Innehållsförteckning för October 2020 från MacLife

Sayonara Wild Hearts Apple Arcade ($4.99 a month) From Simogo, simogo.com/work/sayonara-wild-hearts Made for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV Needs, iOS 13 or later DESCRIBED BY ITS developers as a “pop album video game,” Sayonara Wild Hearts is a surreal, dreamlike game where you race motorbikes, dance battle and shoot lasers to restore balance to the universe. It’s not your traditional shoot ‘em up or racing game, but if you’re a fan of Japanese anime culture then you’ll feel right at home here. The motorbike and skateboard rides in particular are spectacular, and the game can be enjoyed on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV thanks to Apple Arcade. You’ll need to sign up for a subscription to Apple Arcade to play it, but that’s free for your first month. “The game delivers…

WHETHER YOU SUBSCRIBE to Apple Music or keep it old–school with your own collection on your Mac, the Music app — introduced in macOS Catalina — is your go–to program for all your musical needs. Much like the old iTunes app, Music enables you to rip, play, sync, stream and download your tunes, watch music videos and buy items from the iTunes Store. What the Music app doesn’t do is provide a home for your movies, home movies, TV shows, podcasts or audiobooks anymore — these have been hived off into separate apps named, unsurprisingly enough, TV, Podcasts, and Books. This guide will explain how to make the most of them too. So, open your Mac, fire up the Music app and read our 14–page ultimate guide. There’s plenty here…

OUR MUSIC LIBRARY is managed on your Mac by a database, previously called iTunes.itl and now called Music Library.musiclibrary. This references a folder, officially “the Music Media folder” but actually just called Music, which by default lives in your macOS user account’s home folder. Music files you import can be stored here or left elsewhere. Then there are tracks from the iTunes Store. In the Library views, an item you’ve purchased on the iTunes account you’re signed into, but haven’t downloaded, is identified by a cloud icon. If you play it, it’ll stream from Apple’s servers. If you click the cloud, the file downloads to your Music folder and in future will play from there, whether or not you’re signed in or online. If you have Apple Music, tracks added…

From $15/month From Clario Tech, clario.co Needs macOS 10.12 or later, iOS 11.0 or later Security suites are a dime a dozen, but even allowing for the fact that Clario is a Mac–focused product at launch — currently available only on macOS, iOS and Android — it still manages to carve itself a unique niche in this crowded marketplace. Clario firmly targets itself at those who know little about security, but who know they’re at risk whenever they venture online. As a result, Clario’s core security technologies — anti–malware (Mac only), VPN, ad–blocker, and databreach monitor — are kept firmly in the background. Its innovative approach is evident the moment you run the program for the first time. Instead of being confronted with a dashboard telling you what levels of…

$99.99 From Hitcase, hitcase.com Features 3x lenses (SuperWide, Wide, and Macro), carry case, clip If you want to up your iPhone photography game, this lens bundle should be just the ticket. The clip, which allows you to attach each lens, is easy to install (it can be attached with or without an iPhone case) and can be mounted vertically or horizontally — good for portrait or landscape shots, and it can even be used on the front–facing camera. The OneClip lens bundle comes with three lenses: SuperWide, Wide, and Macro. The former is a fisheye lens which gives you loads of detail throughout the entire field of view, with only a 16mm minimum focusing distance and no vignette effect. The Wide lens gives you about twice the viewing detail as…

1 Garmin Drivesmart 65 $299.99, garmin.com The Drivesmart 65 builds Alexa support right into it. You can ask for directions, or use any Alexa feature you like. You get hands–free calling, full North American map regions, and it’s a good size. 2 Roav VIVA Pro $72.99, goroav.com This two–port 12V charger gives access to Google Assistant even when your phone is locked; connect it via Bluetooth or an aux cable to your car stereo, and it’ll pipe your tunes right in. Neat, tidy, and pretty cheap. 3 Nextbase 522GW $259.99, nextbase.com One of the best dash cams you can buy, with great resolution, a strong suite of safety features, automatic emergency calling and, yes, Alexa built in. The camera features are great, and having Alexa is a bonus.…

