Innehållsförteckning för May 2016 från MacLife

When Apple finally made a slightly larger phone, I gladly bought the 6 and loved it for a day or two. Then an old bugaboo I’d forgotten about showed its ugly self. Before ranting about it, let me ask if, perhaps, I’m really weird because I want (and need) to be able to name or rename pictures I’ve taken? I cannot in my wildest imagination come up with any reason why someone would think it wise to prevent me from naming my pictures. Is there a logical explanation? I’m happy with my Android phone but would really love to be able to use my iPhone. Yes, I can use my computer to get the job done but, to be completely honest, I don’t believe Apple has ever advertised the iPhone…

THE APP Store user review system, if it can be called that, is a double-edged sword. Many people check reviews to gauge whether to buy an app, and yet the review process is so broken that a lot of user feedback is unwittingly mistaken or just not very useful. Not helping matters, Apple hasn’t done much to improve reviews since the store debuted. Positive change is long overdue, and it can come from Apple, developers, and us. In Apple’s end of the court, there are so many opportunities for it to improve the App Store’s customer review system, just about any change would receive a warm welcome. I am cautiously optimistic too since, as I wrote in my February column, Apple recently shifted store responsibilities from Eddie Cue to Phil…

SMOKE ALARMS PROTECTING YOUR loved ones is easier than ever, thanks to a growing a range of smart smoke alarms that enable you to tell what’s going on in your home – even when you’re not there. The Nest Protect Smoke + CO Alarm ($99, bit.ly/nest_smokealarm), for example, can detect both fast and slow burning fires using two different wavelengths of light to detect smoke. Designed to work for up to 10 years, it immediately alerts you via its companion iOS app in the event of a problem. And it has a built-in Pathlight to light your way – handy if you need to find your way in the night. THERMOSTATS MANUALLY SWITCHING the heating on and off, and up and down, is so last century. Thanks to devices such…

A LONGSIDE iCloud Photo Library in Photo’s preferences, and in Settings on your iOS devices, is My Photo Stream. This is an older method of getting photos taken with your iOS devices onto your Mac without using a cable, and it remains useful on older devices that can’t use iCloud Photo Library. If you aren’t ready to install at least OS X Yosemite on your Mac, or you have a device that’s stuck on a version of iOS prior to 8.3, it allows you to access recent pictures. It can be used as the screen saver on secondgeneration and later Apple TVs. Photos uploaded to My Photo Stream persist there for 30 days, and it contains only 1,000 items at a time. To keep a photo on a device, you…

$9.99 Developer Bloom Built, dayoneapp.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9 or later THIS MONTH’S MOST INTERESTING iPHONE & iPAD APPS Writing a diary may seem like a quaint concept from a bygone era, but there’s still something satisfying about jotting down personal memories for your eyes only, with the option to instantly share select entries with others when the mood strikes. Day One has always been the best iOS app for this task, but the original version (still being published under the Day One Classic moniker) now looks woefully underpowered compared to its far superior sequel. Version 2 has been completely rebuilt with two marquee features that dispel any reservations we might have had about using this app daily. The first is support for multiple, color-coded journals – memoirs are…

Free (with IAPs) Developer DivDev, divdev.se Platform Universal, watchOS Requirements iOS 9 or later It’s kinda crazy that, in 2016, with such an explosion of on-demand TV distribution channels, we still frequently tune into broadcast channels to watch our favorite shows. Well, some of us are, and if you’re one of them, Episodes helps you to catch them. On your iPhone, search for the shows you love then mark them with a star. With the free version of the app, you can mark up to three; if you want more, you need to sign up for a $4.99/year subscription. Now, on your Watch, you can either launch the app to see the upcoming episodes, or if you’re a diehard fan, give up the big central area of the Modular face…

