is becoming less of a necessity if you want to compute on the go. Ever since the iPad launched in 2010, it has gradually edged into Mac territory and the release of Microsoft Office for iPad four years later proved significant given its high standing in the workplace. Accessories such as the Magic Keyboard which rolled out earlier this year have closed the gap further and it’s now possible not only to use a mouse with the latest app versions of Word and Excel but a trackpad too - so long as your iPad has iPadOS 13 or later installed, that is. Assuming you do, just head for the App Store to install Word or Excel if you haven’t already…

Developer Apple IncDifficulty Time needed Apple Watch has become a very useful device for keeping track of your fitness. It is able to make use of the Watch’s GPS, accelerometer and optical heart sensor to estimate the maximum amount of oxygen that your body is using during exercise. It’ll also keep track of your VO2 max when you’re engaged in vigorous exercise, and monitor the levels when you’re walking too. By monitoring low level activity, the cardio fitness feature will benefit all Watch wearers, not just those who are aiming to be mega-fit. Indeed, upgrade an Apple Watch Series 3 or later to at least watchOS 7.2 and you will now also get an alert on your wearable device whenever the level is too low. You will need to set…

£180/$180 Key features • Bluetooth 4.0 • Digital Class D Amplifier • 60-20,000Hz • AUX-in Learn more audiopro.com Available from amazon.co.uk WITH THE SECOND OFFERING BY SWEDISH SOUND SPECIALIST Audio Pro in as many months, we’re starting to get quite accustomed to the Scandinavian design, especially, the blissful, blanketing audio their speakers produce. Creating the Addon T3+ couldn’t have been easy either. Its predecessor, the Addon T3, won multiple awards, being the standout for many in the wireless speaker stakes. What is interesting is that the Addon T3+ (note the ‘+’) is the sole addition to Audio Pro’s Bluetooth-only range, with the company focusing more on multi-room speakers in recent times as the trends dictate. But Audio Pro saw an opportunity to improve on the original and has made some…

David Crookes Our iOS expert shows you how to remove the Home bar to free up space in certain apps, view how your personal data is handled, and correct iOS’s pronunciation of key words. Shaun McGill Our resident tech specialist shows you how to get the most out of Family Sharing across Mac and iOS. Share purchases, track family members and manage the kids’ screen time. George Cairns Our creative genius shows you how to shoot, edit and share in Apple’s ProRAW format, crop and recompose iMovie clips, and get creative with colour using curves in Final Cut.…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available You can improve a clip’s composition in iMovie in a variety of ways. If you have an unwanted object at the edge of the frame (such as a carelessly placed finger) then you can crop it out to reveal a cleaner unobscured shot. You can also recompose a shot to get a closer look at a distant subject. You can even use iMovie’s cropping tools to add professional camera moves that enable you to zoom in on a point of interest or pan to follow a moving subject. We used an iPhone 12 Pro Max to shoot a mix of 1080 HD and 4K clips for you to work with when following this walkthrough. Thanks to the iPhone’s in-camera stabilisation we could…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available Logic Pro is an incredibly powerful piece of software, capable of pretty much every music production task under the sun. One use for it you may not have thought of, however, is to use it as a practice aid when learning an instrument. Say you want to improve your skills by learning the guitar solo from a song, or working out the chord progression from a particularly tricky piano section so that you can play along. This is where the ability to line up a piece of prerecorded audio to Logic’s timing grid can pay dividends, as you’ll then be able to quickly and easily loop individual parts of the tune, then slow them down at will – crucially, while maintaining the…

Developer Sempliva Difficulty Time needed When running more than one app at a time, it can be hard to find space on the desktop so windows do not overlap. It is a problem that affects 13in MacBook owners most, but even if you have a 16in model, app windows can still overlap. Big screen iMacs have less of a space problem, but MacBook users have to carefully arrange apps to minimise overlapping. One way to avoid this is to use macOS built-in features or third-party utilities to automatically position app windows so they don’t overlap. For example, one app could occupy the left half of the screen while a second app occupies the right. Three apps could divide the screen into thirds, four apps into quarters and so on. Here’s…