We’ve looked at Loup Ventures’ research in these pages before, and the company’s most recent suite of AI IQ tests has determined that the Google Assistant is the smartest thing going. That’s both in its digital assistant form (as in when accessed through a phone) and when powering a smart speaker. It understands best, and it provides relevant responses most frequently. That said, each time Loup Ventures does a new test, every major platform improves a little; Alexa took the “most improved” crown in the most recent suite. Too bad for Siri? Not so fast! It seems that Apple’s assistant is, by their metrics, by far the smartest in the “command” category, which relates to its ability to perform on–phone functions like texting, calling, and emailing. We’re not surprised, as…

As you’ll see from your other Microsoft Office apps, the current version should be at least 16.37, but that copy of Outlook dates back to March 2020. Microsoft released an update to the Office AutoUpdate app in April with a bug which has caused some installations to get stuck and not update properly. Depending on how you purchased and installed the apps you may need to download individual app updates to work around this; some users have had to abandon AutoUpdate altogether as a result. Fixed versions of Microsoft AutoUpdate are available from bit.ly/ml172msftapd. Version 4.23 or later should restore full function, but it seems to work best when you start up your Mac daily, and not so well if you only restart every couple of weeks. You can always…

Router firewalls are designed to block incoming connections from outside your local network, according to the port that they use. They’re essential to protect Macs and devices on your local network from intruders. The software firewall in macOS, controlled through its tab in Security & Privacy, does a similar job, but only for that Mac, and doesn’t protect other devices on your local network. That software firewall is ideal when your Mac is accessing the internet away from the protection of your normal router’s firewall, perhaps when using free Wi–Fi in a public place. But you shouldn’t normally need to use it when you know it’s protected by a good firewall in the router. There’s another type of software firewall: apps like Little Snitch and the free Lulu from bit.ly/ml172lulu…

REQUIRES You’ll need a MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro YOU WILL LEARN Where to find your battery’s condition status and how to make it last longer IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes BATTERY LIFE IS the Achilles heel of any laptop and, while Apple has made huge strides with batteries, there’s always room for improvement. That’s why it introduced an iPhone–style Battery Health feature in macOS 10.15.5, although you’ll only see it if your laptop has Thunderbolt 3 ports: older Macs don’t have the necessary hardware. Battery Health monitors your battery temperature and its charging patterns, and it optimizes charging to make your battery last as long as possible. We don’t mean last as long as possible between charges, we mean last as long as possible before you have to…

REQUIRES iPad running iPadOS YOU WILL LEARN How to customize the Control Center in iPadOS IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes CONTROL CENTER IS one of the most useful but perhaps also one of the most under–used features in iPadOS. Not many people realize how handy it can be and that you don’t have to stick to the default controls. There is much more to Control Center than adjusting volume or brightness, or turning Wi–Fi or Bluetooth on and off. Whether you want to use the Home app to switch a light on, scan a QR code, or make a recording of your iPad’s screen, you can do it all from Control Center — with a little bit of customization. In addition to choosing which features are accessible, you can configure…

REQUIRES iOS 11 or later, something to play or sing YOU WILL LEARN How to master Music Memos IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes IF YOU’RE MUSICALLY minded, you’ve probably used Voice Memos to capture ideas. But while it’s a great app it’s also very basic. Apple’s Music Memos for iPhone and iPad takes Voice Memos and adds stacks of musician–friendly features to create a brilliantly useful app for guitarists and piano players. The first thing you’ll need to do is record your idea — and you can ensure it’s in tune thanks to the app’s built–in acoustic tuner that works for all kinds of stringed instruments. When you play, Music Memos works out what chords or notes you’re playing and enables you to add bass and drums to it. These…

APPLE IS AN international company, but it’s also one of the most American entities imaginable. This tends to be most obvious whenever Maps gets an upgrade and certain US cities get new mapping first, while even somewhere as rich and populous as Europe gets updated months or even a year later. A lot of the decisions made feel US–first. Take the Apple Car — yes, cars are used everywhere but the US has a unique relationship with the gas–guzzler. Apple likes to solve problems, and wanting to give control of regular long drives to a computer to free up time is a very American thing. To create a self–driving car is a very “skate to where the puck is going” concept, and so is quite Apple-y, but that’s not the…

