Indholdsfortegnelse for 1 August 2015 i MacFormat

Whatever Mac you’ve chosen, you’ve opted to make a serious investment. It will, of course, pay off because your Mac is reliable, stable and stands the test of time far better than most other computers. We could all do with some things to be cheaper though. Better still, free! The software world can be a hard thing to keep track of, and expensive if your interests are wide-ranging. It’s not for us to quibble over seemingly expensive programs – that’s a matter for their developers – but the notion that free stuff is less good is just nonsense. So in this issue we’ve compiled the latest and greatest free apps for OS X, from the Mac App Store and further afield, and explain why you should try them. We’ve also…

WE’RE MOST EXCITED ABOUT... NINEBOT ONE E+ $950 (about £625) ninebot.com It’s what Segway could have been, if it hadn’t been adopted by the socks-andsandals crowd What is it? With its fancy blue, black and white styling, the Ninebot One E+ looks like something straight out of I, Robot (minus the overbearing product placements). But no, apparently it’s actually a ‘selfbalancing scooter’, a single-wheeled transport device that can reach a decent 22km/h and travel up to an impressive 35km on a single charge. When’s it due? It’s scooting around now Why are we excited? It looks über-futuristic and the tech inside seems pretty impressive too. In theory, it’s a superb way to make short, traffic jamdodging, urban journeys and one video even shows a rider using it while balancing on…

Prior to WWDC 2015, the rumour mill had gone largely silent on iOS 9. The smart money was on iPhones and iPads getting an update akin to 2009’s OS X upgrade, Snow Leopard. In other words, it would be all about boosting efficiency, power and speed, but not exactly deliver an abundance of shiny new features. But it turns out we’re actually going to get the best of both worlds. If iOS 9 lives up to Apple’s promises, it will be an update that, in the company’s own words, will “elevate the foundations of the platform”, along with offering new apps and features to greatly improve your iOS experience – whether you’re using an iPhone or an iPad. More power? On watching the WWDC keynote, it sometimes felt like Apple…

When it comes to good design, less has always been more, with simplicity and clarity the watchwords to follow. That applies to more than just the physical layout of your pages – it’s also critical when deciding what text styles to use. Typography is more than simply choosing the right font to use too. You need to remember to apply a consistent size, style and spacing to each text element, so readers aren’t left confused by unexpected changes to the way your pages look. There’s more as well – should long words be hyphenated at the end of lines, for example? And how should text be aligned when displayed in columns: left or justified? Finding your style It’s hard enough determining what these rules should be, but enforcing them would…

If you’re the proud owner of more than one Mac – or you live in a multi-Mac household – then you know that keeping all your machines backed up independently can be costly. The obvious solution is to centralise your backups in one convenient location, enabling you to reduce the cost of maintaining separate backups for each Mac by sharing a single back-up drive. One route to achieving this is to buy a dedicated network drive, such as Apple’s Time Capsule, but that’s quite an expensive route. Thankfully, there’s an alternative: OS X Server (£14.99, http://apple.co/1MEKGPL). Install this on your main Mac – or an old, spare one – and it can be configured to give all the other Macs on your network access to its spare storage as a…

If you routinely sync your iPad and iPhone with your Mac and use iCloud storage, you might not be too concerned about losing your Apple device. It can cost a lot to store photos this way, though. And storing huge amounts of data slows your iPad or iPhone. Plus, it’s no fun sifting through thousands of pics when you don’t have the time to find a particular one. Flickr is free and offers a whopping 1TB of storage. You can view slideshows online as well as on your iPad or iPhone, and you have full control over whether photos are private, shared with friends and family or with the wider world. The app’s Auto-Uploadr function syncs your iPad and iPhone photos to your Flickr account, or you can upload individual…

