Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2016 från MacLife

HANDS UP: I’m completely addicted to Star Trek Timelines on iOS. It’s the last thing I do before I go to sleep, and the first thing I do when I wake up. It’s a love letter for fans of the franchise. And as a woman Trek fan, I deeply appreciate that Dax, Seven and Mirror Empress Sato are front and center alongside the likes of Captain Kirk and Picard. And yet, tonight I find myself asking if I should call my contacts at Apple and warn them about the game’s chat feature, which is an embarrassing, unmoderated frat house. Open chat in this game, which is recommended for your 12-yearold, regularly includes lurid sexual fantasies about women Trek characters, racist jokes, descriptions of self-pleasure, and even sexual threats against players…

CHUNKY There are loads of comic apps for iPad, but most are little more than awkward readers for storefronts. Chunky is a standalone app for reading DRM-free content. We love the app for its excellent feature set, which includes support for a wide range of storage services, smart upscaling of lower-res content, optional contrast and tint fixes for faded pages, and the means to disable the page-turn transitions. NOVATION LAUNCHPAD If you recoil in horror on seeing a piano roll or hearing the word “MIDI,” you can still create music on your iPad. This app has you select from eight free genres and then play – and, if you like, record – a mix by tapping on a grid to combine loops, sounds and effects. It’s so simple a sixmonth-old…

TOUCHPRESS > There’s an air of old-school CD-ROM about this semiinteractive classical music app. Watch a “beat map” and “note fall” alongside a performance, revealing the secrets behind the music. Shared videos can be explored and interacted with. PLEX > Although previous Apple TVs enabled streaming from network storage via a convoluted mix of iPhone apps and AirPlay, you can now enjoy native PLEX on Apple’s latest hardware. Set-up is simple, and the app looks superb on your TV, with added artwork for all your movies and TV shows. FLICKR > Bringing photos to life on the big screen has long been part of Apple TV, whether through the screensaver or the Flickr app. On the new Apple TV, this revamped Flickr enables you to view your uploads, turn any…

$4.99 Developer Bloop SRL, airmailapp.com Platform Optimized for iPhone 6 Requirements iOS 9 or later We were recently quite smitten with Airmail, a thirdparty Mac email client that checked off nearly everything on our wish list (and then some). As good as it is, one thing was missing: a companion mobile app, which has finally landed on the virtual shelves of the App Store. Nearly everything we liked about Airmail for Mac is present on iPhone, including message snooze capabilities and bulk editing. There are also plenty of nice touches, such as the ability to attach files from popular cloud services or send details to other apps, including favorites such as Deliveries, Evernote, and Fantastical 2. If you’re already using Airmail for Mac, getting started on iPhone is a snap…

$3.99 Developer Fiplab Ltd, fiplab.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later Ever wonder what’s going on inside your iOS device? StatsCenter peeks under the hood, but only as much as Apple allows (which isn’t much). When launched, the app’s sole purpose is to display real-time statistics on the current device: battery level, storage, memory, CPU, network activity, and other basic information. StatsCenter is optimized for iPhone 6 and iPad Pro displays, so everything looks crisp and clear. A few statistics can be expanded in greater detail – for example, tapping CPU reveals a live graph on what each processor core is up to. Memory, network, and storage statistics can also be displayed in real time as Today widgets from Notification Center. THE BOTTOM LINE. If you’re an information junkie,…

$4.99 Developer Thunderbox Ent, thunderboxentertainment.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7 or later iOS board game conversions can be pretty hit and miss, but Tsuro deserves to be held up as an example of how to do it right. It helps when the game itself is great fun, of course, and Tsuro’s combination of clever strategy and accidental disaster always plays well. In it, you choose a stone totem as your avatar, and place it on a line around the edge of the board – as does everyone else. Players then draw three cards with various lines drawn on them, and you place one in front of your totem to create a path for it. As soon as you place the card, your totem slides along that path. The goals are…

$1.99 Developer Ivan Brazhnikov, facebook.com/cameracomplete Platform Universal, watchOS Requirements iOS 9 or later Apple’s Camera app on the Watch lets you remotely see what your iPhone is pointing at and then trigger a shutter, either immediately or after a three second delay. Like everything from Apple, it’s simple, it offers little opportunity for tweaking, but it’s robust and easy to use. As ever, though, third parties are offering alternatives with more control and customization. With Camera Complete, you can manually adjust the camera’s shutter speed, sensitivity (ISO), focus distance and white balance on the Watch, all while seeing what effect your changes are having. But the execution here leaves a lot to be desired. Tap on one of the adjustments and you can use the Digital Crown to change it,…

