Indholdsfortegnelse for 1 May 2015 i MacLife

THOUGH APPLE HAS historically paid little mind to the complex and often murky world of politics, these day it’s getting more involved. Because the laws and regulations passed in D.C. can have a direct impact on Apple’s bottom line and the manner in which it does business, its lobbying activities are increasing. Lobbying, in its simplest sense, is when an organization attempts to influence the decisions of lawmakers or regulatory agencies. This can be achieved most readily by making financial contributions to help political candidates who hold similar points of view be elected to higher positions of power, but also by convincing lawmakers and other influential power players to take certain interests into special consideration. In 2014 alone, Apple spent approximately $4.1 million on lobbying-related activities – a marked increase…

BESIEGE $6.99 This is good. You need to destroy a building or take out some people in each level of this physics arcade puzzler, and you build a custom (medieval-style) vehicle to do it. A catapult with explosive ammo? Why not. Flying buzzsaw of doom? Okay then. It’s ludicrous fun, but fiddly to control and lacking in tutorials currently. We still love it. VERSION TESTED: 0.02 ARMELLO $24.99 Aiming to mix the best of strategy board games and computer games, Armello pits you against other players to become the new king of a small land. It’s charming (with everyone playing sweet animals), but surprisingly dense, and we found it quite confusing. There’s a lot of depth to explore, though, and some clever systems. VERSION TESTED: 0.3.0P2…

EVERY YEAR, when Apple unveils its newest iPhone, it demos a cutting edge game with breathtaking 3D graphics. There’s no question that Apple devices can now compete with a console in terms of visuals. There’s just one problem. You can’t make those cutting edge games with any of Apple’s dev tools. Infinity Blade wasn’t made with Xcode, it was made with Unreal using Windows PCs. At last year’s WWDC, Vainglory was actually made in a custom engine called E.V.I.L. In fact, many dev teams have to build their own 3D engine to ship games with console quality graphics on iOS. For developers like myself who want to make games that take advantage of advanced Apple hardware, we don’t just pay Apple its 30% – we’re also forced to give Epic…

1 BIG HERO 6 Ryan Potter, Jamie Chung, Scott Adsit $19.99 HD Disney’s latest big animation mixes the adventure of The Incredibles with the heart of WALL•E. It starts with teenaged genius Hiro, whose brother dies in a tragedy, but leaves him with an advanced robotic nurse, Baymax, to take care of him. Soon, the pair must team up with his brother’s friends to fight a mysterious supervillain in the cool East/West mashup city of San Fransokyo. There’s lots of great action and comedy for everyone, and the theme of invention and creation is pretty inspiring for kids. It’s a great adventure, but one that does a few things differently, while still making its more generic elements feel solid. 2 THEN CAME THE MORNING The Lone Bellow $9.99 Who wants…

HAD THE LATEST versions of Apple’s operating systems been given a theme tune, it would surely be Jack Johnson’s “Better Together.” While each can do a great deal in its own right, it’s what they can now do as a team that sets Yosemite and iOS 8 apart from their predecessors. Perhaps the most impressive of these features fall under the umbrella of Continuity, so we’ve given them their own section on page 30. Here, we’ll look at some other ways in which iOS and OS X can work together. OS X Server For a decade or so, Apple’s Xserve, running OS X Server, was the platform of choice for many system administrators. Now Xserve is gone, but OS X Server remains a powerful and flexible tool for running a…

GREEN 4TB $150 Manufacturer Western Digital Technology Hard disk Size 3.5-inch Connection SATA III Spindle speed 5,400rpm If your aim is to add lots of storage capacity to your desktop Mac, you may as well go all-in with a 4TB drive, and this model from Western Digital is terrific value. As part of its Green range, it’s designed for quiet, low-power operation, so may not be suited as a main boot drive, but as part of a Fusion Drive setup it’s fine. TRAVELSTAR 7K1000 1TB $70 Manufacturer HGST Technology Hard disk Size 2.5-inch Connection SATA III Spindle speed 7,200rpm Online backup service Backblaze publishes reliability figures for the many kinds of hard drive it uses, and drives from HGST (formerly Hitachi) consistently proved the most reliable. Take that as you…