CATALINA MAY HAVE split media across separate apps, but for music little has changed. All songs and playlists from the iTunes library on your Mac are imported when you first run the new app. This might include tracks you ripped from CDs, bought as MP3s, or bounced from the masters that time you collaborated with Skepta. As before, you can use File > Import to add more files from any connected storage, or even import CDs if your Mac has access to a CD drive (see bit. ly/impfcds). Music > Prefs > Files > Import Settings affects new but not previous imports. You should see all the music you’ve previously bought from iTunes. If not, make sure you’re signed in to your iTunes account on the Account menu and that…

THE TV APP feels stuck between the old iTunes and the Music interface. The tabs across the top show iTunes Store content, except for Library, which brings up a sidebar like Music’s. In Watch Now, Up Next picks from your library and the iTunes Store. To remind yourself to watch something, click to open it in any Store view and click Add to Up Next at the bottom–left. The only way to add an item from your library is to start it playing, then close it. There’s no Playing Next queue. Your video library lives by default in ~/Movies/TV/Media along with its database, TV Library. tvlibrary. All videos you import via File > Import are classed as Home Videos and appear in that tab. To change this, right–click an item,…

$4.99 From Ngoc Luu, goodlinks.app Made for Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs macOS 10.15 or later; iOS 13.0 or later Read–later apps Instapaper and Pocket make it easy to save articles for consumption at a more convenient time. Although both migrated to mobile from existing web services, a new breed of apps skip this step. With its minimalist UI, GoodLinks feels a lot like a read–later app Apple might have built, taking full advantage of technologies baked into macOS and iOS — sharing extensions and iCloud sync, for example — to deliver a unified experience. This approach extends to the developer’s business model: thanks to Apple’s new Universal Purchase, a single $4.99 payment unlocks the app across desktop and mobile, no subscription required. We’re big fans of this approach,…

Free (IAPs) From Gregor Pichler, punktapp.me Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 13.0 or later ◾Ever since the first cave dweller scrawled on a wall, humans have wanted to record our experiences. There are many journalling apps in the App Store, but few are as simple as Punkt. In Punkt, you post one sentence to describe your day. You can tag it with a mood and assign it to a category so, for example, you might have felt awesome because you were with friends. You can link the entry to a Maps location, and if you’re a subscriber you can add photos too. Subscribing also enables you to edit your posts and make more than one post per day. If you wish, the app can remind you to…

It’s easy to take attractive photos with your iPhone thanks to all the wizardry Apple does behind the scenes, such as improving exposure, ironing out shaky shots, and nailing that focus. And it’s simple to edit photos to adjust your framing or make them a bit brighter. That’s all expected, but with the right apps your iPhone can do things in photos that you never imagined. You can add lighting into a picture in 3D, change the focus after you’ve shot, scan negatives to turn them into regular digital photos, and more. Let’s look at some cool photo tools. When you take a Portrait Mode shot, a 3D map of it is created. This app exploits that fact to enable you to place new light into your shots, as if…

1 Sonos One $199, sonos.com It should come as no surprise that the room–filling Sonos One is an exciting compact smart speaker. You can’t help but notice it; there are cheaper options, but the additional multiroom expertise inside may be worth the extra expense. 2 Bose Portable Home Speaker $349.95, bose.com Bose’s all–in–one device has a handle so you can cart the smarts around with you — as long as you’re within Wi–Fi range. It’s loud, water resistant, has a big battery, and it too is multiroom ready. 3 Sonos Move $399, sonos.com Sonos has its own “portable,” the Move, though at over twice the weight of Bose’s smartie it’s more of a luggable. There’s a weight to its sound as well as its form, and dual–assistant support means it’s…

HOW CAN I TURN COVID–19 EXPOSURE LOGGING ON? If your iPhone is running iOS 13.5 or later, look in Settings > Privacy > Health. However, this is only available if you’re in a region in which it’s supported. That normally means a country which has an approved app to access it, and you will need to install that app too before it can work. HOW TO CORRECT THE CLOCK IN MY iPHONE? Ensure your phone has a good Wi–Fi or cellular internet connection. Open Settings > General > Date & Time and turn Set Automatically off. Wait a few seconds, then turn it back on again. This should force your phone to resync with its internet time source, and display the correct time once again. HOW BEST TO WATCH STREAMED…

Photos has many changes in Catalina, not all of them free of problems. Try clicking on the Duration button, which looks like a stopwatch, and adjust the settings there. Surprisingly those vary between different themes, and changing the theme could either solve the issue or let you fix the settings. The next step is more time–consuming: create a new slideshow using the images and video, and see if that works better. If not, open the clips in your video editor and check their settings. Saving them to fresh files might help. If you’re still stumped, contact Apple Support as it may be a bug.…