We’ve teamed up with wearable technology company Fitbug and fitness program Kiqplan to give you the chance to win a bundle, which includes a Fitbug Orb and a host of fitness plans. The prize is worth £209.87 and we have three to give away. The Fitbug Orb is the ideal way to kickstart a healthier lifestyle. The button-sized activity tracker counts every step, as well as calories and sleep. Wear it on your wrist, belt or beneath your clothing and let it wirelessly sync data to your smartphone app. The bundle also comes with all Kiqplan’s fitness plans, including Beer Belly Blaster, Slim & Trim, Your First 5k and 10k Run Ready. Enter the competition now to be in with a chance of winning this fantastic prize! TO ENTER, SIMPLY…

Yosemite has refined the way we find the answers to all sorts of questions, including some clever shortcuts that you probably hadn’t noticed. 1 Yosemite includes a Spanish to English dictionary. Open Preferences in the Dictionary app and tick the box next to ‘Gran Diccionario Oxford – Español-Inglés’. You can now translate any Spanish word in most OS X apps by right-clicking it and choosing ‘Look Up’. 2 If you need to do a quick sum, you can hit +Space to bring up Spotlight and type it there. Or click the Notification Centre icon in the top-right corner of the screen to slide a basic calculator into view. 3 Spotlight can also search for songs. So if you don’t want to wait for iTunes to load, just hit +Space, type…

REVIEW MANIFESTO Our ratings explained Our reviews are totally independent; we’re not affiliated with Apple or anyone else, nor are we influenced by advertisers. You can trust us. Prices we quote for products are correct at the time of writing and are the best we can find from a reputable online dealer, excluding delivery. Rarely given; a brilliant thing that’s as good as you can get in its class right now A strong recommendation to buy; any concerns are comfortably outweighed by its strengths A good product you should consider buying, but there may be better options for you Fundamentally flawed either in concept or execution; there are almost certainly better options for you A waste of your money and everyone’s time; do not buy! Given solely at the discretion…

£150 Manufacturer Netgear, netgear.com Connectivity 802.11ac Wi-Fi, VDSL/ADSL, auto detection for Universal DSL, beamforming technology Media streaming DLNA It’s not just Apple that makes great wireless routers. Netgear’s AC1600 is an innocuous-looking modem and router with a variety of connection capabilities including ADSL, VDSL and gigabit Ethernet for a cable modem. It has five Ethernet ports and can operate on two wireless bands at the same time. Set up is straightforward and there’s a friendly browser-based interface plus an app to manage router settings. This model is designed with heavier users in mind, and nowadays many households will have 10 or more wireless devices. It uses 802.11ac Wi-Fi, the fastest available to consumers at present, plus beamforming technology for more reliable connections. Transfer speeds were good when copying files, and…

£103.88 or £8.47/month Developer Adobe, adobe.com Requirements OS X 10.8 or higher Lightroom is Adobe’s professional photo enhancing and cataloguing program and it’s designed to be used alongside a regular image editor such as Photoshop. Indeed, if you buy it using the Creative Cloud subscription option instead of a one‑off fee, you’ll get Photoshop included. Lightroom’s editing tools don’t reach the same depths as Photoshop’s, but it’s made with a slightly different intention – simpler, non-destructive improvements to photos, rather than full editing of images with lots of layers. Sweeping change Adobe has introduced new tools for organising photos, but the main additions are to the editing tools. There are also exciting new panorama and HDR tools, and it’s now possible to “brush out” areas adjusted with the Graduated and…

£10.99 Developer Global Delight, globaldelight.com Requires OS X 10.10 or higher The speakers built into the vast majority of computers sacrifice a lot, by way of volume and fidelity, to fit inside the increasingly slim casings of modern machines. Apple does remarkably well with its MacBook Pro speakers, and the 15-inch model in particular sounds better than you would expect, by being able to have slightly larger speakers. As more people listen to music, radio, film and use Skype without plugging in external speakers, however, the limitations of built-in audio hardware become clear. On smaller models, it’s particularly pronounced. Boom! Boom 2 is an application that intercepts your system audio and modifies it, either based on its own best guess or your settings, to squeeze more gain and clarity out.…

