Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2022 i MacLife

FULL INFO Dual panel views show separate directories in whatever view mode, also file path locations. VIEW FILES View hidden files and folders in any directory or hide them again with a simple flick of a switch. FUNCTION BUTTONS Common commands are mapped to Function buttons for quick and easy access. INTEGRATE SERVICES Many major cloud services such as Google Drive or Dropbox can be integrated for quick usage. COMMANDER ONE Free (Pro Pack $29.99) From mac.eltima.com Features Dual panel view, expanded file and folder info and management, powerful cloud integration The macOS Finder is the face of your Mac, the means by which you launch applications, manage files and folders, and you generally just use it every day. Since Apple gives you the same Finder regardless of whether you’re a beginner…

A PRIORITY PEOPLE Spark prioritizes email from real people and puts these at the top of your list. B NEXT LEVEL Newsletters and other more generic content go into their own list with lower priority. C PIN THREADS You can pin email threads to the top so they stay uppermost in your mind. D SNOOZE UPDATES It’s also possible to snooze email threads when you don’t want to keep getting updates. SPARK Free From sparkmailapp.com Features Pin or snooze email, intelligent sorting, advanced collaboration tools, natural language search Apple’s Mail app has changed little in recent years, lagging behind in its rivals in terms of features — although that’s expected to change to some extent with the launch of macOS Ventura in the fall. Until we see what that update brings,…

MICROSOFT OFFICE $69.99/year From microsoft.com Features Create documents, graphs, presentations and spreadsheets, OneDrive cloud storage, Teams for conferencing While Apple’s productivity apps — Keynote, Pages and Numbers — have improved a lot since their introduction, Microsoft rules the roost when it comes to this stuff. Word, PowerPoint and Excel are the worldwide standard for office use, even if Google Docs is making inroads too. By using Microsoft Office you’re more or less guaranteeing that your documents can be opened and edited by anyone you choose to send them to. Microsoft likes you to do everything via an account just like Apple does, so you’ll need to sign up and sign in with your Microsoft ID, though this does get you 1TB of OneDrive storage for your documents, as well as…

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Intel era >>> In June 2005, Steve Jobs told the faithful that hell had frozen over: Apple was moving to Intel processors. The PowerPC G5 was too hot and too hungry for laptops, and Apple felt the PowerPC was now a dead end. “We can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap,” Jobs said. Intel offered what the PowerPC couldn’t: chips running 3GHz and more that didn’t make Powerbooks hotter than the sun. ONE OF THE great years for Mac has to be 2001. The PowerBook G4 was made from 2001 to 2006 first in titanium (nicknamed the ‘TiBook’) and then in aluminum (nicknamed the ‘AlBook’). And it wasn’t just beautiful. It was high–powered…

$69.99 From us.anker.com Features Magnetic battery, kickstand, 5,000 mAh capacity Anker’s 622 Magnetic Battery is an ideal battery pack for charging your modern iPhone, as well as watching movies or checking emails on the move. Thanks to its built–in magnet, it snaps securely to all iPhone 12 or 13 models, and will even work with magnetic cases (but not conventional cases that interfere with the magnet’s strength). It will hold your iPhone in portrait or landscape mode, and a built in foldable kickstand allows you to easily stand it up on a table — it’s very secure. Thanks to its small size, you can keep it attached to your iPhone and place it in your pocket or take calls without it getting in the way. And thanks to the battery…

LOGITECH LIFT $69.99 logitech.com Features Ergonomic, vertical mouse, left–or right–handed options, four buttons with scrolling wheel Needs macOS 10.15 Ergonomic design Left–or right–handed models Fiddly software No rechargeable battery GREAT Logitech’s premium MX range already includes an ergonomic mouse called the MX Vertical, but its new Lift vertical mouse is designed to provide a more affordable option, costing $69.99 compared to $99.99 for the MX Vertical. And, unlike the MX Vertical, the Lift is available in both left–and right–handed versions, as well as in a variety of different colors. It’s smaller than the MX Vertical and, to be honest, our manly paws preferred the larger MX Vertical. Even so, the Lift is still very comfortable to use, with a soft rubber grip and ergonomic “vertical” design that reduces wrist strain…

Free (IAPs) From russell–archer.github.io Needs macOS 12.0 or later WRITERLY Lots of content Good exercise variety Needs non–character tasks Design could be better GREAT Many people dream of being a successful author, but how do you go from unpublished amateur to pro writer? Well, you can start by trying Writerly. It won’t make you a publishing sensation overnight, but it can teach you vital skills and then hone them. Writerly starts you off with simple daily exercises, from jotting down your thoughts, to chronicling every sound or sight you experience in detail for five minutes at a time. These exercises are a great way to warm up your writing muscles and get your brain into a creative space. Note that Writerly is not an “editor” app as there’s nowhere to…