Developer Momenta B.V. Difficulty Time needed There are countless notes apps on the App Store alongside even more calendar and task management apps, and even Apple offers solutions for each within macOS and iOS. They are considered essential and rightly so, but just like email they follow a similar structure and the way they work has not changed much in many years. Agenda is looking to change all of that by attempting to integrate all three into a solution that is designed to bring all of your work into the one beautifully presented digital place. Even better, you can link them together subtly and also view them in any way that is convenient to you. There is a learning curve involved as it is a new way of working, but…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Spoken Content is a handy feature that forms part of iOS and its aim is to help people who are visually impaired by reading text displayed on the screen. But it’s also useful for anyone who simply wants to listen to a block of text rather than read. Sometimes, though, iOS can mispronounce words. Place names can often be troublesome, for example, with a fair few towns, cities and villages prone to various local quirks that trip up outsiders never mind a piece of technology. So here we are going to show you two things: first, how you can get iOS to read pages of onscreen text in the first place and, second, how to ensure it pronounces things correctly so that your listening…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed As of 8th December 2020, Apple has required developers to provide information about how their apps are using your personal data. What’s more, in a bid to be more transparent, the App Store now shows how your details are being used for advertising as well as how data is collected and linked to your identity. Apple is hoping that users will feel more assured by greater transparency but, as you’ll see, some apps are amassing quite a lot of data about you. Here we show you where the information is located and how you can delve deeper to make crucial decisions over whether you want to be installing particular apps and services. Who knows, maybe some developers will be forced to reassess whether their…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Your iPad is well-equipped to deal with PDFs. Not only can you mark them up by drawing or writing across them, you can open them in Mail, view via a browser and enjoy them within apps. It’s even possible to turn webpages into PDFs using iPadOS – either tap the Share button, select ‘Print’ and zoom out of the Preview thumbnail, or tap ‘AA’ in the URL bar and select ‘Show Reader View’. In such cases, you can then copy the PDFs to the Books app, ensuring they’re neatly to hand and manageable. They end up in their own PDF section but you can place them into collections. You can also share PDFs with others, rename them, save them to your Files app, produce…

Developer Sky UK Ltd Difficulty Time needed For years, the NOW TV app for Apple TV devices has felt clunky and outdated. Users of this popular streaming service have bemoaned the lack of basic features and it was clear the app was in need of an update. Thankfully, its time has come. The latest version for tvOS 11.2 or later gives the TV guide a new look so you can better see what’s currently showing and what’s coming up. Watching on-demand is easier too - you don’t need to exit to the menu to view a series’ next episode - click ‘Watch Now’ when an episode draws to a close to continue. You will, however, need a fourthgen device since NOW TV no longer supports second and third-generation Apple TVs.…

Release date January 2002 • Processor: 700MHz to 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 • Memory: 128MB to 256MB SDRAM • Hard Drive: Up to 80GB • Display: 15, 17 or 20-inch LCD • Connectivity: USB 1.1 (x3), Firewire 400 (x2), AirPort Extreme, Ethernet Original price: £1,749/$2,199 Price now: £172/$236 After the in-yer-face colour spectrum of the first iMacs, what initially become known as the ‘New iMac’ needed to impress on a similar level, yet take the design to the next one entirely. So out hopped the ‘iLamp’, so-called due to the computer’s resemblance to a desk lamp, such as the one synonymous with Pixar. The iMac G4’s look comprised of an LCD mounted on an adjustable arm above a rounded base containing a full-size, tray-loading optical drive and a fourth-generation PowerPC G4…