$19 Developer Paintstorm Studio, paintstormstudio.com Requirements OS X 10.7 or later, nVidia GeForce 8800/Radeon x1900 or higher Should you be looking to dabble with some digital painting or sketching, Paintstorm, which is available on iOS as well as this Mac app, may well be the best way for you to start or improve your life as a digital artist. Firstly, it runs really smoothly. Even on an old 13-inch MacBook Pro, moving palettes and resizing gave us no problems, and even the most complex brush stroke had minimum lag. Things did slow a little when working with large canvasses and many layers, but not to the point of being unworkable. Most painting applications offer the same basic functionality, from the simplest stroke or eraser to more complex gradients or perspective…

$99 Developer Rogue Amoeba, rogueamoeba.com Requirements OS X 10.9 or higher Loopback is a Mac utility that creates an unlimited number of virtual device configurations for sending audio between apps, and even allows multiple sources to be combined into one, for easy recording. It works with any app that outputs audio, as well as devices which connect to the Mac, such as USB microphones or video capture boxes. After adding a New Virtual Device and assigning a custom name, add one or more audio devices or applications. Finally, select the new virtual device in your target software, which can include Skype, GarageBand, or countless others. Audio channels are automatically mapped when added, but can be manually configured by dragging the desired channel(s) from Audio Sources. This kind of customization is…

$350 Manufacturer Ricoh, theta360.com Resolutions 5376x2688 (stills), 1920x960 (spherical panoramic video) Storage 8GB Connectivity USB, Wi-Fi This is the year of panoramas; trust us, the virtual reality planets are aligning. A number of VR cameras have become available recently, but Ricoh’s new Theta S is the easiest and most flexible 360° panoramic camera currently available. It’s a slim black device with two bulbous fisheye lenses, positioned opposite each other. Expect jokes about the Men in Black Neuralyzer device when you use it, and expect utter incredulity when you show people the results. Push the button that sits under your thumb and a complete “spherical” (all the way up and down, as well as around) 360° photo is taken in one go, or a spherical video starts recording. It really is…

$39 Manufacturer Satechi, satechi.net Dimensions 15.8x8.3x1.7 in This is exactly what it sounds like: a solid aluminum monitor stand, for not a bad price at all. It comes in silver, Space Gray, and gold – which match the corresponding 12-inch MacBook, iPad, or iPhone pretty well. Despite the color match, we’re not sure that it would be our first choice for a MacBook stand, though – it’s not very tall, so doesn’t raise the screen that far, and it’s a solid piece so there’s no option to adjust the height. It’s a good size for sitting a keyboard and mouse under, or a slimmer external hard drive, but a lot of KVM switches wouldn’t fit, for example. It can support up to 31 lbs but the top surface area is…

A pple giveth and Apple taketh away. The new, fourthgeneration Apple TV has an App Store and the cool, voice-activated Siri Remote. However, for some reason Apple decided to remove the optical audio output (also known as Toslink) that was a feature of the third-generation Apple TV. That shouldn’t be a problem for most people, because the HDMI interface that connects the box to your HDTV is capable of outputting a digital audio signal, including 5.1 and 7.1 audio for surroundsound speaker systems. Most current HDTVs have their own audio output connectors that will enable you to route digital audio from the Apple TV to a set of external speakers. However, audiophiles who use a separate amp or receiver may still prefer to have an additional output. The good news…

Free The concept of shopping from your television is nothing new – the folks at QVC have been doing it for years. But now retailers such as Macy’s are getting into the game with a new Apple TV app that allows shoppers to browse the latest styles and hottest trends from the comfort of their living room. Macy’s m can’t actually be used to make purchases; instead, you click the heart icon to mark favorites, which can be then be paid for in a few clicks from any web browser. You can also sync Apple TV favorites with an on-screen PIN after signing in with either a new or pre-existing Macys.com account. Content is updated on a seasonal basis, and sorted into categories like Knit Picks, Wrap Artist, Top Coats,…