THE MOST USEFUL features in Maps, and those that are used most often, are travel directions, whether you’re going on foot, driving, or using public transportation. So, for the next couple of pages, we’ll focus on those. It’s worth noting that not all features are available everywhere, though. And some are restricted to major cities, so do bear that in mind. Where all features are supported, the driving directions enable you to see filter lanes, cycle, bus and taxi lanes, median strips, and crossings. And public transportation features include highlighting key bus routes, notifying you when you are approaching your stop, and the option to “pin” your favorite railroads so they appear first in the list of direction options when you are near them. iOS 15 also made it easier…

REQUIRES macOS YOU WILL LEARN How to use Siri and Spotlight to find anything IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes GENIUS TIP Spotlight makes an excellent application launcher. Just press Cmd+[Space bar], start typing the name of the app and press Return when it finds it. WHEN IT COMES to finding things on your Mac or beyond, you have several options. If what you’re looking for is on the web, you could, of course, use a search engine in a web browser. If it’s on your Mac, you could use the search bar in a Finder window and even create a smart folder. However, there are a couple of tools you can use to combine local and web searches: Spotlight and Siri. Both Spotlight and Siri will take a search term…

YOU WILL LEARN About the many data–detecting sensors that are built into the iPhone MANY OF THE iPHONE’S SENSORS AND FUNCTIONS RELATE TO MOVEMENT KEY FACT Strictly speaking, GPS is a communication system, rather than a “sensor”. The iPhone has a GPS chip that receives location data from satellites orbiting the Earth and uses that data to calculate your position on the surface of the Earth. However, the GPS chip can work with other sensors, such as the iPhone’s accelerometer, to precisely track your movements while travelling. ONE OF THE great things about the iPhone is that it’s so versatile. Instead of being limited to just making phone calls and sending text messages, it can perform a wide range of different tasks and a run a dazzling variety of apps…

SIRI IS LIKE the Green Bay Packers of voice assistants. There’s no competition between it and the LA Rams (Alexa) and Buffalo Bills (Google Assistant) when it comes to performance, but no one inside the club (Apple) is going to admit to that, despite the fact that in both cases coming in third is the best we can expect. Meanwhile, fans are left to wonder why progress feels so slow overall, despite very occasional bursts of improvement. In iOS 15, we got a sumptuous–looking buffet of Siri updates, but they all had the same goal: making Siri’s existing functions work better. We got offline processing for certain commands and better contextual understanding, but without expanding the limits of what you can do with it. In fact, Apple removed a bunch…

LUMINAR NEO $89 From skylum.com Features AI–powered retouching, powerful object removal, apply “looks”, sky replacement Apple’s Photos has decent basic editing tools and the advantage that it is baked into macOS and iOS. Luminar Neo, on the other hand, features an incredible range of editing tools to help you improve your pictures, while remaining easy to use. You can create catalogs and then work on one image at a time. There are standard tools of course for editing exposure, contrast and color, but the really interesting stuff happens when you start to leverage Luminar’s brilliant AI capabilities. SUBJECT DETECTION IS REALLY POWERFUL AND LETS YOU DO THINGS LIKE EASILY CUT OUT OBJECTS It can analyze an image and detect elements like skies, and let you replace them with a couple…

FOR MANY OF us of a certain age, our first Mac was a laptop: a clamshell iBook. And, now, this article is being written on another Mac laptop, the M1 MacBook Pro. Those two laptops may be separated by 20 years, huge advances in technology and the many other mobile Macs we’ve owned and loved from ‘Snow’ iBooks and PowerBook G4s to MacBooks of every kind. But they’re both unmistakably Apple, designed to excite and delight us as well as to reliably perform. Apple’s first portable Mac was a bit of a disaster, and there have been a few more missteps along the way to today’s hardware heaven. But when it comes to laptops, Apple has had more hits than ABBA or Ed Sheeran. That’s because Apple consistently pushes the…

$59.99 From belkin.com Features Pop-up stand, MagSafe, 15W charging, 2m cable Belkin’s BoostCharge Pro Portable is a simple and useful portable charger for iPhones from the iPhone 12 onwards. It looks like an oversized Apple Watch charger, with a dome–shaped puck and a USB–C charging cable that at 2m long is ideal for travel or home charging, and which is twice the miserly 1m of Apple’s MagSafe Charger. As with Apple’s option you’ll need a charger plug to power it. What differentiates this charger from Apple’s one is the integrated metal stand, which feels solid and enables you to prop up your phone in portrait or landscape mode. The portrait angle is much shallower because of the location of your iPhone’s magnets, but that wasn’t a problem; in fact, we…

