Innehållsförteckning för No. 227 från iCreate

I hope you’ve all had the chance to watch Apple’s keynote from WWDC21. As usual, it didn’t disappoint, with big updates to Mac, Apple Watch and AirPods announced. But it was the iOS 15/iPadOS 15 announcement that really excited us. After a truly wretched 18 months, the new update for iPhone and iPad is very much the iOS for a COVID-ravaged world. Primarily, iOS 15 is designed to bring people back together. People who may still be wary of close physical contact, who will be able to benefit massively from the enhancements to FaceTime and the scope that SharePlay brings for listening to music or watching movies with your friends and family while isolating. And those who continue to work from home will also benefit from Focus, Apple’s new method…

Photos Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed The iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max enable you to shoot photos in a wide range of image formats – HEIF, JPG and AppleProRAW. But which format should you be using? If storage space is an issue then a 2 MB High Efficiency Image Format photo will take up 90% less space than a chunky 20 MB Apple Pro RAW snap! To share a shot on social media, then a 3 MB.JPG file is a good compromise as it has more information to work with than an HEIF file but it’s lighter than a ProRAW file. However if you need more quality and control in the edit stage then ProRAW enables you to use Photos to reveal missing colour and detail. Develop…

Garage Band Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Anyone familiar with 1980s pop music will know all about it. Things were going electronic with the advent of synthesisers, and there was very, very big hair. Haircuts may have changed since, but still you can hear the sounds and styles in today’s tunes. If you want to add that 80s vibe to your GarageBand songs, bass is key. Arpeggiated bass synth lines were a hallmark, and our favourite music-making app has them in abundance. In this guide, we’ll create one from scratch, using software instruments to make a simple line. Then, by using the arpeggiator plug-in, we can get that rapid-fire pulsing effect so synonymous with the era. Step-by-step Add an 80s bass synth 1 Retro Project We start with an…

Automator Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Apple’s Find My service is a shining example of how to track devices. Thanks to the huge network of iPhones, you can see the location of AirTags and other Apple devices in the Find My app. However, one missing feature is location history – you can see where AirTags and devices are right now, but you cannot tell where they have been. To work around this, you can save a screenshot of Find My showing where something is now, then later take another screenshot to see its new location. This way, the location is tracked in images. However, here we show you an Automator script that does it automatically. Take timed screenshots Anatomy of an Automator app Take a screenshot This Automator action…

Pages Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. When it comes to explaining numerical data, it’s probably worth more. A page full of figures, like sales by date or region, takes a lot of effort to analyse, but when those figures are displayed as a bar chart, you can see at a glance what they mean. The largest and smallest ups and downs over time can easily be seen in a chart. Inserting a chart into a Pages document like a report for work, school or university is easier than you might think. There are many different chart types available – here, we look at interactive charts. These provide controls that enable the data to be explored and shown in different ways. Interactive…

Find My Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed AirTags are hugely useful. We’ve used them to find lost car keys and wallets, and they give us peace of mind when placed within other valuable items ensuring they’ll be more easily found if they’re stolen. But there are concerns about their use, such as the potential for tracking people surreptitiously. Apple has thought about this. iOS devices are able to detect AirTags that have become separated from their owners, letting people know they’re carrying one that belongs to someone else. They’re also easily disabled and tapping them with a NFC-capable device such as an iPhone will reveal useful details. Here’s how it works. Stop stalkers in their tracks You can stop an AirTag from pinpointing your movements Remove the battery An…

Safari Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Listening to music on your iPhone, iPad or Mac is all well and good, but you’re not getting a surround sound experience. What if you could connect these devices to your other computers, phones and tablets too? That’s the premise of the BBC’s Pick A Part, only it goes beyond that. A production tool called Audio Orchestrator means sound files can be brought together and assigned to different devices, letting you isolate instruments. This uses music from the BBC Philharmonic orchestra. To use Audio Orchestrator for your own projects, request access at https://www. bbc.co.uk/makerbox/tools/audio-orchestrator. Explore ways to connect your devices The BBC’s tool provides a number of ways to hook up your phone, tablet or computer Copy the URL If you’ve set up…

