Innehållsförteckning för Vol 5 2023 från Mac & MacBook User

We know what you’re thinking. ‘Why on Earth would I need a Chromebook when I already have a MacBook?’ But would you take your MacBook, which could well cost up to £2000, on a hiking holiday when you might be trekking through the wilderness in the rain? Would you work on it in a coffee shop or down the pub? Would you take it camping for watching movies in the evening, knowing it would spend most of your vacation in your tent? Or maybe you only have a desktop Mac; would you buy a Mac notebook just to use on the occasional trip? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘No, it’s too expensive and/or valuable to risk,’ you might want to consider a much cheaper alternative; a…

To tether with an Android phone, open Settings and click Connected Devices. Next to Android Phone, select Set Up and follow the on-screen instructions. To use tethering in this way, you need to be running Chrome OS 71 or later; open Settings and click on About Chrome OS to find out which you’re running. If you’re on an iPhone it’s a little more complicated, but not too difficult. On your phone, open Settings, tap Personal Hotspot and switch on Allow Others to Join. Note the Wi-Fi Password underneath. On your Chromebook, open Settings, click Network and then click the triangle to the right of your current wireless access point. Choose your iPhone from the list of local SSIDs, then enter the Wi-Fi Password from the Personal Hotspot page on your…

First of all, open the website you want to save as a Shortcut. Click the vertical three-dots icon in the top-right corner, and in the menu that appears, select More Tools > Create Shortcut Choose what to call your new Shortcut. There’s already a title in there, but you can delete it and type something different if you wish. Choose whether the shortcut opens in a new window too. Your Shortcut appears on the Shelf. Drag it onto another shortcut to make a folder, or drag it into an existing folder to move it there, just like on the Mac’s App Launcher and iOS Home Page…

Did you know you can now FaceTime on a Chromebook? You can’t initiate a FaceTime call, but an Apple user running macOS Monterey or iOS/iPadOS 15 or later, can do so by creating and sending a FaceTime link to everyone they wish to invite to the video chat. Click on that link on your Chromebook and it opens as a FaceTime web portal in the Chrome web browser (make sure it’s up to date). Enter your name and tap ‘Continue’, and wait for the host to let you in. You can then enjoy an end-to-end encrypted FaceTime chat despite using a non-Apple device. Google Duo is a free person-to-person video chat app for up to 32 people; very much like FaceTime, then. You can download a Google Duo app on…

Step 1 ❱ Visit www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/index.html and click on the Download Now button to get the Chrome installer. You can choose to make Chrome your default browser at this point or you can change that setting later. Step 2 ❱ Once the download is complete, Chrome will install automatically. When the installation is complete, a Chrome browser window will open, giving you the opportunity to take a tour of Chrome’s main features; and that’s it, simple eh?…

This second-generation STM ChargeTree makes a few minor, but welcome, changes from the original model. Like the original ChargeTree it’s available in black or white, and it once more charges a Qi-compatible iPhone, AirPods (with a wireless charging case), and an Apple Watch - all at the same time, using only one power socket. You just need a USB-C mains adapter of at least 20W. It’s not supplied, but they’re not hard to come by. As before, you charge your iPhone by resting it on the backward-leaning mat at the front of the ChargeTree Swing. It’s comfortably cushioned, and there’s an optional rubber raiser to fit over the foot if you have a smaller iPhone that needs the extra height. Also as before, your earbuds sit on a charging pad…

You can use this double-ended flash drive to transfer files between devices, and back up your photos and videos from your iPad or iPhone. Available in 64GB, 128GB or 256GB capacities, it has a USB-C 3.1 plug on one end, and a Lightning connector at the other. You can only copy media and contacts from an iPhone or iPad, using the iXpand app, but plug it into a Mac and you can copy any file. Transferring files to the flash drive is super speedy; it’s certainly faster than its predecessor, the iXpand Flash Drive Go. The iXpand app is easy to use too. It’s a great way of getting more from your mobile device’s internal storage, without clogging it up with things that could be stored elsewhere. Info// SanDisk www.westerndigital.com…