$399 (from free on contract) Manufacturer Apple, apple.com Features A9 processor, 12MP camera, 16GB/64GB storage, four-inch Retina display VISIT MACLIFE.COM FOR ONLINE-EXCLUSIVE REVIEWS, UPDATED DAILY TOUGH TESTING, TRUSTED RATINGS The iPhone SE is a callback to a previous generation of iPhones – but one that many people still love. The phone world moved on to bigger screens, but lots of us want nothing more than four inches. Has Apple looked at the way people are using phones and realised there’s a massive market for a certain form factor – one that’s not being served by either the current iPhone range, or competitors’ phones? Of course, it’s also one that fills the role of a cheaper member of the iPhone family. As you might have guessed from the photos, the iPhone…

$2.99 Developer Inovize, fluidbrowser.com Requirements OS X 10.10 or later This super-minimalist web browser is made with video in mind. It sits permanently on top of other windows, with what few controls it has collapsing into a tiny black border, so you can go about using other apps, but with video always visible. This makes it great for having something fun up while doing a menial task, or you can open a tutorial for an app and follow along in real time. As an added bonus, it can also act as a regular video player – drag and drop a video onto it from Finder to watch it. When Fluid Browser is the currently active app, you can see its few controls: a URL bar, web navigation, a favorites view,…

$400 Manufacturer Parrot, parrot.com Features Bluetooth, noise cancelation, touch controls Weight 9.5 oz PARROT ZIK 3.0 + Best noise canceling that we’ve (not) heard + App offers impressive equalizer and acoustic settings - Great design - Wireless charger not included Parrot was onto a winner with its Zik 2.0 headphones designed by the renowned Philippe Starck, which were probably the most featurepacked ’phones around. So what’s changed? Well, the plush over-ear, closed-back earcups, again designed by Starck, now come in several stylish looks, such as crocodile-skin leather, and are particularly comfortable. Going beyond cosmetics and comfort, Parrot is touting Qi-compatible wireless charging as the new must-have feature, but you’ll need a charger. It’s a bit of a surprise at this price – and considering Parrot’s tagline of “wireless everything” –…

1 ELGATO AVEA $40 elgato.com > Something of an oddity, Elgato’s Avea bulbs – and Flare lamps – connect to your iOS devices using Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi. The app lets you select different colors, and includes atmospheric lighting effects. However, the brightness levels of the bulbs is relatively modest, and best for mood lighting. 2 LIFX COLOR 1000 $60 lifx.com > The LIFX Color bulbs have all the Wi-Fi tech built into them, so they don’t need a separate network adapter. That does make each separate bulb a bit pricey, but they’re quick and easy to use, and include useful options such as remote access when you’re away from home (but there’s no HomeKit support yet). 3 NANOLEAF SMARTER KIT $80 nanoleaf.me The Smarter Kit is good value and…

1 AIRMEGA airmega.com From $749 Smart gadgets are responding to our changing lifestyles and our increased awareness of our environments. The Airmega smart air purifier aims to make the air in our homes cleaner and safer. This might seem like a case of “smart overkill,” but check out the statistics on the AirMega website – 90% of air that goes into your lungs is indoor air, and recent studies have shown indoor air pollutants to be two to five times greater than outdoor pollution levels. The Airmega’s sensor measures the indoor air quality – a pretty colored LED ring displays the results – and the unit responds immediately, automatically adjusting fan speeds to combat pollutants. It claims to capture 99.97% of particles in the air, including pollen, dander, and other…

$2.99 If you sometimes feel like curling up into a little ball and running really fast through loop-de-loops in an effort to collect as many gold rings as humanly possible, chances are the latest update from SEGA America will be right up your alley. Sonic The Hedgehog has now pinballed from the Genesis console to mobile devices and right back to your television screen where he belongs, via the Apple TV. SEGA has faithfully remastered the original game that started it all with the same glorious 8-bit graphics you remember, boosted with smooth 60fps playback in Full HD. Even the game’s legendary soundtrack has been fully restored and sounds better than ever on your home theater speakers. SEGA’s updated port of the game treats fans to the same exclusive feature…