When Apple launched WatchKit, the set of tools allowing developers to make apps for Watch, a number of limitations became apparent. The most obvious is that, for now, you’ll need an iPhone to use many of the features of Apple Watch. All the code used to build apps is stored and executed on the iPhone and the results passed to the Watch. When you interact with Watch, the details are passed back to the iPhone, the relevant code executed, and the results sent to back to Watch. Also, to download apps to Watch, you’ll have to download them on your iPhone and then “send” them over to Watch. Although not confirmed at the time of writing, a beta version of iOS 8.2 contains a companion app, allowing Watch’s settings to…

Free ($2.99 IAP) Developer Bergen Co, usedarkroom.com Platform iPhone, iPod touch Requirements iOS 8 or later We love “create your own filter” apps for giving you a way to add individuality to the barely navigable torrents of photos uploaded to social networks each day. Darkroom lets you create filters through a combination of sliders for things like saturation and contrast, but also levels curves, with red, green and blue all available individually. (Accessing this ability is the app’s IAP, incidentally, and you really need to pay if you’re going to get anything unique out of it.) In theory, this is great – combining this level of control with other, simpler tools makes for a vast range of options. In practice, it’s merely good. The levels adjustments aren’t as fine-grained as…

$1.99 Developer Leandro Luizari, fingerkeyapp.com Platform iPhone Requirements iPhone 5S or higher for Touch ID, iOS 8 or later Unlocking a Mac with an iPhone isn’t new – we use Knock (as in, knock twice on your device to unlock) on a daily basis and it’s saved us countless login keystrokes. FingerKey performs a similar trick using Touch ID, but with one big caveat… FingerKey pairs with a companion Menu bar app on compatible Macs (those that support Bluetooth 4), which allowed our iPhone 6 Plus to unlock a slumbering MacBook Pro at the touch of a Home button. Unfortunately, the iOS app has to be launched before doing so, which negates much of its utility. To be fair, this is an Apple security limitation and the developer includes a Notification…

$2.99 Developer Rival Games, rival-games.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 6 or later, iPhone 4S or later, iPad 2 or later Take every cop show or film you’ve ever seen, throw it in a blender, and what you’ll pour out will inevitably be bit of a mess. The Detail isn’t a bad game, it’s just one that doesn’t know what it wants to be. You get a noir opening straight out of Sin City, a main game far more like a police procedural where occasionally people say rude words, and an art style that goes from dark and effective to looking like (but being less gritty than) the cartoon Archer. You know that serious drama has left the building when two cops are raiding the house paedophile with an unconscious girl…

$180 (250GB) / $300 (500GB) / $600 (1TB) Manufacturer Samsung, samsung.com Ports 1x USB 3.0 Dimensions 2.8 x 0.36 x 2.09in Weight 0.9oz Samsung’s T1 surprised us with a design that’s not just small and light but which also looks and feels good. Its curved edges make it comfortable in the pocket, too. Samsung says the T1 can reach up to 450MB/s, but we measured its peak sequential read speed at 438.8MB/s – only 1.3MB/s slower than the impressive Angelbird SSD2go. However, while the T1’s 366.5MB/s mean speed is comparable to many similar drives, it lags 73.4MB/s behind the SSD2go. When writing sequentially, the T1 peaked at 394.4MB/s – 9MB/s faster than the SSD2go – though its average trails behind on 330.8MB/s, which is 48.5MB/s slower. The T1 excels, though,…

$49.99 Manufacturer Algoriddim, algoriddim.com Requirements OS X 10.9 or later, 64-bit processor On paper, djay feels like a slightly incongruous candidate for promotion from iOS to Mac. The joy of djay (or indeed djay2) on iOS is being able to spin virtual vinyl on a pair of pretend decks; so if you can’t make like Terminator X (kids, ask your parents) by scratching on a touchscreen, what’s the point? Thankfully, what djay Pro lacks in tactile (if gimmicky) fun, it makes up for by doing everything it can to help you seamlessly mix tunes together and make them sound great. It hasn’t ditched the virtual decks; they’re still there and you can interact with them just as you did on the iPad, but it just doesn’t feel quite as natural…

HOW TO DO ANYTHING ON YOUR MAC, iPHONE & iPAD REQUIRES > OS X 10.6.3 or later, Media Browser Server for Mac LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 25 minutes ONE OF THE BEST ways to share your media – films, TV shows, photos and music – is by setting up a dedicated media server, which can be accessed by other devices both inside and outside your home. The obvious solution is iTunes, but that restricts you to using Apple-friendly devices. Another option is Plex, but its best features are hidden behind a paid subscription. But there’s a third option: Media Browser, now on Mac. Media Browser is similar to Plex: it lets you set up separate libraries for different media files, including TV, films, music, and more. You…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.7.5 or later, optionally iPhone, iPad or iPod touch LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > At least 15 minutes IT’S EASY TO make iTunes more personal. You don’t actually need to build playlists by hand either, or even specify criteria for tracks you want to hear by creating a Smart Playlist. Instead, you can pick a single track or genre from your library and tell iTunes to generate a playlist or a continuous mix based on that one piece of information alone. If you’re playing DJ at a party, you’ll definitely want to master the Up Next feature, which enables you to put songs in a queue and make adjustments to the order of playback on the fly. iTunes takes up a lot of space…

