Innehållsförteckning för 1 August 2015 från MacLife

ALTHOUGH IT DIDN’T get much press coverage with WWDC, buried in all the hype was a lot of great news for gamers. Apple is making a commitment to keep iOS up-to-date with some of the biggest changes to the game industry. eSports has become a huge industry, only nobody seems to know it. Over 134 million people regularly tune in to watch people play videogames. 32 million people tuned in to see the League of Legends world series championship. That’s twice the TV viewership of baseball’s World Series. IOS 9 IS INCLUDING tools to broadcast eSports in a big way. It’s called ReplayKit, and it will let users stream their games with a single tap. This brings iOS in line with the streaming convenience of the PS4. ReplayKit will support…

COMMITTO3 Free Oceanhouse Media, committo3.com This app is great for small teams in an office, or for a particularly anal-retentive household head. (“Unite, brothers and sisters! At 7pm precisely!”) It lets you create teams of people, all of whom specify and commit to three jobs each day. It tracks participation and completion with graphs and the whole works. KEYNOTE $9.99 Apple, apple.com Both Apple’s Keynote and Microsoft’s PowerPoint apps on iPhone have a companion Apple Watch app that, cleverly, acts as a remote control. Brilliant! Leave your laptop at home, sync your Keynote presentation to your iPhone, hook it up to a big screen and then control it from your Watch, like some kind of business wizard. DUE $4.99 Due Apps, dueapp.com Due has been a favorite at Mac|Life since…

1. SMARTTHINGS MOBILE FREE Physical Graph, smartthings.com Most home automation apps work with a single manufacturer’s hardware. While that’s technically true here, the SmartThings network hub can control products from Philips, Sonos, Belkin, Dropcam and more. All from your wrist! 2. PHILIPS HUE FREE Philips, meethue.com Philips is the king of the internet-connected lightbulb (even if that’s not as cool a sentence as it started out to be) and having the app on your Watch makes it even easier to switch your lights to a pre-set scene—or off completely. HomeKit integration is coming 3. ALARM.COM FREE Alarm.com, alarm.com This sophisticated home security system can be accessed from its Watch app, and offers features such as a live video feed from your garage on your Watch, and being able to send…

NIKE+ RUNNING Free Nike, nikeplus.nike.com Of course you can just use the built-in Workout app on your Watch to track your runs, but Nike’s pedigree shows in the richness of its app. Not only can you review the GPS trails recorded with your iPhone (including seeing where you were fast or slow), but you can compete with and get/give encouragement to your friends, all right on your Watch. STRAVA RUNNING AND CYCLING Free Strava, strava.com You can track runs with Strava too, but it’s best known as an indispensable tool for cyclists, whether you’re an enthusiast just starting out or dedicated to some serious training. You can start a run or a ride directly on the Watch, and track your progress and speed as you go. Soon enough, you’ll find…

$1.99 Developer Jaiyo, facebook.com/HealthDashForAppleHealth Platform iPhone, iPod touch Requirements iOS 8.2 or later For all the boasting executives have done about the health and fitness capabilities of Apple Watch, curiously the device is incapable of displaying everything being logged by the built-in Health app on your iPhone. HealthDash provides this missing link, snatching nearly all available Health data stored on your smartphone and displaying it on your wrist. The current version supports Step Count, Active Calories, Distance, Running and Walking, Dietary Calories, Flights Climbed, Cycling Distance, Resting Calories, Weight, Body Mass Index, Lean Body Mass, Body Fat Percent, and Heart Rate, but the developer has an aggressive update schedule planned with support for iPad and additional categories. The app doesn’t actually create any data on its own — HealthDash simply…

$2.99 Developer Kemari, aftercamapp.com Platform iPhone, iPod touch Requirements iOS 8 or later Comedian W.C. Fields supposedly once said, “Never work with children or animals.” Decades later, neither subject is much easier to photograph or record on video, even for smartphone owners with the latest devices. AfterCam acts as a kind of time machine, so parents won’t miss baby’s first steps or the winning touchdown. This third-party camera app starts recording video from the moment it’s launched, only saving clips to the Camera Roll when you instruct it to. When something happens that you want to keep while shooting, tap one of the on-screen buttons at either edge of the display to save the last five, 10, or 20 seconds of recorded video. There’s also a shutter button to grab…