What a delightfully clever idea. At a glance, PowerPic looks like an attractive but unremarkable photo frame, but it’s also a powerful wireless charger that’s perfect for your Qi-compatible iPhone or AirPods. PowerPic is a solid, clear photo holder, with a black or white charging unit on the back. It houses a six-inch by four-inch photograph in landscape or portrait mode; which is held in place by a plastic cover, held on by a magnet in each corner. The whole thing slots into a black or white base. It looks excellent with a decent photo in place; right at home in any room. You connect it to the mains using a USB-C cable (supplied) and a 20w USB-C power adapter (not supplied). On a charge Of course, the PowerPic really…

The iPad is a near-perfect platform on which to express your artistic tendencies. Its large display and professional-quality surface and capabilities make for an excellent drawing pad. The iPhone, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. But with the release of Procreate Pocket, artists can now unleash their talents on the smaller screen. Don’t be fooled into thinking the iPhone version of Procreate is a cut-down release; it’s not. In fact, it’s matched with the iPad in terms of features, technicalities and abilities. There are hundreds of handmade brushes available, alongside a suite of tools and the new Valkyrie Graphics Engine – the latest, and fastest, 64-bit painting engine. Highlights include UHD canvases, up to 16k x 4k, a Dark Mode interface, a QuickShape feature for creating perfect…

Sites that collate Internet radio stations aren’t exactly thin on the ground, but Radio Garden does it differently. Instead of listing broadcasters by genre or country, it locates them on a globe which you can rotate on the screen, and zoom in and out of for a better view. Every shining dot on the map is a radio station (or for pedants, an Internet streaming broadcast). Click on a dot, or drag the globe until it’s in the centre of the circle in the middle of the screen, and that station plays. Using the controls at the foot of an iPhone screen and in the bottom-left on an iPad or Mac, you can play and pause the stream, or move to the next or previous local station. Tap the heart…

Ridley Scott’s original Aliens from 1979 was a ground-breaking piece of cinema. Set within the claustrophobic confines of a spaceship, the crew are hunted by an alien creature of immense death-dealing impressiveness. It was tense, scary as hell and the feeling of absolute terror seeped through the screen as the protagonist, Ripley, tries to flush the beast into the depths of space. Sadly, that sense of terror had never really been conveyed through gaming. True, there have been several Aliens-based games in the past, for all manner of systems (one of our favourites was a Doom Aliens mod, from 1994), and we did have space-based horror in the form of System Shock and Dead Space, but the Alien franchise always felt a little flat. However, 2014’s Alien: Isolation from SEGA…

It’s hard to believe Grand Theft Auto III is well over 20 years old. It’s also hard to imagine how the games industry would look without this iconic brand that transcends video gaming. Even non-gamers are familiar with the title, although often for the wrong reasons. Controversy! Violence! Adult content! Yet GTA didn’t become an institution because of its controversial storylines. It invented the ‘sand box’ genre which has changed the face of gaming in subsequent years, with the growth and development of the franchise to the levels one would once question possible with the masterful GTA 5 and the devastating badness of the much anticipated and much savaged Grand Theft Auto Collection. Despite the fantastic ports of Vice City and San Andreas, there was enormous trepidation and excitement about…

It’s time to take the plunge and get started with our Chromebook. For our experiment, we chose an Acer Chromebook 314, featuring an Intel Celeron N4000 processor with Intel UHD graphics, a 14-inch Acer ComfyView LCD screen, 4GB of memory and 32GB of storage. It has Wi-Fi ‘ac’ and Bluetooth 5.0 for communication, and for connectivity, two USB 3.0 ports and two USB-C ports. There’s also a microSD reader, and a 3.5mm jack port for headphones or external speakers. Charging its 12.5-hour battery is through USB-C, and the bundled transformer is fairly small and light, so it won’t take up much room in your bag. The Acer Chromebook 314 costs just £220/$196/240 € on Amazon, which gives a good balance between price and performance. It’s possible to buy Chromebooks for…

You can access your computer remotely from your Chromebook (macOS 10.10+, Windows 7+, Linux). First you need to open a Chrome or Firefox browser. If you only have Safari, download Chrome from the App Store; it’s free. Now go to: https://remotedesktop.google.com/access and follow the on-screen instructions. It’s a simple setup process. You first need to follow a link to download an extension for Chrome on your Mac, give it permissions (you’re guided through this step by step), and choose a six-figure passcode. Then, on your Chromebook, you need to open Chrome and go to the remote access web page you opened on your computer earlier. Click on your computer’s name, enter the passcode you’ve just set up and you can access your files and apps remotely. Obviously, the computer has…