BACK BEFORE IPADS, iPhones, or iPods, who would’ve thought the Mac maker would one day become the most highly valued company in U.S. history? Apple recently blew by the old record, and with a $775 billion dollar market cap, it isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. The incredible momentum can’t last forever, though, and as cynics will say, once you reach the top, the only way to go is down. How far down is the question. So how can Tim Cook and co keep things rolling in the right direction? Here is my entirely unsolicited advice. Tip 1: Don’t lose that chip on your shoulder. At its best, Apple embodies Steve Jobs’s burning passion to prove the rest of the world wrong. That rebellious attitude led Apple to its…

APPLE HAS ALWAYS striven to make the iPhone’s screen totally tough and scratch-resistant, since it’s something that’s always likely to hit keys or coins in your pocket, or even be dropped. Corning’s Gorilla Glass has been Apple’s screen cover of choice since the iPhone launched, and it has improved over the years. But the holy grail of tough glass has always been sapphire, due to its extreme hardness. It’s almost as hard to scratch as diamond, which is why Apple uses it for the camera lens on the iPhone – as well as on the Touch ID sensor (which also uses an image sensor). After all, you don’t want marks on the lens ruining your photos. For a long time, it’s been rumored that Apple is planning to use sapphire…

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM in mobile apps is that people want them to be simple. Add too many options or buttons, and the resulting complexity could alienate users and ruin the whole experience. In fact, a number of apps like Facebook and Foursquare have recently been splitting out key features into separate apps. So why are messaging apps, one of the fastest growing categories right now, adding everything from cash exchanges to taxi services? As it turns out, people really enjoy talking and sharing things with each other. Powerful smartphones enable sharing so much more than simple text, and users have taken to them by storm. Facebook Messenger has over 500 million, WhatsApp has 700 million, Line 580 million – the list goes on. Last year, Apple said it handled over…

1 AIRDROP If Your Mac is running OS X Yosemite and you have an iOS device running iOS 8, you can share files between them using AirDrop. To access AirDrop from an iPhone or iPad, open the document you want to share and tap the Share icon. At the top of the list you’ll see nearby devices that are available to receive via AirDrop. Tap the one you want. On a Mac, switch to the Finder and choose Go > AirDrop, and then drag and drop a file onto the icon of a nearby device. 2 iCLOUD If you use Pages, Numbers, or Keynote on an iOS device, your documents are stored in iCloud. You can access those documents on a Mac running Yosemite by clicking on iCloud Drive in…

HomeKit is a group of developer APIs (application programming interfaces) used in creating apps, which hooks into third-party hardware to allow you to monitor and control some of what happens in your home. So, for example, if you have a smoke or carbon monoxide detector that’s connected to your home Wi-Fi network, you can monitor it from your iPhone. Or you could have an app that controls a thermostat connected to your network, or which turns lights on or off, or monitors energy consumption. Apple only approved third-party HomeKit hardware at the end of last year, but already companies including Elgato and iHome have announced products for release this year – see page 16 for more.…

PEOPLE WHO HAVE never upgraded a computer before tend to wonder which component is most important to upgrade in order to boost performance. Is it the CPU? (Not that that’s replaceable in most modern Macs.) The graphics card? The hard disk? Well, if there’s any sort of “magic bullet” when it comes to upgrading, it’s to increase the amount of RAM – or, as normal people call it, memory – in your Mac. There are diminishing returns, of course, but it’s by far the cheapest and most effective way to boost older machines in particular. It’s especially important to give your Mac enough RAM if you’re asking it to run and switch between many apps at once. But what is “enough?” These days, a rule of thumb is that 4GB…