App Store Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed The number of good quality games available on the iOS platform, and by association for the iPad, is immense, but using a touch screen to control your character or other objects just isn’t that fulfilling. When you add a good quality wireless controller everything changes and you will immediately notice that the games feel more immersive and compelling than they did before. It is also useful that Apple has made strides to build in greater compatibility, and you now have the chance to use top quality controllers and have a mobile gaming experience that competes with dedicated systems in many important areas. You may be surprised at just how easy and relatively inexpensive it is to bring the console feeling to your…

WaterMinder Developer Funn Media, LLC Difficulty Time needed Good hydration is like a good night’s sleep. If you are falling short with your water intake, your ability to stay healthy and exercise will be severely limited. A lack of hydration can lead to long-term health problems. Tracking your liquid intake can be a bind, because it is something that you likely do multiple times a day, but WaterMinder takes all of the pain away and lets you add your intake on your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch in a couple of seconds. The fact that it has been built so cleanly for the Apple Watch is a huge advantage, and at no point should you struggle to either input new data or understand what your intake is throughout the day.…

£1,149/$1,299 Key features Powered by M1 • Liquid Retina XDR display • 5G capabilities Learn more apple.com/ipad-pro Available from apple.com THE iPAD PRO 2021 IS A HUGE STEP UP for Apple’s tablet experience, but is it one that you need? If you want the very best tablet that money can buy, and a slate that can achieve almost anything you want a computer to, this is likely your perfect purchase right now. The iPad Pro 2021 12.9-inch isn’t for everyone, though. The biggest caveats are that it’s incredibly expensive, and that it’s an overwhelmingly large device for those who don’t need a screen this big. For those who can handle both the physical size and the price tag, though, this is an outstanding offering that boasts next-gen power and a…

Release date January 2005 • Capacity: 512 MB or 1 GB • Connection: USB 2.0 • Colours: White • Minimum macOS required to sync: 10.2.8 • Discontinued: September 2006 • Original price: £99/$149 Price now: £30/$40 The reasoning behind the iPod Shuffle’s creation was that many iPod users left their iPods on shuffle anyway, so Apple decided to make a device that offered this feature at a cheaper price. The Shuffle relied on an ‘autofill’ feature in iTunes that selected songs at random from the user’s music library (or from a specific playlist) and stuffed as many onto the Shuffle as storage allowed. The first-generation iPod Shuffle could typically hold about 240 songs, although you could reduce the bit rate of songs to 128 kbit/s AAC in iTunes to shoehorn…

David Crookes This issue, our iOS expert shows you how to get really creative with your iPhone by creating fun animations, enjoying Pac-Man in AR and even conducting the BBC Philharmonic orchestra. Shaun McGill Our tech expert shows you how to transform your home and garden using apps. From picking new colour schemes to learning new skills, there’s an app for everything! George Cairns Our creative genius shows you how to transform your photos into movies and your movies into photos in iMovie, and add atmospheric water effects to your Final Cut Pro projects.…

iMovie Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available Photographers aspire to capture the perfect moment. However, by the time they’ve swiped and tapped to get their iPhone’s Camera app up and running, they may find that ‘the bird has flown’. Fortunately, by shooting footage instead of stills, you can increase the frequency of your photo opportunities. Since a video clip is a series of consecutive images, you’ll have hundreds of shots to choose from. By shooting in 4K resolution you’ll be able to produce an image that will look great in your social media stream. You can also use iMovie to add motion and create a montage sequence or slideshow… With a few simple tricks, you can turn your footage into stills and stills into footage… Stills and clips…