£10.99 Developer TreeFortress Games, treefortress.com Requires OS X 10.6 or higher This quirky game stars a dinosaur wearing rocket-equipped boots on a quest to save his kind from extinction. Pressing a key gives him a short boost upwards, and with well-timed repeat presses Rex gains altitude. His fantastical footwear also enables him to dash horizontally in short bursts, which can also be maintained with welltimed presses. The challenge is to keep Rex moving without crashing into spikes, lasers, sentry robots and other dangers that lie in every which way he can move. Your main goal is simply to reach the end of each level, which earns you a star. Quotas of stars have to be met in order to open up more levels, and you can earn even more by…

£1.99 Developer East Coast Pixels, fusionhdr.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.0 The iPhone’s Camera app is capable of shooting high dynamic range (HDR) images, but Fusion promises more control over your images. For example, while the Camera app allows you to select HDR then shoots three exposures and combines them, Fusion allows you to specify the intervals between exposures (albeit with two options besides auto). A histogram lets you analyse a scene before you shoot and Steady Shot delays the shot until the camera is still. Controls for autoexposure lock and focus lock are included, as well as a spot meter option, while all exposures are saved and can be exported. Editing includes white balance, sharpness, colour, lighting and the ability to specify parts of the image…

Apple’s been getting awfully touchy of late. Force Touch, its combination of a vibration mechanism and pressure-sensitive force sensors, enables MacBook and MacBook Pro users to feel as if they’re using a physical switch instead of tapping on glass, while the same technology in the Apple Watch can tap you or transmit somebody else’s heartbeat. And whether it’s on your wrist or underneath your fingers, it can also detect different levels of pressure and react to your touch accordingly. Force Touch is expected to appear in iPhones and iPads, but Apple has even more interesting ideas for your fingers. In its patent application “Touch Surface for Simulating Materials”, Apple describes how haptic feedback could be used to “simulate a material” such as metal or wood in a MacBook trackpad. It…

We round-up the Apple stories that matter to you Chip giant Intel has confirmed that its latest high-speed data transfer standard, Thunderbolt 3, will use the same USB-C connector as used by USB 3.1, but will be much, much faster. “For the first time, one computer port connects to Thunderbolt devices, every display and billions of USB devices,” Jason Ziller, Intel’s director of Thunderbolt marketing, said. Thunderbolt 3 can transfer data at a whopping 40Gbps (gigabits per second), twice as fast as Thunderbolt 2, which was introduced in 2014 and eight times faster than the MacBook’s sole first-gen USB 3.1 port. This means you can transfer a 4K movie in just 30 seconds using Thunderbolt 3. The ports also incorporate support for cheaper ‘passive’ Thunderbolt cables that operate at a…

Jonathan Ive’s promotion to Chief Design Officer has got Appleologists in a tizzy. Is the newly created position the beginning of the end of Ive’s time at Apple, or has he become the spiritual successor to Steve Jobs, the new keeper of the Apple flame? Will he move to England and try to do everything via iCloud? Is he going to give up on designing things and swan about in gold-plated Bentleys with his designer pals, listening to Pitbull and quaffing Courvoisier? Me, I think Ive wants to be a fireman again. Imagine. You’ve been fascinated by fire your whole life. You understand its power, its terrible beauty. You know its secrets, can hear its beats, can predict its movements in a way no other firefighter can. And because of…

Apple’s Boot Camp software allows you to start your Mac up in Windows, not just OS X. It enables the use of business apps that may not be available for the Mac, designers and developers can test websites and apps on Windows, and you can choose from many more games. However, if you upgrade or replace your Mac, you need to start all over and reinstall Windows on the new Mac, along with all your Windows apps and games. That can take ages because some games are tens of gigabytes large. Then there’s the trickiness of Windows’ activation process. Apple’s OS is free these days, but Windows still costs almost £100. Winclone helps you transfer Windows with all your software to a new Mac Winclone (twocanoes.com) helps transfer your Boot…

At its simplest, Editorial is a text editor that supports Markdown, the plain text formatting syntax that’s gained in popularity in recent years and is supported by WordPress, among others. However, there’s much more to it than that. Editorial enables you to automate repetitive tasks by creating reusable workflows. There are three ways you can add workflows in Editorial: by scripting them from scratch in Python; by putting Actions together in sequence, a bit like Automator; or by importing workflows created by others. Most of us lack the skills to take the first option, but the latter two are reasonably straightforward. Having been around for a couple of years, Editorial has a core of devotees who produce workflows and make them available for use, so you may not need to…

