Innehållsförteckning för No. 224 från iCreate

What, you didn’t expect me to update my photo to tie in with the new-look iCreate, did you? This was never going to happen as, thanks to the endless lockdowns, I now resemble a dishevelled man from the hills, not unlike Michael Sheen in Staged which, mercifully, is a stark contrast to the fresh, clean and vibrant look we have applied to the magazine this month. We hope you like it. Beyond the polished new visuals are the same in-depth how-to guides for mastering your Apple devices that this magazine is renowned for, including one that is very close to home for me. It turns out that a 21.5-inch, late 2015 iMac that you can’t upgrade doesn’t combine well with macOS Big Sur. But on page 36, we show you…

Photos Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Thanks to iOS Photos’ comprehensive suite of tools you can fix a range of picture problems without needing to edit images on your Mac. You can improve composition by cropping, reveal missing detail in contrasting lighting scenarios and enhance colour – as soon as you’ve snapped a shot. You can also creatively grade your images or create striking mono conversions. You can share your edited work in seconds via social media and then carry on shooting on location. By shooting in Apple ProRAW format (available on the 12 Pro models) you can give the Photos app more colour and tonal information to work with. Step-by-step Take creative control of your camera 1 Common problems Here a finger is partially obscuring the lens. The…

Garage Band Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Getting musical timing tight is a big deal in music production. Often referred to as making music to a ‘grid’ or timeline, software makes it easy to perfectly match a strict tempo. Both a blessing or curse, timing tools like ‘quantisation’ can ensure every drum strike or chord strum hits right. GarageBand has historically used something called ‘Flex Time’ here. Flex applies to audio region waveforms, allowing the peaks or ‘transients’ to be moved using markers. This manual option is really useful and could yield a more organic timing edit. In this guide we look at how those markers work and also cover the Time Quantise option. Finding out flex How markers preside over perfect audio timing Enable Flex Flex is only…

Safari Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed No matter how fast computers become, the web always seems slow. Web pages are growing in size and complexity which can make them slow to appear. What can be done to speed up the web? Is it possible? Yes. A new, faster broadband internet connection will speed up the web, but what if you don’t want to switch providers or spend more? There are a few tweaks you can do to Safari to make the web faster and smoother. For example, cutting out the usual web clutter, pop-ups, ads and extensions makes a difference to the speed of the web. With just the content you want, like text and images, web pages load and display much faster. Step-by-step Performance tweaks for Safari browsing…

Preview Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed PDF documents come from many sources; if you scan documents using an iPhone for example, the scans are saved as PDFs. Instead of having lots of PDF scans, such as receipts, they could all be combined into one PDF to organise them and keep them together. If you see web articles you want to save, Safari can export them as PDF files and by saving them in Reader View, you don’t get the ads and web clutter. Related web articles can be combined into a PDF ebook you can read offline anywhere. Merging PDF files is a great way to collect content. It is easy to do and no special software is required. You can just use Finder or Preview. You can combine…

iOS 14 Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed The days when an iOS Home Screen was just a collection of individual app icons have long gone. At first, Apple allowed users to place apps in folders. Then it let us make use of widgets. Together, it means that you can better personalise your screens, and you can even create a whole new set of icons for your apps! Even if you don’t, you can produce amazing bespoke layouts and you needn’t stop with the first Home Screen. Why not design individual pages around a theme: one page for News, one for Productivity, etc? Or keep swiping left for the App Library where apps are organised by categories, just ripe for expanding upon. Step-by-step Add widgets to your Home Screen 1…

Thy Phone Developer In The Hand Difficulty Time needed Yes, these are Windows 10 screenshots in a magazine devoted to Apple devices but there’s a good reason. Not everyone owns a Mac and, even if you do, there may come a time when you’ll find yourself in front of Microsoft’s age-old operating system, and you may as well make the most of it. One way is to connect your iPhone to Windows and interact with the device from the desktop. You can do this using a new app called Thy Phone, created by Peter Freeman Foot. It brings some Mac functionality to Windows, notably the ability to make and receive hands-free calls on a PC or receive notifications without needing to look at the iPhone. Step-by-step Set up Thy Phone…

Discogs Developer Discogs Difficulty Time needed Whichever physical format of music is your passion, you can get super-nerdy by cataloguing your collection into the Discogs app, getting an overall value and then watching that value fluctuate in accordance to how common/rare your items are. But there is a knack to cataloguing quickly so that you don’t have to spend hours scrolling down through an artist’s entire discography to find a matching item. It’s easier for more recent releases and re-issues because you can simply scan the barcode. But for the older stuff, we’ll show you how to find it and add it to your personal collection in a matter of seconds. Step-by-step Build a collection in Discogs 1 Scan barcodes If your item has a barcode, tap on ‘Search’, then…