Free Electronic Arts roars out of the garage with a huge update to Real Racing 3, delivering fun to the big screen natively on your Apple TV for the first time ever – you could play on Apple TV in the past, but only over AirPlay. Featuring a big roster of licensed tracks, a 22-car grid, and more than 100 remarkably detailed cars from leading manufacturers. The update makes this already console-quality game even more like the real thing. Existing user data syncs via iCloud (you can even pick up where you left off on iOS) and there’s support for Party Play mode, where up to four local players can participate at once using a combination of Siri Remote, iOS devices, and third-party Bluetooth controllers. The latest update also includes…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.11 LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 5 minutes IN PAST EDITIONS of OS X, Notes felt like no more than a basic tool for syncing thoughts and flashes of inspiration between your Mac and iOS devices. No wonder the lure of rivals such as Evernote proved irresistible for so many. With the move to El Capitan, Apple re-thought this, pulling Notes to bits and starting from scratch. It still synchronizes with iOS devices through your iCloud account, but now goes far beyond simple lines of text. It’s fully tooled to act as a repository for everything that matters day to day, whether that be the shopping lists, jobs, and recipes (to which it has always been suited), or the photos, maps and grabs it…

ON APRIL 1 1976, Apple was officially founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. 40 years on, none of those men is still at the company they pulled together in Paul and Clara Jobs’ garage (in fact, Wayne left just two weeks later!), but looking at Apple now, it’s clear that what they were building in that garage was much more than computers. Very few companies manage to stay on the leading of edge of their industry the way that Apple has. Over 40 years, it led advances in so many technology areas that it’s hard to keep up – from making computers accessible to all, to enabling desktop publishing, to pioneering digital photography, to kickstarting the touchscreen revolution, to pushing networking for all… from big game-changing innovations…

A LONG-HELD (and hailed) characteristic of Apple is its tendency to be a lone wolf. Aside from a few exceptions, Apple Thinks Different™ and builds its own products on its own terms. But in recent years, Apple has been opening up and partnering on products in ways it hasn’t before. There are ways I could see this become a problem down the road, but overall I’m excited for the potential of Apple collaboration. Of course, Apple has worked with plenty of companies in the past. The iPhone needs third-party cellular networks, and the company has helped an entire industry of accessory makers in various ways. But it feels like this is a new chapter in Apple’s attitude towards partnering with, and helping, other companies in the name of success. EXHIBIT…

DUOLINGO Learning languages can be tricky, so this app transforms the process into a bitesized game. Select a language from over 20, then work your way through exercises that test recognition of words and phrases. Before long, you’ll favor extending your learning streak over wasting time on Facebook or Candy Crush. FORECAST A weather app for people who like the look of Dark Sky, just not its cost, Forecast is about hyperlocal forecasting. You get fast access to current conditions, imminent rainfall, and predictions for the next week. It’s a web app – the sole one included here – so visit forecast.io in Safari and add it to your Home screen. OVERCAST Overcast is worth grabbing as an alternative to Apple’s Podcasts because it’s packed full of features designed to…

TOUCHCAST STUDIO This app makes videos people can touch. Pick your content – web pages, photos, moving footage – then add annotations and use studio features, such as the built-in teleprompter and green-screen effect. Shared videos can be explored and interacted with. The app’s simple to use, and the iPad Pro’s large screen is great for editing. PIGMENT A coloring app for iPad Pro might seem odd, but Pigment’s great when you need to unwind. Particularly with an Apple Pencil, the tools feel great and look the part, mixing tactile realism with digital efficiency — you can, optionally, select sections of artwork so you don’t go over the lines! ADOBE COMP CC This app is all about wireframing layouts for print, web and mobile. Shapes, placeholders, images and text frames…

JOHN SCULLEY, APPLE’S CEO from 1983 to 1993, was president of Pepsi when Steve Jobs famously lured him to Apple by asking him, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want a chance to change the world?” It’s exactly 40 years since Apple Computer was incorporated on 1 April 1976, and over the course of those 40 years Apple has changed the world many times over. We’re not talking about accomplishments such as the first 17-inch notebook, or the biggest, smallest or fastest whatever. No, we’re talking about new ways of doing things. Paradigm shifts. Rewriting the rules. So, we’ll begin by seeing how Apple laid down many of the foundations of personal computing as we know it. Then we’ll look…

$4.99 Developer Samer Azzam, procamapp.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8.0 or later This peculiar grab-bag of tools for taking and editing photos and videos with your iPhone or iPad, lacks polish, but it might contain just the things you need… Like many other “pro” camera apps, ProCam lets you set exposure, shutter, ISO, focus and white balance manually – in a slightly fiddly but usable manner – as well as changing the aspect ratio and showing a range of grids (including golden ratio) to help compose dynamic shots. You can save in TIFF rather than JPEG, turn geotagging on/off, and burn copyright and/or location info into the picture itself. Some features miss the mark for pros; the histogram is coarse and only shows overall light, not per-channel levels, and the…