VIZIO SMARTCAST P50-C1 $999 • VIZIO.COM Ranging from 50 to 75 inches in size, Vizio’s all-new SmartCast P-Series combines brilliant 4K Ultra HD resolution with a high dynamic range, ultra color spectrum, and stylish tablet-style remote that takes advantage of the built-in Google Cast (formerly Chromecast). Makes for a perfect home theater system. LOGITECH BLUETOOTH EASY-SWAP KEYBOARD K811 $99 • LOGITECH.com Now that the fourth-generation Apple TV officially supports Bluetooth keyboards, why not celebrate by investing in this convenient model that allows pairing with up to three devices and switching between them with ease? The K811 works equally well with Mac and iOS devices, too.…

FEED YOUR MIND. FEAST YOUR EYES. WIN A brand new iPad Pro 9.7-inch with Pencil! p49 “THIS IS AN amazing statistic: there are over 600 million PCs that are over five years old in use today,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, at the company’s event in March. “This is really sad,” he continued, to applause and laughter. One of Apple’s most visible executives had just made the case that the iPad Pro is looking to attract old Windows users to Apple’s platform. Apple has been adopting this angle for a while now. In an interview given around the time of the original 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s launch, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook explicitly questioned why anyone would want a PC in 2016. “I think if you’re looking at a PC,”…

BLOCK’HOOD $9.99 Monument Valley meets SimCity in this stylish game of building a little neighborhood block that’s self-sustaining. You make places for people to live, work and play, while providing all the necessary resources to keep everything in balance, creating strange and beautiful structures. It’s dense, but already a solid game. VERSION TESTED: 60.22 OVERFALL $9.99 This role-playing game pits you as a group of adventurers sailing a watery world, meeting new people. Sometimes you fight them, sometimes you talk your way through a problem. It has an interesting multi-step fighting system, and lovely rich 2D art. It still needs polish and better guidance, but is good fun. VERSION TESTED: 4/4/2016…

1 STAR WARS: THE FORCE AW AKENS Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac $19.99 The world breathed a big sigh of relief at the end of last year when the seventh Star Wars film turned out to be not just good, but massively fun, and faithful to the style of the original three films. There’s a lot that’s modernized about it, from the effects to the pacing, but it still feels undeniably long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, and not just because the old cast is front and center. Some people think it’s too similar to the first film, but we actually like that: it’s remake and sequel all in one, and was the most fun we had at the cinema all year. It’s pure rollicking adventure.…

YOUR MAC is probably stuffed to the gills with all sorts of media. A few easy steps is all it takes to make them available to other people. Let’s start with iTunes. Open its preferences and click Sharing, then turn on “Share my library on my local network” to allow streaming of all kinds of media to other computers running iTunes, optionally restricted with a password. Click the ellipsis then Edit at the top-left corner of iTunes, and turn on Shared Libraries. Switch libraries using the new icon there. Home Sharing does the same job, but also allows media to be copied between the libraries of up to five PCs or Macs. This requires Home Sharing to be enabled on each computer: go to File > Home Sharing > Turn…

AS WIRELESS technology becomes faster and more ubiquitous, we’re finding a growing number of uses for it – from being able to shuttle 4K Ultra HD video around our homes to controlling our heating, lighting and more. And thanks to initiatives like the Internet of Things even more of the devices we use every day will start to become connected – from cookers to vacuum cleaners – and that means our hunger for Wi-Fi bandwidth is only going to grow. The problem is we may be already getting close to choke point. The Wi-Fi Alliance predicts that there will be 38.5 billion connected devices by 2020 and providers in the US, at least, have already begun ringing the alarm bells about the lack of available radio spectrum. Fortunately, there are…

$4.99 Developer Ciarlo Software, getdooapp.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8.1 or later The App Store isn’t exactly short of to-do and productivity apps, but Doo stands out thanks to its simple and very pretty interface. It’s based around cards, which you swipe up to complete, swipe down to snooze and swipe left and right to shuffle. In a nice touch, Doo shows you a bright, sunshiney picture when you’ve cleared everything. Doo is a joy to use, with snappy animations that really do feel as if you’re swiping actual cards. The widget looks great in the iOS notifications area too. However, while it looks fantastic it doesn’t really do very much. So far the feature list is very, very basic: you can’t add deadlines without also creating alerts, you can’t…