ShadowDraw: Learn How to Draw Developer Shadow Draw Inc Difficulty Time needed Many of us have pondered the idea of learning to draw and the process can seem daunting if you believe that you have little artistic talent. For some it just does not come naturally and a book or some drawing tools will not be enough. ShadowDraw, however, utilises the iPad and Apple Pencil in a way that will guide you through the process from start to finish. Every stroke can be mimicked and you may be surprised at how quickly you start to gain a natural appreciation for how simple lines can make up a complex sketch. It’s no different than using words to write a sentence. Once you know how to do it your potential can be…

Apple TV Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Not the only user of your Apple TV? Then you may want to consider restricting what others can do with the device. For starters, it’s a good idea to prevent children watching or listening to content aimed at adults. And if you pay the bills, then perhaps relieve yourself of financial stress by preventing other people from making in-app purchases. Here we look at how you can restrict content on your device and stop certain activities from being carried out without your say-so. We also examine the options available for gaming on Apple TV devices, most notably the additional restrictions introduced with tvOS 14. These were added to make gaming even safer, particularly so if this is something younger household members are…

“It can find colour where there was none and turn a mass of muddy colour into a vibrant patchwork” Price £115/$129 Requirements Intel Core i5 or higher • macOS 10.14 or later • 4GB RAM Learn more dxo.com Available from https://shop.dxo.com Noise cancelling In just a few clicks, you can remove digital noise and other lens defects Batch-process You can render batches of RAW files instantly before exporting… Air fix modules Corrections are applied based on the specific equipment used… iCreate Editor’s Choice ☆☆☆☆☆ HARNESSING EXCLUSIVE technologies developed over 20 years, DxO has come up with an app that enhances RAW photo files in ways we wouldn’t have believed had we not seen it with our own eyes. Using DeepPRIME, DxO’s own AI that has been trained by analysing millions…

David Crookes This issue, our iOS expert shows you how to create your perfect iPhone Home Screen, connect your iPhone to a Windows PC and record iOS videos with background music. Shaun McGill Our resident tech specialist shows you all of the key iOS and Mac apps you need to write a bestselling novel. From planning, writing, editing and publishing, he covers the lot. George Cairns Our creative genius shows you how to combine different clips of your beloved pets in iMovie and get creative with your cutting (without relying on transitions) in Final Cut.…

iMovie Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available Most of us have been filming our pets’ antics for years. As a result we’ll have clips that differ in size and quality. If you place an old iPhone’s small resolution (320 x 240) clip beside a (1080 x 1920) HD clip the smaller clip will be enlarged – exaggerating ugly compression artifacts. We’ll show you how to use Picture-in-Picture effects to stop the older footage from looking terrible. As our clips have been captured in different conditions we’ll give you tips to make them look more consistent in relation to colour and tone. We’ll present them using a Photo Album theme, a way to link a wide range of clips into an attractive package. Mix different sizes Combine low-res archive…

Logic Pro Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available Programming drums can be tricky at the best of times, but getting great-sounding fills is one of the hardest things to pull off. Trying to analyse what part of a drummer might be hitting what part of a kit at any particular point in time isn’t the easiest of tasks. Which is why this month’s Logic trick is designed to take the guesswork out of programming fills by using the Arpeggiator MIDI plugin to generate some random sequences, played by the drum sounds of your choosing, which can be captured to audio and inserted into your song. So if your tracks could do with an injection of random percussion genius, simply follow the steps outlined here. Have your fill(s) Meet…

A recent security report revealed that Mac threats increased 1,092% in 2020 and that amounts to an average of 1,847 threats every day. Don’t panic because that is a drop in the ocean compared to the number of threats on you-know-who’s operating system. The figures are not good, but they are small in comparison with threats elsewhere. However, there is even M1 Mac malware. Security threats are out in the wild and are active. Security cannot be ignored and it must be considered whenever you deal with email, text messages (via the iPhone), browse the web and download software. Make yourself aware of common threats and how they appear, and deal with them. It is actually quite easy to stay safe and there are features in macOS to help you.…

Anybuffer Developer Ameba Labs, LLC Difficulty Time needed Anybuffer is a place to store and organise text, lists, images, URLs, videos and more. In some ways it is similar to Apple Notes in Gallery view, but it has more features for organising the contents, filtering items and using them in work or personal projects. Think of it as a souped-up version of Notes. This free app is available on Mac and iPhone and here we use the Mac version because it has more features. To get the full feature set for the iPhone you must pay for the Pro upgrade, but anything you create on the Mac is synced to the iPhone, so set up advanced features on the Mac and access them on the iPhone for free. Step-by-step Organise…