Both macOS and iOS now provide detailed listings of what is held in your iCloud storage. In macOS, open the Apple ID pane and at its foot click on the Manage button. After a moment loading, it shows a detailed breakdown by app; it then suggests ways to reduce used space for each item. iPhones and iPads offer similar through Settings > [Apple ID] > iCloud > Manage Storage. These won’t be the same — each Mac and device also has its own data as well as that common to all that can access that account. Some but not all of these files are also visible in the Finder’s iCloud Drive. The free tool Cirrus from bit.ly/ml172cirrus lets you explore what’s in those and other hidden folders in more detail.…

REQUIRES Luminar 4, an image file YOU WILL LEARN How to use Luminar’s tools to enhance and improve portraits IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes THERE ARE MANY things to consider when shooting portraits of people, and you will want to start by shooting in good light, with a natural–looking subject on a sympathetic background. Even great Raw images will need some post–production, and less–great ones considerably more. That’s where Luminar comes in. It has a whole section of tools dedicated to manual as well as AI–assisted portrait enhancement. The artificial intelligence can really help a lot if you’re not an experienced retoucher, since it’s able to automatically detect which areas of an image contain skin, eyes, lips, teeth, and more. You can even change head shape or remove shimmer from…

REQUIRES An iOS device, the Readwise app YOU WILL LEARN How to import, memorize, and organize ebook highlights and notes IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes READING EBOOKS CAN be thought–provoking, inspiring, and educational, prompting us to highlight memorable passages and take copious notes alongside them. Before we know it, though, we end up with an unassailable mountain of highlights that we never actually read, defeating the whole point of saving notes in the first place. Readwise aims to change that by making highlights much more accessible. Instead of being confronted with a heap of unsorted notes from your favorite books and articles, Readwise “surfaces” selected quotes in the app and in a round–up email every day, giving you a manageable digest of information that will help you memorize key passages…

I’m writing to report an issue that I am experiencing with my MacBook after following the guide on how to install Sidecar on a non–compatible MacBook Pro. I followed each step, however once everything was done and I restarted, Finder would not open anymore. It went into a loop where you couldn’t even force it to quit and reopen. I’ve spent a few hours on the phone with Apple support and the only thing left for me to do is to try to restore the data via an external drive. While I appreciate it to be my fault for not having done a backup before, I would suggest putting a big warning on those sort of guides in future for users, in case things go wrong. I hope this heads–up…

ALL PODCASTS SUPPORTED by Apple are free, and found in the Browse and Top Charts tabs. Clicking through to a podcast gives you a Subscribe button, which adds all new episodes to your library as they appear; or click the “+” for an episode to add it alone. You can stream any episode or click the cloud to download it. macOS hides your library database and downloaded files in a cache folder. There are no playlists, but as long as Podcasts > Preferences > Advanced > Sync subscriptions across devices is selected, your library syncs via iCloud. This doesn’t require Apple Music or iTunes Match. For iOS and iPadOS, select Sync Podcasts in Settings > Podcasts, and set a Download Episodes option if you want new episodes ready for offline…

$39 From iterate, mountainduck.io Needs macOS 10.12 or later, 64–bit processor Mountain Duck would like to be your one–tool–fits–all for accessing cloud storage. It’s a souped–up version of the free Cyberduck application, adding Finder integration to supported services, which include a variety of cloud storage providers, plus FTP and WebDAV. Version 4’s highlight is the ability to view the progress of the current file being synced, along with a list of recently changed files on the computer and server. This is accessed via the main drop–down menu, which is becoming rather unwieldy with all the extra features being added. Elsewhere, changes are less radical. Microsoft Office and LibreOffice documents open in read–only mode if they’re already open elsewhere, and you can now add labels to bookmarks, which then ensures they’re…

Free (Starter Plan) From Connectify, speedify.com Made for Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs OS X 10.10 or later; iOS 10.0 or later The COVID–19 pandemic forced many of us to work remotely from home, a challenge for those without the proper setup. Even with plentiful bandwidth, video calls can be a connectivity and buffering minefield. Speedify 10 addresses this problem with “channel bonding,” which allows more than one available internet connection to supply bandwidth to your Mac and iOS devices. This can be almost any combination of Ethernet, Wi–Fi, or cellular data — as long as you have internet access, Speedify can improve it. We installed the free app on our home office iMac, where Speedify automatically bonded the available Ethernet and Wi–Fi. Although both connections came from the…