$849 (body only)/$1,149 (with 18-135mm lens) Manufacturer Canon, canon.com Features 24.2MP, Digic 6 processor, 1080p video recording at 30fps, Wi-Fi and NFC REBEL T6S + Fantastic picture detail + Useful extra LCD + Great value + Fast dial control The Rebel T6s is a new addition to Canon’s beginner-level DSLR range. It uses Canon’s new APS-C format CMOS image sensor, with an effective pixel count of 24.2 million – which is a notable boost from the Rebel T5i’s 18 megapixels. You also get the Digic 6 processing engine and a phasedetection autofocus system with 19 cross-type points for use when focusing images in the viewfinder – all extremely capable. In the hand, it doesn’t have quite the solidity of the higher-end 5D Mark III, but has a chassis that is…

$24 Manufacturer Inateck, inateck.com Requirements OS X 10.6 or later, Windows 2000 SP3 or later, Android 2.2, 3.0 or 3.1 or later, USB ports At a simple level, this is a compact 3-port USB 3.0 hub, but it can also attach to a second Mac, PC or Android device. When you run the software (which mounts as a CD on each system when the HB4009 is plugged in), you can use the keyboard and mouse connected to your main computer to control the secondary one. Switch with a keyboard shortcut or by moving your mouse cursor off the edge of the screen; it’s cool, if disconcerting, to throw your Mac cursor off the edge of a screen and onto a PC. Using a keyboard and mouse cursor on an Android…

$49 Manufacturer Twelve South, twelvesouth.com Dimensions 5.1x8x108 in Though you can easily get a couple of days of use out of one charge of the Apple Watch, most of the time you’re going to be charging it every night. And it’s just cooler if it’s on a stand, isn’t it? Twelve South’s HiRise for Apple Watch matches its excellent HiRise stand for iPhones in basic shape, with a flat base and rising arm made of metal in a high-quality finish. You need to integrate your own charge cable by slotting it into grooves along the back, before putting the magnetic disc into the provided slot. Then you can just pop the Watch on it, held in place by magnets and the way its straps rest on the top and bottom.…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.10 LEVEL > Hard IT WILL TAKE > 30 minutes THERE WAS A time when all computers were controlled using a command line – you typed in strings of characters to make your machine do something. The Mac’s graphical interface superseded this way of working (for good reason), but in fact the command line lives on as a way the technically minded can often perform certain tasks more quickly than with a graphical interface; it’s also frequently a means by which to activate “hidden” settings that Apple has decided not to enable general access to. You can use it with a utility called Terminal. Terminal can be found in Utilities within the Applications folder; open it and you see a textbased prompt. At this point, it’s…

THE INVITATION TO Apple’s press event in October 2001 announced “the unveiling of a breakthrough digital device.” If they’d said it was an MP3 player, people might have yawned. Nicknamed after the compressed file format that made them practical, pocket-sized digital audio devices were already common. Yet the iPod would be the product that defined a decade, shifting Apple from the lower reaches of the PC industry to the top of the global brand rankings. By the time the final version of the original design was retired in September 2014, 400 million iPods had been sold, making it one of the most successful consumer electronics products ever. It was a rethinking of a gadget that already existed, but one that Apple had taken enormous care to get right. Hardware chief…

TUCKED AWAY IN Apple’s WWDC keynote, taking a back seat to the bombast, was something that could end up as Apple’s most notable new endeavor: proactivity. Apple describes iOS 9 as a proactive assistant that offers intelligent suggestions for what you might want to do next, based on your past behavior (which apps you regularly use, when you use them, stuff like that). Why is it a good thing? Because our devices do so much now that they demand our constant attention – not only for tweeting, texting, and taking selfies, but for an endless loop of menial tasks: checking notifications, swiping away spam, toggling features on and off, and so on. So this fall, iOS 9 will know to continue the podcast you listened to earlier when you plug…

LIKE CLOCKWORK, Apple unveiled this year’s advancements to OS X, iOS, and now watchOS 2 (yes, the “w” is meant to be lowercase) at WWDC 2015. There is a handful of common themes driving Apple’s new focus, developer tools, and features you will soon see in your favorite apps. But one thing is clear: Apple is sharpening a double-edged sword of features and privacy, for better and worse. LET’S BE CLEAR, this is not a year of major upheaval or revolution for Apple’s operating systems, and that’s a good thing. Instead, I saw themes of strengthening foundations, exploring contextual utility, and doubling-down on security and privacy. On one side of Apple’s increasingly polished blade, OS X El Capitan’s Spotlight can pull in data from even more services than ever and…