Overcast Developer Overcast Radio Difficulty Time needed Apple is committed to increasing privacy and decreasing tracking through a range of measures. One of these is to clearly display which apps collect information about you and what they do with it in the App Store, so you can avoid the worst apps. What you may not be aware of is that podcasts can also track you. Apple’s Podcasts app shows no information about privacy or tracking, but Overcast for iPhone, a third-party podcast player, shows that podcasts have plenty of tracking capabilities. Overcast shows which podcasts track you the most, what information they collect and what they do with it. It is up to you whether to allow them. Podcast privacy See what info is collected Tracking services Here you can…

Camera Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Imagine watching Jaws without John Williams’ terrifying theme or Stranger Things without the synth-wave sound. It’s fair to say that both would significantly lose their impact so why not enhance your own videos with some background music of your own? As it stands, Apple won’t let you, but the good news is that the necessary bit of magic isn’t that difficult so long as you have iOS 14 installed and a relatively recent iPhone. The workaround is compatible with any music app or streaming service that allows audio to be played in the background and it takes advantage of the Quick Take video function baked into the Photo mode of the Camera app. Edit your videos in iOS Videos can be trimmed within…

Group Transcribe Developer Microsoft Corporation Difficulty Time needed Group Transcribe makes use of speech and language AI to not only work out who is talking but create transcriptions that follow the course of a meeting in real time – without participants having to press a button before they talk. Available to use without needing an account, transcripts are automatically saved, letting you view and share them. The app also lets participants speak in different languages, allowing everyone to follow along with quality translations. Since speaker attribution is based on the volume captured on each phone, it works best when everyone is using their own device. This may prove tricky because the app is iOS only. Step-by-step How to use Group Transcribe 1 Setting up When launching the Group Transcribe app…

Watch Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed When setting up a new Apple Watch the key is to get the basics right and explore extra features later. Concentrating on how you will wear it and how it will be used should enable you to complete the setup quickly and to get used to the daily experience. While it is true that the Apple Watch, in particular the Series 6, can do many things don’t try every feature for the sake of it initially. Go slowly and you’ll end up with a wrist-based assistant that genuinely will become a part of your day as you take advantage of cellular notifications, music, podcasts, payments and even navigation without the need for your iPhone. Your health tracked A new Apple Watch will monitor…

Key features Built-in XLR connector • Adjustable gain • +48V phantom power Learn more ikmultimedia.com Available from amazon.co.uk THE iRIG PRE 2 IS A POCKET-SIZED MIC PREAMP AND INTERFACE that lets creators, musicians and journalists, easily use XLR mics to record, perform and stream with an iPhone, iPad or DSLR camera. And this next-gen model delivers the same professional sound as IK’s earlier mic preamp, but with the addition of direct monitoring and auto-switching wiring for use with digital cameras. Stunning audio, whatever Whether you’re recording a podcast or a new album, shooting action sequences or interviews, the iRig Pre 2 is the easiest way to connect any type of XLR microphone to your iOS device, and the new auto-switching circuitry makes it adapt to work with the input on…

Download available Tutorial project files All the assets you’ll need to get creative with our projects. Look out for the above icon to see if there are downloads available. Exclusive video tutorials Discover how to get more out of your devices with a selection of iOS and macOS video guides from MacMost. Loads of other cool stuff! Customise your Mac with stunning wallpapers, grab some royalty-free fonts and watch more how-to guides. Log in to www.filesilo.co.uk/icreate Register to get instant access to this pack of must-have creative resources, how-to videos and tutorial assets Free for digital readers too! Read on your tablet, download on your computer The home of great downloads – exclusive to your favourite magazines from Future Publishing Secure and safe online access, from anywhere Free access for…

Apple prides itself on producing intuitive devices that anybody can pick up and use, young or old. The Mac has always been far more user-friendly than a Windows PC, and the touchscreen of Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices has become synonymous with speed and efficiency. But not all of the best features are on display at the top of the interface – sometimes you have to do a little digging around to uncover some of the cooler nuances, which brings us to the purpose of this feature. Over the following pages, we showcase some of the best ‘pro’ features of iOS and macOS that can enhance your productivity and help you tailor your device to better meet your needs. And although many of the tips we provide can be used…