> THE DIGITAL CROWN Pressing the digital crown on the side of Watch displays its Home screen, much like an iPhone’s Home button. Rotating the crown zooms in and out on what you’re viewing – the pinchto-zoom replacement. > MAKING CALLS Watch has a speaker and a microphone, so if you’ve always fancied yourself as Dick Tracy, you can now make and receive phone calls from your wrist. Whether anyone will actually use it that way remains to be seen. > BENEATH THE CROWN Pressing the big button below the crown calls up icons of the people you communicate with most often. From there you can send a text message or drawing, or tap out a signal which they’ll receive as a vibration. > INSTALLING APPS Apps are loaded onto…

$15.99 Developer Rahul Dewan, duetdisplay.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7 or later THIS MONTH’S MOST INTERESTING iPHONE & iPAD APPS A laptop is great for portability, but the convenience of a secondary screen can be handy while mobile, either for monitoring something like your email at a busy time, or for extra tools, such as productivity or creative apps. This is where Duet Display comes in, letting you use an iPad as a wired extra monitor. The requirements are simple: any Mac that can run OS X 10.9 or higher, and any iOS device that can run iOS 7 or higher. Grab the free Duet Mac utility from duetdisplay.com, and install that on your Mac, get the app on your iPad, launch both and you’re ready to go. One of…

$0.99 Developer Apptitude ApS, squigglyapp.com Platform iPhone, iPod touch Requirements iOS 8 or later Emoji is great for expressing your feelings without words, but why not say it in a more personal doodle instead? This is an alternative iOS keyboard allows iPhone owners to sketch simple drawings and animated GIFs inside any app. After switching to this keyboard, the lower third of the screen turns into a small sketchpad where artistes can squiggle graphics in a handful of colors and stroke widths. (A text keyboard is also included.) Once completed, tapping the green checkmark clears the canvas and copies your latest little masterpiece to the clipboard, ready to be pasted into a new missive. Animation controls allow users to add/remove frames and preview motion, although the keyboard crashes back to…

$1.99 Developer Built By Snowman, builtbysnowman.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7 or later “Adventure” is a strong word for a snowboard-based endless runner, but there’s no doubt that this is lots of fun, and incredibly pretty to look at. Alto races down a slope, and you can tap to make him jump or hold your finger down to backflip while jumping. Pull a backflip off and you get a score multiplier and a speed boost. Fail and your run is over. There are also lines of bunting that you can grind (physics be damned) as a trick, which can be combined into larger multipliers with the flips. And, throughout it all, you need to jump over rocks and chasms. The variety here is added by the tricks, and by unlockable…

$199 ($99 for Amazon Prime subscribers) Manufacturer Amazon, amazon.com Connections Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Dimensions 9.25x3.27x3.27 in For detailed definitions of every score on Mac|Life’s ratings scale, go to maclife.com/ratings. The main attraction of this wireless Bluetooth speaker from Amazon is its alwayslistening, always-connected AI, Alexa. It can understand everything from music requests to basic trivia, and can give you a morning news briefing and even add items to your to-do lists (found in the accompanying Echo app). Obviously, this means the speaker needs to be plugged in and connected to Wi-Fi at all times. On top of the canister are two buttons, mute and listen, while the top ring rotates to control volume. The Echo also comes with a traditional remote, or you can control it from your phone with the…

$3.99 Developer Danilo Torrisi, danilo.to/command-c Requirements Mac OS 10.8, iOS 7, Wi-Fi connection This handy program from Danilo Torrisi extends the idea of copy and paste so that you can swap information between multiple Macs and iOS devices. The Mac version of Command-C is free to download from the Mac App Store, but the iOS version costs $3.99. The Mac version adds a little pull-down menu to the main menu bar at the top of your screen, while the iOS version appears like any other app on your Home screen. When you run Command-C it automatically detects all the Macs and iOS devices on your Wi-Fi network, and you can then link devices simply by tapping their name on the list. Any text that you copy on one device can…

$220 Manufacturer Toshiba, toshiba.com Capacity 1TB Connectivity USB 3.0, Wi-Fi, SD card Dimensions 4.78x3.39x0.96 in Weight 0.6lb Toshiba is a tad late jumping on the bandwagon for wireless hard drives, but its new AeroCast works well and provides a healthy 1TB of storage at a competitive price. The AeroCast looks like a fairly conventional hard drive, with a USB 3.0 interface. It’s supplied in Windows NTFS format but you can easily reformat it for use with a Mac. Toshiba also includes an NTFS utility for the Mac so you can use the drive with both Macs and PCs, and there’s a slot for SD memory cards as well. The AeroCast also includes Wi-Fi for connecting to your iPhone or iPad, along with a rechargeable battery that provides about five hours…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.7 or later, Liquid 6.1 or Liquid Legacy 6.1, internet connection LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 15 minutes LIQUID IS AN app that’s all about workflow efficiency. It’s designed to rapidly supply you with relevant information based on a particular text string – be that search engine results (web pages, images or maps), Amazon listings, YouTube videos, local information found via Spotlight, online reference (Wikipedia, IMDB, Wolfram Alpha and so on) and conversions. It also enables you to perform complex copy actions on selected text (such as extracting sentences that include specific terms) and, in the paid version, translation between different languages. As of OS X Yosemite, Spotlight can do some of these things ably, but it has its drawbacks. It’s relatively slow and…