Free ($9.99 IAP) Developer Dynamic App Design, dynamicappdesign.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9 or later Learning music by ear used to involve repeatedly rewinding a tape player, and quite a lot of teeth-gnashing. Today, technology makes the process faster – and less risky from a dental standpoint. With Transcribe+, for example, you load any track stored on your iOS device, slow it down, set flags, and loop regions until you’ve cracked a chord progression or licked a riff. The app excels regarding interface design. Speed and pitch are adjusted by dragging, respectively, horizontally and vertically in the area at the foot of the display. Adding and manipulating looping regions is straightforward, and we were pleased to see they silently saved, reappearing the next time we opened a track. Audio quality…

$2.99 Developer Dastan Games, dastangamestudio.in Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7 or later The Children of Light have been cruelly separated from their mother, and they’re suffering from a serious case of separation anxiety – from both mommy dearest and each other. But you can largely disregard the by-numbers backstory here in favor of the solid puzzle-shooter built upon its foundation. The Children stick together in an amorphous orb, moving as one to wherever you tap on-screen. Enemies come in the form of swarms of red cuboids, which spawn from portals dotted in clusters around each level and deplete your family’s numbers on contact. You have a trick – or, rather, several – up your pixelly sleeve, however: you can use the Children as projectiles. Firing is a case of holding…

The strategy game genre has had something of a rejuvenation on iOS, with tactile touchscreen control making it easier than ever to direct troops, arrange resources, and battle your way to victory. We’ve picked our favorite strategy games here, so whether you want to take over the world or save it, there’s an ideal option for you. CIVILIZATION REVOLUTION 2 ($9.99, Universal) is a simplified version of the long-running PC/Mac strategy series – but there’s still a huge amount to do in it. You build a civilization from a single city, advancing your technology over time, and expanding into the world around you. You can fight for dominance with other players, or trade your way to becoming the ruling empire. For strategy that takes place on a much smaller scale,…

99¢ Developer vsmedia.de, blue-asteroid.com Platform Universal, watchOS Requirements iOS 9 or later We’ve seen this a million times before: move a ship up and down a screen while asteroids pan across from right to left. Avoid the asteroids, or bump into and destroy them once you’ve picked up a shield. Here, you move the ship up and down the screen by rotating the Digital Crown on the side of the Watch – a nice little idea, which keeps the screen clear of your fingers. This is not, let’s be quite clear, a game you’ll sit and play for hours. It’s uncomfortable for long stretches, and hardly deeply engrossing. What’s more, the framerate is truly dismal – so bad, indeed, that it adds an extra level of difficulty to the game.…

$599 Manufacturer Apple, apple.com Features A9X processor, Apple Pencil support, 12MP camera, True Tone Retina display Launching a proper iPad Air 2 successor has taken Apple over a year and a half – perhaps because that tablet was so hard to improve on. The result is that it fit almost everything from the giant iPad Pro into a smaller frame, producing something far beyond just an “iPad Air 3.” You can listen to amped up music through its four loud stereo speakers, work and play harder with its powerful A9X processor, doodle away with the Apple Pencil, and seamlessly attach a keyboard without fumbling with Bluetooth. It’s not all hand-me-down features, though – the smaller iPad Pro strikes out with a few advancements of its own, including one of our…

$2.99 Developer Xi Lin Xie, eagleapp.net Requirements OS X 10.9 or later Mini Screen Recorder is a lightweight and welldesigned way to quickly make screen recordings, though one that struggles to distinguish itself far enough from QuickTime Player’s recording tools. Open Mini Screen Recorder and you get options for recording either fullscreen, a draggable area, or by selecting a particular window to focus on – the latter is a useful feature, though all it does is focus the recording area on a particular part of the screen, rather than follow the window or anything. You can choose your audio input, including a checkbox for system audio, which installs the plugin required to do this. When you record, an icon in the title bar tells you how long you’ve been going.…