CITYMAPPER FREE Citymapper Limited citymapper.com Sure, transit directions are coming to iOS 9, but you can already get very detailed, live transit information for NYC, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia and more cities internationally. On the Watch, you can plan journeys home or to favorite places, get alerts for when to alight, service updates and more. UBER FREE Uber Technologies, uber.com If public transport isn’t your thing, you’re possibly an Uber kinda person. Uber, of course, lets you call a cab and have it take you where you need to go, and being able to do so quickly and discreetly on your Watch is a boon, e specially if you’re in a sketchy neighborhood. Not that we’re suggesting you’re ever likely to be, of course. TRIPADVISOR FREE…

1. RULES! $2.99 TheCodingMonkeys, rulesgame.net On the face of it, this is a childishly simple game which has you tapping cards in the order prescribed, but after the first few rounds it starts doing things like telling you to “follow rule 2” without reminding you what that rule was. Eep. 2. ELEVATE FREE Elevate, elevateapp.com This brain training game starts by asking you what skills you want to sharpen up, assesses your ability, then presents you with a series of challenges tailored to you. On the Watch, you get a series of quick-fire questions, perfect for the waiting room or bus stop. 3. DJAY 2 $2.99 algoriddim, algoriddim.com This DJing app is functionally amazingly rich — with the op tion of cuing tracks to each deck, syncing tracks’ BPM, doing…

THES CORE FREE theScore, mobile. thescore.com Covering the NFL, NBA, NCAA Football plus the English Premier League and Champions League, PGA, NASCAR and much more, the Score lets you follow your favorite teams and players. Having it all on your Watch is great for discreetly checking the score when you’re not supposed to, too! Even if you get noticed, you can just pretend it was an email… MLB.COM AT BAT FREE Advanced Media, mlb.com You can’t beat MLB.com At Bat for baseball coverage, and the app manages to squeeze an astonishing amount of data into the Watch’s tiny screen. As well as notifications, you get live scores, stats, pitch tracking, player cards and news — and it’s all surprisingly readable to boot. Again, very handy for checking out the latest…

$19.99 Developer Future Moments, micswap.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7.1 or later Lots of amp modeling apps give iOS guitarists simulated Vox AC-30s, Fender Twins and Marshall stacks, but there hasn’t been an equivalent iOS tool for singers. Enter MicSwap Pro, which offers room modeling and simulations of classic mics such as the Shure SM58 and the Neumann U87. It won’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse and you can’t expect a $20 app to reproduce a $2,000 mic perfectly, of course, but with a decent mic you can get really great results – and Audiobus, Inter-app audio and iTunes File Sharing support means it’s easy to get audio in and out. The only issue we encountered was very occasional lag using the built-in monitoring, something which was…

$2.99 Developer Tinybop, tinybop.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7 or later Getting kids to unconsciously learn as they play is the nirvana of children’s apps. Simple Machines aims to get there via six digital toys which showcase basic physics. Pulleys, wedges and more are on display, each embedded into a simple game. A bike, with a variety of frames and wheel shapes, demonstrates axles. The power of levers gets leveraged to demolish a leering building. It’s colorful, features a few fun Easter eggs, and is easy to use. There’s no doubt kids will play. The question is for how long, and to what benefit? The game encourages players to explore for themselves. But younger players lack the foundations to understand what they’re seeing. One experiment shows how the thread of…

$4.99 Developer Kairosoft, kairopark.jp Platform Universal Requirements iOS 6 or later This is a classic case of looks being deceiving. Thanks to its pixelly, Habbo Hotel-esque aesthetics, you’d be forgiven for assuming this is a casual, fairly shallow piece of store-management sim fluff. No: what you’re actually getting yourself into is a lot more complicated and involved. It’s deep, but not always rewarding. You first pick from opening a burger bar, a boutique or a games store, with more options opening up as you become more successful, until you’re running your own miniature empire. This involves being dropped into the multifaceted world of business with a few tips from your secretary to keep you afloat. You can place furniture (it’s not always clear what these items do, other than drain…

Beating a puzzle or challenge laid out by a game’s developer is all well and good, but there’s no sweeter victory than that over your fellow humans, especially if they’re your friends. iOS is full of excellent competitive multiplayer games, for playing online or locally, and many are asynchronous, so you can play just in your downtime. CARCASSONNE ($9.99, Universal) featured in our round-up of the best iOS board games back in issue #99, and that’s because it’s superb. You lay tiles together like a jigsaw to build a landscape, taking points for completing cities and roads. You can play asynchronously online, or pass-and-play locally. As you get better at it, you can buy its expansions to mix things up, too. If you like to get more tactical, try HEARTHSTONE…