Make sure your Chromebook and the NAS drive are on the same network. In the Files app, click the three-dots icon and go to Services > SMB file share. You’re shown a list of servers that are connected to your network. Scroll up and down and find the one you want to add, and then click on it. Enter a username and password if necessary, and the drive appears in the sidebar. It stays until you remove it – you don’t need to repeat these steps.…

You can access apps, or websites you’ve saved as Shortcuts, through the Chrome OS Shelf. This works like macOS’ Dock and App Launcher combined. Move your trackpad pointer to the bottom of the screen, to see apps and Shortcuts you’ve pinned to the Chromebook’s Shelf. Click an icon to open its app or website. Also on the Shelf is the clock; click it for system controls. Click the circle in the left-hand side of the Shelf to expand it, showing recently used apps and a search field, which you can use to search your Chromebook for apps, websites, settings, documents and just about anything else. Click the chevron at the top – or just swipe up with two fingers – to expand it further, showing the Chrome OS answer to…

So should you buy a Chromebook? As discussed, a Chrome OS notebook might be just the thing for taking away from home in circumstances where you don’t want to risk your Mac notebook, but we wouldn’t recommend it as a full-time alternative to your Apple gear. Ask yourself this question. What am I likely to do with a notebook while away from home, and can a Chromebook achieve these goals? As we’ve discovered, it’s great for entertainment, useful for work and OK for casual (but not serious), gaming. There are tasks you can do on a Chromebook before transferring it back onto your Mac, you can keep in touch with video calls, email and most messengers (Apple Messenger is the exception), and you can work offline to an extent too.…

The GorillaPod range of camera and mobile phone tripods is among the most versatile and comprehensive mounts around, and now there’s one for the latest, MagSafe iPhones (that’s the 12-series and later). The lower half of the device is business as usual; a regular GorillaPod tripod which you can bend and mould into almost any shape. Need a shorter leg to compensate for an uneven platform? You’ve got it. Want to mount your phone at a lower height without sacrificing stability? Not a problem. You can even hold the legs together and use it as a (short) selfie stick, or bend them around a tree branch or metal pole to hold your phone in positions that just wouldn’t be possible with a traditional tripod. Click and stick The upper part…

A wireless extender is designed to compliment your wireless router by extending the reach of your Wi-Fi network. Set it up in a location that’s within the range of your current network, and it provides an access point of its own, which in turn transfers data to and from your router. The FRITZ!Repeater 6000 wireless repeater is an update of AVM’s popular FRITZ!Repeater 3000 model, and it makes several advances on the older product. Most importantly, the FRITZ!Repeater 6000 is Wi-Fi 6 compatible. This new Wi-Fi standard is designed for the modern network, where far more connected devices are present than was the case just a few years ago. These days, as well as computers, mobile devices and smart TVs, you’re likely to have Internet radios, connected smart devices such…

This is the perfect editor for anyone wanting to put together videos quickly and easily. It takes literally just a few minutes to get the hang of using it, and you’ll be putting together your own videos in next to no time. Ease of use is everything in an app like this, and Splice manages to be flexible enough to create good, professional-looking videos while keeping everything so simple you can’t go wrong. You can add videos and static pictures as well as title pages. Choose from a variety of fades to move from one to the next. You can add music tracks from iTunes, record a voiceover or use the sound from the videos themselves. Adding and removing sections is easily accomplished with a couple of button presses. Click…

iMazing is a device management tool for all iOS and iPadOS devices. Open iMazing on your Mac and connect an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV or even a classic iPod, and you can explore and organise its contents with a far greater degree of control than macOS natively allows. Various price points are available, depending on how many mobile devices you wish to use with it. The app can back up your device to your computer, without deleting previous backups. These backups are encrypted, and unlike regular backups, they can be stored on any connected hard drive or NAS drive – it doesn’t have to be your boot drive. Backups can be scheduled and carried out automatically, and you can review and restore their contents just like you can…