$129 Manufacturer Western Digital, wdc.com Dimensions 3.21 x 0.83 x 4.33 in Weight 0.5 lb Western Digital’s My Passport drives have been around for a while, but this latest update includes a 3TB model that makes it one of the highestcapacity portable drives that we’ve seen so far. It uses a standard USB 3.0 port to connect to your Mac, and when backing up a 5GB batch of music and video files from iTunes, the My Passport achieved read and write speeds of 125MB/s and 89.3MB/s respectively. Those speeds were confirmed by the AJA benchmark suite, and are pretty respectable for a conventional hard drive. Western Digital is also one of the few companies that makes hard drives specifically for the Mac, so the My Passport is formatted in the…

The smart bulbs from Philips and Nanoleaf are the only ones that currently support Apple’s HomeKit software on iOS devices. HomeKit is still a work in progress, but one of its key features is the ability to control your devices using Siri voice commands. If you’re at home and your iPhone or iPad is on the same Wi-Fi network as your smart lighting, you can simply activate Siri and tell it to “Turn off the lounge lights”, or ask an iPhone 6s to “Dim the bedroom to 50%” without touching it. It’s a particular kind of geeky cool when you get it to work for the first time. You can even use Siri commands on your iPhone when you’re away from home – although you do need a thirdor fourth-generation…

YOU CAN’T MOVE at the moment without someone trying to slap a virtual reality headset on you. Mark Zuckerberg wants us all to put 360-degree VR selfies on Facebook, and Samsung is now giving its Gear headset away for free with its latest Galaxy smartphones. But all we’ve had from Apple so far is Tim Cook’s recent comment that VR is “really cool.” We do know that Apple has hired several engineers, and even bought a number of companies that have VR experience. But, as always, the company prefers to maintain complete secrecy until it’s got a product that is actually ready to ship. In the meantime, though, there’s always Google Cardboard. This is a cheap and cheerful kit that lets you make a cardboard headset that uses your smartphone…

Free You know what every television set in America could use more of? Funny animal videos! And that’s exactly what you get from AFV animals, a new free Apple TV app from the makers of America’s Funniest Videos — and they’ve got plenty of ’em, having collected submissions since the late ’80s. Who can forget the hilarious little kid who stars in “Baby Laughs When Mom Says Donkey” or the epic drama of “Black Cat Pushes Orange Cat Into Pool?” Whether it’s Animal Antics, Animals Using Toys, Babies With Animals, Crazy Animals In Wild, Funny Cat Videos, Funny Dog Videos, Cat vs. Dog, or Meerkat Odyssey you seek, all of your favorites (and plenty of new additions) are here for the viewing. As you might expect, AFV animals is a…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.6 or higher, a Magic Trackpad (either model) or a MacBook trackpad LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 15 minutes MODERN MAC trackpads have learned a lot from iOS devices. The gestures you can perform have become increasingly elaborate and useful, making it possible to more easily trigger commands and manipulate onscreen content. Though it all seems clever, your trackpad’s actually even smarter than you might realize, which becomes clear on installing the excellent BetterTouchTool (boastr.net). This app unleashes the full power of your trackpad by enabling user-defined gestures. You decide in each case how many fingers to use, the gesture they should perform, and what that should trigger. You can get a 45-day trial of the app, after which it’s “pay what you can…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.9 or later, Serif Affinity Photo LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 20 minutes BEING ABLE TO select parts of an image has a virtually limitless list of benefits – your eBay photos will look more polished, and you’ll be able to seamlessly merge images together. For example, in a group shot where one person is blinking, you can excise them altogether or drop in a better snap of them. There are several ways to do this in Apple Mac App of the Year, Serif Affinity Photo: the most straightforward is to use the freehand selection tool, laboriously dragging around the item you want to select – but being precise is difficult, undoing mistakes is tricky, and a selection is gone forever when you delete…

REQUIRES > GarageBand for iOS, an iPad, and (optionally) an iPhone LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 10 minutes YOU KNOW HOW it goes… A phone goes off in a packed place. Everyone fishes their iPhone out of a pocket before all but one person sheepishly realizes it wasn’t their device screaming for attention. Rinse and repeat. By creating your own ringtone – which you can do with GarageBand on your iPad, a few spare minutes, and no musical skill – you won’t find yourself in this situation again. You’ll have your own personal slice of sound no-one else will own. Well, apart from other Mac|Life readers. So if you hear this tutorial’s ringtone elsewhere, you know you’re in good company. Creating a ringtone is different from working on…