GET IN TOUCH If you have a technical issue that you need help with, please email us at: sos@macformat.com Is this error important? Q Should I be worried about the warning message that appeared when I used Disc Utility following an unexpected quit by Mail? It says ‘SUID file – System/Library/ Core Services/ Remote Management/ ARDAgent.app/Contents/ MacOS/ ARDAgent has been modified and will not be repaired’. I’m using a mid-2010 Macbook Pro with Mavericks. Disk Utility reports everything else as OK, verifying and repairing some permissions. I have tried to find the file in Library with no success. Andrew Knight A Don’t worry this is perfectly normal. Disk Utility checks the permissions for the OS X system files against a master list that details the ‘correct’ permissions for each one.…

GET IN TOUCH If you have a technical query with your iOS device that you need answering, please email us at sos@macformat.com What’s up with my password? Q iTunes does not recognise my Apple ID password in my iPad! Maritza Arroyo Muñiz A Does your Apple ID work anywhere else? Try logging in at https://appleid.apple.com. If you can log in there, then perhaps the email address used for your login is wrong on the iPad. Check it in Settings > iTunes & App Store. If the email address there matches the one you used when you logged in through the web browser, try signing out on all your mobile devices and then changing the password on your desktop. If this still doesn’t work, or you can’t even log in through…

From £1,599 Manufacturer Apple, apple.com/uk Processor 3.3GHz Intel Core i5 Graphics AMD Radeon R9 M290 2GB Memory 8GB Storage 1TB HDD turer Apple, apple.com/uk Core i5 Graphics AMD Radeon R9 M290 2GB 1TB HDD We absolutely loved the 5K iMac when it first appeared late last year. The base model rivalled the Mac Pro for computing power and gave us that amazing 14.7-millionpixel screen. At £1,999 it didn’t come cheap, but now Apple has cut the price of that original model down to £1,849 and added this new entrylevel option, which weighs in at just £1,599. The question is, what corners had to be cut to save that £250? First, the processor is slower, with a frequency of 3.3GHz compared to the 3.5GHz in the higher model. But it’s still…

£150 Manufacturer RHA Audio, rha-audio.com Frequency range 16-22000Hz Weight 41g Cable 1.35m Earphones are still the most discreet way to enjoy music on the move and the T10is are at the top end of RHA’s lineup, designed for those who don’t mind paying extra for fidelity and flexibility. The first thing you notice is the beautiful packaging and array of accessories in the box. In addition to 10 pairs of different-sized ear tips in multiple materials and with a stainless steel holder, there’s a choice of three metal tuning filters, also in a special metal holder. These can be swapped for a more treble or bassheavy sound, or a neutral character. The earphones are crafted from solid stainless steel and sit snugly inside your ear. The wires form flexible ear…

£3.99 Developer Thomas Peterson, ghostnoteapp.com Requires OS X 10.9 or higher Ghostnote is a Post-itstyle app with a difference. Instead of littering your Desktop with notes, it’s made them contextaware. You can apply them to a document, folder or dozens of supported apps. When Ghostnote is running its icon sits in your Mac’s menu bar. Click on it while in an app or with a folder or document selected and an empty note drops down, ready to be filled in. Text in notes can be formatted, including making it an ordered list or bullet points. And you can add tasks with tick boxes next to them. Note colours can be customised and detached from the menu bar so they float on the desktop. In some apps, you can add notes…

£2.29 Developer 3 Minute Games, 3mingames.com Works with Apple Watch (with iPhone app), iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.2 Something that becomes apparent when you have an Apple Watch is that most games created for it don’t really work. They’re not suitable for how the device is used – they’re either ergonomic nightmares or demand play sessions that last too long. However, Lifeline… is an exception, and while it also works well on iOS devices, it’s tailormade for Apple’s wearable. The game starts with you receiving a communication from Taylor, a marooned astronaut. They’re keen to survive and clearly terrified, despite a facade of morale-boosting humour. Decision-making is clearly not a strong suit, however, and that’s left to you. At certain points in the conversation, you’ll get a choice of…