I blooming love Double Dragon. Back in the late Eighties, at the local arcade – a dingy, dishevelled dive, complete with sticky carpet and drenched in eye-watering neon – my mate Daz and I would force-feed ten pence pieces into the Double Dragon arcade machine and settle in for an afternoon of cooperative digital violence. It was superb. Imagine how happy I was to get my hands on the complete trilogy on the iPad. Sadly, Daz and I have parted ways in the years since 1987, but these days I have a couple of children who can help me take on the bosses and finally rescue poor old Marian from the clutches of the Black Warriors gang. Often, when it comes to arcade conversions for mobile devices, the end result…

Tengai or Sengoku Blade as it is know in its homeland, Japan, is a horizontal scrolling arcade shoot - ’em-up which was released in arcades in 1996; and via several excellent home ports at the time. Yet this iOS conversion somehow feels the most fitting of the home releases. Allow me to explain. As a long-time fan of the genre, I have always experienced issues with lifespan vs price when it came to purchasing stand-alone releases. Numerous shooter collections litter my games collection, but very few stand-alone packages join them. This is far from a criticism, but the genre itself lends itself well to short bursts of intense gameplay coated in rich, over-the-top visuals, sonics and a pumping soundtrack. This is perfect arcade fare, as a handful of credits offer…

Picture the scene. You’re at a factory or building site, and need to incorporate some new figures into a spreadsheet and email it back to the office. You left your MacBook at home as you didn’t want to risk damaging it, so how will your Chromebook cope? Should you be worried, and if so, what about? One thing you definitely don’t need to be concerned about is battery life. A combination of a low-powered processor and a minimalistic operating system combine to give Chromebooks an amazing power efficiency. The model we’re using, the Acer Chromebook 314, runs for over 12 hours on a single charge, beating the 16-inch MacBook Pro and being not too far behind the 13-inch MBP and the MacBook Air. It charges through a USB-C cable, so…

If you’re going on a camping or caravanning trip, or going away from home on business, you might want to use your notebook for entertainment in the evenings. And if you don’t want to risk an expensive Apple device, a Chromebook is perfect for the job. Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. The Chromebook can handle streaming video services just as well as any other computer with a web browser. If you want to watch Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, YouTube, live TV and catchup services such as the BBC iPlayer, UKTV Play and ITV Hub and more, you’re OK using your Chromebook. Naturally you need an Internet connection, which is fine if you’re in a hotel or B&B with Wi-Fi, but for camping in the…

You can store documents, data and media on an external hard drive or thumb drive and plug it into your Chromebook. It has to be formatted in a way your Chromebook can handle. FAT and NTFS are usually used, but it can recognise a few others. If it’s not formatted correctly, the first time you plug it in, you’re offered the chance to format it. You can navigate to a connected drive using the Files app; click on it in the sidebar to see what’s stored on it. You can then enjoy any music, movies and photos using the Chromebook’s Gallery feature. In our experience this worked well, but one or two AVIs that played correctly on our Macs stuttered on the Chromebook, presumably due to its lesser processing power.…

The Chromebook is an online machine that makes heavy use of cloud computing, but this doesn’t mean it can’t be used when you’ve no Wi-Fi connection. As we’ve already covered, you can tether your Chromebook to your smartphone and use the phone’s data connection to get online, but even if you’ve no way of getting onto the Internet at all, there’s still plenty you can do with Chrome OS. Google Drive has an offline mode built in. If you’re working in Google Docs, for example, it saves a copy to your local storage and syncs with the cloud when you’re back online. Obviously, this doesn’t apply if you’re using Apple’s apps in the iCloud web portal. If Internet access is likely to be intermittent, it’s best to copy out what…

Device Guide While most of our reviews cover most devices, we have added these icons to give you a quick reference to what device is best suited for the product or software. Scores// Our ratings explained: 5 - excellent 4 - good 3 - average 2 - poor 1 - avoid…

Here at Essential AppleUser Magazine, we’ve long been fans of devolo’s excellent homeplug devices. Plug one into the mains near your router and connect it with a supplied Ethernet cable, then set up the other bundled homeplugs anywhere in the house, and they use your home’s electrical cabling to carry your network data. Individual plugs offer Wi-Fi hotspots and/or Ethernet ports, so you can make cabled and wireless connections to the homeplug instead of directly to your router. At last, you can have Wi-Fi throughout the house, even a long way from the router, and cabled Internet access without having to drill holes in the walls and trail cables under the carpets. These latest devolo homeplugs conform to the newx Wi-Fi 6 protocols, which give up to 50% faster wireless…