I HAVE BECOME a convert. Totally and completely. This column is basically me turning up at your door holding an iPad Pro 9.7-inch out in one hand and asking: “Excuse me, have you heard the good news about True Tone displays?” When Apple announced this feature of the iPad Pro – which shifts the color temperature of the screen to match the ambient light in the room, so a white page on the iPad’s screen would match the tone of a piece of white paper left alongside it – I shrugged it off. I thought it looked cool, but what’s the problem with just looking at its actual color? The brilliance of it hit me while I was sitting at my dining table late on a Sunday. Someone had sketched…

WHEN iOS developers design their games with mechanics that reward you for paying money, they don’t care about the 99% of players that will balk at the idea. They care about “whales” – the 1% of players that are willing to pay to win. Whales will pay to speed up their crops. They’ll pay for extra shuttle bays. We’ll pay for character shards for a chance to download our favorite Jedi. Some of us spend quite a lot. King, the maker of Candy Crush, made over $2 billion in revenue for 2015. So, even though no one will admit they pay, I will. Although I spend more than I care to admit…! I was giving a talk in Vegas last month at the Bellagio. Growing up in a religious family…

EVER SINCE Apple introduced AirPort in 1999, it has been at the forefront of wireless technology – making it easy to shuttle files back and forwards between all your devices cable-free – it’s hard to imagine using a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch without it. And what you can do wirelessly has grown hugely since then, enabling music streaming, video entertainment, control of our homes, and much more. The technology has developed over time, too. The original AirPort used the IEEE 802.11b networking standard with a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 11Mbps, but since then we’ve had 802.11g (54Mbps), 802.11n (600Mbps) and now 802.11ac (1.3Gbps) – the current standard found in all new Mac and iOS devices. 802.11ac brings more than just a huge increase in data transmission speeds (which…

WHILE MANY OF the new smart gadgets available in our homes have been designed to work with the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, the Mac is far from neglected. Apple, of course, sells its own wireless devices, both in terms of Bluetooth peripherals such as the Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad 2 and Magic Mouse 2, as well as Wi-Fi routers such as the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule. Then there are initiatives such as AirPlay and AirPrint. AirPlay, of course, enables you to send music to compatible speakers as well as media streamers such as the Apple TV, while AirPrint enables you to print wirelessly from your Mac (or iOS device) to a huge range of compatible printers – you can find a list at apple.co/1Y5BXwu. A huge range of…

WHY ISN’T BLUETOOTH WORKING? IF YOU’RE having problems connecting your Mac to a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, speakers or some other peripheral, first check Bluetooth is switched on both devices, then head to System Preferences > Bluetooth to pair it again. First, delete its existing pairing profile under Devices (if it has one), then switch both your Mac and the other device into pairing mode (you may need to read the manufacturer’s instructions for how to do this). When the Bluetooth device to which you want to connect reappears, select Pair. It should now connect successfully. To do this in iOS or on Apple Watch, head to Settings > Bluetooth. The process for doing this on either device is the same as on the Mac. WHY WON’T MY MOVIES PLAY PROPERLY?…

WHEN AN established app is replaced by a ground-up rewrite, disruption is pretty much inevitable. That’s true even of something seemingly innocuous like software that organizes and edits your photos. Though Photos was a capable app in its initial form, it lacked some important features that were present in its predecessor. Apple has since remedied several key criticisms, even going so far as to allow developers to augment the app with new editing tools, but even now the workings of features such as iCloud Photo Library can seem obtuse. Make a small change to one of Photos’ preferences and suddenly things no longer work as you expect. We’ve distilled the essential info about the app and its connections to iCloud to help you get to understand the capabilities and the…

YOU CAN share photos on various social networks or other methods. To post on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or Vimeo, first make sure you’ve signed in to your accounts for those services in the Internet Accounts pane in System Preferences. Next, return to Photos, select an album or some pictures, click the Share button and choose one of those networks. The Share menu also includes a bunch of other common ways to share privately. At some point, you may want to send high-quality copies of photos to a family member or a friend for their library using email, probably because they don’t have an Apple device and find a direct email is less bothersome than downloading from a shared album at iCloud.com. Of course, Photos lets you share in this way,…