ON TEST... > LaCie Mobile Drive 2TB > SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD 2TB > Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB > Toshiba Canvio Flex 2TB > Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go Alu Slim 2TB > WD My Passport 2TB ARD DRIVES MIGHT be unfashionable right now, but for less than half the price of most equivalent external solid–state drives (SSDs) these products deliver two terabytes (TB) of versatile mobile storage. Whether you’re commuting your documents between home and office, out on the road with your MacBook Pro, or just need somewhere convenient to keep your backups safe, the portable hard drives in this test will do the job efficiently and at significantly lower cost. At best, hard drives are only about one third the speed of a basic USB–C SSD, so they’re…

Big companies and data brokers make fistfuls of money from selling your private data. Add to that the threat of nosy people combing through your unlocked devices, and there are plenty of reasons to keep your data private. If you’re sick of being tracked online, try these great security–conscious apps. One of the best places to start is with a VPN, or virtual private network. In essence, VPNs create a “tunnel” that encrypts your web browsing data, hiding your IP address and allowing you to browse as if you were from a different location. 1. EXPRESSVPN (free with in–app purchases from ExpressVPN, expressvpn.com) is one of the best out there. It’s super simple to use yet is packed with features, like a streaming service unblocker and protocol switcher. It also…

NOW THAT YOU know how to get and use directions in Maps using your iPhone, it’s time to dig deeper and see what else Maps has to offer. If step–by–step directions were all it was good for, there would be little point in having it on the Mac. Thankfully, there’s a great deal more to it than that. Curated guides are one such example. Compiled by the likes of Time Out, Culture Trip, and Lonely Planet, the guides offer insights into destinations with tips on where to eat, where to stay, and where to party. Once you’ve found a guide you like, you can add it to your favorites. And you can create your own guides with your own favorite places to go. In some towns and cities you can…

REQUIRES iPad, iPhone or iPod touch YOU WILL LEARN How Guided Access can limit your device to a single app IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes GENIUS TIP Guided Access limits your device to a single app. If you want more flexibility, use Screen Time to enable or limit multiple apps instead. THE THING ABOUT having personal devices such as iPads and iPhones is that you don’t necessarily want other people to access everything that’s on them. For example, you might want party guests to be able to cue up songs without getting into your other apps, or you might want to limit a child’s usage to a single child–friendly app, or you might want house guests to be able to use Safari without having a look at any of your…

REQUIRES iOS/iPadOS 14 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to use Apple Translate for easy communication IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes GENIUS TIP To add accessibility shortcuts to the menu, go to System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar > Accessibility Shortcuts and tick Show in Menu Bar. DID YOU PAY much attention to learning a language at school? Sure, we can tell a French person that the pen of their aunt is in the garden but for many of us that’s about it. So we’re very happy to have the Translate app on our iPhones when travelling; it knows the languages we don’t, enables us to communicate clearly and courteously with others. And even if you do know a bit of the language, the app can help fill the…

YOUR MAC COMES bundled with apps and tools to achieve all sorts of things from making music to conference calling and, while they’re great, there are plenty of alternatives on the market. But why, if you have Apple’s apps already, you may ask? As well as providing different ways to do things, third–party apps often go beyond the capabilities of your Mac’s built–in tools, giving you expanded control over your files and folders in the Finder for example, more powerful reminders and scheduling, or giving you access to more professional movie–making features. In fact, for every one of the Mac’s built–in tools there’s at least a couple of alternatives, sometimes free and sometimes paid for, but always offering a different take on the task at hand. You might find, for…

1 Import your footage Create a new project in Premiere Elements and click on the Add Media button at the top left. Then choose Files and Folders and navigate to your files. Click Import to bring the files into the media pool. 2 Assemble your clips Drag a clip to the Video 1 track and a second clip to the Video 2 track. You’ll find that if you line up their edges, Premiere will snap the clips together so they play seamlessly. Try the same with a third clip into the Video 1 track again. 3 Add a transition Try dragging the second clip over the point where the first one ends. With the second clip selected, go to Timeline > Apply Default Transition Along CTI > Video. Premiere will…

LOGIC PRO $199.99 From apple.com Features Bundled instruments, loops and effects, unlimited audio and MIDI tracks, Dolby Atmos mixing GarageBand is based on technology from Logic Pro, its industry–standard music–making bigger brother, and Logic can open GarageBand project files if you are stepping up to the bigger app. Made for Mac only, Logic Pro is heavily optimized for Macs, especially those boasting the latest Apple silicon, which is important when you start to run big projects. You get essentially unlimited audio and MIDI tracks — as many as your machine can handle — and a vast library of instruments, sounds, loops and effects available to download as part of your purchase. Once you get Logic Pro you have everything you need to start making music (or other audio projects) to…