$4.99 Developer Agile Tortoise, agiletortoise.com Platform Universal Requirements OS 9.1 or later Once you’ve found your way round, this app offers some of the key features sadly missing from Apple’s built-in Contacts app. It just takes a bit of getting used to. For example, one of the app’s standout facilities is Scratchpad, which enables you to copy text from email signatures, websites and other apps and paste them in to add to or create a new contact. Brilliant. It’s just not immediately obvious where it is. Once you know it’s the stick figure with lines, you just select details from your chosen source and hit Create Contact. From then on, it’s easy and useful, and worked every time. One of the biggest omissions in the Contacts app is the fact…

99¢ Developer Mark Cotterill, facebook.com/NoteTapper Platform iPhone, watchOS Requirements iOS 9.2 or later We were all ready to call this stupid and pointless; it’s an alphanumeric keyboard on a screen about an inch and a half across, for crying out loud. One, moreover, that doesn’t work anywhere but within the Note Tapper app, since watchOS doesn’t have the ability to swap out input methods system-wide. But there actually is something here. The shtick is that you may be somewhere either out of range of your phone and so can’t use Siri, or are somewhere you just don’t want to – yet you still want to note something down. The lowercase-only, alphabetically arranged keyboard doesn’t even all fit on screen – you scroll it up and down with the Digital Crown…

$59 Manufacturer Firaxis Games/Feral Interactive, feralinteractive.com Requirements OS X 10.11.2 or later, 2.4GHz processor, 4GB RAM, Nvidia 650ti 1GB/AMD 5770 1GB/Intel Iris Pro or better, 32GB HDD space The first XCOM game was a brilliant turn-based tactical affair of defending the Earth from alien invasion, holding them back one battle at a time using a small, elite team of soldiers. XCOM 2’s premise is that you failed, and it uses this conceit to turn the first game’s setup on its head. The Earth is now under alien control, and you’re the attacking force – flying in a guerilla squad to hit targets and liberate the world. The result is simply one of the best games on the Mac. There are two elements: the strategic level, where you develop your secret…

After keeping third-party developers and apps at arm’s length for years, Apple has finally seen the light and announced that “the future of TV is apps.” By opening up a new App Store on your television, Apple is inviting developers to produce content that simply wasn’t available for previous versions of the device. Of course, the Apple TV by itself is just a little black lump of plastic and metal. You’ll need a few other pieces of equipment to make the most of all your music, video and games, so here’s our guide to the best accessories available for it. It’s not essential to go out and buy a new screen to go with Apple TV, but there’s a lot going on in the TV industry right now, so it’s…

1 Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator samsung.com $5,000 >>> Samsung’s new super-fridge sounds absolutely crazy, but it does make a warped kind of sense. Your current fridge probably has an assortment of notes and reminders stuck on its door, along with pictures drawn by your kids and a selection of animal-shaped magnets. Samsung is simply bringing that idea into the digital age with its new Family Hub Refrigerator. To replace all those bits of paper, this super-fridge has a 21.5-inch HD screen built into one door, and Wi-Fi connectivity that allows it to connect to your home network and become part of the great Internet of Things. You can use the screen to view calendars and notes, display recipes or photos, and you can even watch TV or stream music to…

Free If every day is Halloween in your house, fire up the Apple TV and install Shudder, a new streaming service from cable provider AMC that specializes in the scariest, most gruesome horror flicks ever made. The lineup includes bona fide classics such as Day of the Dead, Hellraiser, and The Evil Dead, along with an eclectic mix from around the world, including international favorites like Deep Red, Black Sunday, and Tombs of the Blind Dead. In the mood for something new but don’t want to spend hours searching through Shudder’s extensive catalog? Collections sorts movies into curated categories like Bad Genes & Killer Kids, Haunted Habitations, and Socko Spoofs, or you can roll the dice with Shudder.tv, which presents a randomized “endless stream of screams.” Best of all, Shudder’s…