Logic Pro Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available When producing music on any platform, adding effects like reverb and delay is an essential part of the mixing process. Fortunately, Logic ships with a generous bundle of effects plug-ins, not to mention the array of third-party AudioUnit plug-ins it supports. The problem with applying effects like this is that often you need the same effect on multiple tracks, but how do you pull this off without incurring a massive CPU performance lag? Luckily, Logic’s signal routing system is based on that of a real-world, hardware mixing console, so it features a workaround for this issue in the form of auxiliary sends. Let’s find out more… Auxward moment Efficiently add the same effect to multiple tracks with Multiple sends To…

macOS Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed When Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984, the word “hello” was written across the screen. With the release of the M1-powered, 24-inch iMac, Apple has revived the message in the form of a new screensaver that draws the greeting in a cursive font. It’s also available in different languages. As you can imagine, it’s very cool, yet it’s not immediately available. To enjoy the new screensaver, you’re going to have to perform a small number of actions – none of them tricky, we’re happy to note. It certainly makes for a fun homage while also being colourful and modern. Here’s how to see this treat for yourself. Manage Apple’s new screensaver You have a few options at your fingertips to make the retro…

Disk Utility Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Not all folders are equal. Some will contain files you don’t want others to see, such as financial documents, contracts and sensitive info. To be sure people can’t access your Mac and easily open these folders, you can encrypt the data so it can only be viewed by entering a password. This also means you can feel more comfortable sharing that data, knowing the other person will also have to enter a password. A good way to do this is by turning folders into password-protected, encrypted DMG disk image files using a process that makes use of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). What do the different icons mean? When encrypting folders, you’ll end up working with DMG image files and volumes The…

iOS 15 Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Rather than wait for the official rollout of iOS 15 in autumn, there are a couple of ways to get hold of the software early. Beta versions are usually released simultaneously with the update being announced at WWDC, but to get hold of one of these, you will need to be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program (which costs £70 per year). We will guide you through the process of enrolling and obtaining the dev beta here, but alternatively you can wait an extra month and then install the newer, possibly more stable public beta – check out ‘Knowledge base’ for information on how to get that. Updating to iOS 15 Everything you need to know Wait a while If you don’t…

Soothing Sleep Sounds Developer Phase4 Mobile Difficulty Time needed In May, Apple announced some great new accessibility features coming to iOS later in the year (https://apple.co/3wYZLcB), and they will likely appear in iOS 15 in the autumn. One of these new features is Background Sounds, and Apple says that ocean, rain and stream sounds will play in the background to help you focus, stay calm or rest. We need a bit of ‘zen’ these days! This may sound like several dozen apps already in the iOS App Store, but you can have this iOS 15 feature right now, and out of all the apps, we like Soothing Sleep Sounds. It’s free, and works brilliantly. Find it in the App Store on your iPhone, and you will be calmer after consistent…

Scroobly Developer Google LLC Difficulty Time needed Google experiments with artificial intelligence and it has, over the years, produced a host of creative tools based around its machine learning library, TensorFlow.js. Scroobly is one of them, which lets you produce your own digital animations, that you can map to your own live motions: just doodle, allow the camera access, pull some facial expressions and move around – and your actions will be replicated on the screen. You can have loads of fun playing around with different shapes and creations, quickly testing what works well. You can then make some recordings, which you can share with friends! Step-by-step Design your own animated doodle 1 Launch the website Open a web browser on your iPhone to visit scroobly.com. Google’s animation tool also…

£389.99/$379.99 Key features 37.5W superfast charging• Qi wireless charging Learn more kensington.com Available from amazon.co.uk IF YOU WANT TO TRANSFORM YOUR iPAD INTO A MAC then this fantastically engineered stand is the perfect way to go. Compatible with iPad Pro (2018 or later) and iPad Air (2020 or later), the StudioDock is designed to enhance the functionality and usability of your iPad in home and office desktop environments, and it certainly accomplishes that mission. Extra tilty Available in 12.9 and 11-inch versions, the StudioDock lets you magnetically connect your iPad to a facia pad that can rotate around 90 degrees and tilt backwards to allow you to view your iPad in any orientation. The only thing you can’t do is adjust the height. This surface pad also includes a USB-C…

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…

Very much an iOS for the times, iOS 15 arrives as we’re still feeling our way out of lockdown into a post-COVID world. A world where things feel relatively normal, yet we’re still hesitant to get too close to friends and loved ones. A world where many of us still work from home, and face the challenges and potential distractions that it brings. And a world where the freedom to travel has been dramatically restricted, possibly marooning us from family residing in far away lands. The new update for iPhone and iPad helps you stay connected to the people who matter most to you, find the space to focus on what you need to without distraction, and bring the world to you in stunning detail. Read on to discover more…