ACK IN 1989, Apple introduced the Macintosh Portable. The LA Times wasn’t impressed: “It’s too big, too heavy and too expensive.” And it was, coming in at a whopping 16lbs. That’s heavier than five M1 MacBook Pros, while its $7,300 price tag then would buy you the equivalent of 13 M1 MacBook Pros today. But while the Macintosh Portable was more transportable than truly portable, it was the beginning of a new kind of computing. It had a sharp active matrix LCD screen, a hinge to fold it over the keyboard for easier transporting and a 40MB hard drive. The Macintosh Portable didn’t sell well — Apple predicted 50,000 sales in the first year but was well below its target after the first quarter; it cut the price by a…

1MORE PISTON BUDS PRO $69.99 1more.com Features USB–C charging case. Active noise cancelling (ANC), capacitive controls Needs Bluetooth, USB–C Great battery life Good for sports use Sonically just OK ANC could be better SOLID 1More’s Piston Buds Pro are inexpensive wireless earbuds that use Bluetooth 5.2 to connect to your iPhone, iPad or Mac. Pairing is as simple as removing them from their case, which places them into pairing mode. The battery case charges the buds when they are placed into it, and it charges over USB–C, though there’s no wireless charging. You’ll get a full case charge in two hours and a full buds charge in one hour, with playback from the buds of 7.5 hours with active noise cancelling (ANC) off and five with it on, and a…

Free (Penbook Premium $14.99, Penbook Premium Lifetime $49.99) From User.camp Made for iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch Needs iOS 14.0 or later Pairing an iPad with an Apple Pencil is something that’s often been thought of in terms of enabling artists to create art, which of course they do. Another, somewhat overlooked application for it is for creating a digital version of a notebook or sketchbook, the kind of thing that people use to jot down notes or sketch ideas. This is sort of possible in iPadOS’ Notes app of course, but only in a fairly basic form. Penbook takes this idea several steps further, aiming to combine the tactile feel of a real notebook with the smarts and convenience of modern technology. It’s worth mentioning at the outset that…

Free (IAPs) From readkit.app Needs macOS 12.0, iOS/iPadOS 15.0 READKIT 3.0 Supports lots of news services Smart, tidy interface Little help for beginners Limited free version GREAT There are lots of online news services now available, such as Apple News, which provides some news stories for free, as well as a subscription option that includes many additional newspapers and magazines. However, there’s another way to gather your own selection of news and articles, by using an app such as Balazs Varkonyi’s ReadKit. ReadKit supports the RSS format for newsfeeds that many websites use to send out updates and news stories. It’s also compatible with aggregator services like NewsBlur and Feedly, and bookmark services such as Pocket or Instapaper that let you save stories from your web browser and read them…

WHILE APPLE’S MAPS got off to a bit of a slow start, it’s now a rival to Google Maps and Google Earth. macOS Big Sur and iOS 15 bought big new additions, enabling you not just to get directions to places, but to research and plan trips ahead of time, as well as get live on–the–move navigation. The inclusion of travel guides from well–known publishers means you can fully immerse yourself in your intended destination long before you get there. And, if that destination happens to be one of a handful of major cities, you can even fly over it in Maps to get an even better feel for where you’re going. Many of the really impressive features in Maps on the iPhone rely on the A12 Bionic chip (or…

REQUIRES Spark (Free, upgrades available), macOS 10.13 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to use Spark to manage email IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of excellent email clients for the Mac, including Apple’s own Mail. However, while Mail and others, such as Spike, focus more on the social aspects of email, and the likes of Microsoft’s Outlook are heavily business focused, Spark is all about personal productivity. That doesn’t mean Spark doesn’t have lots to offer if you work as part of a team, thanks to features that enable you to collaborate on creating email messages and to share links to conversations. But it’s not geared towards office workers in large organisations. Spark also enables you to share email messages to other apps, like productivity tools such…

REQUIRES iOS 12 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to create an audio sleep timer that automatically turns itself off IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes GENIUS TIP To use a podcast, replace Play Music in step 4 with Play Podcast, then choose a show from the list. This will play the show’s latest episode. IF YOU STRUGGLE to get to sleep some nights, a relaxing podcast or chilled–out music playlist can do wonders for your ability to drift off. Yet the problem is that once you’re asleep, your device keeps playing, potentially wasting battery life if it’s not plugged in. And if your podcast gets to an exciting bit at 3am? You can be sure that’ll jolt you out of bed. The solution is to create a sleep timer. This…