AFFINITY DESIGNER £29.99 Developer Seriflabs, affinity.serif.com Requires OS X 10.7 or higher Winner of an Apple Design Award at WWDC 2015, Affinity Designer is a beautifully powerful graphics design app for the Mac that’s mainly for creating and editing vector graphics but can open pixel-based images too. “This is an excellent example of what a state-of-the-art Mac app should be,” Apple explains, pointing out that the 64-bit software takes full advantage of OS X technologies like OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch and Core Graphics. The application also supports tablets and the Force Touch trackpad, so you can use it to draw and paint with a degree of pressure sensitivity. The user interface is highly intuitive and contextual, which means that not only are the tools you need are easy to find,…

As this series progresses we’ll be delving deeper into the mysteries of Affinity Designer and learning various skills as we go. In the previous issue we learnt about the versatility of the gradients and how you can use them to create the appearance of layers and depth. Here we’ll be learning about how to use the brush tools as well as how to mask an area quickly while still retaining both layers. By the end of this part of the tutorial you will hopefully be confident enough to create your own fish, all of which will be swimming at different angles. You will also learn how to create a brush to make painting sea weed quick and enjoyable. One of the aims of this part of the tutorial is to…

For many, Evernote is indispensable. The ability to grab content from just about anywhere, sync it and share it with any device linked to your account means you always have that crucial research information, recipe or checklist close to hand. Now Evernote is on the Apple Watch too, the notes are even closer to hand – literally and metaphorically. There’s a lot more to Evernote, however, than just typing in new notes, making audio notes or grabbing clippings from the web. It’s AppleScriptable, for example, so you can automate the creation of notes on your Mac using tools such as Automator and Hazel. The iOS version has a Today widget in iOS 8 which allows you to create new notes without opening the app. Evernote has a chat facility so…

Welcome... There’s always plenty to say about Apple, whether it’s good or bad. And we’d particularly love to hear what you think! Write to us at letters@macformat.com and remember, the Star Letter wins a prize! GET INVOLVED Apple Mail 62 Photo Stream 64 Mac User Groups 65 Win a fitness bundle 66 Ask the Experts 67 JOIN US ON LINE Email your questions to letters@macformat.com Visit macformat.com for more great Mac news Join the conversation with our Facebook page Keep up to date by following us on Twitter at @MacFormat Are you on App.net? So are we! We’re @MacFormat there too Subscribe to our videos at youtube.com/MacFormatUK STAR LETTER Flight risk With reference to your article on the Bebop Drone, it describes the thrill of flying the copter out of…

Since Apple replaced iPhoto with Photos, the forums have been full of wailing and lamentation. This is what forums are for of course; no one bothers to let the internet know when everything is great. But Photos has changed the way your snaps are sorted and categorised and no one likes change. One change in particular, has alarmed many people. Photos no longer hides ‘hidden’ photos from the All Photos view. In iPhoto, you could mark a photo with the hidden flag and it wouldn’t show up in any of the albums or events views. This was a handy way to discretely tuck any cheeky bedroom shots out of view. It was never going to resist the forensic glare of the vice squad, and it wasn’t meant to. But I…

From £1,599 Manufacturer Apple, apple.com/uk Processor 2.2GHz, 2.5GHz or 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 Memory 16GB Storage 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of flash storage We didn’t have to wait too long for Apple’s largest notebook to gain a Force Touch trackpad, and the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro is now being offered in 2.2GHz and 2.5GHz models (there’s a build-to-order 2.8GHz option, too). As you’d expect from the ‘big’ MacBook Pro, you get a stunning Retina display, which looks fantastic, and a Core i7 processor that delivers excellent performance when stacked up against the Retina 5K iMac. Unlike the recently-released 13-inch MacBook Pro, there’s no generational upgrade to the CPU. Here you get last year’s 22nm Haswell processors rather than the even more power-efficient 14nm Broadwell of the 13-inch version (although…