LG 55EG9100 $2,000 LG.COM Forget LCD and plasma: LG’s affordable 55EG9100 looks great in bright or dark rooms from any angle, thanks to its vibrant OLED display. Although a 55-inch screen may not be the biggest around in 2016, it’s hard to go wrong with the sleek curves and mere quarter-inch depth, which make it an attractive Apple TV companion. INNOVELIS TOTALMOUNT PRO $29 INNOVELIS.COM If you prefer Apple TV to work without being visible in a home theater, the new TotalMount Pro offers a premium, tool-free solution for mounting the media box (and attached cables) completely out of sight on the back of your HDTV, along with an innovative charging holder for your Siri Remote. It’s available exclusively from Apple.…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.11 LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 15 minutes DELVE INTO System Preferences or the preferences of many Mac apps and you’ll find a lot you can customize. Curiously, though, many commands and features are hidden from you, especially when it comes to Apple’s own apps – unless you know how to enable them, as we’ll see here. Mostly, the commands in this walkthrough require using Terminal, found in /Applications/Utilities. You’ll need to be careful when typing them because even a missing character may result in an error message, though nothing should be harmed. Note that if you want to reverse one of these commands you can; in some cases, do so by entering the same command again, but with capitalized values reversed (so YES…

REQUIRES > Apple’s Photos, Keynote or another app that can export QuickTime movies, iCloud account, iPhone 6s or 6s Plus LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 30 minutes THE ABILITY TO USE A Live Photo as the Lock screen wallpaper on an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus is ripe for fun, but Apple provides no way to use an existing video in this way. It turns out that it’s possible using nothing more than Keynote, Photos and a shared photo album in iCloud. This opens up all sorts of opportunities to turn hand-drawn or computer-generated animations into Lock screen wallpapers, or you may just want to convert an animated GIF of amusing animal antics for when you need a pick-me-up. Note that the crossfade and enlargement from a Live…

I was very disappointed to read that Apple discontinues their support of Macs over seven years old. I have an Early 2009 iMac that I just updated from 4GB to 8GB of RAM. I love my computer and since I am now retired, will not be able to purchase a newer model, nor do I have a need to. I wonder what Apple is thinking! I think they should continue support a lot longer, after all they are built to perfection - a tribute to their product. Maybe they need to consider Senior Geeks like me and keep up the support for a lot more than seven years. BARBARA DICICCO Apple stops supporting models five years after it stops manufacturing them, in fact. Between five and seven years, a product…

SLIME RANCHER $19.99 This is a mix of farm management and exploration. You farm “slimes” (gelatinous creatures), which you find and keep to generate money, which you use to unlock new lands and more exciting slimes. And you control it all with a funky vacuum gun. More areas are coming as it gets developed, but it’s good fun now. VERSION TESTED: 0.2.6 RUN RABBIT RUN! $1.99 Looking for a fast-paced hardcore platformer? In the vein of Super Meat Boy, this game is full of tiny levels that take only a few seconds to complete – assuming you can actually complete them, since they’re full of death traps. We find its controls a little sluggish, with odd momentum to jumps, but there’s loads of game to play. VERSION TESTED: FEB 1…

1 CREED Michael B Jordan, Sylvester Stallone $14.99 One of the most pleasant surprises of last year was this spin-off/torch-passing new film in the Rocky franchise – though labeling it that way does it a disservice, really. It’s much more than just a seventh Rocky film. Jordan plays Adonis Johnson, the son of Rocky’s former rival and friend Apollo Creed, hunting down Stallone’s old boxer to persuade him to become his trainer. They forge a relationship that helps Adonis get to know his father’s life, while Rocky is forced to face his own mortality, and the past friends and family he’s lost. It’s heartfelt, and Stallone’s performance is excellent. 2 LUFTRAUSERS Vlambeer $9.99 This blistering arcade shoot-’em-up has finally found its way onto the Mac App Store, where it can…

1 USE IT WITH SAFARI To use a stored login, tap the Share button, and select 1Password (tap More if it’s not visible, then turn it on). Select the details to use. The app allows you to store multiple logins for sites. 2 SECURE NOTES In the 1Password app, tap Categories and then +. You’ll see a list of the many things you can store securely in it. Tap Secure Notes. You can now create a basic text note outside of Apple Notes. 3 LOGIN DETAILS To edit a login in the 1Password app, tap the item to open it and then tap Edit. 1Password provides you with greater control than iCloud Keychain when generating complex passwords.…