Developer Apple Inc Time needed Difficulty Download available Video cameras work hard to capture an accurate representation of a scene’s colours. Final Cut Pro’s Color Inspector enables you to boost saturation and tweak tints to fine-tune the look. If you dig deeper into the Effects panel you can produce more creative colour grades, with the Hue/Saturation Curves effect. This powerful tool enables you to use an eyedropper to selectively sample a particular colour in the clip. You can then adjust the position of the control point to lighten or darken a particular colour, change its hue or even produce spot colour effects where only one colour is visible in the frame. We’ll show you how to use this tool to turn blue skies to cyan and darken them to make…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Calendar is a great app for organising business meetings, trips, parties and other events. Not only does it add alarms and reminders of upcoming events, you can also use it to invite other people and see which ones are attending. A new sidebar has been added to the Big Sur version of Calendar and it works a bit like email. There are two tabs and invitations appear on one tab (like an Inbox folder) and you can reply to them. Replies appear in the other tab (like a Sent folder). If you change your mind and cannot attend an event, you can notify the organiser. It is a brilliant feature and one that works well. There is still the fallback of emailed invitations though…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed You will already know that you can unlock a hidden Developer menu in Safari by going to Safari>Preferences> Advanced and ticking the ‘Show Develop menu in menu bar’ option, right? Well there is another, even more hidden menu that you might not be aware of called ‘Debug’, that you need to enter a Terminal command line to access. Many thought that this was removed in macOS Big Sur as the command line no longer seemed to work. However, there is a quick System Preferences trick you can perform to make it accessible again, which we will guide you through here. We will also showcase some of the features within this new menu that some people may find useful. Useful options to explore Just a…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed To produce attractive guides, courses and training materials about the Mac, software or services, record the screen and save it as a video you can share. Screen recordings have many uses and you might need to create recordings for work, but it could be simply showing a friend or relative how to do something on their Mac that they are having difficulty with. Instead of explaining in words, you could record yourself doing it and send them the video. Screen recording has been around for some time, but more features have been added in recent macOS updates. A keypress and click is all it takes to start recording. One more click and it can be edited and saved for sharing. Step-by-step Create desktop recordings…

Developer Apple, Inc Difficulty Time needed Apple is committed to privacy of course, and this is a good thing, but it does mean that the number of settings on the iPhone related to privacy has multiplied at a rapid rate over the last few versions of iOS. Every new update brings more settings and options and ways to opt in and out of tracking. Here we take a fresh look at privacy on the iPhone (much of this applies to the iPad too), and see where the settings are and how to manage them. There is a new private search engine for Safari, the so-called privacy ‘nutrition’ labels in the App Store, and so on. There are no right or wrong settings and it is up to you to decide…

Developer WhatsApp Inc Difficulty Time needed Conversations in real life tend not to be permanent but online chats have a habit of hanging around, stored on devices in the various apps that we use to communicate with each other until someone on either side decides to remove them. With WhatsApp, you can now take control over how long messages will remain. Although you can’t adjust the length of time, Disappearing Messages ensures that anything sent between individuals or within groups is removed after seven days. It’s not perfect as we’ll see, but it’s a step in the right direction. One of the benefits is that it reduces clutter within the app and it also means that some missives are less likely to come back to haunt you. That said, you…

Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed The iPhone has two power modes - normal and Low Power Mode. As the battery level of the iPhone falls throughout the day it may be in danger of running out of juice before you can get to a charger. Thankfully, you can enable Low Power Mode to extend the battery life, giving you an extra hour or two of running time. Enable Low Power Mode by going to Settings>Battery or add a button to Control Centre. The only problem is that you may not notice the battery expiring and cannot see it if the iPhone is in your pocket. A better way to enable it is to automate it with Shortcuts. Just choose the level at which it should be activated and it…

Developer Circadian Design Difficulty Time needed Apps that help you manage your medications are plentiful and they vary from very basic to overly complex which means that it can be a chore to find the one that works best for you. We believe that for something as important as medicines you should use an app that supports the Apple Watch, if you own one, because this will help to guarantee that you never miss a tablet or medicine that could be crucial to your well being. Also, the simple approach will also help because it minimises the setting up process and the effort required to remember when you need to take your medication. The Round Health app fits those criteria with ease and is completely free, so we will take…