$1.99 Developer Binary Thumb, grid.binarythumb.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later Grid is a tactile, gesture-happy digital moodboard, to use solo or with friends who also have the app installed. Each project comprises a grid canvas on which you drag out rectangles. These rectangles can be filled with text, color or imagery. The best aspect of Grid is how you interact with it. Once you’ve approved relevant services (Camera Roll, Dropbox, Evernote) to work with the app, you simply drag pictures from a menu to the canvas. Adding a collaborator is similarly simple – drag down on the app’s home screen to view your contacts and then drag one of them to a grid. The problem is that Grid’s elegance is too often countered by inflexibility and awkwardness. Multiple…

$2.99 Developer Tiny Whale, cornertube.tinywhale.net Platform iPad Requirements iOS 9 or later One of the best features of iOS 9 is the ability to watch videos in a floating, repositionable, scalable window, while you use other apps. Called picture-in-picture, it’s only supported on the iPad Pro, iPad Air or later and iPad mini 2 or later, so if you have one of those devices, it’s great. Or at least, it’s great for those apps that support it – by default, that means FaceTime and anything that uses the standard iOS movie player. YouTube, though, doesn’t, so you can’t watch YouTube movies picture-in-picture. CornerTube solves this, and though it’s sometimes not a frictionless experience, that’s sometimes the fault of how other apps expose their links. You can search YouTube from inside…

$2.99 Developer Digidiced, digidiced.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7 or later There’s a great allure to board games on a tablet: the ability to play on the go, to play with long-distance opponents, or even not to have to clear up the endless reams of fiddly little tokens. After all, a good board game is fraught with either tension or laughter, Machiavellian scheming aplenty and the potential to turn all your friends against you. Unfortunately, though, Patchwork is a mediocre board game. It’s based around the idea of stitching together a blanket. On your turn, you have the choice of three scraps of fabric (you can also see which pieces are upcoming), which you can buy using buttons, and then add into place on your board. In addition to its…

Free (with IAPs) Developer Lookout, lookout.com Platform Universal, watchOS Requirements iOS 8 or later WATCH APPS AND GUIDES TO GET MORE FROM YOUR WATCH Read the description for this app and it sounds like something everyone should have on their iPhones. With it, you can locate a lost iOS device from any internet-connected device; it saves its last known location before it runs out of juice, displays a custom “lost” message on your device complete with contact details, and alerts you when your Watch and iPhone are about to go out of range of each other, potentially saving you from walking away from your phone in a gym locker, say. But wait, you might be thinking; I can literally do all save the last one using Find My iPhone, which…

1 A PRIVILEGED FEW In Mail on your iPhone, assign contacts as VIPs and then configure notifications in the iPhone’s Settings to only notify you of emails from VIPs. 2 SEND ’EM TO WATCH Now, either mirror the iPhone’s email notification settings to your Watch, or configure them separately in the Watch app. 3 FOLLOW THE THREAD You can also chose to be notified for important threads. Tap the flag icon in one email, then Notify Me… and then set preferences, as in step two.…

$200 Manufacturer Fitbit, fitbit.com Features Color touchscreen, heart monitor, five-day battery charge FITBIT BLAZE + Great battery life + FitStar app is superb - Limited notifications - Not waterproof The Blaze is a “smart fitness watch,” a push to make a fitness tracker more like a smartwatch, but is it half-baked and ill-conceived, or a cheaper alternative to the Apple Watch? In terms of fitness sensors, the Blaze has a three-axis accelerometer, optical heart-rate monitor, and an altimeter. Crucially, there’s no built-in GPS – you’ll need to connect to a phone for that. There is however a color touchscreen – bright, vivid, and sharp – which enables the watch to perform more advanced functions, such as notifications. That said, it can only receive call, text and calendar notifications, so it’s…