CLICKER We keep hearing that Apple Watch should have a “killer app” – an amazing, advanced, futuristic product to set it apart from other devices. And then we use Clicker and remember Apple Watch is about simple things done well. With this app, you tap to count something: laps; days; people; sheep. Haptic feedback means you needn’t stare at the screen; if you make a mistake, Force Touch brings up a menu to reduce or clear the counter. And there’s a complication to see your number whenever you check the time. CHEATSHEET > Rather than jotting down important but short notes — Wi-Fi passwords, new luggage lock combinations, and so on — on scraps of paper, use Cheatsheet. A list is created on your iPhone — or directly on Apple…

>>> THESE DAYS, A lot of us keep a huge amount of our data in the cloud. Dropbox and iCloud Photo Library mean files are available wherever you are, and on whatever device you’re using. Inevitably, though, there may be some data you don’t want to put there. Sure, you might not be worried about the FBI or the CIA, but maybe you have teenagers who sometimes borrow your iPad or iPhone, or sensitive documents you want stored digitally, but privately. The likes of Tresorit.com offers encrypted cloud storage, but that’s another $12.50 per month on top of all your other commitments – and do you really have enough secrets to warrant paying $150 a year? There is a cheap and easy answer: turn an old Mac that you don’t…

99¢ Developer Quest Mobile, bit.ly/itunes_audrey Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later This is a truly strange app. At a simple level, it’s just a camera app with filters (with more unlockable via In-App Purchase). You get the option to tweak ISO, focus, shutter speed and white balance before you press the shutter by rotating the big on-screen button, and then once you’ve taken a photo you can apply filters or edit it. Editing is where it gets strange. Rather than sliders and buttons, you edit your photos with voice commands, and while that sounds like it could be cool, not only is it tedious and error-prone, but it’s also just… weird. In the hard-to-discover list of suggested phrases we get “My face is a bit blurry please help,” “Great…

$1.99 Developer Appgr8, appgr8.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7.1 or later Police and Russian motorists aren’t the only ones who’ll benefit from cameras mounted to their vehicle dashboards. Road Watcher is a universal app for turning any iPhone, iPod touch, or even iPad into a full-fledged dash cam, and a great way to repurpose old devices you’ve since replaced, if they can run iOS 7.1 or later. All that’s required is a dashboard mount (and power cable; it’s a battery hog) – the app takes care of the rest, capturing up to 60fps video in color or black and white, with or without sound. There are three quality settings, all of which look good for the purpose; recordings include geolocation and map data. Because the app records how fast you’re…

$3.99 Developer Grapefrukt Games, twofoldinc.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7 or later The never-ending conveyor belt of excellent iOS puzzle games continues to drop little gems onto the App Store. Twofold Inc is a game of tracing lines of same-colored blocks in a multi-colored grid, scoring points in order to achieve goal totals for each color, displayed at the top of the screen. The longer the line, the more value it has; every extra block doubles the points it creates. To get longer lines, you’re able to shift the columns and rows in the grid. When you complete a line, it disappears, and new blocks pop into place. Easy, right? Well, there are two wrinkles. First is that you can only successfully make a line if you use every single…

Tough testing, trusted ratings Remember when we used to telephone buildings and hope that somebody was there? Crazy times. These days messaging apps enable us to chat in real time no matter where we are or what we’re doing. Every iPhone and iPad ships with Messages and FaceTime, of course, but third-party apps offer all kinds of additional goodies – not least the ability to chat with people who aren’t using Apple gear. Im the business world, SLACK (Free, Universal) is becoming a very big deal. It’s rather like a private Facebook for the world of work, with teams messaging one another individually and in groups, sharing files, tracking projects and updating their expenses. There’s a great Apple Watch app too. If your work is more like Jason Bourne’s, you…

$2.99 Developer Sang Hyun Jun Platform iPhone, watchOS Requirements iOS 9.0 or later Apple’s Remote app lets you control Apple TVs or iTunes libraries from your iOS device or Watch, but that’s all it can do; it won’t control VLC, QuickTime Player, Spotify, or similar Mac apps. Remote Play will. Indeed, Remote Play can control any media app you want it to, by creating new app profiles through the server app that runs on your Mac, and tying keypresses and shortcuts there to buttons on the Remote Play app. It’s ugly as sin, and lacks user-friendly polish; the server app has to be downloaded (from the iPhone app!) by punching in an IP address on your Mac. The sluggishness of launching apps on watchOS means using it to control media…