$59 Developer Frontier Developments, elitedangerous.com Requirements OS X 10.10 or later, 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB RAM, GeForce GT 650M 1GB of video RAM (or equivalent), internet connection, 8GB HDD space ELITE: DANGEROUS + Looks beautiful + Sounds good too + Plenty of ships and content - Many empty solar systems The fourth game in a series that stretches back to the mid-’80s and the Apple II, Elite: Dangerous gives you a spaceship and a 1:1 recreation of our galaxy populated by NPCs and, if you wish, other players. From then on, it’s up to you whether you carry out missions, look for a fight, trade commodities or go mining so you can buy a bigger ship and repeat the cycle. It’s a game of spaceships, and they…

I want to tell you a great Steve Jobs story. I once got a grant for my classroom for a computer and a video projector. In my ignorance, I unfortunately bought a clamshell Mac with no digital video out, so the kids couldn’t see the desktop on the projector. I called numerous Apple Educational sites in Texas, Sacramento, and Cupertino, and none of them would take a laptop back, not even when I explained it was from a grant and that I wouldn’t be able to buy a new one for years. What the heck, I emailed Steve Jobs. The very next day I got a call from Jobs’ secretary, who said they were sending me a new laptop and that I could keep the one I already had. The…

SPACE ROGUE Captain a space hot-rod on a mission to save the galaxy! This game is very similar to indie hit FTL, in that you go around a galaxy having encounters, many of which end in battles, with you managing your crew to repair damage and defend. It’s slick and fun with good variety, but also often overly brutal at this stage. VERSION TESTED: 1.1 TRAIN VALLEY This lovely-looking puzzle game puts you in charge of building rail tracks between colored stations. You choose when to allow trains to leave for their given station, making sure they won’t hit each other – but the longer you wait, the less valuable they are. It’s simple to learn, but becomes frantic fun over time. VERSION TESTED: B1.2…

THERE’S NO DOUBT that the new MacBook is a wonderful machine, but there’s a question of whether its merciless removal of almost all ports has come just too early for most people – we’re not all quite as wireless as the MacBook would like us to be just yet. It’s not the first product Apple has launched where either the technology wasn’t ready yet to make them truly work, or users weren’t ready to move to a new way of doing things (or both). They just arrived too early… 1 Newton (1993) A mobile computer for organizing your life – sounds good! And the Newton ran on ARM processors, just like the much later iPhone. But the hardware was too clunky and this kind of device really needed the mobile…

1 EX MACHINA Alicia Vikander, Domnhall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac $14.99 Films exploring humanity in the face of advanced artificial intelligence aren’t new, but while many take on an epic scale, this incredibly tight, thrilling film from director Alex Garland (who wrote 28 Days Later and Sunshine) feels fresh by going narrow. Gleeson plays a programmer invited by reclusive genius Isaac to apply a Turing test to his latest creation – a robot with an advanced AI, played by Vikander. It’s all about the three of them, locked away in a compound, and the shifting priorities and manipulations that emerge in their time together. It’s tense, super smart, and perfectly acted. 2 HOW BIG, HOW BLUE, HOW BEAUTIFUL Florence + The Machine $12.99 There are more big melodies in the latest…

APPLE’S IWEB WAS a smart little program that made designing websites super simple. It didn’t do much, but then it wasn’t supposed to. It was about making website building as easy as using Pages or Keynote, by removing all the pain from designing a website. Unfortunately, Apple never seemed too keen on iWeb, and when development officially stopped in 2011, its users were hardly surprised. One of the reasons for iWeb’s demise was that more and more people were publishing using web-based platforms: Google’s Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, social networks such as Facebook, and so on. They all have their place, but dedicated desktop web publishing software has advantages that they don’t. You have more control, you get much faster performance, you can often do a great deal more with your…

DARK SKY $3.99 Jackadam, darkskyapp.com We’ve long loved Dark Sky for its hyper-specific minuteby-minute rain and snow alerts. While recommending it might seem like a cruel irony if you live in somewhere like California (or more of a grim reminder if you live in, say, Seattle), it’s nevertheless a highly useful app to have on your wrist. Its glance is useful too. LIVING EARTH $2.99 Radiantlabs, livingearthapp.com Although on the face of it this just looks like a purely pretty app — and to be sure, it certainly is pretty, with lovely “live” cloud cover on a beautifully rendered globe — there’s actually plenty of hard weather data available: nine-day forecasts plus detailed hourly forecasts for your location, as well as overviews for your favorite cities. FRESH AIR Free Backcountry…