Final Cut Pro Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Download available Water can change the mood of a scene. A ripple-free lake creates a natural mirror that adds symmetry and tranquillity to a landscape. Sheets of driving rain can add drama to genres, such as thrillers and crime shows. Adding water as a postproduction visual effect gives you more control over your footage. You don’t need to rely on a wind-free day to create a mirror-like surface. You can even add water to landscapes that don’t feature a lake. Final Cut Pro has a wide selection of water-related effects so you can shoot ‘dry for wet’ and then turn on the taps to create a digital deluge. Let it rain! CGI water effects add atmosphere and symmetry to a landscape…

macOS Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed If your Mac is running out of available memory, it affects its performance. It could slow down, and in extreme cases apps can be frozen by macOS with an error message. Don’t worry – we’ll show you how to tell if the Mac is short of memory and what can be done about it. There are a few techniques that help you to avoid running out of application memory, and useful ways to deal with it if an app is frozen. These tips apply to Intel Macs and those with just 4 or 8 GB of memory. However, we have seen 16 GB computers run out of memory when editing large images in Adobe Lightroom. Memory is a common issue with photo editing…

macOS Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Many people never experience problems shutting down their Mac, but occasionally it does happen, and either the Mac takes a long time to turn off or it begins shutting down, but never completes it. Holding down the power button for five or six seconds will instantly cut the power, but this is not recommended because there is a chance of data corruption when files are open. It’s best to find the source of the shutdown problem, and this is usually a bug or fault in a hardware driver, app or service that’s running in the background. Even if you don’t have shutdown problems right now, it’s useful to know what to do. Step-by-step Avoid macOS shutdown problems 1 Update macOS Major releases of…

TextSniper Developer Valerijs Boguckis Difficulty Time needed Of all of the forthcoming features for macOS Monteray, one in particular caused jaws to slacken. It was the new Live Text feature, which will allow words within images to be highlighted, copied and pasted. Now, there’s more to this function, which is why it’s so exciting. It’s an interactive feature, so if a telephone number is detected, then it’ll be possible to make a call.. But if you’re simply after copying and pasting text in images and documents where words cannot be selected, you can carry out that task today on macOS Catalina and Big Sur thanks to TextSniper. Here, we look at how it works. Step-by-step Copy and paste text from images 1 Install TextSniper You can download TextSniper by visiting…

Books Developer Apple Inc Difficulty Time needed Did you know that emails can be saved to the Books app on your iPhone as a PDF? Once in the Books app, they can be read and even annotated using drawing tools. You may occasionally receive emails that you want to keep. It could be a special event, a receipt, or something similar. You will not want to save every email, but sometimes it is very useful. In this tutorial, we will show how to save Apple product announcements in Books, so you can refer to them in the future. A year or two from now, the emails will not show the contents because remote images have been deleted, but the PDF in Books is fine. Emails in Books Organise, print and…

Google Developer Google LLC Difficulty Time needed Augmented Reality allows you to use your iPhone to overlay objects on to your real-world environment, giving the impression that those items are sitting in front of you. While it has many ‘serious’ applications, there is also scope for fun. Google certainly thinks so. For a while, it has been letting users of its Search app play around with dinosaurs, wild animals and items from history, but now it’s introducing Japanese characters from the country’s popular culture. Chief among them is Pac-Man, but there are many others. Here, we look at how you can bring them to life… Step-by-step Use AR in Google Search 1 Install the app The Augmented Reality feature works within the official Google search app in iOS 11 and…

One of the best features in watchOS7 is the ability to share Apple Watch faces. It has allowed users to expand the range of designs – you only need glance at the Facer app to see the difference it has made. Facer is jam-packed with stunning Watch faces. It also comes with easy-to-use built-in Watch face creation software that lets you come up with your own designs in very little time. If you want to achieve more complex faces filled with complications, there’s a fee involved (£4.99/$4.99-a-month). There is a free seven-day trial though, and you may find that this is plenty of time to create what you need. Facer Developer Little Labs, Inc Difficulty Time needed Share your Face designs Once you have created your own Face design, you…