Earlier in the year we saw the release of the NEO P2 4-Port GaN Charger. This is a remarkable and extremely useful multi-port charger that’s bristling with features and comes in at a fantastic price. However, MINX has since upped its game yet again and released the P2’s smaller but just as capable brother, the NEO P1. The MINIX NEO P1 is a three-port charging station, with a pair of USB-C Power Delivery 3.0 ports offering 65W, 5~15V/3A, 20V/3.25A and a single USB-A1 36W Quick Charge 3.0 port at 5V/3A, 9V/3A, 12V/3A and 20V/1.8A. While it may lack an extra port over its sibling, it certainly makes up for that in portability. The NEO P2 wasn’t a huge charging station by any stretch of the imagination but the P1 is…

Airpulse’s latest offering, the P100X stereo Bluetooth speaker, should appeal to those who like their tech to be beautiful as well as practical. Inspired by traditional FM radios of old, it has a gorgeous mesh finish at the front and back, and an elegant cherry wood speaker casing at the top and sides. Sound-wise, it features a pair of custom-designed 10w tweeters and a 4.5-inch 40w mid-woofer, for 60w in total. The tweeters use an oval-shaped diaphragm to deliver a better high frequency response, accurately reproducing even the highest audio frequencies. The mid woofer is a 4.5-inch unit, featuring a hard anodised aluminium alloy cone suspended in a heavy, rigid cast magnesium alloy frame. The device connects to your audio source via Bluetooth v5.1, supporting the aptX HD codec, or…

It’s always nice to come across an app that does something a little bit differently, or takes an existing idea and puts its own unique spin on it. Especially considering that everyone is talking about Netflix’s new undead action romp, Army of the Dead. Zombies, Run! does exactly that, and it helps you to get fit as well. It’s part adventure game, part fitness app and part interactive story. The concept might sound a little strange at first but it makes perfect sense when you start using it, so you just have to trust us that it works. Zombies, Run! is an app designed to help people who want to run, but lack the motivation to actually get out there and do it. The incentive in this case is to…

Camera+ 2 Developer: LateNiteSoft S.L, http://latenitesoft.com Price: £2.99, $2.99, 3,49 € System Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later Camera+ 2 is a complete overhaul of the popular photography app Camera +. It’s compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, and gives far more control over your shots than the iOS Camera app. You can capture photos in RAW mode, set shutter speed, ISO and white balance, and in dual camera iPhones, use the impressive depth capture mode. You can also set it to only trigger the shutter when the device is stable, or when it detects a smile. Halide Camera Developer: Chroma Noir LLC, https://halide.cam Price: £5.99, $5.99, 6,99 € System Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later Another replacement for the iOS Camera app, Halide intelligently optimises ISO and shutter speeds for…

Part game, part interactive movie, when Another World was first released for the Amiga it was more than just another game. It was a real interactive experience. Rather than falling into one of the established genres of the time, Another World was neither a puzzle game, a shoot-’em-up nor a platformer, but it was all of these and more. Playing it now it’s easy to forget how revolutionary it was at the time. The spookily realistic sprite animation still looks very nice, but it was gob-smacking in 1991. The game begins with a scientific experiment gone wrong, which transports the main character to a strange, dream-like world and so begins the adventure where you take on challenge after challenge as you try to stay alive and figure out a way…

BADLAND is a beautifully designed side-scrolling action adventure puzzleplatformer that takes place in an atmospheric forest packed full of deadly traps you must navigate through to reach the end of each level. The game is controlled by using one finger to guide the peculiar furry character through the treacherous BADLAND, much like the highly addictive 2D Helicopter PC game if you recall, or the side-scrolling sections in classic Mario. However, this is a great deal more in-depth and obviously visually superior. The screen automatically scrolls from left to right. You simply tap your device’s screen in order to cause the furball to rise higher, thus avoiding the many traps and obstacles in your path. Releasing your finger causes him to drop back down. There are many power-ups available in each…