TWITTERRIFIC 5 FREE The Iconfactory, twitterrific.com Although we’re generally Tweetbot users, Twitterrific’s smart design and ease of use make it easy to understand why it has legions of fans too. The Watch app is better than Twitter’s own, showing you a summary of how you did on Twitter in the Glance, with the ability to dictate new tweets from the app. SLACK FREE Slack Technologies, slack.com Slack is something of a phenomenon, especially for businesses. At its heart it’s basically a chat app, but it’s hugely powerful and extensible too, and having notifications pop up on your Watch can be very handy. You can reply to messages and DMs with emoji, preset phrases or dictation, or continue on your iPhone using Handoff. RE:QUEST FREE MartianCraft, martiancraft.com Rather than ask “Which…

FREE Developer Readdle, readdle.com Platform iPhone, iPod touch Requirements iOS 8 or later There have been many attempts lately to drag mobile email kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Although innovative solutions such as Mailbox, Inbox by Gmail, and Mail Pilot have been praised by users looking for a completely new approach, none of them has yet displaced Apple’s built-in Mail on our dock. The latest contender to the throne is Spark, a free iPhone app with striking similarities to Microsoft Outlook for iOS – the only third-party email app thus far to really make us sit up and take notice. Featuring a comparable unified inbox approach, Spark emphasizes smarter email, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. One unique feature we like automatically sorts incoming missives into personal,…

$9.99 Developer Secret Base Design, musicioapp.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7 or later As virtual instruments and audio effects running on iOS improve, musicians increasingly need a way to integrate iPads and iPhones into their Mac-based recording setup. Music IO is a really clever app that lets you stream four stereo audio channels from iOS to your Mac in 32-bit resolution and at low latency, as well as sending MIDI back and forth between the devices. Install the bridge app and AU (Audio Unit) or VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plug-in on your Mac, and then you can specify any Inter-App Audiocompatible iOS apps, like synths or drum machines, into your digital audio workstation, such as Logic or GarageBand, and record it. The MIDI side of Music IO enables you to…

$7.99 Developer Creaceed, creaceed.com Platform Univeral Requirements iOS 8 or later If you find that writing or drawing your plans out by hand helps you to get them in order, you’re far from alone. But storing things digitally does tend to make them easier to find and sort. Carbo bridges the gap between these two, letting you take (or import) photos of drawings on paper or whiteboard, then digitizing them. It clears out things like the paper, leaving you with only the information itself. It’s not the first app to try something like this, but its results are among the most impressive we’ve seen. Snap a photo and it will detect the lines, which you can then imediately make stronger or softer – our writing came out very weak at…

99¢ Developer Alper Sarikaya, swordofxolan.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 6 or later At their basest level, platform games are really about three things: jumping, hitting things, and dying. You can throw in as many fancy enemies and artfully designed stages as you like, but you still need to have that trio of basics nailed. Thankfully, Sword of Xolan has. You’re a warrior tasked with ridding the land of vile beasties because… actually, we forget, because we were having too much fun scuttling about and generally being a badass. But fear not: there are plenty of vile beasties to be bested in satisfying fashion, whether that’s up close and personal or at a distance. The former is your simplest move – a quick sword-slash, effective when teamed with jumps and nimble…

$1,999 Manufacturer Apple, apple.com Processor 3.3GHz Intel Core i5 Graphics AMD Radeon R9 M290 2GB Memory 8GB Storage 1TB HDD We absolutely loved the 5K iMac when it first appeared late last year. The base model rivaled the Mac Pro for computing power and gave us that amazing 14.7-million-pixel screen. The only downside was that it certainly didn’t come cheap at $2,499. Now, though, Apple has cut the price of that original model down to $2,299, but crucially has also added this new entry-level option, which squeezes in just under the $2K barrier at $1,999. The question is, what corners had to be cut to save that $300? First, the processor is slower, with a frequency of 3.3GHz compared to the 3.5GHz in the higher model. But it’s still an…

$49.99 Developer Zengobi, zengobi.com Requirements Mac OS X 10.10 or later For nearly a decade, Zengobi’s Curio has been praised by users and critics alike as one of the best Mac notebook applications on the market. But not everyone is willing to spend $99.99 for such software, especially when there are so many free alternatives. Curio Express appears to have been designed as a solution to this problem, slashing the cost in half but losing only one flagship feature in the process – the option to manage multiple pages (called “idea spaces”) within a single project. You can, however, create unlimited projects, so this won’t really be a limitation for students or home users, especially considering Express is otherwise the same as its sibling. Although marketed as a notebook app,…