$2.99 Manufacturer Angela Liu, techwilder.com Requirements OS X 10.8 or later, 64-bit processor ScreenClone is a super-lightweight tool to take a quick image of something on your screen so you can easily refer to it – just click the menu bar icon and select New Capture (or use the shortcut ç+ß+5 , which ties in nicely with the built-in screengrab shortcuts), drag over the area of the screen you want to grab, and it instantly pops out as a new borderless window. You can then drag it around the screen, and it always stays on top of all other windows. Just double-click it or click the x in the corner to close it. And that’s it. You’re only taking an image of the screen, so you can’t interact with text…

1 SAMSUNG UN48JU6700 $1,100 samsung.com > A big, curved screen with 4K resolution is a little like having your own personal IMAX cinema. This one won’t cost you a fortune either. It packs in a 48-inch screen, Wi-Fi, 20W speakers, and UHD Dimming, which dynamically improves the images’ contrast in localized areas of the screen depending on the picture. 2 SENNHEISER URBANITE XL OVER-EAR $100 sennheiser.com > These great-sounding headphones work with both Bluetooth and wired connections. The padded earpieces are comfortable, and they can be adjusted to get a good fit. They fold flat into a pouch too, which is terrific for traveling. If you’ve got the money, try the Momentum Wireless instead. 3 SONOS PLAYBAR $700 sonos.com > The PlayBar looks like a conventional soundbar, with an elongated…

CARPLAY HASN’T made many headlines lately, but it’s been bolstered by the announcement of new car models that support Apple’s entertainment and navigation system, including a smart new Honda Accord. The biggest CarPlay news for 2016 is Ford’s announcement that all its new models will include the system. If you buy a new Ford in 2016 then CarPlay will be available as an optional extra, and from 2017 onwards it’ll be a standard feature in all models sold in North America, with Europe to follow. However, that pales in comparison to the steady stream of hints that Apple is working on its own self-driving car, codenamed Project Titan. Elon Musk of Tesla Motors recently said: “It’s hard to hide something if you hire over 1,000 engineers to do it.” It…

$4.99 Here’s an educational Apple TV app that actually grows with your children, starting with simple addition and subtraction problems in kindergarten, all the way through elementary school, where learning multiplication and division truly becomes a challenge. Parents can configure the app to match the abilities of the individual student, and MathBoard encourages kids to actually solve problems, rather than simply guess at potential answers. Should they get stuck on a particular math challenge, a handy Problem Solver is ready and waiting to offer assistance whenever the need arises, which walks students through the steps required to tackle addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division equations. MathBoard could very well be the only homework aide your children ever needs. The app also supports multiple student profiles.…

REQUIRES > Affinity Photo, OS X 10.7.5 or higher LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 20 minutes FOR MOST PEOPLE, giving an image the Instagram treatment involves nothing more than tapping a selection of premade filters. What’s really happening is a process known as split-toning, in which dark areas (shadows) and light areas (highlights) of an image are tinted with complementary colors. The result is vintagelooking, filmic photos that look like they’ve come straight from a lo-fi camera. In this part of our Affinity Photo series you’ll create a cross-processed effect from start to finish. By the end, you’ll be able to turn a photo into an Instagram-style classic without relying on automation at all – useful because it will allow you to vary how each of your images…

REQUIRES > iPad or iPhone, version 2.6 or later of Pages, Numbers or Keynote for iOS LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 5 minutes With iOS becoming ever more important, Apple is working hard to beef up its mobile apps. iOS productivity has really come to the forefront since the launch of the iPad Pro, but Apple’s improvements to its key apps have been going on far longer than that. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are the primary beneficiaries, and version 2.6 of each app, released in October 2015, added a key feature to the iOS versions that will be familiar if you’ve used the apps on a Mac: document versioning. In a nutshell, this lets you roll your document back to an earlier state if you decide against an…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.11. Siri Remote, a Mac with Bluetooth 4.0, SiriMote LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 5 minutes THE NEW APPLE TV comes with a brilliant new remote control that has touch controls and integrated Siri commands, but what if you want to use it away from your little black box? Being a Bluetooth device, the Siri Remote can be paired with a Mac, but you will need to install SiriMote (free, bit.ly/mlsirimote) to be able to do anything more with it than test your self-developed apps in Xcode’s Apple TV simulator. SiriMote, from the same developer as Mac|Life favorites Transloader and Yoink, enables anyone to use the Siri Remote with numerous Mac apps, including QuickTime, iTunes, VLC and Keynote. The app translates button presses on…