Every smart assistant, like every computer platform, is different — your Mac is not the same as someone else’s Windows PC or Linux box. Although they share a vast amount in terms of concept and design, while they might use some of the same components or even (technically) some of the same underlying code, they’re distinct. They’re powered by very different engines, they have different levels of knowledge available to them, and they have different hardware makeup and methods of connectivity. But one thing does tie Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and minor assistants like Bixby and Cortana together: they can all be as dumb as a rock when they feel like it! SAY WHAT? Whichever platform you’ve staked your claim on, whether it’s Siri or not, there are things you…

Email Mac|Life at ask@maclife.com To make a faithful backup, as Time Machine and other backup apps do, the disk that you’re storing your backups on needs to support all the features used in the original files. Few cloud services provide those, and Dropbox has limitations which make it unsuitable for storage of Photos libraries which can break their backups. Photos libraries are really folders containing images, thumbnails, databases, and more. There are known problems which may arise in syncing changes in images and databases which can at best cause strange effects, and at worst can make a restored library unusable. Another common problem with cloud storage is that it doesn’t support metadata such as extended attributes, used by many Mac files. Even iCloud limits which metadata it handles. One way…

Apple introduced this new battery health management system in the macOS 10.15.5 update, but it doesn’t give the user any more information about or control over their battery. It also doesn’t apply to older models of MacBook Pro, but is available on all those with T1 or T2 chips and some recent models without them. Its purpose is to prolong the lifespan of your Mac’s battery before it needs to be replaced, which it does by reducing the maximum charge given to the battery as it ages. That also means that your Mac may not be able to run as long on battery alone, which is a trade–off you control by enabling or disabling this in its Energy Saver pane, when you click on the Battery Health… button at its…

Your fundamental problem is that your home now has two different Wi–Fi networks, both trying to use the same frequencies on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, with two different IP sub–nets, and two different DHCP servers. They are tripping over one another, and you should simplify them by running just one, your new mesh network. You could possibly get away with running the networks together if you set one to operate on 2.4GHz and the other on 5GHz, then segregating your devices. You would still need to address the DHCP server conflict, and the network would be more complex to manage. If you’re getting good coverage with the mesh system, it’s better to switch to using that alone, particularly as AirPort Express was discontinued two years ago.…

REQUIRES A Fantastical subscription, macOS 10.13 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to create and manage calendar sets in Fantastical IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes Calendar sets add flexibility to your daily and weekly outlook FANTASTICAL HAS AN excellent weapon in its arsenal: calendar sets. These let you quickly change tasks and events that you see on your calendar, adding useful flexibility to your daily and weekly outlook. That means instead of a single calendar that’s crowded with work, personal and family tasks, you can separate your events into different sets and view each set individually. That helps to keep you organized and prevents you from feeling overwhelmed by your schedule. INTERESTING CALENDARS A lot of calendar apps include public holidays and anniversaries, and Fantastical is no different. But Flexibits’…

Syncing your content from online services to Readwise is easy, but there’s one exception that takes a bit more work: Apple Books. First, download the Readwise Mac tool from readwise.io and install it. Launch the app and let it sync your Books highlights and notes. When it’s done, open Readwise on iOS and your Books highlights should have appeared. Be aware that if you’ve saved notes to a PDF using Preview, then imported it into Books, these notes will not transfer to Readwise. You need to make the notes in the Books app itself.…

IN THE MID–1990S, Apple was struggling. CEO Michael Spindler’s one major achievement was to form a partnership with IBM and Motorola that resulted in the PowerPC processor, giving the Power Macintosh range higher performance than comparable Intel–based PCs. But the machines, produced by a complex international manufacturing chain using many parts that differed from contemporary industry standards, were too expensive and incompatible to capture more than a few percent of the personal computer market. Yet, with their pale beige plastic cases, they were barely distinguishable from cheaper generic PCs. Perhaps the problem with the Mac was the Mac? Its operating system, System 7, was well–established and highly regarded. Some users modified PCs with illegal copies of the Apple ROM chips required to run it, and from time to time companies…