$4.99 Developer Thomas Peterson, ghostnoteapp.com Requirements OS X 10.9 or later, 64-bit processor Ghostnote notes are context-aware, so you can apply them to a document, folder, or dozens of supported apps. The icon sits in your Mac’s menu bar; click on it while in an app or with a folder or document selected, and an empty note drops down. Text can be formatted, you can add tasks with tick boxes, note colors can be customized on a per application basis, and can also be detached from the menu bar so they float on the desktop. In some apps, you can add notes to individual documents, and in Safari you can add them to specific websites. It’s not always the most intuitive app. By default, the feature which allows you to…

$9.99 Manufacturer Real Casual Games, forecastbar.com Requires OS X 10.10 or later This really useful weather forecast utility sits in the menu bar, giving you an at-a-glance idea of the weather, unless you open it up for more detail. By default, what you get in the menu bar is the temperature and an icon showing you the prevailing weather type (sunshine, clouds, rain and so on), though you can customize this. Click this icon, though, and you open a full five-day forecast. The next eight hours are shown in detail, with graphs covering temperature, chance of rain or heaviness of rain. The five days after that have icons and a bit of detail for each, along with high and low temperatures. It’s really well designed, accurate thanks to its use…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.7 or higher, Moom 3.2.1 LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 15 minutes APPLE LIKES TO keep things simple where window controls are concerned, which is why you don’t get very many of them. You can minimize a window to the Dock by clicking the yellow button or by using the keyboard shortcut. You can switch to fullscreen mode with the green button (or by pressing, or maximize its size for its content by holding a when you click. Beyond this, you’re on your own. Which is perhaps fine if you live in fullscreen mode, but not if you spend far too much time attempting to manage a mess of windows on your screen. This partially changes in the upcoming OS X 10.11 update, El…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.6 or later, Syncthing LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 30 minutes THERE ARE MYRIAD ways you can keep data in sync across two or more Macs, but if you’re worried about security or cost, a peer-to-peer (P2P) solution is better than a cloud-based service such as iCloud or Dropbox. Until recently our P2P choice was BitTorrent Sync, but concerns over security and privacy coupled with its switch to an expensive freemium model have left people looking for an alternative. That alternative is Syncthing. It’s completely free and open source, plus it offers a more transparent and secure way of connecting your Macs. It’s still in its infancy and a little rough around the edges. But it has all the core functionality you need and…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.10 or later, Pages, Numbers LEVE L > Medium IT WILL TA KE > One hour IF YOU’VE EVER had to send a letter to multiple recipients, each displaying the recipient’s name and address, possibly with a personalized greeting, you’ll understand the value of mail merge. Mail merge allows you to write a letter once, select the group of people you want to send it to, and allow whatever software you’re using to create and save individual instances of the letter. It’s a lot quicker and less labor-intensive than copying and pasting it yourself. Microsoft Office has the ability to mail merge, but Apple’s iWork apps don’t have it built-in. Fortunately there’s a way to create letter templates in Pages, and a table of names and…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.6 or later, iOS device running iOS 7 or higher, Google Chrome, Chrome Remote Desktop LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 15 minutes APPLE IS INCREASINGLY integrating OS X and iOS, enabling data, files and even half-completed emails to be passed back and forth between your Mac and iOS devices. However, one thing that’s missing from the equation is a built-in means to directly control your Mac using an iPad or iPhone. Plenty of remote desktop options exist, but Google’s is entirely free and, during our testing, proved itself to be reliable and robust. The process of getting it up and running is quite involved, but Mac|Life is here to help. This walkthrough assumes you’ve downloaded and installed the free Google Chrome for OS X…

REQUIRES > iPhone or iPad, iOS 8 LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 15 minutes YOUR IPHONE OR iPad use multiple sensors to track your location. By combining data from GPS, Wi-Fi and mobile phone cell towers (though the non-cellular iPad is limited to Wi-Fi), it can create a pretty accurate picture of where you are. But, very reasonably, there may be occasions when you want to keep your location data private. Fortunately, iOS 8 makes it very easy to give and revoke permission for apps to access location data – and it makes it very clear when your location is being shared, with which apps. The first thing to note is that newly installed apps must ask you for permission if they want to access location data. This…