REQUIRES > iPhone, iOS 8, an Apple ID, at least one Contact with an iOS device or a Mac LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > A few minutes THE MESSAGES APP is the most common place to send text and multimedia messages, and it’s also packed with advanced features for managing conversations. Many of these features are tied into Apple’s iMessage system, so won’t work with SMS-only contacts. An iMessage is a type of message that can be sent only between Apple devices, whether they be iPhones, iPads, iPod touches, or Macs – as long as they’re online. Messages saves you resorting to a social network such as Facebook to arrange meeting up with a number of people. That’s because iMessage allows everyone who has an Apple device to…

Apple promotes the changes in Yosemite like they are great… It changed the system font (not needed); it changed the Dock from 3D to a flat 2D look (not needed); it altered the appearance of Safari (not needed); it made Spotlight search results show in the middle of the screen (not needed). This list goes on. More than half the user comments are negative, citing crashes, freezing, etc. The bad reviews are enough to keep me from updating. What Apple should do with its billions of dollars is correct all the mistakes in Yosemite, show it to some users before releasing it, and admit it made some terrible mistakes. I used to think Apple could do no wrong, but now I wonder if it can do the right thing. Yosemite…

CONTINUITY IS Apple’s name for a suite of services which enable Macs running Yosemite and iOS devices running iOS 8 to work more closely together. It incorporates AirDrop, the ability to make and receive phone calls on a Mac or an iPad, the ability to send and receive text messages on a Mac or an iPad, and a feature called Handoff. Handoff enables you to, say, start working on a document on a Mac and then continue seamlessly on an iPad or iPhone without ever having to close or save it or think about how to switch to another device to carry on. There’s a step-by-step guide on how to use Handoff below, but the basics are straightforward, if a little lengthy to explain. You need a Handoff-compatible app, which…

AS YOUR MAC gets well past that “brand new” stage into older age, it might feel a bit more sluggish than it did when you took it out of the box. There’s also the chance that it might struggle to run the most recent operating systems and software, too, if it’s getting on a bit. Happily, those older machines are often actually the easiest and most rewarding to upgrade, though new ones can be boosted in unexpected ways as well. But what upgrades should you get to give your new Mac a fresh lease of life? Where can you spend your money to get the best return on your investment? And isn’t this sort of thing difficult with Apple hardware? Don’t worry; as always, Mac|Life is here to help! Over…

16GB RAM FOR AN IMAC (27-inch, Late 2012) $132 Manufacturer Crucial Specifications DDR3 PC3-12800 unbuffered non-ECC 1.35V SO-DIMM If you bought a 27-inch iMac a couple of years ago, it would have come with 8GB RAM – a decent amount to run OS X and several mid-complex apps back then. Happily, you can now double it for very comfortable running, or max it out to a very comfortable 32GB by getting two kits for $264 – a solid investment for creatives. 16GB RAM FOR A MACBOOK PRO (Mid 2012) $125 Manufacturer Crucial Specifications DDR3 PC3-12800 unbuffered non-ECC SO-DIMM The RAM in the Retina MacBook Pros or MacBook Airs can’t be upgraded, but if you have an earlier MacBook Pro whose age might be making it feel a bit sluggish, good…

THE PRE-2013 Mac Pro – and the Power Mac G5 that shared the same basic design – was Apple’s most traditionally upgradable Mac, and the easiest thing to upgrade is the hard disk. Your boot drive – the drive that came in the Mac Pro when you bought it – takes up one slot, but there are three empty bays just waiting for more disks. Install one and once you start up the Mac again, it’s likely to be that you’ll be prompted to initialize the disk. Even if it mounts successfully, it’s worth loading Disk Utility to check what format and partition map it’s using. If it’s anything other than a GUID partition (for Intel Macs) with a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format, you should repartition and/or reformat, since…