$349 (about £227) Manufacturer Nix Sensor, nixsensor.com Requires iPhone 4S or later, iPad third-generation or later, iPad mini or later Includes Ribbon USB cable, microfibre carrying pouch Weight 43g If you wanted to figure out what colour a pixel in an image is, you could use the eyedropper tool in Photoshop to grab its recipe. But if you wanted to figure out what precise colour something is in real life, you had no such luxury. Until now. Ish. In theory. This peculiar, enigmatic, vaguely diamond-shaped device, about the size of a disappointingly small cupcake, connects wirelessly to an iPhone and when you press it against a colour, it reads it and sends it to your device – defining its RGB, CMYK, hex and CIELab values. You can save it, compare…

£34.95 (£17.50 upgrade) Developer MacPaw, macpaw.com Requires OS X 10.8 or higher The third iteration of MacPaw’s Mac cleaner is here and includes several much-needed improvements and new features. There’s a new menu bar icon to offer convenient access to the main program, as well as a quick summary of drive space, memory and Trash. The main interface also gains an optional dashboard view with a detailed breakdown of key stats. The program includes six cleaning tools and five utilities – four of which are new to version 3 (Mail Attachments, iTunes Junk, Maintenance and Privacy). There’s little ground-breaking here, although we like the new Maintenance tool’s promise to fix application errors and optimise your disk and search index. One criticism of past versions is the fact it’s too easy…

£14.99 Developer Red Barrels, redbarrelsgames.com Requires OS X 10.9 or higher, 2.2GHz dual-core CPU, see site for graphics cards It’s a setting we’ve seen before: abandoned psychiatric institution; shady company performing medical experiments; humanoid monstrosities. This firstperson survival horror game seems like a paint-by-numbers scarefest at first glance, but it goes much deeper. Outlast does a great job of setting the spooky tone right from the start. Arriving at the asylum to investigate a charity gone wrong, journalist Miles Upshur is determined to break the story. Outlast gives the everyman protagonist a realistic ability to fight (read: none). Miles can’t attack or defend, and there are no convenient weapons strewn about. All he has to rely on are his camera and notebook. Miles’ trusty camcorder is used to take notes…

£4.99 Developer Psychose Interactive, forgottenmemoriesthegame.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.0.2 The scariest thing about any iPad horror game is knowing you might only be one jump-scare away from an expensive accident. Forgotten Memories has a fair few other tricks up its sleeve too though, borrowing from classic horror games (particularly Silent Hill) for a great looking, though occasionally frustrating, journey into a creepy asylum. The light from your torch casts spooky shadows on the wall. Posed mannequins add a grim touch. And yes, there are monsters in the dark. Of course there are. As with the games it borrows from, this is often where things go wrong – a mix of sluggish and fiddly touch controls that would rather be on a console controller and a bizarrely…

79p Developer Timothy Hise, micdapp.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.1 One lessermentioned use for an iPhone or other iOS device is as a voice recorder. And while the fidelity is never going to be as good as a dedicated pocket recording device, you always have your phone with you. Mic’d is a simple app that uses the microphone on your device (or indeed any other connected mic) to capture audio. It can be set to start recording on launch, and to split recordings into five, 15 or 30 minute chunks. Recordings can be played back, renamed, shared to social media or exported to an email or message. There’s support for Apple Watch too, though it’ll trigger recording or playback, rather than record on the phone. There’s no…

SPQTLIGHT The Apple kit we’re most excited about The Mac Pro was last updated at the end of 2013 – and what an update it was! It shrank from a bulky – and heavy – tower design to a compact form that you can lift with one hand. Its design is stunning and it’s a hugely powerful computer. But if your interests are in the realm of high-end video – we’re talking 4K film here – then it’s worth getting a few more months out of your current Mac and waiting for a refreshed model. Mac Pro Eschewing the traditional tower design of high-end workstations, the Mac Pro is just one eighth of the previous model’s size – standing just 9.9 inches tall – but it packs a lot of…