Final Cut Pro Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available Modern video editing apps such as Final Cut Pro enable you to drag a transition into the timeline to wipe or mix between two separate clips. Transitions help link clips shot at different times and locations into a smoother flowing sequence. In the days before computer-based editing, video-makers had to copy footage from a player onto recorder. To create a mix or wipe transition they needed an extra video player plus a vision mixer. As an alternative to using transitions they had to be more creative with their cuts. Here we show you some creative shooting and editing techniques to link clips together without using transitions. Creative cuts Use J-cuts and whip pans Whip pan By panning quickly from…

Disk Utility Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Mac speed issues are usually resolved by stuffing in more memory, but what if you have reached the limit or own one of the late 2015 21.5-inch Retina 4K iMacs that cannot be upgraded? The solution could be to run your Mac from an external hard drive. We put this to the test on the above iMac and, running macOS Big Sur off a 2TB, USB 3.0 desktop hard drive (£89.95), noticed a considerable difference in speed with only fleeting glimpses of the spinning beachball. Here we show you how to set up your own external macOS hard drive so that you can try this out and see if it works for you. Step-by-step Set up your own macOS startup disk 1…

Mail Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Some services have gone paperless, but there are still a lot that rely on paper documents. When you need to send them to someone over the internet, such as by email, you need to scan them in and attach them to a message, which can be easy or awkward depending on your hardware and setup. The easy way to scan a document and attach it to an email is to use an iPhone and the Mail app can wake your phone, activate the camera in it and monitor the picture for rectangular shapes. It automatically snaps them, crops them, sends them to the Mac and they appear in the email. This is a fantastic feature and a real time-saver. Scanned and deliver Insert…

Podcasts Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Podcasts are a great source of entertainment and information. They can be listened to while you are doing something else, like travelling, gardening, in the gym or out for a run. However, a mis-configured Podcasts app has the potential to fill a large amount of storage space on the iPhone and smaller capacity devices could even run out of space completely thanks to hundreds of podcasts auto-downloading. It doesn’t take much to keep podcasts’ storage under control, and you can use the Podcasts app without using any storage at all. Here we take you through the settings you need to configure. Step-by-step Take control of Podcasts space usage 1 View subscribed shows Are podcast shows taking up too much storage? Open the app…

Shortcuts Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Collages are a great way to show off multiple photos and there are many apps for the iPhone that can do them for you, but one you may not have thought of is the iOS Shortcuts apps. To be fair, it is only a basic collage app and other apps have more features, but it is quick and easy to create and save photo grids that can be shared on social networks. Building the shortcut is not only useful, it teaches how Shortcuts actions can be used to construct complex modules that perform useful functions. Once you understand how Shortcuts work, you can build more time-saving mini-apps. It is the iOS equivalent of macOS Automator. Step-by-step Create simple photo grid collages 1 Start…

Nebo: Note-Taking & Annotation Developer MyScript Difficulty Time needed There is something extremely satisfying about writing your notes with an Apple Pencil on an iPad. It blurs the lines between traditional and modern in a way that few other products can apart from maybe the newer e-ink notepads. The input method is quick and efficient, and of course natural for most people, but the main disadvantage is that the notes are not natively searchable or able to be copied easily to other apps. There are, however, a variety of solutions that will work directly on the iPad to digitise your handwritten notes, and some of them are extremely quick and accurate. They highlight just how accessible and affordable the best software is today, and we will demonstrate how easy they…

Overcast Developer Overcast Radio Difficulty Time needed Overcast is considered to be the best app for listening to podcasts on your Apple Watch. The developers have overhauled the app so it’s easier to use and packed with more features. These include being able to skip chapters and alter the playback speed. Watch complications are also enhanced: the app now supports orange or blue icon colours and a new complication has been added for users of the Solar watch face which lets you tap the date to launch Overcast. Work has also gone into refining the backend of the app, too. Overcast now uses less cellular data and it will sync with its servers rather than communicate through your iPhone, increasing reliability. Yet this does come at a cost. The new…

FoodMarble £149/$169 foodmarble.com This digestive breath tester aims to take the guesswork out of diagnosing your digestive problems. It works by measuring the levels of hydrogen in your breath, which comes as a result of bacteria breaking down undigested matter in your large intestine and then moving it around your bloodstream to your lungs. By giving you instant results via an app on your phone, FoodMarble can help you identify possible trigger components in different foods. HoverBar Duo £79.99/$79.99 amazon.co.uk Designed for iPad (but also works with larger iPhones in landscape), the HoverBar Duo is an adjustable stand that frees up the user’s hands for cooking, music or any other creative pursuit that you use your iPad for. It can suspend your device in any position and at any angle…