$4.99 Developer Creaceed SPRL, creaceed.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8.1 or later The camera is one of the iPhone’s most used features, so any app that promises to improve its already strong output is sure to attract attention. Hydra is interesting because, as well as offering HDR modes to increase highlight and shadow detail in stills and video, it promises to boost image size to up to 32 megapixels – four times the 8 megapixels of the iPhone 6. There’s also a Zoom mode for capturing distant subjects without reducing image size, and a Lo-Light mode designed to reduce the amount of image noise. Just like the iPhone’s standard Camera app, Hydra is very easy to use. The shooting mode is selected by swiping between the options arranged along the…

$4.99 Developer Snowman Inc, builtbysnowman.com Platform iPhone, iPod touch Requirements iOS 8 or later Unless you’re on a regular nine-to-five work schedule, juggling ever-changing work shifts can be a pain. There is, of course, an app solution for taming this time-consuming beast, though, which makes your schedule easy to follow. Shifts is specifically designed for people who need to manage non-standard schedules, such as medical professionals or factory workers who don’t punch the clock on a traditional Monday through Friday routine. After creating one or more shifts – each with a unique name, icon, and color – adding them to a monthly calendar can be done in just a few taps. For hourly workers, Shifts can also use this data to offer a glimpse at your monthly earnings, which is…

$1.99 Developer GlobZ, globz.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 6 or later You are a (pretty adorable) vampire. You want to get to your new castle for a nice undead rest, but the path to it is blocked by priests, villagers and other rude opposition who’ll kill you if they catch sight of you in their torchlight. The core of this single-screen puzzle strategy game, then, is to get to the coffin in each level alive. Or unalive, or whatever. To succeed, you’ll need to figure out the unique ways each enemy type moves, so that as you painstakingly move one space at a time, you stay out of their vision. Which is hard, right from the start. Special abilities help, but they cost your health, which is partially replenished by…

$99.99 Developer Topaz, topazlabs.com Requirements OS X 10.8 or later, 64-bit processor, GPU acceleration Ever wanted to turn your photos into natural-media style works of art? This app makes it easy. Fire it up and you’re presented with a box asking you to select a photo to work with, which you simply drag into the boxed area – yes, it’s that easy. The interface is pretty well laid out and all rather uncluttered, with the photo you’ve selected shown in the largest window on the left. On the right you’ll find a series of boxes with different visual representations of the various default paint effects from pastiche and charcoal to Dali and Turner. You can then simply click these effects to attribute them to your photographic masterpiece – the software…

$399 Manufacturer Bang & Olufsen, bang-olufsen.com Dimensions 1.7x5.6x40.1 in Weight 2.4lb Connections Bluetooth 4, aux-in This is a really expensive portable Bluetooth speaker. There’s no getting around that – four hundred dollars is a lot to spend on something that probably isn’t even your main sound system. But this isn’t like pay-over-the-odds vanity headphones. The BeoPlay A2’s price might raise your eyebrows (right off your head, admittedly), but it sounds just phenomenal for its size. Despite being less than two inches thick, it’s perfectly capable of filling a room with truly enjoyable music. There’s a speaker on both of its large, flat sides, meaning that its designed to blast out its audio in all directions, giving a lovely open sound. Stick it in the centre of a group when you’re…

From $60 Manufacturer Leef, leefco.com Sizes 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB This flash drive has a USB plug to connect to your Mac, and a Lightning plug for connecting to your iPhone. Genius! On iOS, a companion app can back up your Camera Roll to it, and you can browse content copied from your Mac. USB transfer speeds aren’t that impressive – it takes about a minute per gigabyte. Though the drive sticks out from your iOS device, its curved rubber body sits neatly and feels comfortable beneath your fingers. The app smartly detects metadata such as artist and album to sort audio files, but the lack of a search feature makes it a bit of work to find things if they aren’t perfectly organized. Built-in camera access is rudimentary,…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.6.8 or later, Photos Duplicate Cleaner or Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 45 minutes JUST HOW MUCH space on your hard drives is taken up by duplicated photos? Thanks to two free programs – Duplicate Photos Cleaner and Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto – you can easily go through a selected drive, folder or iPhoto library and weed out unnecessary copies, potentially freeing up many gigabytes of drive space. Both apps are available through the App Store and work in a similar way. The only real difference is how you select what to scan; the step-by-step guide opposite reveals what to do with Duplicate Photos Cleaner, while Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto will first ask you to launch iPhoto, then select your…