$399 Manufacturer 360fly Inc, 360fly.com Features 360-degree video capture The 360fly is like no other action camera. The exterior is formed of geometric patterns that make up a spherical shape, to take video in all directions. There’s no housing for the lens, so it’s remarkably open to the elements, but we found it stood up to a variety of weather conditions. Elsewhere on the body, you’ll find a small on/off push button on the side, and an even smaller microphone hole. The camera is water resistant up to 50m – although a little rubber plug needs to be inserted into the microphone hole. Although the camera is “360,” this refers to the horizontal rotation – you actually get a 240-degree field of view. As the lens points up, the sharpest…

BETTER LIVING THROUGH SMARTER TECHNOLOGY There are plenty of smart lighting systems available these days, some of which offer weird and wonderful features such as built-in speakers, or motion sensors that can turn on the lights to scare away would-be intruders. However, the main advantage of smart lighting systems is that they can save you money. The LED technology used in modern smart bulbs is very energy-efficient and long-lasting, and the apps that control these bulbs allow you to instantly turn the lights on or off in any room, dim the lights to watch a film, or set daily lighting schedules to suit your routine. Many LED bulbs also allow you to choose different colors, rather than plain old white light, which is good for creating a relaxing atmosphere in…

QUICK TIP When you turn off a smart bulb using your iPhone, the main wall switch is still left on, but the bulb goes into standby mode and reduces power consumption to less than 1W of electricity. JARGON BUSTER Zigbee is a low-power alternative to Wi-Fi that allows lighting from different manufacturers to communicate. Osram and Nanoleaf support it, so you can mix and match their bulbs in your home. You could use Osram’s color bulbs for mood lighting in your lounge, and a cheaper white Nanoleaf in your kitchen, for example. 1 Let there be lights Like most of its rivals, Osram’s Lightify app lets you group lights in different rooms and then control the lighting all around your home with just a quick tap. Here we’ve created two…

99¢ We enjoy a good game of tic-tac-toe as much as anyone, and there’s no shortage of such apps for Apple TV. One of our new favorites is a faithful reproduction of playing the popular game on a chalkboard — without the need to clean the board between games or get your hands dirty with chalk dust. Tic Tac Toe 4 Two serves up a twoplayer game that turns your television screen into a virtual chalkboard, complete with fun sketches displayed alongside the game for authenticity. In addition to the graphics, the game serves up sound effects as X and O is “written” on screen, then offers up the requisite cheer and applause for the winner — or a sad tuba when it’s a tie. There’s also a free version…

HOW TO DO ANYTHING ON YOUR MAC, iPHONE & iPAD REQUIRES > At least one Mac or iOS device with an internet connection LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 15 minutes BACK IN 2014, Apple came under fire when a number of celebrities said their iCloud accounts had been hacked, leading to personal photographs being published online. Security experts argued that this couldn’t have happened if Apple had adopted a security technique known as two-factor authentication. This adds a second layer of security to your Apple ID, sending an extra security code to your iPhone or iPad that must be entered in addition to your normal Apple ID or iCloud password before anyone can gain access to your account. Apple still hasn’t adopted two-factor authentication properly. To be fair,…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.7 or later, the Viivo app with a free account LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 10 minutes JUST HOW SECURE is your data in the cloud? Services like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive encrypt your files, but the all-important key that’s used to decrypt those files is stored online, out of your control. With online security breaches on the increase, can you trust your cloud storage provider to keep your most sensitive files private? Viivo is one of a growing number of tools that provide greater protection for your data by adding a second level of encryption while keeping the decryption key firmly in your possession, stored locally on your Mac. Even if your cloud storage is compromised, any files on it that you’ve…

REQUIRES > OS X 10.10 or higher, or iOS 9.2 or higher; an iCloud, IMAP or Exchange account in Apple’s Mail app LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 10 minutes MAIL DROP enables you to email much larger files than usual by uploading them to iCloud, and then substituting them in your message with a download link. This avoids burdening the recipient’s bandwidth as soon as they receive your message, and it enables you to send much larger items than most mail servers will accept – up to a hefty 5GB! For certain types of attachment – images, for example – the recipient will see a preview of what you’ve sent to them. For many other file types, they’ll see each attachment’s name, size and a download link –…